Culture
The Snowman Shirt That Got Kids Expelled Is Now Sold at Nordstrom
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
In 2005, Young Jeezy released a T-shirt featuring a cartoon snowman. The snowman was not building a snow fort. The snowman was not wishing anyone a Merry Christmas. The snowman was a piece of deliberate, layered iconography from a rapper whose entire brand was the trap economy, and school administrators across the American South responded the way American school administrators respond to everything: with a laminated policy document and a phone call home.
The shirts were confiscated. Children were suspended. At least one school district in Georgia reportedly distributed a memo identifying the Snowman logo as gang-related apparel, placing it in the same threat category as bandanas and, presumably, suspicious eye contact.
Jeezy, now in his mid-forties and recently very busy with a public divorce and a memoir, has reflected on this chapter of his legacy and arrived at the conclusion that it was, on balance, worth it. He did not specify worth it for whom.
The kids who got sent home are not, as far as anyone can determine, the ones being consulted.
"It was a movement," Jeezy told the interviewer, a sentence that carries different weight depending on whether your movement included three days of in-school suspension and a parent-teacher conference about your "choices."
What is genuinely remarkable, and what nobody in the original memo seems to have modeled out, is that the bans worked as advertising. Every confiscated shirt was a press release. Every suspension was a five-paragraph essay on scarcity marketing that no business school has yet had the courage to assign. By 2007, the Snowman had migrated from the underground economy to Hot Topic, which is where American counterculture goes to retire with benefits.
By 2010, a version of the aesthetic was available at Nordstrom. The assistant principal who wrote the original memo was, statistically, still working in the same building, still wearing the same lanyard, still explaining to a different set of teenagers why their clothing choices reflected their character.
He was not consulted for this article either.
The arc is almost classical. A symbol gets banned precisely because the people banning it understand, on some level, what it means. The ban makes it mean more. The meaning gets purchased by a larger audience that finds it charming rather than threatening. The original audience watches this happen from a distance, some of them with a disciplinary record that followed them to a job application.
Jeezy, to his credit, built something that lasted. The Snowman is a genuinely interesting piece of American design: legible, deniable, and absolutely clear to anyone paying attention, which is a description that also fits most of the institutions that tried to stop it.
The schools, for their part, have not issued a follow-up memo.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-young-jeezy-logo-used-to-get-kids-kicked-out-of-school-but-the-rapper-still-says-it-was-worth-it/