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Hair holds a deep significance for many demographic groups, often along racial lines due to differences in style and texture. This frequently involves hair length. For some people, hair has religious significance, for others it is more an expression of heritage, but opressors have forced people to cut/change their hair as a means of stripping people's cultural expression for a long time. Shaving newly enslaved black people as a means of erasing their cultural heritage goes back to the 15th century, as many groups had distinctive styles and slave owners wanted to impose conformity. Forcing Indigenous Americans to cut their hair was done to homogenize children removed from their peoples and punish/demoralize adult men, stripping both of them of an important religious and cultural signifier in the process.
A lot of modern hair discrimination has its roots in this more explicit racism, denouncing hair that isn't in line with western-european beauty standards as unprofessional, unkempt, or unsightly. Length of hair and specific styles hold value to many different ethnic groups today, just as it did hundreds of years ago. Many black people see the display of black hairstyles (including long braids, dreads, afros, etc.) as a form of cultural reclamation, many indigenous americans still view hair length as religiously meaningful, tons of Sikhs, Muslims and Jews have strict beliefs regarding hair/beard cutting, the list goes on. Forcing these people to conform or face discipline is absolutely discrimination, and these groups are often a different ethnicity or race than the person mandating the hair be cut.
Is forcing people to maintain a certain hair length always solely racist? No. It can be discriminatory in a plethora of ways. It can also be sexist, queerphobic, and/or a form of religious discrimination. I was subject to the purely sexist aspect of this by old white guys for having long hair as a white, cis-het teenage boy, no racism involved. The label for any discrimination relies as much on who is being discriminated against and how it is applied as it does the views of the person enforcing it, making it an intersectional issue
A good rhetorical example of this multitargeted discrimination would be the banning of necklaces with stars on them. Is it inherrently discriminatory on its own? Not in a vacuum, no one is born wearing a necklace with a star. But consider two major religions that involve star iconography (judaism, islam) and you can see how this rule is antisemitic and islamiphobic whithout ever mentioning jewish or muslim people explicitly. Which form of discrimination it is contextually depends on the person experiencing it. Hair is no different. Making a black guy cut his dreads/braids is both racist and sexist when viewed in this light, as it targets a cultural symbol (a black hair style) and is likely unevenly applied across genders (black girls aren't usually required to have short hair). I hope this answers your question, if asked sincerely, and here are a few sources if anybody wants to learn more:
EEOC Guidelines on Title VII protections against religious garb discriminatjon, including hair
NAACP on Black Hair Discrimination.
CNN on Native Hair Discrimination.
ACLU Article on a legal fight against sexist hair discrimination in Texas schools.
ACLUTexas Article about transphobia via hair discrimination.
1991 Duke Law piece on the intersectionality of hair, race, and gender, with the key takeaway quoted below.
"Judgments about aesthetics do not exist apart from judgments about the social, political, and economic order of a society. They are an essential part of that order. Aesthetic values determine who and what is valued, beautiful, and entitled to control. Thus established, the structure of society at other levels also is justified."
This is pretty much exactly my point. Having had long hair in my youth, while never outright punished in school for it (I didn't start growing it until I was in historically very liberal university), there was often pressure from authorities to conform, I also noticed that being harassed by the police (which happened frequently) effectively ended overnight after I got my hair cut. Pressuring young men to conform by cutting their hair is a tale probably as old as time. Certainly it's a constant theme throughout American culture, as I mentioned elsewhere with movies like Dazed and confused and Dead Poet's Society. And this doesn't even begin to delve into all the times it's used as a symbol as non-conformity.
There was a lot in my comment you just slid right over to only address the point you agreed with, I was hoping you might address literally anything else I wrote, but oh well. We agree that it can be a form of sexism, but it is more complex than that, hence why it is an intersectional issue. Why do you believe it necessarily stops having a racial connotation just because it can be used to hurt white people?
Just because white people have been subject to abuse due to their hair length, it doesn't absolve the racial connotations and racist historical context when applied to non-white people with long hair. If this case was about an Indigenous American student, with religious reasons to wear long hair, would you be making the argument that this isn't racial discrimination? What about a Sikh student? A Rastafarian?
This is an intersectional issue, and as such, requires a little more nuance in diagnosing than "Well I don't see any white boys getting away with it, so it can't be racist!" When rules are made, they need to be evaluated on their ability to hurt people. If the rule can disproportionately hurt people based on racial elements, that rule is racist. This kid is black, part of him expressing his blackness is his hair being long, so any rule forcing him to change his hair is racist. If it was an Indiginous kid, the rule would still be racist. If it were a white kid, the rule would still be racist. The rule and the people enforcing it are racist, even if they never apply it to anyone.
First, I owe you an apology. You gave a thoughtful, rational, and thorough response (unlike pretty much all of the other posters) and I didn't give it its due respect. To explain myself, the reason I glossed over the other parts is that I generally agree with them, and think the crux of argument boils down to the part I responded to.
I understand and agree why this is a sensitive topic: hair discrimination is real. I understand that one can discriminate even with "equal" laws: "no one can marry someone of their own sex." We also both agree that rules like this should go away. We might have slightly differing reasons why: for me it's more about sexism and force conformity, for you it may be more about cultural/race discrimination.
Honestly, I feel like the exact opposite is happening. From my perspective, y'all are arguing that because a rule made a black kid cut his hair, it is automatically racist. As I said above, I agree that rules that can be applied "equally" can still be meant to oppress a minority. I don't think that "because it can get a white kid it isn't racist" I think because there is a long tradition of schools making boys conform by cutting their hair, including in mostly/all white schools, that claiming it is racist doesn't hold much water.
Say the schools are segregated. The white school has a rule that all boys have to have short hair. Desegregation becomes law. Black kids end up going to that previously white school. Rule about short hair still applies. Racism? Or sexism? I say the latter, as that is what it always was, and there was nothing about rule that changed (assuming still an equal application - which is why I keep going back to the "please provide an example of a white kid getting away with it"). People here seem to be saying it's all of a sudden a racist rule meant to oppress minorities.
I don't like these aesthetic rules for all the reasons I initially provided, which includes your provided reasons. They are invariably a combination of sexism, queerphobia, racism, religious persecution, and are generally authoritarian in a way that only exists to hurt people.
Let's dissect the segragated school example, considering only black and white students. Pre-integration, forcing the white students to have short hair is a sexist and authoritarian rule from an explicitly sexist and racist institution. Upon desegragation:
If the school was genuinely concerned about equality for the black students, they could reevaluate the rules about hair and gauge whether or not it will have an outsized impact on the new black student population, which it would given the cultural context. Parallel to desegregation efforts was the reclamation of natural black hair among black people (afros being the most iconic example), many of whom had been forced or coerced into white-coded hair styles since slavery ended.
Counter to this, if the school wanted to hurt the new black population, they could maintain the rule and use the equal application of it as a shield against people crying foul. The rule is still sexist, as a part of an explicitly sexist institution, still authoritarian by the very nature of the rule, but the school's racism has become implicit rather than explicit given who it now has the power to harm. This has been the racist playbook example since slavery was abolished, sliding the scale towards more implicit racial strategies in a culture that is less willing to engage with explicit race discrimination.
In the midcentury, long hair among white men became a symbol of the white counterculture, so curtailing it was authoritarian and sexist. At the same time, natural long hair among black men became a symbol of both black counterculture and black empowerment/liberation, so curtailing it was authoritarian, sexist, and racist. This dynamic exists to the modern day, and applies to different minority groups than just black and white people.
Sure if. I'm not denying it's a possibility.
But the other explanation is that they just remained authoritarian wanting conformity, the original intent of the rule, and so never bothered to revisit it after black people came into the school because the rule was never about respective individuality and cultural heritage.
I feel like we've first started with the fact that a black kid got swept up in it, and then worked backwards to find a reason why it is racist. . .rather than actually seeing if the evidence supports the claim it's racist.
I appreciate the respectful back and forth and I again apologize for not outwardly showing your earlier post the full respect it deserved. But I do believe we have hit a impasse here, so with all due respect, this will likely be my last response in this chain. I hope to butt heads with you again because you definitely make good, sound arguments, even if I ultimate disagreed here.