FUBU Klansman clowned for ironic footwear in rift between staunch white supremacists and Southern sympathizers

?The whole damn Internet is having a blast at the expense of one clueless Klansman and his ironic, if unintended, fashion statement.
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?Even Atlanta-based journalist George Chidi, who has written about DeKalb County politics for Creative Loafing, admits he saw a lot of weird things while covering last Saturday's Confederate flag rally at Stone Mountain. But the hood-less Klansman he caught on camera wearing sneakers designed by the former African-American brand FUBU "was the worst of it," he tells CL. "That was the funniest thing."
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?The majority of Confederate flag supporters on-hand were not laughing. In fact, many were fighting mad as they chased the culprit away from the rally. "If there weren't people with cameras and witnesses, that guy would've been going home through Grady Memorial," Chidi, who decided to attend the rally after delivering an op-ed on the flag debate for Fox 5 news, believes. 
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?Basically, what Chidi stumbled upon Saturday is the somewhat nuanced rift that separates openly racist Dixie-flag wavers like the FUBU Klansman from those who see the flag less as a symbol of undying white supremacy than a desperate cry for Southern relevancy. If old allegiances die hard, this one may have as much to do with class for some as it does race.
??embed-1"I don't think most of the people there necessarily identified with the Klan either as an organization or even ideologically," Chidi says. "I think a lot of the people there want very much to be able to define themselves as something other than the worst human beings on Earth. And so the go after the guy who looks like the worst human being on Earth — Joe Klansman who shows up."
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?Which raises the question: Can one be truly be pro-Confederate flag and anti-racist?
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?"I think that there are lots of people who very sincerely believe that is possible. Whether or not they can do it is another thing. But they sincerely believe that," Chidi says. "For all the prejudices that American society has against African-Americans, there are prejudices against poor white Southerners. People who were at that rally are the ones who sustain those prejudices, and they view the attack on the flag as an attack, not on racism, but on them as a people. So they're not fighting for the flag because they're fighting for racism, necessarily, they're fighting for the flag because they personally don't want to get shit on."
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?Chidi, a biracial resident of Pine Lake and former reporter for AJC and Raw Story, wrote about other ironies he observed Saturday in a Peach Pundit column. Another such oddity included a man waving a Confederate flag with a respectable image of President Obama superimposed onto it. Was he trying to make the flag more offensive or less, Chidi wondered. It was hard to tell, and "there was a lot of that all day," he says.
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?"The problem is there are people who are racist who do revere the flag as a racist symbol and use it as such, and it's impossible to distinguish them from people who aren't racist. I believe the flag started out racist and continues to be racist. But there are people who want it to be not racist. They don't want to associate with that because it reinforces the stereotype of stupid poor white Southerners. But they can't claim it for that new identity because nobody listens to them. Because we've got it in our head that they're poor white Southerners.... That's my impression coming out of this thing," he continues. 
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?"These are people that feel downtrodden, and so they're defensive. And that's what a lot of this is about," Chidi says. 
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?As for the tacky Klansman rocking shoes by FUBU — the same formerly black-owned "For Us By Us" brand created by Queens, New York natives and originally endorsed by hip-hop legend LL Cool J — he symbolizes the Klan's diminished public presence as hate groups have attempted to go mainstream, according to Chidi who has studied and written about the Ku Klux Klan.
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?"The Klan has lost steam. It's been losing steam," he says. "It doesn't mean that the attitude is going away. It's just changing. About 25 years ago David Duke basically told the Klan, We need to go mainstream. No more redneck stuff, wear suits and ties, get into corporate America, join the police force. There was an actual meeting. They got the heads together and said, We need to go lone wolf and underground, and we need to push our views quietly from outside. Because whenever we show up as an organization, we are immediately attacked...."
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?"So it's not that the Klan doesn't exist. It's like they took off their uniforms and they're just there and you don't know who they are," Chidi says. "The amazing thing is that somebody actually showed up with Klan symbology at all at a place like this. And it'ss because he's out of the loop."
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?The funny thing is Chidi never would've recognized the lone Klansman's FUBUs if it weren't for another flag supporter there who pointed it out. "As the crowd was getting this guy to get out of there, a woman in the crowd — white, South Georgia accent — grabbed me and said, 'Look at his shoes! Look, it's FUBU shoes!' And I was like, wait, really? Then I looked and said, 'Oh my God, they're FUBU shoes!'"
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?While the man didn't seem the least bit concerned with his odd choice of footwear, Chidi thinks he's probably somewhere having second thoughts right about now.
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?"I think he's gonna burn the shoes," Chidi says. "Because there's no way that the video hasn't gotten back to him. It's going to be perfectly obvious that he's viral. I don't know if he'll recognize what that means. But whether or not, he'll realize it when he walks into the Walmart and people recognize him as the doofus Klansman who wears FUBU."
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