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If someone decries the price of a Che Guevara t-shirt, and you point out the irony, you are perhaps missing their sarcasm. But racism is different. There doesn
by ttyprintk 4y ago
If someone decries the price of a Che Guevara t-shirt, and you point out the irony, you are perhaps missing their sarcasm.
But racism is different. There doesn’t seem to be a social hurdle in pointing out racism, even when it’s conspicuously ironic.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoWhen Glasnost was a thing some fashion company made high priced Communist themed jackets (communist enough that kids on a bus thought I was Russian), of course I had to get one. Some months later I was in San Francisco at the part where the Haight touches Golden Gate park wearing my jacket when an old hippie got mad and started yelling at me that communism was more than just fashion, having had his say he wandered disgruntled off to the nearby McDonalds to get some lunch.
- ttyprintk 4y agoThat’s a great example. There have been some times in Russian history when art has been allowed to re-evaluate virtues. Often, the State realizes this and clamps down. In living memory, you might hear that art is owned by the people and must be understood by the people. For at least 50 years everything outside Socialist realism was therefore obscene. So a jacket with symbols of a one-party state, or a t-shirt with an aspirationally Marxist revolutionary is art in both the state-controlled and free worlds. Your jacket probably outlived the USSR and I bet Che Guevara t-shirts are the only thing keeping his memory going.