Tuskegee University President Dr. Mark A. Brown sent a letter to parents this month announcing a new dress code for the upcoming semester. Business suits and “appropriate shoes” for professional events. No revealing clothing in class. And — here’s the part that’s actually got people talking — no bedroom shoes, no bonnets, no du-rags in classrooms or the cafeteria.
Brown says the goal isn’t to restrict students from enjoying “the Tuskegee Experience,” just to prepare them for the workforce. That’s the official line. Let’s talk about what’s actually happening underneath it.
The World Moved. This Policy Didn’t.
Here’s my first problem, and it has nothing to do with hair care: this dress code is arriving at the exact moment the American workplace is loosening up, not tightening down. Remote work reshaped what “professional” even means. Hybrid schedules are the norm at a huge share of companies. Business casual replaced business formal years ago in most industries, and plenty of white-collar offices haven’t required a suit since before the pandemic. Tech, media, finance-adjacent roles, even law firms in some markets — the four-inch heels and full corporate armor Tuskegee wants their graduates drilled in are becoming relics.
So when a university tells you in 2026 that a business suit is the standard you need to internalize for “the workforce you will enter,” you have to ask: which workforce? Because the one most of these students are actually walking into increasingly doesn’t look like that. If anything, an HBCU steeped in Booker T. Washington’s legacy of practical, forward-looking education should be preparing students for the world as it is, not the world as it was in 1985. Teaching adaptability and self-presentation is fair. Pretending the suit-and-tie standard is timeless when it’s actively eroding everywhere else isn’t preparation — it’s nostalgia dressed up as career readiness.
Now Let’s Talk About the Bonnets and the Durags
This is where the policy stops being merely dated and starts being something else entirely.
Ask yourself who decided a bonnet in a hallway or a durag on the way to the cafeteria was a problem that needed a rule written about it. Not a fashion label. Not a boardroom. It was decades of media, corporate HR departments, and yes — often our own institutions — training us to treat Black hair care as something to be hidden, apologized for, and managed only in private. A silk bonnet protects your hair overnight or on a rushed morning. A durag lays your waves, protects your edges, is a piece of Black style history that goes back generations and shows up on runways, in music, in barbershops, in every corner of our culture that people now pay to imitate. These aren’t pajamas. They’re haircare and self-presentation tools that happen to be racially coded as “unkempt” by people who never had to think about their own hair texture a day in their life.
And that’s the trap. An HBCU — a Black institution, built by and for us, at a school literally founded by Booker T. Washington to lift Black people up through education — is now the one enforcing the idea that our own grooming practices are something to leave in the dorm room before you’re allowed to be taken seriously. That’s not accidental. That’s respectability politics, and it didn’t originate with us. It was handed to us by a system that has always used “professionalism” as a polite word for “be less visibly Black,” and too many of our own leaders picked it up and started swinging it at their own students.
There’s a difference between teaching young people workplace norms and teaching them that a piece of their culture is shameful. Tuskegee blurred that line, and now they’re getting called on it.
The Real Conversation Nobody’s Having
If Tuskegee genuinely wants to prepare students for the workforce, the more honest move would be teaching them how to read a room and code-switch by choice — not stripping the culture out of them by policy. There’s a version of this that respects both: help students understand when a boardroom calls for a suit and when a durag on the way to the dining hall is nobody’s business. Instead, the university reached for a blanket ban, and blanket bans on Black hair coverings have a long, ugly paper trail — this is the same fight that produced the CROWN Act in states across this country because employers and schools kept trying to legislate our hair out of “professional” spaces.
Tuskegee isn’t just behind the curve on where work is heading. It’s repeating a pattern our own community should recognize on sight by now. The suit can be optional. The shame shouldn’t be mandatory.
