As a private school, the Immaculate Conception Catholic Academy in Jamaica, Queens, has considerable leeway to set a dress code and grooming rules for students it educates. Most religious schools are heavy on discipline and lean toward conservatism. That's their right; it's why many parents choose them.
But the school was wrong to tell 9-year-old Jediah Batts he couldn't attend school with his hair in cornrows, as part of a policy that explicitly prohibits the style in grooming rules requiring all boys' hair be "neat and trim, no longer than the top of the shirt collar. No designs, Mohawks, ponytail, braids, buns, no hair color."
One of those prohibited hairstyles is not like the others. Most of the banned 'dos are ways boys of any background could render their hair unnatural, too long, distracting.
A ban on otherwise neat and trim, collar-length locks, braids or cornrows _ common hairstyles that are both culturally black and also help protect from damage the fragile, tightly-coiled hair texture many black people are born with _ is a prohibition with an outsized, arguably discriminatory impact on one subset of kids.
The idea that cornrows, braids and dreadlocks are "fad" or "inappropriate" styles, as some schools' dress codes describe them, is a relic of a culturally ignorant era. Such hairstyles are only distracting to people not used to seeing them. They symbolize rebellion only when nonwhite people proudly wearing their hair in a 'do, comparable to a side part in straight hair, is a radical act.
Immaculate Conception and other city Catholic schools should change their policies.
