Virginia becomes fourth state to pass law banning hair discrimination

Joining California, New Jersey, and New York, Virginia is the fourth state to pass legislation that bans hair discrimination in schools while other states are considering similar legislation.

You’ve read the reports in the media of black students being penalized for their hairstyles. A school in Georgia shared photos on a poster of what is “appropriate” and “inappropriate for haircuts and hairstyles … with only black children pictured. A high school senior was told he couldn’t walk at graduation because of his dreadlocks. A black high-school cheerleader was kicked off the team because her hair was too thick. And the stories go on and on.

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, also teaches sixth grade in Utah. She says that many rules schools have about hair are not always inclusive when they define what is “normal,” which too often looks “like a white child’s hair, and everything else is not normal.” Even if a school’s rules about haircuts and hairstyles weren’t originally drafted as an ethnic or racial attack – for example, the 1980s ban on spiked hair during the “punk” years – Garcia notes that the rules have now become an “attack on the culture that these children bring into their schools.”