“What and who is your true enemy?”
— a question my parents asked me my whole life
The Tuskegee dress code has been our timeline the last few weeks. On the most recent episode of ‘Freedom Friday,’ Chris Stewart, Ish Jimenez, and I take up the forage-bag-and-bonnets question — what it means when Black institutions ask Black young people to change how they show up in shared learning spaces, and what it means when the rest of us pile onto the argument. This piece is the written companion to that conversation. What we are trying to name, in both places, is this: the bonnet is the visible thing. It is not the enemy.
Tuskegee’s 2023–2024 Student Handbook already forbade sleepwear outside residence halls, du-rags and stocking caps inside buildings, and sagging pants in academic facilities. Michael Harriott posted a screenshot of the 2021 handbook page with the du-rag and headwear language already there. What is actually new in Dr. Mark A. Brown’s letter to students is the addition of bonnets and bedroom shoes, the reach into the cafeteria, and the sentence that faculty will be empowered to respond.
Formation-through-appearance is 145 years old at Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington wrote in Up From Slavery that “when the students march out of chapel in the evening and their dress is inspected, as it is every night, not one button is to be found missing.” And in the same book he named the trap: “no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.” The man who built the button inspection knew exactly what the button inspection was up against. That is the tension we are still standing inside.
My Thoughts on the Dress Code
I like uniforms and I hate ties. I believe in structure, in tradition, in the way a room can shape a person. I also do not know how to tie a tie. When I have had to wear one, a colleague ties it, and I hang it up already knotted so I can slip it back over my head the next time it is needed. And in the schools I led, we had uniforms — I wore them too — and we had so many dress-down days that central office kept asking whether we had a uniform policy at all. Structure with joy is a real thing. I can be rigid and flexible — ten toes down with a steely gaze on the goal, and agile in the pursuit of it. I disagree with this particular policy. Both are true.
Dr. Brown is not the true enemy. He is a Black man trying to steward an HBCU under a microscope that has been trained on HBCUs since before he was born. I understand the reach for policy. I disagree with the reach, and I refuse to disrespect him for it. This nuance is important.
What I am unwilling to do is treat a bonnet in the cafeteria as though it is the thing killing our children — nor act as if every fad, trend, or new thing must be automatically enshrined and accepted as holy Black cultural norm. Who gets to choose is complicated too. What history seems to keep is what has carried respect, dignity, joy, communal formation, and the advancement of the blood-stained banner of liberation. The rest of it comes and goes.
Let us start with what is under the argument, not on top of it. In September 2023, the federal government sent letters to sixteen governors documenting that their 1890 land-grant HBCUs — Tuskegee among them — had been underfunded by $12.6 billion over three decades compared to their 1862 predominantly white land-grant peers. Alabama alone owed Tuskegee more than $500 million. That is what a state theft ledger looks like when it is printed on federal letterhead. That is the fiscal room Dr. Brown is stewarding in. That is the room Tuskegee students are learning inside. Meanwhile, Black male enrollment at HBCUs has fallen 25% since 2010, more than half of Black men who start college leave without a degree, and tuition keeps climbing to cover the funding these states refuse to send.
This dress-code fight lands on top of that historical backdrop.
Who Is Your Enemy, Really?
Brittney Cooper’s words on Night School are worth quoting in full:
“We’re not drawing the line at the mass adoption of AI technology. We’re not drawing the line at data centers being proposed to be built on our campuses. We’re not drawing the line on the Department of Defense investing ninety million dollars into HBCUs to create autonomous weapons.” That is what we are missing while we argue about bonnets.
Josh Myers, on the same stream, named the other true-enemy question the dress-code conversation keeps skipping: enforcement.
“Hampton’s dress code was actually enforced by their campus police. You actually would be an increased contact with the carceral system. That’s not care. That’s not concern...“ Every dress-code letter carries an enforcement mechanism whether the letter names one or not. A good stewardship argument is not complete until it names the enforcement it is comfortable putting into a Black student’s day.
The Truth About “Professionalism”
The necktie is a white garment. Its modern form traces to 17th-century Croatian mercenaries in France, adopted at the court of Louis XIV. It has been called neutral so long we forgot it was ever anybody’s in particular. But the moment a Black student is told she cannot wear a bonnet in a cafeteria, everyone becomes a sociologist of dress. “Professionalism” arrived from one specific culture and got called universal.
Tuskegee’s own commencement code already includes an exemption — students who need to wear specific attire for religious or cultural purposes are welcomed to do so. Good. That is the standard. Peer HBCUs have been carrying similar exemptions in their day-to-day dress codes for years — Hampton’s policy does not apply to head gear considered as part of a religious or cultural dress, and Virginia Union asks students requesting special permission for head attire due to religious affiliation to give notice to the Dean of Students Office. Whether Tuskegee’s new day-to-day policy carries that exemption forward, in writing, is the diagnostic.
Because bias against a bonnet can turn into bias against a hijab, a kufi, a beard. Philadelphia has watched schools and workplaces try to police our Muslim sisters’ hijabs more than once, despite obvious legal and moral precedent protecting religious coverings. There are still workplaces in this country where a Black man with a beard is called unprofessional. A narrow policy can be legitimate stewardship. It can also be how broader policing arrives when nobody is watching.
What the Young People Are Saying
Rayne Caldwell, Tuskegee’s sophomore class president, reached out to HBCU Gameday not to defend bonnets or attack the dress code, but to name what the dress code is drowning out.
“The issue isn’t simply about clothing. It’s about priorities.”
She named freshmen and sophomores promised on-campus housing and placed in off-campus housing farther from Tuskegee than they expected. Administrative offices students and families cannot reach with urgent questions about housing, financial aid, and enrollment. She corrected the caricature from the inside: “I have not observed students wearing pajamas during lunch.” Her closing is where I want to close too: “We love our university, and that’s exactly why we’re speaking up. We are advocating because we want to see our institution succeed, not because we want to damage its reputation.”
That is a young Black woman holding her institution accountable. Not outrage. Not celebration. Accountability, transparency, solutions. If we grown folks want students to demonstrate propriety, we should be prepared to demonstrate it in return — by hearing what they are actually asking for.
The first time I ever thought about any of this, I was a fourteen-year-old sophomore in my first days at a public school. A classmate was doing her hair in English class, taking off her shower cap, removing pink foam rollers, like the classroom was her bathroom mirror. She caught me staring and asked what I was looking at. I shrugged then. I often shrug now. That reaction wasn’t respectability. It was the same instinct that told me I would not stand in that same classroom brushing my teeth. Some rooms ask something of you. Fourteen-year-old me already knew that.
Presence, Not Policing
The lesson the best of our elders modeled — while plenty of others modeled the opposite — leans toward presence and truth-telling more than policing or rule enforcement. That is a lean, an orientation, not an absolute. Respectability politics is old and real. Booker T. wrote the button inspection into the same book he named the trap. Educators I respected frowned when I taught without a tie, and some challenged me directly when I became an administrator. They were not wrong to care.
My judgment and my upbringing told me a dashiki, a t-shirt with a political statement across the chest, or teaching without a tie was professional inside my worldview. And when colleagues asked me to put on a tie to chaperone the 8th grade dinner dance, or for my US Department of Education Ambassador Fellowship official pictures, I obliged. So it is not a refusal of the room. It is a refusal of the hard-and-fast doctrine.
I am not against judgment. I judge to decide what I prefer and what I value. I try to do it with humility — I could be wrong about some things. What I refuse is belittling other Black people, holding them in contempt, or joining the incessant gender wars and intergenerational wars playing out online.
I hope my first instinct is empathy before enforcement when a young sister walks into class with her hair half-done, or with a bonnet protecting the hair she has not finished. My four daughters — their hair takes hours. I know what a household loses when a young Black woman is turned away from a classroom over the state of her hair. And I am fine with a school having a standard. I am fine with families and students choosing the school whose standard best fits what they want for their child. What I do not want us doing is confusing that choice with the emergency in our children’s lives.
Bonnets and du-rags may offend some of us — in a classroom, in a faith-based institution, sometimes even on an airplane. They do not maim our children.
The question is not whether bonnets and du-rags belong in classrooms. And I am not convinced our children need years of college dress-code prep to survive a workplace whose standards will be different every place they land. The real question is whether we are teaching Black students to code-switch when they need to and to resist code-switching when they need to. That is the skill. Everything else is a room, and rooms change.
I can hold structure and love, honor stewardship and demand discernment, push back on a policy I would not have written while still defending the Black leader who wrote it against the worst of what is being said, and keep my energy on the $12.6 billion, the autonomous weapons, the carceral enforcement question, and Nolan Wells — the eighteen-year-old from Ocean Springs, Mississippi who went to Horn Island on July 4, 2026 with three white friends and did not come back, whose family is still asking questions the sheriff cannot answer.
Here’s to more questions than answers, more hesitation and reflection than hot takes, more consternation than certainty, more constraint than conclusion. And to being clear about what is and is not the enemy.
