In Defence of The Bonnet
What does it mean that Black women’s appearance must constantly be justified as “presentable,” “respectable,” or “appropriate”?
When public debates emerge condemning the wearing of bonnets in public spaces, the conversation often conceals deeper anxieties about what it means for Black women to be seen.
For Black women, visibility is never neutral—it is a site of surveillance and control. Blackness is often positioned as the opposite of beauty, associated with disorder, abnormality or excess. To be seen is to risk being evaluated, disciplined, and condemned within an aesthetic regime that centres whiteness as the norm.
The white gaze constructs a hierarchy of visibility in which certain forms of self-presentation are deemed “civilised” while others are marked as “unruly.” When a Black woman wears a bonnet in public, she disrupts this aesthetic order. Her choice to protect her hair rather than perform “presentability” violates the visual norms that uphold white standards of decorum.
The public rejection of bonnets is not about the fabric itself, It is about the violation of aesthetic norms, of failure to assimilate to the disciplined aesthetics of whiteness. The disdain for bonnets is thus a continuation of colonial and modernist projects that tie beauty to moral worth and orderliness to humanity.
The harshest critics of bonnets in public often come from within our own communities. This intra-communal policing reflects the long shadow of respectability politics.
By performing cleanliness, modesty, and propriety, Black women sought to counter racist depictions of Black degeneracy. Respectability, however, was double-edged: it offered survival, but at the cost of self-surveillance.
The modern condemnation of bonnets as “unladylike” echoes this legacy. Respectability demands that Black women manage their visibility to appear worthy of respect—worthy of being seen as human. Yet this worthiness is always conditional, always mediated by whiteness.
The bonnet controversy reveals the double bind of this politics: to be respectable is to be seen as human, yet to be respectable is also to reproduce the very gaze that dehumanises.
When people criticise bonnets, they’re really expressing discomfort with Black women who refuse to make themselves pleasing or legible to others. By refusing to “perform” beauty or respectability for the public gaze, the bonnet wearer challenges deep social assumptions about what being human, beautiful, or respectable looks like.
To wear a bonnet in public is to assert the right not to perform availability, not to justify or apologise for one’s presence. It safeguards both the physical and psychic integrity of Black womanhood against the relentless demands of the gaze. It allows the wearer to occupy public space on her own terms—to exist without conforming, assimilating, or providing aesthetic pleasure for others.
Being human does not require being beautiful, presentable, or legible to anyone else. It’s to say, simply and profoundly—
I exist, and that is enough.