[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]TDub301 wrote:
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]sifu wrote:
I’m guessing that you have never seen this behavior where you live, but if you have ever been to Miami it is something you see. It is part of the Miami “I’m so hood” dress code and is related to the pants down around your ass, fashion statement. To do it properly you don’t just hold onto your waistband or put your hand at your waist. They grab up their pants in such a way that it looks like they are carrying something and are using their pants to conceal it. Then there is the slouch and walk that goes with it that makes it look like there is something in their pants making it difficult to walk normal. The look is meant to give the impression that they are carrying a gun because that is what it looks like. Or as the man says at 3:38 of this I’m so hood video “pants hanging off me now cuz my pistol heavy, I’m so hood” [/quote]
The thing is, we have that in Houston as well and I don’t see “thug with potential gun” when I see it because the style is too widespread and that is NOT what most of the people with their pants sagging are doing.
That means if you attach a blatantly criminal act directly to a style, you would have to be blind to not see the mistakes that could lead to.
This kid had a bunch of store bought goods…IN THE RAIN…he was trying to keep dry. That would make anyone’s pants sag because Arizona Iced tea is pretty heavy.
That means if you see “black man with pants sagging” and immediately think “thug with gun”, you are making the same mistakes as any racist would whether you call yourself one or not. Your limited exposure to that style or the people who use it has led you to purely negative conclusions based on it that you can’t see past.
I see the same guy and none of the same thoughts enter my mind because I grew up around that culture and I’m not afraid of every black person I see who isn’t dressed like Bryant Gumble.[/quote]
So after saying all this, would you agree that suspicion is in the eye of the beholder?
You’ve mentioned that rappers have been making videos with saggy pants for decades, but you fail to realize that a lot of white people from the generation Zimmerman is a part of may have never seen a rap video in their lives.
So if there’s no exposure to this sort of thing, why is it so far-fetched for them to think it looks suspicious? Especially if all the kids in their neighborhood don’t look like that when they’re walking down the street? (this is an assumption, none of us knows how the rest of the kids there walk around their neighborhood, I’m just trying to make a point here and it is fairly likely that any given neighborhood, especially if it is a gated neighborhood in a white area, would not contain kids who wear clothes like this).[/quote]
Are you serious? Rap has been around since the late 70’s and the specific motion or "style we speak of has been present since before Micheal Jackson was grabbing his crotch and Moon Walking.
Anyone still using CULTURAL DIFFERENCES as signs of CRIMINAL ACTIVITY is seeing the world through bigoted eyes…whether they admit it or not.
That is why people in this thread can state that a black male with a hood on is SUSPICIOUS yet turn right around and act like it had nothing to do with race.
People see what they WANT to see. To claim someone has been blind to rap for 40 years is ridiculous. They see it as a negative…and then use that negative stereotype and apply it to people so they can avoid “being racist”…yet doing the exact same thing as a “CULTURALIST”.[/quote]
So you’ve never met a person that literally knows dick about rap? including how they dress?
Do you hang around any white people at all? If so, do you ever talk to any of their parents?
I’m willing to bet my own parents can count the number of rap videos they’ve seen on their fingers and these are people who live in PG County, a predominantly black county right outside of NE DC with a son who has a half-black son with a black woman and whose friends are mostly black. We even started a damn rap group when we were younger.
Still with all that, I’m positive that my parents would only be aware of that style of clothing because of the area they live in, not because they saw any rap videos or pictures of rappers. It isn’t ridiculous at all to think someone literally knows nothing about rap. It’s a genre of music that can easily be avoided if there’s no interest in it. It isn’t forced down anyone’s throat to the point where they definitely know anything about it at all.
Besides, rappers portray themselves as law-breakers in almost every song they make and glorify it, so why is it so hard to believe that seeing someone who dresses and acts like someone who professes in their music that they break the law on the regular (or at least claims to in order to get street cred) looks suspicious?
This is giving me the impression that you want and expect white people to be racist until proven otherwise.
You’ve already said yourself that that look is age specific. Not exactly the same as a cultural difference. I see young people of all races dressing like this every day (to be fair, it’s probably due to the area I live in).
Who said that a black person wearing a hoody looks supsicious? Zimmerman even gave more details about it. He may have been making them up, that’s certainly possible, since lately he has been looking pretty racist. But he didn’t call the police and say “a black guy in a hoddie is walking around”. He gave a lot more detail than that, I’ve heard the tapes. He commented on how he was walking slow in the rain and looking into houses with his hand in his waistband. Yes, there’s reasonable explanations for this and it wouldn’t look suspicious to me either, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t look legitimately suspicious to literally ANYONE.
Once again, suspicion is in the eye of the beholder. Just because it doesn’t look suspicious to you doesn’t mean you can jump down on someone because it looks that way to them.