Hood

Alison Kinney is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. She is a regular correspondent at The Paris Review Daily, and her writing also appears online at The New Yorker, Harper's, Lapham's Quarterly, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Longreads, Hyperallergic, L.A. Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Inquiry, New Republic, VAN Magazine, and other publications.

Provocative and highly informative, Alison Kinney's Hood considers this seemingly neutral garment accessory and reveals it to be vexed by a long history of violence, from the Grim Reaper to the KKK and beyond—a history we would do well to address, and redress. Readers will never see hoods the same way again.

• Chapter One: “That very, very simple thing about the hood”The Grim Reaper. The executioner and the executed.Chapter Two: The Struggle Against Terrorism Two Murals. The Ku Klux Klan. Lynching. The Spanish Inquisition. A Timeline of Hooding. Abu Ghraib.Chapter Three: Little Red Riding Hoodlum Our bodies, our hoods. The Seattle WTO protests. Black Blocs and pink blocs.Chapter Four: “It’s What’s Under the Hood That Counts”Everybody’s hoods. Anti-hoodie initiatives. Black Lives Matter.AcknowledgementsList of Illustrations Notes