Stretched across the ceiling of a chapel-like gallery in the Brooklyn Museum is the painter Kehinde Wiley's 2003 large-scale panel Go. It's a mural of young black men, floating through a blue sky scattered with large cumulus clouds, wearing our era's streetwear: baggy blue jeans and oversized T-shirts, bomber jackets, Timbs, and Air Force 1s to perfectly match the backwards fitted caps on their heads. One figure, body crawled inward, eyes wide and wandering, appears weary. His head, encircled by an ornate doily-like gold halo, is covered by a shimmering sign of black protection, style, and beauty: the du-rag.Go, and later Wiley's Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Study I of a black figure wearing a white du-rag, are the first works of art I remember seeing where a figure sports a du-rag. The du-rag has its roots in the decorative headdresses of sub-Saharan Africa and subsequently, the rags American slaves used to tie their hair back in the the field and on Sunday morning to praise God. During the Harlem Renaissance, the du-rag (sometimes made of women's stockings) began to be worn by black American men inside their homes to protect their hairstyles. Into the latter part of the twentieth century, they were used by men of the diaspora to create waves in their fades and to protect their cornrows while they slept.By the 1990s and early 2000s, it became a fashion accessory for young black men, worn outside in the world--despite the protests of many black parents, who wanted to protect their sons from easy stereotyping-- as a point of self imaging, black cool, and a gesture of their own representation. Rappers like Nelly and 50 Cent wore them in their videos and on red carpets and basketball players like Allen Iverson stylized them off the court. These men were owning their blackness in a whitewashed world.Continue reading on I-D
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