Behind the Hood
January 26, 2024 at 03:13AMHoods themselves have no overarching meaning as a signifier. As Nicholas Russell points out in this probing essay for The Point, they can evoke everyone from Emperor Palpatine to tech bros. But the hooded sweatshirt is another matter entirely; it completed its trajectory with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, lodging inextricably in our collective consciousness.
Rankine knew the hoodie would forever be associated with the murder of Trayvon Martin, that that association redirects but doesn’t necessarily reframe the hoodie as a symbol of black masculinity. There can be no other political association attached to it after the numbing scrutiny thrust onto it—first after Martin’s murder, again during the protests of 2020, and once more after that, on the tenth anniversary of Martin’s death. The hood, politicized, commented upon, reclaimed, commodified, floats in space like it does on Citizen’s jacket, as powerful and defanged as an abstraction. Which is what it remained for me, for so long. A hood is a piece of clothing, an object of no importance. And yet, somehow, stubbornly, even though I wish it didn’t, it remains a haunted emblem.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/01/25/behind-the-hood/
via IFTTT
Watch