By Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
I guess this shouldn’t bother me. Maybe I don’t have the right to allow it to bother me.

But it does.

Since the crack cocaine epidemic began spawning so much carnage in black communities two decades ago, another morbid trend has evolved. In many violence-ridden places, people have taken to remembering their murdered loved ones by wearing the images of the slain on T-shirts.

Now, people who have lost people they care about to violence have every right to express their grief in whichever way offers the best comfort. If that means a T-shirt, then so be it. Yet while I’m sensitive to their loss, I can’t help but be troubled by the collective message that wearing T-shirts airbrushed with the faces of the dead sends.

That message being that, among many of us, violence and murder has become so common that it has transcended the realm of cemeteries and solemnity into the realm of mass-marketing. Murder — especially slayings generated by drug and gang-related violence — is no longer shrouded in anomaly as it is in the trappings of pop culture.

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