A Brief History on Why White Women Should Not Wear or Sell Head-Wraps
Just stop, Nancy.
“This isn’t your grandmother’s silk hair wrap.”
The subheading seemed to grow larger, taking up the entire page, as I stared at it, baffled at the irony. “No,” I thought, “it’s not yours, or your grandmother’s, or mine.”
A black activist I follow on Twitter, Godis Rivera, retweeted an article from online magazine Fashion Canada singing the praises of a company called NiteCap. Its founder, Sarah Marantz Lindenberg (whose name suggests her family money came from ivory or exotic spices) explains that her invention sprung from desperate times:
“My concept came out of a problem that needed solving. I was preparing for my wedding and, like a lot of brides, wanted everything to be perfect. My skin was breaking out and I have quite long hair…”
Lindenberg goes on to describe her struggles with her long hair being in her face, which causes her to break out. I can wait for a moment if you need to grab some tissues. She tried everything — a dermatologist suggested she sleep with her hair pulled back; it is not ever addressed why she couldn’t bear this option. In the end, after trying a silk scarf that didn’t stay on, a synthetic fabric that caused ambiguous damage, and some monstrosity with horrible colors she hated going to sleep in, Lindenberg was inspired to create something of her own.
This is not the first nor the last time she’ll claim ownership over the very concept of a nice headscarf, though she does concede succinctly that “the practice has been around a long time”. There is even an editor’s note tacked on that reads, “Though not strictly used just for sleeping, the item has a long history in black hair culture.”
Quite the Canadian understatement.
A Brief History Lesson
Historians often cite a 13th-century Assyrian legal text as the first mention of the practice of veiling as having cultural import — in this case, a woman’s headdress (or lack thereof) indicated her social status and marriageability. Wives and concubines were required to don a veil when going out in public, while prostitutes and slaves were banned from covering their heads at all, and could face punishment and death for doing so. Ancient Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Byzantine cultures are also all recorded as engaging in similar traditions — there are clear lines to be drawn to current practices from the Muslim hijab (or niqab or burqa…), either compulsory or banned depending on where you are; to decidedly non-Black Abrahamic cultures like the Orthodox Jews.
Few cultures are able to lay claim to some manner of traditional head covering, especially related to its use as knowing a woman’s worth without having to talk to her.
But as ever, white people seem discontent with our own boring/horrific cultural histories and feel compelled to invent things that have existed for centuries — to satisfy a need white people don’t have, from a history white people weren’t subjected to.
Thousands of cultures in continental Africa had and have their individual beauty ideals and hair dressing traditions, often having styling sessions as a community, reflecting today’s Black barbers and hair stylists. After and during the four hundred years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which over 20 million people were kidnapped from West and Central Africa and enslaved, modifications had to be made to both the methods and ideals for beauty.
Being deprived of their usual grooming products, slaves were forced to use drastic measures such as kerosene to rid themselves of scalp infections exacerbated by their terrible living conditions. Many men shaved their heads altogether and donned caps to protect their scalps from the unbearable sun. In addition, women were suddenly subjected to all-new colonizer standards of beauty: white slaveowners mandated straight, shiny hair, which required scalding tools and mixtures with ingredients like lye, permanently damaging the scalp upon contact — predecessors to chemical relaxers, perms, and hot combs. Forgoing all else, the choices left were to shave and wear a wig, or to cover the whole damn thing up.
Which brings us to the Tignon Laws.
Esteban Rodríguez Miró was appointed the governor of what is now Louisiana in 1785, controlling the territory Spain seized after France’s defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years’ War. Miró wasted no time passing a series of sumptuary laws designed to increase the visibility of Catholic worship and stave off the Inquisition — though their true impact was to regulate the appearance of Afro-Creole people and codify their oppression.
In short, the Spanish establishment needed to make great efforts to stifle the Creole women who had begun dressing like (and enjoying hints of the privilege of) their white mistresses, who of course felt intimidated by their mulatto appeal. They required a tignon — pronounced and alternatively spelled tiyon — which is a traditional head wrap that covers the crown of the head, concealing either their natural hair or any endeavor to make it more Anglo.
This dual purpose, of course, had just one desired result: to quite literally neutralize the power of Black women.
While certainly they were instructed to go to any measures necessary to make themselves as close to white as possible — was there ever really going to be a “white enough”? And while their Blackness was certainly the primary (and often only) trait by which they were seen and thus treated, taking any sort of ownership or pride therein was not an option. One’s skin color made them an automatic “other”, which was a designation not afforded further complexity. Historian Virginia M. Gould explains that Miró hoped the laws would control women “…who had become too light skinned or who dressed too elegantly, or who, in reality, competed too freely with white women for status and thus threatened the social order.”
Continuing the grand tradition of Black women making the system look like a bunch of goddamn fools, the Louisianans gathered fine fabrics, such as silk and madras, with which to fashion these tignons. They adorned them with jewels and cameos, often gifted to them by their young white suitors. They wore them in gorgeous, rich, loud colors, turning the attempt to hide them away into an opportunity to enhance their beauty — and their visibility — even more. After the Tignon Laws went out of effect in the 1800s, the cultural tradition continued in the Caribbean Islands and beyond.
There are surely many identical, discriminatory attitudes now towards Black hair — from the military to elementary schools and beyond — and again its long, painful history of being restricted, appropriated, and touched without its owner’s permission is well-chronicled and too complex for one article, especially one written by a white woman.
That didn’t seem to be an issue for the editor of Fashion Canada. Instead of responsibly pointing out that, no, this Lindenberg baby did not invent head wraps, she effectively demolished centuries of hair culture with 17 little words (which, incidentally, also admit that “while not strictly used for sleeping, this item”… has actual utility amongst its intended group of users?). A group that dutifully reamed this $98 white hood and its tone deaf creator on Twitter:
“not a white lady pretending she invented sleep bonnets and selling them for $100” — laments user Jean-Luc Gohard.
“The Nitecap? You mean a bonnet that black women have been wearing for decades. Now you’re just gonna pretend it never existed, sell it for $100, and call it the Cleopatra. Leave it to a freakin Sarah.” — @shaheenkapambwe
No singular patent exists on similar head wraps, including on durags for men, but they still offer a solution to a problem only people with Black hair face — their main use is to keep natural hair in place after styling or a chemical straightening treatment, and to train new growth hair straight.
If a white person with straight hair is truly struggling to keep it off their face, that is some sort of personal issue. In the article, Marantz-Lindenberg says that she “measured the heads of every person [she] interacted with”, which is behavior that certainly would get a Black person arrested. Personally, my ears have usually sufficed for keeping my hair in place; a rubber band, some water, a cloth headband, a bandana, and gravity have also worked just fine. Sarah also concedes that a Scrunchie would probably be okay — by selling a $32 silk version on her website.
Since apparently, in our world taking something that’s existed for centuries and jacking up the price constitutes inventiveness, Sarahs across America will continue being able to profit off the pain, exploitation, and resulting innovation of Black women.
But you don’t have to be party to it! Just about anything you buy can be purchased from a Black woman-owned business, assuming you have the privilege to afford what it’s worth. If you’re a white person who has curly hair and would like to keep it out of your face, there’s everything from the $3 version Black women have been using for decades, to pricier, gorgeous options, such as these made by Melissa Mitchell that have been worn by goddesses like Lupita Nyong’o. If you’re a white woman with straight hair who needs to keep her rollers in overnight, just use the leftover parachute silk you saved during the Great War. You sound like an old person, is what I’m saying.
It’s my responsibility and that of other white women to call out this Techy Becky bullshit when we see it, to do our own homework when we see it in ourselves, and most importantly is to just fucking listen. Oh, and discussion and introspection are always encouraged, but your money talks loudest.
[The heavy history and current attitudes towards Black hair are topics on which I am working to educate myself, but there are a billion people better-suited to discussing it than I: required viewing includes Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, required reading includes Hair Story by Ayana Byrd, required listening is always Solange.]
