Grooming policy is progress

Jamaica aims to address contentious issues related to students' hairstyles through new guidelines developed by schools to govern grooming. While progress has been made, the courts may need to affirm Jamaicans' constitutional right to wear their hair, with minimal policy restrictions, particularly for styles commonly worn by black individuals, such as locks, braids, bumps, and cornrow plaits. A 2020 Constitutional Court ruling upheld a school's right to exclude a student for wearing locks, citing hygiene concerns, and a 2021 appeal has yet to be decided. Education Minister Fayval Williams recently announced that Rastafarian children can attend school without covering their hair, signalling progress in respecting religious freedoms.

Hair in schools

Jamaica Gleaner

1 Sep 2023

JAMAICA IS hopefully closing the chapter on the periodic contentions over students being thrown out of school for how they are groomed, which mostly has to do with their hair. And usually it is because the hair is locked or worn in some other style suited to hair typical of black people.

According to the education minister, Fayval Williams, new guidelines which will inform the rules governing uniforms and grooming developed by schools should put this past us.

What would be preferable to this newspaper, however, is for the courts to affirm the constitutional right of Jamaicans, including students, to wear their hair, with only limited policy caveats, in easily managed styles, such as locks, braids, bumps and cornrow plaits. In which event the Court of Appeal would probably have to overturn the Constitutional Court’s 2020 ruling in the Dale and Sherine Virgo case in which it held that Kensington Primary School in Portmore had the right to exclude a child who wore locks.

The school’s defence for its policy was that the dreadlocked hairstyle tended not to be washed regularly, which could lead to outbreaks of lice among students. The court essentially held that the school was making a public health argument, which was a legitimate foundation upon which to rest the policy.

“It is my view that hygiene does fall within the purview of Ali (a case from the UK to the European Court of Human Rights of a boy who was excluded from school) as a legitimate aim,” wrote Justice Sonia Bertram Linton on behalf of the three-member bench. And although the child’s parents declared adherence to Rastafarianism, the court ruled that the case was not about religion, which it said was not an argument the Dale and Sherine Virgo made for declining to cut, or unlock their daughter’s hair. Nor did the school’s policy, based on what transpired, the child’s freedom of expression, right to privacy or equality before the law, the court ruled.

NO DETERMINATION

An appeal of the case was heard in late 2021; there appears to be as yet no determination of the matter. A judgment isn’t posted on the court’s website.

The issue, however, has renewed interest in the face of Minister Williams’ recent announcement that Rastafarian children will no longer have to keep their hair covered while attending school, usually by wearing knitted caps, which Jamaicans call tams. Rastafarians, whose religion emerged in the island in the 1930s, generally allow their hair to grow in long, and sometimes matted, locks. They hold the former Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, as God.

“There have been a few times that I’ve gone to schools and I see boys, maybe not more than one or two in a particular school, wearing tams to school to cover their locks,” the education minister said in a speech at the annual conference of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA). “This is 2023. We really should not be doing that any more. We need to respect other people’s religion.”

This newspaper agrees.

But, while Rastafarians are more often the subjects/ victims in these disputes, the politics and sociocultural conflicts over hair is limited neither to that group nor to the wearing of locks. Indeed, the 2021 draft grooming document, which Ms Williams is now rolling out, noted that over 90 per cent of Jamaicans are of African descent, which means having hair of a texture unlike other other groups, and different issues with respect to grooming.

“Rules that dictate how students are required to wear their hair raise complex legal, culturally sensitive and deeply emotive issues,” the document says.

POLITICS OF HAIR

Indeed, two years before the eruption of the 2018 quarrel between the Virgos and Kensington Primary, the politics of hair similar played out at Hopefield Prep, a private preparatory school in Kingston, where the parents of a three-year-old boy refused to cut his frizzy afro. His mother claimed that the school’s request was discriminatory. Although the school insisted that the demand was for safety, the mother claimed that white children, or children of other ethnic groups with straight hair, routinely wore theirs at shoulder length – and beyond.

Fundamentally, there was a claim of race/ethnic bias which goes against black children with thick, frizzy hair. It’s a claim that periodically erupts in Jamaica and has even inspired literary and other creative attention.

Ms Williams’ policy acknowledges and attempts to address these tensions.

It says, “There must be no guideline specified within the Student Dress and Grooming Policy that promotes discrimination against natural hairstyles, and it must expressly prohibit, regardless of gender or ethnicity … discrimination against African-centred, and other culturally specific hairstyles and headwear (e.g., afros, plaits, twists, locks, braids, cane row/cornrows, Bantu/Nubian knots, ponytails, hijabs, fades (school’s specifications for dimension contemplated) and any other hairstyle or headwear which is identified with a person’s ethnicity or cultural identity).”

It would be good, from our perspective, if these policy declarations were buttressed by a ruling in the Virgo case that gave a more liberal interpretation of when rights are engaged and a narrow space for institutions to limit those rights.

Or the government might give the policy the force of law by making them part of the regulations to the Education Code.

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