This was an image that Spector had taken down from the website, Lingua Franca during the summer of 2020. It is an image of her swearing a black cashmere sweatshirt with the words “Original Gangsta” written in white or light pink cursive, across the front. On Twitter, people grabbed images of this, after which a number of eagle-eyed viewers noticed that it went missing from their website after people posted the image on Twitter. A few people sent me screenshots, for my records.

It’s worth noting, in the context of hip-hop halos, that the company who made this sweater — Lingua Franca — was founded by Rachel Hruska MacPherson, who was profiled in the 2020 article, “The Ladies Who Lunch: Lingua Franca and The Rise of The Resistance Socialite” became known for creating sweaters “with hip hop lyrics and references embroidered on them.” The beginnings of the company follow, according to the piece: “That weekend, in February 2016, she [Hruska MacPherson] was in Montauk and followed her therapist’s advice by embroidering BOOYAH on an old cashmere sweater.” Subsequent cashmere sweaters with hip-hop (Conceptual?) iconography followed, including the “Original Gangsta” sweater that Spector is wearing above, which according to the article, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio bought “for whomever he was dating at the time.”

In the gentrified Brooklyn/Manhattan world that Spector occupies, I can understand why she thought this was a edgy thing to do. It also reinforced why she fought hard against edits, and thought that she was “cooking with grease”, as the saying goes, with “hip-hop halo”. To a group of White women in New York City who mostly only know Black people through the extremes of service or celebrity, they believe that they are the good ones, their racism is not racism but blind-spots, and they believe that their status as women gives them license to speak on all matters of marginalized people. Even if they have no lived or cultural or intellectual experience with the worlds, like hip-hop.