Who Benefits From Dress Codes? Almost Always, It's People In Power

By Preston Mitchum


“You are your child’s first teacher,” Principal Carlotta Outley Brown instructed them populace of Houston’s James Madison High School in a April 9 letter explaining “acceptable” dress codes on campus. “However, please know we have to have standards, most of all we must have high standards.”


Although while most dress code “standards” ordinarily target what a student wears to class, Outley Brown’s sweeping new policy applied to parents, and aimed to ban particular items of clothing for all people visiting the school, and also pajamas, hair rollers, satin caps, and bonnets, which are usually worn by Black females for hair protection.


“We want [the students] to know what is suitable and not suitable for any setting @they could be in,” the principal added. “This is a professional education environment where we are teaching our children what is right and what is correct or not correct.”


Nevertheless some people reportedly praised the school for its policy, several people on social media saw it for what it was: a unnecessary set of rules singling out a particular order of people who couldn’t or didn’t conform to the school’s definition of suitable attire. Others also noted how the school could have done literally anything else with their time than seemingly pick to target Black families for their attire. (Outley Brown has since defended the policy.)


It should escape no one that, in her letter, Principal Outley Brown showed little regard for why a parent may be dressed a certain way whenever visiting school grounds. As a substitute, she simply focused on how one is dressed — as if that is a symptom of how successful a student will be. No such metrics exist. What we do know, but, is that some parents cannot afford clothing that others would find “appropriate,” and that working countless jobs or picking up odd hours might impact how someone chooses to dress themselves in their off-hours.


It’s not the initial time that schools have questioned the likelihood of a child’s “prosperous future” based on what an authority figure was wearing. In 2016, Atlanta teacher Patrice Brown, otherwise referred to as #TeacherBae, was penalized soon after a photo of her in a pink dress went viral. Through no doing of her own, people called the look inappropriate and revealing; however, considering she are usually be seen on Instagram page wearing mostly knee-length dresses and form-fitting clothing, people likely thought her attire was “unprofessional” primarily because of her race and the shape of her body.


Identically, it’s been shown that school dress code policies are disproportionately applied against Black ladies. As one storyteller instructed them National Women’s Law Center for their project Dress Coded: Black Females, Bodies, and Bias in D.C. Schools, “Black ladies with curvier figures would wear the same top [as white, skinnier girls] and be met with disapproving smirks and sent to the front office to change — soon after barely stepping one foot indoors within the school door.”


the content surrounding what is “appropriate” attire, either for work or to visit your children at school, is rooted in respectability politics, a reaffirmation of the false idea that there really are only a couple of correct way to show up for particular people, places, and events. These rules and mores are arbitrarily created and preserved by society; we follow them because we have been taught there really is no other way. But they’re anti-Black, and are particularly weaponized against Black ladies, who are usually subjected to unwanted and unnecessary policing  — for example, as soon as they're told that hairstyles are inappropriate and worthy of punishment.


Nevertheless many folks are pushing back on the ways in which these policies promoting outdated models of “professionalism,” they have although to be eradicated altogether: In 2016, Kentucky’s Butler Customary High School introduced a new dress-code policy banning twists, dreadlocks, Afros longer than two inches, jewelry worn in hair, and cornrows. In 2017, Mystic Valley Regional Charter School suspended twin 16-year-old girls Mya and Deanna Cook for their braided hair extensions, and in 2018, a 11-year-old was asked to leave school because her braided hair extensions allegedly violated policies.


These are all piece of sweeping dress code policies claiming to promote “high standards” once they are case in point discriminatory policies aimed at maintaining normalized (read: white) ideas of success that effectively rewrite and erase the Black experience.


there really is nothing wrong or inappropriate about parents wearing pajamas, bonnets, rollers, and leggings outside; how we feel about seeing those articles out and around says more about us than it does about anyone else, and these classist and elitist standards we apply to others are rooted in our own linear understanding of so-called professionalism.


If dress code policies are enacted to promote “high standards,” who ultimately advantages? Response The answer is a sad one.