who's a green american?

Green America (formerly Co-Op America) is currently promoting its newest t-shirt design:
"I AM A GREEN AMERICAN". (100% cotton, made in the U.S.) It is a clever, problematic, referential design that is ripe for deconstruction.

The artist chose the Statue of Liberty from the eyes up, apparently to obscure the racial and gender identifiers of the original statue and to emphasize the dark green outstretched arm--a clear reference to Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' raised arms at the Mexico Olympics in 1968. The torch, instead of a vessel for a flame, is a nest of flowers for a lone bird.

Using the Statue of Liberty makes sense as an easily identifiable referent to a popular narrative of Americanness--it was one of the first sights seen by white-skinned Europeans who immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century via ships.

The artist was smart enough to know that relying on an icon that would equate Americanness with whiteness wouldn't cut it. Tattooing or grafting a deeply American iconic image of blackness--Carlos' and Smith's Black Power(ed) raised arms and black-gloved fists-- onto the the arm of Miss Liberty is artistically brilliant. And conceptually intriguing.

Where does green begin and American end? Does green refer solely to ecology (flowers and birds)? And American solely to racialized humanness? Or is the blurring of green and American intentional?

Here's what I see:

The pairing of the lone human with the lone bird, representing, respectively, growing and dwindling masses, alludes to a symbiotic relationship between humans and other animals within a contentious rights framework.

And the t-shirt design suggests that green is not solely about ecology. That it is implicated in the U.S.'s racialized and color-struck history. Therefore, green is not a neutral color (or movement) without a history or identity that somehow absorbs and neutralizes other colors in the current march toward a collective fight against climate change.

For these reasons, I love this t-shirt.

What I don't like is that the Green America marketers chose to advertise the t-shirt on a thin, white-skinned woman thereby implicitly making a green American a white American with a green tan.