My remarks today will be offensive to many of my readers, I am sure of that, but they are heartfelt, and represent an interesting perspective on social tensions in our time. Like everyone else I have been following the horrendous news emanating out of Ferguson MO, grieving for yet another young African-American male victimized for being black essentially, the focus of suspicions and fears that have nothing to do with the youngster in question. I remember years ago when I taught an undergraduate class up in the Bronx and in a discussion on social relations a group of young black men in my class remarked on how if they were in high spirits and ran forward as a group to board the subway the other riders, they could clearly see, shrank from them. And their fellow passengers were mostly dark hued. From my upper middle class white perspective I unthinkingly said: "It's the clothes." And this is an idea that has never left me. There is a popular image of young black loser and dangerous teenagers wearing hoodies, pants that extend to mid calf, and sneakers. What if a nice looking young man were to come along in chinos, loafers, and a button down collar dress shirt? I can hear the howls of outrage from my readers. Yet, I myself know, that as a gay male who has a powerful urge to wear necklaces, bracelets, rings, sometimes a flashy little scarf wrapped around my wrist, I would be branding myself in the larger society. I know for a fact, because I well remember people with their pained smiles moving very subtly away from me in the eighties, not saying a word of course, but not wanting their children "to catch AIDS from me." I remember at Harvard we loafer and chino garbed students were always menaced by muggers from the Irish Catholic parts of Cambridge. Our clothes gave us away, something I knew well, since I had to walk through dicey parts of town every night to my job as a night watchman. The clothes were not suitable for a nightwatchman but it was before the era when the gentry could wear levi work pants ubiquitiously. Recently I hired a young white working class male, aged twenty three or four, to help me pack up my house. He was as handsome, soft spoken, courteous, hardworking, gentlemanly as you could ask for (although a director on the set would have ordered: "Lose the accent!") We talked of possible futures for someone with only a high school education. I didn't know how to tell him that pants with a mid calf cut off says ghetto or imitation ghetto. I offered him suits that were on their way to Goodwill, beautiful, some from Brooks Brothers. Even after I said in an avuncular fashion befitting the old queen who was his neighbor how important clothing of this sort could be in certain human interactions, social situations, he declined. I was sorry for him, and for all the young males, black particularly, that the insidious social painter that is television has devised their immediate personal identification in clothes that they will not shed at their peril.
An addendum two hours later, as I realize how utterly simpleminded I am in my analysis, depending as it does upon the notion that "clothes makes the man," that there is a badge of gentility all men assume by dressing in a certain fashion. This dictum of course utterly denies the experience of hundreds of persons of color in this country who have been dressed as the New York fashion dictates for middle and upper middle class males who are still routinely subject to harassing search and interrogate procedures unknown to the rest of us. In my own life I am so conscious that I have no occasion to talk seriously with an African-American after a life in which a high school buddy was black, a sister dated a black in college, my first wife's best friend was a black woman who introduced us to her circle of friends, most of them African-American, and my eldest sister's marriage in all but name to a black gentleman for the last ten or so years of his life. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, it makes assumptions flakier, insecurities more pronounced. So what I have written in the first paragraphs let them stand as the instinctive remarks of a very elderly person who just doesn't "get it."
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