ABSTRACT
Parents and baby boomer teachers alike find themselves involved in cultural wars which they believe they can win by going "back to the basics" or "back to the future" as in the case of Discipline Based Art Education. The prize of owning a pair of top-of-the-line basketball shoes has caused "swarming" raids where teenagers rob and kill one another for such shoes by ganging up on those who possess such items. The well-known justification for such "semiotic" dressing has been advocated by cultural critics who claim that irony and parody function in this war of signs as the new politics of postmodernism. If Jeremy's comments are any indication of the raised consciousness of racism through Cross Colour T-shirts, hats, and jeans, the answer has to be a lukewarm "yes" to the label's impact in intervening the discourse on racism—pointing to the differences of color which exist amongst African-Americans themselves.
