| Clothing: Dressing for
the Occasion
In this essay, Robin D.G. Kelley is trying to explain how people
protest in everyday ways. One example: the Zoot suit. Here Kelley looks
carefully about what it means to wear a Zoot suit while the nation was
embroiled in World War II. To make sense of the suit, Kelley must look
at when and where people wore the suit, at what was happening in the larger
world and at what kind of statement people made by wearing a suit in that
context.
While the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement,
the social context in which it was created and worn rendered it so. The
language and culture of zoot suiters represented a subversive refusal to
be subservient. Young black males created a fast-paced, improvisational
language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering,
tongue-tied Sambo; in a world where whites commonly addressed them as "boy,"
zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other "man."
 Moreover,
within months of Malcolm [X]'s first zoot, the political and social context
of war had added an explicit dimension to the implicit oppositional meaning
of the suit; it had become an explicitly un-American style. By March 1942,
because fabric rationing regulations instituted by the War Productions
Board forbade the sale and manufacturing of zoot suits, wearing the suit
(which had to be purchased through informal networks) was seen by white
servicemen as a pernicious act of anti-Americanism -- a view compounded
by the fact that most zoot suiters were able-bodied men who refused to
enlist or found ways to dodge the draft.
Thus when Malcolm donned his "killer-diller coat with a drape-shape,
reat-pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic's cell," his lean body
became a dual signifier of opposition -- a rejection of both black petit
bourgeois respectability and American patriotism. … Seeing oneself and
others "dressed up" was enormously important in terms of constructing a
collective identity based on something other than wage work, presenting
a public challenge to the dominant stereotypes of the black body, and reinforcing
a sense of dignity that was perpetually being assaulted."
-- Robin D.G. Kelley. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black
American Working Class. New York: The Free Press, 1994, pp. 18-19.
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