John L. Cook was established in Buenos Aires, 1975 and reached its popularity peak during the 80’s and 90’s. Today, it is considered one of Argentina’s most high-fashion/cool clothing brand regarding the “hippie” style; Cook’s owner Emiliano Fitá makes $140 millions from it.

Being an Argentinian myself, I’ve seen this brand’s stores in most malls, people wear their clothes, my own friends sporting their clothing items and accessories. Slight problem: the brand’s logo is the Confederate flag.

Something should be taken into consideration: Argentina has very little history of discrimination again the black community, it dates back to the 1800’s. Our population barely consists of any black person, quite unlike the United States. There is little to no knowledge, even among the most educated classes, on who the Confederates were.

I remember sitting in History class, one of my classmates had her John L. Cook jacket laying on her desk (it had the flag embroidered on the inside) and she was sitting right in front of the teacher. He was teaching the class when he simply stopped talking, glanced at the jacket, looked at my classmate, and said: “Do you even know what that flag means?” She didn’t.

Here’s the thing, some of the people who do know what that flag means and represents choose not to care and give the brand their money anyway.

Here’s a very brief summary on what the Confederation was: the civil war im the United States was fought between 1861 and 1865 between the Confederate States (made up by the southern states), and the Union (every other state that wasn’t Confederate, a.k.a the United States). The Confederate States defended slavery, most of its soldiers and affiliates came from white, slaveholding families who were white supremacists. They believed in the superiority of the white, felt no shame in slavery, and deliberately went into war with a sky clear opinion of what they were fighting for.

The KKK itself has used the Confederate flag to represent themselves, although it has never been their official flag. I think that gives a pretty clear idea of what these people believed in.

How can we, as human beings, choose to ignore the amount of bloodshed and injustice represented in this flag because it looks pretty and fashionable? How can a man see a flag he knows nothing about and decide to make it his brand’s image? How can that same man keep that image up after learning what it represents?

The oppression, murder, and suffering of black people is not your fashion brand.

Many complaints and petitions have been made to change the logo, there is no way that the owners don’t know what it means by now. Yet they choose to keep it, maintain their image, and say they support love and what comes from the heart. If you believe in love so much but are unable to change your business’ logo into something else as it represents hate and slaughter because of whatever reason you’re making yourself believe to feel better about it, then I’m sorry but you couldn’t care less about love.

Just because this tragedy didn’t affect our country or killed our people doesn’t mean we can’t care. We can, we must. I’ve heard a few people saying  that stressing over something like a fashion brand is pointless, that we should just “let it be”, but winning this argument would not only mean that a company would stop profiting from a blatant symbol of racism, but also a step towards not normalizing hate and  intolerance anymore. Many small gestures, either good or bad, can make up a big one with an even bigger impact and it is up to us to decide whether we want to help change the world into a more loving and kind one little by little or just accept and naturalize every-day injustice.

If you are interested in signing the  petition against this logo as well as getting more information on what it means and stands for, you can click here.