How celebrating a head covering became an annual event

• 5 October 2015

Black people across the world have been using social media to celebrate the durag – a piece of cloth which protects waved and corn-rowed hairstyles.

On Twitter the hashtag #DuragHistoryWeek has attracted around 120,000 tweets over the past seven days, with the majority of those coming from the US and the UK.

The hashtag’s origins can be traced back to last year when freelancer journalist and writer Van Newkirk tweeted “declaring this week #DuragHistoryWeek”.

“The durag has a special place in African-American and global black history as a head wrap,” Newkirk told BBC Trending. “I’ve always thought it was kind of funny and interesting that something so universal is very well known by some folks but not very known at all by those outside of that [culture].”

“I was expecting a couple of people to respond – I wasn’t expecting it to become an annual trending topic on Twitter,” he says.

This year, many tweeters used the hashtag to post pictures, some Photoshopped, of celebrities and fictional characters wearing a durag. Others uploaded pictures of historical and religious figures wearing similar head coverings:

“There’s a humour involved in it – some people go and have fun with it but there’s also a secret knowledge to it,” says Newkirk. “Lots of folks use durags, while other folks may not quite know what they are. It’s hard to quantify why it took off but people are using it to celebrate their culture and laugh at the same time.”

• A durag is “a piece of cloth that is worn on the head to cover the hair” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary.
• The origins of headscarves performing similar functions have been attributed to African American women during slavery and 19th-century Ethiopian soldiers.
• Van Newkirk says the word durag can be traced back to the United States in 1940s and 1950s after a rise in the availability of commercial hair products for black people.
• Durags have had various resurgences over the years. They remerged as a popular fashion trend amongst young people during the 1990s and 2000s.
• Also spelled doo-rag, dew-rag, du-rag or do-rag.

Some tweeters also uploaded pictures of prominent white celebrities such as Eminem, David Beckham and John Travolta wearing durags.

“It’s another element of the humour,” said Newkirk. “Durags have actually entered high-end fashion; designers have put them on the runway. Things that come out of global black culture become part of the mainstream. Whether white folks are borrowing or appropriating, from Eminem to Steven Seagal there are a lot of layers to that conversation about how cultures bleed over to the mainstream.”

Blog by Jonathan Griffin

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