White Boy Summer is a bad idea — but are its shirts racist?

A “White Boy Summer” t-shirt that uses the Cloister Black font. Courtesy of twitter
“White Boy Summer” is one more item in a line of Chet Hanks’ bad decisions — but does it also have a racist aesthetic?
Son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, the 30-year-old actor-rapper, who is the recent subject of a protective order requested by his ex-girlfriend, went on Instagram last week to announce (or threaten) a forthcoming season of white guydom; he hastened to say he didn’t mean “Trump, NASCAR-type white.” An apparel line soon followed, and quickly raised eyebrows higher than they were already pitched.
?CHET’S OFFICIAL WHITE BOY SUMMER MERCH HAS DROPPED?https://t.co/DScFY0cFVMhttps://t.co/DScFY0cFVM pic.twitter.com/lpcTeOLRws
— Chet Hanks Updates (@upchets) March 30, 2021
Despite Hanks’ protestations that the white boys in question were white hip-hop artists like himself, the phrase certainly seems like it might appeal to the Charlottesville and Capitol Siege crowd, and the clothing isn’t helping. Internet observers were quick to opine that, while not quite a Camp Auschwitz hoodie, the text on the clothing, in Gothic font, appeared to be a bit… well, Nazi-ish if not just flat-out racist. The Guardian noted that it resembled Fraktur, a style of script used on Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and early Nazi letterhead. But what if a font is just a font?
“There is no question that ‘gothic’ lettering (the general style is more accurately described as ‘blackletter’) is associated with white supremacist groups,” typographer and book designer Scott-Martin Kosofsky wrote in an email to the Forward. But Kosofsky noted that this particular font was not actually Germanic, but English. It’s called “Cloister Black” and is “more closely related to the banner of The New York Times than it is to the early Nazi style.”
The word “early” tells a tale. While blackletter was once favored by Nazis as a signal of German identity, it was later abandoned. The reason? The Nazis thought it was Jewish. In what Kosofsky calls a “compound comedy of errors” the Nazis nixed blackletter because they believed that one particular form of it, Schwabacher, was associated with a late-Medieval Hebrew script. In fact, “the influence was the other way around.”
Harald Geisler, a German artist and typographer, said that the “fake story” labelling the painstaking Fraktur fonts Jewish was introduced to justify a transition to a more efficient state style. In any case, the lettering on Hanks’ merch doesn’t carry the same historical baggage.
“The “Old English” blackletter, as exemplified by Cloister Black, is no less ‘white’ than its German cousins, just not in that way,” Kosofsky said, adding that if this font was meant to be advance white supremacy, it would not be the “first visual malapropism” of the movement.
Steven Heller,,) an art director and graphic design historian who’s written extensively on fascist aesthetics, said that White Boy Summer’s merch “speaks more to tone-deafness than racism.”
He argued in an email that using blackletter should not be “a priori, considered White Supremacist. But the mash-up of word and letter equals a mental picture that is hard to irradicate.”
Does the typeface have other connotations? Certainly. Goth culture is one obvious example, and Heller noted that hip-hop uses it often as well. (Hanks and the co conspirators named in his White Boy Summer announcement, Jon B. and Jack Harlow, are hip-hop artists.)
“It periodically returns as popular styles change from this to that,” Heller said of the font’s trend, adding, “Style uber alles!”
Here, however, the style is lacking.
“I thought it was just bad typography,” said Geisler. “There’s a lot of spacing between the letters. The lettering should be done very tightly. It’s also not something to be used in a typesetting environment. It’s something that used to be written.”
He suspected that the design was a hasty product — which makes sense given that it services an undercooked idea.
“It strikes me as going to a font menu and saying ‘This looks like fun,’” Geisler offered, wondering why Hanks might not have the funds to hire a professional calligrapher and, damningly, comparing him to a typographic dilettante who thinks that loathed fonts like Papyrus and Comic Sans look nifty in all contexts.
Even if Cloister Black is blameless, the whole sentiment of Hanks’ season of white guys, a far cry from Megan Thee Stallion’s empowering Hot Girl Summer, is questionable at best.
“I’m curious to know what ‘White Boy Summer’ signifies and who, in this era of post-Trumpism, would think it a good idea,” Heller said.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected].
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Marine Le Pen may be headed to prison — antisemitism and xenophobia still roam freely
-
Fast Forward Israel announces new offensive to seize ‘broad territories’ of Gaza Strip
-
Film & TV Val Kilmer was the voice of my generation’s Moses (and God)
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker spoke at a synagogue on Yom Kippur. Its rabbi says Jews should learn from his 25-hour Senate speech.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.