I spend much of my time in a suit and tie with my top button done up and my sensible shoes neatly polished. When it comes to work, my appearance is about communicating professionalism and confidence. But, as in any walk of life, the Westminster dress code is also about fitting in. In western societies, this begins with expectant parents choosing pink or blue and ends with black-clad funeral corteges. Outside the office, like millions of Britons, I routinely throw on jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie for pottering around the house. For me, a hoodie is like a pair of slippers or pyjamas – something comfortable and well-worn that you can wear unthinkingly. Unless, of course, you happen to be a black male.
In Florida in 2012, Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman, who cited his hoodie when asked by the 911 despatcher for a description of the teen’s clothes. Did Trayvon’s clothing choice and skin colour play into Zimmerman’s unconscious bias that the teenager looked like he was “up to no good” and was “on drugs or something”? Certainly, a Fox broadcaster claimed “the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was”. While the case is extreme, in the UK, too, the hoodie has become a highly politicised and racialised item of apparel.
Over the years, shopping malls including the Trafford Centre in Manchester and the Elephant and Castle shopping centre in south London introduced hoodie bans to combat what they see as intimidating groups of youths. The Children’s Society has described such bans as “blatant discrimination based on stereotypes and prejudices”. Likewise, scores of black men and boys have told me stories of being harassed by the police or followed by shop detectives simply because they have been wearing a hoodie. How do they know this? Because those pointing the finger tend to flag up the hoodie as a signifier for some perceived or imagined transgression. Having been stopped and searched in a hoodie myself as a young black student studying to be a lawyer at the University of London, I know that distrust of black men in hoodies is endemic in the UK.
This is why I got involved with the 56 Black Men project. Set up by Cephas Williams, it seeks to liberate black men from invisibility. Featuring powerful photographs of black men in hoodies, from all walks of life, the project doesn’t ask us to think about what is outside of the hood, but what is underneath it.
The campaign features a spectrum of men from trainee surgeons to choreographers. Williams says: “This is generally the opposite of what society has been conditioned to expect of a black man and in some cases even influences how many black men view themselves and their ability.”
It uncovers important dimensions of their stories – our stories – which are largely untold in the current distorted narrative of black lives. Crucially, the campaign goes beyond the simplistic mantra of “not all black people wear hoodies”. Obviously this is true but this lazy chant also positions the hoodie in contrast to success: you are either a hoodie or a goodie, reinforcing the stereotype that if I am wearing a hoodie, I can’t be somebody who has achieved much in life. It leads to coding, where black men feel the need to wear something “whiter” when we want to feel comfortable in our own clothes, and in our own skin, on our own terms.
Of course, the hoodie is not the only piece of contentious clothing. In France, the gilet jaune (yellow vest) became a riotous, anti-establishment badge of honour; while in the US, Make America Great Again (Maga) baseball caps have become a symbol of rightwing bitterness. But today, in the context of rising knife crime – which is widely framed as black men killing one another – both the hoodie and the black male wearing it have come to be seen as emblems of violence: the image of a black guy in a hoodie as a violent thug has permeated our public consciousness. It is true that black men are disproportionately affected by knife crime. However, no black boy was born with a knife in his hand. Any disproportionality that follows is a product of complex structural forces. Dismissing violence as a “black problem” is not only lazy but deeply harmful, while the disproportionate use of stop and search against black men only reinforces the collective paranoia. It is not just white people who look at black people in an uneasy way; black people start to look at each other in this way too.
Young black men have told me that they often wear a hoodie with the hood up to anonymise themselves from what they see as a hostile, judgmental society. But this defence mechanism is seen as surly or intimidating. Such a clash of cultural dynamics reminds me of Windrush generation kids schooled in 1950s and 60s Britain who, having been raised in the Caribbean to avoid direct eye contact with elders (as this was considered disrespectful), found themselves receiving the cane in the UK for not making eye contact with white teachers who thought their behaviour impudent.
The media also uses the hoodie as a means of dressing up boys’ blackness, or rather a particular idea of what blackness means: disorder, threat and crime. Even for eminent black men, the news media adds hues of bloodshed to their image. Under the headline “Stabbed teens die on streets” in the run-up to last year’s World Cup, the Sun aimed to fabricate a causal link between the Manchester City and England footballer Raheem Sterling and violent crime. “Two more teenagers were killed over the weekend as Raheem Sterling revealed his controversial gun tattoo,” read an intro that was a lesson in character assassination by juxtaposition. And when a genuinely positive image of black men is broadcast, this image is confined to a very narrow range of qualities: footballers, basketball players, rappers or predominantly hyper-masculine characters in films. They are aggressive, not intellectual.
The options on the table for the young white man’s identity are generally wider. Yes, the image of certain, typically poor, white men in hoodies is also one of delinquency. When David Cameron told the nation to “hug a Hoodie” in 2006, he showed the power of the “hoodie” to signify a poor urban youth, whether a white working class boy in Salford or a black boy in Tottenham. But while the negative stereotype of the hoodie is not exclusive to black men, it has greater force. Plenty of white students will walk into a lecture theatre in a hoodie and flip-flops without any reprimand. Even if you are unpersuaded by the racial variation in stereotyping, there is a more significant disparity at play: white men have a more realistic means of escaping the image of a thug. There are so many black men I know who are doing great things, as fathers, doctors, nurses, city workers, sponsors and local councillors. But they fade from visibility.
The images of black people that are most visible are those of the youth in a gang or the old man with white hair. There is not much clear sky in between. What about those people who are neither thugs nor Morgan Freeman?
•To find out more about the campaign visit the website, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.
