Notice: Hawaiian Shirts may be canceled soon

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How white nationalists hijacked the Hawaiian shirt




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Jul 31st 2020
BY MATTHEW SWEET

They’d been growing underground for months – years, possibly – on the gloomier levels of the internet, where the dank memes live. But lockdown and the early-summer sunshine made them rise in the civic spaces of America. Blowsy hibiscus flowers. Cycad leaves. Fat yellow pineapples. The bright, cheerful blooms of armed, dangerous, white, alt-right America.

Fascism has a history with fashion. In the 1930s the Nazis designed their own shirts and commissioned Hugo Boss to produce them in black and brown. Their modern American cousins buy them off the rack at high-street beachwear boutiques. The “Boogaloo Boys” as they are known, an amorphous coalition of gun-loving anti-statists, white supremacists, preppers and libertarians, have adopted the Aloha shirt as regulation. A garment once associated with golfing seniors and barbecue dads now wraps the bodies of American militiamen gagging for a second civil war.

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Aloha shirts have become a disconcerting signature for members of a gun-toting, anti-government faction


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Who are these people and why are they dressed like tropical vacationers heading into battle? Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center of Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League based in Ohio, explained that deceptively cheery Hawaiian-style button-ups have come to signify extremists who believe that a second American civil war—or “boogaloo”—is on the horizon. Sharing rhetoric with far-right sects like white supremacists, militia groups and anti-government ideologues, these boogalooers, or “boogaloo bois,’’ have at times been a very small, but disruptive presence at overwhelmingly peaceful protests.

On Saturday May 30, after attempting to provoke violence at protests in Las Vegas, three self-identified members of the boogaloo community were arrested and charged with conspiracy to cause destruction. “Violent instigators have hijacked peaceful protests and demonstrations across the country, including Nevada, exploiting the real and legitimate outrage over Mr. Floyd’s death for their own radical agendas,” said United States Attorney Nicholas Trutanich in a public statement.

The boogaloo community trades information via social media sites like Facebook, message boards like 4chan and messaging services like Telegram. In a roundabout way, this decentralized approach to communication gave rise to the group’s peculiar name and choice of attire. The term “boogaloo” comes from the 1984 film “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” which has long been the basis for a trite internet joke about imaginary sequels. At one point, the riff “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo” started being bandied about on far-right channels. As the ideology spread, the reference to “boogaloo” became contorted, variously appearing as “big igloo” and “big luau.” The Hawaiian shirt grew out of the “big luau” shorthand, according to several experts on far-right groups who were interviewed for this article.

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The boogaloo community’s Hawaiian-shirt dress code crystallized in a more organic, bottom-up way, emerging via a tangled web of internet humor and memes. Within fringe groups, this circuitous pathway from a meme to something more real is “a new phenomenon” said Ms. Miller-Idriss. As an earlier example of a meme that was elevated into alt-right iconography, she points to Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that in recent years was appropriated by racist and anti-Semitic groups and subsequently plastered on T-shirts, stickers and flags. The Hawaiian shirt reflects the diabolical sense of humor at the root of the boogaloo community. “Hawaiian luaus feature a pig roast, which is a slur for the police. So [the shirt is] also a way of evoking or suggesting violence in the coming civil war against the police,” said Ms. Miller-Idriss.

Plus, the inherent jolliness of a Hawaiian shirt gives heavily armed boogaloo boys a veneer of absurdity when they appear in public that can deflate criticism. “It’s tough to talk about the danger of guys showing up to rallies in Hawaiian shirts without sounding a little bit ridiculous,” said Howard Graves, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The Hawaiian shirt dates back to the early 20th century, when a Hawaii-based shirt maker of Japanese heritage began producing the ornately patterned designs. Aloha shirts were both birthed and popularized by people of color so their adoption, a century later, by a far-right militia can be viewed as dismally ironic, a white-supremacist act of appropriation.

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