Why Burberry's Noose hoodie needs to be called out

Burberry is the latest to join the fashion fray for completely inappropriate pieces.

In their latest show for London Fashion Week, they showed a look featuring a hoodie with neck chords tied as a noose.

While many are calling out the label for bringing a negative light to mental illness by glamorizing suicide, to People of Color, nooses represent something completely different.

Namely, the murder of Black people by lynching. More than 4400 African American men, women, and even children were hanged but also burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. The true number may never be known.

So prolific was the practice of lynching here in the United States, there is now an entire Museum and Memorial dedicated to the numerous and brutal murders. Actually located on the site of a former warehouse where Black men, women, and children were enslaved in Montgomery, Alabama, this narrative museum gives the tribute to the victims of the domestic slave trade, racial terrorism, Jim Crow, and so on.

This look that Burberry displayed is also reminiscent of another very public death, Trayvon Martin, who, because he had his hood up walking in the Floridian rain home from school, was publicly murdered. His murder never saw justice for taking his life. Trayvon was only seventeen years old. The hoodie has become a symbol here, a memorial for Trayvon and the many Black men and women murdered without justice.

To me, this Burberry hoodie highlighted both of these truths for the Black community and mocks it by attempting to make it aesthetic. But it comes as no surprise that this hoodie along with pieces of luxurious blackface have come along when they have. Anyone can see that racism has been unleashed and allowed to run rampant, new incidents from people of all positions are getting caught and the vile acts that Black people have been only telling the "post-racial" populous about for decades are now filling our feeds, timelines, and headlines. So why wouldn't a lynching hoodie come down the runways now?

I am also not surprised that Burberry would pull a stunt like this. After all, Black people have created culture, from hairstyles to the way we wear our clothes, slang and even music. It was only a matter of time before they got around to mocking our very pain, lynching being the capstone of it all.

Some will say this is a reach. People, mostly those outside of the community, will say that Black people are way to sensitive and that we are just looking for something to complain about. But as I have said from the jump, those who are outside of our communities have no right to tell those within the communities how we should feel about the things that hurt us. It is said that those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Zora Neale Hurston said, "If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

Well, we as Black people are learning from the past, and we will damn sure be silent no longer.