The Point Isn’t the Pajamas

One morning, a student walked into my eighth-grade classroom wearing a sweatshirt with the word fetish printed across the front.

I’ll admit, my first reaction was to simply tell her to take it off and put on one of the shirts and sweaters I kept in my classroom closet for any student who needed one.

Instead, I asked her, “Do you know what that word means?”

She looked at me, already knowing where this was headed. Looking up unfamiliar words was a common practice in my classroom.

“I’ll go look it up,” she said.

A few minutes later, she came up to me with her arms crossed to conceal the word on her sweatshirt and quietly asked, “Ms. Harmon, can you write me a pass to go to my PE locker so I can put on my other shirt?”

The sweatshirt belonged to her older sister. She thought it looked cute. She wasn’t trying to be provocative or disrespectful. She simply didn’t know what the word communicated.

There was no rule in our student handbook prohibiting that sweatshirt. If she had understood what it meant and still chose to wear it, that would have been her decision. The lesson I wanted her to carry with her was not, “Don’t wear that shirt because Ms. Harmon said so.” It was, “Understand what you are communicating, gather the information you need, and then make your choice.”

That moment has stayed with me for years because it reminds me that education and compliance are not the same thing. It also reminds me that relationships matter.

That memory came rushing back as I read about Tuskegee University’s new dress policy prohibiting bedroom shoes, bonnets, do-rags, and revealing clothing in classrooms and other campus settings.

To be clear, this essay isn’t about what students wear to class.

I don’t wear pajamas to get the mail, much less to a meeting or a classroom. I fully understand the argument that there is a time and a place for different kinds of dress.

That’s not what caught my attention.

What caught my attention was how quickly the conversation became about enforcing a standard instead of helping students think through it.

College students are adults. They vote. They conduct research. They lead organizations. They complete internships. They are trusted with decisions that shape the rest of their lives.

Why wouldn’t they be part of a conversation about the norms their own university expects them to uphold?

When I attended Emory University, I had classmates who walked into class looking like they had just rolled out of bed. Pajamas. Flip-flops. Wrinkled T-shirts. Baseball caps. Some kicked off their shoes and put their bare feet on the seat beside me (which I promptly redirected).

No one questioned whether they belonged at Emory or even suggested their clothing reflected their intelligence or their future.

Many of those classmates came from affluent families whose last names appeared on some of the lecture halls I entered. Their casual appearance was interpreted as exactly that: casual.

That same casualness is not afforded to everyone. Too often, clothing worn by Black students, particularly those perceived as poor or working class, is treated as evidence of something much larger. Their appearance becomes a proxy for their character, their ambition, or whether they deserve to be where they are.

That’s why this conversation cannot be separated from race and class.

I also understand why older generations, particularly older Black professionals, have these conversations. Many of us learned that appearance could keep doors closed. We also learned that dressing professionally did not guarantee entry, but it might earn us a second look. We were navigating a world that judged us more harshly than our peers. Sometimes, dressing the part was simply the price of reaching the point where our preparation might be considered.

The question is not whether those realities exist. The question is how we teach students to navigate them.

Do we issue a directive? Or do we invite them into a conversation?

Pointing to photographs of Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in suits does not settle the argument. Their clothing choices were deliberate and strategic within the political circumstances they faced. They understood that every part of their presentation would be scrutinized and used either to support or discredit their cause.

That history deserves to be understood in context, not converted into a permanent dress code for every generation of Black students.

Every generation has had its version of this debate. Long hair. Miniskirts. Bell-bottoms. Baggy jeans. Tattoos. Hoodies. Every generation seems convinced that the next one has forgotten how to present itself appropriately.

I was a teenager in the 1990s. I wore my boyfriend’s jeans, and he is now my husband. He was six feet one and more than 200 pounds. I was four feet eleven and barely 100 pounds. When I look at those pictures now, I know I looked ridiculous.

But I also knew what I was doing.

The clothes connected me to my time, my peers, and the version of myself I was exploring. I also understood, or was learning to understand, that there were places where I would wear those jeans and places where I would choose something else.

That is what we mean when we talk about time and place. Yet “time and place” is not knowledge young people inherit automatically. It develops through conversation, observation, experience, correction, and sometimes poor choices.

It also requires us to ask who receives the freedom to make those poor choices.

My affluent classmates at Emory could enter a classroom looking disheveled and remain individuals. Their clothing might cause someone to think they were sloppy that morning. It did not become evidence that people from their race, neighborhood, family, or social class were unprepared for college.

Black students, particularly those perceived as poor or working class, are not always granted that individuality. Their clothing can quickly become evidence presented in a much larger case against their seriousness, intelligence, upbringing, or right to occupy the space.

A university should help students understand that reality. It should also help them question it.

Tuskegee’s president wrote that the goal of the policy is to prepare students for a workforce in which presentation can outweigh strong preparation. That concern is not imaginary. Many Black professionals know exactly what it means to enter a room already aware that we may be judged differently.

But naming that reality should begin a conversation, not end one.

Students should have the opportunity to consider what their clothing communicates and who created our ideas about professionalism in the first place. Which expectations are connected to safety and respect? Which are rooted in racial, cultural, gender, or class bias? How might their appearance affect their opportunities, and how do they want to respond to judgments that may be unfair?

They may not all reach the conclusion I would reach, and that is part of the point.

Education should give students the knowledge, relationships, and opportunities they need to exercise judgment. It should prepare them to make decisions with an understanding of context and consequences. A directive may produce compliance while authority is present. A conversation has a better chance of shaping the decisions students make after the directive is gone.

Years ago, my student changed her sweatshirt. She did not change it because I forced her to obey me. She changed it because she learned what it communicated and decided that message was not hers.

The point is not whether I agreed with her final decision.

The point is that her decision was informed, and it was hers.