The first part of my last post seems to have gotten lost in cyberspace, so:
Recap:
What if the boy didn’t have a clean white shirt that day and thought it was more important to be in bais medrash learning than in the laundromat? What if he didn’t have enough white shirts to last the week and his mother had just had a baby and couldn’t do his shirts for him? It’s premature to conclude he was making any ideological statements simply from seeing him in a blue shirt. As long as the shirt was clean and presentable, and not neon-orange, how could it disrupt the learning in the bais medrash?
The “dress code” hasn’t just mandated “white and black” – it also informally decides what type of shirt, what type of hat, etc., and you’d better have the money to buy them or face social consequences. Many years ago The Jewish Observer had an article written by the father of a little boy who was ostracized in school because he only had plastic-framed glasses instead of wire-framed ones.