Is hair a Title IX issue? To cousins DeAndre Arnold and Kaden Bradford it was.
In January 2020, Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas, suspended the two Black students for violating the district’s dress code. Their infraction was the length of their locs.* The district’s dress code required that male students not have hair extending below their eyebrows, earlobes or tee-shirt collar.
If the boys did not cut their hair, the school said, they wouldn’t be allowed back in class. When they didn’t comply, the two were placed on in-school suspension, which Kaden says was like prison. They were confined to a room and got no instruction from teachers, leaving them to complete their studies and homework on their own. They couldn’t participate in extra-curricular activities, a huge blow to Kaden, who was in the marching band.
In addition, the school said it would bar DeAndre, a senior, from his graduation ceremony, while Kaden, a sophomore, would be indefinitely on in-school suspension.
DeAndre and Kaden filed a lawsuit, claiming discrimination under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The lawsuit pointed out that the district had no such rule for female students.
It’s cultural, too
For DeAndre, the case was about both gender and race. Locs are a part of his culture and heritage, he said, as his father is from Trinidad. Both DeAndre and Kaden said they tied up their hair to comply with the dress code.
“I really wish the school would kind of be open to other cultures and just at least let us try to tell you some things,” he said. “Don’t just shut us out.”**
But the district doubled down in 2020, adding the phrase “when let down,” to the hair length policy, meaning that the boys’ hair didn’t comply even if they tied it up.
The district maintains that it can legally enforce a gender-specific dress code, and that the hair requirement for male students is just to ensure a neat appearance and doesn’t bar any particular style.
“There is no dress code policy that prohibits any cornrow or any other method of wearing of the hair,” the district’s superintendent, Greg Poole, said. “Our policy limits the length.”***
Poole even placed the dispute in the context of the civil rights movement, claiming that exempting Black students would enforce unequal treatment of Black and white students. (The district is 97 percent white, and 3 percent Black, Hispanic or other.)
Photo tell-all
But Christina Beeler, an attorney interested in the case, leafed through old Barbers Hill yearbooks and came up with photos of white students with long hair.
“White male students aren’t being held to same standard,” Beeler said. “It’s so clear that white male students and Black students are being treated differently.”†
No matter what the district says, to suspend students because of their hair is ridiculous, DeAndre’s mother said.
“It’s just hair, it’s not going to define how well they are going to do in school or how their behavior will be,” said Sandy Arnold.†† In the lawsuit, she also claimed gender discrimination, saying she was harassed after contesting the dress code.
Still with the hair!
The U.S. District Court in Houston eventually barred Barbers Hill from enforcing the hair length policy. Yet on the first day of school in 2021, the district tagged 36 high school students for hair length violations. Twenty-two of the students were white, 12 Hispanic and two “other.”
Meanwhile both DeAndre and Kaden left Barbers Hill to attend Ross S. Sterling High School in Goose Creek, Idaho. Kaden is finishing high school back at Barbers Hill, while DeAndre is at college studying to be a veterinarian. He got help with his tuition from Ellen DeGeneres and Alicia Keys, who presented him with a $20,000 check on DeGeneres’s show.
Despite the emotional and educational toll the lawsuit took on the cousins, Kaden says he’s just glad they could make a difference.
“Our main goal has always been to change the policy to where it wouldn’t discriminate against different racial groups,” he said.†††
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* The lawsuit uses the term “locs” instead of “dreadlocks,” noting that slave traders used the term “dreadlocks,” meaning “dreadful,” to refer to Africans’ hair.
** Associated Press, “Ellen DeGeneres surprises Texas teen told to cut dreadlocks with $20K for college,” The New York Post (January 31, 2020).
*** “Ellen DeGeneres.”
† Raga Justin, “Texas school district’s dreadlocks ban discriminatory, federal court rules,” The Texas Tribune (August 18,2020).
†† Tiffany Justice, “Barbers Hill ISD facing backlash once more about controversial dress code policy,” Fox News (August 25, 2021)
††† “After 2 Black students were suspended, court rules hair policy is discriminatory,” ABC13 (August 18, 2020).
PHOTO: DeAndre Arnold (l) and Kaden Bradford (r)