8-Year-Old Girl Kicked Out of Class Because of Her Hair

Growing up a girl is no easy thing to do under any circumstances, but throw in being raised by parents of two different ethnicities, being the only child of color in your smart kids class, and attempting to rock the curls, kinks, and coils that naturally grow out of your scalp, and truly nightmarish events are sure to take place. Such is the case for an eight-year-old Seattle child who happens to be the daughter of a Zimbabwen man, The Stranger editor Charles Mudede, and a white woman.

Mudede's daughter was kicked out of her honors classroom at Thurgood Marshall Elementary (where she was, ironically, the only non-white child selected for the special honor) because her hair disturbed her teacher, who is white. Allegedly, the scent of the hair lotion the girl's parents used to style her hair was making the teacher sick; the teacher has allergies, which the parents were aware of. But instead of taking the matter up with the grown-ups who make decisions about a little girl's hair, the teacher ejected the student from her classroom one day last month. First to a hallway and then to another class altogether (the alternative classroom, her father points out, is predominantly black).

This is why it's important that all kids, not just kids of color, learn something about the race, ethnicity, and cultural sensitivity. This incident demonstrates ignorance and disregard for how a student must feel as the only black kid, the only curly-haired kid in a class for "special" kids, even without being singled out and essentially disciplined for her hair, of all things.

But such is the nature of media coverage and reaction, the outrage isn't quite there. Most people's first reaction seems to be to ignore the racial nature of the incident and the effect this will have on the girl (who, sadly, by eight may be used to this kind of treatment) and to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she really was absolutely sickened by the hair product. But no one at the school bothered to be sure if it was the earthy smell of the hair lotion or one of the other thousands of things one smells as an elementary school teacher. Full disclosure: I've used the product in question before and the smell is a bit obnoxious, but no more so than, say, those fruity Herbal Essences conditioners.

I'm coming at this story from a wholly non-mainstream angle, however. My natural hair texture probably isn't that different from Mudede's daughter. It's tightly curled, course, dense enough to hold a comb even when I take my hand away, and big. The only way it would even remotely resemble a white woman's is if I regularly applied a dangerous and erosive chemical that would essentially burn my hair straight. And for 19 years, I did, or my mom did, or my sister or a hair stylist did, because that is what is expected of non-white people in this country. Even white women with non-straight hair often go to great lengths to wear their hair in the straight styles that we equate to female beauty.

When Mudede says that he wants his daughter "to know she's beautiful," I understand just how daunting that task can be for any American parent, but particularly for parents of children that don't look like the rest of their classroom or like the kids on T.V. or like the kids they read about in books.

Photo credit: Michele Eve