[PDF]ERIC EJ1076463: Dressing Diversity: Politics of Difference and the Case of School Uniforms

DRESSING DIVERSITY:

POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE AND THE CASE OF SCHOOL UNIFORMS

Samantha Deane
Loyola University Chicago


In The New York Times parenting blog, Motherlode, Debra Monroe
writes about “the dynamic that makes public school democratic—a place to
confront the humanity of others,” because she is concerned with what
schooling teaches children about diversity and difference . 1 This paper begins
with a similar assumption and concern; I too think schools ought to be places
where children learn to confront the humanity and difference of others, and I
am concerned with how children are taught to do so. Through an analysis of
school uniform policies and theories of social justice, I argue not that children
consciously experience school uniforms as uniforming, but that school
uniforms and their foregoing policies assume that confronting strangers—an
imperative of living in a democratic polity—is something that requires seeing
sameness instead of recognizing difference. Imbuing schooling with a directive
that says schools ought to be places where children learn to confront the
humanity of others requires that we ask questions about how educational
policies teach children to deal with human difference. Broadly speaking,
uniform policies undergird the assumption that a child’s capacity to confront
difference is unimportant . 2 3

To consider the ways in which school uniform policies unjustly teach
children to disregard difference so that they can reasonably participate in public
and school life, this paper engages in a rich conversation about social justice.
Fundamentally, social justice is about recognizing grave injustices between
individual persons and groups of people living in, or being prevented from
living in, the world. The works of John Rawls, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy
Fraser represent three common theoretical constructs for dealing with social
justice. Rawls comes from a social contract position and constructs a floating
theory of justice based on a Kantian self that ultimately addresses injustices by
way of redistribution. ’ Young aligns herself with critical theory, founds her
critique in the messiness of the “real world,” and tackles injustice by


1 Debra Monroe, “When Elite Parents Dominate Volunteers, Children Lose.”
Motherlode (blog). New York Times (January 19, 2014), http://nyti.ms/19EIwRF .

“ I am purposefully not differentiating between public and private schooling, because all
schooling situated in a democratic context ought to teach children to confront the
humanity of others. Moreover, children are a part of the larger “public” in a Deweyan
sense.

3 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001).


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advocating for a politics of difference . 4 All the while, Fraser works out a
bivalent conception of social justice that bridges the divide between the spheres
of distribution and recognition . 5 Rawls’s Justice as Fairness: A Restatement is
the theoretical backdrop against which this paper employs Young’s Justice and
the Politics of Difference and Fraser’s “Social Justice in the Age of Identity
Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation” to speak to the ways in
which diversity can and should be “undressed,” and therefore, “addressed” by
children in school.

To “address” diversity, the first section of this paper will focus on the
language of school uniform policies. Policy makers tell us that school uniform
policies are meant to: minimize disruptive behavior, remove socioeconomic
tension, and maintain high academic standards . 6 There is nothing unjust about
wanting to reduce socioeconomic difference, nor valuing high academic
standards. What is unjust is that these policies do not remove socioeconomic
difference, nor cure disruptive behavior. School uniform policies dress
difference; they do not address it. Accordingly, in an attempt to “undress”
difference, and, perhaps, “redress” the injustice of school uniform policies, the
second section of this paper argues that schools ought to be places where
children are confronted with the humanity of others. The argument is that
removing uniforms should not be a mere undressing that leaves children to deal
with difference and humiliation on their own, but that we must redress the
injustice by philosophically resituating schooling. Finally, the concluding
section will sketch out what it might mean to philosophically resituate schools
and to think of school life as a reflection of city life where, “the public is
heterogeneous, plural, and playful, a place where people witness and appreciate
the diverse cultural expressions that they do not share and do not fully
understand .” 7 Schools in this vision are not apolitical sanctuaries where
children develop into perfect rational subjects; rather, schools are messy,
vibrant, lively, worlds where children both constitute and come to know the
diverse world and public(s) that surround them.

Dressing Diversity: The School Uniform policy

A policy bulletin from Los Angeles states: “The Los Angeles Unified
School District believes that appropriate student dress contributes to a


4 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990).

5 Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution,
Recognition, and Participation.” Tanner Lecture Series, Stanford University (April 30-
May 2, 1996), http://tannerlectures.utah.edU/_documents/a-to-z/f/Fraser98.pdf.

6 David L. Brunsma, “School Uniforms in Public Schools,” National Association of
Elementary School Principals (January/Febraary 2006), 50.

7 Young, Politics of Difference, 241.




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productive learning environment.” 8 While a policy from Pitt County states:
“The implementation of school uniforms will help minimize disruptive
behavior, promote respect for oneself and others, build school/community
spirit, and, more significantly, help to maintain high academic standards.” 9
Most school uniform policies echo these sentiments. They appear to originate
from a genuine desire for students to succeed academically, and/or a need to
improve behavior and safety. Yet, the history of asking students to appear one
way or another is a story of mingled concerns about academic achievement,
juvenile delinquency, gender appropriateness, race relations, and gang
affiliation. 10 Ines Dussel historically situates these concerns within a broad
trend toward institutional organization and control of people who pivot around
the “axis of difference.” 11 According to Dussel, “such policies were tied to the
disciplining of‘unruly’, ‘savage’, ‘untamed’ bodies, that is, the bodies of those
who were not able to perform self-regulation or self-government: women,
Black, Indian, poor classes, immigrants, toddlers or infants.” 1- In Young’s
language, the victims of cultural imperialism are frozen “into a being marked as
other,” while the dominant group occupies a universal “unmarked” position. 1 ’
The impetus to uniform is at once entangled in a project to mark or dress
difference and to extend the “universalized” position to the “other.” 14 The
policy trend toward institutional control vis-a-vis school uniform policies is
enmeshed in the desire for definition and regulation of student’s personal
bodies and is a means to regulate and define children’s relationships with one
another.

School uniform policies are not merely concerned with what one
wears, but are a part of how we organize schools and the students therein.
These policies are an attempt to make schools safer and better, to regulate what
happens, and who affiliates with whom. A District of Columbia uniform policy
hints at these underlying tensions by taking measures to define what “uniform”
means within the policy: “The term ‘uniform,’ for the purposes of a mandatory
uniform policy, is defined as clothing of the same style and/or color and


s Jim Morris, “Student Dress Codes/Uniforms,” Los Angeles Unified School District
Policy Bulletin, BUL-2549.1 (December 2009), 1.

9 Ibid.

10 Wendell Anderson, “School Dress Codes and Uniform Policies,” Policy Report
(ERIC Clearinghouse on Education Management), no. 4 (2002), 4. Anderson briefly
captures this history in the synopsis of his policy report.

11 Ines Dussel, “When Appearances Are Not Deceptive: A Comparative History of
School Uniforms in Argentina and the United States (Nineteenth-Twentieth
Centuries),” Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 1-2 (2005): 191.

12 Ibid.

13 Young, Politics of Difference, 123.

14 To this point, Dussel, notes that elite, private, “preppy” school dress was extended
down, as it were, to public mass schooling and has become the school uniform we are
familiar with today, e.g. khaki pants and Oxford shirts.




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standard look, as agreed upon by the school community.” 15 Nonetheless, a
definition of “uniform” does little to draw attention away from the fact that the
policy is asking all children to appear the same. The concluding advice from a
US Department of Education policy report for drafting a uniform policy reads:
“when they are justified by a school’s circumstances, wisely conceived in
collaboration with the community, and coupled with appropriate interventions,
dress codes and school uniforms may positively influence school climate,
student behavior, and academic success. However, it is critical to keep such
polices in proper perspective and avoid overestimating or exaggerating their
potential benefits.” 16 This hesitant endorsement of school uniform policies
manages to advise caution about drawing specific cause-and-effect
relationships between school uniforms and academic gains, and in the same
instance, it glosses over the historical and philosophical significance of asking
students to uniformly dress their difference. Standardizing how students appear
may give the school an air of control over the schooling environment, but in
doing so, these policies tell students that when and where appearances differ,
danger lurks.

Addressing Diversity: Social Justice
and the School Uniform policy

Claims for social justice, more often than not, stem from one of two
directions; summed up by references to distribution or recognition, social
injustices are either rectified by redistributing wealth/social goods, or by
recognizing and valuing difference. Redistributive claims generally follow the
logic of John Rawls’ theory of justice and utilize some version of an “original
position.” The policy logic, or reasoning behind, school uniform policies
broadly appeals to logic derived from a distributional ethic, which finds its
ideal articulation of the student in the rational, reasoning, and regulated self.
The problem with this ideal articulation and the distributional ethic is best
illustrated by evaluating the ways in which Rawls’ theory of social justice
informs the rationale of school uniform policies.

Rawls’s theory of justice and the school uniform policy share a similar
objective: thinly constructed reasoning parties. In Justice as Fairness Rawls
develops the “original position” whereby parties can agree to the terms of
society and justice without conceding “differences in life prospects.” 17 That is
to say, difference or diversity is an essential consideration in Rawls’ project. In
an effort to deal with the mandates of diversity, the fact of pluralism, Rawls
adopts and builds upon the Kantian deontological self to describe the sort of
people contracting in the original position. Accordingly, the original position


15 “District of Columbia Public Schools: Notice of Final Rule Making,” (District of
Columbia Register, vol. 56, no. 33, Chapter B24, Section B2408, August 2009), 3.

16 Anderson, “School Dress Codes,” 4, my emphasis.

7 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 6.3-6.4, 12.2.




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imbues these intrinsically worthy subjects with neutrality and structural
impartiality, both of which ensure that they are representative of any person
from society. Placed behind the “veil of ignorance,” the parties are situated
symmetrically and on this undifferentiated plane they do not claim a social
class, racial or sexual orientation, a comprehensive conception of the good, or
any other distinguishing factor. 18 Rawls states, “the parties are artificial
persons, merely inhabitants of our device of representation: they are characters
who have a part in the play of our thought experiment.” 9 In consequence the
representatives in the original position are, admittedly, non-real characters with
limited knowledge, or “complicated amnesia.” 20 Moreover, it is the
“complicated amnesia,” or the “veil of ignorance” that gives the parties the
ability to be impartial and, more importantly, rational.

It is true that Rawls works to construct a thin consensus in the public
about society’s basic structures because he wants to leave open the ability to
construct individually defined thick lives; however, the parties of the original
position are abstracted to such an extent that a monological position ensues.
Michael Sandel summarizes the problem aptly: “The notion that not persons
but only a single subject is to be found behind the veil of ignorance would
explain why no bargaining or discussion can take place there.” 21 The “veil of
ignorance” removes the parties’ “thickness” so that they can reason together.
The problem is that a truly pluralistic or diverse society will not be the product
when a single subject conceives the definitions of justice. What’s more, the
agreement of like-minded parties does not necessitate actual participation—it
merely requires appearance. Uniform policies are theoretically similar. They
function as a “veil of ignorance” for children who are too poor, too brown, or
too different from one another to be members of the same school. Uniform
policies imply that children in uniform are freed from any context that might
impose a restraint on reason. Under a “veil of ignorance” children are not asked
to think about why their classmate is poor, or brown; they are required to show
up. Rawls’ theory of justice constructs thin, uniform, rational people (students)
who can operate in the political sphere (school) as a way to achieve some kind
of overlapping consensus (standard academic achievement). I believe it is clear
that these thinly constituted people are both objectionable and impractical;
nonetheless, Young helps draw out the unwelcome side affects of favoring the
impartial subject and proposes an alternative solution.

Young approaches justice from within the messy, situated context of
the world. Her argument for a politics of difference highlights the fact that
theories of distributive justice have monopolized the conversation about what
justice entails in the era of modern political philosophy, such that “displacing


18 Ibid., 23.3, 25.3.

19 Ibid., 23.4.

20 Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 105.

21 Ibid., 132.




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the distributive paradigm” is part of accepting her theory of justice as
recognition of difference. 22 For Young the distributive paradigms pose a large-
scale problem in the sense that the “ideal of impartiality or logic of identity”
infiltrates every aspect of civic life. The logic of identity is problematic because
of the intrinsic desire for unity. As such, “The logic of identity seeks to reduce
the plurality of particular subjects, their bodily, perspectival experience, to a
unity, by measuring them against the unvarying standard of universal reason.” 2 '
The reverence deferred to universal reason is part of the project of moral ethics,
which defines impartiality as necessary for the capacity to reason. The Kantian
deontological ideal is to find a point of view that everyone can agree to, or see
from, irrespective of their particular difference. School uniform polices strive
for the same ideal. The hope is that if kids are all wearing the same clothing, no
one will notice another’s socioeconomic status, or speak from their particular
position. The ideal of impartiality creates a dichotomy between the “universal
and the particular, public and private, and reason and passion” to the extent that
the civic public, the terrain of schooling, becomes the place of universal
reason.’ 4 Much like the problem identified by Sandel’s reading of Rawls’
original position, universal reason requires agreement of abstracted parties, not
dialogue with those who are differently situated. Furthermore, if the terrain of
schooling is a place of universal reason it is no wonder that the “either-or
thinking” of dichotomies reigns. Children are either uniformed or partial,
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