For four generations, my mom’s family has sent their kids to HBCUs (Historically Black College & Universities). For the first two generations, it wasn’t truly a choice, due to segregation; but when my mother sent me; and when I sent my son last month it was a choice.  I want for my son the same thing that my mother wanted for me: to leave college with not just a good education but with a strong sense of self-esteem.  When your country tells you that you are less and daily microaggressions tear you down, there is great power in having the armor forged by four years of being built up and told you are magnificent.  I graduated from Tuskegee University knowing that I was Black, brilliant, and capable of greatness.   I want my son to graduate from Hampton University with the same self-assuredness.

So, I was a bit taken aback when he called to let us know that as a business major he was required to cut his hair and maintain it at one inch or shorter.  No high-tops, dreads, braids, twists or afros.  This rule, if I remember correctly, was in place when I was in college; and I didn’t think anything about it.  My entire upbringing, as the upbringing of most Black kids, had an inherent assimilation curriculum.  No one told us that we were being trained how to be “acceptable” to White people when we sat for painful hours getting our hair straightened, overheard conversations about how so-and-so wasn’t going to get a job because her parents named her an “African sounding name,” shortened our own names, and practiced the “King’s English” so much that many of us can diagram sentences in our heads.  While that “training” may not have been self-evident, it was omnipresent and substantial.

We’d tsk-tsk at the Brothers whom would wear dashikis or the Sisters whom would wear braids.  Pink Oil moisturizer and Blue Magic were used liberally to make our hair as straight and shiny, as possible.  I knew before I was teenager that a proper Black man should never have facial hair.  Our tv shows used hair to display who was and wasn’t “militant”.  Michael on Good Times wore the afro, just as Re-Run wore sideburns and Shirley had a large afro on What’s Happening.  They were the ones whom were the rebels—the ones not trying to obtain a professional job with benefits.

So, I understand the policy. I understand that my son’s school is trying to prepare him for the “real” world; the world where California was the first state to ban hair discrimination in April of 2019, and wearing natural hair just became a protected right in New York in August of 2019.  Considering that it just became legal for Black people to wear their hair the way it naturally grows out of our heads in just two states this year, it makes a lot of sense that our institutions of higher education would prepare our Black children for this reality.

I can’t help, however, but wonder how that reality ever changes if our leaders, and our leading institutions don’t take a stand?  Instead of accepting and acquiescing to the racist and outdated practice, could the business school create a movement to encourage and pressure corporations to be more inclusive?  It seems as if the students could work on a campaign with the professors where they are writing letters, writing articles, having meetings with corporations and getting them to sign-on to a campaign to accept diverse hairstyles – there could be change.  It seems there would be many life lessons and practical business tips in teaching these students to advocate for themselves.

If not, what do they learn? Do they learn that their hair is wrong and in turn that their Blackness is wrong?  Will they have the confidence to not just get a job, but to build a successful career if they have learned that professionalism equals Whiteness because no matter how short they wear their hair, how many khakis and polos they wear, they will never be White.  They will just be Black boys minimizing who they are, trying their best to fit-in so they can move up.