Free Your Hair; Free Your Mind

[WARNING: UNCHECKED SARCASM AHEAD]

Sadly, it look like political correctness has won the day in the fight to groom people of color:

In the wake of an outcry over an Ohio charter school's attempt to ban "afro-puffs and small twisted braids," the institution’s dean has apologized and said the policy was taken out of context.

Because there's clearly a non-racist "context" for telling black parents how to groom their children; just give us time to think of one...

On June 14, officials at Horizon Science Academy in Lorian sent a letter to parents, outlining the school’s new dress code for the upcoming school year. Among other rules regarding hats and tattoos, the updated regulations said that "afro-puffs and small twisted braids, with or without rubber bands are NOT permitted,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by the blog Black Girl with Long Hair.

A swift backlash against the policy –- which many perceived as racist -- prompted school’s administration sent out a letter of apology on Saturday, explaining that the ban would not be included in a final version of the school’s new dress code. The letter, which can be found in its entirety on Black Girl with Long Hair, explained that the administration for the K – 10 school did not have “any intention of creating bias towards any of our students.”

See? All you folks who claim charter schools aren't "public" schools responsive to the needs of parents and protective of students' rights are dead wrong. All you need to do to get your child's charter to respond to your concerns is mount a national media campaign! Hey, no one said being a parent is easy...

James Knight, an advisory board member for the school, told HuffPost Live that the proposed policy was “a misunderstanding.” Knight, who has four African-American sons, said that the policy was specifically directed at the school’s male students.

“It had nothing to do with young ladies, young African-American ladies. It was really more so addressing young African-American men here at this school,” said Knight. “We want to maintain a certain type of college prep culture here, and we just want the young men to be well-groomed.”

Leila Noelliste, creator and editor of Black Girl with Long Hair, told HuffPost Live that the problem lies with the idea that natural African-American hair is not automatically considered well-groomed.

“It’s an issue black people face within the black community and outside, that our naturally occurring features are characterized as unruly, undisciplined, unkempt," Noelliste said. [emphasis mine]

Which, of course, is why poor black children living in cities need to be lined up and talked over and made to chant and marched through the halls and told to stop talking at lunch, even after all the "troublemakers" have been segregated away.

And it's also why communities exerting local control over their schools are so dangerous to the powers-that-be. Because if you allow a local community to make decisions about grooming, you're starting down a slippery slope that ends with teachers reading Howard Zinn and students questioning why they're stuck in crumbling schools. Next thing you know, mayoral candidates who call for raising "offensive" taxes on the wealthy to fund pre-school start moving up in the polls.

Freeing hair is the first, dangerous step in freeing minds.

Can't have that, can we?

The 1% says: "Whew..."

It's been a while since we've heard George preach, hasn't it?

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying -- lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want -- they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They DON'T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that, that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting ****** by system that threw them overboard 30 ******' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly ******** jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. 

ADDING: Silly me -- I forgot to add the story that started me thinking about all this in the first place:

The parents of a Tulsa girl have pulled her from school because the administration wouldn't let her keep her hairstyle. Speaking with KOKI-TV this week, Tiana Parker, 7, said tearfully, "They didn't like my dreads."

According to the parent-student handbook of the Deborah Brown Community School, a charter school, which Tiana attended until Friday, "Hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros and other faddish styles are unacceptable. For safety reasons, girls' weaved hair should be no longer than shoulder length. Boy's hair is to be short and neatly trimmed." The school's website also states, "Uniforms are required as a part of the strict dress code we strongly enforce."

 Tiana's father, Terrance Parker, told KOKI that school administrators told him that his daughter didn't look presentable. "She's always presentable. I take pride in my kids looking nice," said Parker, who works as a barber. He also said that last year, she wore the same hairstyle to school without consequences. A school representative told Yahoo Shine via email, "We have photo documentation in our yearbook that her hair was not in dreadlocks during the 2012-2013 school year." [emphasis mine]

It will be such a relief when inBloom gets up and running; that way, charter schools will be able to track little black girls' hairstyles across state lines...