Dead & Buried

When I was 14, I used to love coming to the mall.

On a good day, I would walk out with a Cinnabon, a glamor shot, and a new airbrushed T-shirt memorializing my favorite celebrity.

What I did not fully understand was the rich history and culture importance of how rest in peace T-shirts help those who have lost a loved one process and sometimes even create justice around loss derived from systemic oppression and social injustice.

A memorial or R.I.P.

T-shirt is the way to commemorate a deceased loved one.

The shirts typically include an image of the loved one, their date of birth and date of death, and often a quote that captures their personality.

So what is the story behind these shirts and why are they so meaningful and prevalent in the black community in particular for black people in the US have a long history of creating alternative ways to celebrate and remember family and friends who have died.

But when we explore the black American relationship to cemeteries, a complex and unpleasant history is revealed to maximize their profits.

Enslavers often force black communities to bury their dead in remote areas that could be difficult to access.

Black Americans practice elaborate burial rituals, but frequent family separation, brutal living conditions and the use of temporary markers made it almost impossible to return to a loved one's gravesite to remember and mourn.

Over the past 30 years or so.

The memorial T-shirt has become a visible and tangible tool used to honor loved ones.

Dr. Kami Fletcher, an associate professor of history at Albright College, defines R.i.p T-shirts as a multipurpose ritual garment that is worn in a celebratory style.

The T-shirts liberate black mourners from the cemetery setting, allowing something accessible.

Dr. Fletcher coined the term walking memorial to describe mourners ability to memorialize their loved one by wearing their R.I.P.

shirt as they move about their community and beyond.

R.I.P.

shirts within the United States originated around the late 1980s 1990s, and the shirts usually came about after the violent death of usually a young person.

And usually you see memorial shirts now publicly at rallies and marches and protests concerning black lives.

People in other countries also create shirts to present their stances against different matters.

Attire what you wear on you can be a way to show how you deeply care.

Memorial shirts take on a different meaning in the minds of some other people who are not familiar with this particular coping mechanism.

So I think that knowledge, increased knowledge, more information, fashion about the shirts and what they're for and what they're trying to represent is really important.

The origins of wearable memorialization are not clear, but many say the tradition can be traced back to the West African custom of placing a deceased loved one's name on scarves, handkerchiefs and other tangible objects.

However, R.I.P.

shirts originated in the graffiti and hip hop culture of the 1980s and nineties.

This happened along side the rise of violent deaths in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and New York.

Men in the community use R.I.P.

shirts as a way to express their grief, memorialize their peers, and emotionally reconcile the tragic death of their young friends and brothers.

Okay, let's take a pause here and break this down.

The increase in gun violence emerged from systemic issues rooted deep in dominant American culture.

The deindustrialization of the era, high unemployment rates, lack of government investment in black communities and subsequent mass incarceration all contributed to the rise in violent deaths.

In this context, R.I.P.

T-shirts were an important way for men in a hyper masculine culture to express grief in a manner that was socially acceptable at this time.

Tupac and Biggie both experienced violent and widely publicized deaths.

These tragedies made R.I.P.

shirts highly visible in mainstream culture for the first time.

So why have they stuck around for so long?

R.I.P.

T-shirts can also function as an important tool for social change.

Activist s in this space have used photos on shirts as motifs for social movements like, say, her name, defund the police and Black Lives Matter.

This is often a deliberate way of shifting broad media coverage into a nuanced perspective on who a person was and how they were loved by the community.

With a T-shirt, you can say something without saying anything.

It lets people know where you stand.

I want everybody in the world to know of my sister and know that even though she died, tragic looking, she was a tragic person.

A taxi and a car.

Jefferson.

She was a graduate of Xavier.

University of Louisiana.

Majored in biology, minor in chemistry.

Her goal was to find the cure for diabetes.

And on October 12th of 2019, a neighbor called said that the doors to my mother's house were open.

The police came.

They decided to go around the house, go into the backyard.

As my sister was looking out of the window to see who was in the backyard.

In front of her was a police officer with a gun.

And he just said, Show me your hands.

And in that same breath of Show me your hands, he shot through the window and killed my sister, Tatiana.

I think a lot of times people see a name in a headline and they don't understand the significance of it being somebody that close to you and your family and then you having to take on something that is a world issue.

All of the sudden that, you know, you probably would never ask for.

Why do you think that it's important to design the shirt in a way that represents the idea without many words?

It's not the uniform I've always wanted, though, Princess Belle.

I wear my shirt.

You know, I have my son.

I'm ready to go.

Why do you think that it is so effective to use wrap shirts in this way?

They're not gone.

So we want to make sure that people see them and they're not invisible.

And just the last image of them is their headstone.

No, we're going to have several images of them.

Just keep going because that's how they stay alive.

The careful use of memory in presenting multidimensional narratives of loved ones who were killed are what make our t shirts such an important tool in activism.

To quote historian Dr. Kami Fletcher, who helped create this episode, R.I.P.

T Shirts Allow Room for Healing by metaphorically filling the void of the loved ones absence.

Serving as a second skin to keep the loved one close.

What do you think?