That thing young people wear on their heads is called a dew-rag, NOT a do-rag.
And it’s NOT a ‘black thing’, it’s a farm thing – as is wearing your hat backwards.
I get so fed up with seeing the language butchered by folks who don’t seem to know anything about what they’re talking about.
I’m a (white) grandmother, and my grandmother wore a dew-rag, and that’s what she called it, as did all the women who worked on farms, or even did their own housecleaning, back in the day.
My grandmother explained to me that it was called a dew-rag, because women in those days weren’t allowed to do anything as vulgar as sweat – instead they “got all dewy”. And the rag was there to ’soak up the dew on their brows’.
And this whole thing with wearing your hat backwards – give me a break! Farms, plantations, road gangs – all those guys wore their hats backwards. Well, after billed caps were invented, and provided they were lucky enough to have a hat at all. The purpose was to protect their necks from the sun while they were bent over working. The boss wore his brim forward to shade his eyes so he could keep an eye on the workers.
I would see it as being more constructive to emulate something a bit more forward looking.
Neither of these clothing choices was invented by the current young generation, and both look back to a hard past – a time that is still being lived out in many countries. Just because we have been fortunate enough to leave much of that behind doesn’t seem to be a good reason to trivialize those customs.
And then there is the fad of wearing jail-house attire. Shoes flopping off the feet, great baggy clothes. Why are we allowing our youth (and Heaven forfend!, sometimes copying them) to glorify the criminal class, and then in the next breath whining about the crime rate? We can’t have it both ways – but that’s a whole other story, too . . .
