Is this Hair Racism??

See post below for details in case you missed the originating post. Here are a couple of my responses to comments:

Kiki, I checked the handbook after you suggested it. It has stuff about keeping fingernails short, but nothing about hair or hair accessorizing.

In response to your lovely long comment (thank you you obviously thought a lot about it) I, too, would be thrilled if someone DID C's hair nicely. In this case though, I did her hair, and someone UNDID it. Without asking. I do think it's slightly racist, maybe not purposefully, but lordy if black kids have to go through this everywhere they go to school, it does seem mighty exclusionary. Also, everyone KNEW she was a white teacher and I never mentioned her color. They just knew a black teacher wouldn't dare undo C's hair which takes a lot of work to do.

But Kik, imagine if you spent an hour on Ola's hair, and did intricate braids, and then when you picked her up, they were all undone.... How would you feel? Then add in that the teacher's a different race, the majority race...

I did ask the director about the little rubber bands and she said they were fine.

Michelle, I did not talk to the teacher this morning because there were other people in the room and I didn't quite know how to approach it... I had imagined she would be alone like usual, not with some other parents in there. That threw me for a loop and I chickened out. Maybe tomorrow. I need to get my momma bear hackles up and protect my baby, or at least inquire politely about WHY she took them out.

I was thinking today, maybe she took them out and the teacher who sometimes does C's hair was going to put in the better kind of elastics that that don't break as easily, but ran out of time? That would have been fine with me. It just didn't feel like that was the case though....( because of the main teacher's attitude the day before about having to pick up pieces of elastic.)

So far, I have been lucky. Even though I live in "the South", I have not experienced any overt racism towards C. Not that I noticed anyway. I hate to think this was our first experience of it, because I was so proud of our little city. But I suppose *they* are everywhere, North, South, East and West. And *they* are ugly everywhere.

Camil2, I have given two of the African American teachers permission to do C's hair. They do a great job, but they only do her hair when I have left it in an Afro. They have never UNDONE something I did (even if I did a poor job). They just plain know better. This DID remind me of the teacher who cut off that girl's braid, although this is NOWHERE NEAR as bad as that. If she had done that, I would have been calling the news stations.

One of my regular readers, who was in ET with me picking up her son, wrote me an email (which I didn't ask permission to post) but basically the first sentence was that this teacher is racist and the reader obviously felt very strongly about it. That was her first reaction reading what happened.

Thanks for all the input. I'm glad I wasn't off base to be irked by this. For a second there, I second guessed myself and thought I was irritated by my work day (which I was) and that I was over blowing the hair thing. Your comments let me know I was on track to feel angry and offended. And I did originally write that she was a white teacher, and then decided I should erase that, as possibly offensive on my part, like I would be starting something by hinting at racism. But since all the commentators knew she was white anyway, I do think that proves if not racism, at the LEAST a cultural ignorance.