THERE are undoubtedly parents in Paterson who refuse to let their teenagers wear "stop snitching" T-shirts.
They know the shirt's message is about looking the other way where drugs and crime are involved. Even if the kids say it's all about fashion, these caring parents know the implicit threat in the message is "Mind your own business - or else."
That's just the attitude that helps to keep gangs and drug dealers in business.
But there are lots of other parents who don't know what the message means, or even if they do, will not stop their kids from wearing the shirts - including the shirt that has a thug holding a rat in one hand and a knife in the other.
That's too bad, but the schools and store owners can step in. The T-shirts should not be allowed in class in any Paterson school, and store owners should find other clothing to sell.
Kids can be hip and fashionable without doing public relations for criminals.
AT PATERSON'S John F. Kennedy High School and elsewhere, the "Stop Snitching" T-shirt, like any other fad, will blow over soon enough. The sentiment will not. It's part of peer loyalty. Even more, the code of silence is a bond that unites outsiders against the more powerful.
Trying to ban the T-shirt is a losing battle, especially when the wearers have patron saints like Lil' Kim to look up to. Choosing not to rat on a pal, the raunchy rapper was tried and sentenced to a year in federal prison. She'd rather fight than snitch.
Lil' Kim went to prison in September rather than betray a member of her posse. A surveillance tape proved she had lied about not knowing if her friend and bodyguard was involved in a shoot-out. She had refused to snitch on him.
Don't think of anti-snitching as a ghetto thing. "Omerta" is not exclusive to any group. Also called the blue wall of silence, it kept New York City police from ratting on one another about who sodomized Abner Louima with a stick. It shielded a Prospect Park police officer, who finally had to pay for sexual indiscretions while on duty. And Catholic bishops routinely drew a curtain of silence that allowed pedophile priests to sexually assault children in one church after the other.
The snitch or collaborator is never a hero in our culture. The turncoat, the quisling, the betrayer, the rat-fink, the stoolie. The shirt in question has different versions of the same message: "Don't Snitch," "Stop Snitchin'." At Lil' Kim's trial, "Real Men Don't Snitch" was seen on one shirt. It took a few months for the anti-snitch T-shirt, complete with an international traffic control symbol, to make its way to Paterson. It'll be gone soon enough. But it's not just about the T-shirts.
Beyond the obvious implied threat that makes this a problem, it's also an ad for the fact that minority communities don't trust the police. Too many have bad experiences equal to or worse than consequences on the street. In addition to the implied threat in "Don't Snitch or else" message on the T-shirt, there is also the subtext of bad relations between the community and law enforcement in the inner city.
The criminal justice system is not accepted as an instrument of fairness. False testimony from informants ratting people out is seen as one instrument making black and Hispanic defendants dominate the prison population disproportionately. Paterson's high school students may not know that 87 percent of the kids in juvenile lock-up look just like them, but they do know that many of their peers get sent to jail.
On her newly released CD, "The Naked Truth," Lil' Kim puffs out her chest, crowing proudly about her decision not to snitch. She uses her rap on a cut called "Spell Check" to condemn the two former members of her Junior M.A.F.I.A. posse who turned "state's evidence" on her. Their testimony helped convict the diminutive rapper.
"They took the stand, on the D.A.'s side," she says in her rap immortalizing her so-called friends as turncoats. The two members of her group won't be able to hold their heads up in a world where loyalty is held at high premium and snitching makes you a wuss. That code of silence is the very thing that keeps the nearly 10-year old murder of her former boyfriend, Biggie Smalls, unsolved. The same goes for the murders of two other rappers, Tupac and, more recently, Jam Master Jay.
Even hip-hop fans have not been very aggressive about pushing for answers. That would destroy the anti-snitch ethos that keeps outsiders banded together as a force against the more powerful. One of the unfortunate contradictions of barrio life is that even though people want to see crime and other gang activity cleaned up in minority communities, the price is high: To stop crime in the community you have to rat on your friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, parents.
I'm not endorsing drug dealing. Far from it. I encourage the kids to be smart about drugs and discourage their friends from getting involved as users or sellers. Better they should wear a T-shirt that says "Go to school, don't be a fool." If they're going to be a walking billboard, then it should be for a positive message or a neutral message. The cost of snitching is enormous, but so is the cost of not stopping street crime. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Send comments about this column to opedpage@gmail.com .
"Kids can be hip and fashionable without doing public relations for criminals."
I'm not so sure that sentence is accurate in this day. Fashionable? Perhaps. Hip? No, I don't think so.
Non-narcs are doubleplusungood