By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 12 years ago

“Do I look suspicious?”

Students at the historically Black college Howard University have put together this beautiful little video about racial profiling and the assumption that any man of colour in  a hoodie is suspicious.

In light of the comments about how Trayvon Martin’s clothing was as much to blame for his death as the man who killed him, many people have been making the point that any man of colour is considered suspicious in America, regardless of what he’s wearing.  As one of my friends said, “It’s not about the clothes. It’s never about the clothes.” As the men of Howard explain so succinctly and beautifully, it’s about racial profiling.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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