A judge ordered Wednesday that a trial be held next month to determine whether a Black high school student in Texas can continue being punished by his district for refusing to change a hairstyle he and his family say is protected by a new state law.
Darryl George, 18, has not been in his regular classroom in Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu since Aug. 31. Instead, he has either been serving in-school suspension or spending time in an off-site disciplinary program.
His Houston-area school district, Barbers Hill, has said George’s long hair, which he wears in neatly tied and twisted locs on top of his head, violates a district dress code that limits hair length for boys. The district has said other students with locs comply with the length policy.
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In the ad, Poole defended his district’s policy and wrote that districts with a traditional dress code are safer and had higher academic performance and that “being an American requires conformity.”
This school principal used “conformity” as an American principle, implying the kid was being anti American or foreign in some way. Black Americans and their hairstyles are just as American, if not more so than that of white Americans, many who don’t have roots to this land as deep as that of some black Americans. This is another example of racist, white administrators, who think that only a white American is a true American.
Gotta love treating the descendants of people who were brought to America by force as foreigners.
A conversation circa 1780:
“Get out of our country, you don’t belong here!”
“You brought me here against my will, motherfucker.”
Yeah, I love the “go back to Africa” assholes. It’s your ancestors who took them from there in the first place, motherfucker.
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The law bans discrimination against hairstyles that are “commonly or historically associated with race”. The school district is in clear violation of that law.
The actual law is supposed to protect minorities. The school district is just in fantasy racist land.
Being an American requires respect of others, originally different religions, and now encompass race. Who still cares about hair style as long as it isn’t whipping in someone else’s face.
Looks like you drank the propaganda lol. Being an American is about bombing brown children for oil.
😭 I don’t like that you are correct
When has that EVER been required in America? Respect of others has been optional AT BEST.
it’s incredible there are still guys who act like a grade school dress code is some sort of sacred biblical text. just really makes your skin crawl. imagine believing in something like that. imagine taking time out of your day to punish someone over their hair and thinking you’re a noble servant of the barber’s hill tradition. what the fuck dude
oh and also the virulent racism
My daughter got in trouble in her public middle school for wearing a spiked collar. Now she’s in online school and can wear whatever the fuck she wants. She wants to wear spiked collars. Fuck school dress codes.
America was founded in a rebellion against tyranny. Conformity was for royalists, who undermined the revolution and some of whom later served as spies or fought with the British Empire.
These people wave flags and pretend they embody American ideals when they’ve never even understood those ideals, much less even made an effort to live up to them.
The Revolution was fought because rich men hated paying taxes. The same reason we’re on the verge of a second civil war, now.
Ironically, all these conservative “patriots” would have been Tories back in day.
No taxation without representation.
It wasn’t just taxes. It was taxes that were being taken out of their community that they had no say in.
Texas gets more representation in our government than any other state not named California.
And you know where Texas money goes? 60% goes back to Texas. The rest goes to Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, New Mexico, and Kentucky.
Do you actually believe you have any say in what your taxes are allocated to now? Do you think your Representatives and Senators don’t nod and smile, then do whatever the fuck they want with our tax money?
Yes, I do. Not much, but yes.
I think if we were able to move another 25% of the electorate towards public healthcare that we’d get it. I think votes are more powerful than money in our politics; the issue is that people allow their votes to be indirectly and cheaply bought with money, largely through political advertising and media propaganda.
I also think 60 years ago that most politicians were in it for the good of the country, with differing opinions of what that means and how to get there. Now too many are in it only for themselves.
Politicians have always said disingenuous things with the idea that the ends justify the means (for example being religious). Many of these newer politicians, particularly from one party, have lost the last of that good faith and don’t even care about the ends anymore.
You are painfully naive, or you’re a “both sides” provocateur. There are maybe 10 to 15 politicans, total, in Congress who aren’t solely there to enrich themselves by groveling before corporations and billionaires, and none of them are Republicans.
We are going to live to see the end of democracy in the US. There is a very high probability of a second civil war. If I could afford to move to Canada, or Scandinavia, I’d leave tomorrow.
Bloody royalists
That’s a hilariously bad interpretation on why the colonialists came here, and then eventually rebelled against the monarchy. Or even the culture of the colonials.
Hilariously bad.
Whatever you say, champ.
Nobody knows
For context, Poole got his conformity idea from looking at the military academies. Barber’s Hill is not a military prep school and the Military does not believe being an American requires conformity. They believe target identification and units working together at low levels requires conformity. (So they know exactly what they’re going to do and can just execute the mission without input from higher)
This guy is an authoritarian hiding behind things he only pretends to know about.
I like that the two people who literally wrote the law the school is currently breaking were at the hearing to confirm that the law covers this
I pasted this the other day. For those who missed it, this is what Barbers Hill is about-
https://www.bhisd.net/district/about-bhisd
Explains a few things, doesn’t it?
What a fucking weird thing to focus on for a school district.
Unless of course… They’re funded and lobbied by the Petroleum companies… no, that couldn’t be it…
Not really. If you are from Houston you would understand. All of east Houston is petrochem. About 60% of ALL refined oil in America comes from Houston, and specifically the east side. Pasadena (houston) is even nicknamed Stinkadena because of the constant chemical oder in the air. They also employ a large majority of everyone who lives on that side of town. Most of the area around it, Mont Bellview included, has their entire local economies based around support for the oil and gas industry.
I know people are going to comment about ‘boooo oil and gas, we should switch away from oil!’ And others are going to say ‘that’s disgusting! Think of the poor people trapped to live there!’ But the reality is that is was how the city evolved. With the rise of oil and gas, there was the rise of the refinery towns in East Houston. Without it, they would have never existed. And several of the refineries are making other products than gasoline. If you ever use and lubricants, plastics, crayons, waxes, or ever driven or biked on asphalt, then you use oil products.
It’s fine for a school district to talk about the history of the area, but it’s that last line that’s just really weird. They talk about the petrochemical industry as if the school district is part of it and paid for by it.
School districts should be separate from corporate interests. Especially from an industry that has done so much lobbying and spread propaganda about their impact on the world.
Oil is a part of patriotic thought for people down there, believe it or not. It’s why people become angry about public transit and electric cars.
BTW if you have never been to Houston, just don’t go. It is seriously one of the ugliest cities on the planet–nonstop chemical plants everywhere you look.
Here’s an excellent video on this exact topic: https://youtu.be/_pNRuafoyZ4?si=dUuYw1VmzF3VWeY_
Same people in Texas make fun of North Koreas defined list of hairstyles probably lol
Seriously, what is offensive about his hair?
His skin color.
Hopefully it’s obvious I don’t agree with that statement, but at the end of the day, that’s what this case is really about.
Hey, it’s also about power trips and compliance. “You WILL do what I said” kind of thing.
You say that as if there’s a difference, but really, racism is just a special case of that.
I know. Ridiculous.
The end of segregated schools was not that long ago. Growing up it seemed like forever ago, a whole other time and place. Apparently they’re still on the menu if you go far enough south though
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oh man, is it just me or were pretty much all of the examples in that list absolutely awful looking. not saying the styles they mentioned aren’t fine or good, just their choices for pictures. i hated almost every single one of them, and I’m normally one who likes bolder styles on men… also, the single nod to the existence of black hair halfway through 😅.
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The length doesn’t matter, the CROWN Act says that districts can’t discriminate against hairstyles that are “commonly or historically associated with race”. His hairstyle has been worn by African Americans for over 400 years. The law doesn’t say that they can discriminate against “commonly or historically associated with race” of a certain length.
Edit: can to can’t
A bunch of Take me to McDonald’s cuts in that list.
I was suspended for my hairstyle, twice I think. Definitely at least two times. Just wasn’t in line with the dress code for the school. Annoyed me at the time but it’s like… the rules weren’t racial, I’m white and one of the times I had cornrows. It was the 90’s, I’d just been to Tenerife, I definitely looked stupid.
In the this case the dress code is a child’s argument. The hair is “too long” and the statute only protects cultural hair styles without using the word “length” anywhere. It’s exactly the same level as your buddy arguing you can deal illegal drugs if you get a tax stamp.
They comments are pretty worked up but I’m not quite sure how this is even considered racist.
Unless there is some reason that I don’t know that black people need to have long hair it sounds like everyone is being treated equally. It’s not like they are asking him to shave with pseudofolliculitis barbae.
Hair discrimination is a form of racism, mostly used against black people.
Black hair often tends to be more coarse, dry, and curly than others’ hair. A lot of black hairstyles are meant not only as source of self expression, but also to promote moisture retention, scalp health, and cleanliness since frequent washing can easily strip oil from the hair and damage it. It also helps protect the long but brittle hair against breakage.
Unfortunately, there’s a long history of black hair styles being seen as “messy” and “unprofessional” in the US, owing to our colonial past. Many people don’t really understand black hair care and believe the same rules apply to all kinds of hair, requiring or at least implying that hair should be relaxed/straight in a professional setting and anything else looks “nappy”, unkempt, or “ghetto”.
This is the feeling we get when seeing the rule about length when hair is “let down”, the idea that, should George not wear this particular style, his hair would hang down to his shoulders. That’s just not how that kind of hair works, so why is that kind of measurement being applied? “Length” is not deterministic for that kind of hair (ever seen someone before and after they pick their hair?) so the rule seems rather arbitrary. Is this rule applied equally to students with looser curly hair that naturally sits above their hairline when, if straight, it would drop over their eyes? How about people who wear a fro that can be pulled down to their shoulders? His hair is not to his shirt collar or over his ears, nor could it easily become so during the school day, so what exactly is the problem with it? It feels like this rule has been arbitrarily enforced in this case not because of the length of his hair, but because of the particular style of it. Intentional or not, it smacks of some of those old (but still prevalent) conceptions about certain traditionally black hairstyles.
