Are we pimping our own misery?
 
I know some black folks spend way too much time in “I am victim, hear me whine” mode, but the T-shirt with pictures of Emmett Till’s mutilated body and the poor brother whose body burned while a group of white people cheered was a bit much.
 
It was a pleasant summer weekend I had been looking forward to for quite some time. Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum -- dedicated to black history -- was opening on the same day the city’s annual African American Heritage Festival was being held.
 
So, I headed to the festival looking to celebrate some black heritage. I met Greg Brown, my old high school and college buddy-slash-fellow amateur wrestling fan, who steered me to a stand selling T-shirts.

Most of the shirts were just fine. I ended up buying one with Muhammad Ali standing over a prostrate and beaten Sonny Liston in what may be the most famous photo of “The Greatest” ever shot. I bought another one with Jack Johnson on the front. Every July 4, I celebrate what happened that day in Reno, Nevada in 1910 as much as I celebrate what happened that day in Philadelphia in 1776.
 
But the brothers running this particular booth had other T-shirts. Some talked about the horrors of slavery. Others called for reparations for slavery. Some explored the horrors of slavery AND demanded reparations for slavery.
 
And then there were the lynching T-shirts.
 
One depicted Till’s horribly disfigured face -- the result of a beating from two white racists in Money, Miss. in 1955 -- as he lay in his coffin. The other was of a black man’s body as it lay burning on smoldering logs.
 
I’ve seen both pictures in books more times than I care to remember. I never thought I’d see them on a T-shirt. And for sale, at that.
 
This is properly called “pimping misery.” It’s also milking victimhood for everything it’s worth, except that victimhood isn’t worth much. Victimhood and two bucks wouldn’t even buy you a good meal at the cheapest restaurant in your town.
 
But that’s not what bothered me the most about the T-shirts. It was the curious feeling of deja vu. I got an eerie feeling as I looked at Till’s face and the lynched black man on the T-shirt.
 
Didn’t white people used to do this?
 
Indeed, they did. Except they didn’t put pictures of black lynching victims on T-shirts and sell them for $15 a pop. They put the pictures on postcards and sent them to friends and family.
 
That was sick business. Putting the pictures of lynching victims on T-shirts to sell for profit is just as sick. It may not be exactly the same thing. But it’s sure as heck adjoining pews in the same church.
 
Having no wish to flail the “black misery” horse, I walked around the festival until I found a T-shirt vendor with wares more to my liking. A couple of brothers from South Carolina had a line of shirts devoted to the Buffalo Soldiers, the Negro Leagues and the Tuskegee Airmen.
 
Now, that’s black history more to my liking.

Our brothers from South Carolina knew -- whereas the ones hawking the Emmett Till T-shirts failed to grasp -- that our history is more than about being victims. It’s about achievement. And those black men in the 9th and 10th Cavalry units and the 24th and 25 Infantry regiments were about achievement. As were those Tuskegee Airmen and those ballplayers in the Negro Leagues. It’s worth noting that the stellar achievements of all these black men came at a time when white racism was most virulent.
 
How, then, do we explain the existence of what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the “color me victim” T-shirts? I suspect they’re meant to appeal to black America’s hip-hop generation, who were born on the tail end of the oppression black folks faced and want in on the misery for some reason.
 
But as a black baby boomer who was only a four-year-old when he saw how his elders reacted to those pictures of Emmett Till, and who was 11 when those four little girls were blown into eternity in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, I can assure them: you don’t ever want to live through something like that.
 
And you sure as heck don’t want to memorialize it on a T-shirt.