Finally?! Elements in the Caribbean judicial setup, have found the courage and human rights character, to admit as it were? “in open court” that black people have the right to wear dreadlocks and that that right is a legitimate form of self-expression.
Here in the Caribbean, we are coming from a place, where at least one country, was sufficiently backward and brutish in their perception of black people, to pass and enforce something called The Dread Act. A piece of legislation which gave the police the signal to hunt down and brutalize dreadlocks wearing humans, as though they were wild aliens from yonder planet.
And a lot of big strong black policemen would have joined the hunt; sometimes cutting off the dreadlocks of, their victims, with big scissors, blunt knives and old machetes.
Not unlike the choice of the: biggest and strongest black slaves, being selected to flog and brutalize other slaves into submission.
Not to belabor, the point, but we should recall that, it was the brutalization and ruthless persecution of black citizens of the Caribbean, who chose to wear a dreadlocks hairstyle, that led to the establishment of countless Rastafarian, jungle communes, in a desperate bid to assure their survival and defiant resistance.
It is a tribute to the independence and self-sustainability commitment of the Rastafari movement, that many of those settlements, are now respectable shrines and testimonials, to Rastafari resistance and self reliance.
Having said all of that, it warms my heart to see so many of our Caribbean brothers and sisters, embracing the dreadlocks hairstyle, and making it clear to an otherwise skeptical judiciary, that our culture is ours to behold and not theirs to humiliate and vilify.
Some wise old jurist, is reported to have observed, that the law is, at one and the same time, a plow and a peg. It is certainly time for more Caribbean jurists, to take their signals from more advanced centers of jurist prudence, and systematically plow up and dismantle the brutish judicial mindset which some may still maintain, against the dreadlocks hairstyle. Bless up to the members of the Belize Supreme Court. They are obviously “drinking” something good in their judicial juices.
Reference: “Supreme Court rules cops can wear dreadlocks as freedom of expression” https://guardian.bz/?p=27256
Walk good until next time.
Arvel Grant,
Political and Current Affairs Analyst.