A Single Garment of Destiny; Young, Black, and Creative in America
I was going to do a wrap-up post on my prior series about necessary changes in fashion due to COVID 19. But history intervened, and another ailment I have personally known compels me to deviate from that plan and make a comment on my own experiences as a black man - a black gay man - in Mississippi, in New York, and in the fashion industry.
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. “ - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Night at the Opera- FEBRUARY 2018
George unselfishly took this photo of me as we celebrated his birthday at the Metropolitan Opera House experiencing their production of Wagner’s epic opera Parsifal. I am so grateful to have a partner that sees so much beauty in me. In my smile. My hair. My skin. And ultimately my heart.
I know that MLK quotes can get a little played out, and have been used on both sides of recent debates, but his words are used so often because he had an unbelievable ability to analogize, to paint pictures in words. I cannot think of my life - in fashion and out - without seeing King’s single garment of destiny hovering before my eyes. I see the threads pull in the world around me and I try to hold, to keep the tension from pulling my vision out of place, but it is hard and I am not sure what the garment will look like in the future. So let me show you how my bit of this garment was woven.
I’m only 35 years old, but I grew up knowing that my Mamma had to hide from the Klan as a girl in the same town where my folks raised me. That thread is bright, clear, and ugly before my eyes. It runs through our whole garment, yours and mine - even if you don’t see it.
I cannot recall being called any type of racial slurs directly to my face growing up. Most folks in my community were black, However, just like with most things as a sheltered youth, you don't get introduced to some things until a certain age. I have always been really sensitive to that type of stuff, coming from the south; there’s a certain sense of honor and pride I needed to protect with my heart.
Now, in the south, we know racism. I am sure my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents (all the greats) had their share of poor treatment. I see the picture of my great-great-grandmother every day; born enslaved, died free. I can recall the tales about things that happened back in the days of the Jim Crow South. The Story of Emmett Till being the most terrifying. He was just a boy, like me, and all I could think was how could that happen to a child!
Then my mother’s powerful recollection of how she once hid under my grandparent’s bed one night when the KKK was riding out hunting down Freedom Riders, who made a special trip to Holmes County, which is mostly black, to make sure people were registered to vote. The KKK went from door to door at every black household-they knew trying to flush them out. The Freedom Riders would often hide out with families that felt bold enough or capable to accommodate them. My family didn't sign up for such, but every black home was a suspect, and “the boys” were out and didn't care - they'd force themselves into your house just to make sure.
When it came to my generation, things had shifted a bit. I am certain my parents set down and made sure the standards were set on the use of certain words in our home. My Mamma was a librarian and she would challenge me often by saying things like “you know you can find a better word to say than that”. This was frequently the response when I said “I hate (insert anything akin to chocolate or homework).” I can also remember a talk I had with my Daddy about some off-limits words. The N-word being the main one, no matter the context. FOOL and SISSY were some others. Unfortunately, the bullies never got that memo in school. I was chubby then, and sensitive as ever, so you can imagine how much I heard “BIG SISSY” in grade school.
Shopper’s Delight
One of my first fashion illustrations I did growing up. I always idealized Vogue Magazine. I imagined making beautiful things for women and featuring them in the pages of Vogue.
Dreams Can Come True
This is a photo from an editorial Vogue Magazine featured in 2015. When I worked in fabric development at Rebecca Taylor I sourced and found the fabric for this very lurex skirt. Maybe it was the first notable thing I ever had a hand in while starting my career in the fashion world. All I knew was something I touched and handled ended up in Vogue. I felt I had something to do with this magical photo no matter how small.
Lexington, MS was one of those interesting places in the rural south where black people outnumbered whites by nearly two to one in 1990. I am sure that ratio has shifted even further by today, mostly because white folks either died off or moved out of the town completely. So I grew up seeing black police officers (who were all pretty much taught by my parents or related to people my parents taught), law clerks, and county officials. I never had much of an opportunity to question how poorly police officers or law enforcement might treat you if you were black. You just had to do something bad and you would go to jail. Simple, right? I thought that wouldn't be me because who has time to steal when you are drawing on the floor, stomach facing downwards, with papers everywhere dressed in your white t-shirt and your favorite Smurfs underwear (being 17 was a breeze- joking of course!-that was more along the ages of 3-10). Though, to be honest, this is still my favorite drawing position! Like many of us, I was taught to respect the police and if I ever got lost they would help me find my mom.
I also watched a lot of PBS, including Sesame Street, and WISHED from an early age that I could be Mr. Rogers when I grew up (now I want to be the Mr. Rogers of the Fashion World - still working on that). So I really had an idealized vision of what authority figures like police officers were supposed to be like. Then I recalled the Rodney King incident in 1991, the videotapes shown at the hearing, and the 1992 race riots in LA.
I was 6 years old at the time and saw snippets of it on news outlets. I didn’t quite understand what it all was about, but I did understand that the police beat him and they didn't particularly care for the color God made his skin. It wasn’t just that Mr. King was black - he was black like me - and looking back at his photos I would say we have some similar features. Long lost cousins, perhaps? All jokes aside- this was America beyond the deltas and endless coils of kudzu vines I knew in my small town in Mississippi. Some places, like LA, were too nice and valuable for white folks to just run away from, so they stayed and filled the ranks of law enforcement, policing the people they resented.
The public schools I attended were all black and mostly led by black staff and teachers (my parents among them). But early education options were limited, and my mother paid good money to get me into the fancy preschool in town. It was called the “Children’s Center.” Nice as it was, I hated the idea of not being able to do my own thing and draw all day, but Mamma paid good money and I ended up there after much crying. It looked and felt just like Sesame Street, and I was quickly won over. Asian kids, Black kids, and White kids! Like TV! I even made friends with a biracial girl named Clementine! I was in love; she was pretty and the teachers had a hard time saying her name, just like mine (“No, it’s PAIR - RUN”). They never really got it.
But my Sesame Street life at the Children’s Center didn’t last. Over the course of the year kids vanished - white, Asian, even Clementine. It changed overnight. I guess they didn’t set the price high enough, because white families were dismayed at how many black kids from outside of town their children had to play with. I didn’t know it then, but “white flight” happened before our eyes, and I lost friends and resources in my early education because of it. Michelle Obama’s personal story of this in the Chicago Public Schools is an amazing perspective and one of my favorite passages in Becoming. I am saddened by it to this day - my opportunity to hang out or play with those kids (and their opportunity to play with me) was over before I learned how to tie my shoes.
Black Excellence
Polaroid taken in June 1990. I graduated from the Children’s Center. I was so excited! As usual, I was awkward in the photo. I remember my Daddy giving me stage direction. It was totally his idea to do the strong balled up fist and smile you see here. I hated it at the time but I appreciate what this signifies now. Education and my start into the journey of excellence. It was a “small stitch” into my destiny.
We should have known. In the late 1960’s, just as my parents were starting their careers, white families across the south banded together to form “Christian Schools,” if you can believe the nerve, where they could set the private tuition high enough to keep black folks’ kids out and avoid real integration. Holmes County had a Christian School. It still does. And it is still almost all white. Even for black families who could afford admission, why send your child to a school where the whole faculty is white - not a single black face in leadership?
Holmes County Public Schools, like S. V. Marshall High and Elementary School, where my parents both taught, remained almost all black in leadership and attendance. I used to imagine them donning Afros and fighting the power back in the day. Mostly because I used to peruse old family albums with my mother and dad at their colleagues’ homes hanging out. That’s when school felt like East Side High in the movie “Lean On Me.” Not as crazy as the beginning of the movie, of course, but more like the spirit at the end of the movie, when people became prideful and excited about not being a statistic in a black school and pursued higher learning. My parents always pushed the idea of education. My dad being a math teacher would often tutor me and push me to get that stuff but I guess my mind was too crowded with drawing, video games, and cartoons!
Wait! Before folks get the idea that this economic segregation was some “solution” or an arrangement that worked both ways, please let me point out that the public schools survived on our solidarity and culture and close community all the more because we were starved of funds. Yeah, I loved seeing black role models and I long for the days when fashion can truly feel like S.V. Marshall in that way (more on this later) but the funding wasn’t there, and still isn’t. White families had centuries of opportunity to buy cheap land, make a home, build assets, and develop networks that supported higher incomes. The state learned early on that Christian Schools could leverage this advantage to fill the gap for white students and that they could save money by just letting the black schools under perform. It’s still better than what the black folks had been used to in Mississippi, right? You get the picture.
“The talk” came around when I was 12 years old or so. My Dad’s biggest lesson was to make sure I was ready for the world and what that meant as a black man. Spoiler alert: if you are not hoping to learn, or would rather stay blind to why some black men feel less-than or might have a grudge against your easy grasp of the American Dream, then maybe the following will be news to you.
Black men have to work harder and longer just to earn close to equal pay to white men, and that is made even harder in situations where a white man’s assertiveness can be twisted as aggressiveness when exhibited by an ambitious black man. My Dad’s advice was to keep my head in the books, get my education - knowledge is power - and if I have that, no one no matter what color, nobody can take that from me. They might make me feel stupid, insult me, spit in my face, but the knowledge I have is mine. Get it. Learn it. Protect it. No matter how much I wish this weren't true it, unfortunately, is this way. It’s hard. You add this with social injustice of black and brown bodies, the likelihood of getting thrown into prison for false accusations, high school dropout rates, and no positive male figures in the community you are handed a cocktail that's seconds away from a DUI.
I am not saying hard work isn’t worth it. It’s just that we need to do more of it for similar results, and it’s often ingrained in us that people will see us differently and we have to work harder to prove them wrong because of whatever prejudices they might already have. I’ve been at it since I was 12 and it’s exhausting! I was already making up for other people's BS well before I started my career. Who knew!
Like with anything painful, these times will only make us stronger and braver. Braver to have “THE HARD” conversations. MORE “STRAIGHT TALK”. I recall when Solange’s album hit the airwaves in late September 2016, “A Seat At The Table” was on everyone’s lips. The phrase was added to the lexicon. It opened the discussion and encouraged people of color to re-address what if we had a chance to have an opinion in the board rooms around the world. What would that type of diversity look like?
Creative Genius
Image is taken from Solange’s video for the single track, Don’t Touch My Hair, on her album “A Seat At the Table”. The video is about the beauty and versatility that is found in the natural hair of people of color. I can do an entire blog post on this subject and the cultural appropriation of black hair and then the shade real black people get for having it! Stay tuned!
Black and brown folks like Solange, myself, and many others, have a voice and a point of view that should be heard. We need that opportunity too. I take my hat off to Solange for having the vision and taking the chance to share this perspective in her album. But did the mainstream really take note and offered a “seat”? I look across the creative fields, including my own industry.
Fashion has its own plight, filled with discrimination in leadership, underpayment of labor, environmental destruction, cultural appropriation, lack of black models on the runway - you name it. Fashion has sliced multiple pieces from the racism pie and that table is full of crumbs! But black creatives like myself can be there to clean up fashion’s act by giving our unique perspective, and recent signs are promising.
Edward Kobina Enninful, OBE is editor-in-chief of British Vogue. Edward also mentions in his British Vogue article that even growing up in London, England as a youth his mother told him to “keep your wits about you” whenever he left his house. He still to this day holds that same fear and anxiety when he steps out of his home. And he’s the HEAD OF BRITISH VOGUE AND FROM AN AFRICAN COUNTRY! The pains of racial equality run THICK and know no bounds, no matter which side of the pond you are on.
Edward Enninful was appointed Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue in 2017. He was the first person of color appointed to an Editor-in-Chief position at the famed fashion publication and quickly used his position to shed light on the issue. In his piece, Racism Is A Global Issue, Enninful emphasizes that “we need black people ingrained within the infrastructure of the fashion industry, not just on the other side of the camera or appearing on an Instagram feed. People need a seat at the table.” There it is again; a seat at the table. And once we’re there, we make our vision known. Black fashion designers here in the States have made great strides in recent years and we need this growth to become the norm. It is only then that we will see real change and design a better future in the industry that I’ve loved ever since I picked up my first Vogue magazine all those years ago in Lexington, Mississippi.
This is American, and Global, and Personal. I have seen hardships and opportunities; adversity and growth. I hope that this understanding encourages you to support the designers, brands, and other workers who make the art we wear. To see how different my garment may look from yours, but that the threads are woven the same and that we cannot strive for a more beautiful future without each other.
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