That’s the question that’s been tickling my brain as I’ve watched the roiling debate about the new dress code at Tuskegee University, the historically Black institution in rural Alabama.
ICYMI: Tuskegee announced that its students are to wear “business suits and appropriate shoes for business meetings and other professional occasions.” What’s now verboten: du-rags, bonnets, and slippers in classrooms or the cafeteria, and “revealing” clothing in class. The folks who run the university said these rules were meant to get students ready for professional life after college. Cue the evergreen debates around respectability politics, bodily autonomy, and whether Black folks who didn’t attend Black colleges are even allowed to comment on the internal cultures at HBCUs.
None of this, of course, is new: as the sociologist Saida Grundy pointed out, fights over how young Black people dress are part of an “eons old” debate “around Black people’s personal comportment, behavior — this idea that how one carried themselves … the class expressions they had, were going to convey to a white dominant mainstream that we deserved citizenship.” (I’d only add that lots of Black folk lean pretty conservative on this kind of stuff without caring much at all about what white people think.)
More than a decade ago Hampton University made news for a longstanding dress code that forbade male students in its business schools from wearing their hair in dreadlocks or cornrows. And Morehouse College, the storied institution for men, has long cracked down on the ways its femme-presenting students dress (although that may be changing).
But what’s different about these conversations now is how much the eye-watering cost of going to college has changed the relationships between institutions and their students, at HBCUs and everywhere else. You can hear it in how people talk about college in utilitarian, brass-tacks terms — you’re there to get a job on the other end that makes all those expenses worth it, and you should choose your school and major accordingly. But the flip side is that it’s also changed how students see what their colleges owe them. When we’ve covered campus protests over racial issues in the past, students would often straight-up explain their raising a ruckus like: why am I paying all this money and going into debt to attend this place and y’all are treating me like an interloper?
My hunch is that a lot of the people taking issue with the Tuskegee dress code, on campus and off, are motivated in part by a desire to protect a different, romantic notion of college – one that may sadly be slowly slipping away. College as a waystation to full adulthood; as a safe(ish) space to try out new ideas, to try on new identities and modes of being; a place to test boundaries and take weird, dope classes before being flung into the world of work and rent and bills. A place where you can roll down to the cafeteria on a lazy morning (or afternoon) in your pajamas and du-rag and bonnet, to get up with your friends before y’all scatter to the wind.
The respectability and socioeconomic and uplift stuff matters in these convos, but these debates are also about diverging expectations in how universities and colleges are supposed to go about being custodians to this short chapter in their students’ lives.
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