Ghost Turtles

Vanessa Friedman:Once again the white suit rears its powerfully symbolic head. There are few garments in the political wardrobe that have been worn so deliberately and become as imbued with meaning. This time it has stepped front and center thanks to the saga of State Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee, a Democrat and, at 27, one of the youngest Black lawmakers in the state government.

Mr. Jones and his fellow representative Justin J. Pearson came to national attention on April 6 when they were expelled from the legislature over a protest for gun control. Mr. Jones was reinstated on Monday by the Nashville Metropolitan Council, his district’s governing body, but by then his image had already gone international: a totem of what it meant to stand up to, as he called it in a fiery speech from the House floor on the day of his expulsion, the “flexing of false power.”

See, on the day of his expulsion, Mr. Jones was wearing what The Tennessean called his “trademark white suit” with a white shirt and light brown tie, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. The image of him walking out of the woody chamber with a fist held high, glowing from every angle, made for an indelible picture.

“The world is watching,” he said, and it was. Since then, photographs of him in the suit have not just appeared again and again online and in news reports (even in stories about his return, rather than the sage green he wore at the time), but have also been used as a clarion call in emails by political action committees.

As Alison Cook, of The Houston Chronicle, tweeted, it was simply a “masterstroke of presentation.” One made by a member of a new generation that understands just how useful a picture can be to make a point in a social media age.

Source: The Return of Justin Jones and the White Suit – The New York Times