Maybe We Should ALL Start Wearing Hoodies – It is Amazing What You Can Hide Under These Things

Soon to be starring in the remake of Boyz n the Hood, Boyz n the Hoodie

In the spirit of racial harmony, I have, for several days now, been thinking that I have to stop dressing like a white man and get with the Hoodie program. After all, isn’t it better that we all learn, like Reginald Denny to “just get along?” (Or was it Rodney King? So hard to remember all the post-racial celebrities, isn’t it?) Isn’t it also safer for WASPs to Africanize now that we live in a nation where very marginal, very demented, and very repulsive groups such as the “New” Black Panthers can offer bounties on the head of anyone they dislike because of the color of his skin? Do I really need a weatherman to know which way their skin blows?

But how best to do that? At first I tried skin-tinting, or as my dermatologist likes to say, “reverse Jacksoning.” Alas I quickly discovered, as millions of my fellow Americans of the African persuasion have discovered, that it just isn’t that easy to change my hue. The other night I steeped in a bathtub I’d filled with hot water and 496 Black Teabags. I was hoping for some sort of mahogany tint by midnight but all I got was a transdermal caffine rush.

Yesterday morning I briefly applied a gallon of walnut body paint but one glance in the mirror and I recalled that running around in blackface, or even walnutface, was  frowned on from every official African American from Lewis Farrakhan to  Rachael Maddow and that albino president Bill Clinton. Hence body paint was right out. Following that I considered a full body tattoo using India Ink but the process of covering half of one cuticle was so painful I backed out of that one too.

It was clear to me that the only thing I could do was to dress like a brother. Fortunately I’ve had a lot of help with over the past few days from a gazillion white folks who also want to “African-American up” in the ever-popular hoodie. The hoodie, of course, is a perfect marker for African-Americaness because — as we have been taught assiduously by glorious television shows such as the Wire and endless rap videos — to wear a hoodie is to take on the aspect of the clean-cut and honest African American without any criminal overtones attached to such a garment at all. All those black hoods and thugs in hoodies you’ve been seeing and hearing about for years you did not, it turns out, see at all. Your eyes and ears were lying to you the whole time.

Of course, dressing in a hoodie in support of my African-American non-hood hoodie wearing fellow citizens was hard for me since I was, I am deeply ashamed to say, born white. Not just white but worse, WASP. As such I can’t just boogie down with my bad self to the half-block ghetto of Seattle and grab me a genuine hoodie.  As a WASP I not only don’t know where the Hood Hoodie Store is, I am not allowed to know. Hell, I don’t even know where to find the stores that sell those special baseball caps that have the bill sewn onto the side. The bottom line is that I am just too, too white to wear a brother’s hoodie. It’s not my fault. I was born this way.

But this morning,  thanks to Rodger the Real King of France at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical I found an answer. I found a  hoodie that was a compromise between the Hood Hoodie and the Neighborhood Watch Hoodie;  a hoodie that, like our current president, brings us together at last: The NRA Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt!

We want concealed carry to fit around your lifestyle –€“ not the other way around. That’s why we developed the NRAstore’s exclusive Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt. It’s the only garment of its kind we know of! …. Inside the sweatshirt you’€™ll find left and right concealment pockets. The included Velcro®-backed holster and double mag pouch can be repositioned inside the pockets for optimum draw. Ideal for carrying your favorite compact to mid-size pistol, the NRA Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt gives you an extra tactical edge, because its unstructured, casual design appears incapable of concealing a heavy firearm –  but it does so with ease! Colors: Black, Navy. Made in USA

Sounds just great, doesn’t it? Sounds like something that can be worn with pride by every American from the Klu Klux Klan to the New Black Panthers! Sounds like something that will, like our half-white, half-black president, really bring us together at last. At least until we have to reload.

I’m thinking of ordering seven. One for every day I get to wear one in Barack Obama’s new “post-racial” America. How about you?

Thanks to American Digest at: http://americandigest.org/