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. The week I arrived on Clemson University’s campus in South Carolina, George Zimmerman was found not guilty.
At the university, things seemed different from when I was in Illinois. The classes were less diverse, and almost everyone assumed the formal way I chose to dress had more to do with religion than professionalism. For a person who isn’t very religious at all, it was strange to suddenly be asked if I was on my way to or from church on a weekday morning when I was teaching. Eventually, I decided that, if I was going to be misread, I would rather be comfortable.
My work and research are about how arguments appeal to people. I believe that people are almost always engaging with the world in rhetorical ways. From how we choose to speak to our eye contact to the ways we dress, we are making and responding to appeals. To emphasize how these rhetorics work, I wrote my doctoral dissertation as a rap album titled Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions. I decided the project had to be a rap album, in part, to highlight how Blackness is read as a set of appeals that are offered through music, speech, form and more.
Rap music was the most effective way to demonstrate the kinds of appeals I was interested in exploring. The project highlights how sometimes our commitments to “tradition” and our unquestioning adherence to notions of what is “proper” or “improper” might limit our ability to identify and resist some of the mundane versions of this violence. If I were a professor at Tuskegee, it would be brazenly hypocritical of me to enforce such a dress code given the work I do and how I do it. Because of this, I empathize with the students who have sounded off in response to the public discourse.
More generally, though, my professional investment in eschewing what’s considered “traditional” has created similar pushback that I can’t help but experience as personal in some ways. To take seriously the position of the supporters of policies like Tuskegee’s dress code, to me, seems to be a concession to self-harm. I experienced this as a graduate student at Clemson as the assumptions about religious fervor shifted to assumptions that I was a trespasser or interloper when I stopped wearing a tie to teach and started wearing T-shirts. These misreadings followed my work, even as I experienced what might be considered professional successes. In 2017, as news of the rap album dissertation, my successful defense of it, and my appointment as a professor of hip-hop spread across the world, the same politics of respectability that couch so many of the defenses of the Tuskegee dress code were aimed at me and my work.
People seemed unconvinced that making rap music to earn a PhD was a good thing. Like the current online discourse about young college students at Tuskegee and elsewhere wearing bonnets, durags and house shoes in public, criticism of my work said that rapping my research might make other Black people look bad. Others worried about whether a university should employ a professor of hip-hop. These concerns were mixed in with apprehensions about rigor, evaluation and the abandonment of traditional academic forms, but they all seemed to me to boil down to the perceptions of white folks.
The ways these polarized debates have played out through history are part of the inspiration for my book, Being Dope. Rather than give in to those politics of respectability, I have continued to do the opposite. When it was time to be evaluated for promotion and tenure, I submitted the portfolio of rap albums I’d been recording since I was appointed in 2017. The book is composed through forms that are often misread and less appreciated in academia. My inclusion of rap lyrics, personal essays and poetry in an academic monograph might be read as balking at the kinds of respectable preferences that would prohibit wearing a durag or flip-flops to an academic conference.
I think Being Dope offers a valuable perspective about the debates over the Tuskegee dress code. It wasn’t insolence that led me to ignore the people insinuating that my choices were disrespectful to the Black people who sacrificed so much to make it possible for me to study and become a professor. It was actually a commitment to the same cause – principles that we have expressed in defense of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis and so many other young people whose clothes and musical choices were used to excuse the violence done to them. Studying what is offered as “tradition” can challenge us to be better critical thinkers. Sometimes challenging those “traditions” can highlight the underlying violence and anti-Blackness that drives an institution like Tuskegee to make the clothing preferences of some people into a policy by which all students must abide.
It’s also a reminder to those Tuskegee students and any reader willing to learn that trying to earn the understanding of people committed to misunderstanding you is a losing game. In a society committed to anti-Blackness, anything that might even vaguely be considered an expression of Blackness is subject to policing.
Even after sticking to my convictions and earning tenure as a rapper, since I released the book, I have been chastised for daring to describe Black people by using the word “dope”. For some, it seems like an insult rather than an apt metaphor for how Black people have forever fought against the politics of respectability and recognized it for the kind of trap it is.
This current focus on what young Black folks wear in public is a similar trap that has pulled our attention and ire away from more pressing issues like the actual safety and security of those students. I would hope we openly and unapologetically resist people and institutions that cling to questions of clothing, grammar, area codes, academic credentials and whatever else they have at their disposal to minimize the humanity of others and do them harm.
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AD Carson is associate professor of hip hop & the global south and a Shannon Center fellow for advanced studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir
