How Turbans Helped Some Blacks Go Incognito In The Jim Crow EraPosted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2014-07-23 01:10Z by Steven |
How Turbans Helped Some Blacks Go Incognito In The Jim Crow Era
Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-07-19
Tanvi Misra
There’s a weekly trial on the Internet about who may be stealing culture from whom. Earlier this week, the defendants were Iggy Azalea and white gay men. A while back, it was Macklemore and the Harlem Shakers.
Now, we have come across a story from the Jim Crow era about cultural mimicry between people of color.
In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for “confounding the color lines,” writes Manan Desai, board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive.
At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color — both foreigners and African-Americans — employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others — performers and businessmen — to gain access to fame and money they wouldn’t have otherwise had…
Read the entire article here.