i have a love/hate relationship with the idea of politicizing babies. on the one hand, it feels exploitative to put a message on a child who does not yet have the tools to comprehend its implications - a t-shirt, a sign at a protest. but on the other hand, aren't all children emblematic of their parents' beliefs?
for example, a little girl head-to-toes in pink baby gap suggests many things about the parent/guardian that chose to dress her this way. one could easily speculate about their attitudes toward gender, sweatshop labor, global vs. local economies and more.
at the same time, many if not most people, especially in the united states, do not think of their consumer choices as intertwined with their politics and ethics at all; rather, they are just going with the flow, following the trend. if the gap is "in" within the community that they feel most part of (or the community they aspire to be a part of), gap is how they will dress their children. they probably won't actually think for even a moment about the labor or environmental conditions in which the clothes were made.
so when a hip progressive buys one of these shirts for their three-year-old, they are at least stepping out of the consumer-with-blinders-on default and being "political." but does
this parent think about who made the shirt, where the materials come from, or a myriad other things that contribute to its true cost and true ethical symbolism? and do they know the complete stories of the individuals who are being monochromatically iconicized? i, for example, have only been learning in the past few years that
gandhi sometimes condoned violence and was sometimes misogynistic, and that
che guevara was homophobic and that
jim morrison was the "lizard king".
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