When Geraldo made his insane comments about hoodies last week, I couldn’t even get my brain to the inherent racism, the excuse for violence, or the fact that he would go so far as to blame hoodies for the death, but not guns. My brain got stuck on how stupid you have to be to associate hoodies with any kind of violent image. I couldn’t even take the offensiveness of the statement seriously because Geraldo, and then O’Reilly (later agreeing with Geraldo), are actually that detached from American culture. Before I can even get my brain to process how obscene it is to blame an innocent young black man for getting shot because of the way he was dressed, I have to get my brain to understand how stupid the people on FOX News really are. They aren’t just racist, they’re flat out brain-dead.
I, along with every person I went to college with, wore hoodies almost every day. I did this because I was lazy, not because I wanted to rob a 7-11. My friend Lori, a physical therapist at a VA hospital in NY who is also potentially both the whitest and most conservative human being I know (barring her parents) wears hoodies almost exclusively.
However, then I saw the following photographic evidence, and decided I had hoodies all wrong. They really are nothing but glorified gang paraphernalia. Be warned, some of the images advocate a dangerously thuggish lifestyle, including nerds, adorable babies, world’s greatest daughters and more. See for yourself:
Chilling stuff.
