“Why are you so sad?” a TV reporter asked the little girl with a bright pink bow in her hair.
“Because they didn’t like my dreads,” she sobbed, wiping her tears. “I think that they should let me have my dreads.”
With those words, second-grader Tiana Parker of Tulsa, Okla., found herself, at age 7, at the center of decades of debate over standards of black beauty, cultural pride and freedom of expression.
It was no isolated incident at the predominantly black Deborah Brown Community School, which in the face of outrage in late August apologized and rescinded language banning dreadlocks, Afros, mohawks and other “faddish” hairstyles it had called unacceptable and potential health hazards.
A few weeks earlier, another charter school, the Horizon Science Academy in Lorain, Ohio, sent a draft policy home to parents that proposed a ban on “Afro-puffs and small twisted braids.” It, too, quickly apologized and withdrew the wording.
But at historically black Hampton University in Hampton, Va., the dean of the business school has defended and left in place a 12-year-old prohibition on dreadlocks and cornrows for male students in a leadership seminar for MBA candidates, saying the look is not businesslike.
Those varying sentiments are not lost on Atlanta author Denene Millner, 45, who also blogs on her life raising two daughters at mybrownbaby.com.
She heard similar comments when she let her hair go natural when she worked in corporate America. It’s a subject the country has been unable to move past.
“I live it every day as an African-American woman and mother of two girls,” Millner said.
“It’s much better now, but still, this is not happening at just one school in Oklahoma or Ohio.”
Her blog lit up with conversation after the incidents, and the subjects of black standards of beauty, particularly hair, are among the most read on her blog, she said.
In Oklahoma, Tiana’s father Terrance Parker chose not to change her hair and moved the straight-A student to a different public school.
“I think it stills hurts her. But the way I teach my kids is regardless of what people say, you be yourself and you be happy with who you are and how God made you,” he said.
Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said legal rulings on hair and other issues pertaining to school dress codes have been fairly clear.
“For decades now, Supreme Court precedent has reaffirmed that clothing, including hairstyle, is part of a student’s speech, and if you’re going to interfere with that, then the school district has to make some findings beforehand demonstrating that there is an immediate threat to the academic environment,” he said. “That wasn’t the case here and in most dress-code cases.”
There is no central clearinghouse for local school board policies on hairstyles, or surveys indicating whether such rules are widespread.
Still, like Millner, others deal with the issue frequently.
"Our girls are always getting messages that tell them that they are not good enough, that they don't look pretty enough, that their skin isn't light enough, that their hair isn't long enough, that their hair isn't blond enough," said Beverly Bond of the New York-based esteem-building group Black Girls Rock.
In Chicago, Leila Noelliste has been blogging about natural hair at Blackgirllonghair.com for about five years. She has followed the school cases closely. The 28-year-old with a natural hairstyle said it is a touchy issue among African-Americans and others.
“This is the way the hair grows out of my head, yet it’s even shocking in some black communities, because we’ve kind of been told culturally that to be acceptable and to make other people kind of comfortable with the way that we look, we should straighten our hair, whether through heat or chemicals,” she said. “So whether we’re in non-black communities or black communities, with our natural hair, we stand out. It evokes a lot of reaction.”
Millner said she has tried to raise her daughters — now 11 and 14 — to love who they are before sending them out into the world. She models that in her own hair styles wearing it natural or braided. Later if they want to straighten or color their hair, it’s fine, she said.
“I didn’t want them to grow up with the same idea that I had when I was little, that there was something wrong with the way that my hair grew out of my head,” said Millner.
The AJC contribued to this article
