Annie's Mailbox: Tattoos in the Worlplace

[cereta]

Dear Annie: The principal of the school where I teach has some big tattoos on her neck. She says they are Chinese symbols for "good fortune." I think they look trashy. I don't mind tattoos, but I don't think large markings on one's hands and neck are appropriate for school. They don't convey authority, and I have a hard time taking orders from her.

The last time she entered my classroom, she pointed to a poster listing class rules and said she didn't like that it had torn edges. I gently said, "I'm sorry, but I've been preoccupied with my students' reading skills, math and grammar, so the torn edges will have to wait a bit." She left the classroom looking uncomfortable.

The school security guards also have tattoos and not simply the names of their girlfriends or boyfriends. They picture playing cards, dice and other motifs that I consider more appropriate for a biker bar. During the last parent-teacher conference, one parent exclaimed, "Did you recruit the security guards from the county jail?"

Why is it acceptable for teachers, court officers and other professionals to tattoo their hands and necks when it makes them look like street thugs? How do they expect kids to listen to them when they look like that? I warn my older pupils that visible tattoos may bar them from certain jobs. Most of them take my advice. The ones who don't are harder to place for summer internships. -- N.Y.

Dear N.Y.: The proliferation of tattoos on the faces, hands and necks of professional sports players and TV reality stars makes this type of artwork seem more mainstream and acceptable. But just as there are dress codes for businesses, there are also dress codes for schools. If the students are not permitted to show such visible tattoos, neither should the administration and security personnel, who presumably set the example. If you believe this undermines the principal's authority, you can register a complaint with the school board.

Comments

[the_rck]

Word of God. I was there when they told several other parents to go the FOIA route. It was a public meeting for any parents to come in and talk to the principal. They came in as a group. I know at least one mother in the hostile group had moved her daughter to an entirely different school years before. She got loudly indignant when the principal suggested that there might be some sort of cultural clash in communication styles between what the woman expected and what was normal for the principal.

The school's location meant that there was a large disparity in terms of the poorest families and the wealthiest, and the principal put a lot of energy into support for the families with more limited resources and for students who were lagging behind, something that makes sense to me even if my family wasn't one of those. (The school district as a whole does some of this because the state penalizes school systems that have too large a gap between the test scores of the highest achieving students and the test scores of the lowest achieving students.)

I had a lot more sympathy for the mother who didn't like the principal and who told me why-- The principal's response to a report of this mother's daughter being bullied was 'well, there's no proof.' That's an entirely reasonable cause for being pissed off.

Saying you have grounds but won't tell me because you don't want to? No. That makes me damned certain that it's something really ugly about you.

[jadelennox]

this sounds like one of those meetings where I actually would have had to give up and leave because the rage would have choked me.

You totally know that those parents were going home and saying "we can't tell the other parents because those jerks will call us racist! But we're not! It's just that she's too urban to teach our kids, and not very articulate!" or some such BS.

[the_rck]

I give it maybe a 2% chance that they weren't doing that, just because weird things do happen sometimes. It just would be a lousy way to bet.

I'm sure that the principal made mistakes at times and also reasoned decisions that hurt someone because all of the options would. Those are things people do because we're people. I kind of doubt I'm ever going to meet someone who hasn't and/or won't. I just don't think those parents would have been judging her the same way if she had been white, and that's what they taught their kids, by example even if not by explicit word.

[minoanmiss]

This might sound weird, but... thank you for noticing and caring about this. I remember struggling to explain similar situations to the utter incomprehension and disbelief of the people around me, who were not of color.

[the_rck]

I suspect that the denial comes from people not wanting to accept that people who they know (or who are like those they know), people they have (and likely will) interact with positively, can do evil. It's really close to admitting that we all can and all might. At some point in our lives, we probably will. That's really terrifying both because of not wanting to be bad and because of not wanting to be vulnerable to our communities turning on us.

I find that most people I know have a really strong investment in denying that small evils committed by normal people are real things. History shows that they are, and people are still people decades, centuries, millennia on, but it's much easier to accept comfort and advantages/privilege if, somehow and abruptly, those old time ways of doing things aren't what underlies now.

Admitting the possibility of small evils also opens the door for terrifying things like wondering which of your friends are really safe with your children. It's very unsettling to have to look at people and understand that you can trust them for X and Y but absolutely not for Z.

And the idea that small evils pile up to be vast horrors... Well, it goes so far beyond terrifying that vast swathes of history have to be not-real to people in much the same way that horror movies are not-real or even more-- in the way that death is not-real in a TV show like Murder She Wrote, cumulative without being fenced off as having started then and ended so long after. Having the definite start and end makes it more like a hurricane or an earthquake than like something that real people-- like me-- did.

I think that I saw this partly because I liked the principal and partly because I'm disabled. My disabilities are largely invisible; I can pass. But it means that I know what passing is from the inside.

I'm lucky to be cis, het, white, and married to someone supportive. I try to be open about my disabilities because I'm in a position for it to be relatively safe for me to be. I wouldn't insist on anyone else revealing invisible disabilities publicly, though, because not everybody is safe doing that.