School Hair Codes, Colonial Respectability, And Caribbean Rights with amílcar peter sanatan

A school bans “edges,” a graduation blocks braids, a child with locks is told to stay home—on the surface, they’re dress code debates. Look closer and you see a lineage of power: colonial respectability, “imperial cleanliness,” and the policing of Black and Brown bodies through hair. We sit down with artist, educator, and gender rights advocate amilcar sanatan to map how grooming rules took root, why they persist, and what it takes to change them without sacrificing learning or dignity. 

We unpack the language of “neat,” “professional,” and “acceptable,” tracing it from plantation hierarchies to modern handbooks. Together, we connect scholarship and lived experience—Rastafari resistance and the Coral Gardens legacy, the gendered training of girls into silence and boys into “tidiness,” and the quiet violence of sending students home over texture or style. Along the way, we explore key legal and cultural flashpoints from Trinidad and Tobago’s school hair code to Jamaica’s Kensington Primary case, and why each decision matters for access to education, equal employment, and human rights.

This conversation doesn’t stop at critique. We highlight grassroots wins and everyday acts of repair: natural hair days led by young teachers, principals revising codes to center hygiene and safety rather than assimilation, and families rethinking what professionalism looks like in Caribbean contexts. The goal isn’t disorder—it’s dignity. Keep students in class. Measure readiness by curiosity and conduct, not curls. Celebrate cultural expression while maintaining clear, fair standards that actually support learning. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe for more Caribbean history and culture, and leave a review telling us how grooming rules shaped your school or workplace. Your stories move this work forward.

amílcar peter sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator and activist. He is from Trinidad and Tobago and currently working between East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: About Kingston (Peekash Press) and The Black Flâneur: Diary of Dizain Poems, Anthropology of Hurt (Ethel Zine & Micro Press). 

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Hair And Power
• 2:20 Guest Intro And Influences
• 7:30 Defining The Coloniality Of Grooming
• 11:30 Imperial Cleanliness And Body Policing
• 16:30 Rastafari, State Control, And Resistance
• 21:50 Gendered Rules And Respectability
• 27:20 School Policies, Court Cases, And Access
• 33:20 Personal Activism And Transformation
• 39:00 Cultural Pride, Natural Hair Days, And Change

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean History and Culture, where we examine the histories, cultures, and social dynamics that continue to shape the Caribbean today. In this episode, we're exploring a topic that may seem small on the surface, grooming and hair, things like that, but is deeply connected to larger issues of colonial control, race, gender, and identity in the region. You may have seen the recent posts and subsequent conversations on social media that went viral after a local school, high school specifically in Jamaica, deemed that they would bar girls from wearing edges this school year. And while that I know from you know reading it that that specific situation was really it's a bit more complicated than our discussion today because there were concerns about safety and access to restrooms and things of that nature, it does tangentially bring this recurring issue that we have as we're talking about it today in terms of hair, grooming, and what is acceptable, quote unquote, in schools and in the workplaces. And so grooming policies in schools, um, public spaces, workplaces in the region have long been shaped by colonial ideas, enforcing standards of appearance that reflect European notions of respectability, cleanliness, hierarchy, etc. These rules have historically policed black and brown bodies specifically, and the groups facing particularly harsh discrimination, while gendered expectations meant that boys and girls were often held to different standards. And so joining me today is my big friend, longtime friend. We met on a plane, is a whole story, but we won't get into the full story. Um my friend, artist, activist, he does many things, wears many hats, educator as well. Amilkar Sanatan, whose work is at the helm of gender rights in the Caribbean. So thank you so much, Amilkar, for joining us. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about you? Where, of course, I know the answer, but where um in the region is home to you and what inspired your work as you know a public intellectual and activist.

SPEAKER_01: 2:36

Thank you very much, Alex. As I said, my name is Amilka Sanatan. I am an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist. I am from Trinidad and Tobago, where I spent most of my life. I went to secondary school in Barbados shortly, so I carry the traditions of Frank Warrell, George Laman, and Bad Gi Alreana in my brains. I've developed closer professional and personal connections to Jamaica and more broadly had the privilege of working through most Caribbean countries in one capacity or the other. For the moment, I'm working on a literary and visual anthropology project called Imagining Futures in Imagins of the State at the University of Helsinki in Finland under the leadership of the Finnish-born anthropologist Marek Ford, who has spent several decades in Trinidad and Tobago doing ethnographic work and cultural studies. You know, sometimes when we talk about what we do, we try to think about our influences. It's very difficult to narrow down my influences, what brought me to the work. I see so many forces that unlock my creative imagination, as Rex Nettleford would call it. I call it the car imagination and my practice. That's the philosophy of my art practice, the Caribbean creative imagination. One of the first influences would have been my family. Both of my parents were part of a small but growing upwardly mobile, educated, middle, and professional classes to call it. But their formation and that post-independence intelligentsia came about in the Black Power Revolution. So we had new names. Names of third world revolutionaries. My big brother, Fidel Castro. I am Amilka Cabral. My younger brother, Marcus Gavi. New ways of thinking about economic participation for majority classes, appreciating spiritual baptists, Ram Neal celebrations, the rise of folk hymns in the Catholic Church, and so on. I grew up listening to Calypso Intense, went to panyards to burn hours with friends and later performed spoken wood in them. Mur Hutch, what I'll call the adorable revolutionary, was a novelist, educator, activist, comrade in the Grenada Revolution. But she also embodied a model of women's rights leadership in my life. And I was grounded in that everyday reality. And I would say where our conversation would go a bit later, I was really struggling with the weight of some of those histories. Elders and authorities who lived through these transitions, some demanded so-called standards for our new independence project. And we were given strokes and lashes when we didn't meet them. Some were upset that we had newfound freedoms, had nostalgia for the colonial past. Like a mathematics teacher of mine who had a curious sadness for the years he he saluted colonial authorities in public and he flogged us when we didn't show deference to authority in the present. So in an area that is less studied, even, I had an up close look at the lives of comrades and liberation leaders, the trauma, neglecting families, seeing some of the abuses or the lack of skills and resources people had for sustainable livelihoods after a political moment, after revolution, especially when that so-called revolution was seen as failed. So there were casualties of revolutions and revolutionaries and distrust to meet standards. But I'm glad that I came of age in the 21st century with vibrant social movements, spoken words, feminist women's rights, gender justice, depatriarchal futures, environmental justice. And I come from an extractive society with oil dollars. The youth movement with its many tendencies. The youth movement that brought me into public policy advocacy, connecting with youth from Brazil to Peru, to Belize, to Guyana, to St. Lucia. I worked in communities, development, research institutions, classrooms, and political parties. That is the world I've known. Hello.

SPEAKER_00: 6:43

Thank you for sharing. I hope our listeners can tell from his introduction that this is going to be a very deep episode. Um, when we were preparing for this episode, you were like, yes, I think we should call it the coloniality of grooming. And so um, just so our listeners understand what that means, I looked it up before we we started. So coloniality refers to the lingering structures of power, knowledge, and ways of being that persist long after formal colonial rule ends. Um, and we can put that ends in quotes a little bit because has it ended? But you know, another conversation. Um, and those that are perpetuating hierarchies and domination. So that I think is sort of foregrounding the root of our conversation in a lot of ways, because while, you know, it can certainly be argued that some of the more recent occurrences um that have challenged hair policies and grooming, um, what is socially acceptable hairstyles and schools and things like that are, you know, for some of our islands, and you know, in Jamaica and Trinidad's case, certainly um in independent spaces, what do these things come from? What are they rooted in, and how do they continue to perpetuate today is something that I definitely want us to underscore.

SPEAKER_01: 8:00

Yeah, I I like to work through the back canal, and so much of our life is a kind of back canal. So, for example, just on the surface, home economics is an important course that teaches us the management of the home, nutrition security, addressing things like protein poverty, how to manage household budgets, but that has been so feminized, and that is connected to a larger imperial project of teaching girls in particular how to be respectable ladies, and it even took on this kind of social work function in the post-independent state. So we have to sometimes unpack things to see the receive meanings, and some of the radical um thinkers and revolutionists of our time, like Amilka Cabral, said there's sometimes positive accruations that came from these exchanges. We could hold on to it, but we must think critically of it. And that is why the first back and all I really have to register in this reasoning is understanding that assimilation was not a process that was exclusively happening in the Francophone Caribbean or Dutch Caribbean. I don't think many writers commit that error, but I have heard about l'assimilation discussed as a specific feature of colonial societies, and it's useful to grapple with the ways there are continuities in the present, in the post-colonial nation state that you spoke to, Alex, with independent and republican statuses. So Alison Bashford, an Australian-based historian, published a particularly insightful book in 2004 called Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health. And she talks about that concept of imperial cleanliness, which was part of the colonial project, which is very much part of urban planning and renewal development that I study with latrines and the eradication of pit latrines, and that is also connected to education systems. In the Caribbean, we place a lot of psychological effort in who is a dirty boy, what's smelling nasty, so and a racist association of blackness with the so-called stink, dirty, and unruly. So the back and all we need to understand is clearly that colonialism does not simply discipline space or politics, it disciplines bodies, it orders who belongs, where and why. So orderly, disciplined, respectable, quote unquote professional workers, girls, boys, and subjects were groomed. And we were very well groomed. One of the major sources of trauma, conflict, and yes, violence in Kragan homes is around grooming. Older women disciplining girls' hair on patios and verandas, hair coming on Sundays were not always love stories. Parents shining girls for the length of their skirts or the print on their bodies and uniforms during puberty. Of course, boys were given licks for being sweaty in primary school and were expected to go to the barber routinely to trim the hair and keep a so-called neat hairstyle. So we have mislabeled these things as unnatural, and natural hair becomes messy, unkept, and then we have colonial contempt and designations of people referring to them as they would have referred to fields and food crops on plantations. So grooming policy in schools institutionalize this nonsense. And I never identify with that little boy that they had an outline of that they threw as the ideal male students in my secondary school rule book. Hair codes and grooming policies were not for boys like me. And I paid a very high price for it, growing out my hair in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. Now, in Trinidad and Tobago, since 2023, the state has established a national school hair code that has little effect to protect students who affirm their cultural identities by their hair. The National School Hair Code protects schools, namely denominational and prestige schools, with defining their own rules and limiting the intervention of the state in rights protection. All codes apply, but always, and they use this language, in compliance with individual hair school rules. So, Alex, I know about Papy Show with good politics, but this is entirely a papy show with bad politics. And the change must come from the ground up on decolonizing education and tackling this Babylonian and beauty regime of national hair codes.

SPEAKER_00: 12:42

Thank you for I think painting not only like a historical context for us, right? But also bringing it to the present with current um legal statutes and things and how they are still being challenged and repudiated in many ways. I do want us to sit a little bit with this ideal of Victorian respectability. That's my way of maybe framing it, but you talked about in terms of the colonial project, which, you know, I think that's a more general term because in many ways we all um differed in terms of who was the colonial power. But in many ways, this this project, colonial respectability, worked in a sense to, as you outlined for us, define cleanliness, to find um who was of value to make standards on who could get jobs, right? What you had to look like in the workplace to even get a job to even be giving an interview in many ways. Um but there are also different aspects of this. I think I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the Coral Gardens Massacre, for instance, in 1963 in Jamaica, in which it's a longer story that I maybe for the sake of our conversation won't get into, but um there were disagreements between the police and Rastas in Montego Bay, um, or near the Montego Bay area in Jamaica. Rastas are scapegoated for the incident. And at the time, Alexander Bustamante is telling you know police to haul in all the Rastas, dead or alive. And in many ways, part of that sort of scapegoating, part of that social control system was also giving police authorities the right to cut Rasta's hair, um, cut their dreads, right? And I think to talk about where these standards come from and how they've emanated um and evolved over time, that's one for me that I think it's not the only one, certainly, of course. Um, but if anybody knows anything about Rastafari and the um, I don't even think, you know, to say love of their hair is enough of a word. And we can talk about our own experiences as well. Um, but that for me is, you know, it's a it's a sacrament in many ways. And to allow police to do this is sacrilegious, right? Um, and so that's a moment for me where I think is very clear that we hold that in terms of this conversation and talk about it in tandem. Um, but there are so many others, I think, in a lot of ways, when we talk about black power in the Caribbean in the 70s and 80s, hair doesn't always, you know, get uplifted in this conversation, but in the same way, right? Um, that as people were sort of advocating for changes and evolution in our post-colonial world, hair becomes very part of that. It's a very integral sign of how people were campaigning for improved rights um and empowerment and access to anything, to to work um to these schools, hair becomes part of that. And so there are so many different, I think, angles to this conversation and many ways that we could take this conversation, but I definitely wanted us to sort of underscore those very important moments for us in the Caribbean region.

SPEAKER_01: 15:55

Yes, and one of the things I really like your discussion and what you were trying to speak to that Victorian is important to understand these colonial projects are also shaped by context from which they emerged. There were forms of social class repudiations that happened in Europe against people who were not aligned with these beauty ideals. The difference is that that function on the level of social class and exclusion. In the case of places like the Caribbean or Latin America or in Africa or in Asia, they thought it was blended with racism. So you were innately inhuman or subhuman. That is the difference in our situation. And with the Coral Gardens massacre of 1963 in Montigo B. Some people think of it as bad Friday. What this moment taught me is how in the independence era of the post-colonial state, we still struggle to recognize the rights of groups in our societies. It's as if we missed the point of independence, not only as freedoms and political texts by the constitution, but our total investment in a project that recognizes, affirms, and respects the humanity of our people and the environments of our spaces. But let's be clear, in 2017 there was an apology by the Jamaican state, and that brings me to a lot of my work. What does repair and reparations look like in the post-colony? Our freedoms being fought for won and compromised in the period of independence. One of the less studied regions in the Anglo-Caribbean is the Eastern Caribbean, in terms of the vibrancy of its Rastafari movement. We have rastafari who were put in jails for Myronic possession, killed in unclear and uncanny circumstances without serious justice, and many individual students protesting the domination of colonial school rules against their individual expression. How do we reckon with these histories and move forward? So the trauma that we carry from colonialism was not our fault, but the independence of thought and action, sovereignty of the imagination, and creativity in nation building and healing are all our responsibilities. Caribbean society was a great debt to Rastafari, a movement seen as ground-up, proper, imaginative, prophetic, liberatory movement, which moved from Jamaica and captured the world's imagination. I walked through Helsinki and random people shout out Rastafari, Bruce Out in Mali's redemption song. Little children grab my ear in Venezuela and so on. Of course, these engagements can be problematic around race, gender, and sexuality, but there's also a deep respect for it around the world, which connects me to many movements, struggles, and peoples resisting colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, Babylonian regimes.

SPEAKER_00: 19:09

I think in that sense, right, I also want us to talk about the gendered aspect of this coloniality of grooming. And I think maybe in a large way you can speak to it from your work specifically in terms of your work in politics, that there is a distinction, right? Between you can say boys and girls, you can say women and men in the workplace, um, but how femininity and masculinity have been impacted by these sort of, you know, this coloniality of grooming and and hair, and how have these sort of policies reinforced gendered expectations in the region, even as well.

SPEAKER_01: 19:50

Yeah, well, if I may, you have to give me the license to speak about a Caribbean reality that might scare some of your listeners, yeah, Alex. Some people really don't know what go on in these islands. It it seems strange to know that these regimes continue with the level of gusto that they have. It's so intense to everyday life. So while there are specific kinds of discrimination against boys of African descent who grow here, especially dreadlocks, considering their exclusion from national security service, some jobs in the financial sector and hospitality sectors and so on, young men have also been really threatened with the projections of being seen as a failure. And one of the interesting conversations that we could look at or cultural artifacts would be the Calypsonian gypsy song Little Black Boy, and it brings together a lot of the what I call those kind of anti-black boyisms, rife in our society. He sings little black boy, go to school and learn, little black boy, show some concern, little black boy. Education is the key, so get off the street and out of poverty. So there's that anti-black boyism that could exist in our society, and for a time, a lot of blows, licks, and lashes, floggings that happen to boys who were seen as sweaty and all relief. But yeah, there's a gender paranoia when it comes to grooming and girls that we can't ignore. Black, brown, white Caribbean girls are disciplined from this transition of girl to a lady, and we literally deploy the term that is unbecoming. There are school rule books that forbid girls from even eating in public in the Caribbean. That is seen as unbecoming. And then we act surprised when we eat doubles in Trinidad and Guyana and see that it is still a masculinized space where most women eat privately in a corner outside of the crowd, or they eat in a small group of women, or they really prefer to eat doubles to go, but just to put it in a bag, or have it in their vehicle and get in and out of the car when they buy a double. We literally have gender patterns to eat in street food in the street. Girls are training to docility and respectability. So, yes, there's a flair right now with Jamaican students and edges, but there's so much policing on girls' hairstyles, jewelry, speech, expressions, policing of noise. If girls could laugh out loud, so many girls cover their mouths when they laugh because of what schools did to them, policing of mobility, how they move in and out of school premises. What do we really gain from this? So, a lot of these actions bring me to a deeper understanding of the continuities of these features in Caribbean life and Olive Senior's Colonial Girls School, that poem, um, which was written before I was born, before you were born, Alex, and she writes very clearly borrowed images, will our skins pale, muffled our laughter, lowered our voices, let out our hymns, de-kinked our hair, denied our sex in gym tunics and bloomers, harnessed our voices to madrigals and genteel ears, yoked our minds to declension in Latin and the language of Shakespeare told us nothing about ourselves. There was nothing at all. How those pale northern eyes and aristocratic whispers once erased us, how our loudness, our laughter debased us. There was nothing left of ourselves, nothing about us at all. So I'm being clear, I want healthy, ethical, caring, critical thinking, team-oriented, and knowledgeable workers and citizens. All our environment should be clean and sanitary. People can work to be on time, understand the value of reasonable, fair, and rational rules for systems we collectively contribute to and sustain. But it's back canal and arbitrary policing of bodies, adoption of foreign beauty regimes, and an uncritical take of what we do in development. Things like weak architectural planning and air-conditioned infrastructures which make Caribbean workers head to office with scarves, bands on people wearing comfortable sandals and public buildings and clubs, which really affect mature citizens, elderly citizens, and stigmatization of people in sleeveless tops and short pants. We have to do some work on getting over it.

SPEAKER_00: 24:56

I was also going to bring up that poem in a lot of ways to sort of mark the changes or the lack thereof in a lot of ways, because I think some of the parts of that poem particularly really range true today. I think you had brought up the policy changes earlier, and I think that sort of, if I'm not mistaken, went with the Trinity College um graduation incident in Trinidad, in which some boys are trying to wear um braids or cane rows, cornrows, um, what may have you, to their graduation and were barred from attending. I think that also brings to light the Kensington primary school case in Jamaica, um, which went through several court sort of situations to sort of eventually, you know, rule that this child who had locks was able to go to the school. The moral of the story is they were trying to bar the child from going to the school because of her locks. Um, and it was ruled that, you know, that wasn't a suitable reason to bar the child. There's nothing in terms of the policies on how children had to appear in this school, that that was sort of a part of that. But I definitely want us to speak to a point that you have brought up that it's more than just, oh, you know, your hair is unkempt, quote unquote. And, you know, how this affects the person, it affects how they move in the world. Um, it also affects access in a lot of ways. If your school has deemed that your hair isn't appropriate, um, now you're missing a day of class, right? Um, now you have to go home, you have to wait how many days, and you know, I don't believe in the sort of, oh, it's the child's fault or oh, it's the parents' fault, because there I think are many complications, you know, to sort of place the blame in that way. But I I'm really particularly keen on this conversation of, you know, education and how much school can be missed as a result of this, right? Um, where are we sort of drawing the line between what is acceptable and like students need to learn? And I think the part of me that's very striking is oftentimes students are when I see videos that go viral, people are like, yo, I want to be at school. I want to be in my social studies class or whatever it is today, I want to be in my English class and they're sending me home. Um, and so that is something that I also want us to unpack a little bit because it impacts learning, it impacts, as you noted, you know, how we evolve as citizens um and place our sort of part in the world and even how and when people choose to sort of reclaim this autonomy over their hair, their bodies, etc.

SPEAKER_01: 27:36

Uh thank you, Alex. And shout out to Trinity College, my brother's school in the US. And um, but that is directly related to my reasoning. My first public activism was on challenging hair codes on school grooming policy. In sixth form, I was punished and on the receiving end of a lot of prejudice by faculty and my teachers because of my decision to affirm my cultural heritage and grow my hair. In fact, um there was interest by a number of teachers on withdrawing my participation in the national youth parliament in Trinidad because they felt symbolically that would have been an open defiance of the school's rules. So I did a petition, I canvassed in corridors, I designed a hear me out campaign, we plastered the picture of Boondocks Huey Freeman on notice boards, and my school principal ripped up the petition in front of my face, man. Oh no, we got Miss Joan Mason. She gave me my first lesson in power. That paper not moving her hand. I was very clear on the power dynamics. Um, but my consciousness was expanding. And at that time, I read the edited collection, The Black Power Revolution 1970, a retrospective, edited by Selvin Ryan and Time Moon Stewart. Now, anybody who knows that book, that's really a book of conference proceedings from uh kind of 20-year retrospective conference on the 1970 revolution. I think it was out in 1990. So that is very um testimony-based. I got a good sense of how people were reckoning the afterlives of the revolution, and uh it had an interesting temporality. I was asking questions of myself in 2006, 2007. What did that mean for me? So it was really a first introduction into public politics, intimately understanding the politics of change. And Amilka Cabral said, We are not fighting for ID. In people's heads. So I had to get my hands dirty with it. A lot of emotions, a sense of loss for a 17-year-old. But it was part of my political formation. And the principal who enforced many of those rules became my greatest supporter in life. A mother-like figure, Mrs. Joan Mason. She's a special, so with a special contribution to the educational landscape of Trina and Tobago. And if I may, I would just like to read a poem to honor what she has done for many. The lessons she learned with my intervention and the lessons I would have learned with hers. And a lesson in compassion. And also to honor my mother. I wrote a poem at that time in my mother's backyard. For Linda Claudia the Foo and Mrs. Joan Mason. She was a cocoa brown skin girl from a derelict village, Four Road Stamina. She bathed in barrel water, ate blue food, ate what she grew, wore her best dress, straws, shoes. She was poor, her family knew. Children were blessings, not expenses. Fourth daughter of Tapia Housewife, Coco Pile Creation, Damned by colonization, her hair. My mother's mother that is curled like wind spending around bamboo shoots, carrying the whispers of Dwens and Papa Bar. I imagine my mother in tears. My grandmother with her rat tail comb ordering the dense forest of her daughter's hair. Years later, never would she have known she would be tugging the hair of her son. In the patio at the back of the house, my mother, that is. As a child, they called me wild, uncivilized. For my mother, I was root. Root in our backyard. Root in the bush. Root in history. At times she requested, cut your hair, son, cut your hair. On my way to school, cut your hair, son, cut your hair. But I admire your power to fight for what you believe in your head hard, just like your father's. So the cases of Trinity College Mocha and Trinante Bago and Kensington Primary School in Jamaica are major new stories. But this is something happening in every Caribbean school, parish, and jurisdiction. And I have communication from people in Belize and Barbados who are reaching out to me on this matter. I've met with comrades in St. Lucia who are addressing this issue decades ago, before you and I were born. So our politics need to match a liberation project much more than the kind of competition and management models that dominate our systems at this time. And I would really want to hold on to the words of George Laman, who said by politics, I don't mean the party, the specific ideology or the professional politician. Politics for me includes the teacher, technician, and poet. Politics is a collective enterprise by people who have been given the opportunity for the first time to build a society the way they want to build it.

SPEAKER_00: 33:23

Thank you for sharing not only your poem, um, but also I think this idea of change and evolution as it goes. I feel like in parts of our conversation, we've been like, you know, we haven't changed enough, which is true. Um, but there have been incremental changes, right? I think even for me, um, although this it's from a different perspective in a sense, because I went to school in the US, so I didn't have that same, the same experiences of the some of the cases and students were talking about in the region. Um, but my family's response to me locking my hair was very was very much so why? And I don't think this is a good idea, and maybe she's just going through a phase um and all these things, and now we are almost a decade later, and people have been like, you know, say and wanting to know who does my hair because if when they're going home, they think they want to, and so I will say that you know, it might not necessarily be on the scale um of you know the schools and um some of the conversations that we've been having today, but I have definitely seen into more intimate changes and evolutions. Um, you know, people have said things to me a decade ago that they probably don't remember that naturally I would not forget. Um, but the things have definitely spun around and they've you know changed and evolved. And I think that's also um in large way credited to social media in some ways, but also this sort of more acceptance of natural hair from a global perspective, I will say. There is a current act in California, it's the Crown Act um of California, which has prohibited discrimination um based on hair texture and protective styling associated with race and national origin. And so, as um our listeners might imagine, was really heralded by black women who were um, you know, being told that their hair wasn't acceptable, whether that was, you know, their own natural hair, wigs, um, leaves, protective styles, etc. I bring that up just to sort of say that, you know, there are some changes, and I think in some ways, things that we can learn from one another as a diaspora are very important. And I would love to see um something like that sort of replicated, you know, in a in a Caribbean way for us to to sort of break down some of these barriers. My listeners know that this is one of my favorite questions. You have brought several to the fore already because you you brought the colonial girls poem, you brought little black boy, but I didn't know if you had any other favorite instances of how you know hair abundance and celebration shows up in the Caribbean, um, in terms of you know how how we feel about our hair.

SPEAKER_01: 36:13

Yeah, I may have to betray a question.

SPEAKER_00: 36:17

That sounds like you have a whole list.

SPEAKER_01: 36:19

I have, but I want to give a warning. I want to give a warning. I have to cite the great 20th century philosopher of the African Atlantic philosophical traditions, Robert Nestorley, known as Bob Martin.

SPEAKER_00: 36:38

I didn't know where you were going with this, but yes, Kendra.

SPEAKER_02: 36:41

He says, You're running and you're running and you're running away, you're running and the running and the running away, you're running and you're running and you're running away, you're running and you're running, but you can't run away from yourself, can't run away from yourself, can't run away from yourself, can't run away from yourself, can run away from yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 37:07

I don't know much times, Bob has to tell you you cannot run away from yourself, and I think that song, poem, prophetic warning, custodianship for Caribbean societies allows us to protect what we are doing here on this nation-building project. I would also say we could look at Colin Robinson's collection of poems. You have your father hard head, it's published in 2016, and he brings about a critical masculinity's black personhood, family conflicts, violence, and sexuality. And then, third, this is really a shout-out. I want to hail out the increasingly several young women educators in secondary schools, African and Indian in the Caribbean, have been hosting natural hair days. Shout out to them for this quiet act of institutional resistance and pick up the principals and the deems who endorse this proposal coming from these young teachers. I see your videos online, people look beautiful, good things. My secondary school has since changed their approach to boys growing hair as well. And I see their efforts to have what we call ethnic wear days where children dress in saris, dashikis, indigenous and chinese clothing. So big up Bishop and C Trinity College and China to be good too.

SPEAKER_00: 38:38

Thank you. I think I'm glad you betrayed the question a little. As much as I'm always keen on us upholding, you know, how this work shows up in our popular culture, there is also so much work happening on the ground. So thank you for upholding, you know, these changes and ways that these things are evolving in schools. Um, my last question, I definitely want us to end on, is that given sort of you know how things go viral now and how things are changing, uh, what do you hope our listeners take away from the historical and contemporary significance of our hair and the coloniality of who we are in Caribbean societies today?

SPEAKER_01: 39:21

I'm talking to every student who's discerning. I'm talking to every parent, every uncle, every tanti, every Aji, every Aja, everybody in the Caribbean. I'm talking to scholars who study our field and region, understand the Caribbean present as much as you can. I want people to be ethnographically present in Caribbean society and space. We have passionate conversations about youth and discipline, but we could also have passionate conversations about personal and collective freedoms, human rights, dignity, a culturally grounded way of life, systems, and nation building. How shall I live? How shall I govern? And we could pursue these questions beginning with ourselves, reckoning with our histories and imagining sovereign futures. We also have the right to beauty, beauty in our eyes and self-definition. We must be beautiful on our tones, and we could show the world that.

SPEAKER_00: 40:37

That's a beautiful note to end on. I thank you, my friend, for joining me for this episode. Uh I hope our listeners walked away with as much as I did because I think in a lot of ways, you know, the conversation as we we've uh highlighted is multifaceted, um, it is a bit complicated. It's also nuanced depending on where we are in the region, right? And the many things that go with that. But it's one that I think was really called for, you know, for me when I saw some of those stuff going viral of late. But it's something that I would like to see not, you know, be be such a question, be be such an issue recurringly. I would like to see our students in school. I would like to see, you know, people not feeling like they are barred from getting jobs for whatever reason because of how they look. I would like to see it also not be tokenized, right? Where if you are a performer working at a resort, you might can have locks because you're doing the pseudo bob Marley thing. But if you're behind the desk or whatever, these are not. So all of these things to say, I think, as you put it very well, love ourselves um and all our dualities and all of our beauty. And so, with that, as I said, thank you for joining me for this episode. It is a long time coming, and Miss Smotley have your oath because a long time we could do this, but you know, nothing to do before it's time. So long time we're still so thank you for joining me for this episode to our listeners. Um, I will link everything that we discussed on the um strictly fact syllabus, as you know. And till next time, look a more. If you have any thoughts, um, if you want to connect with any of us, be sure to send me a DM and I will, you know, we can talk and take it from there. But till next time, look them. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit strictlyfactspodcast.com for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at StrictlyFacts PD on Twitter.