Skegee Got a Job to Do: HBCUs can teach students to survive the game, without teaching them the game is righteous.

Tuskegee University recently announced that bonnets, durags, bedroom shoes, and attire it deems revealing would no longer be permitted in classrooms or the university cafeteria. President Mark Brown framed the university’s new dress, attendance, and cellphone policies collectively as an effort to provide students with a stronger foundation for the professional world they will enter after graduation.

Tuskegee University has a responsibility to prepare students for a world that will often be unkind to their humanity. That preparation should include giving students every advantage available to them through their education and their presentation.

But the Black community at large has another responsibility. We are supposed to tell them the truth about its function, why it’s necessary, and what it means. Based on the responses on social media, we have failed our end of the bargain. Instead, too many of us have taken the standards imposed upon Black people by the larger society and converted them into measurements of Black worth.

And in teaching young people how to survive the game we’ve convinced them that the game is righteous. In that, we lost the plot.

Skegee Got a Job to Do

Let’s start with a harsh truth. The world judges people by how they look. It shouldn’t, but it does. Black people, especially, don't have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

Before a Black person can display our acumen and aptitude, somebody may have already made assumptions about us. They very well may have read danger into our skin, hair, clothing, accent, body, neighborhood, or before even reading a curriculum vitae — our names.

Tuskegee cannot make that world disappear simply because it hates Blackness, in fact Tuskegee University at its inception was founded by negotiating an affinity for Black education in spite of the disdain for Blackness in this world. 

Its job is to prepare students to walk into that world with as many cards in their hand as possible. That is part of what HBCUs have always done. in that, expectations for one's attire isn’t new. Ask enough HBCU alumni and you’ll learn about that beloved professor who lead with tough love and did not allow you to “come as you are” any more than a Southern Baptist church would.

Absent heavy media coverage, many HBCUs simply had such a culture. Presentation day? Put the good clothes on. Business event? You better have a suit. Coming in looking like you just rolled out of bed? Turn around.

Some professors delivered with warmth. Others like a decorated drill sergeant. Either way, they understood that their students were eventually leaving an affinity space and entering institutions that would extend them far less grace and assumed humanity.

A white student might look inexperienced. You look dumb. They might be having a bad day. You have an attitude problem. They’re eccentric. You’re ghetto. So an HBCU’s policy that teaches a student how to best combat those misconceptions and enter those spaces with strategy for success is wise, prudent, and effective.

Other Side of the Game

These are very harsh realities that we have to combat daily, and while HBCUs equip us with information and skills much like military training. Home is supposed to be where we find a soft landing, where we are reminded what we’re fighting for. But apropos with the war metaphor, Black youth too often find that home is where the hatred is.

One supporter of Tuskegee’s new policies on Facebook wrote:

“A lot of our young people are coming to college from homes that don’t know any better. They reflect their environments. Thank you to everyone stepping up to teach them differently.”

That is a euphemism.

What it means is: These ghetto hooligans do not know any better.

Another commenter celebrated the policy by saying:

“It’s about time someone takes a stand against the ratchetness!”

That gets us closer to the truth. This is not simple agreement with the idea that certain clothing is too informal for class. “Ratchetness” suggests a supposedly defective Black person. The bonnet or durag is treated as evidence of laziness, poor upbringing, intellectual and social inferiority. Many believe that success means the shedding of anything associated with poor, urban, or culturally inappropriate Blackness.

The Gospel of Discomfort

Another commenter wrote:

“I love love love this. Yes, to succeed in life one must be uncomfortable. This makes one strive to be the best. Because the real business world outside of comfortable zones is a battlefield of success.”

There’s some truth in that sentiment. Success does often require discomfort. Even when comfort itself is the goal, capitalism is such that it costs money to be comfortable. It can require years of sacrifice to earn the money necessary to purchase the ease that comfortable living demands.

But growth merely involving discomfort does not make discomfort inherently productive.

Poverty, anxiety, humiliation, and racism are uncomfortable. A rigid collar rubbing against your neck is uncomfortable as are shoes that leave calluses on your feet, heels that alter your posture and compress your toes. Tight waistbands, restrictive skirts, suffocating shapewear, and hairstyles maintained through tension, chemicals, or heat can all be uncomfortable. None of these conditions is virtuous just because we can survive them.

Too many of us have developed a weird de facto-theology of achievement in which suffering proves seriousness. The student must be stressed. The worker must be exhausted. 

For men, that performance may mean the suit, tie, polished shoes, short cropped hair, and carefully groomed facial hair. For women, the burden can extend to tailored dresses, blouses, skirts, blazers, heels, makeup, pressed or otherwise institutionally acceptable hair, and the constant calibration of whether an outfit is too loose, too tight, too feminine, too masculine, too plain, or too revealing.

Comfort is interpreted as evidence of complacency. Pain and discomfort are posited as worthiness and preparation.

Absent from this doctrine is the reality that it will not stop at attire. Absent artful and strategic career choices, professionalism may eventually dictate the people invited into one’s personal space, the social events one attends, the interests and hobbies considered acceptable, one’s public persona, and even one’s self-image.

In championing these ideals we reinforce for them that navigating such is not just strategy, but righteousness. Therein lies the error. 

Professionalism Is Neither Goodness Nor Effectiveness

The fallacy in the community is that we’ve lost sight of the responsibility to teach young people that though professional attire is often thought of as a moral or otherwise positive intangible virtue, it is indeed not.

Some of the most destructive people in modern life have been quite well presented. Bankers have devastated communities in tailored jackets. Politicians have ordered extraordinary suffering while draped in Cole Haan and Hugo Boss or M.M.LaFleur and Christian Louboutin. Corporate executives have poisoned land, exploited workers, truncated  livelihoods, and then celebrated the quarterly results in calm voices from behind polished lecterns.

Clothing does not reliably reveal morality in either direction, and professionalism is not goodness. It is legibility to power. At most, professional appearance communicates that a person understands a particular social code and possesses the resources, willingness, time, or physical ability to perform it. It tells us almost nothing about whether that person can teach, heal, build, organize, calculate, lead, protect, or tell the truth.

Since professionalism does not reliably produce positive results in practice, then unprofessional clothing cannot logically be assumed to produce negative ones. What either outfit signals is far less important than what happens when the axe is at the root and it’s time to bear fruit. 

We understand this intelligently but in action we fail to reinforce the tenets without reinforcing the dogma.

Young Black people don’t deserve to be told that professional attire reflects greater ability or moral correctness. We shouldn’t impress upon their still growing minds that a bonnet reveals an inferior home or frame looking good in front of that white gaze as what is good, right, and pure. 

We ought not romanticize discomfort as the price of success or behave as though the professional world’s prejudices are natural laws that education and aptitude are powerless to challenge.

They don’t need to believe that a garment must be sacred before their choice to wear it deserves respect.

Hijabs, turbans, yarmulkes, and other religious head coverings are protected not because American society universally reveres them but because those who value them forced society to accept them and these students possess that power to change their world. They have carved that space in an anti-semetic and islamophobic world. 

A bonnet or durag does not need to be a religious artifact, an ancient cultural lynchpin, or the centerpiece of a civil-rights campaign to carry weight for the person wearing it. Black people should not have to produce a sacred history lesson every time we want control over our own bodies.

Sometimes a person wears a durag to maintain their hair. Sometimes a person wears a bonnet to protect theirs. Sometimes it is comfort, convenience, style, resistance, familiarity, or self-expression.

And sometimes the reason is simply: because I feel like it, and that should be enough.

There is absolutely a time and a place for the graphic bonnet, the du-rag color coordinated with an outfit, and any other measure of comfort that Black people employ up to and including the low effort endeavor of pajamas for a quick store run.

Tuskegee has its job: prepare its students to survive a world that will misread them. Ours is harder and slower, make sure that by the time they’re our age, the durag doesn’t need defending at all.