Close… As heat transfer is near and dear to my heart I’ll pick a couple nits.This is true! I spent some time with a bunch of Bedouin in the Negev desert for a while (long story), and they were incredible people who made the absolute best coffee.
I asked about the black robes; they wear it because it makes them sweat, and in the desert, sweating is how you cool off. Every breeze feels like A/C when your skin is wet/moist. The cooling happens by convection; either through a bellows action, as the robes flow in the wind, or by a chimney sort of effect, as air rises between robe and skin. That’s why their robes are always very loose; lots of air flow.
The wind convects the heat away faster from the body than it is absorbed. White clothing reflects sunlight, but also reflects internal heat back towards your body, so the net effect under identical conditions is less cooling than if you wore black.
Black clothing doesn’t “make them sweat”. If the clothing is working correctly it transfers less heat to the body, so the wearer will actually need to sweat less, though it might feel like you’re sweating more.
White clothing reflecting heat back towards the body is also a misconception, for two reasons: First, if it’s hot out and the clothing is at skin temp (~93F), the two surfaces are in radiative balance so radiative heat transfer to the clothing stops. Above that heat transfer reverses, so “black” would hurt not help. However in reality it’s a non-issue, as most clothing that look “black” in visible wavelengths (380-750 nm) is in fact quite “white” in the IR wavelengths human skin emits at (~9500 nm). So I’d drop the part about white reflecting heat back to the body.
The chimney effect is the really important part. The black clothing does get hotter in the sun. In the process it causes the air close to it inside the garment to heat and rise. That pulls more fresh, dry, air through the garment. That in turn makes evaporative cooling more effective. Evaporative cooling is 80% or more of total skin cooling in dessert conditions, so making that more effective is the key to staying cool. It wouldn’t work where it’s humid and evaporative cooling breaks down, but for the desert it’s effective. Of course there’s an argument that properly designed white could do as well or better (loose fitting white is also used), but there’s no argument that it looks cool…