New York Times reporter Michel Marriott recalls watching in astonishment this summer as a T shirt war between the sexes played out in his West Side Manhattan neighborhood. Young men sporting Dr. Dre’s slogan annoyed local schoolgirls so much that some struck back with shirts of their own denouncing men (in language too graphic for this publication) as dogs with human penises.
What’s driving young people to parade around in such obscene and hostile apparel? Many say they’re simply being cool. “These shirts are the move…Everybody’s wearing them,” says Avery Matthews, a 17-year-old Harlem resident who preens in a Mike Tyson shirt while insisting that he would never wear anything that “degrades women.” If “everybody” means people of all races and both sexes, Matthews has a point. Women have been spotted wearing the Tyson shirt, and whites buy much of the rap-rooted wear. Peter Livingston, a 21-year-old white man from Bayonne, N.J., who has a BACDAF–UP number, says, “I wear it because it tells people what state of mind I am in. I don’t take mess from anybody and don’t want to be bothered.”
Yet the rap-inspired shirts, like rap music itself, are most popular among minority youths. That troubles University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Majors, who sees the aggressive shirts as a reflection of “the anger, the apathy, the despair that many young black men feel.” Majors, who is cofounder of the National Council of African American Men (which provides “manhood training” mentoring programs for fat black youths), says that the men are responding to society writing them off. “As they were treated, they will…treat others,” he observes. Freelance rap writer and college student Christina Veran, 23, likens the allure of the rap images to that of James Bond movies. Making women “disposable,” she surmises, helps some young men “feel in control.”
Calvin Butts, the influential pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, thinks that sense of control comes at too high a price. The reverend, who in the past has attacked cigarette companies marketing their products in black communities, has for the last several months crusaded against debasing lyrics and T shirts. During a demonstration in front of his church, he threatened to drive a steamroller over a stack of what he considered obscene recordings; he called off the action for fear of sparking a confrontation with counterdemonstrators but has continued to lambaste the offending rappers.
Some onlookers wonder what all the screaming is about. As Harlem T shirt vendor Andy Wilson put it, “These shirts are just a reflection of society, of the world these kids live in….This is a part of their language, a part of their lives….It will pass, just like the ‘X’ craze has.” For Andrea Lewis, 18, of Brooklyn, it cannot pass soon enough. She tells of recently confronting a man wearing a shirt that read NIGGAZ 4 LIFE, asking him why. “He didn’t know what to say, just coming up with excuses like, ‘It’s cool’ and ‘Everybody wears one’…I [said], ‘What are you telling the world? That you believe that you are what the white man says you are, and that people who look like you are, too?”’ Her anger is warranted. For in a significant way, this is quite different from the Malcolm X craze. While that fad celebrated a symbol of racial pride, this latest one wallows in the most demeaning racial and sexual stereotypes. Some of the young rappers, who are quick to call their black critics Uncle Toms, are shucking, jiving and gyrating with a gusto that would put Sambo to shame. Something is screwy, as Veran observed, when young people go “from calling each other brother and sister to calling each other niggers and bitches.”
Rap devotees are right when they argue that not all rap lyrics are hatched in the gutter–and that the problems certain lyrics (and T shirts) reflect did not originate with rap. But they are wrong when they say the abusive words have no consequence, or that the stereotypes they celebrate somehow capture the essence of black life. What the lyrics do demonstrate is the durability of harmful images that, unfortunately, are sure to outlast this current T shirt fad.
