Few things sow discord within the Black populace quite like bonnets and du-rags in public discourse. It’s a polarizing respectability paragon that has made its way to one of the most trusted spaces in Black academia: HBCUs.
Ahead of the 2026-2027 school year, Tuskegee University announced it will ban bonnets and du-rags in classrooms and the cafeteria in an effort to provide students with a “solid foundation for the workforce they will enter once they leave Tuskegee,” Tuskegee President Dr. Mark A. Brown outlined in a message directed to parents of prospective students. Professional dress codes are nothing new, both at HBCUs and in the world in general. You can’t go into a stakeholder meeting wearing your pajamas, a category that often includes bonnets and du-rags, even though an argument can be made for the latter’s role as a cultural style staple with its own gendered implications.
Furthermore, predominantly white institutions have notoriously lax campus clothing cultures, and they still manage to navigate the corporate world without issue. Stroll through any school in the SEC, and you’ll see a symphony of messy buns stuffed with unbrushed hair and oversized Comfort Colors T-shirts so long they render the accompanying shorts invisible. Yet no one seems to think this casual culture of baggy sweats and unwashed hoodies automatically translates to corporate incompetence. These students are trusted to understand the difference between grabbing a quick breakfast before an 8:00 a.m. class and showing up to an Am Law 100 interview. When it comes to Black students, though, the consensus seems to be that we don’t understand the difference between grabbing a bite to eat during finals season and clocking in at a Big Four accounting firm for our first post-grad internship.
We’d be remiss not to acknowledge the inherent role respectability politics plays in these conversations. From not sagging our pants to opting for straightened or otherwise manipulated hairstyles, Black people have been categorically conditioned to alter our behavior based on what is deemed acceptable by white culture, even if that culture doesn’t abide by those same principles itself.
What constitutes a presentable appearance is undeniably linked to archaic metrics of validation, and this practice has a storied history within Black academic spaces. We all know about the “paper bag test,” but during the 20th century, certain campuses also implemented “comb tests,” where, if your hair was too coarse to pass through a fine-tooth comb, you’d face varying degrees of exclusion. This undoubtedly propped up integration-focused hair practices like chemical relaxers, which have been linked to uterine cancer, effectively nipping the “It’s just hair” conversation in the bud.
This acquiescence, for all intents and purposes, stands in direct opposition to HBCUs’ perceived status as modern Black utopias where, even if just for a few short years, Black people can exist as the majority. It’s a cherished, albeit limited, period during which young Black people can live wholly as themselves.
Within the context of historically Black colleges and universities, though, this accommodation to whiteness has existed at the periphery of the Black experience for the past century.