(ThyBlackMan.com) Tuskegee University announced this month that bonnets, do-rags, and bedroom shoes will no longer be permitted in its classrooms and cafeteria, and the fuss that followed says more about us than any scrap of cloth ever could.
Give me a minute with that, because the noise came fast and the reasoning limped in behind it.
Dr. Mark A. Brown laid it out in a letter to parents of the freshmen headed his way this fall. Not a scolding. A heads up. Show up prepared for the room you claim you want to walk into someday. That was the whole spirit of the thing.
Now, I earned my degree at Howard. Bison to the marrow, and I won’t pretend otherwise. So when folks online started hollering that the Alabama institution had declared war on our heritage, something old stirred in me. Seen this picture before, and it rarely holds up by the second act.
Here is where I split from a lot of my younger cousins on the timeline. Somewhere down the road we decided that any rule handed to our kids must be a boot pressing on the throat. Expectation got treated like a cage. A simple guideline about attire got recast as shame wearing a necktie. The reflex makes plenty of sense to me. Our grandparents were told to shrink, to grin, to make white people comfortable in exchange for a paycheck and a little peace. That wound is real. No, I would never wave it off.
But grief can turn lazy if you let it. And lately the phrase respectability has become a spell folks say to end a conversation instead of starting it. Somebody asks a freshman to leave the sleep cap in the dorm, and suddenly we are back in 1955. That flattening does us no favors.
There is a difference, a wide one, between a hostile society demanding that we erase ourselves and a house of our own asking eighteen year olds to rise to an occasion. Tuskegee is not the sheriff. It is the grandmother straightening your collar before church, telling you that you are worth the effort. Brown did not say the bonnet is ugly, nor call our grooming shameful. What he said is that the classroom is a rehearsal for a life these young folks swear they want.
Let me speak plainly about that head covering, since it sits at the center of all this. Overnight it guards the curls, the waves, the locs, the work our women and men put into looking sharp. Nobody with sense is coming for your edges at midnight. Protecting your style while you sleep and strolling into a noon seminar in the same wrap are two separate acts, though. The first is simple care. Its twin is a habit the working world will quietly punish, and I would rather a professor correct it in September than a hiring manager bury the résumé in June.
Here is the part that makes some folks wince, so I will say it slow. Truth is, I am proud to be a Black man, and Black folk have always carried ourselves like somebody, prouder than I can say. That is exactly why I sweat how our young present themselves. The world arrives already holding a picture. It clocks a durag, a hood tugged low, denim sagging off the hip, and reaches for the word thug before it ever learns your name. Unfair to the bone. True anyhow. Dressing for the win instead of feeding that stale lie bows to nobody. It refuses to hand a stranger the excuse. We can love the block and still show a freshman that a clean collar opens the door a slouch keeps shut.
The sharper objection deserves an honest answer, and I hear it plain. Some argue that these caps shield textures that European grooming standards never respected, so barring them in class smuggles in an old prejudice through the side door. That is a serious point, not a silly one. Hair has been a battleground for our people a very long time, from the CROWN Act fights to little girls sent home from grade school over braids. History like that stays close to me.
Still, the answer to unfair scrutiny is not to abandon every standard. It is to be excellent on our terms, drawing the finish line ourselves rather than letting somebody else set it. That is what these campuses were built to do. Booker T. Washington did not raise that place in the red clay so his descendants could show up to organic chemistry dressed for a nap. The man believed labor and dignity walked together. Agree with all of his methods or not, that thread runs straight through the school’s marrow.
I think about my own four years on the yard. We had elders who checked us. Straighten up. Speak up. Iron that shirt. Nobody mistook it for hatred of self. We understood it as love with a spine. Somewhere we traded that spine for the comfort of feeling perpetually wronged, and I do not believe the swap served our children well.
Character grows inside boundaries. A jazz player learns the changes before he ever breaks them. Liberty without form is just noise, and these kids are drowning in noise already, phones welded to their palms, which Brown also addressed, bless him.
None of this hands the school a blank check. If the policy gets enforced with cruelty, if it becomes an excuse to humiliate a poor kid who cannot afford a blazer, then I will be first in line to raise hell. Grace has to ride shotgun with any rule. Fairness lives in how you carry a thing, not only in whether you meant well by it. The alumni ought to watch that closely, and so will I.
But the core idea, that a proud institution can ask its people to present themselves with intention, is not betrayal. It is inheritance. My grandmother would have grasped it in about four seconds flat, no essay required.
We do our young no kindness by teaching them that every boundary is an insult and every insult is oppression. Life will hand them plenty of the genuine article. Ready them for it. Let them learn the gap between a warm demand and a cold one, because the warm kind, the sort that says I believe you can rise, is the rarest thing a person ever receives.
Wear the bonnet home, and wear it proud. Just let that future you keep talking about meet you halfway at the door, dressed and standing tall.
Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna
Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.
One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.
