The Hoodie Image Analysis

On a recent night, shopping online for a light jacket or a cotton sweater —

some kind of outerwear to guard my body against a springlike breeze — I

clicked on the ‘‘new arrivals’’ page of the website of a popular retailer and

encountered, unexpectedly, another instance of the complex oddity of race.

Here, projecting catalog­model cordiality in the sterile space of an off­white

backdrop, was a young black man in a hoodie.

On the street, a black guy in a hoodie is just another of the many millions

of men and boys dressed in the practical gear of an easygoing era. Or he should

be. This is less an analysis than a wish. The electric charge of the isolated

image — which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the

issue by

In a cardigan or a crew neck,

this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a

scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that

weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian

cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather

During the

N.F.L. playoffs, football fans saw the quarterback Cam Newton, the locus of a

running dialogue about blackness, wear hoodies to interviews, and they read

tweets that called him a ‘‘thug’’ for it. The boxing movie ‘‘Creed,’’ — starring

Michael B. Jordan opposite Sylvester Stallone, who made the hoodie a fixture

in ‘‘Rocky’’ (1976) — features rousing scenes of Jordan jogging across

Philadelphia in a gray hoodie. The transfer of the garment from the old white

champ to the young black contender plays as an echo of the film’s broader

racial politics.

At the computer, prodded out of the rhythm of browsing, I tried to

imagine the meetings that led to this catalog model being placed in this

hoodie, in the vacuum of commercial space. Beyond the usual earnest

discussion of the styling of his pushed­up sleeves and the asymmetrical dangle

of his drawstrings, there had to have been delicate conversations, informed