Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness
192
Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness
192eBook
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Overview
Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world.
Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more.
With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, writer and filmmaker dream hampton, MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey, fashion legend Michaela angela Davis, and critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks, Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond.
This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781593764722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 785 KB |
About the Author
Walker has won many awards, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation, and continues to teach her masterclass, "The Art of Memoir," at gorgeous and inspiring places around the world.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AUDACITY
dream hampton
My rape story makes me feel guilty. I will tell it as simply as I can.
I was an eighth grader, a "senior" at a magnet middle school for "gifted" children. In the way that children who display academic aptitude are plucked from their neighborhood schools, I was separated from mine, and from my school-aged neighbors, and bused less than three miles away from an increasingly rough neighborhood. I was born on Mack and Helen, on Detroit's "Black Bottom," a notorious and working-poor neighborhood that had become synonymous with urban blight by the mid-twentieth century. My mother and stepfather moved a few inches farther east, to the lower half of a two-family flat on Eastlawn and Charlevoix, where as a kindergartner I was once pummeled by much older boys with snowballs stuffed with rocks.
There were seventies gangs in my neighborhoods whose fifties-style monikers belied their menace: the Bubble Gum Gang and the citywide-famous Errol Flynns. By six, I preferred to read than to go outside. "Outside" was confrontation masked as "playing"— mean talk meant to carry on the tradition of signifying, but these dozens had become a bit meaner, more misogynistic. As a post toddler, I didn't have the language to describe this misogyny; I knew only that being called a "yellow heifer," when all I wanted to do was learn to double Dutch, hurt my feelings. Then there was the uneasy way sexual attention from grown men made me feel.
There was one group in particular, who posted up on the Vatican-style wall meant to protect the Polish Catholic church that served free summer lunches. When groups of tiny girls walked by, these guys would comment on a pair of nipples that wanted to sprout or on what would a decade later be a round ass. If you weren't lucky enough to be in a group larger than three, these twentysomething men would reach right out and "smooch" our booties, "smooching" being a euphemism for sexual harassment by pedophiles. The boys our age would watch and learn and chase us down on the playground and try and smooch our booties. Or drag us out of sight and dry-hump us or, worse, tear our panties down and show their friends. I'd like to say this wasn't most of the boys, but it was. It was the few boys who didn't play that way — like my friend Junior, whom the other boys called a fag — whom I remember most.
Junior heroically got socked in the eye, dragging a much older girl (she was a second grader, we were still in kindergarten) away from a group of boys. When he told the teacher, and then the principal, what had happened, he was threatened so badly by the boys and men in our neighborhood that he and his mom left our block. I was so sad the day his grandmother came and put eleven black garbage bags, containing all of their belongings, into her wood-paneled station wagon. I avoided the playground from then on. Became a teacher's pet. Spent lunch hour organizing and cleaning the room.
Then my mother and stepfather moved me and my brother a mile north, past Chandler Park Drive, to a neighborhood that was made affordable to my waitress mom and mechanic stepdad because of sudden white flight. My parents bought a gray brick three-bedroom house with a pool from a white family running to Adrian, Michigan (a neighborhood that would in a decade become all Mexican — I imagine that family ran again). Having an aboveground pool that was six feet deep in the center was a huge deal. My brother and I leveraged our access to chlorinated water to make friends in our new neighborhood, which to us felt damn near upper middle class. I was a better swimmer than my brother and most of the boys he befriended, but it didn't stop me from nearly drowning the time three boys held me underwater trying to remove my bikini top. I remember being humiliated at the time.
When my top was finally removed, there wasn't much to see. I was seven. Still, I internalized the attack and sat in our kitchen nook, watching the boys bully my brother in our own backyard, taking over our pool almost ten at a time. At night, I'd sneak into the pool and float on my back and count stars. I'd dream I was queen of my pool, but, more important, that I alone had dominion over my body. I'd stare at the moon till my fingers pruned, but always, after the attack on my halter bikini, in a one-piece racer-style swimsuit. Or sometimes shorts and a long tee.
As in my old neighborhood, my fear of "outside" was widely understood as my being "stuck up" and "light-skinned." When I did come out to play, few of my friends found my interests interesting. I liked to tag and describe rocks and soil, read science fiction, and drum the theme song to The Six Million Dollar Man on empty chlorine pails. I was never great at double Dutch, or backward skating. I did excel at jacks, and would always have a set and a ball handy in my pocket should one of the girls on my block be interested. Sometimes they wanted to play; most times they ignored me.
And so it went. I wasn't the loneliest girl in my city, but I probably believed I was. By third grade I began to understand my mother to be an alcoholic. In the Pisces way, this was mostly an act of self-harm. Having drunk a bottle of vodka, she'd be passed out on the couch by the time we got home from school. My brother saw it as an opportunity to steal money from her purse to go to the arcade. I saw it as an opportunity to clean.
It wasn't until the summer before fourth grade that I discovered I was fearless. My "real" father, who was always present, had given me and my brother a matching pair of green and yellow Schwinns. The boys on the block knocked my brother, who is 363 days younger than I am, off his bike and called it their own. My brother came home bloodied, muddied, and crying. I put down my book (I distinctly remember I was reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time), went to the backyard, where my own bike was chained to the fence, unlocked my bike, put the chain around my neck, and rode around the corner to get my brother's bike. When I got around the corner, three boys were arguing about who was going to ride my brother's bike next. I hopped off my own, and it fell to the ground on my friend Mar-queila's grass. I told them to give me the damn bike.
It was my first time cursing to anyone but my mirror. The boys laughed at me. I took the bike chain from around my neck and swung it at the legs of the boy trying to mount my brother's bike. He fell to the ground in pain, and the group's leader, Marvel, an older, fifth-grade boy who'd already grown taller than my mother, pushed the bike my way, holding the other two boys back from revenge as I walked our twin Schwinns home around the corner. I remember being surprised at my lack of adrenaline rush (I'd learned about such things watching the Bionic Man). My heart wasn't beating fast at all, and what I remember most is how deeply annoyed I was that my book had been interrupted. My diary entry from that night says as much.
By fifth grade I learned I loved to drive. I'd steal my mother's car as she was passed out on the couch, stack some books on the driver's seat, and circle my neighborhood with one arm out the window, like I'd seen my father do. In my mind, my neighbors were duly impressed. By middle school my writing skills had become public knowledge, and boys at my neighborhood junior high, Alexander Hamilton, would pay me their lunch money to write their essays. Some of these boys were as old as fourteen and had mopeds. My friend Darius had a red moped and a chin-length jheri curl and had been held back once. He really wanted to make it to high school, so I began doing all his homework, and when he ran out of money I'd barter rides on the back of his moped. He'd take me back to my old neighborhood, which had only become worse in the three or four years since we moved, and I would watch kids and young men who dressed alike battle-dance each other doing elaborate pop-and-lock routines.
Darius was the big brother I never had. He'd remind lecherous high school dropouts that I was only eleven ("She ain't even got no titties, man!"), backing them off me when they'd try to talk to and touch me. I was losing my fear of "outside."
My seventh-grade English teacher nominated me for the highly selective magnet school Bates Academy, where I'd graduate from eighth grade. In the spring of my second semester at my new school, Marvel and two boys broke into my house to rape me. It was storming that night. A movie kind of storm. My mom was waitressing nights and my stepdad often stopped at a bar near his job before coming home. I'd cooked dinner for my brother and his friend Bo. Or, rather, I'd shaken some drumsticks in a Shake 'n Bake bag and roasted them in the oven, then chopped some carrots and poured Italian dressing over them and fed my brother and Bo, who was from the block where the boys who'd stolen my brother's bike lived.
I was in my bedroom on the second floor when the doorbell rang. Bo was in the bedroom attached to my room, a room that had once belonged to my parents but now, since they'd moved to the basement for privacy, was called the "playroom," where they'd left a bed, a TV, and a chair. Bo was sitting on the chair, watching TV. The bell rang more than once, and I went downstairs to see if my stepdad had lost his house key. He had not. Marvel and two other tall boys were yelling through our heavy wooden locked door, through the thunder and the rain, for my brother to open up. I told my brother he better not even think of it. My brother looked at me, on the stairs, and then again through the window, where Marvel was threatening his life should he not open the door, and he did something that still makes my heart sink: He opened the door and let the outside in.
The three boys, who were all older than sixteen (I'd learn this later, from Friend of the Court documents), pushed my brother aside the moment he cracked the door and chased me upstairs, where I was hoping to lock myself in my room and use the fire escape ladder my dad had bought me to run to my neighbor Ms. Erma's, across the street. I remember having that plan in my head. But they ran faster than I did. And were stronger. And they threw me on the bed in the playroom, where Bo sat frozen, and pulled off my panties. There was an attempt, many attempts, to pin me down, to keep my legs from kicking, but I would not stop kicking. I kicked and I punched and I screamed and I spat and I squirmed.
One of the teenagers pulled his penis out; it was my first time seeing a real one since I'd bathed with my brother as a preschooler. I kicked the boy in his groin and he doubled over, just like in the movies. One of the other boys slapped me, and for a moment I didn't fight. Then Marvel pulled out his penis and I regained my fight. I wanted to will myself into the Tasmanian devil, to be un-pin-downable, impenetrable. And I succeeded.
After what was more than fifteen minutes, what felt like much longer than the second half of The Brady Bunch — which, once the police came, was how I measured the time — the three boys finally gave up. One of them said, "She don't wanna fuck." And they left. My brother never came upstairs to help. Bo never left the chair where he sat in the same room the entire time.
I've told this story three times. To my two best friends and to a lover I trust. In the sister circle where I sit, or the many friendships where my girlfriends have asked me to witness the telling of their own rape stories, I've stayed silent. I always feared my not being raped because I refused to stop fighting would seem an indictment of their stories. But I don't feel that way. I don't believe they weren't strong enough or should have fought if they didn't or that their rapes were in any way their fault. But I never tell my own story, because of a kind of survivor's guilt. That, and the deep contempt I hold for Bo and my brother.
But now, here, I see it all differently. Now I know I tapped into something bigger than me. My audacity is my fight, to be bigger than my fear. I've never been able to summon fearlessness by anger, even when it's been a reaction to deep injustice, social or personal; instead it's functioned in my life as a kind of walking meditation, one that has driven me around the world and back. That stormy night on the east side of Detroit was terrifying, but it was also the night I learned there's nothing I fear too much to fight.
CHAPTER 2THE GEEK
MAT JOHNSON
Look, let's get this out of the way right now: Geeks are not dorks. Dorky, sure, but that's not the definer. Dorks: socially awkward, stumbling into a constant patina of embarrassment. Merriam-Webster lists its definition only as "nerd; also jerk," but it is a combination of the two. The dictionary goes on to describe a geek as "one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.," but that's only halfway there.
No, the defining element of geekdom is an overwhelming passion for the idiosyncratic intellectual crush. It could be on computers, comic books, much maligned or obscure fantasy movies. The crush could be international politics or third-world finance, or the history of forgotten or imagined continents. The subject itself doesn't matter — that doesn't define the geek. The passion for that crush object does. An interest so large it at times blots out the existence of the rest of the world. Geekery uses passion as a passport, a transportation device to take you to a different world: a land of your choosing.
I'm a Black geek. A comic-book geek, specifically. When I refused to pick up Snow, Snow by Dr. Seuss one more time to try and push through the words, my mother decided it might be better to have me start on The Incredible Hulk instead. I've been geekily passionate about comics ever since.
The store that sold them in my neighborhood in Philadelphia was down the block, past a corner where the local society of future violent offenders would congregate, but I didn't care. I would hustle through them anyway, just to get my fix. The covers were ripped off so the store could sell the books for just a quarter, but I didn't mind. I loved what was on the pages. In comics, good and evil were clearly marked; the good always won, and the weak were always protected. As a boy being raised solely by my mother, I instinctively knew I was missing a world of men, and that's where I found them, on those magical pages.
I didn't let anyone outside my house know about my passion for comics, though. Books, even comic books, were not acceptable in my larger environment. I grew up going to a public grade school where it was a lot easier to get punched in the face than it was to learn anything. By second grade I'd figured out that a good way to stay safe was to not stand out, not break from the herd, lest the predators notice me and pick me off. My cousin Alex was three grades ahead of me, and just as nerdy as I was. I looked up to him, in part because he was proof I could survive three years down the line.
One day on the schoolyard, I saw Alex walking around with his head stuck in a magazine. Immediately, I ran over to see what it was, because the only magazines I'd seen kids bring to school were nudie magazines and I just knew I was going to get to see an image of fully developed mammaries. One of the thug kids saw the magazine, too, and saw me running and joined in behind me.
When we got there, I asked, "What you reading?" Alex, annoyed, held up the cover for me to see: the Economist. The Negro was reading the Economist, right there on the do-or-die lot of Henry H. Houston Elementary. The thug who had followed me pulled it out of Alex's hands, flipped through the whole thing, and said, "It ain't got no kind of pictures. What? You just reading to read?" and threw it back. I like the news, my cousin told him. The thug looked at Alex like he'd lost his gottdamn mind. He left Alex alone after that, because he thought Alex really had. And Alex kept reading, cool as ever. Confident, relaxed, like he already knew he was going to end up sitting in a corner office as a millionaire tech CEO and the thug was destined to sit on a bed in a Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution. Which is what happened.
It wasn't just that Alex was reading, or what he was reading, either. It was what he was saying: I'm smart. In a playground filled with boys who were trying to prove their worth by being the best at handball, or dunking the basketball, or slashing the third-grade teacher's tires, or seeing who could convince a girl to throw her better judgment, Alex was just saying, I am smart. And therein lies the heart of black-geek coolness. The center of its power: I know more than you, and knowledge is power. You do the math.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Black Cool"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Rebecca Walker.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
Foreword,
Introduction,
AUDACITY,
THE GEEK,
CRAZY,
RESERVE,
THE HIPSTER,
THE BREAK,
RESISTANCE,
FOREVER,
HUNGER,
ECCENTRICITY,
SOUL,
AUTHENTICITY,
THE SCREAM,
EVOLUTION,
THE POSSE,
SWAGGER,
PLAYERS,
Acknowledgments,
ABOUT THE EDITOR,
Copyright Page,