(This is the third in our new series, “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Read about TV trauma here and ratting out your kid here.)
It’s a case that DadWagon has been watching with some amusement and, let’s face it, a twinge of urban superiority. In Balch Springs, Texas, the long hairstyle worn by 20% of the boys in Dalia’s class in New York got 4-year-old Taylor Pugh suspended last month.
After an appeal by his mother, who has water buffalo horn ear piercings herself, the school board ruled this-a-way: screw you, mom and constitution, your boy can only wear his hair long if he braids it and it stays above the shoulder.
This raises a lot of questions. What kind of braid exactly? Braveheart side-braids with war paint? Allen Iverson brain-pattern cornrows? Legolas elvish herringbone? A Lil Jon braid explosion?
Whatever they intend, it ain’t gonna look good on a preschooler. Mom has decided to ignore the ruling and send the boy to school with her own odd-looking compromise, a ponytail on top with lots of gel.
There’s just so much wrong with this story. As much as I sympathize with the mother, is it right for her to continue to have her kid suspended for her beliefs? I often have this question about the long hair worn by hipster New York kids–how much of that is the parents trying to feel cool and how much is what the kid himself really wants?
In the end, that’s why in this Tantrum, I’m coming out against long hair for little boys. Yes, I had long hair for much of the 90’s, and was a proud associate member of the langhaariger Ossirockerscheiss club (choke on that one, Google translate). Wearing your hair long is about individual expression; it’s a (tiny) gesture of defiance to conventional society. A preschooler doesn’t really have the information to give that kind of consent.
Back to the Mequite school district: what kind of hysteria is causing the public schools there to worry about gang-related hair (their ostensible concern) in preschool? It’s plenty ironic that this ruling comes from Texas, the state that, as you can see in this drawing I found on the Internet, once defined long hair for men (and, where, it might be noted, many people are quite fond of a certain longhair preacher from Nazareth).
What really bugs me is how much these school administrators are living in the past. It’s 2010, people. How could you not know about the invention of the boy-rette barrette for boys?
This has been the way in Texas for decades. It has nothing to do with gang related what not. It’s just conservatism. They don’t want boys that look like girls. Dallas is a series of white-flight suburbs. This is part of the way they preserve the white before the inevitable flight (which is why you have the “gang” red herring nonsense).
When I was in school “duck tails” were the big issue because they could potentially go below the shoulder. Then earrings on boys were a huge issue. When I started elementary school we couldn’t even wear shorts.
There’s constant challenges to this, but the Supreme Court has been remarkably consistent in saying kids don’t really have much in the way of free speech rights when at school, and especially if all we’re talking about is hair.