Looking below racism. Renegotiating authority at school through challenging the policing of hairstyles, an inside view on a girls-led protest in Soweto.

The policing of Black girls' hairstyles at school has become increasingly publicly politicized and primarily analysed through the lenses of institutional racism, and a lesser extend its intersections with sexism and religious discrimination, in post-segregationist education systems (in the United States and South Africa in particular). While acknowledging that such dimensions often feed in the policing of learners's hairstyles, I argue that there is a need to look below explanations in terms of racism in order to understand the other issues at stake, especially in the case of conflicts that have led to collective mobilisations in low-income de facto racially segregated schools. Through focusing on a girls-led protest in a Sowetan high school that happened in August 2017; and based on observations of the mobilisation, class discussions and participation in staff and parental meetings in its aftermath while being a quasi-teacher at the school during my doctoral research, and a reflective interview with the main instigator of the protest conducted in 2021; I discuss how the contestation of the policing of learners' hairstyles was both ignited by and became an opportunity to challenge the lack of democracy at the school, the social conservatism of the parents, and the sexualisation of girls' bodies. The case study hence sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power may be exerted through policing hairstyles at school, and on the subtle strategies of politicization and depoliticization, and of selective obedience to schooldress code restrictions, that may enable learners to partly reclaim it.