After serving more than a month of in-school suspension over his dreadlocks, a Black student in Texas was told he will be removed from his high school and sent to a disciplinary alternative education program on Thursday.
Darryl George, 18, is a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu and has been suspended since Aug. 31. He will be sent to EPIC, an alternative school program, from Oct. 12 through Nov. 29 for “failure to comply” with multiple campus and classroom regulations, the principal said in a Wednesday letter provided to The Associated Press by the family.
Principal Lance Murphy wrote that George has repeatedly violated the district’s “previously communicated standards of student conduct." The letter also says that George will be allowed to return to regular classroom instruction on Nov. 30 but will not be allowed to return to his high school’s campus until then unless he’s there to discuss his conduct with school administrators.
Barbers Hill Independent School District prohibits male students from having hair extending below the eyebrows, ear lobes or top of a T-shirt collar, according to the student handbook. Additionally, hair on all students must be clean, well-groomed, geometrical and not an unnatural color or variation. The school does not require uniforms.
George’s mother, Darresha George, and the family’s attorney deny the teenager’s hairstyle violates the dress code. The family last month filed a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency and a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state’s governor and attorney general, alleging they failed to enforce a new law outlawing discrimination based on hairstyles.
The family alleges George’s suspension and subsequent discipline violate the state’s CROWN Act, which took effect Sept. 1. The law, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination and bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, dreadlocks, twists or Bantu knots.
A federal version passed in the U.S. House last year, but was not successful in the Senate.
The school district also filed a lawsuit in state district court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act. The lawsuit was filed in Chambers County, east of Houston.
George’s school previously clashed with two other Black male students over the dress code.
Barbers Hill officials told cousins De’Andre Arnold and Kaden Bradford they had to cut their dreadlocks in 2020. Their families sued the district in May 2020, and a federal judge later ruled the district’s hair policy was discriminatory. Their pending case helped spur Texas lawmakers to approve the state’s CROWN Act. Both students withdrew from the school, with Bradford returning after the judge’s ruling.
link: https://www.aol.com/news/black-student-suspended-over-hairstyle-220842177.html
I keep hearing America is the land of freedom and that Europe is way more racist than America.
This story would have never happened in Europe. Suspended because of a hairstyle, wtf.
I was suspended for my hairstyle on a number of occasions, in the UK. Bald now… the final humiliation.
Admittedly quite a lot of Brits would prefer not to admit that we are, in fact, in Europe. But Ruby Williams: No child with afro hair should suffer like me
Hijabs in France.
Texas is a GOP-strangled shithole, but Europe isn’t squeaky-clean, either.
Why did the student just not simply turn into a white kid with non-threatening, non-geometric hair?
finally, someone has a workable solution!
“Failure to comply”
There it is, that’s the entire purpose of the modern education system, to beat us into submission to arbitrary socioeconomic roles, to curtail independence and creativity, rendering us fodder for corporate masters. Mind all the rules and maybe tomorrow you’ll get the extra nice table scraps.
Good for them not complying, they literally harmed nobody including themselves. The suspension is clearly a punitive measure to heal the administration’s wounded pride, which is also an essential aspect of the education system.
… Do you really believe all that you just wrote here? Because that is just conspiracy theory level nonsense.
Yes, this school, and likely
toianynoyherstoo many others (typing at night is fun) have a bunch of asshole administrators that feel the need to show who’s in charge. That doesn’t mean all education is to shape us into slaves. Chill dude.
this whole situation is ridiculous
Barbers Hill Independent School District prohibits male students from having hair extending below the eyebrows, ear lobes or top of a T-shirt collar, according to the student handbook. Additionally, hair on all students must be clean, well-groomed, geometrical and not an unnatural color or variation. The school does not require uniforms.
Land of the fucking free.
Call me when the HOA allows you to plant clover on the front lawn.
Barbers hill, and they’re picking on a dude’s hair.
The other day I was walking into a bar with my partner. We’re white, straight-passing, generally clean looking folk. The bar had a sign on it that said “No bandanas, no gang colors”. They were wearing a bandana, and my t-shirt was blue, but I couldn’t help but notice that we were able to walk into that bar, be served and settle our tab at the end of the night.
It’s about selective enforcement. You can’t say “No black people”, so you say “no black people stuff”. Or you make something everyone does illegal and then give the people in charge broad leeway as to when they can choose to ignore it. Or you set up situations that aren’t open in their racism but just so happen to target one group over another, like setting up checks on the Mexican border and then claiming you’re not targeting latino people because if you happen to catch white illegal immigrants you’ll deport them too. In the words of Republican party strategist Lee Atwater (trigger warning: just lots of open, blatant racism and n-bombs)
spoiler
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ngger, ngger, ngger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nIgger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ngger, n*gger.”:::
I hope the family successfully destroys the finances of the people involved in these super racist decisions.
Usually it’s taxpayers money.
And in this case it shouldn’t be.
It won’t, it’s not a racist policy. The people enforcing it probably are but if anything it’s a homophobic policy
The problem is hair length not hair style
Though some religious beliefs prevent cutting hair so there may be something there
The word you were searching for is sexist. I’ve been saying since the initial article that this might be unconstitutional under Bostock v. Clayton County.
Disgustingly ridiculous
It’s just hair. Why is the school district so interested in restricting hairstyles?
It’s not just hair though. It’s the fact that a black student challenged a decision they’ve made.
I can hear the shrieks of “uppity” from over here.
I’m the whitest dude you ever saw, and it’s even obvious to me: black hair is different, at a molecular level. You can’t mindlessly apply grooming standards to people who are not the same, physically. Not better, not worse (obviously), just different. These people are racist.
So their guidelines are openly discriminatory at best, and openly racist otherwise…
It’s mind-blowing how quickly the US is regressing because we’re kowtowing to a miniscule minority.
I’m openly curious how well a “liberal” minded individual who isn’t afraid to be an asshole would be received.
Largely, the problem is that the far-right shows up.
No matter how tiny the power grab, they’ll have someone there to grab it, often unopposed.
Principal Lance Murphy is literally just going to die on this hill apparently. Between the massive cost the school district took because of the 2020 court loss over this exact same thing, and this giant L the school district is about to take for not only being now in Violation of Federal Law but also Texas literally passed a law, because of this asshat and the 2020 loss, indicating that he’s not legally allowed to do exactly what he’s doing.
The school district also filed a lawsuit in state district court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act
Which if you are unsure if your policy is violating a law or not, you should likely not have the policy until the court gives you more clarity. Because if the Courts do indeed indicate that the school is in violation of Texas’ CROWN Act, they’ve just handed this kid millions of dollars in restitution, which I guess they can just pile on top of the millions this school district has blown so far on litigation.
You would think that at some point taxpayers would be up in arms, but nope it’s Texas, blowing billions on stupid lawsuits is their thing.
Nah, they’re not asking. This is a setup for a challenge of the CROWN Act and a possible reversal. Just watch, they’ll appeal it all the way up to Texas Supreme Court if they need to.
To be fair being racist has long been a winning strategy in Texas so you can imagine that their bag of tricks isn’t particularly deep in matters like this
How does a previous case not automatically make the current situation unacceptable? Do they have to retry the exact same situation over and over again?
Because principal is a bully and willing to use his powers to destroy lives. The methods to protect people are very slow and so he gets away with it for years until the district loses a major lawsuit. Then he quietly gets reassigned or retires and we pretend the entire thing never happened.
I don’t trust principals
Why tf they even care about students’ hairstyles? Tbh, looks like whoever came up with this brilliant rule is a bolding and jealous fossil :::|
My school added a hairstyle rule because it was being used to bully others. Kids with expensive perms mocked the poor kids with “trashy” haircuts.
Dress codes are more common in areas with rich kids to avoid isolating the kids who can’t afford expensive clothes and haircuts.
What a shithole.
Hope he gets into a college as far away as possible.
It’s baffling to me, that the US always claims to be the champion of freedom, but runs most of their education like part-time prison camps. My school here in Germany didn’t give a crap about anyone’s appearance. If you’re street legal, you’re fine in school.
