In anticipation of the coming school year, the president of Tuskegee University, Dr Mark A Brown, sent welcome letters to students and their parents last month. Part of the message focused on the university’s policy for student attire. A newly enforced dress code prohibits students from wearing “revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation.
They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets, or durags to class or the cafeteria.” Dr Brown goes on to let the students know: “Faculty will be empowered to respond to students who are inappropriately dressed based on these guidelines.” The policy has produced polarized responses. Supporters believe that since the university is a private school, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have often been places where Black people learn discipline and earn entrance into the professional world, this dress code is simply reinforcing a tradition that calls for students to exhibit professionalism during their training. It harkens back to WEB DuBois’s idea of a “Talented Tenth”, which would consist of upwardly mobile Black leaders such as teachers and other professionals whose example of hard work and social standing would uplift the entire race.
Dissenters like me largely concede that as a private HBCU, Tuskegee has the institutional authority to require dress codes, as any similarly situated institution does. But we believe the policy is ultimately rooted in politics of respectability, a set of assumptions I’ve grappled with throughout my own academic career. One of the damaging implications of such a dress code is the reinforcement of anti-Black standards that have been externally and internally imposed on Black people in the United States for decades and have never equaled success or safety.
In fact, debates about “proper attire” have polarized the country throughout its history. This has been especially true when the conversations have been tied to violence. Black men returning to the US from war were lynched in their US military uniforms because white folks thought them “uppity” for trying to claim the honor and valor supposedly synonymous with military service.
More recently, debates about clothing became a primary focus after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. The fact that the 17-year-old was wearing a hoodie apparently justified his killing: for some people, the outfit was enough to provoke the fear and apprehension Zimmerman claimed to feel. When Zimmerman was on trial, I was a high school teacher in Illinois.
In that job, I usually wore a tie and a jacket to work. I fondly remember teaching many young students how to tie a half windsor or a bowtie. In 2013, I left that job to go back to school for a PhD.
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