A Tale of Two Hoodies

Scene 1: Trayvon’s Hoodie

It is February 26, 2012, evening in central Florida. Trayvon Martin is walking home from a local store, wearing a hooded sweatshirt (hoodie). Martin chats on his cell phone with his friend while carrying his purchases, a bag of Skittles, and an Arizona iced tea. Another actor appears: George Zimmerman, an unofficial neighborhood watchman who notices Martin walking through his neighborhood. Zimmerman calls the police, suspecting Martin might be involved in the recent robberies that have occurred in the neighborhood, and makes it his mission to follow Martin. Zimmerman continues his pursuit despite the emergency operator’s request to stand down and let the authorities handle it. The rest of the details of the encounter are unclear because only one person survives to tell the story. But there is one truth we all know: seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin dies from a gunshot wound at the hands of George Zimmerman.

Although Martin’s life ends that night, the way he dies spawns public debates that rage on. Some loudly proclaim that Martin’s hoodie was to blame for his death. The hoodie, they cry, is a part of a larger negative trend in young people’s fashion: dressing like criminals and thugs. In their opinion, the hoodie justified Zimmerman’s suspicion. The most noteworthy indictment of Martin’s hoodie comes from TV personality Geraldo Rivera, who tells the world that the hoodie was as much to blame for Martin’s death as Zimmerman. Rivera warns black and Latino parents of the dangers that come from their kids wearing hoodies. Rivera argues that people associate hoodies with gangs, crime, and urban life (but only when they are on certain bodies). These associations, and the assumption that hoodie wearers are asking for trouble, criminalize black bodies. Geraldo and those who agree with his perspective imply that erasing negative stereotypes about people of color is as simple as a person choosing not to wear a hoodie; this is respectability politics. Respectability politics suggests that if blacks and Latinos act, dress, and talk like respectable (read: white) people, they are less likely to encounter discrimination. These perspectives absolve the United States of its history of associating danger with darker-skinned bodies and absolve George Zimmerman by validating his suspicion. Most disturbing, this rhetoric implies Martin was to blame for his death because of his clothing choice.

The media debates that took place in 2012 overlooked how Trayvon’s hoodie became a black hoodie, a black male hoodie, and most importantly a black male and presumed lower-class hoodie. A sociology of the body perspective allows us to see how clothing takes on meaning based on the intersecting identities of the wearer and the social space in which interactions happen. A hoodie worn in a swanky fitness center is different than a hoodie worn on a dark street at night. Martin’s black male hoodied body signaled danger and in turn aroused suspicion in Zimmerman, suspicion that many are socialized to have, causing some people to sympathize with the shooter. Zimmerman identifies him as black during his 911 call and specifies that he is wearing “a dark hoodie.” Trayvon’s intersecting identities and the social space of the street caused him to unintentionally embody danger. Martin’s black masculinity did not allow him to wear the hoodie without being labeled a thug. Neither did he hold the privilege to redefine for strangers what a hoodie meant when it was on his body. The intersection of his dress and his black maleness, and perhaps his youth, did not grant him the freedom to walk through a public space on the night his life was lost. Ironically, being seen as embodying danger put Martin in danger. This case cannot be understood fully without recognizing that Martin’s race, perceived class, masculinity, and hoodie are all important when interrogating what happened that night and interpreting the discourse that followed.

Scene 2: Zuck’s Hoodie

In spring 2012, just a couple of months after Trayvon Martin is gunned down, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg goes on a “road show,” visiting bankers and investors up and down the East Coast in anticipation of his company’s initial public offering. Despite the huge moneymaking potential of Facebook, the big story is Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to wear a hoodie to these meetings. Many of the finance bigwigs whom “Zuck” meets, and other commentators in the media, express shock and dismay at this dress decision. A suit and tie usually constitute the expected business dress in finance, especially in places with more buttoned up local dress cultures, like New York City. Zuck’s hoodie makes a statement in this context…but what is the statement?

The hoodie has been Zuckerberg’s trademark even before his Wall Street tour: he is referred to in the press as a “hoodie-wearing boy genius,” “the social network’s hoodie-wearing head honcho,” and a “hoodied techno-guru.” But the word that TV talking heads and everyday white-collar types use when discussing this incident is “respect.” It is disrespectful to depart from the norms of professional dress when you are in a business space, and even more so when you are asking for money, they say. Corporate and finance professionals seem to feel that their space is being invaded by a body that is deviant, that violates long-standing norms of self-presentation. What might fly in Silicon Valley’s tech-business campuses marks Zuckerberg as an outsider in Wall Street firms. When he bucks the expected dress by wearing his hoodie in the halls of corporate finance, headlines detail “hoodie gate” and jokingly proclaim “Zuckerberg wears hoodie, world ends.” The media coverage of Zuck’s hoodie emphasizes the critique from the finance industry—that such dress signals immaturity or flippancy—and the response from his supporters, who stress the Facebook mystique of youth and coolness. Unlike the presumed rebelliousness of young men of color who wear hoodies, Zuckerberg’s embodied rebellion against corporate norms is both criticized and praised.

It’s easy to come up with possible reasons why Zuck wore the hoodie to the meetings: it’s a sort of uniform for him, he wants to embody the ways Facebook is a different type of company and he is a different type of CEO, he is used to dealing with Silicon Valley executives and not East Coast bankers, the hoodie is emblazoned with his company’s logo…we could go on and on. As sociologists, it’s more interesting for us to deconstruct the vociferous reaction to the hoodie covering Zuck’s torso. And if we use theories of the gendered body as a tool for analyzing this case, we quickly see that the debate is over how to embody privilege.

It matters that Zuck is youngish (young for a man in his position, at least), white, and filthy rich. Hegemonic masculinity, the most valued image of masculinity in the contemporary United States, is associated with whiteness and wealth. Yet Zuck is twisting the typical embodiment of hegemonic masculinity by eschewing the expected and respected dress of the business suit. He embodies privilege in an unorthodox way that makes it seem as if he is thumbing his nose at the traditional suit and tie and those who wear them. He chooses a style associated with casual workouts, with hip-hop, with youth, rather than the formal attire of Wall Street handshakes. Yet he is still able to achieve his financial objectives and remain one of the most powerful businessmen in America, because in the end, even his adversaries give credit to his ideas over his appearance. They do this because of his success and his old boys’ club bona fides: he is the product of professional parents, prep schools, and the Ivy League. Zuckerberg’s whiteness also allows him to escape the potentially negative meanings of the hoodie even in a semihostile environment. He is not hemmed in by the hoodie. The hoodie does not keep him out of the rooms he wants to be in. Because of his status, people know him when he walks in and treat him with respect—albeit begrudging respect in some cases—because he is a wealthy white whiz kid who embodies the American dream.

Body, Dress, and Space

A hooded sweatshirt gains meaning with a particular body inside it in a particular social setting. It seems like a trivial item made of pieces of fabric stitched together. You probably have one hanging in your closet right now. Americans of all walks of life wear hoodies. But slip it onto a body—a body people see as having a particular age, gender, race, and class—and it acquires meaning. How does a hoodie become more than a hoodie, sparking public debates? By looking at the same object of clothing, the ubiquitous hoodie, worn by two different masculine bodies in different scenarios, we can see how dress matters in combination with other factors.

Intersectional feminism shows that gender interacts in complicated and sometimes unpredictable ways with our other ascribed characteristics: age, race/ethnicity, or social class, for example. As these two cases illustrate, being a young black man in America is different than being a young white man, especially in social spaces like a neighborhood street versus a corporate boardroom. No body is just a body; it is a specific kind of body (covered or uncovered by items of clothing) in a specific time and place.

Most of the time, we conform to official and unofficial dress codes, which are generally set by people holding economic power or high social status. But as with any bodily practice, our dress decisions might communicate messages other than those that we intend or that we are aware of. We can consciously or unconsciously embody privilege or embody danger by donning particular items of clothing. We have some control over what we wear, but very little control over what others think about what we wear.

We put on hooded sweatshirts for many reasons or no reason: to be comfortable, to conform to casual dress norms, and to look cool. But what kind of body is wearing the hoodie matters, and so does the space in which it is worn. In our first scene, a hoodied young man of color walking on a neighborhood street embodies danger whether or not he intends to intimidate. In contrast, a hoodied young white man giving a presentation in the corporate boardroom embodies privilege, bucking conformist dress codes while symbolically wearing his tech smarts on his sleeve. The combination of who dons the hoodie, and where they wear it, can be met with different perceptions and behavior, as we see in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mark Zuckerberg. In both stories, the hoodie was interpreted as a sign of social deviance, but in one case this deviance was feared and in the other it was laudable, at least to some.

Because of common negative stereotypes about hoodie wearers, we have heard of politicians in Oklahoma, schools in Massachusetts, and shopping centers in the United Kingdom (with the blessing of then-prime minister Tony Blair) all proposing to ban hoodies in recent years. Such superficial efforts to regulate supposedly dangerous masculinity are aimed at nonwhite or lower-class men while pretending to be universal. It is understood that women in hoodies are not a social problem, despite this being a unisex clothing item. And rich white men in hoodies are also not likely to suffer under such bans. The 2016 Department of Justice report on the policing practices of the city of Baltimore exemplified these policies disproportionally targeting certain groups. The evidence shows supervisors in the police department issued explicitly discriminatory orders for officers to arrest “all the black hoodies” in a neighborhood on a particular evening. The report shows that often hoodies alone were the impetus to stop and frisk or harass a black person. The focus on hoodies was designed to “clean up the streets,” perpetuating the narrative that this article of clothing on black male bodies is linked to danger and crime.

Hoodies have also been used as a form of activism in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s shooting, being taken up as a symbol of resistance to antiblack violence with “Million Hoodie Marches” and NBA players showing up to their arenas in hoodies. One of the most striking images from pop music icon Beyoncé Knowles’s much-talked-about video “Formation” is that of a young boy in a hoodie dancing in front of a line of police officers in riot gear.

The hoodie also takes center stage in the 2016 Netflix original series, Luke Cage. In this live action series television program (based on a Marvel comic book superhero), Luke Cage, a bulletproof black man, chooses to wear a hoodie instead of a cape while fighting to save Harlem. This was a conscious choice by the show’s creator, Cheo Hodari Coker, who has said in interviews that he was inspired by the cases of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, two black male police shooting victims. Coker sees this costuming decision as an opportunity to resist popular stereotypes. He has said that “heroes come from everywhere” and “black men in hoodies can also be heroic,” countering the common assumption that they are suspects. Mike Colter, the forty-year-old actor who plays Luke Cage, has said in interviews that as a younger man, he eschewed hoodies at the request of his mother, who warned him that wearing a hoodie made him “fit the description” of people the police are more likely to harass. But Colter’s opinion shifted with the death of Trayvon Martin. He decided to wear hoodies to resist ideas about black bodies and criminality and to assert that a black man in a hoodie should be viewed as human.

The goal of these demonstrations and representations is to challenge embodied privilege and negative perceptions that affect some men’s dressed bodies and not others. Respectability politics is combated in these collective acts of protest, in which people use the hoodie as a tool for communication, rejecting its imposed negative meanings and reclaiming it for their own purposes.

The hoodie is not just good for covering up a bad hair day. It hides much more than flesh and face. The hoodie—and the debates over who should wear one and where—can reveal or conceal how power works, who has it and who doesn’t. A hoodie may seem like just a hoodie…but if we uncover these power relations, we can see how gendered and racialized bodies, dress, and space combine to shape perceptions and social interactions.