4-year-old suspended for long hair

[Easy Bakes 253]

Parents Cave in. and give the kid the princess Leia braids.

Good luck kid.

No picture of that though.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/ap_on_re_us/us_hair_fight

[Herdervriend 46]

I've never had any school, never seen one to, where an actual dress code is needed. So yeah, this is shocking for me. Children should be free in this kind of stuff.

Damn, were doomned.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Some people just can't live comfortably without doing things like telling 4 year olds what they can't do with their hair.

[Meg 368]

There is a picture here.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but that just looks wrong.  and he doesn't look happy.   I think his hair is more "distracting" this way.   They should just leave the kid alone and let him wear his hair the way he wants to.

At the risk of being politically incorrect, I have noticed that I have different reactions to the same hairstyle based on the race or age of the person with the hair.

I can see a little black kid with his hair braided and I don't think twice about it.  I see the aforementioned little white kid with his hair braided and it just looks wrong.

I've know several middle aged black men who chose to be fashionably bald and it looks distinguished.  Not so much on Howie Mandel but it's not offensive.  But, if I see a 20-something white guy with a shaved head, he looks like a skinhead who I don't want to meet in a dark alley.

Making assumptions about people based on their hair is wrong but I have realized that I do it.     

Which is how this whole mess started.  Someone in that school system decided boys shouldn't have hair that long.

I may or may not like particular hairstyles but I don't see where it's my place to decide who should have what haircut. 

[Duke87 1,070]

Well, we're talking about aesthetics here. The color of your skin is a very major part of a person's appearance and this is a huge factor in determining what does and doesn't look good on them. The problem is that that's "unmentionable" since it sounds too much like you're saying that people of different races are not equal - even though you're not.

There are two common fallacies with regards to this sort of thing:

1) Saying different groups of people are different is not the same thing as saying they are unequal. The former is in many cases objectively true. Only the latter is "racist".

2) Criticizing a person of a different race does not mean you are criticizing that person because they are of a different race. It is merely a correlation. No causation is implied.

Add to that all the double standards and you have a whole buffet of absurdities.