Losing My Cool (26 page)

The twins, under the influence of a day of discovery and not a little wine, were going through this revelation in front of me, I could see it in their faces, their searching, contemplating faces, and I knew it at first glance because I had gone through it too, many times before. At last, they could see the lie, which they had never previously glimpsed; it was right there in the room with them, tethered over the table like a fluorescent helium balloon, and no more impenetrable than that—they could reach out and touch it, puncture it with a fork or a toothpick if they wanted. And that hurts.

Sitting there at Hôtel Costes or in the Jardin du Luxembourg or in the Tuileries or just at some humble neighborhood brasserie, where finally it occurs to you that a bloody piece of meat actually tastes good, or at Dean & Deluca, where you encounter your first baguette, you think to yourself: I kind of like this. “This” being cheese, or wine, or bread, or fresh spinach leaves. Or crossing your legs, or polite conversation, or Renaissance art, or serious books. Or music that is not rap, or curiosity, or cosmopolitanism—in short, education, edification, exposure, whatever you want to call it.That is, whatever it is you used to think wasn't real, wasn't strictly for the N.I.G.G.A.s. You think to yourself: If only someone had told me all this was out here, I might have paid better attention in school! You think to yourself: This isn't fair. It gets you hot and vexed.

And then, all of a sudden, when you feel as if you can't take it anymore, when you think there must be some exculpating explanation, some scenario that will allow you to pass the blame—it must be because you're black and these things aren't intended for people like you in the first place, that racism is what it's really all about—some Malian or Sudanese (yes, Sudanese!) chick walks by, all ebony-complected, all elegant and arresting, fluent in French and English as well as some obscure tribal dialect, and you realize this isn't a skin thing, a color thing, a hair-texture thing, or even a money thing anymore (your childhood was comfortable enough). No, this is a culture thing, and yours has limited and cheated you profoundly. And then the final realization: You have been lying to yourself all this time—The Supreme Lie—you have been an accomplice, a co-architect of your own ignorance. And that really hurts, because you're not a dummy. I knew what they were feeling because I had felt it many times before. In the twins I could see myself, and long after they had left, I reflected on the stifling circumstances in which we'd all grown up.

And yet, as I sit here now, recounting those two nights several years ago—nights that really started this book for me—I am filled mostly with hope, not pessimism. Has there ever been a more exciting time than the present to be young and black in America? Overnight, it seems as though the vistas of circumstance have opened up for us dramatically: Suddenly, the most powerful man in the country is not white, he is black; and the most visible black person in the world is not a thug or entertainer, he is a nuanced thinker. I have asked my father many times how such a development makes him feel. “Son, you are living in a different world,” he says. “This is no longer my world. The question is: How does this make
you
feel?”

The more pressing question, though, is, How will this make subsequent generations of black people feel? Will such a twist in the American racial narrative prove powerful enough to alter the underlying laws that still govern day-to-day black life? Will we, at long last, allow ourselves to abandon the instinct to self-sabotage and the narcissistic glorification of our own failure? Will the fact of daily exposure to a black president in turn expose once and for all the lie that is and always has been
keeping it real
?

Since the dawn of the hip-hop era in the 1970s, black people have become increasingly freer and freer as individuals, with a wider range of possibilities spread out before us now than at any time in our past. Yet the circumstances of our collective life have degenerated in direct contrast to this fact, with a more impoverished vision of what it means to be black today than ever before. If these exciting new circumstances we now find ourselves in, of which our black president is the apotheosis, are to mean anything of lasting value, the zeitgeist (Hegel), the They (Heidegger), or whatever we might call it,
this
is going to have to change, too—and permanently.

 

 

 

 

It is more accurate to say, however, that the mood of black culture doesn't need to
change
into something wholly new so much as it must simply find a way to
reclaim
what it once had. One of the most fascinating paradoxes the student of black history ever observes, as well as a tremendous justification for black pride, is the extent to which this culture, against all likelihood, has customarily embodied a joyful, soulful, affirming approach to life and not a spiritually bankrupt or self-defeating one. It is only very recently—basically within my brother's lifetime, which is to say, the three and a half decades of the hip-hop era or, roughly, the post-Civil Rights era—that this has, in the main, ceased to be the case. In other words, it is only
after
the tremendous civil-rights victories of the '60s, only after desegregation, only after affirmative action that black America has become so militantly provincial and wildly nihilistic.

Why has such undeniable societal progress been met with such obvious cultural regress? Why when external limitations have been—and still are being—lifted do we frantically search for replacement constraints to bring down on ourselves? Is this, ultimately, what slavery's residue tastes like? Is this the legacy of Jim Crow? Or is it, as some do argue, that the black community simply fell apart with integration? Is white flight to blame here? Was it crack? Was it AIDS? Is there an inherent bias in the nation's criminal justice system? Is it all of the above, just some toxic mix, or something else entirely? I am not a sociologist and do not presume to have a catchall theory; I only know what I have seen. Perhaps it is the case, as many have claimed, that hip-hop culture is nothing but the logical outcome of the profound and alienating experiences so many blacks have had in the great American cities in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. Perhaps it is simply the result of all that disillusionment all those blacks and their children surely must have felt. Perhaps this is true. Be that as it may, though, are we bound now to keep the alienation and disillusionment going; are we bound to keep this culture that was born in negativity running in perpetuity?

In college it tripped me out to think that Hegel could have understood the slave and not the master as the ascendant consciousness. Unlikely as it may seem, though, many blacks in the past have seen things this way, too. There is a joy, an aliveness—after all, it is the slave, Hegel wrote, who
loves
life—a spirit that has manifested itself throughout the course of African-American history. It is a way of working hard and taking pride in one's work, of laughing through tears and coping with miserable circumstances. It is a way of transforming blind hatred into beautiful music, bad cuts of meat into delicious meals. It is a way of turning searing pain into quiet strength. It is what Ralph Ellison called
discipline
—a quality he saw as inherent in black culture and something he believed, ultimately, would prove to be the salve to heal the racial sickness that plagued the country in which he lived. Ellison's idea of discipline, of course, has roots in W.E.B. Du Bois and his conception of the new Negro youth:

How poignantly do these words capture what was to come—the figure of Martin Luther King, the jazz of John Coltrane, the fiction of Ralph Ellison, the nonviolent Civil Rights movement of the 1960s? How ludicrous and naïve, how wildly off base, do they seem now in the age of 50 Cent? The above quote is from a 1926 speech entitled “The Criteria of Negro Art,” which Du Bois delivered in Chicago to a gathering of descendants of slaves. A deep reader of philosophy himself, he would have been aware of the Hegelian notes ringing through him. Consider what else Du Bois had to say:

The man raises some questions that are worthy of reconsideration: If blacks were to become rich and powerful, just what, exactly, would we want from life? Would that something be
more
than “the most powerful of motor cars”? “Pushed aside as we have been,” would we exhibit a “distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant”? Would we seek to create a new sort of world, a world where men
realize themselves
?

Some of the finest minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contemplated these same questions and could not imagine that the slave consciousness—that modest vessel for the progression of human spirit—would evolve into the petty, limited, money-hoes-and-clothes-obsessed consciousness of today, that Malcolm X's “By any means necessary” cry for dignity and freedom would, in just three decades' time, get butchered into Kanye West's soulless “Buy any jeans necessary” claptrap. That black life in America has suffered a tremendous loss of
discipline
and
spirit
in the hip-hop era is a fact meticulously documented throughout the culture.

Nietzsche believed the greatest deeds are thoughts.“The world revolves around the inventors of new values,” he wrote. For more than thirty years the black world has revolved around the inventors of hip-hop values, and this has been a decisive step backward. My generation, if we are to make it and to make good on the debt we owe our ancestors, must find a new vocabulary and another point of view. We have to reclaim the discipline and the spirit we have lost. We have to flip the script on what it means to be black. We have to think about what is and is not beneficial to our own mental, cultural, and even physical health. As a people, we have emerged from centuries spent in the dark woods of slavery and racism only to come upon an ominous forking path. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our survival will be determined by the direction that we take. If we can't change our ideas, if we fail to cultivate future generations of personalities that are something more than just cool—or hard—if we fail to realize that certain values are better, and worse, than others, then what we are doing is presiding over our own gradual destruction. And that is something, for my father's generation, that not even the most fanatic Klansmen could have hoped to achieve.

“Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” Du Bois asked that gathering of descendants of slaves. This was a serious concern for forward-looking blacks in the 1920s, but today it feels anachronistic. Just imagine, however, if the only black American who survived one hundred years from now was that cartoonish thug of the past thirty years, so vividly wrought on the canvas of hip-hop music and culture. Would that not be equally depressing? Would that not be
worse
since, after all, we have drawn this grotesque with our own hand?

On the day before the MTV Video Music Awards this past September, I found myself walking on the Lower East Side of New York City. Manhattan, the downtown portion of it at least, was overflowing with the kind of moneyed young blacks the rap industry has produced in startlingly large numbers over recent years. I was walking along Rivington Street with an attractive girl and we were approaching a tall, thirtyish black guy who was dressed from head to toe in brands you would find at Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys. He was struggling with several bulging shopping bags from Louis Vuitton, and as we passed he noticed us and turned, peering over his Tom Ford frames to say to my date, “I just throw it in the bag; I just throw it in the bag!” He was referencing one of the most popular and ubiquitous rap songs of the moment, Fabolous's vapid ode to shopping without looking at price tags, which was surprising, since he did not, on first glance, appear to be confined by the categories and thought processes of hip-hop at all. He had on the kind of tight-fitting, ultra-expensive European threads Playboy wore in college, gear that has as much to do with keeping it real and 'hood living as Sub-Zero kitchen appliances do. What was so striking to me about this man the more I thought about him—even more than his lovely and costly garments—was the fact that wealthy and seemingly worldly as he may have been, as flush with resources and credit as he may have been, he was actually
living
the inane lyrics of a rap song as unthinkingly and literal-mindedly as the most hard-core and insulated thug.