‘If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy’: black hair as a site of ‘post-racial’ social control in English schools
Open accessAbstract
A growing body of literature examines how social control is embedded within, and enacted through, key social institutions generally, and how it impacts disproportionately upon racially minoritised people specifically. Despite this, little attention has been given to the minutiae of these forms of social control. Centring Black hair as a site of social control, and using a contemporary case study to illustrate, this article argues that it is through such forms of routine discipline that conditions of white supremacy are maintained and perpetuated. Whilst our entry into a ‘post-racial’ epoch means school policies are generally thought of as race-neutral or ‘colorblind’, we draw attention to how they (re)produce and normalise surface-level manifestations of anti-Blackness. Situating Black hair as a form of ‘racial symbolism’ and showing Black hairstyles to be significant to Black youth, we show that the governance of hair is not neutral but instead, acts as a form of social control that valorises whiteness and pathologises Blackness.
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Black hair practices need to be contextualised within a racialised social structure that privileges White appearance ideals and stigmatises physical features associated with Black people, such as skin colour and hair.
“This is consistent with work by Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly (2018), who argue that Black hair practices need to be contextualised within a racialised social structure that privileges White appearance ideals and stigmatises physical features associated with Black people, such as skin colour and hair.”
From Skin shade and relationships: how colourism pits Black and mixed Black-White women against each other (2024) · cites this paper as Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2018
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- Authors
- Joseph-Salisbury, R., & Connelly, L.
- Affiliations
- Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
- University of Salford (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Connelly, Laura
- ORCID
- Connelly, Laura
- Venue
- Social Sciences
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2018-11-01
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 219
- ISSN
- 2076-0760 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2898754046
- Cited by
- 79
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 24.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Social Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) (acceptedVersion)
- University of Salford Institutional Repository (University of Salford) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/R009341/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Critical Race Theory in Education
- Social Sciences › Education › Education Discipline and Inequality
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
- Keywords
- black hair, social control, post-racialism, anti-Blackness, whiteness, racial symbolism, school policy, English schools, white supremacy, color vision deficiency
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