Hair discrimination and the racialization of Black young people’s bodies: A critical analysis of racism in UK school settings

Black children and young people’s bodies have long been a site where questions of identity, representation, conformity, and control are contested both at the individual and the institutional level. Relatively little research has explored how race, racisms and racist logics operate through hair discrimination in U.K. schooling and the impacts of this on Black children and young people. This article considers Black children and young people’s bodies as sites of struggle in school settings in the context of discriminatory school uniform policies which discipline their hair, thereby denying their right both to religious, cultural, and/or racial self-expression and to an education. Drawing on Critical Race Theory as well as theories around racial embodiment, the article highlights contemporary stories of Black children’s exclusion from school—both formally through suspension and exclusion and informally through the engendering of feelings of non-belonging—to explicate the ways in which systemic racism unfolds. The article illustrates that hair and hair discrimination are a unique way ‘in’ to understanding how Black children are racialized in school settings. It argues that the contemporary policing of the hair of Black children and young people is connected to longer histories of institutional banishment and institutional racism in educational settings.