That not wearing a durag will keep you alive.” What we’ve learned-and what we’ve always known-is that your respectability won’t save you. “They’re unsafe from agents of the state or white vigilantes. “I think when African-Americans of certain generations reject durags, they’re doing it, in part, out of fear-out of the desire to protect black youth,” Ford says. Ford argues that parents and guardians feel the anxiety my mother felt when she told me not to wear mine outside of the house. Intra-cultural and white opposition toward the durag don’t run parallel. (In fact, I wasn’t sure if the argument was actually satire, but Asim hasn’t returned my request for clarification.) Dignity in abundance, but no do-rag in sight.” True, but Malcolm X didn’t give “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in capris, and James Baldwin never lectured in just a ribbed tank top. Photos show that she was arrested and fingerprinted in 1955 while wearing a crisply tailored suit and minimal makeup. In a 2005 Washington Post column titled “The Case Against Do-Rags,” for example, author Jabari Asim wrote: “Maybe you'd rather discuss the late, great Rosa Parks, the ultimate modern symbol of principled individuality. What’s more, the league’s biases were compounded by criticism by African-Americans, some of whom were ignited by cultural elitism and respectability politics. With the criminalization of black bodies comes the assailing of black expression, whether that comes in the form of curbing civil protest, music, or fashion. In an act of self-preservation, white Americans elected Donald Trump, a fink who has criminalized black bodies in the past, and whose current “law and order” rhetoric promises the same. White America has remained “deadeningly predictable” in the 50 years since Blues People’s publication. I’ve formed lifelong relationships with potential high school bullies because we realized waves were more important than debts. if he’s not wearing a durag inside out, he’s in blackface) are connectors amongst young black men. Wearing it, the practical uses, and the particulars (i.e. Seeing the durag as a crown is to take pride in something inextricable from blackness. The bargain luxury is symbolically significant, too. Others, like myself and the young man on the bus, tie them for waves-those linear textures whose suppleness brings the instant satisfaction of a “That’s the Way Love Goes”-era Janet Jackson. Some wear them to lay down their cornrows. He’ll either be stone faced or slyly grinning, eyes glinting with promise. Walk through a bodega or hair supply spot in a major American city, and you’ll see them: rectangular packets uniformly covered with an image of a black man donning a durag (or doo-rag or do-rag). It’s why I value waves, and all who seek them know they’re linked with a $2 piece of headwear a crown, even. As a term used by Negroes, the horror, etc., might be simply the deadeningly predictable mind of white America.” Blues People mainly examines music, but black artists and two broke black men on a bus are bound by similar blues-trying to flourish in a country that antagonizes melanin. In his seminal book Blues People, Amiri Baraka explains that in its original context, “To be cool was … to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.
And a cool brother, a required adjective for many of us. He was wavy-his hair was a radial thicket of blackness and hair product. It wasn’t the three-piece suit and the burgundy tie that wonderstruck me. I was riding the MTA bus on an autumn evening when a twentysomething-year-old man sat across from me.
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