All About Hair

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When my daughter was three, she showed up at preschool without her normal braids or twists, her glorious afro present for all to see and celebrate. Her little peers didn’t respond kindly though; they chimed in instead — quite loudly — with criticism: “What’s wrong with Zoe’s hair?”

Some might fault my partner and me for placing Zoe in a nearly all-white preschool. We welcome, and understand, that criticism. And yet, as Zoe has entered kindergarten, in a school that’s nearly a quarter African American, her lived experience hasn’t changed all that much. Tears greeted me on a recent Wednesday along a familiar theme: Other children had teased her that day about her hair.

What fascinates me about all of this isn’t so much how my child is “different.” (She’s not “different” to me.) What draws my attention is that her peers seem so predisposed to examine the “other” — overlooking the ways hair connects us as human beings.

This is among the reasons I am thankful to Teaching Tolerance for affording this opportunity to present three lessons about what unites us, and can divide us (if we’re not careful), when it comes to hair:

For young children whose classrooms are based around learning centers, there is Who Has Hair? (Pre-K-Grade 2). This comprehensive unit, featuring an original picture book, is crafted around the premise that all mammals have hair. It builds on literacy goals, extends to science and arts activities and introduces preliminary service learning.

For upper elementary students (grades 3-5), there is Caring for Hair, a language arts and health lesson that helps students understand the diverse ways human beings — male and female, of color and not — groom hair.

For middle- and upper-grades students, we get to the pesky issue of who should have say about our hair — and why. In Should Your Hairstyle Be a Constitutional Right?, students examine school policies that dictate hair grooming, in the context of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

As Shana Alexander, the first woman staff writer and columnist for Life magazine, put it, “Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.” Let us bring those mysteries to the forefront — and discover what we share in common.