A Tale of Two Hoodies

Abstract

It is February 26, 2012, evening in central Florida. Trayvon Martin is walking home from a local store, wearing a hooded sweatshirt (hoodie). Martin chats on his cell phone with his friend while carrying his purchases, a bag of Skittles, and an Arizona iced tea. Another actor appears: George Zimmerman, an unofficial neighborhood watchman who notices Martin walking through his neighborhood. Zimmerman calls the police, suspecting Martin might be involved in the recent robberies that have occurred in the neighborhood, and makes it his mission to follow Martin. Zimmerman continues his pursuit despite the emergency operator's request to stand down and let the authorities handle it. The rest of the details of the encounter are unclear because only one person survives to tell the story. But there is one truth we all know: seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin dies from a gunshot wound at the hands of George Zimmerman. Although Martin's life ends that night, the way he dies spawns public debates that rage on. Some loudly proclaim that Martin's hoodie was to blame for his death. The hoodie, they cry, is a part of a larger negative trend in young people's fashion: dressing like criminals and thugs. In their opinion, the hoodie justified Zimmerman's suspicion. The most noteworthy indictment of Martin's hoodie comes from TV personality Geraldo Rivera, who tells the world that the hoodie was as much to blame for Martin's death as Zimmerman. Rivera warns black and Latino parents of the dangers that come from their kids wearing hoodies. Rivera argues that people associate hoodies with gangs, crime, and urban life (but only when they are on

Culture, Milieu, Phenotype: Articulating Race in Judicial Sense-making Practices

“…Processes of drawing racial boundaries between selves and others may involve intersecting social identities (Yuval-Davis, 2010), and social categories may come to overlay others: think, for instance, of the way the category of religion (especially Islam) has become vulnerable to racialization in that it has become tied to certain bodies and bodily practices (and not others) (Meer, 2013). In legal contexts, we can see such slippage between multiple registers of difference when actors attach raced meanings to (subcultural) forms of dress such as caps, gold chains, or hoodies (de Casanova and Webb, 2017; Johansen, 2019).…”

Geeks vs grandees: A transnational comparison of dress codes in American and British federal technology agencies

“…Different reactions to Zuckerberg’s hoodie became a press feeding frenzy, which the Wall Street Journal called ‘hoodiegate’, the clash of ‘Hermes’ vs ‘hoodies’. Finance leaders critiqued Zuckerberg’s hoodie as a sign of ‘disrespect’, ‘immaturity or flippancy’; technologists praised it for its authenticity, for representing ‘the Facebook mystique of youth and coolness’ (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 119). Reports suggested Zuckerberg’s hoodie was central to Facebook itself.…”

“…Some even speculated the ‘hoodied techno-guru’ and ‘hoodie-wearing head honcho’ Zuckerberg endowed his hoodie with magical powers (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 199). In a 2010 interview with business journalists Kara Swisher at the ‘All Things Digital conference’, Zuckerberg claimed, ‘I never take it off’ before paradoxically taking it off to reveal what one journalists called a ‘(magical??)…”

“…Perhaps paradoxically, Zuckerberg’s use of the hoodie was only possible because he had other markers of power and prestige, for example wealth, prep school and Ivy League credentials. Zuckerberg gained access to Wall Street funders because he was the kind of person who could wear a suit and embody the power it signified, ‘because he is a wealthy white whiz kid who embodies the American dream’ (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 119). Zuckerberg’s cultural capital allowed him to wear a hoodie and not suffer universal ostracization as it also mobilized cultural associations with creativity and entrepreneurship, associations valued in capitalist economies focused on markets and productivity.…”

“…But those meanings were not always embraced abroad. Thus, this article builds on the research that traces the hoodie phenomenon (Casanova and Webb, 2017; Nguyen, 2015; Ross, 2003) to show how the phenomenon played out differently in the United States and the United Kingdom when it met federal institutions and confronted new national cultural and political dynamics.…”