Urban Profile T-shirts

Back in late July of this year, Gregory Kane of Black America Web wrote an article about Black T-shirt vendors entitled: Commentary: By Selling Images of Black Victimhood, We’re Pimping Our Own Misery. After reading the article, I immediately went into self defense mode and contacted the Black America Web editorial dept., an Atlanta radio station that responded to and discussed the story on one of their talk shows, and I left several *heated* comments on the message board where the article was published. (Needless to say, I was pissed off.)

At the time I learned about the story, I never heard of Mr. Kane. After doing a little research, and reading through some of his past articles, I learned that he writes in the tradition of Black conservatism - a modern day social and political construct I just don’t quite understand. But that’s an article for another day. (By the way, here is a great analysis and running debate I found regarding “prominent” Black conservatives: Click Here.)

Mr. Kane’s article asserts, among other things, that Black people spend too much time whining (presumably about racism), and T-shirts that commemorate such acts of racism are over-the-top. Mr. Kane goes on to write that these T-shirts “pimp misery” and promote “victimhood”. But that’s not what bothers him most. He compares the act of selling images of lynchings on T-shirts for a profit with the fact that whites who committed these crimes shared their deeds through photographs printed on postcards. Somehow, the Black T-shirt vendors and the white criminals who did the lynching and made the postcards, are partners in crime.

This is beyond absurd. I’ll explain why in just a minute.

The article continues to explain why T-shirts that display images of the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo Soldiers - “Black achievement T-shirts” as he calls them - are far more to his liking. Mr. Kane makes the supposition that the lynching T-shirts - those “color me victim” T-shirts - are the creation of the Hip Hop generation, a group of people too young to appreciate the horrors of racism.

I have several problems with Mr. Kane’s article:

1) Victimhood, or the “woe’s me” attitude that Mr. Kane rightly disdains, is a negative and self-destructive reaction to a given action or condition. The display and sale of images depicting the mutilation of Black men and women isn’t victimhood, it is remembering the historical treatment of African Americans. These T-shirts chronicle the actions of the oppressor, not the reactions of the victims.

2) The whites that committed crimes against Black men and women celebrated their deeds. Those that make, sell, and purchase such T-shirts today do not celebrate the actions of these tormentors; they chronicle the actions of these criminals because their deeds have gone unpunished and ignored for centuries. The attitudes that perpetuated such crimes 100 years ago have been passed down to their children today.

3) Refuting the necessity of T-shirts which depict lynching is the same as diminishing the significance of Hiroshima to the Japanese, or denying the Holocaust to Jewish people. Why put it on a T-shirt? Why not just leave it in history books or museums? Because history books - the ones that this Hip Hip generation and beyond used in school - have somehow omitted this chapter in history. The vast majority of museums have done the same. The music of KRS1, Public Enemy, X-Clan, and others has been replaced with Fifty Cent. Where else could this information be placed so that the people of the latest generations could reach it? A T-shirt seems most appropriate.

I could go on with many more reasons why I don’t like Mr. Kane’s article. But because I am presumably one of the “pimps” that Mr. Kane admonishes, I suppose my opinion means little. After all, I’m profiting from the sale of these images. Kind of like record company execs and gangster rappers get paid to sell music that call Black women bitches and hoes. Kind of like the director of FEMA got paid to “help” the victims of Katrina. Kind of like Mr. Kane gets paid to write his articles.

We live in a capitalist society. Everything we see and touch around us was bought and sold, and somebody profited. Are pimps defined by the fact that they get paid, or are they defined by what they do to earn their money? Who’s the real pimp here?

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