Faith discrimination fight in West London school

The Fulham Boys School has found itself inadvertently in the eye of the cyclone just a mere two months into the start of the new academic year. Scandal surrounds this West Kensington all-boy school after reports surfaced exposing the headmaster demanding a student’s mother cut her son’s dreadlocks, as the hairstyle did not comply with the school’s uniform policies. Tuesday Flanders, the mother of 12-year-old Chikayzea, has claimed that the school’s solicitation for her to cut her son’s dreadlocks is an act of discrimination of her and her family’s Rastafarian religious culture . The headmaster, Mr. Alun Ebenezer, still maintains that the school has a strict uniform policy regarding hairstyles, that all pupils must follow, and dreadlocks do not comply with it.

According to the Fulham Boys School website, uniform policies aspire to “make the boys feel equal to their peers in terms of appearance and help nurture cohesion between different groups of boys.” A mealy-mouthed statement from Mr. Ebenezer defends the school’s policy, stating that the Fulham Boys School is a rigorous school and although it welcomes students from different cultures and religions, ultimately “all boys need to follow and adhere to the school policy.”

With the rise of many ethnic self-awareness movements that insist on reclaiming one’s roots and origins through visual expressions, the edifice of uniformity in British education has been called into question. The Fulham Boys School’s uniform policy has a strict tenet for hairstyle, demanding that “hair styles...be tidy and of a conventional nature, [with] no extreme or ‘cult’ haircuts including sculpting, shaving, dreadlocks or braiding...allowed.” The policy itself is worded such that the convention on hairstyle is exclusive of multiethnic expression. Dreadlocks and braiding are powerful symbols of black heritage and culture, the former being a widespread hairstyle among indigenous cultures in Africa, and the latter being a hairstyle—often referred to as cornrows—reminiscent of how African slaves working on cotton and sugar plantations in North America and the Caribbean would wear their hair.

Not only are these hairstyles regarded as unconventional, the school posits them as “cult haircuts”, when they are clearly not. Moreover, grouping braiding and dreadlocks with shaving in the same semantic category fails to grasp the significance—and the effect—of each haircut for the people wearing them. Shaving, in its extremity, was a haircut popularized in the 1930s and 1940s under the fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler, and in its mildness is reminiscent of military culture. The negative connotations that surround this haircut are evident and rightly considered “cult”-like. Instead, braiding and dreadlocks are subliminal expressions of pride in one’s own culture and heritage—not an expression of a cult. To say so, would imply that the Rastafarian religion is also a cult—the discriminatory nod that Ms. Flanders states to have deduced from her meeting with Mr. Ebenezer.

Mr. Ebenezer’s choice to “treat this as a social issue [because] I have seen no tenets that you have to have dreadlocks”, is being highly contested by Ms. Flanders. So much so in fact that in partnership with The Black Child Agenda, Tuesday Flanders is pushing a demonstration to protest the ban on braids and dreadlocks outside the Fulham Boys School on October 31 from 8 am to 2 pm. While Ms. Flanders recognizes that the school is explicit about the parent’s role in making sure of the “acceptability of hairstyles that may be considered ‘different’”, wearing dreadlocks for Chikayzea and his older brother Amaechi is not a social trend or a popularized fashion or to stand out as different. Tuesday Flanders insists that “we wear [dreadlocks] because of our culture. Dreadlocks identify us as a person and a people. They identify who we are.”

Ultimately, in a day and age that values the expression of what makes us different above all else, the edifice of uniformity stands on shaking grounds.

Maria Julia Pieraccioni