Thoughts.
Oh! I had completely forgotten about this. This is a link to a site showing a kind of wallet-holster.
There’s many kinds. Here’s another. A gadet holster.
I was looking up something to do with male fashion and clothes and gadets and extra pockets. And up it came. Now this isn’t the first time I’ve seen these things. But in light of this entire YEAR. 2012.
This is the first time, (and for this I am ashamed) it’s hit me solidly in the fact, that MoC (PoC all through, yes, but specifically MoC) could never. ever. wear something like this.
Because if keys, soda, candy, a regular billfold wallet and empty hands can be claimed to be a weapon (an excuse to shoot us all I know) and lead to innocent unarmed people getting shot. dead.
The excuses that would come up if someone was minding their own business walking down the street with something like this? Or worse? Having a jacket over it, so there’s a woosh of air, and someone thinks they see something?
It would be non stop: “Why would anyone wear that if they didn’t want other people to think they had a gun.” — “The dead person has no one to blame but themselves, playing at wearing a gun.”
There’s hip side wallet holsters too. I believe I saw something on Tumblr recently about someone having rigged themselves something similar.
But it’s just hitting me hard right now, the privilege of this. Wearing something that looks like a gun-holster. Perhaps even for the FASHION TEASE that it IS a gun holster, and then you pull out your iphone or whatever. And NEVER. NEVER having to think it’s an item of clothing/accessories that will end you dead.
NEVER.
My little brother can’t put a liter soda in his jean or jacket pocket while walking down the street in NYC, in the boroughs. Because it could look like something. But this can be invented and sold and white people, white men can just wear it and never think twice. It’s cool for them. It’s NOTHING.
White privilege is when fashion doesn’t mean getting shot.
(via karnythia)
