urbanoutfitters: OBEY x Keith Haring (Okay. Considering the legacy of Keith Haring, and the bullshit that is Urban Outfitters, not only within the sphere for gay rights (um, hello, THEIR CEO DONATED MILLIONS TO RICK SANTORUM), but also in cultural appropriation, stealing from independent designers, borderline racism, sexism, and sizeist slurs (to name a few!), let me just say, WHAT THE FUCK?! The worst part is, I’d love these shirts. How is it that the people holding Keith Haring’s rights are allowing this?!) DEAR URBAN OUTFITTERS, please! Stop appropriating queerness to sell your overpriced clothing. Stop exploiting our movement for equal rights to sell t-shirts, while FUNDING the opposition. Stop being evil. Please. Just stop. Just for a little bit. It may have been cool to stop caring. To become apathetic. The information age overwhelmed us with more founts of bad news than we’ve ever had to deal with, exposed us to more differing and contradicting points of view than we knew how to process. Many of us reacted, perhaps understandably, with irony and apathy to arm us. That was our youth culture. There are horrible things in the world, yeah, whatever—I’ll snark it. I’ll put it on a t-shirt. In a classic move, Urban Outfitters and other businesses like it took advantage of this, appropriated the new youth culture and “movement,” if we can even call it that, to sell, our irony and our apathy and our tee-shirts and our nostalgia for better times, for the cartoons of our 90s childhoods, to the street culture of the 80s and the fashion of the 70s, when times were different, when kids like us were cool and passionate and not overwhelmed—all this, now, in the $50.00 - $500.00 price range! But Urban, let me tell you. That tide is turning. And I know your marketing team is just doing its thing. They don’t know, or care, about my cultural analysis. They might not even know or care about how appropriative and hypocritical their company—hell, their work—is. The people who run your tumblr, who  I am now reblogging, don’t give a shit. They probably make $10/hr to do it. And you will continue to sell. But we will not always be apathetic. We will learn to take in all the information at our fingertips, and process it, and harness it, and launch it. We find our niches, things to care about, to be passionate about. If tumblr is indicative of anything, we youth are caring again, and our caring is rich, it is plural, it is inclusive—and it is biting. It is bitter. It is tired of your bullshit. Capitalism will chug on. But the pulse under your finger is beating differently. Keep up. Please, for the good of the world, if not your bottom line—keep up. Also, until you do— KEITH HARING IS OURS. GIVE HIM BACK. P.S., it’s just a start, but call JC Penney on how to start doing “corporate support” right.