How to Be Black (4 page)

Otherwise, she simply kept me so busy that I couldn't get involved in the increasingly troublemaking activities outside our front door. As the 1980s progressed, so did the breadth and destructive effect of crack cocaine on Washington, DC. I had seen friends' older siblings go from selling lemonade to selling crack and then watched as many of them were carted off to prison. I witnessed an addict brutally beaten with the stones from our front yard, likely because he couldn't pay. I observed as my mother took hundreds of photographs of drug deals going down across the street, not to turn over to the police but because she sensed the historical significance of this terrible transition. Having preserved most of her collection, I'm glad she documented the environment of my early childhood so comprehensively. I was a little black boy living in a war zone. Our own mayor was a crackhead.

When the HBO show
The Wire
came out, I recognized so much of what was on my television screen from my memories of my own neighborhood. As I've reflected back on both, I realize that my neighborhood was just like
The Wire
. We had the drug dealing, the police brutality, the murders. Well, it was
almost
a perfect match. We had everything
The Wire
had except for universal critical acclaim and the undying love of white people who saw it. Of course, eventually white people would fall in love with my old neighborhood as development and gentrification have led to its supporting a subway station, wine bars, and even a Target. Back in the day, I lived in a black neighborhood under siege. For a single black woman raising a boy, this was a terrifying environment. In a 1992
Washington Post
series about mothers raising black boys in the inner city, the caption on the photo of my mother and me states:

Arnita Thurston says she acted like a crazy woman trying to protect Baratunde from the streets.

Thanks to my mother, I survived that war. At twelve years old, I was a bass-playing, tofu-eating, weekend-camping, karate-chopping, apartheid-hating, top-grade-getting, generally trouble-avoiding agent of blackness.

How Black Are You?

T
his book was almost called
How Black Are You?

In the summer of 2009, I bought a bottle of wine in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn. I didn't know much about wine and still don't, but I didn't want to ask the shop employee and then pretend like I cared about her in-depth description involving earthy hints of nutmeg and subtle karmic rainbows of frankincense or sadness or whatever. Instead of admitting my ignorance and seeking help, I browsed the bottles and waited for a sign.

That's when I spotted the label “Negroamaro.” This was the sign! I would buy this bottle because it had the word “Negro” on it. I did not know what “amaro” meant, and I did not care. Clearly, this was a red wine created for a discerning black connoisseur.

Later that week, I got up early to catch a flight, and as I rummaged through the kitchen counter of my friend's apartment, looking for something to eat, I spotted the empty bottle of Negroamaro. I thought, “That's pretty black of you, Baratunde.”

As with most of my thoughts, I decided this was something I should share with the Internet, so I fired up the Twitter app on my phone and instigated a battle of blackness with my friend and fellow Brooklyn-based comedian Elon James White.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 7:32 a.m., I pressed “send” on the following message:

this weekend i picked my red wine because it was called “Negroamaro.” that's how black i am. @elonjames #HowBlackAreYou

Two minutes later, Elon responded, “Challenge, son?” and it was on. For the next several hours, we went back and forth trying to prove our blackness in a game of satirical one-upmanship. Others saw the #HowBlackAreYou hashtag flying across their screens and decided to join in. Before long, thousands of #HowBlackAreYou tweets had been generated.

I later retold this story in a technology conference keynote address called “There's a #Hashtag for That,” and got the attention of an editor at HarperCollins. After I met with her and her team, the title “How to Be Black” was born. I thought an entire book on “How Black Are You?” was a bit much. (But “How to Be Black” felt just fine!)

Still, that original question interests me. It is an inextricable fact of blackness that one will at some point be referred to as “too black” or “not black enough” by white people, black people, and others. I've yet to meet the Negro who is “juuuuuust right” to everyone. So I turned the question over to The Black Panel. Here's some of what they had to say in answer to the question “How black are you?”

W. KAMAU BELL

I guess we need to know who's on the scale. I would probably say I'm in the middle. I'd say I'm solidly in the middle. I think I've spent most of my life in the middle of blackness, maybe just north of the middle as I've gotten older. I think I get more reason to be black the older I get.

It's like everything. The older you get, the more you get calcified in whatever direction you were going in. I feel about racism the way a lot of guys feel about male-pattern baldness. “This was supposed to be done by now!” Which makes me more black, like “Okay, then I'm going to really step up my game, my black game.”

CHERYL CONTEE

I'm pretty black on the inside. That said, genetically, it's obvious there's a little bit of a mix here. And that's something that I've gotten to know over time more extensively through the oral histories of my family, very quietly learning the large extent to which people actually chose to live in the black community to be with the people that they love, which is really awesome and amazing. So I do pay homage to those other heritages, but I feel very much, very strongly, rooted in African-American culture.

That said, I think that there is a stereotype that you're not really black unless you grew up dodging bullets, or eating food stamps, or . . . I don't know, actually engaging personally in rap battles or break dancing. I didn't do any of those things. I may have witnessed some break dancing and some rap battles. Okay, that may have happened. But I didn't personally do that.

Sorry, eating . . . Did I say that, eating food stamps?

ELON JAMES WHITE

How black am I? It depends on the day of the week. It depends on who you ask. It depends on what situation I'm in. It depends on if my white girlfriend shows up. It depends on what topic happens to pop up.

I'm fairly black to people. I've gotten blacker. Like, I wasn't that black for a while, but then I got really, really black. And apparently when I got really black, it wasn't because I did anything specifically black, like I wasn't all of a sudden rocking hip-hop and wearing a hoodie.

I got black when I was like, “You know what, I see racism in a lot of things that people don't like to acknowledge.”

And they're like, “Why are you so black?”

And I was like, “Whoa, but I didn't do . . . It's institutionalized.”

“Yes, Negro, we understand you're militant, get over it.”

“I haven't even raised my fist. I like brunch! I don't know why you're yelling at me!”

I remember my uncle said that I was trying to be a white boy, because I referred to my mother as “mother.” I would go, “But mother is saying so and so.” [He would say], “Why you try to talk like a white boy?” That's stupid.

In high school—I must have been in tenth grade—a classmate turned to me:

CLASSMATE:
Why do you talk like the teacher?

ELON:
What are you talking about?

CLASSMATE:
You try to talk like the white kids.

ELON:
What white kids? [I went to a black school.]

I found myself constantly defending my place in the ranks of blackness.

DAMALI AYO

I am so black that the other day a black person asked me what race I am. That's how black I am. I was like, “Excuse me?” I apparently am the switchy-changy black person. People like to see me as white or as black as they like to see me. I'm so black that everybody says I look like their cousin. I am so black that I don't have to bring up the race card. I am the race card. I am so black that I grew up with a black history bulletin board in my hallway as a child. I'm so black that my father looks like Malcolm X. That's how black my shit is.

DERRICK ASHONG

I am very black. I come in the more ebony shade of jet! I'm a little chocolate-flavored chocolate.

I remember a kid in high school, who said to me once, “Yo, you're not really black. You don't have any slave blood.” And I was like, “Wow, you have not been going to enough school. And we need to stop talking, because I would like to get to college someday.”

For me, I'm very Pan-African, I'm very much in touch with my African roots. I speak my father's language. I get by in my momma's language. When I was in college, I did Afro-American studies because I wanted to study African-American culture and see what the differences were.

I was really interested in what happened in the African Diaspora and how you could think about diasporic identities and how having those identities, understandings of each other, could empower and strengthen your understanding of self, rather than feeling like, “You came up from this circumstance, and this is the length and the breadth of your history,” which is largely told by someone outside of your community, who may not have the same vested interest in you feeling good about yourself, or seeing the value in who you are and where you come from.

I engaged in that kind of study, and that is where I think a lot of my idea of blackness comes from. And it's an inclusive sense.

In a nutshell, I am black insofar as I embrace the idea of a Pan-African and diasporic identity. But in my language, if you ask me who I am, I'm
Ebebinyi
. I'm an African. The word we use for a white person is
Obrunyi
, which is a non-African. The color thing, it does not compute.

JACQUETTA SZATHMARI

I don't think I'm very black. It's been a point of contention for other black people for a long time. People have always made it very clear to me that I wasn't being black enough. Then I've had lots of white people [say], “I don't even notice you're black!” Which usually means you're not poor and smoking a five-piece on the corner and trying to rob my sister. I don't think I'm considered to be very black in the mainstream sense.

However, [2012 Republican presidential candidate] Herman Cain
*
makes me a lot blacker. [He] wears a cowboy hat and just says ridiculous stuff that most black people wouldn't say. I think characters like that make me blacker by comparison. [There are] shades of blackness, and I think that I was towards the lesser black, but then if you have weird people coming along, then that pushes me towards the center, which is where I like to be.

I'm also from the country . . . I'm from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is a wretched place . . . I always considered that black. Black people are country. That's what I thought until I got older and then I met black people who were like, “No, black people [are] hood.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I can't do that either, because I'm from a cornfield.”

When I went to boarding school, I met a lot of African-Americans who were . . . legitimately inner city or playing it up to try to retain some kind of blackness. Their whole thing was about
Do the Right Thing
, urban culture, Spike Lee. And I'm like, “This guy just seems angry and disgruntled.” That was not my experience of blackness.

I had never had to fight to make a space for my blackness, because on the Eastern Shore you're black or you're white, but more important, your family's been there for four hundred years, and you're from the Eastern Shore. If you come from another place, even if you're one year old, and you died at one hundred on the Eastern Shore, [they'd say], “Not a local.” So it was more about that identity of being from Maryland and being from the Eastern Shore.

I'd never had to prove the blackness thing until I got out and older and other black people were like, “Hey, wait a minute. I'm black, you're not.”

No, I didn't ask Christian how black he was, but I did ask him about how
white
he was:

CHRISTIAN LANDER

I'm about as white as it gets. My family came over on the Mayflower and then left the United States to stay loyal to England and moved to Canada during the Revolutionary War.

As his is the most expert opinion I could find on the subject, I also asked him about notions of “whiteness,” especially since most of the
Stuff White People Like
checklist is based on beliefs, values, and tastes, not phenotypical traits.

At my high school, anyone who liked something on the list and was not white was called white, was accused of acting white.

• A “coconut” is brown on the outside and white on the inside. You could use that for Indian, you could use that for Latino, too. It's your choice of which ethnicity you wish to disparage.

• “Banana” is yellow on the outside, white on the inside, which is for Asians. The Twinkie is another replacement.

• “Oreo” is obviously black on the outside and white on the inside.

• I actually would probably be called what is known as an “egg” in my high school, which is white on the outside, yellow on the inside. I mean, I live in Koreatown, I grew up in Chinatown.

We have it all. We have a wide variety of food-people: coconut, banana, Oreo, whatever you want.

My own introduction to food-people, to blackness as a mere facade for interior whiteness, came with a change of schools.