It’s not the hoodie — it’s who’s inside
U.S. anger over slaying of Trayvon Martin spills to Nathan Phillips Square
What happened in Florida to a 17-yearold black youth named Trayvon Martin could also happen here, say local political activists who attended a rally honouring the slain American in Nathan Phillips Square Saturday night.
“It’s not just an American issue,” said community activist Trevor David. “It’s a North American issue. All we’re asking is simple justice.”
About 50 demonstrators gathered to express their anger and distress over the Florida boy’s apparently unprovoked killing and the continuing failure of U.S. authorities to arrest his assailant. Carrying placards and glow sticks, they planned to march from City Hall to the U.S. consulate. “There’s a lot of injustice in Canada, too,” said one young man who refused to give his name. “It could be any one of us.”
Many wore hoodies, the garment Martin was wearing when he was killed and that some say contributed to his death.
Since Martin’s fatal shooting in Florida in late February, the hoodie has received a degree of international notoriety few people would have expected.
“I was surprised,” admits Toronto author and pundit Christopher Dewdney.
“Hoodies are ubiquitous now.” But they still seem to pack a powerful cross-cultural punch — “a wearable Rorschach of contemporary American culture,” as one U.S. scribe put it last week.
If hoodies are a problem, Sylvester Stallone is probably the man to blame. In the 1976 film Rocky, Stallone played an boxer who happened to wear a hoodie while in training. Until then, the garment was mainly favoured by outdoor labourers, who wore hoodies for their warmth.
“It’s a very practical form of winter wear,” says Dewdney. “What is it — 30 per cent of your heat goes out through your head?”
Following its break-out moment in Rocky, the hoodie fashion was taken up by the hip-hop music culture, where the look did at first assume a somewhat sinister image, associated with violence and crime.
“Hoodies had a real street ‘gangsta’ association,” says Dewdney. “But that was 20 years ago. Now everybody wears them.”
Mainstream celebrities who’ve sported hoodies in public include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, pop singers Selena Gomez and Avril Lavigne, comedian Bill Cosby, and former boxer Muhammad Ali, among many others.
Yet hoodies still make some people nervous. U.S. broadcaster Geraldo Rivera broached the issue on Fox News late last month, when he seemed to blame Martin’s death as much on the hoodie he was wearing as on the man who shot him — 28-year-old George Zimmerman, who claims he acted in self-defence. Rivera later apologized for his remarks, but hoodie-paranoia had been outed, to be met almost immediately by a powerful, countervailing force — people in hoodies. Defenders include the Miami Heat basketball team, which posed for publicity photos in hoodies, Washington pastors who conducted services in hoodies, and Congressman Bobby I. Rush of Illinois, who appeared on the floor of Congress in a grey hoodie. “Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” he said. But hoodies do tend to obscure the faces of those wearing them, and that upsets some people. Authorities from Australia to California have sought to limit how hoodies are worn. “Just take down the hood when you enter a business,” Los Angeles police Lt. Alan Hamilton said. “It’s not raining in the bank.” On the other hand, Ontario Justice Dianne Nicholas last month acquitted a youth of being an accessory to a bank robbery. The main evidence? He wore a hoodie. “Hoodies are now commonplace attire, and no longer have a nefarious connotation,” she ruled. Trayvon Martin would have applauded her words, but he was already dead.