Tag Archives: Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011)

Coping in the Boy @ The Window World

06 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Gaius Baltar tortured/in imagination (merged pics), Battlestar Galactica, October 6, 2012. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res (1st picture) and merged rendering.

“A wide receiver tiptoeing the sideline of a football field after making an acrobatic catch, barely keeping his left foot in-bounds by tapping his big toe in the two inches of space between the grass and the thick white line in front of him. A note in a song that is so inspiring, so well-balanced between rhythm and harmony, so well sung that the hairs on my neck stand up and my spirit feels like soaring.” This is what I wrote in the first paragraph of the preface (which I need to revise yet again, by the way) to my Boy @ The Window manuscript.

In context, I was writing about the infinitesimal decisions and actions that could’ve added up to success or failure for me growing up in those dismal days and years. But I could’ve just as easily been writing about what imaginations and fantasies went through my head growing up to make my inner world more powerful than anything I saw and experienced in the real world. Much of Boy @ The Window is about how I coped, good, bad and ugly (see my posts “Peanuts Land” from April ’12 and “Mr. Mister’s ‘Kyrie’” from March ’11 for more).

How I coped through imagination, inner projection and fantasy changed during the worst of my preteen and post-puberty years. I went from imagining and acting out an entire city, nation-state and culture in my room to the need for an internal world that couldn’t be taken apart by abuse, poverty and isolation. Ultimately it came for me in the form of the everyday things I either already liked or was on the cusp of liking. I already enjoyed a wide variety of music by the fall of ’82. Once I became a sports fan and occasional sports participant, those images and achievements became part of my inner movie and soundtrack.

It became a partnership that I eventually learned to conjure up at will, that became part of my residual sleeping state, that made the madness of 616, MVHS and Mount Vernon, New York dissolve into background noise.

Santonio Holmes’ Super Bowl XLIII game-winning catch, Tampa, FL, February 1, 2009. (http://bleacherreport.com).

It meant, though, that watching a Mets, Giants or Knicks game or listening to Earth, Wind & Fire wasn’t a simple casual experience. It involved rooting for the underdog, which in turn meant rooting for myself. It included the synching of home runs, touchdown passes and three-pointers to guitar riffs, crescendos and other highlights in a particular song or series of songs. It meant that my imagination became itself a fully dedicated line for coping with stress, checking anger, solving problems, and seeing my world the way I chose to see it, rather than the way my world actually was.

Take one of my favorite songs as a teenager, Yes’ “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” (1983). It wasn’t just the fact that I actually felt lonely and could relate to the song. When I heard the song, I could see myself running a screen play in football, following a group of well set-up blockers all the way to the end zone for a touchdown. I could relate emotionally, because the song was about me as an underdog, because of my unrequited love for Crush #1, because I now knew what a screen pass was. It made existential philosophy easier for me to understand my senior year of high school in my AP English and Philosophy classes.

“Owner Of A Lonely Heart” also reminded me to never “concede my free will,” even when my now ex-stepfather Maurice’s fists met my face and teeth and ribs at fifteen and sixteen. Like a scene from the ’00s Battlestar Galactica involving Gaius Baltar or Caprica Six, I often projected a view of the world I wanted over whatever was going on in reality. Going the mile or so between 616 and the C-Town in Pelham could either be a chance for me to catch a long touchdown pass or for me to figure out to which colleges I should apply.

Ryan Fitzpatrick of Buffalo Bills v. NY Jets, in rare protection against blitz while in pocket, October 6, 2012. (http://bleacherreport.com).

Sometimes, if I allowed myself to slip deeply enough, like, in the moments before an exam, I could use a buildup point in the song to bring in an extra blocking tight end to run a max-protect play. I’d snap the ball, send three receivers on one side of the defense, and wait just long enough for one to cross before delivering a perfect pass that allowed my receiver to split the secondary for a long score. All while taking a hit in my right ribs and being knocked down to the turf, just a quarter-second after my index finger’s come off the ball, giving it a smoother spiral rotation while in flight. And so many times, that re-visioning of my world made it so that my natural ability to remember everything and discern many things resulted in very good grades, solid performances, and a balancing act that made life at 616 and MVHS just bearable enough.

I was reminded of how often my mind went down this road by Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (which I blogged about earlier this week), particularly his chapter on imagination and art, “Keep It Real Is a Prison.” Except that my mind does still go there sometimes. Usually as I’m about to give a speech, or while running a five-miler, drilling a three or driving. Or in writing something for publication, like Boy @ The Window.

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.