Michael Eric Dyson (13 page)

Bill Cosby is not the first person to lash out at poor black youth for how their bodies are clothed and modified, and for what seems to be the infernal nonsense of their names. His disgust echoes ancient white and black protests of strutting
and signifying black flesh. It is impossible to gauge Cosby’s disdain, and the culture’s too, without following the black body on the plantations and streets where its styles were seen as monstrous and irresistible. We might then see how depressing it is for Cosby to be so ignorant of black youth and the issues they are up against, and what’s more, we should mourn his determination, and that of many more, to stay that way.

Human beings use clothing to create and control their identities.
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That’s especially true for poor youth, who often feel powerless to influence the world around them. For young people, styles of fashion often encourage extravagant self-expression. When they select clothes, young folk do more than drape their bodies in the latest styles; they are also helping to shape identities they have either inherited or invented. Their clothes may suggest playful excess or curious understatement, depending on their moods or needs, and young folk often see their bodies as works of art in need of relentless restyling.

Black urban youth can hardly help viewing their bodies as targets—of cultural opposition and creative opportunity. Since they are so widely talked about and often feared, their flesh is a mobile laboratory of personal expression where style is both the hypothesis and the experiment. There is little doubt that fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art, a necessary trait in a culture where performance has always been at a premium. Black urban fashion constantly reminds young folk of just how culturally durable they are, since they are among the most imitated and appropriated people on the globe, though often without footnotes, copyrights
or royalties. But they are vulnerable too, and despite their achievements they are often devalued by elders like Cosby who have already made up their minds about black youth’s bodies. Their flesh may be celebrated in stylish cultural theories of resistance, but the plain fact is that hating the dress of black youth, or, really, the lower classes in general, is older than the baggy pants and short dresses that ride up Cosby’s nerves.

Ever since we have been free, black folk’s style of dress in urban centers has been a concern to white society and bourgeois Negroes.
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At first, whites laughed at ex-slaves as they strolled along the streets of southern cities in the late nineteenth century. Black folk were considered repulsive and ludicrous in their imitation of the fine clothing worn in white society. Hateful whites, and even less vicious commentators, played up the contrast between fine clothing and awful, ugly black flesh. Darker hued black women were singled out for their alleged grotesqueness: big lips, noses and eyes protruding beneath bonnets and lace caps as their blue-dark skin shined remorselessly out from get-ups deemed unsuitable for the Negro body.
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The very stylishness of blacks also angered many whites. They were not used to seeing well-dressed blacks during slavery and became severely agitated by the sight of elegantly dressed men and women attending social gatherings in northern cities like New York in the 1820s. Whites called the New York police when they were outraged at seeing
in public
well-adorned blacks strolling in style to their rare place of recreation, a club called the African Grove, which was immediately shut down. Later, when an African theater that featured
the debut of legendary actor Ira Aldridge was established on the same spot, white rioting and police harassment closed its doors as well.
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But white laughter soon turned to scorn as whites caught on to blacks who were using the streets as a performance arena. Forced by economic hardship and racial segregation into the public spaces of black neighborhoods, especially the corners and main walkways, black folk were literally performing their newfound freedom from slavery by moving and displaying their bodies. Making a virtue of necessity, since they had to compete with whites for public space, blacks in the late nineteenth century took to the streets and remade them into a theater of self-expression, parading and strolling back and forth in the clothing that was the most visible sign of their emancipation. There was certainly a compensatory function to their raiment: Blacks who were otherwise poor and deprived would nevertheless invest in clothing and perform their liberty by freely experimenting with fashion.

This trend continued into the early twentieth century. By then, whites resented and feared the ways that black bodies invaded sectors of southern urban culture. The black streets had by then become a largely masculine domain where black males experimented as extravagantly with their social identities as they did with their colorful dress. Despite the brutal confinement of black life under Jim Crow law, black folk in the early 1900s refashioned the streets with some of their most uplifting and imaginative performances: A constant parade of black bodies claimed formerly terrorized social space
with stylish abandon. Blacks still had to be careful, however, because looking too good offended whites. They didn’t want to believe that the same colored folk who had scraped the bottom of the barrel could now rise higher than whites had either hoped or expected. Good dressing among blacks signaled resistance to the lowly status they had been forced to accept. A great outfit carried ominous symbolic weight far beyond the segregated borders of black life.

The social customs of subordination on southern streets revolved around clothing: Black men had to have their hats in their hands to show deference, or tip their hats to whites to show respect.
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Whites aimed to control and monitor black life—which was the meaning, after all, of laws that restricted black mobility in the white world—and bore down on even the most intimate details of black life before they, well, got out of control. The black sense of the ornate carried political meanings that whites surely didn’t miss; they were insulted by good black dress because it meant that blacks had, however subtly, shredded social barriers. Their way of dress gestured to the beginning of the long, slow death of social apartheid. If black folk could wear the clothes that white folk wore, and look good in their defiance of white culture, it wouldn’t be long before they would want to slip into the prestige and authority whites enjoyed as well. As Shane White and Graham White write, just as “slaves, in the antebellum world, had been expected to look the part, shunning any sign of assertiveness and even demonstrating their contentment, so, under the racial system that had crystallized by the turn of the
century, African Americans were required to dress, walk, comport themselves, and direct their gaze in a manner that registered uncomplaining subservience.”
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In the north, where the Great Migration in the early 1900s swept Negroes by the thousands into industrial cities from Chicago to Detroit, city sidewalks were jammed with signifying black bodies that were to a degree free of the intrusive eye of white society. Although they contained women and girls, the streets remained a masculine haven, filtering the mores and values, the styles and sensibilities, the worries and fears, and the joys and hopes of black males, accounting for the streets’ vibrancy and their occasional, unavoidable terror, given the cramped circumstances of black living. Lower-class men overtook the streets to perform their distinctive modes of masculine identity: in the clothes they wore, the walks they perfected—including “shooting the agate,” or strutting coolly with one’s hands at one’s sides with the index fingers protruding—and the thrilling way they captivated the corners with their commerce, recreation and carousing.
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Looking good on
their
streets was of high value to the black middle class and black elite as well.
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In Afristocratic circles, sartorial splendor was differently judged; the aesthetic of black elegance and dignity countered stereotypes of black savagery and contrasted favorably with the gaudy extremes associated with lower-class blacks. The class divide found a sure index in competing styles of dress. Middle-class blacks “and members of the elite were keen to distance themselves from the dress and demeanor of ordinary African Americans and, at the same time, to curb what they viewed as the sartorial
and kinesic excesses of those they saw as their social inferiors.”
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The black elite saw their dress as part of “genteel performance,” where black aristocrats “exercised the self-restraint, both in the parlor and on the street, that were the prime attributes of gentility. For them, the genteel performance no more allowed boisterous laughter and conversation on a streetcar than it did shouting during a church service.”
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Black aristocrats disdained “overdressing” and the “exaggerated styles” that black female aristocrats associated with “Boulevard women.”
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The extravagant dress of lower-class blacks, perfected in the stroll down any number of northern streets, is part of what may be termed
jubilant performance
, marked by social verve, resistance to convention, and the willingness to experiment. There was a freer, more improvisational character to dress as well: Blacks embraced unique fashion combinations that reflected the hodgepodge manner in which black urban identities were carved together. To be sure, jubilant performance was also associated with antitypes of secular black culture, including “pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, hustlers, numbers runners, bootleggers, and drug dealers,” evoking criticism from white and black quarters.
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The black aristocracy was unnerved by the black poor—how they dressed, how they spoke, how they behaved—because they constantly felt the stares of white disapproval. Although blacks successfully battled whites to garner space in the urban north and transact their cultural affairs, they still fell under white scrutiny. The black elite’s fear that the ways of poor black folk would make their own tenuous positions in
society even more vulnerable prompted black aristocrats to carry out a program of moral rebuke disguised as social uplift. They lectured, preached, cajoled, beseeched and condemned the black poor for the good of the race, or, rather, for the good of members of the race who were fatally obsessed with white approval. To a degree, the black elite acted out of necessity, but perhaps to a larger degree, their actions proved how they had unconsciously drank in the poisonous view of the black poor that whites forced on them. The Afristocracy, therefore, became accomplices to white panic and surveillance.