By Charley Locke, Photo: Djeneba Aduayom/The New York Times, The New York Times, April 22, 2022
One day last spring, Jett Hawkins, 5, asked his mom to braid his hair for him. He loved the way it looked: “I was so proud and happy,” says Jett, who lives in Chicago. But when he got to school, his mother says, an administrator called her and told her that his hairstyle had broken a school policy that banned students from wearing braids, locs and twists.
Jett is not the only kid who has been singled out at school for wearing natural Black styles. Hair-based discrimination can be official, like when a school handbook states that students can’t wear braids, or unofficial, like when a teacher tells a student that their Afro is “too distracting.” Either way, it “sends the message that your culture and your identity is not accepted,” says Danielle Apugo, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies Black women and girls’ experiences at school.
Kids, parents and others have been fighting back. After Jett’s mother, Ida Nelson, gave an interview to a local newspaper about what happened, an Illinois state senator named Mike Simmons read about it and decided to propose a new law so it wouldn’t ever happen again. In January, the Jett Hawkins Act went into effect, preventing Illinois schools from creating dress codes based on hairstyles.
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