Brazil's White Women Deny Racism When Wearing African Head Wrap

A controversy was sparked in Brazil last week after a young white woman complained in a Facebook post that, as she was wearing an African-style head wrap because of her cancer treatment, a Black woman approached her and questioned about her choice.

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Black activists in Brazil responded that if a Black woman had really reacted as such, she was not representative of the various Black movements in the country.

Nevertheless, Brazilian news and social media exaggerated the controversy by attacking and attempting to delegitimize the historic struggle of the Black movements, argued Black activist Ana Maria Goncalves in a column written for the Intercept.

With the hashtag #VaiTerBrancaDeTurbatneSim! or #WhitesWillUseHeadWraps! Brazilian white women claimed that the headwrap was “from Brazil” and therefore “everybody’s,” just as pizza was originally “Italian,” that the cotton used to make the fabric of the head wrap is “Indian” and that the world is now globalized.

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“We are signs made by white people so that our Blackness can be commercialized,” said the columnist. “The head wrap we wear is not the same as yours. What for you is the simple desire to be cool ... (our) wearing a head wrap is a form of belonging. It is joining with another member of the diaspora who also wears a head wrap and, without needing to say anything, know that he or she knows that you know that the head wraps on our heads cost and continue to cost our lives.”

She recalled that head wraps used to be constantly racialized and criminalized when worn by Black women.

Goncalves asked white women “you will be with us when we weep over the deaths of young Black boys and cry out for justice, right? You will use head wraps when our Afro-Brazilian religious leaders are kicked out of their communities and held down on top of ant hills by police, right?”

“Under this head wrap we teach young Black children not to take bananas to school for lunch because the other kids will call them monkeys," she concluded. "We tell our children not to use clothes with hoods, not to run, not to make harsh movements in public and not to look suspicious, whatever that means to you.”