Hood Dangers: (Ad)Dressing Race Through Trayvon Martin?s Hoodie

Hood Dangers: (Ad)Dressing Race Through Trayvon Martin?s Hoodie

S. Alexander Smith (Ad)Dressing Race Through Trayvon Martin?s Hoodie

Trayvon Martin?s death has received an almost overwhelming amount of attention by both traditional news outlets and social media. Writers at both the New Yorker and the Nation have seen his death as evidence that a post-racial society is still a dream deferred. Other outlets are going so far as to suggest that Martin is ?this generation?s Emmett Till.? Every major news network has dedicated hours of coverage to the tragedy?except for Fox News, which up until March 19 ran only one story about Martin. This silence was engulfed by outrage on Friday when Geraldo Rivera?s comments about Trayvon Martin?s death incited a media uproar.

During Friday?s ?Fox & Friends,? Rivera issued an unsolicited public service announcement urging ?the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly not to let their children go out wearing hoodies.? He rationalized that

[w]hen you see a black or Latino youngster, particularly on the street, you walk to the other side of the street…[Trayvon Martin] didn?t deserve to die. But I?ll bet you money, if he didn?t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy [George Zimmerman] wouldn?t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.

The assertion, largely interpreted as shifting the blame to Martin for his own death, was swiftly picked up on social media sites and blogs and met a furious outcry. Rivera had, in the words of his own son, ?gone viral for all the wrong reasons.? Rivera responded on Twitter, doubling down on his rhetoric. His tweets merely inflamed the situation. One user mocked Rivera?s logic, asking whether or not it would be appropriate to ?stop any white person wearing a suit and ask them about my online bank statement?? On Tumblr, ?Geraldo in a Hoodie,? a blog featuring photos of Rivera wearing a hoodie in public, went viral almost as quickly as Rivera?s comments. Another site mocked Fox News itself for ?irresponsibly selling dangerous hoodies? in their online store.

Geraldo Rivera?s loose phrasing and smug attempts at parenting America?s minority children notwithstanding, it is inaccurate and irresponsible to ignore the link between American-style racism and sartorial choice.

Decades before the American Revolution, British colonists attempted to control African slaves by making their status and condition visible through attire. During the seventeenth century, New England colonies passed sumptuary laws to ensure dress coincided with individuals? economic and social standing in the community. Historians have unearthed evidence suggesting eighteenth-century slaves were purposefully adorned alike in order to broadcast both their subservience and their occupations on the plantation to white society. So successful were these efforts that in Virginia runaway slaves were often described in newsletters as ?clothed in the usual manner of laboring Negros.?

This need to visibly delineate race and subservience only increased after the Civil War, when emancipated slaves began migrating out of the South. For instance, African-American women in the late nineteenth century were routinely derided and harassed by white men and women who interpreted their respectable dress as an attack against their own sartorial choices. During the same era, well-dressed African-American men attending a New York City theater incited an angry white mob. As evidenced by the popularity of minstrelsy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white society preferred that African Americans retain slavery?s sartorial chains even after their emancipation.

Whether through the Zoot Suit, Afrocentrist hair and clothing styles, or the emergence of b-boy and gangsta aesthetics, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries witnessed the continuation of a tradition that judged the acceptability of black bodies by the way clothing either supported or subverted societal norms. In Riviera Beach, Florida, nearly 70 percent of voters in 2008 passed an ordinance banning ?sagging pants? in public, a style commonly associated with African-American male youths. Similar laws have been adopted in such disparate communities as Albany, Georgia and Lynwood, Illinois. African-American hairstyles are just as heavily policed, with bans passed in certain districts on unnatural hair colors for black students and dreadlocks (because the principal considered the style threatening)?and we all remember Don Imus?s comments about the Rutgers women?s basketball team. (Meanwhile, white youths around the country continue to mock African Americans by attending school, sporting events, and parties wearing blackface and dressing in stereotypically black attire.) When looked at through history?s lens, Martin?s hoodie is just the most recent example of America?s long-standing belief that race can be read through attire.

George Zimmerman?s suspicions about Martin were not formed in a vacuum, nor can they be written off as an anomaly in our otherwise post-racial society. Though by itself a hoodie is nothing more than fabric and dye, it stands at the intersection between racial stereotypes and cultural currency. Clothing, like race, gains meaning through the masses? socio-political and cultural whims. This fluidity helps explains why Zimmerman was able to rely on Trayvon Martin?s sartorial choices to justify his suspicions that night, and why activists are able to organize their protest movement around the same hoodie. While most major networks focused on the apparent legality of shooting an unarmed black teenager, Geraldo Rivera, perhaps unwittingly, stumbled upon an important and heretofore overlooked component of Trayvon Martin?s death: in America, clothing is still one of the ways society fashions race and racism onto the black body.