A brief look at major moments in Black history reveals how battles over race, class, and adornment have majorly influenced mainstream American fashion trends…
From slavery to the present, African Americans and other people of color have used fashion as a form of cultural-political resistance and creative self-expression… Under the system of slavery, whites dictated how people of African descent dressed, purchasing inexpensive fabrics such as denim and osnaburg in dull colors for them to wear. To develop their own identity outside of that as laborers, bond women often sewed their own clothes to wear to church—garments of more brilliant colors made from materials they purchased with their own earnings.
After emancipation, some former bondwomen and men began wearing flamboyant outfits full of color as a means of resistance. Though many black Americans adhered to styles that reflected the mores of whites in an effort to assimilate into white society, they created their own dress aesthetic by using non-traditional fabrics and unusual cuts to embellish their looks. Over time, their innovative modifications morphed into dramatic fashions like the zoot suit (with its long suit jacket and tightly tapered pants), which came to symbolize youth rebellion, jazz culture, and black and Latino urban life in the interwar period. These styles were then appropriated by mainstream American and European fashion designers.
During the Civil Rights Movement, a politics of adornment was employed to garner media attention for the movement. Images of black activists dressed in their “Sunday best” attire (dresses, cardigans, pearls, and suits and ties) being attacked by white segregationists highlighted the barbaric nature of American racism and the system of Jim Crow. Wearing such fine clothes was a subversive act, in the U.S. South especially. Dressing nicer than working-class whites placed African Americans in danger of being beaten, arrested, or lynched because their clothing was an outward sign of their challenge to southern social order.
By the late 1960s, young African Americans had ditched the Sunday best look and the integrationist politics for a more radical, African-inspired “soul style.” Organizations such as the Black Panther Party and countless black youth in cities across the country donned Afros, dashikis, miniskirts, and ornate jewelry to showcase their cultural pride and their political solidarity. Black women in particular used the soul style look to challenge conventional notions of feminine propriety, which mandated that they wear their hair straightened and dress in conservative clothing. The mainstream fashion industry responded—as it had in the early twentieth century—by appropriating this politically-influenced soul style, selling the look everywhere from department stores to haute couture fashion boutiques.
[Image Description: a drawing of a transmasculine genderfluid filipinx standing while making a quietly tired and frustrated frown. They have a relaxed undercut they pretend isn’t a bowl cut. They have a casual urban minimalist chic style, and they are dressed in all black. They’re holding a smart phone in their hand disdainfully. It would appear based on the screen that they were on Facebook. Next to them is text in cursive that reads, “If I have to explain how racism works, that’s when y'all white allies need to put in labor.”]
This website has a clickable map where you can see suspected and confirmed sundown towns by state, as well as information about whether these attitudes are historical or current.
REBLOG IT DOESNT MATTER WHAT BLOG YOU ARE THIS IS GONNA SAVE SOMEONE
I am poc too and i am scared for my LIFE when i go to the south. please stay safe.
I am not poc but I know this could save someone’s life. Please reblog and spread the message.
My obligatory addition to this every time it crosses my dash, because I know the link is definitely missing ones in my own (northern) state and there are some in this thread not on the above link either - thread by LeVar Burton with a LOT of replies from people naming the sundown towns near them:
Still angry that Christopher created Little Yangtze, arguably the most devastating location in the game, and gave it less narrative relevance than a fucking dog
After Little Yangtze, I played through the rest of OWB with the goal of securing some kind of justice for the prisoners. They give you a group of people who’ve been imprisoned and tortured for more than two hundred years and make you witness their deaths firsthand, but only one conversation with the Think Tank even acknowledges that. The least you should be able to do is look Borous in the face and tell him exactly why he’s about to die.
But no, you’re expected to care more about the dog.
You don’t get to talk to the prisoners. They don’t even have names. Any prisoner there who didn’t die from Elijah experimenting with bomb collars on them doesn’t make it out alive. All of the lore surrounding that area is heart wrenching and uncomfortable but it’s never addressed
OWB’s Little Yangtze combined with Point Lookout’s Turtledove Detention Camp and FO4′s poorly done (and easily missed) narrative with Kim Wu is just racial devastation for edgy/graphic shock value
and what’s worse is that OWB is often praised as the best DLC because of its “fun wacky sci-fi humor” that overshadows and dismisses everything about Little Yangtze
Just in case you were wondering: any piece of media that creates “good” and “bad” races (Skyrim, Fallout, LOTR, D&D, etc), is racist. Any piece of media that presents a single “good” member of an “evil” race, or in which the “evil” members of a race far outnumber the “good” members, is racist. Any piece of media that uses the fact that the evil races are permanently and unchangingly evil - even though there may or may not be exceptions! - to justify the genocide and extermination of that race, is racist.
This is not a Watsonian argument. The relative goodness or evilness of a good or evil race, in that piece of media, is irrelevant. The fact is, if you write a story that pits two different races against one another, and one is deemed good and one is deemed evil, that is racist.
