A Black student at BYU-Hawaii was told his locs were against the Honor Code. This is what happened next.

Kanaan Barton was hanging out with some friends by the dorms when a school security officer saw them and stopped. The man pointed at Barton.

“You there,” Barton remembers the officer barking at him. “Are you a student here?”

Barton nodded his head. He was the only Black student among the group outside the apartments at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. And he recalled the officer demanding only Barton show his ID card. He did.

The officer looked several times between the photo and Barton, with his shoulder-length locs. “I guess you are then,” Barton said the officer told him.

“But to stay a student,” he added, “you’ll need to cut off your hair. It’s against the rules.”

The officer handed Barton back his ID and told him he’d be checking in with the university president’s office to make sure Barton “followed through.” Or was expelled, if he didn’t.

That charged interaction last September marked the start of what’s become a monthslong battle over hairstyle — and the intersections with culture and race — as Barton has faced off against the religious university sponsored by The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints.

As a private school, BYU-Hawaii can require that students follow certain standards as a condition of attendance. The Hawaii university — as well as the church-run campuses of BYU in Utah and Idaho — enforces a strict Honor Code ordering students abstain from sex before marriage, as well as prohibiting the consumption of coffee, alcohol and tobacco.

In the dress and grooming section, it says hair “should be clean, neat, modest and avoid extremes in styles and colors.” For men, beards are off limits, and hair should be “neatly trimmed.”

Barton is an active member of the LDS Church. He served a proselytizing mission in Utah, where the faith is based, before transferring to BYU-Hawaii when he returned home. He said he loves the church and isn’t trying to challenge core teachings.

But the code for the church’s schools on hair, he believes, is arbitrary at best. At worst, he feels, it’s discriminatory.

“Regardless of the length of my hair, I am spiritually involved. I am actively going to church,” Barton said. “I am doing well in school work. I am doing everything else. But my locs mean something to me. They are culture. They are family.”

He emphasized: “I shouldn’t have to cut my hair to get an education here.”

The school’s administration, he said, initially told him otherwise.

A spokesperson for BYU-Hawaii responded by saying she couldn’t talk about specific student cases, for privacy, and repeated the language of the code. She said as long as locs fall within the parameters, they are permitted. Barton said he’s been told his are too long — and been urged not to have them at all.

He is not the first to push back against the hair standards for cultural reasons; and BYU has, in the past, permitted individual exceptions for that. When he was a student, Michael Williamson Tabango notably received one in 2018 — after speaking out and filing a federal complaint — so he could maintain his long hair in keeping with his native Ecuadorian Otavalo tribal custom.

But Barton’s case has drawn renewed attention, particularly after it was broadcast by the popular Black Menaces group that films videos for TikTok addressing racial and other inequities at BYU and in the LDS Church.

Both the Black Menaces and Barton hope this case will spur a sea change for the Church Educational System that oversees all the BYU campuses to reexamine and rewrite the rules for hairstyles to be more culturally inclusive.

Barton said he doesn’t want students of color to feel like they’re being policed or profiled by school staff — literally, in his case — for expressing their culture.

To him, it’s not just hair, it’s identity. And the length isn’t a measurement of his faith or academics.

What do the rules actually say about length?

Barton would like to be clear about this: He doesn’t feel like he was breaking the code with his hair to begin with.

When he started at BYU-Hawaii last fall, the 22-year-old computer science major had twisted, dark brown locs that fell to his shoulders. He has been growing them since he returned from his LDS mission in 2020.

The style is important to his family, with his mom and sister both having locs as well. And it’s significant in his culture as an African American of Afro-Guyanese descent.

“It’s a style that has been passed on for a long time,” Barton said. “People take pride in growing them. And I am one of those people. In my perspective, my locs represent strength and courage, as well as freedom.”

Barton said he takes pride, too, in the maintenance of his locs. He visits a loctician once a month “to keep my hair neat, clean and fresh.” And he goes to a barber twice a month on top of that, trying to abide by BYU’s expectations. He feels the shoulder length is appropriate and within the rules.

The university’s code instructs male students to have their hair “neatly trimmed,” but it doesn’t mention any explicit ban on locs. And there are no longer any specifics on length.

The Honor Code previously said that men should have their hair “trimmed above the collar, leaving the ear uncovered.” That language was removed in an update last year. The Church Educational System has said the changes were made to simplify the rules and make them unified across its institutions.

A “frequently asked questions” document that accompanies the Honor Code, though, adds that the intent remains for “hair to be cut short and neatly trimmed” for men. It doesn’t mention “above the collar.”

Still, Barton said he sees that update as an acknowledgment that length isn’t as important. “What is short?” he asked. “... I don’t feel like my locs are too long.”

In fact, he notes, while the school has standards on hair for students to uphold, no such rules exist for church participation. So he questions why they’re necessary at BYU.

And the standards for male missionaries of the faith also don’t mention hair length. Those rules say that missionaries should “choose a neat, conservative hairstyle that is easy to maintain and does not draw attention.”

Barton said he learned on his mission, though, that’s what written isn’t always what’s enforced.

Then, he had his hair in an afro — again in a way that he felt was in alignment with the rules. But he was frequently told, he said, by mission leaders to “pat it down” so his hair wasn’t “so big” or “so distracting.”

He sees the response to his afro and to his locs as a reaction to him expressing his Blackness. He feels the church and BYU use what he sees as “a vague set of rules” to tamp that down, relying instead on unwritten motivations.

Historically, the LDS Church, along with BYU, has not always been accepting of Black members (though the faith has, in recent years, partnered with the NAACP and worked to address that).

Others have pushed for change before

Even a landmark committee of faculty formed by BYU to study racism and discrimination on campus recommended that the Church Educational System “take steps to ensure that the BYU Honor Code and Dress and Grooming Standards are applied with cultural competence and sensitivity.”

It was among a list of recommendations in its 2021 report on how to make the church-run schools more welcoming to students of color, whom the report found often “feel isolated and unsafe as a result of their experiences with racism at BYU” — including frequently hearing the N-word and other racist slurs.

Currently, though, the process to request an exception to BYU’s dress and grooming standards only allows appeals for the beard ban and only on three grounds: religious, medical or theatrical (applies when a student is participating in a production through BYU’s Theatre and Media Arts Department that requires facial hair).

There is no stated exemption for culture or process to appeal the rules for hairstyles on that basis.

Michael Williamson Tabango, who is part of the Kichwa Nation and the Otavalo tribe of Ecuador, was frustrated by that when he was a student at BYU in Provo. He was granted an exception to the hair policy in 2018 for his culture — but only after a monthslong public fight that included his parents, neighbors and the Ecuadorian embassy speaking out against the school’s demands that Tabango cut his hair to remain enrolled.

The school’s Honor Code Office initially told him: “BYU has received requests such as yours before this. We have sent this up to the university leaders and each time it has been denied. ... We can appreciate your loyalty to your cultural identity, there are others at BYU who have these same loyalties also, however, they have chosen to keep the standards while they are studying here.”

Days after his dad filed a complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights, Tabango said, BYU reversed its denial.

Tabango’s culture encourages men to wear their hair in long braids as a symbol of power, age and wisdom. He explained that in a letter to the president of BYU, also noting that his grandfather was one of the first in Ecuador to join the LDS Church. And later, Tabango found and submitted the exception that his uncle was previously granted in 1984 to maintain his long braided hair as a student at BYU.

But even that letter from the then-president of the school said it should be viewed as a “very unusual circumstance” and not “some sort of broad or easily granted exception.”

Tabango disagreed.

“This is a sensitive matter for not only me and my family, but for my people all around the world,” he wrote in his 2018 letter. “… The vast majority of church members are ready to see people like me study alongside them at their universities.”

Tabango, now a doctoral student at Purdue University, said the hair policy — particularly asking Native folks to cut their traditional hair — has “a chilling effect” on Indigenous students, prompting some to not even apply to BYU because of it.

Some Pacific Islander cultures also value long hair for men.

And Barton said he’s surprised that BYU-Hawaii, which has a sizable Pacific Islander student body, isn’t more accommodating because of that.

The Hawaii school is far more diverse than the Idaho and Utah BYU campuses. BYU-Hawaii’s enrollment is 38% white, while Idaho’s campus is 65% white students and Utah’s campus is 81%.

“Culture is a word that’s been boasted here,” Barton said. “BYU-Hawaii takes pride in culture, especially Polynesian culture.”

He wants the Honor Code to reflect that for all students of color.

The school says it’s based on ‘distraction’

After that first night in September when the security guard stopped him, Barton emailed BYU-Hawaii’s President John S.K. Kauwe III. Barton was surprised that Kauwe agreed to sit down with him the next day.

He said Kauwe apologized to him for the officer’s behavior. Then, Barton said, the president asked him: “Kanaan, do you believe you’re abiding by the Honor Code and standards?”

Barton replied: “Yes, I do. I believe I’m not doing anything wrong.”

He said Kauwe nodded and didn’t push it further. But it didn’t end there.

A few weeks later, Barton was hanging out by the dorms, when a female staffer stopped him. Again, she asked if he was a student. “Well, as a student your hair is too long,” Barton recalled her saying. “You need to talk to the president.”

Barton said he already did. She insisted he needed a formal letter from Kauwe exempting him from the standards. So he reached out to the president again. This time, he said, Kauwe told him he needed to talk to the Honor Code Office.

Over several weeks, Barton met with Honor Code staff multiple times to talk about his hair. “They said if my hair was shorter, I would have less of a problem,” Barton recounted. They stopped short of telling him to cut it.

In October, while heading to class, Barton said the same female staffer noticed him and stopped him a second time. Barton had his locs pulled back, a compromise while he was trying to work on a solution with the school. The staffer pushed Barton to walk with her to the Honor Code Office.

This time, he was directed to talk to Jonathan Kalaonalani Kau, the vice president for student life.

During a meeting the following month, Barton said Kau was more explicit than anyone before. Barton said the man told him he needed to lose his locs, that they were “a distraction” and that Barton was “trying to push his own agenda and be defiant.”

Kau concluded by saying Barton needed to abide by the Honor Code because he committed to it when he signed it, and the rules needed to be enforced with all students. Laura Tevaga, the spokesperson for the school, reiterated that in her statement.

The Church Educational System’s “Dress and Grooming Principles outline that ‘each student, employee, and volunteer commits to maintain an elevated standard distinctive to educational institutions of the Church of Jesus Christ,’’” she wrote. “By being part of CES, individuals commit to this distinctive, elevated standard.”

The spokesperson for the LDS Church declined to comment, saying it was a BYU-Hawaii matter.

Barton suggested several ways to try to adjust his hair: pulling it back, covering it, getting it twisted tighter to bring it up a bit, even trimming a few inches. Kau said he wasn’t sure any of those would work, but that Barton could take the time to think about it and make changes before the new semester started in January.

A temporary solution but a policy ‘worth fighting’

The second day he was back on campus this year Barton bumped into Kau, who wasn’t satisfied with Barton’s decision to pull his hair back into a ponytail. The vice president, Barton recalled, told the student that solution “lacked integrity.”

Barton sat down with Kau again, in a meeting before classes started. Barton asked to have his mom, who lives in Virginia, on speaker phone while they talked, hoping she might be able to better explain the significance of locs. The conversation went in the same circles, said Evette Barton.

“I said Jesus walked around with a dress and long hair,” Evette Barton noted. “… Hair doesn’t disrupt education. In fact, this debate is doing more to distract from my son’s education than anything.”

It’s not the first time that Barton has had to talk to BYU administrators about one of her kid’s hair. In 2003, when her oldest daughter was attending BYU-Idaho, Cheyenne Barton was stopped from getting her student ID picture taken because her extensions had purple dye mixed in — which violates the Honor Code that requires only natural hair colors.

With that, Evette went to the store and bought black hair spray. But they didn’t cut Cheyenne’s long braids, which were deemed acceptable for a female student.

Now Evette worries about her 8-year-old grandson one day attending a BYU institution. “Ten years from now, if he chooses to, we’re going to have the same problem,” she said.

The family is asking the Church Educational System to reconsider now, before the trend carries on for generations.

“You want us to be part of an organization, but you want to strip us of our identity,” Evette said. “We should be seeing more Black people in these spaces, as they are. … We’re not going to just quietly go off in a corner.”

The last solution the family suggested during the meeting with Kau was for Barton to have his locs folded so they would fall “above the collar,” as the previous version of the Honor Code read. He did, and for now, Barton said, the school has tepidly accepted that.

He said he has an email from Kau confirming if he will “continue to maintain them in this way,” he can move forward with his education at BYU-Hawaii (though it also still notes that Kau “wishes they were shorter”).

Barton said it’s not a solution that will last forever, as his hair continues to grow. But now, he says, maybe his locs should be seen as a measurement of his determination to permanently change the rules for students of color.

“I’m not special,” he said. “I just figured this was worth fighting.”

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