Thanks. I wrote a longer response to the article, citing that women all over the world cover our heads for various reasons, and have always done so. And noting that the aurhor of this article is white and we got bigger fish to fry.
What I didn’t say in the article — because it’s too personal — is that the tignon laws were written to distinguish people like me from people like my slightly darker skinned cousins. So I’ve always known about those laws. You see, I’m a white-passing Creole from New Orleans, descended from the earliest (white single male upper-class ) immigrants to Louisiana, mixed with the Indigenous and African women. My earliest male ancestors on this continent came here because they could not inherit due to French and Spanish primogeniture laws. So they came over here to “seek their fortune”. Unlike the English settlers who came at about the same time as family units, the earliest French and Spanish settlers were generally young single men. Thus, they got with Indigenous and African women, and the occasional boatload of sex workers and petty criminals sent over from the women’s prisons across the pond. That’s where the Creoles come from, and that’s what I am.
Over time, some Creoles retained their light skins, while others became darker. These became known as the “passant-blanc” and “cafe au lait” Creoles respectively. There were various tests to tell which category one was in, such as the paper bag test and the pencil test. Since the distinction was rather arbitrary, Creole women who did not “pass” these tests were required to wear tignons for the convenience of the State.
During the Great Depression, many Creoles (who were mostly middle-class) lost their wealth and were demoted to working class. At about this time, most passant-blanc Creoles stopped referring to themselves as “Creole” because they wanted to disown their darker-skinned ancestors and relatives, and referred to themselves as White. And now you know the rest of the story.
So I wrap my head mostly for comfort, but also I do it to pay respects to my Creole and BIPOC relatives, all of them.
