Easter Sunday: Reflect on the hoodie that Christ wore
OPINION - The hoodie Christ wore can be observed in the literal sense, and the one He wears in the metaphorical sense, in that He identified and identifies with those who are oppressed, stopped and frisked...
Jesus, according to Cone, became a “human being for oppressed persons, whose identity is made known in and through their liberation…God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering.”
This suffering Galilean community in the time of Christ was constantly negotiating between the dream of freedom and the reality of subjugation. The resistance movement led by Judas the Galilean remained fresh in Rome’s mind.
Rome feared that at any moment any Galilean, but especially Jesus, might organize and mobilize to resist again and challenge their authority. All Galileans were, therefore, deemed subhuman and criminalized, including Jesus–an outlaw and a hunted man, constantly pursued for arrest.
Jesus was, therefore, like young people of color today, constantly stopped, and when not frisked, vigorously interrogated by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Profiled, Jesus was able to elude capture by simply blending in with the crowd. He, therefore, was not only a typical Galilean in class, culture and speech, but a typical Galilean in dress, also.
Galilean men wore tunics, mantles, sandals and head coverings to protect from the sun. How many images have depicted Christ and his disciples with their heads covered? The accepted, popular, yet lamentably, too-white image of Christ in Western culture is a messiah with his head covered. So, Jesus was likely to have worn a head covering, at least, when he was not in prayer, as Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians mandate (I Co 11), or, at most, he wore one frequently, especially during prayer, as was Jewish custom.
Jesus likely identified with all things Galilean. If his dress was indistinguishable from the average Galilean, so, too, indistinguishable, were the authorities surveillance of Him as a stereotypical Galilean subject. All Galileans were a threat because Jesus was somewhere among them, and Jesus was a threat because he was somewhere among the Galileans.
So Jesus was a working class carpenter with no union in a poor, urban, diverse community, forging a style and language all its own, despite both oppression and an occupying force seeking to demoralize and discourage any resistance. Does not Jesus’ reality in His day describe the reality of the average youth of color today, except for the part about Jesus being employed?
As was the case with Christ’s Galilee, the question is to resist or not to resist. Our youth choose to resist most often by forging their own music, sometimes loud like Jordan Davis’s, their own language and their own popular style of dress, like the hoodie–also, a rather practical attire for rain, as was the case when George Zimmerman pursued Trayvon Martin. As a result, our youth, “over the past 50 years,” Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad has observed, “have been identified as ‘suspicious’ by their clothing, whether they were or not.”
Samad writes: “In the 1970s, wearing army jackets (as many of the returning Vietnam vets did – and many school kids – Hell, I had one), made black men suspicious and dangerous. In the 1980s, it was P-Coats. In the 1990s, it was Raiders jackets. In the 2000s, it was Georgetown jackets. In the 2010s, it is ‘hoodies.’”
Historically, law enforcement in America, just like Rome breathing down the neck of Galilee, feared that at any moment any African-American might organize and mobilize the people to resist and challenge racism and white supremacy. So the police were deployed to occupy the ghettoes disproportionately, and all were suspicious according to skin color and dress. The handful of true criminals in our communities were used to indict us all,as Criminalizing A Race author Charshee McIntire wrote, “inherently deviant and criminal.”
