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Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? The Euphoria actress obviously used a lot of the N-word on Tumblr before becoming an actress. Stay with us to find out more.
An American actress and model, Barbie Ferreira is best known for her role on the HBO series Euphoria as Kat Hernandez. In addition, the series also starred other actors such as Zendaya and Jacob Elordi.
Born in New York City, Ferreira began her career as a teenager and has modeled for brands such as Adas, Forever 21, Target, Missgued, H&M and Asos.
In 2016, her untouched photos and video interviews from the Aerie campaign went viral and were later included in Time’s “30 Most Influential Teens” list.
Fact Check: Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? Tumblr Post With N-Word Controversy
Tumblr users have been upset with Barbie Ferreira for being racist.
It’s reportedly believed that before she became a well-known actress, she had a fairly substantial following on Tumblr and eally used a lot of n-words.
Because of Barbie’s flippancy in using the word, her followers called her racist. However, Barbie denied all these rumours.
Meanwhile, Ferreira sa she used to use the B-word, which stands for black. Numerous users have tweeted regarding their remarks on this controversy.
Barbie Ferreira Sexuality Explored
Barbie Ferreira is completely open about her sexuality and is a lesbian.
The actress once sa that she doesn’t really entify as a straight woman and feels more like queer. She also believes that the second season of HBO’s Euphoria will allow her character to explore her queerness.
However, Ferreira is one of Euphoria’s most well-known newcomers, and her character has one of its strongest plots.
Is Barbie Ferreira Married? Boyfriend Or Husband Details
Barbie Ferreira is not married but is in a relationship with her friend Elle Puckett. The duo has been together since 2019.
Her friend Elle Puckett, better known by her stage name Rosie Ugly, is a Los Angeles-based guitarist, artist and producer. At the age of 16, she was tricked into joining Poema, a pop band, with her sister.
Although Ferreira is completely open, she hasn’t spoken much about her dating life. As of now, no pictures of Barbie and her friend could be retrieved from her Instagram.
However, there are plenty of her selfies and stunning model photos that she shares with her whopping 3.2 million followers on Instagram.
Is Camila Cabello’s Apology for Past Racist Remarks Enough? | Daily Pop | E! News
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Fact Check: Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? Tumblr Post With N …
The Euphoria actress clearly used to use N-word a lot on Tumblr before being an actress. Stay with us to learn more. An American actress and …
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Date Published: 10/19/2021
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Fact Check: Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? Tumblr Post … – Dish De
Barbie Ferreira, an American actress and model, is best known for her portrayal as Kat Hernandez in the HBO series “Euphoria.” Other actors that …
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Date Published: 2/16/2021
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Fact Check: Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? Tumblr … – 44Bars.com
An American actress and model, Barbie Ferreira, is popularly known for her role in the HBO series “Euphoria’ as Kat Hernandez.
Source: 44bars.com
Date Published: 3/28/2022
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Is Barbie Ferreira Racist? Tumblr Post With N Word Controversy
Is Barbie Ferreira racist? The Euphoria actress clearly used to use N-word a lot on Tumblr before being an actress. Stay with us to learn more. An.
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Date Published: 1/15/2021
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Two ‘Euphoria’ Stars Under Fire for Alleged Racist Social Media Content, Using N-Word
Euphoria actresses Sophia Rose Wilson and Ziayla Pizarro have been accused of posting or sharing racist content on social media.
Wilson plays Barbara “BB” Brooks, aka Vape Girl, on the hit HBO show. Although high school student BB was only a supporting character in Season 1, she quickly became a fan-favorite character and often appears in memes from the series.
Four Facebook posts Wilson allegedly wrote in 2016 have recently resurfaced online, and now the actress is in the hot seat. In three of the alleged posts, she repeatedly uses the N-word. She also seems to use the R-word.
In another, she celebrates former President Trump’s victory in Ohio, writing, “Trump just won Ohio!”
In a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 2.6 million times, user @zioraaaa shared screenshots of Wilson’s alleged posts.
The screenshots were also circulated on Twitter. See them below:
The alleged posts reportedly first surfaced when Season 1 aired in 2019, but didn’t garner as much attention as they do now. Around the same time, an unconfirmed allegedly racist Tumblr post by Barbie Ferreira, another Euphoria star who plays Kat on the show, was circulating online and garnering more attention from fans.
Adding to Wilson’s racial controversy, new cast member Ziayla Pizarro, who plays character Elliot’s (Dominic Fike) cousin on the teen drama series, has been criticized for using both the N-word and R-word in an Instagram Live has various old alleged tweets, some of which you can see below.
@_ZIAYLA via Twitter @_ZIAYLA via Twitter is loading…
Pizarro used the N-word several times during a recent Instagram live stream. During the stream, she clarified that she’s not black, but that “half her family is black.” Pizarro said she is of German and Puerto Rican descent.
“Race shouldn’t be in your vocabulary if you’re a real person… Get that damn race out of your head,” she told viewers during the stream.
On Jan. 19, Pizarro directed a backlash at the livestream and resurfaced tweets on Twitter.
“I’m not a racist, please STFU!” Pizarro tweeted before turning off comments on the post.
For her part, Wilson has apparently not addressed the backlash. However, some viewers have taken to the actress’ Instagram comments to get her opinions heard on the matter.
One user simply commented “wanna be black” next to a clown emoji.
Whether on screen or off, part of the action or just IRL, euphoria and controversy seem to go hand in hand.
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The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force
After the February 26, 2012 shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the hoodie became a material witness who was called upon to tell the truth about the body it is covering. I propose that the figuration of the hoodie as an animated thing demonstrates some of the power operations that some bodies consider criminally different – because they are black and therefore menacing – and available for state violence. Constructs of race teach us to see, as Frantz Fanon so aptly observed, in calling meat an “epidermal schema” which is believed to convey usable knowledge of the humanity and its other supplies. The liberal denial of racism as the basis of the rule of law proliferates such abstractions as alibis: the abstractions labeling skin as visible or material evidence of ontological truth slide onto other surfaces, including clothing as evidence of crime, for example. The hoodie is thus an example of Hortense Spiller’s significant property plus unfolding for us the racial optics that make someone lose in a devastating way – and the deadly structures that make our loved ones lose in the first place. Because of its incoherences, correspondences, and movements in and through things laden with an excess of stories that leave some beings at risk of untimely death, the hoodie gives a sense of the permanence of racism as a sign, as a screen, as an expectation, and as a force uncovers some of the forces threatening black lives at this moment.
After the February 26, 2012 shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the hoodie became the scene of forensic investigations. It was a central player in the competing stories told throughout the night, as twenty-eight-year-old George Zimmerman followed Martin, a black teenager whose presence on the premises the neighborhood detective found — Zimmerman claimed to 911 — suspicious that his “dark hoodie” pulled over his head. After Martin bought Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea at a nearby 7-11 supermarket, he returned to his future stepmother’s home in a gated community with Zimmerman following him, first in his truck and then on foot. Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel, who spoke to him on the phone minutes before he was killed, insisted he pull up his hoodie not only because it was raining (which it was) but also because a strange man was stalking him in the dim light. A hundred heartbeats later, Zimmerman fatally shot Martin in the chest.
The Hoodie soon populated the landscape of protest and panditry: millions of Hoodie marches in New York City, Philadelphia, and over a hundred other cities across the country; the viral distribution of the hoodie photo across media landscapes as a gesture of solidarity and criticism; Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera’s ‘Warnings’ to Parents of Black and Hispanic Teens to Unhood Their Children; Shooting targets from bland hoodies; (presumably mostly) non-black youth reenacting the spectacle of Martin’s death, substituting their own prone bodies in hoodies out of mockery, not solidarity; and the spreading messages asking “Hoodies: danger or fashion?” (Kuperinsky 2012), “When did hoodlums start wearing hoods?” (Palmer 2012), or “The history of the hoodie” (Wilson 2012). As I collect and search through this unrolling archive, I am struck by the close interactions between people and things even after a six-person jury acquitted Zimmerman of Martin’s murder, particularly where the Hoodie is asked to tell the truth about the body it is in he covered. (Indeed, Martin’s blood-stained hoodie appeared at the trial — flattened between two panes of glass, sleeves spread, hood pulled up — as a material witness to his assassination.1) Even as the hoodie stretched Martin’s boundaries into the world, making him both even more dangerous and vulnerable, his body appears and disappears, materializing as a threat and dissolving in shadow. In this ontological confusion between subject and object, between disclosure and deception, the hoodie codifies part of the achievement of racial optics and its claim to legitimate violence.
What protection does the hoodie offer then? I leave to others the relation (and non-relationship) of Blackness to ontology, to being human and being to things, with the understanding that others are doing this work with much more depth than I could ever hope to get here. Mine is the humble suggestion that the hoodie lets people experience the importance of surfaces in racial optics. Since clothing is both coherent and non-coherent with what it covers – skin, flesh – it is a shifting boundary that asserts itself within a field of matter, forcing us to engage with the intimacy between bodies and things and the interface between their amalgam and the environment to be confronted.2 In considering these dense interactions, I begin with these three premises. Clothing is often understood through an indexical relationship to the person who wears it and functions as a clue to a person’s existence in the world. But because clothing often acts (or is accused of) as camouflage or a costume to facilitate false perceptions, clothing also increases concerns about epistemic security. (Do we really know what we know by sight?) Precisely for these reasons, clothing could also provide an alibi for a racial colonial look as a meat substitute. Through such similarities and revelations, some things that are close to some bodies endow them with affective qualities that legitimize forms of domination or violence. Such suspicious things abound in structures that control and create divisions between the nonhuman and the human and that make the ontological other available for rape, conquest, imprisonment, or death. Some garments overpower or animate some more vulnerable bodies, whether damaging their flesh (think of the language of weakness and deformity sometimes used to describe the burqa or stilettos) or compelling others to act against them, on them ( even wearing that dangerously ambiguous thing—the short skirt, the hoodie—is something like asking for it). Thus, matter—as a possible substitute for flesh, where flesh is the overdetermination of metaphysical substance—participates in the racial meaning and sovereignty of bodies in a world-shaping way.
Borrowing from the anarchic archive that brings together (and sometimes detaches) the hoodie and the body that wears it, I propose that the figuration of the hoodie as an animated thing demonstrates some of the operations of power that some bodies as criminally different – because they are black and therefore threatening – and are accessible to state violence. Constructs of race teach us to see, as Frantz Fanon so aptly observed, in calling flesh an “epidermal schema” (1967, 112), which is supposed to be formed by a series of abstractions that shape the subjectivation from substance , useful knowledge about being human and its others. The liberal rejection of racism as the basis of the rule of law increases such abstractions as alibis; the abstractions inscribing the skin as visible or material evidence of ontological truth slide onto other surfaces, including clothing—for example, as evidence of crime. The hoodie is thus an example of Hortense Spiller’s significant Property Plus, which unveils to us the racial optics that make someone devastatingly lost, the deadly structures that make our loved ones lose in the first place (1987, 65).3 Convey a certain sense of racism Endurance because of its incoherences, correspondences and movements in and through things, things laden with an excess of those stories that some beings abandon to untimely death, the hoodie as a sign, screen, expectation and force revealing some of the powers that threatening black lives at this moment.4
Profile Trayvon Killed by an idiot with a gun, but black & latino parents need to pierce kids’ heads: A hoodie is like a sign: Shoot me, or stop and search me. – Geraldo Rivera 5 After Martin’s assassination, the hoodie became a material witness. What part did it play in Zimmerman’s hunt, Martin’s death? Was it an accomplice or an innocent bystander? Does the hoodie have a criminal record, a troubled past? Editorials and news features asked for testimonies about the objects or possessions of the scene — including race, innocence, and crime. For some, the hoodie’s utilitarian ubiquity signals its insignificance, even muteness, as a witness. A boundless jumble of qualities—silly, classic, harmless, functional, cozy, universal—describes the hoodie as an ultimately inert thing. Apparel maker American Apparel noted in a press release that its hoodies are sold to “everyone,” from toddlers to successful entrepreneurs to college students: “We even sell hoodies for dogs. To say that this classic piece of clothing implies that its owner is a dangerous criminal to be “feared” is absolutely ridiculous” (in NBC News2012). “Such a silly, harmless piece of clothing,” said Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan (writing for the Daily Beast). “There [is] far too much that is functional, cozy and universal about hoodies” (Givhan 2012). In A Place Where We Are Everything, published on The Rumpus, Roxane Gay argues that discussing the hoodie is “sideline”: “Discussing the hoodie is the same as discussing what a woman was wearing when she was raped. What was George Zimmerman wearing when he shot Trayvon Martin? Did his outfit contribute to his paranoia and vigilantism? Discussing the hoodie is as ridiculous as trying to find an answer to that question” (Gay 2012). Others, including Neil Roberts (2012) in the introduction to a Theory and Event forum on Martin and Toni Morrison in Interview magazine, also cleverly dispense with the hoodie. As Morrison aptly notes, “The killing of young black men has never changed so much, with or without hoodies. I don’t know of a young black man who hasn’t been pulled over by the police. Ever” (in Bollen undated). In such arguments, the hoodie is dumb and mute, an inert thing, a detail that obscures the horrific truth of social death. But the hoodie makes a difference, albeit not a simple one. We can easily agree that Zimmerman would have targeted him even if Martin had been wearing, as Gay puts it, a My Little Pony t-shirt. At the same time, such a T-shirt would not be as subject to confiscation as the subject of forensic investigations. So what is lost by abandoning mere ornament (which is dismissed as such)? Does peeling the hoodie off the surface reveal the truth? To insist on seeing Martin’s unadorned body, blackened and murdered, is to insist on returning to a deeper state under a numbing, noisy distraction that impedes our perception of the stability of the real. But its dissemination as a crucial detail, a “plus”, can and should tell us that the hoodie constellates historical-racial schemes. The hoodie, unsettling and confusing depictions and references to race, might seem like a distraction as a detail to some, but as a detail it nonetheless captures time and movement, or the span and breadth of a life. While some argue the hoodie’s insignificance, others equally insist on its indexical nature: the social media photos of teenagers reenacting Martin’s murder became recognizable in part because of the hoodie; the terrible shooting targets sold in Martin’s likeness, a likeness that includes a featureless, latent presence in a hoodie; the cover of a scholarly collection about his assassination (Yancy and Jones 2014) that does the same; the hoodie photographs created and shared in love and fury. So the central question is: how and where (in which direction) does the hoodie draw attention—away from the fact of anti-Blackness, toward how it works, or both at the same time? I contend that not only could the hoodie dramatize the materiality of bodies, it can also show us how such materiality is animated through racial histories of abstraction that create similarities and fusions between people and things. That said, because it appears as a devastating distraction and detail, we might think of the hoodie not as a vile substitute for the black body, but rather as the excess assigned to that body, in a nod to Denise Ferreira da Silva. Silva writes: “I am interested in racist violence as an expression of excess – which justifies otherwise unacceptable occurrences, such as the shooting of unarmed people by the police [or vigilantes in this case]” (2013, 50). Because the hoodie is both overstuffed, because it’s the meaningful detail, and empty, because it’s the detail only filled in specific, contingent, and changing circumstances, the hoodie does not hide a history of racial violence, but instead could attract our attention to their deadly structures and abstractions. In his philosophy of signs, Charles Sanders Peirce applied the term index to a multitude of signs: a footprint, a weathervane, a sundial, a thunder, the index finger, the word “this”, the photograph, the knock on the door: “Everything, what attracts attention is an index” (1955, 109). All this leads to confusion. It could be a sensory feature or trace – a touch, an image, a sound – that correlates and implies with a body, a movement, or a moment. It thus confirms a touch, an existence that is made present to the addressee. But the index does not necessarily name a one-to-one correspondence between an individual object and its imprint.6 It may or may not bear a resemblance to what it points to. Other indexical abstractions require contextual information (being, place, and time) to convey meaning. Consider this, that, now, here and me, references that depend on the situation of speaking itself, moving from one implementation to the next. That is, the hoodie could materially derive from the body or thing to which it is attached (a relationship that is indexical) and also resemble that body or thing by possessing some of its same properties (a relationship that is iconic) and another gesture to those qualities without body or thing (an abstract relation that is symbolic in its use of language). These are not opposite or different relationships, but can operate to different degrees in certain characters, such as Martin’s hoodie in particular and the hoodie in general. Wesley Morris, in his 2012 Grantland essay What We Talk About When We Talk About Hoodies, shows how the hoodie is variety in this way: The reason you see some people at the airport and at brunch in jerseys instead of in something else has everything to do with the cozy warmth of the fabric and the pleasant lack of structure. On the street, a hoodie can transform you. The jersey becomes armor, soft to the touch and rough in some eyes. The hoodie is “hood”. It’s Hollywood. For most black men, the only way to be noticed in a hood is that hard. … The hoodie gives blackness. Filipinos and Latinos found street cred in it—even white boys like John Cena, Mark Wahlberg, Channing Tatum: as tough guys. (2012) this or maybe that. Merging trace (what we might abbreviate as coherent intimacy), icon (existential resemblance), and symbol (discursive arbitrariness) to analyze precisely how the hoodie’s reference structure unfolds requires that we consider its interface to other indices. Hoodie is Soft, Tough, Comfortable, Scary, Comforting, Street, Cool, Criminal, Righteous or maybe. Merging trace (what we might abbreviate as coherent intimacy), icon (existential resemblance), and symbol (discursive arbitrariness) to analyze precisely how the hoodie’s reference structure unfolds requires that we consider its intersection with other indices. We might then observe that the hoodie cannot be reduced to a specific material trace (as “just” adjoining Martin at the scene of his assassination), but instead signals a specific distribution of the sensual, to borrow from Jacque Rancière, a state that can be grasped through the senses, including configurations of time and space, sensory forms, and modes of perception and activity (Rancière 2004). In this way, too, as Sara Ahmed writes, the hoodie is “an effect of how objects gather to reveal a floor, how objects are arranged to create a background” (2006, 87). This insight helps to understand the index as a structure, but also as an event, since it is a situational arrangement of objects that are triggered in their conditional proximity. Consider the New York City Subway’s announcement that “suspicious” backpacks and large containers will be searched as if suspicion were a property of the object, although these objects only become suspicious when they are adjacent to some body and not to others. The accumulation of a few objects in a cluster thus justifies suspicion, to then create a reason for surveillance and police work. This distribution of the sensual – as usable knowledge and as a felt atmosphere – helps us to grasp the hoodie’s far-reaching properties to facilitate or hinder the cognition, movement or will and formation of others, to transform a body and into that Being transforming or being like something else – the criminal or the criminal profile. The diversity of the hoodie then changes depending on the proximity to other characters and their characteristics. For those for whom the hoodie is an instigator, a provocateur, it is not the yoga studio but the street that animates its character. Or as Rivera translates, the hoodie dares, “shoot me or stop and search me”. He’s far from the only one who perceives the hoodie as a taunting delinquent. Consider this from the Twin Cities-Area City Journal, where columnist Harry Stein finds the Million Hoodie March unsettling: This is a symbol of where the entire American discussion of race is veering into the land of appearances. It is pretended that the hoodie is a harmless piece of clothing or at least wrongly associated with negative associations. There’s a word for that: nonsense. The hoodie is not like a letterman jacket or a t-shirt or jeans. It actually brings with it associations – ominous to many. Like pants worn low to reveal the shorts underneath, hoodies are part of a style favored by gangbangers and drug dealers and others who keep life extremely cheap; That is, under certain circumstances, it increases another’s insecurity and fear, bringing with it potential dangers for the wearer. (2012) underclass and black in full view). In this way, the hoodie renders such youth deviant by association, a relationship denoting a porous contiguity between suspicious surfaces that together are a sign of criminal potential. Stein unfurls a number of things that he claims don’t signal anything in particular: The postman’s jacket, T-shirt, and jeans are neutral and also innocent items. Against those innocent duds (although some might argue the letterman’s jacket poses a particular threat), the hoodie is menacing, dangerous (with slips between and in full view). 7 His taxonomy is, of course, nonsensical and imprecise. Hoodies are a well-known staple in an athletic wardrobe, but that’s beside the point. Stein deploys the hoodie for the cover it provides — that is, he uses the hoodie to identify black youth as predators. In this way, the hoodie renders such youth deviant by association, a relationship denoting a porous contiguity between suspicious surfaces that together are a sign of criminal potential. In his 1974–75 lectures at the Collège de France, summarized in the volume Abnormal, Michel Foucault discusses the creation of new technologies in modern criminal justice that categorize individuals who “resemble [their] crime before [they] committed it (2004, 19). Foucault specifically examines the emergence of criminal psychiatry, through which institutional structures marry psychiatric power with legal power to capture a portrait of the dangerous individual, “the individual who is not exactly ill and is not, strictly speaking, a criminal” (34). Its calculations are used before a crime happens, whether or not a crime will ever happen, to see the person matching a profile as a dangerous criminal. While the profile that Foucault describes is a psychological portrait of a causal background leading to crime (in which any behavior could be construed as a symptom of a structuring state), we also know that the profile has long been the arena for the inscription of Pathology is a body about visible signs – the body as information. Created by the co-emergence of criminology and photography in the 19th century, the profile acts as an index and optic that predicts a match between the character (tattoos, facial features, flesh, clothing) and the criminal propensity in a body, each individual . As Stephen H. Marshall notes, “When Zimmerman saw Martin, he saw crime, understood as the commission of a crime, the intent to commit a crime, an escape from a previous crime, or a combination of the three” (2012). Although accorded probative status, sight is not a neutral or passive activity, nor has the knowledge of race ever been a simple matter of perceptible fleshiness. Judith Butler, writing of the use of witness video during the trial of the Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King caning caning, notes: “The visual field is not neutral to the issue of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and powerful” (1993, 17). Thus, as documentary evidence that King was not resisting arrest, the video became instead evidence that his flailing limbs under the constant fall of batons were deadly weapons. Butler continues: “For when the visual is fully schematized by racism, the ‘visual evidence’ referred to will always and only refute the conclusions based on it; for within this racist episteme it is possible that no black man can fall back on the visible as sure evidence” (19). Calculations informing the profile’s scientific rationales (including phrenology and eugenics, but also psychology, sociology, sexology, and anthropology) historically involve the screening of populations to ascertain these indices and optics. Racial profiling, then, is about how race is seen, but also—through the cognitions, affects, and fantasies that pervade visual perception—how race is structured prior to the act of seeing. As Joseph Pugliese argues, racial profiling is the persistence of a hallucinatory vision: “Visual perception is inscribed here with its double, that is, with a disturbing superimposition and a barely perceptible asynchrony” (2006). In the profile optics schematized by racism, the hoodie firstly signals a possible threat and secondly makes the potential perpetrator visible. Here Ahmed might be led to dwell on Foucault if we revisit the causal background that leads to a criminal, whether criminal activity has been committed or ever will be. Some objects reveal both the ground and a causal background (which may include ‘poverty’, ‘urban setting’, and being in a ‘high crime area’); these objects act as sliding indices that together make up the palimpsest of racial knowledge and crime prediction.8 To paraphrase Ahmed, the hoodie paves the way for the profile (allowing it to be called anything other than racism), while the profile then arranges certain objects (e.g. the hoodie) around it to create a causal background. To illustrate, an Atlantic Wire commentator suggested: “The more general point is that the published photos portray Mr. Martin as a neat, well-behaved child. He probably was. but in my opinion the main suspicion was not only based on the color of the skin, but mainly on the style of clothing. This in no way or form excuses Mr. Zimmerman. His actions are his own. But it does shed light on the extent to which races have played” (Hudson 2012). The author shrewdly poses the question, suggesting that a move from race profiling to hoodie profiling is ethically less troubling, even if it once again commemorates race through a double, its cover. So locating the perception of crime in clothing in no way signifies a departure from a racial perspective that focuses on the body as a coherent surface of readable information about abilities and pathologies. Profiles that include these other surfaces—clothes, but also tattoos, hairstyles—teach us to see race, both skinned and skinless, as anchors. To paraphrase Lisa Marie Cacho’s Social Death (2012), we can see this operation in the creation of categories of non-persons such as the “gangbanger” or the “illegal alien”, non-persons who commit what she calls de facto status crimes, who are criminal in being, even without committing an actual crime, and visibly criminal based on the interpretation of signs organized by the profile as a structured way of perceiving, predicting, and preventing. As Cacho observes, most anti-gang laws profile gang members by such marks: Georgia includes “tattoos, graffiti, or clothing or other distinguishing marks”; New Jersey lists a shared “tattoo or other physical mark, style of dress, or use of hand signals or other evidence of connection or shared leadership”; and Arizona specifies “clothes or colors.”9 Thus, clothing became a suspect in Arizona’s draconian immigration law SB1070, which made it a federal offense not to have immigration documents (and worse still not to carry such papers with you at all times) and police too force officials to determine immigration status when they have “reasonable suspicion”. California State Representative Brian Bilbray discussed this legislation and appeared on a cable news program to counter the accusations of racism with claims that “trained professionals,” believed to be criminal profilers and other experts in scientific observation and evaluation methods, will be able to To identify “illegals” by their clothing: “You’re going to look at the kind of clothing you’re wearing, there’s different kinds of clothing, there’s different kinds of — down to the shoes, down to the dresses” (in Musk 2010). Und Richard Cohen von der Washington Post kommt in seinem sympathischen Porträt zu dem Schluss, dass er „verstehen kann, warum Zimmerman misstrauisch [gegenüber Martin] war und warum er dachte, Martin trage eine Uniform, die wir alle kennen“ (2013; Hervorhebung hinzugefügt). Eine solche Liste visueller Zeichen erhebt den Anspruch, das Auge zu schulen und eine angemessene Erkennung des De-facto-Verbrechers zu erzeugen. Indem Stuart Hall „a taxidermy“ und „a specular matrix of intelligibility“ (1996, 20) nennt, konzipieren Rassenoptiken das Profil durch die Abstraktion zusammenhängender Oberflächen, wodurch die Unterscheidung zwischen Überschuss (das Tattoo oder Hoodie als Detail) und dem Ontologischen verwischt wird (das Fleisch als Essenz), das uns wiederum lehrt, in rassischen Anderen die unsichtbare Wahrheit der Kriminalität zu sehen. Das Profil beansprucht somit Vorhersagekraft von bedingten Anordnungen von Objekten, während es selbst einen Taschenspielertrick ausführt, indem es die Objekte vor uns anordnet. Das heißt, diese Zeichen sind so funktional verteilt („Assoziationszeichen“ könnten auch für Uniformen oder griechische Schriftzüge gelten), dass ihre Betätigung wie beim Hoodie von dem (hier männlichen) Rassenkörper abhängt, der mit ihnen verbunden ist, während dieser Körper wiedergegeben wird als nur ein Objekt in einem zufälligen Cluster. In dieser ontologischen Verwirrung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt bietet der Kapuzenpullover dem Rassismus einen Deckmantel für das Abgleiten in tödliche Strukturen, die vorgeben, Bedrohungen mit Desinteresse einzuschätzen und vorherzusagen. Auf diese Weise normalisiert das Profil die Überwachung auf potenzielle Kriminalität, während es seine grundlegenden Prämissen in rassischen und kolonialen Strukturen deklamiert. In einem liberalen Imperium, das legitime Gewalt als Präventivmaßnahme für sich beansprucht, muss beachtet werden, dass Polizeibefugnisse zunehmend mit Kriegsbefugnissen zusammenhängen. Das Profil schränkt nicht nur die Bewegungen von „muslimisch aussehenden“ Personen in die Vereinigten Staaten und die Einreise in die Vereinigten Staaten ein, sondern auch einen Kunden für ein Unternehmen, das „Aufständische“ in Kriegsspielen kleidet, die für die US-Streitkräfte inszeniert werden katalogisiert seine schneiderische „Genauigkeit“ und studiert Bilder im Internet („um beispielsweise die genaue Stickerei auf der Schulterklappe der Militäruniform eines Oppositionsführers zu bestimmen“), um Soldaten beizubringen, zwischen „bösen“ und „guten“ Arabern zu unterscheiden Kleidung (Nir 2010). Aus dem Ramparts-Skandal nach dem Vietnamkrieg unter der Polizei von Los Angeles in den späten 1970er und frühen 1980er Jahren; zum War on Drugs, der die rasche Expansion des Gefängnis-Industrie-Komplexes beaufsichtigte; zur Militarisierung der US-mexikanischen Grenze; Neben den Millionen von Dollar, die die örtlichen Strafverfolgungsbehörden in den letzten zehn Jahren oder mehr für kampfbereite Panzer, Drohnen und Überwachungsoperationen muslimischer Gemeinschaften ausgegeben haben, werden der Gangster, die Person ohne Papiere und der Terrorist durch sichtbare Zeichen und Bildschirme vollständig erkennbar gemacht schematisiert nach Rassismus und organisiert nach dem Profil als umsetzbare Kategorien für Gefangennahme oder Tod.
Missverständnis Nicht jeder Typ in Camouflage-Cargohosen ist ein Marine. Nicht jeder Typ in einem Garnett-Trikot spielt für die NBA. Nicht jeder Hipster mit Hornbrille arbeitet in der Bibliothek. Und nicht jedes schwarze Kind in einem Hoodie versucht, einer Überwachungskamera auszuweichen. – Wesley Morris (2012) Ein Argument gegen das Profil, das den Körper als Information wiedergibt, beruht auf dem Problem der Fehlerkennung. Auf dem Boden des US-Repräsentantenhauses sprach der Abgeordnete Bobby Rush (aus Chicagos South Side und ein ehemaliger Black Panther) Martins Mord an in seinem eigenen grauen Hoodie, unter seinem Anzug und gegen die Kleiderordnung des Kongresses. Als er seine Jacke auszog und die Kapuze über seinen Kopf stülpte, argumentierte Rush: „Racial Profiling muss aufhören, Mr. Speaker. Nur weil jemand einen Hoodie trägt macht sie nicht zu einem Ganoven.“10 Aber der Kapuzenpulli markierte Illegitimität – gemäß Hausregel XVII, Abschnitt 5, sind Hüte und andere Kopfbedeckungen verboten.Während Rush sprach, verwies der Sprecher pro tempore, Repräsentant Gregg Harper aus Mississippi, Rush „Das Mitglied“, sagte Harper, „wird nicht mehr erkannt.“ (in MacAskill 2012) Mit Martins Ermordung versuchten Rush und andere, die ihre Hoodies hochzogen, das Profil eher als Hindernis denn als Hilfe bei der Aufnahme anzuklagen Erkenntnis. Such an indictment pointed to a twofold failure: first, that the optics of the profile actually encourages misrecognition, which is no recognition at all, and following from this that misrecognition as nonrecognition or the withdrawal of recognition is a violation of personhood. These arguments rest on the noncorrespondence between the faulty arrangements of the profile to actual individuals and between misrecognition and the ideal presence of personhood. Their proposed solution is more perfect recognition before the law in order to restore that personhood to rightful subjects—those who are not criminal, unlike the gangbanger, the undocumented person, and the terrorist—thereafter. How should we unfold the racial optics upon which misrecognition and perfectible recognition depend? The foreclosure that comes through the hoodie in the profile produces the refusal or inability to acknowledge that an erasure and denial have taken place because that erasure and denial have been excised in turn. But what further erasures or denials occur? And what can these other erasures or denials, or what we might call—following Evelynn Hammonds—“black holes” (1994) tell us about the properties of personhood, their distribution of the sensible or arrangement of objects, that are the effects of law and therefore themselves forms of so-called legitimate violence? And alternately, what else might we discern about the scripts of subjectivation from the hoodie? To address this last question first, we might observe of its utilitarian nature that the hoodie presumably blurs the distinction between the unique individuality of the one who wears it and that of an infinite number of other bodies who might don a similar garment. Hoodie up, it is a garment that obscures or covers the face, so often cited (as Emmanuel Lévinas does) as the seat of reciprocal recognition or ethical sociality (Lévinas 1985, 98, 119). The encounter with a stranger is presumed dangerous; the stranger whose face is disappeared into the hoodie as its surrogate even more so. For these reasons—because it hides, camouflages—the hoodie (and its racial, colonial sister-other, the hijab) becomes itself a criminal, even legally outlawed in some public spaces as a mobile border zone, obstructing the security powers that wish to see the body-as-information more perfectly. Just as the hoodie renders identification of its wearer more difficult, the hoodie also provides cover for antiblackness. Under such lethal structures and abstractions, the profile is the sensible assessment of risk that conceives misrecognition as an unfortunate consequence. Collateral damage, as it were. To put it another way, the presence of the hoodie in the profile renders what is systemic violence against black life an accident understandable as a rational calculation of danger deferring, but not displacing, the fact of blackness in such a calculation. The deferral of certainty (of meaning, identification) via the effacing hoodie provides recognition and misrecognition simultaneously and also supplies the occasion for the deferral of ethical and legal responsibility for targeting black life. This occasion becomes clear in an exchange between commentator and satirist Elon James White and a reader, when White posted a photograph of himself in a hoodie to his blog with the confrontational caption (and popular hashtag) Am I suspicious?. Before a white background, White posed with the hood of his black sweatshirt pulled over the baseball cap on his head. His hands are clasped, and his lips unsmiling; across his eyes is a black bar lettered in white capital letters: “SUSPICIOUS.” It is clear that the intended invitation to look here is to first observe and to then discard the presupposition that a black man in a hooded sweatshirt is necessarily criminal. The viewer is meant to recognize the hooded profile as a racial stereotype that denies White his personhood as someone who is not larcenous but enlightened. But this provocation did not unfold easily; one onlooker suggested that yes, he did indeed look suspicious: [REDACTED]: I grasp the point racism is rasicm [sic], no dress code needed. But we need to watch our PR and how our message is distributed. The above is not helping or helpful to disseminate the message. It’s an image of a thug in a hoodie. Treyon [sic] was not a thug, he was a child and this is the image that should be used. And the main goal is to make the “point” as EASY to grasp as possible. We can march and protest and leverage petitions, but if our attitude is, “read between the lines to get my point”, then we move no one. We also need to utilize the most powerful, personable images we have. This guy is not one of them. Elon James White (me): Oh HI [REDACTED] I’m the image of the “Thug in a hoodie.” Do you know who I am? Do you know what I do? You said that THAT’s an image of a thug in a hoodie and TRAYVON WASNT A THUG. Ma’am, I’m not a thug. I’m an engaged political commentator with a background in I.T. I throw dinner parties and build studios from scratch. But YOU saw a thug in a hoodie. Do you understand the problem now? (White 2012) Here, the challenge to misrecognition inadvertently invites surveillance (“Am I suspicious?”) and presages the failure of the “education” of the eye against stereotype. The frame of misrecognition thus presumes that behind an erroneous suspicion there is a “real” distinction between the thug and his opposite, the rights-bearing person. The hoodie makes it possible for White’s interlocutor to escape from culpability. Asked to look beneath the hoodie to see the distinctive individual, the hoodie confounds her recognition because the hoodie implies the qualities of thugness, or criminality, and imparts them accordingly. Racial subjectivization thus emerges through this interaction between flesh and fabric. Imbued with animative power, Martin’s hoodie not only lends to him the resemblance of criminal behavior and deviant being (because it obscures recognition) but also propels his body physically, expressively, into that other realm of possible activity. Implicit in this reading is the suspicion that the black body is without the self-possession to “just” wear the hoodie. The hoodie instead wears him, wields the power to transform him into another, the thug. Such intimacy between susceptible body and sovereign thing is illicit. That the hoodie is not presumed to wear nonblack or nonbrown bodies in the same way implicitly divides rational subjects from material objects along historical-racial schema and consigns black and brown bodies to the side of objects. The hoodie thus highlights the raced body’s presumed affectability—what Silva defines as “the condition of being subjected to both natural (in the scientific and lay sense) conditions and to others’ power” (2007, xv)—so often construed as pathology, as dispossession, as subjection to the design and will of others, even such objects as the hoodie. Such racialized modes of perception and configurations of space and time presumably compel those who watch to act on the body who wears it—to withdraw recognition, to condemn that being to exile, or death. For instance, City Journal columnist Stein (2012) asserts that the hoodie is apt to inspire fear in another and thus brings to bear upon the one who wears it a legitimate violence. The hoodie as a sign and a screen then conditions an expectation (criminality) and from this a feeling (fear) and then a force (preemption). Jasbir Puar is useful here in parsing this operation, as she discusses the turban (which is not a hat): “The move from visibility to affect takes us from a frame of misrecognition, contingent upon the visual to discern the mistake (I thought you were one of them), to the notion of resemblance, a broader affective frame where the reason for the likeness may be vague or repressed (You remind me of one of them): from ‘looks like’ to ‘seems like’” (2007, 187). Recognition and misrecognition, then, are not the primary activities working through the profile, and more perfect vision not its resolution. Where an affective frame is in play, it is not just the black body wearing the hoodie who is subjected to a strange animation but also the watchful body who perceives the hoodie as a threat and cannot help but feel or act in its latent presence. Thus does resemblance, not recognition, inform the preemptive rationale that pervades our political moment. In our culture of danger (as Foucault puts it), security names a category of decisive action that perceives a threat to the future as a concrete possibility in the present. At any moment, this threat is realizable as absolute potential, such that even when a threat “passes by,” as Ahmed (2004) observes, it heightens the anticipation of a consecutive moment when it does not. Thus, in the name of watchfulness and heightened security, action is taken not in decisive surety but because of uncertainty and doubt: the NYPD’s citation of vague “furtive movement” as justification for stopping and searching thousands of youth of color; the Obama administration’s insistence that any “military-age male” in a particular region is a potential enemy combatant and available for killing (Becker and Shane 2012); Zimmerman’s accusation, “Fucking punks! These assholes always get away” (Cobb 2013). When the hoodie is narrated as a possible aggressor whose violence is realizable at any moment, the one who reacts aggressively to the hoodie even when no violence is forthcoming is understood to be vulnerable, a precarious being. In such a scenario, an armed vigilante might be compelled to stalk and murder a teenaged boy on his route home and yet claim self-defense. As Butler observes of Rodney King’s beating, and as might be said of so many other beatings and deaths of black bodies, “He is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver” (1993, 19). So it should not be surprising that, on the Fox morning cable show Fox and Friends, Geraldo Rivera argued that parents should denounce the hoodie as a bad influence. He further stated, “I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.” In this grammar, it is the hoodie (and not the state) that criminalizes “black and Latino youngsters” through an animative power or trace, a transferable property of thugness that attaches to what it covers. “I’ll bet you money, if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way,” Rivera explained (Media Matters2012). “You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a ‘gangsta’ … You’re gonna be a gangsta wanna? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That’s what happens. It is an instant reflexive action” (Hudson 2012). He continued, “Don’t let your kid—you know the old Johnny Cash song, don’t take your gun to town, son. Leave your gun at home. There is [sic] some things that are almost inevitable. I’m not suggesting that Trayvon Martin had any kind of weapon or anything, but he wore an outfit that allowed someone to respond in this irrational, overzealous way and if he had been dressed more appropriately, I think unless it’s raining out, or you’re at a track meet, leave the hoodie home” (Media Matters2012; emphasis added). When the gun and the hoodie are analogized as aggressive objects (thus Martin could not be absolved as unarmed), the presence of the hoodie renders violence against black and brown youth a rational calculation.11 Though Rivera demurs that such a murderous response is “irrational, overzealous,” he nonetheless presents it as a logical consequence. He moreover suggests that rights and respectability might yet adhere to suspicious bodies through clothes that presumably cleanse them of, or at least weigh against, a criminal resemblance. (The Tumblrs “Geraldo in a Hoodie”—featuring copious images of Rivera in hoodies—and “Hoodies Are Not a Weapon” sprang up almost immediately.12) Through these means, the conditions for discipline and death are further displaced through an alternate premise of parental abandonment or individual neglect of appropriate, rational calculation. Because the black body resembles a criminal profile that intimates danger as the imminent action of that body, that body must reasonably expect to be the object of another’s preemptive violence (stopping, frisking, detaining, killing). According to Rivera, black and brown parents should anticipate such preemptive violence by themselves curbing (as much as they can) the contingencies and continuities that attach more fear, and criminality, to their children—such as refusing to permit hoodies as casual wear and disciplining their corporeal presence (encouraging eye contact with authorities, walking without a swagger).13 That is, parents and their children must accommodate themselves to the increasing securitization of public space through the preemption of preemption as a series of rational actions. As Melissa Harris-Perry writes, “These statements suggest that the unarmed teenager was culpable in the encounter that led to his death, not because of any aggressive or illegal act but because he was not following the appropriate protocol for being black in public. A black body in public space must presume its own guilt and be prepared to present a rigidly controlled public performance of docility and respectability” (2012). The performance of docility and respectability in order to be recognizable as a rights-bearing person unavailable for discipline and death is, as we know, unreliable, and yet it traffics as if personhood (and therefore liveliness) depended upon it. Against the profile, then, some sought a complete picture of a person—to humanize Martin, to demonstrate that he more than accommodated social norms, that he was a good boy and no gangbanger. In the New York Times, Charles Blow presents Martin as a young man both ordinary and extraordinary: He liked sports, the mall, hamburgers and fries, “brownies with lots of nuts”; having taken advanced English and math classes, he had planned on attending college; he worked hard and earned money working part-time gigs, painting houses, washing cars, and selling snacks at a Pee Wee football league concession stand; he looked after his younger girl-cousins, “and when he watched the girls he baked them cookies” (2012). Also in circulation were photographs of Martin in other clothes—an Abercrombie and Fitch sweatshirt, a photograph often paired with multimillion-dollar sensation Justin Bieber wearing a similar item, and a high school football uniform. These photographs marshal “evidence” that Martin was an “ordinary” teenager, even a teenager whose now stillborn dreams or future (social and economic) value might be discerned through his clothes. Journalist Michael Ross writes: “Consider the picture of Trayvon in his Bulldogs football uniform, a young man on purpose, a young man of purpose clearly eager to be a part of the wider picture of the world, to contribute to something bigger than he is” (2012). Recognition (and the rights that follow), then, are based on measurable signs of value, such as heteronormativity, higher education, productivity, and piety, through which we might narrate Martin as a “good kid” against those who are not. As another meme insisted, featuring a webcam photograph of a serious Martin gazing steadfastly at the viewer, captioned “my ‘hoodie’ does not mean I’m a criminal.” When photographs of another young black man surfaced on right-wing social media as the “real face” of Martin—this interchangeable, “real face” included gold teeth, pot smoke, and gang signs—the counterresponse included side-by-side comparisons of the “bad” thug and the “good” kid. Presumably, one life is more valuable than another, and we are meant to recognize this distinction immediately, implicitly. But as Nicholas Mitchell observes, “What if Trayvon Martin had come at this white man who held a gun? … What if he’d had, instead of Skittles, a bag of weed? Or a beer? Or a knife? Or something else that made it harder to make him look like a kid? How many fewer signatures would that correlate with on change.org?” (2012). If recognition is that which confers liveliness and value as personhood, and to be misrecognized is to be consigned to social death, then perhaps the problem lies in the premise. As Cacho argues so well, the law depends upon the permanence of some bodies’ criminalization: “As criminal by being, unlawful by presence, and illegal by status, they do not have the option to be law abiding, which is always the absolute prerequisite for political rights, legal recognition, and resource distribution in the United States” (2012, 8). Thus she observes that contingent and conditional processes of valuation and revaluation reinforce normative structures of power. In this case, closely paraphrasing, to narrate Martin as someone who should be valued in death, such efforts must emphasize his youth, his ordinariness, and cast him as someone he might never have become (Cacho 2011, 42). That is, to represent Martin as a person of recognizable value, and deserving of life, we would need to refuse others who are unlike him, which is to adopt a politics that would abandon those deemed proper objects of suspicion and rightlessness—those whose very being constitutes a status crime, rendering them alienable—to their end.
The protest After Trayvon Martin, “hoodies up” became not just a rallying cry but also an incitement to create new images. Tweeting the widely propagated photograph of the NBA’s Miami Heat—hoods raised, heads bowed, and hands clasped—LeBron James tagged it: “#WeAreTrayvonMartin … #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.” In addition to celebrities (Jamie Foxx, Sean Combs, Wyclef Jean, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, Arsenio Hall, CNN journalist Roland Martin, LeVar Burton, the list goes on), others too sought solidarity through the same, seemingly simple act, including Harvard and Howard law students in front of ivy-covered buildings; elementary schoolchildren lined up along a wall holding bags of Skittles; New York state senators Kevin Parker, Bill Perkins, and Eric Adams; former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm; attendants at vigils and marches; black-and-white drawings of a range of humans in hoodies published in a special issue of the New Yorker; even professional portraiture as protest art. Thousands more appear on Facebook and Tumblr, featuring photograph after photograph—selfies often snapped with webcams or mobile phones—of persons with their hoodies up. The hoodie photograph aims to produce an affective register of solidarity in the forms through which social media provides a (provisional) public sphere. I cannot pursue a full assessment here of how the specificity of the medium illuminates the transformations of the image, its reproducibility and circulation as a perceptibly multitudinous object, but I do wish to gesture toward the optics of indexicality elaborated therein. The hoodie photograph points to something that is there, but what is being pointed to, or brought to our attention, and how? There is the obvious something, the photograph acting as a witness to a past moment, in which the person pictured leaves a trace. At the same time, before the hoodie photograph one is aware of the gesture, the “this” of language—this indicates another presence outside the frame, a presence whose own moment is irretrievably lost to us, but also the presence of all those other others who also simultaneously gesture toward him. The gesture is contingent upon the presence of the hoodie (and the hood up) but also the captioning of the photograph as part of an ever-growing, anarchic series (whether through an actual caption or through its appearance alongside others); there were photographs before and after Martin’s murder that feature the same elements (frontal pose, hooded sweatshirt), no doubt, but that are not included in this series. So if the “this” of the hoodie photograph (recalling Elizabeth Alexander’s 1994 essay on the Rodney King video “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’” that brings presence into being in the present only achieves its reference in relation to a specific situation, just what composes this other this? Many hoodie photographs record the lived relations of black life into which they intervene in a culture of profiling and preemption. In handmade sweatshirts proclaiming, “I am Trayvon Martin”; holding Skittles or a copy of coding handbook Core JavaServer Faces; bearing signs reading, in the form of a checklist, “Skittles, iced tea, black, hoodie, am I next?,” a multitude of black bodies situate themselves as like Martin. Scrolling through these hoodie photographs ossifies a material history of racial violence through continuity and repetition; we know that as Toni Morrison points out, black boys (and girls) have been killed, and will continue to be killed (Bollen n.d.). The indexicality of these photographs is not produced solely in relation to the someone who poses but rather to the processes that rendered the absent presence of the murdered Martin not only possible but also structural—that is to say, these photographs gesture toward a this that names a serial murder, the grim predictability of more events with the same terrible outcome. But what about those hoodie photographs that do not seem to feature black or brown bodies, bodies of young men? While the body-as-information is (as we know) an unreliable measure of race and gender, it might appear more difficult to discern the this of these photographs. Do these photographs protest the innocence of the hoodie through its presence on the bodies of uncriminalized (or less or differently criminalized) others, in order to reeducate the viewer—about the hoodie? about the fungibility of black life? Where others produce an individual hoodie photograph, we might readily observe that the hoodie becomes the means through which reference is achieved (we know they mean to gesture to Martin’s murder) but also deferred (because not all bodies are targeted the same by lethal structures and abstractions). That photograph might misrecognize the site of misrecognition as sited, sighted, or cited in the hoodie, substituting the specific body that clears the ground for the hoodie’s criminality with any hoodie worn by any body. Exploring the formula “I = Another” in advertising and awareness campaigns (as in the AIDS campaign called “I am Africa,” featuring celebrities claiming such correspondence), Kara Keeling usefully observes, “I = Another provides an opportunity and a rationale for a mode of appropriation wherein the needs and interests of an other are assumed to be served by articulating them into the systems and structures of the I who stands in for the dominant group vis-à-vis that for which the other is representative” (2011, 64). This is the by-now-familiar critique that haunts the substitution “I Am Trayvon Martin” as politically impossible. At the same time, we might also readily observe that some bodies are less available—black women, especially black trans women, who are also murdered with impunity—for even this abstraction as reference. These photographs might also occasion an investigation into how race and gender unfold and envelop bodies distinctly, such that the hoodie adheres criminality to some bodies and not others. As Roland Barthes might explain, “I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?” (1982, 84). In one photograph, a light-skinned man holds a sign reading, “Skittles CHECK, Ice Tea CHECK, Hoodie CHECK, black [BLANK BOX], maybe I’ll be spared.” How is it that the person pictured there is alive? And how is it that others like or unlike him, most obviously Martin—who is named as the origin of a series into which he enters (though he is not the origin either)—are not? Accompanying the hoodie, this statement (along with similar statements once collected in a Tumblr titled “We Are Not Trayvon Martin”) suggests that the flesh that it covers is the decisive difference between life and death. Do these hoodie photographs of those whose bodies are unlike Martin’s also indict lethal structures or occasion what Saidiya Hartman warns is the slipperiness of empathy, through which black suffering is made legible only on white bodies, or nonblack bodies?14 Indeed, the initial protests last year around the failures of grand juries to indict the police officers who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, while avoiding the “I = Another” formula explicitly, found large groups of black and nonblack protesters marching with their hands up, or dying in solidarity with the dead, a shared repertoire of gestures that has not been uncontroversial. As performative acts that attempt to embody an attachment to a collectivity (however broadly conceived) or the possibility of its repair, their failure for some comes from not feeling together or from the presumption (perhaps the presumption of a presumption) of political or social mutuality. In this regard, the hoodie photograph cannot succeed or even satisfy as an aesthetic or performance commensurate to the condition of foundational violence against black life. But with and against such failure, we could also read these hooded faces in their anarchic nonseriality not as images of the other but as images for the other. This image for the other is a necessarily inadequate gesture, following the exposure of the one pictured there to the precarious life of the other addressed in the photograph. How should we understand that a person alone in a room fell still for just a moment before the camera’s eye to construct an image of feeling solidarity, or even of feeling out of control because of the crisis that is in truth a condition, an image to circulate in the world, even if this is an always already poor image because that is what they have to give, though it is never enough? In a randomly chosen series of these hoodie photographs, we might see a light-skinned older black woman in red-framed eyeglasses and a grim expression; a multiracial group of teenagers gathered on a sidewalk holding a banner, “Do I look suspicious to you?”; two girls, one white and one light-skinned, who took the time to add a frame of smudged black ink and the caption, “We Are Trayvon Martin”; an American Indian teenaged girl with facial piercings; a woman in hijab and a hoodie posed in her living room, or a waiting room; a group of four possibly white children (and their dog) sitting on a porch with the sign, “NY Demands JUSTICE for Trayvon Martin!”; a black drag queen in dramatic false lashes and green eye shadow matching her hoodie; a middle-aged, mustachioed Latino man in his office cubicle; a young black child holding the sign, “I am Trayvon Martin” snuggled against an older white woman holding the sign, “Do I look suspicious to you?” In each person’s submission to the camera eye, decrying the nonneutrality of the vision that renders some humans into things, we could understand these hoodie photographs as a demand to look without knowing again, again, and again. Toward this end, the multitudinous details—the adolescent flourishes (using apps to add borders, captions, tints), the hand-lettered signs, the messy bedrooms walls, the careful application of makeup or its absence, the pet who intrudes—attest to each photograph’s unique conditions of manufacture. Collated together, those photographs might embody this hope from Jacques Derrida, “that pure ethics, if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the other as the absolute unlike, recognized as nonrecognizable, indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition and all recognition” (2005, 60). In their incommensurable failure and noncorrespondence, perhaps the hoodie photographs point us to an affective solidarity that requires that we abandon resemblance as necessary for personhood, recognition as a condition for subjectivity, and expressive truths as prerequisites for choreographies of protest against state-sanctioned violence.
The force Had Trayvon Martin not donned a hoodie, George Zimmerman would have stalked and murdered the unarmed teenager regardless. No matter what is worn, the black body is regarded as a mobile danger and therefore a moving target. Nonetheless, where racial optics operate through vitalizing or animating a thing such as the hoodie as contiguous with the body it covers, we find that race does not depend on immovable parts but on a dynamic constellation of signs, screens, expectations, and forces. And this is no small thing. We might summon the My Little Pony T-shirt as the very opposite of the hoodie—because it connotes a girlish innocence presumably unavailable or absurd to persons in Martin’s body—to argue (correctly) that no garment would have provided adequate protection. And yet the hoodie is also not interchangeable with this T-shirt, because the hoodie is crucial to the profile that covers for antiblack violence, because it is a decisive object that clears the ground and provides a background for that violence, and because it is a suspicious object that is called upon to render race an incidental detail in a murder. We find that the hoodie is not passive or lifeless at all but instead that it bears the tensions, forces, and powers of its history in this moment. At the same time, as Fred Moten insists, “the history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). With this in mind, we might consider what it means to be objectified in order to transform our sense of the impossible. To be an object is to be determined by another, is a being-for-other (to recall Hegel). However, becoming a subject is also a subjection, because to be a subject is to be inscribed through layered abstractions that render one recognizable, and against those who are not, who are instead alienable. So we might instead stay with the thing to understand better these lethal structures, as Silva elaborates: “This is done by focusing on the relationship exposed when The Thing is addressed as a mediator and not a measure. … The Thing immediately/instantaneously registers (mediates without transforming, reducing, or sublating) the relationships (violent and otherwise) that constitute our conditions of existence” (2013, 58). Thus, we might linger on the intimacy between subject and object, body and thing, to picture another ethics of being-in-relation. As Silva’s Thing, the hoodie refuses both the accommodation to an unjust politics of the human (through respectability, through forms of recognition that create further cutting into life) and also the lethality that invests the object with life only to murder its double, its cohort. As impossibly figured at the scene of a million hoodies marching, the hoodie protests the racial violence that targets its intimacies with bodies that always already resemble the crimes they have not committed, have yet to commit, or might never commit, bodies with whom it is ontologically confused—not to draw a bright line between human and thing but to be in solidarity across radical incommensurability and to indict the ways in which racisms arrange the ground between them, before them.
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