You're Known By The Hat You Wear

Cynthia Tucker

January 27, 2019 4:36 am



Symbols are powerful, conveying profound messages with the simplest images.

Soldiers carry a flag into battle and face death to hoist it aloft. Christian churches are identified by T-shaped pieces of wood or metal affixed to prominent places. In some ancient Eastern religions, the swastika represented peace, but it is today universally recognized as a sign of racism and anti-Semitism, violent repression and genocide. Each of those symbols carries a deep meaning recognized by those who display it.

During his 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump launched his own symbol — a baseball cap with the words “Make America Great Again” emblazoned on it. Because of the incendiary rhetoric he spewed during his rallies, the MAGA cap quickly became associated with a bundle of prejudices — xenophobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia. If you wear the cap, you aren’t just a fan of Trump; you’re also a bigot who wants to build a wall on the southern border.

Or so the thinking goes.

That helped to make last weekend’s encounter between the Covington Catholic High School teens and a Native American man on the Washington Mall especially fraught: Several of the Covington students were wearing MAGA caps. (And regardless of what you’ve heard about the students being misrepresented, some of them can indeed be heard sarcastically whooping Hollywood versions of Indian war cries and miming a tomahawk chop.)

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