Black pupils are being wrongly excluded over their hair. I’m trying to end this discrimination | Emma Dabiri

Across the UK, cases of black children being punished for their hairstyles have escalated. I want to amend the Equality Act

The UK school system has a problem with afro-textured hair. Across the country black and mixed-black pupils are being excluded because their hair is too short, too long, too big or too full. Pupils have been excluded for fades, locs, braids, natural afros and more – in effect every single style and necessary protective method for the maintenance and upkeep of afro hair has been penalised, often in the harshest possible ways. Whatever we do is never enough.

This is reminiscent of my own experiences in school where I was one of the very few black children. I remember a detention in my first year of secondary school at age 12 (we start secondary school a year older in Ireland). All of the other girls were 17- and 18-year-olds who proclaimed shock at my inclusion in their cohort. “You’re too little to be on detention!” they said. My crime? The sheer devilry of wearing the wrong colour scrunchy. The offending scrunchy was a woefully inadequate measure, one which I had used out of desperation to try and tie back a texture of hair not designed to be tied back, hair that I was made to feel deeply embarrassed by and which needed products and expertise not easily found in the Ireland of the late 1980s and early 90s. So I know firsthand how it feels to be punished for having hair that is deemed deviant simply by growing.

With the advent of the natural hair movement people of African descent have been rejecting the standard that insists we must straighten our hair to fit in

Related: Do a DNA test to 'find out my roots'? That's complicated for a black woman like me | Derecka Purnell

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3a1VKZd