The Blickity Black Impulse
And the future of American freedom.
When I was just turning 30 I had become bored with many of my black friends. It was a kind of black fatigue almost nobody in America understands, it was the tedium of bourgie black success. At the time I was one of the 1% of black Americans living in Hermosa Beach, California, the beach volleyball capital of the world and home to a zipcode described by the demographers at Claritas as “money and brains”. My cohort were software and electrical engineers working in aerospace and living mere blocks from the beach. Around this time, I was driving my second BMW.
Conversations typical of my friends included the cost of a down payment on condos, business networking and the scourge of MC Hammer and ‘the Element’. You see we lived much more directly with today’s kind of black fatigue, the fear and loathing of degenerate Negroes from burglar bar neighborhoods. In other words, ghetto people. We used to designate such people and places where one could reliably run into the Element as ‘GU’, geographically undesirable. Yes Virginia, black Americans socially redlined other black Americans.
One day at a pool party thrown by my girlfriend and her roommate, I found myself just getting started reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I was captivated. While my friends were splashing playfully, but not getting their hair wet, and eating brie, I was discovering one of the most powerful literary masterpieces of the 20th century. It was about slavery, the archetypical characteristic of black Americans - the humiliation, degradation and shame of it all. Unlike Roots, a decade earlier, Morrison’s writing was dense, complex and quite frankly brilliant. It was, at long last, the kind of intellectually captivating prose that stood head and shoulders above our black escape from the emerging NWA gangsta aesthetic that made so many of us buppies flee to David Sanborn and smooth jazz.
Of course none of us were so naive to think that the wine and roses served at this party were bestowed eternally. We all still placed ourselves in the upper layers of a sandwich of classes, our faces smushed against the ‘glass ceilings’ of corporate America. A first world problem but our struggle nonetheless. As a young vanguard of black America’s successful elites, none of us were unfamiliar with those callbacks to those archetypes I was now reading like Beloved’s Sethe. We still heard the drums.
Slowly the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope, unborn had died.
It bears mentioning that a great deal of the recent American hypocrisy of ‘white privilege and cultural appropriation’ was mastered decades earlier by blackfolks including my cadre of graduates from elite institutions now integrating and infiltrating corporate America in record numbers. Just like we did at predominantly white colleges and white sports leagues before that. If you’re white, you probably know that one of your black friends can could code-switch with you like an intimate enemy. That friend might be the person who reminded you of the one word you could never say. Perhaps that friend is the one who carried around the spirit of Nat Turner. That friend may have spearheaded your white guilt, and the two of you obsess over your roles in this racial panto. You’ve both learned how to finesse this subtext by using the right weasel words. You are at the new post-Obama equilibrium. Neither of you expect to learn anything new about race relations. You already know what I’m talking about. You’ve got this.
In 1990 I was sick of this kind of double dealing. That’s because I was literally the dude whose job it was to run the manpower planning numbers. I knew the limits of Affirmative Action from inside the nationally awarded corporation several years before the word ‘diversity’ replaced ‘affirmative action’. The model showed me something very simple about supply and demand. My own experience with the Element fitted the truth. You can’t always get what you want. You cannot demand supply, but that’s exactly what the finesse of weasel words that become policies attempts. You cannot demand that the supply of ghetto fabulous suddenly transform into black senior management. You cannot demand that the supply of black senior management suddenly accept the ghetto fabulous. You can’t demand that any race supply you with the transformations you wish for. Alas we are all self-interested and disunited, yet the wishful rhetoric continues — individuals subsumed by sloppy groupthink.
After the Party
That summer I broke up with my girlfriend and started listening to more industrial rock, soca and reggae music. I was looking for a different sort of black friends to hang out with and I landed with that kind of crowd who dug Toni Morrison. Still, I didn’t quit my corporate day job. I found myself around young academics, mostly from UCLA in the liberal arts. That included English department nerds, film critics, urban planners and historians. That was the year I learned to speak of an historian. My favorite was Nell Pointer who turned out to be a counter-example to the proto-woke mainstream. Like those new friends I fell into the literature of Derrick Bell, Patricia J. Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Gloria Aldanzua, bell hooks and Audre Lorde, with various levels of affection and agreement with each. I had previously ingested Cornel West, Thomas Sowell, Harold Cruse, Shelby Steele and the authors of the bourgie black book club including Terry McMillan, Gloria Naylor, August Wilson and Ernest J. Gaines.
While this new cohort weren’t particularly soaked in the archetype of Sethe and slavery, there was still a rebellious energy that I recognized. As the outsider I was, representing Nordstrom, BMW, wine coolers and 94.7 The Wave, I came to recognize my role. Somewhen around that time, Cornel West had a discussion with some Hispanic academic who considered privileged blacks like West, and my buppie cohort of native English speakers as ‘Anglo’. All of this difference did not take the later Woke characteristic of oppressor vs oppressed. Some did, but specifics of difference were part and parcel of the multicultural concept. It became clear to me that black Americans could be differentiated into multiple cultures and that was certainly what I was looking for at the time. I leaned into Caribbean and diasporic identity but I harshly and purposely punched down against Afrocentrics and Hoteps. One of the friends I made at the time was photographer Tony Gleaton who in showing Africans in South and Central America was part of my enlightenment.
Navigating these new sorts of blackness helped me quickly walk away from my new understanding of racial essentialism. My experience clearly told me that blackfolks differentiate themselves, sometimes much more viciously than any white racist as Shelby Steele put into words. In the end, I came to pretty much the same decision as most black Americans tacitly recognize. We’re all rather different in temperament, religious sect, class, ethnicity, education and comportment. We are famous and infamous, celebrated and unknown, violent and passive, self-possessed and dissolute and everything in between. But we all hate racism, and so we all fight racism. Some do so effectively, some fight fire with fire, some throw up their hands.
You can say anything you want about black Americans and you will find some fraction who fit the profile, but if you want to be sure you can say something about all black Americans, it’s that our common American dream is to defeat racism. The difficulty of course is that our American life isn’t all about race and racism and fighting. That’s only the Nat Turner dream. It’s fair to say that it’s reductively racist to say that we all obsess. That’s just you and your kinte-wearing racist friend. This is where the party ends.
In 1991 I moved from LA to Brooklyn and discovered yet another variegated macrocosm of wholly unique blacknesses, heretofore unknown and unacknowledged. The overwhelming commercial success of gangsta rap subsumed everything black into the stewing juices of the Element and that mutated into the meta-narrative of East Coast vs West Coast. Forget Ella Fitzgerald vs Sarah Vaughan. It was Tupac or Biggie. You were either Spike Lee + Public Enemy or some idiot wanker bigot. The so-called Black culture flattened out even as my original buppie cohort became much more visible.
Here I was witnessing the Caribbean Festival for the first time and getting my haircut at a Haitian barber shop off Flatbush, hanging out with my new Bermudian girlfriend drinking champagne cola or Bustelo. I was missing my own LA upscale people. People like Robert Townsend and his Partners in Crime, one of the few crews like the Wayans who played mockingly fast and loose with old and new black stereotypes. One of my favorite sendups was CB4 with this classic scene with Allen Payne.
Yes of course that’s Chris Rock in that video, you know, host of the Oscars who got punched in the face by Will Smith.
An American Outsider
The existential constant of being my own kind of black man through all of these changes in my own life was a search for something I’ve always called the noble arena where people were industrious, virtuous & clever and I didn’t have to deal with the Element. I always expected to find it somewhere in America. If I had settled for whatever legacy of past racial discrimination remained evident in my life, then what would be the point of having any ambition? It was Sowell’s Ethnic America that explained to me a progression of integration success over multiple generations.
My blackness was, like everyone’s original blackness was as defined by the Black Arts Movement as an ironic label. The idea was to take the insult and invert it into a matter of [sometimes perverse] pride. Some people needed to dig down further to find an ultimate expression of alienation, but alienation was the point. As an existential tenet, blackness took the outsider’s position and dared America to live up to its ideals. Obviously for my buppie cohort the irony bordered on hypocrisy. We actually succeeded in our goals to live affluent lives within the halls of corporate professions. Like many of my GenX pals, the models of Sidney Poitier, Blair Underwood & Denzel Washington loomed large in our imaginings. Even the rebranding of Whitney Houston from hiphopper to the greatest singer of the National Anthem was latent in all of us. We knew her mother, Cissy.
For us, the point was to push against every limitation and brand it as black success. That formula worked for those of us who didn’t push the irony into nihilistic self-denegration. That’s why Allen Payne’s blickity black is funny, because the mask of rebellion did not seek to defend against injustice, it was a pretense to act out and act up. Yet still, we buppies occasionally borrowed from the anger and frustration of black hypersegregation (the GU where we didn’t live), the Bad Old Days, and of course American slavery. What major black celebrity doesn’t have a sad trombone story about a racist cop? That trope goes wall to wall. Affluent Americans still appropriate from a seemingly endless parade of ‘black lives’ from Amadou Diallo to George Floyd. Funny we don’t know the names of those who kicked off the Detroit Riots, or the Watts Riots, or the Orangeburg Massacre. Nevertheless some academic disciple of Audre Lorde with a PhD has those to provide undergraduates ‘of color’ and presumably a list that goes back to 1619.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
What happened to the decent respect to the opinions of mankind? This is how you separate the nihilist reactionaries from the considerate radicals. This is how you separate Nat Turner from Frederick Douglass. Apropos Douglass and the Fourth of July narrative, here’s my drilldown.
Anyone can be an outsider for any reason, and the consistency of any sort of blackness highlighting existential difference, the reason the ironic mask works and is part of black American survival is that it is a hedge against moral complacency. It doesn’t matter that the lowest common denominator of black American identity is ‘anti-racist’, it mattered that racism was a transgression against individuality and citizenship. In that regard, it could have easily been one of the declared causes in the Declaration for separation of the African from America. For some Garveyites, it was. That’s just a secular way to describe a righteous moralistic attitude. The Christian way is even more simple and profound. Black Christians have generated their own unique liturgy grounded in Christian ethics and Constitutional principles. You know that to be true of MLK and so many others.
The outsider stands at the door and knocks. Not to come in and knock over chairs and tables, but to sup. Not to supplicate. Not to preach. To simply share respectful company and what we think of as a Thanksgiving meal, still one of our most sacred American observances. Bringing our gifts and sharing in the bounty. It is obvious to me that having abandoned this Christian ethical standard, a large plurality of Americans are colorstruck in racial traffic from which they find no moral escape. Here’s how to escape.
The Future of Freedom
Patriotism is not complicated for black Americans. Indeed many Americans live in their own yokel bubbles convinced their perceptions are totally accurate renderings of the entire picture. It only takes a few hundred words to be spelled out. Simply listen to what people are willing to say.
The future of American freedom, indeed any freedom requires an honest acknowledgement of what liberty is denied. It requires a genuine accounting addressed to mankind, not some permanent open-ended license to political hostility, oppositional stances, trickster games and grievance. Certainly not establishment of blood and soil claims to historical victimhood to be paid off in subsidies. That’s not true independence, that’s just a new type of auction block. Remember that the next time some one mentions the ‘permanent interests of the black community’ or uses the term ‘ADOS’. Remember that for any conspiracy theory or pretense of sovereignty excusing one from civility and citizenship. All black posturing is not of this type. Your discernment is necessary. You need to recognize the difference.
In that is the very difference between the persona of the radical black mask which assumes the ironic outsider’s fight against moral complacency and the cynical performative agitprop and bourgeois appropriation of the struggles of the dead.
Life lies in the future. Make your babies. There’s plenty of freedom to be grown. Civilization is where you make it, independently. You can’t deceive and blackmail humanity. We’re all too invested. Enjoy your citizenship and liberty. Do not become complacent.
Lots of deep stuff here in this essay.
It's been so great to track your journey through your thoughtful writing over these many years; what a great day to say 'thanks.' Dex