I can't really say that I think this "deserves" a diary, but maybe it would serve some to have a diary about this shirt.
As a largely feral child, I had precious little access to decent clothing. One reliable source of clothing, however, was my aunt and uncle. The two of them owned a silk screen business, but it was mostly operated by my aunt. The shop was almost completely manual. I remember when they got their first big roll through dryer installed. I remember looking forward to the possibility of a box of misprinted items- mesh back hats, and some long and short sleeve t's.
They had a shop a little bit from Mckinney, and I spent my Summers in the area. I don't know if I ever visited Mckinney, but I'm sure we must have. We drove a lot on the weekends. In the front cab or the open back of a pickup truck driven by someone who may or may not be holding a silver can between their denim jean cutoff clad legs.
There were some leftover shirts after Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton win, so they stored them for a bit and then liquidated them.
I had two of these Ross Perot shirts, but my wife apparently slept away all of the fibers in the first one, and she is coming perilously close to losing the memory of the 1992 presidential candidate, Ross Perot.
We spent many of our days running across broken blacktop and cracked sidewalks in oppressively hot weather, drinking one kind of coke or another. We exposed the bored neighborhood kids to the exotic Northwesterners. We wielded words like "Awesome," but they would just say it was "Bad."
I learned a lot of things that I would later discover were overtly racist. The neighborhood kids simply didn't stop to think twice about the words they used. These were new things to me, and I hadn't really faced the issue of racism at this point. What luxury. The racism that they displayed was really not hidden, and it seemed to be such a normal part of everyday life. Someone would have a hard time telling that such racism is morally unacceptable if that was all they had to go by.
I kind of remember what "the projects" looked like there. The dark red bricks and rusty clothes lines might just be archival or stock footage in my mind. It was simply an understood fact among the neighborhood kids that the black people lived there. These were not evil children. Maybe they were unfortunate. These were just kids growing up without anyone to correct their ignorance. I wonder if some of those kids didn't grow up to become the completely average profile that the local PD's desire.
In order to remain racist, people have to actively search out these more and more convoluted ideas. We live in a widely connected world where more and more people are becoming more and more comfortable with "the other." In order to remain racist, someone has to actively search out and create explanations for events that become more and more ludicrous, whether they be conspiracies, false flags, or simple "facts of life". These are the root of the stories that the racists are telling themselves about the motives of the shooter in Charleston.