Archival Consumed: Stop Snitchin’ T-Shirts

[ Silent Treatment ]

The adoration of the outlaw is a durable feature of American culture, giving us romantic images of authority-defying individuals from Billy the Kid to Tony Soprano. And maybe this attraction has something to do with the recent and rather controversial success of a Boston clothier called Antonio Ansaldi, which has sold more than 10,000 T-shirts featuring a big red stop sign and the slogan “Stop Snitchin’.”Stop Snitchin’ T-shirts are popular among young men in inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Jersey City and elsewhere — not just the shirts that Antonio Ansaldi makes but also a host of variations and knockoffs. Snitching, of course, refers to giving information to law enforcement that might result in an arrest for, say, drug dealing or murder. Last year, a DVD that circulated in Baltimore gained nationwide notoriety for showing self-professed drug dealers making explicit threats against snitches. Apparently opposition to cooperating with the police — and, by extension, to the rule of law itself – has a constituency. The Web site for Antonio Ansaldi features a group of unsmiling young African-Americans wearing the shirts under a graffiti-style sign reading, “Stop Snitchin’: The Movement.”

Not surprisingly, this has outraged police officials and various community leaders. After all, given the degree to which crime victimizes inner-city residents, it seems perverse to endorse flat-out resistance to combating it. (Boston’s mayor has called for a boycott of a store there that sells the shirts.) The Antonio Ansaldi site suggests a First Amendment defense in the form of a slogan: “Freedom of Expression. . .Is Not Intimidation.” But this rationale (with its unfortunate echoes of arguments that hate groups use to promote their right to public demonstrations and so on) turns out to be only a minor element of the explanations offered by Antonio Ennis, co-founder of Antonio Ansaldi.

Ennis, a former hip-hop artist of African-American and Hispanic descent who describes himself as having been “raised on the streets,” says he understands the objections to his shirts but finds them unfair. First, he contends that snitches are routinely demonized in popular culture — as in the “Scarface” scene in which a suspected police informer is dangled from a helicopter — yet no one is going after Hollywood honchos. Second, he argues that the shirts are not causing a negative attitude about cooperating with the police; they are reflecting one that is already pervasive in inner cities. Giving information that sends someone to jail, he continues, is risky, because violent retribution is likely. Besides, most snitches are ex-cons and liars anyway, he says: “The snitch element is not a good element in the urban community.” In other words, the alienation of the core Stop Snitchin’ consumer from the legal establishment is already complete; the T-shirts merely turn that sentiment into a (salable) symbol.

As grim as that sounds, it is not Ennis’s final point. He says that he has offered Stop Snitchin’ shirts for several years (predating the Baltimore DVD) but that they have truly taken off only recently. The reason is that the shirt has since been displayed in rap videos. One features the rapper Jim Jones leading a bunch of swaggering young black men in Stop Snitchin’ T-shirts down a dark and murky street. It looks like an outtake from some fear-mongering, stereotype-filled 1970’s police drama; today, this imagery is apparently moving the shirts to a new demographic: suburban kids. These consumers, Ennis says, make up a growing chunk of his business. He gets 50 or 60 online orders a day, through his site as well as his Amazon.com storefront, from all over the United States (and, lately, other countries). Ennis claims that even police officers have bought the shirts.

Gangsta rap has played to the fascination with outlaws for years, of course, with commercial success in the mainstream. “It’s almost like they don’t know what it means,” Ennis says of his new customers. “But it looks good. They see it, and it’s like — ‘I want that.”‘ This is what Ennis means when he maintains that, ultimately, the shirts are nothing more than a fashion statement: a symbol of a rift — gaping, heartbreaking and raw — in American society catches on because it looks cool and famous people wear it. Incredibly, he may be right.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the October 9, 2005, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]