Hair in dispute: institutional racism, biopower, and the capillarity of the state.

By Mauri Balanta Jaramillo

Over the past week, an intense regional debate has reignited over the criteria for classifying and representing people of African descent within institutions. From a violent reprimand of a police officer in Colombia to the banning of students from schools in Panama for wearing their natural Afro hair, it is once again clear that Afro-descendant identity is shifting from an expression of cultural pluralism to a subversion of the racial order that persists in the administration of both states.

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The arrest of young Afro-Colombian police officer Winy Saray Córdoba has gone viral after she rebuked her superior for reprimanding her for demanding that she “comb her hair.” In the video, her hair appears thick despite being tied back in a ponytail, which she tries to argue while receiving angry shouts from her white-mestizo superior for what he considers a lack of respect for the values of the institution, associated by him with an aesthetic paradigm that is at odds with the population he is also called upon to serve in the municipality of Quibdó (Chocó), which is predominantly of African descent. 

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A similar case occurred at the Alfredo Cantón Institute in Panama City, where several students and their families protested when they were denied entry for wearing their hair loose or in ethnic hairstyles, under a personal presentation code that, at the same time, normalizes the aesthetics of white-mestizo students and emphasizes corrective practices on Afro-descendants. Adding to the controversy, President José Raúl Mulino referred to the incident, blaming families for allowing their children to go to school looking “ragged,” as did Education Minister Lucy Molinar, who, being of African descent herself, also alluded to certain levels at which Afro hair ceases to be “healthy” for school life.

In both contexts, Afro hair is presented as an element that transgresses the notions of order and discipline that underpin the “good” image of these institutions, according to biopolitical criteria (Mbembe, 2011) that reinforce the hierarchies of power bequeathed by colonialism. Thus, the issue ceases to be a simple aesthetic appreciation and reveals the racism that has shaped the figure of the state and national identity, where hypervigilance and the concealment of blackness are part of ensuring institutional effectiveness. The reactions of the police officer in Colombia and the students in Panama reflect the suffocation experienced by Black people within institutions, as they are constantly corrected in their subjectivities and ways of life, while those who hold racial privilege can ignore the rules without major consequences and reproduce racism as if it were not considered a crime.

These episodes are not isolated from the reconfiguration of political conservatism at the global level, where the concepts of nation and citizenship are inscribed in a grammar of power associated with whiteness, leaving only assimilation or exclusion for racialized people. Thus, the radical defense of Afro hair and other factors of ethnic-racial connection, such as accents, demonyms, and customs that strain institutional rigor, are also manifestations of the social capillarity of the state (Oszlak, 2011), which encompasses the frameworks of representation that have determined the place of “blackness” in the organization of societies. Violence perpetrated by the civil service takes the form of “legitimate” prohibitions and sanctions, insofar as they stem from a racially biased institutional framework that re-actualizes the material and symbolic conditions for keeping blackness on the margins of any social sphere.

What is happening in Colombia and Panama contradicts the mission of any institution built on the foundations of democracy and plurality. Therefore, Afroresistance joins in the energetic rejection of these acts, demanding justice and reparation for all victims of an institutional framework that constantly resorts to the abuse of power to deny the contributions of Afro-descendant communities to the history and progress of our countries in the Americas.