Interview Feature Rising numbers of school policies are discriminating against afro hair, damaging students’ identity, wellbeing and performance. Emily Jenkins reports. ONE in six children is being discriminated against at school because of their afro hair and identity, a recent survey found. With a reported 66.7 per cent rise in anti-afro hair policies in UK schools in recent years (according to the Hair Equality Report, More than just hair, published in 2019), it seems many young people with afro hair are struggling to feel accepted by the very education system that is meant to protect them.
Michelle De Leon, founder of World Afro Day (WAD), is trying to change this. And she is calling on educators to help raise awareness and end discrimination in schools.
Anti-afro employment law in Alabama Since 2017, WAD, a global day of change, education and celebration of afro hair, has been celebrated on 15 September. Exactly a year earlier the US state of Alabama had passed a law allowing companies to deny jobs to people with dreadlocks. Around the same time, students in South Africa were protesting against a ban on afro hair at a Pretoria school, where it had been deemed “untidy” and “unladylike”. Michelle read about these events and knew she had to do something: “I thought: ‘This is crazy.’ The fact that Alabama has enshrined in law, in the 21st century, discrimination against people with afro hair, really galvanised me.” On the endorsedcaption: by the Quote orfirst justWAD, a straight United Nations Human Rights Office, more “Quote or just a straight caption.” than 400 children and teachers took part in the Big Hair Assembly. WAD has been going from 32
Celebrating World Afro Day at Clapton High School, London
Keeping it real strength to strength ever since: creating lesson plans for teachers and schools; establishing the WAD Awards; and in 2019 attracting 11,500 children across eight countries to celebrate hair, identity and equality. But as WAD’s Hair Equality Report shows, the problems facing young people with afro hair are getting worse. Josiah, 5, banned from playground Take, for example, Josiah Sharpe, a fiveyear-old boy who, in 2019, told his mother he “didn’t want to be Black any more” after he was banned from his primary school’s playground for his “extreme-skin-fade hairstyle” because it “detracts from learning”. Or 12-year-old Chikayzea Flanders who, in 2017, was put into isolation in his first week of secondary school because he wore
educate Your magazine from the National Education Union (NEU)
dreadlocks – part of his Rastafarian religion. The head teacher told his mother that if she didn’t cut off her son’s locks, he would be expelled. The family was forced to take legal action against the school and eventually won. But the case was so traumatic for Chikayzea, he never returned to the school. More recently, students in Pimlico, London, have been protesting against the implementation of a strict new uniform code that says hairstyles that “block the views of others” will not be permitted. Although the school claims that this does not relate to any particular hair type, students have labelled it as racist, saying that it implies and singles out afro hair. Afro hair is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, but according to the Hair Equality Report, “there appears to