University of Virginia professor argues new policy reflects ‘politics of respectability’
Tuskegee University President Mark A Brown sent welcome letters to students and their parents last month announcing a newly enforced dress code, according to an opinion essay published Aug. 11 in The Guardian by AD Carson, an associate professor of hip hop & the global south and a Shannon Center fellow for advanced studies at the University of Virginia. The policy prohibits “revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation,” and it bars students from wearing bedroom shoes, bonnets or durags in class or the cafeteria. Brown wrote that faculty “will be empowered to respond to students who are inappropriately dressed based on these guidelines.”
“The policy has produced polarized responses,” Carson wrote. Supporters note that Tuskegee is a private school and argue that historically Black colleges and universities have often been places “where Black people learn discipline and earn entrance into the professional world.” Carson wrote that the defense harkens back to WEB DuBois’s idea of a “Talented Tenth” — upwardly mobile Black leaders whose example of hard work and social standing would “uplift the entire race.”
Dissenters, including Carson, largely concede that as a private HBCU, Tuskegee “has the institutional authority to require dress codes, as any similarly situated institution does.” But Carson argues the policy is “ultimately rooted in politics of respectability,” a set of assumptions he says he has grappled with throughout his academic career. One damaging implication, he wrote, is “the reinforcement of anti-Black standards that have been externally and internally imposed on Black people in the United States for decades and have never equaled success or safety.”
Carson places the dispute in a longer American history of conflicts over appearance. “Debates about ‘proper attire’ have polarized the country throughout its history,” he wrote, and he noted that Black men returning to the United States from war “were lynched in their US military uniforms because white folks thought them ‘uppity’” for claiming the honor of military service. He also invoked Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old killed by George Zimmerman in 2012, writing that the hoodie Martin was wearing “apparently justified his killing” for some people.
The essay draws heavily on Carson’s own path through academia. He described teaching high school in Illinois wearing a tie and jacket, and fondly remembered teaching students how to tie “a half windsor or a bowtie.” In 2013 he left for a doctoral program at Clemson University in South Carolina — the week George Zimmerman was found not guilty — and found that people assumed his formal dress was religious rather than professional. Eventually, he wrote, “I decided that, if I was going to be misread, I would rather be comfortable.”
Carson wrote his doctoral dissertation as a rap album titled “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” a form chosen, he said, to highlight “how Blackness is read as a set of appeals that are offered through music, speech, form and more.” He was appointed a professor of hip-hop in 2017, and when he was evaluated for promotion and tenure he submitted the portfolio of rap albums he had recorded since the appointment. Criticism of that work, he wrote, included the view “that rapping my research might make other Black people look bad” — a charge he likened to the current online discourse about Tuskegee students wearing bonnets, durags and house shoes in public.
Carson wrote that, were he a professor at Tuskegee, enforcing such a code would be “brazenly hypocritical” given the work he does and how he does it, and he said he empathizes with students who “have sounded off in response to the public discourse.” His book “Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir” is composed through rap lyrics, personal essays and poetry — forms he said are “often misread and less appreciated in academia.”
Carson closes by arguing that the current focus on what young Black people wear in public “is a similar trap” that has “pulled our attention and ire away from more pressing issues like the actual safety and security of those students.” Commitments to “tradition” and adherence to notions of what is “proper” or “improper,” he wrote, can limit the ability to “identify and resist some of the mundane versions of this violence.” He urged readers to resist “people and institutions that cling to questions of clothing, grammar, area codes, academic credentials and whatever else they have at their disposal to minimize the humanity of others and do them harm.”