When Breaking the Dress Code Depends on Skin Color, and If You’re Skinny
In June, a group of current and former New York City public school students arrived at a City Council hearing to speak out on the indignities of getting “dress-coded.” The term had evolved to refer to running afoul of apparatchiks who did not like what you were wearing, although rules about what counted as problematic were not always obvious, and enforcement of them could seem random and riddled with bias.
Accompanying the girls was an educator named Alaina Daniels, who introduced herself as a “white, queer, neurodivergent, nonbinary trans woman” with 12 years of experience teaching everything from robotics to activism.
She had also worked as a “lunch lady” and an adviser to eighth graders. In that capacity, she explained to the Council’s Education Committee, she saw “marginalized students and teachers being policed by dress codes in ways that privileged communities are not judged.” Black, brown, queer and “fat” students, she said, were often upset because they had been punished for wearing tank tops or cropped tops, while their “skinny, white, cis peers” were left alone.
On too many occasions, children were made to feel as if they had the “wrong” body. Consequences of being dress-coded could range from a forced change into a grubby, oversize school T-shirt to being pulled out of class to maybe even missing the prom.
