The title of this post was written by Jose Vilson, the well-known teacher, author, blogger, and activist. His book This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education is a fearless examination of his encounters with racism and the larger society, and his analysis of present-day issues in education as they affect the children, his children, who are the targets of reform.

In this post, Vilson takes Dr. Steve Perry to task for his masterful showmanship and salesmanship, which has no connection to the lives of children. (The title of the post is Vilson’s.)

Vilson read a tweet from Perry, in which he wrote about his collaboration with comedian Steve Harvey and the U.S. Armed Forces in getting 200 young men to cut their braids and dreadlocks and ready them for success.

Vilson found this highly objectionable, and he wrote:

In subsequent tweets, he comes within inches of calling himself the next Messiah, stopping kids from stuttering and pulling them from gangs, stepping in for their absent fathers, and keeping them up until midnight for no other reason than his own need to set these boys straight. In subsequent tweets, he shouts down tweeters who resent his anti-Black message, chiding him for implying that dreads and braids — hair styles with African traditions — make black boys look dirty and, worse yet, unsuccessful. He continues to use this weekend experience of setting boys straight (yes, like the jail, but only with a comedian and an army veteran) to make other wild assertions about the American school system and absentee fatherhood. He admittedly spends 29 tweets extolling the virtues of depriving boys their sleep and cutting their natural hair to detractors, then makes an about face to chastise “y’all” for spending time on Twitter instead of getting to work.

How do you lead an education revolution when your ideas are so revolting?….

[A sidenote: Two years ago, Steve Perry said on air that CNN required him to cut his hair to please the white audience.]

Vilson writes:

For years, educators who’ve paid even minimal attention to the charlatan have told anyone within ear shot that he’s up to no good, one of the horsemen for the larger hedge-fund manager agenda to dismantle and give away one of the most fragile but critical institutions in our country: public education. Ideally, public education is meant to reinforce citizenship and democracy, tenets that any country on this planet should aspire to. In the late 1970s to 1980s, we came the closest to closing achievement gaps, during the height of integration and getting closer to true equity for all schools. As with all social progress, a handful of people saw black people getting their comeuppance and said “We can’t have that!” In communities of color, we know that the ideal has fallen way short of its promise. Even though we’ve seen gains in both high school dropout rates and college enrollment, achievement gaps persist, and our country’s schools across the board are more segregated than ever, creating a resource gap along with a cultural and academic gap for our most disenfranchised.
Whenever there’s a narrative gap in any community, there’s a salesperson willing to make money off the most vulnerable. Insert Dr. Steve Perry.

Our trouble is that too many people are fooled by a tie, and a penchant for inflammatory statements. I give him two more years before he has to sell monorails.

This ethos is the reason why his horrific tweet exists. If vulnerable communities allow swindlers to peddle their petulance across our hoods, we’ll continue to see his rendition of respectability politics police the ways and means that black culture exists. There’s plenty of money to be made in telling everyone black kids, specifically boys, need to be controlled and managed. That’s why so many schools militarize their pedagogy so they can remove any part of a child’s personality that would get in the way of their learning, as if personality, and not systemic racism, is obstructing students of color from learning. But, because “it’s all about results,” they invert Malcolm X’s decree and instill conservative values onto our children by any means, even if that means bringing in the actual military.
So it’s not about hair. It’s about how America perceives our humanity.

Vilson writes that dressing up and acting white is not enough to protect young men and women from the traps that are set for them:

A tape-up and a nice tie won’t keep the bullets away from our black bodies. Pulling our pants up and aligning our values to the military sounds ridiculous on its face as well. Changing our aliases to more Euro-centric names might lead to more jobs, but won’t help us keep our jobs longer than our white counterparts, much less give us that elusive promotion. Staying up past our bedtimes won’t make us more resilient; if anything, lack of sleep would add more stressors to a community already suffering from a myriad of diseases and preventable conditions. Speaking in the King’s English won’t pause the school-to-prison pipeline and the lack of wraparound supports our schools need to survive the trauma associated with their lives.

Vilson cleverly points to some of the most successful men of our time: Mark Zuckerberg, who seems never to have met a tailor; Bill Gates, who usually dresses like a schlump. He might well have added Steve Jobs, whose wardrobe apparently consisted of black turtlenecks and blue jeans.

His point:

In each of those instances, there is nothing powerful about their aura, just their institutional privilege. They’ll never be judged as less than, or be neglected the access to their generational resources. They’ll never be admonished for not adhering to the white supremacist standards Dr. Steve Perry expects of his now sleep- and hair-deprived black boys.