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A Jamaican Mother Is in a Supreme Court Battle Over Her Child's Dreadlocks

Sherine Virgo was told by her five-year-old daughter's school principal that dreadlocks would not be allowed because of a policy tied to "hygiene" and "avoiding lice," and the resulting case has spurred a political conversation about discrimination.
Rushay Booysen / EyeEm

At a school orientation at the prestigious Kensington Primary School in Kingston, Jamaica, Sherine Virgo was told by the school's principal that her recently admitted five-year-old daughter's dreadlocks would not be allowed. The principal informed her of the policy, which was tied to "hygiene" and "avoiding lice," and said Virgo would have to cut her child's hair before the school year started. That never happened. “I said, ‘I will not be cutting her hair,’” Virgo told The Washington Post. "Here you’re thinking that this should not be a problem. We are just trying to get her an education.” Earlier this month, the Ministry of Education voted in favor of an injunction allowing Virgo's daughter to keep her hair intact. The Supreme Court decision came down after decades of historically discriminatory treatment of Rastafarians, who wear their hair in dreadlocks as a part of their religion rooted in Abrahamism. The case will be heard in January. Human rights group Jamaicans for Justice argued that the school's policy violated the child's constitutional rights—including the right to an education, freedom of speech, and freedom from official discrimination. “This is an important first victory that will allow the child to attend school and receive an education which she has a constitutional right to,” the executive director of Jamaicans for Justice, Rodje Malcolm, said in a statement to WaPo. "Without this court order, she faced the prospect of being denied an education simply for refusing to remove her dreadlocks." This issue goes far beyond the walls of Kensington Primary School. There have been several cases of Black students—in the United States—being admonished, disciplined, and even suspended from school for wearing their natural hair texture because of punitive attitudes and policies about the rejection of European beauty standards and embrace of Black aesthetics. In a statement to Broadly, Drs. Mireille Liong, author of BAD Hair Uprooted: A Celebration of Black Follicles, said, "The stereotype that dreadlocks are dirty is a persuasive one that doesn't seem to go away even though Bob Marley explained in one of his earliest interviews that he does wash his hair." "Black people are the only people on planet earth who don't have the right to wear their God-given tresses natural," continued Liong, who is also the founder of America's Next Natural Model, an online pageant to promote the beauty of natural hair. "All styles natural to the way our follicles grow are stereotyped, like dreadlocks. We are basically denied a human right." "The consequence is that even though Black babies are born with the most hair on their head, girls are the first ones to go bald in their teens, and 73 percent of Black women are suffering from what is called relaxer-induced alopecia: hair loss related to straightening." Despite the unexpected legal case which has resulted from her child's hairstyle, Virgo is unmoved in her conviction in her daughter's right to wear dreadlocks, as she told The Washington Post: “It is our natural hair, it is our nation’s culture, and it what God has blessed us with."

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