Let me walk you through a brief history of hoodies. First off, the hood is a shortened version of the Anglo-Saxon word. Here is when things start to get interesting. The hoodie was created in America. It first appeared in freezing New York warehouses in the 1930s. Champion was the first company to create hoodies after that, mainly for workers who had to endure the bitterly cold conditions in upstate New York. Ahegao Hoodie
The racial discussions around the hoodie are still going on in America on the ninth anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death.
The attire has a long history of being connected to a racialized perception of crime in African communities and a tool for racial profiling in the US. On February 26, 2012, Martin was out purchasing a pack of Skittles when he was fatally shot by a neighborhood watchman in Florida while wearing one.
Wearing a hoodie is still provoking discussions and debate about racist stereotypes of Black youth in this month when Martin would have been 26 if he had lived.
I was 12 years old when Trayvon Martin was slain in 2012, and I’ll never forget it, stated Coby White of the Chicago Bulls on Instagram.
In honor of Black History Month, White has been sporting a variety of custom-made sweatshirts from A3 Craaaftz, including hoodies honoring Shirley Chisholm, Matthew Henson, Claudette Colvin, and Martin with the slogan “Don’t Shoot.”
I became aware of racism at this point. As a result, I realized that in order to survive, I had to pay close attention to my surroundings. In particular, if I was wearing a hoodie in public, “my father made sure I was cautious.”
According to Richard Thompson Ford, the author of Dress Codes, at the time, the hoodie was involved in a type of semantic call-and-response that exposed racism in relation to crime in America.
Some Black people avoided wearing hoodies because they were associated with “Black hoodlums” in the media, while others embraced them. “The hoodie’s public image transformed it into a statement of racial pride and defiance, solidarity with a community, and an emblem of belonging, all of which reinforced the negative associations for those who were predisposed to be afraid of assertive Black people,” Ford said.
“As a Black guy, wearing a hoodie included a decision to make a statement that may cause certain people to mistrust you, get you in trouble with the law, or possibly get you killed,” Ford continued.
