Pressing Forward: Whether Sunny or Grey, Durags and Bonnets Away
Graphic by Habib Salami.
Op-Ed
BY RANN MILLER | Pressing Forward
I’ve worn a durag before. I’ve owned multiple, and when in college, I’ve worn them to class. People may not have liked it, Black and white people alike. But a durag didn’t speak negatively on my character nor my intelligence. Sadly, some people believe that it does, including the Administration at Tuskegee University, which rolled out a new dress code policy earlier this summer.
The only thing that makes sense about this Tuskegee dress code nonsense isn’t that it is nonsense–but to be clear, it is nonsense. That makes the most sense: that it would be the University of Booker T. Washington that would institute a dress code to police Blackness in ways reminiscent of the calls to respectability of old… Because being a respectable Negro is what will keep us safe and elevate us while in an anti-Black society.
According to Tuskegee President Dr. Mark A. Brown, “The goal here is not meant to restrict students from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare them with a solid foundation for the workforce they will enter once they leave Tuskegee.” In other words, Tuskegee’s dress code seeks to make Black people respectable for white employers so that they feel comfortable enough with their presentation, along with their acumen, for Black graduates to be gainfully employed.
I get it. Obviously, you cannot wear a durag or a bonnet to work. But wearing a durag or bonnet to a job interview isn’t why Black people aren’t considered for jobs. Racism explains that. Wearing a durag or a bonnet to the office isn’t why Black people cannot rise above their station. Racism AND capitalism explain that.
Dr. Brown sounds like Washington, actually, who in 1895 said the following:
“Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we… shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful.”
A gewgaw is a flashy yet cheap (and useless) accessory that often lacks value and utility. I think it is safe to say that the university brass believes that a durag and bonnet are gewgaws. That’s respectability politics. Clearly, it doesn’t matter that durags and bonnets trace back to the African practice of wearing head coverings. The practice arrived with Africans in the West to maintain a level of identity, which continued to be worn–particularly by women–for practical reasons; although Black women specifically were forced to conceal their beauty because white women were insecure and white men couldn’t control themselves.
After African people were emancipated, headcoverings like the durag and bonnet continued to be used for similar practical reasons, specifically protection from the sun and other foreign objects. However, whiteness has always sought to police Black people and the Black aesthetic out of a need to criminalize Black behavior so that we can be imprisoned… and returned to enslavement. That’s what Black Codes were all about: criminalizing everything from not having a job to gathering with 2 or 3 other Black people on the sidewalk.
Respectability politics–the myth that, in order for Black people to be seen and treated as human, they must conform to whiteness–is a response to Black Codes and the doctrine of separate but equal. Worse, Black folks bought into respectability politics, some integrating the philosophy into civil rights politics, and many still do today. Combine that with the origin story of HBCUs, their role in producing skilled members of the labor market, as part of a capitalist system, and you have a recipe for the stunting of Black people, Black cultural identity, and even the Black Radical Tradition.
What does this moment require of Black people? It requires that we collectively ask ourselves a question. We are not to ask if we should be part of Black institutions. Rather, we must ask which Black institutions we should join.
The United States has always been hostile to Black people and enemies of Black liberation movements that were unwilling to compromise with the neoliberal order. It is natural to think our institutions are safe havens, whether they be our schools, our colleges and universities, our churches, or our barbershops and hair salons. We can no longer afford to be so presumptuous. Because if these institutions were created in concert with white people, they are subject to white infiltration. Therefore, we must be discerning and question their motives and the money behind them.
HBCUs were created so Black people could receive academic and vocational training to become productive members of American society. These institutions were also created so that white folks weren’t subjected to attending school with Black people. Meanwhile, many of these schools were created by white philanthropists, white Protestant organizations, and the federal government through the Second Morrill Act of 1890, created to replicate white universities.
All this to say that while these institutions have contributed more Black doctorates, doctors, lawyers, teachers, congressmen, and other distinguished professionals, along with adding Black folks to the middle and upper classes, they’ve done so as Black institutional spaces influenced by white institutions, including the neoliberal order of the American government and Western society at large.
I get the desire to run to HBCUs in light of who’s currently in the White House and the ripple effect of his racism on institutions within our society, but if Black institutions replicate white institutional spaces’ policing of Black bodies and minds, these are institutions we must abandon and reject.
It doesn’t matter if it is an HBCU, a civil rights organization, or a Black business. If “Black liberation” means emulating our oppressor to have stuff in exchange for being overworked, underpaid, and our Blackness policed, that’s not liberation. That’s the American way, folks… racial capitalism and not Black liberation.
It is apropos that it is Tuskegee with this mandate. For it was Tuskegee’s founder, Booker T. Washington, who said to white folks at the Atlanta Exposition:
“It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges… I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race…”
Tuskegee seems to be continuing the tradition of being a patient and sympathetic help to white folks who have to deal with Black folks. Is that the Tuskegee way? I wouldn’t ball and parlay to that tune.
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