NewNowKnowHow

Dispatches on Post-Blackness

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I Am the Boogeyman

When Trayvon Martin was killed a year ago today, I almost immediately thought of my parents. I remembered my dad waking up at night when I came home late from a night out. He’d call out from bed, ask if I was okay.Sometimes he would get up to use the restroom, stopping long enough to have a brief conversation about what I had done with friends, where we went, how everyone I’d seen was doing. I remember my mother prepping me and my brother with advice deeply rooted in what I believed, at the time, to be hyperbole to an eye-rolling extreme. This advice may have included how to act if I were ever pulled over by police or being mindful of the fact that being alone with a white girl could be hazardous to a black boy’s health depending on the situation.

I thought of my parents, of their concern when me and my brother left their sight, because I knew that they spent their entire lives trying to guard us from exactly what happened to Trayvon. He was killed because he was a young black kid someone didn’t recognize and assumed the worst of. My parents, and in particular my dad, who spent much of his youth in segregated Alabama, understood the inherent danger to black males in America, one that goes beyond the things that every parent of every child worries about when their kids aren’t near. Some of these dangers are more apparent than others depending on a variety of factors. I know I was lucky enough to be spared the horrors many brothers face day in and day out due to where I grew up, who raised me, and how I was raised. My neighborhood was just a couple blocks away from one of the most crime-ridden and poverty-stricken places in America, but honestly I could have been 100 miles away from east Camden and a city that’s consistently ranked amongst the most dangerous in the country. Over half of homicide victims in the United States are black — despite African Americans making up just 13 percent of the U.S. population — and an overwhelming majority of black murder victims — roughly 85 percent — are black males, according to a Wall Street Journal article from last August.

I grew up knowing I never had to deal with that.

What my parents knew I couldn’t escape was the enduring prejudice, fear, and animous that spurred Trayvon’s death. In the weeks that followed his murder at the hands of, at best, an overzealous neighbor, or at worst, a racist vigilante, there was a lot of talk about what Trayvon Martin should or shouldn’t have been doing, or what he should or shouldn’t have been wearing, or what he should or shouldn’t said to the random stranger who started following him as he walked home from the store. All of that talk about Trayvon’s behavior, this assumption that a 17-year-old boy had a statutory duty to make his neighbors feel comfortable with his presence despite doing nothing more than mind his own business, reminded me of what my parents and a lot of parents of black boys try to prepare their sons for as they ready to strike out on their own. I don’t know if Trayvon could have dressed differently or walked differently or spoke to George Zimmerman differently and it make a difference in the ultimate outcome of the situation. But I know a lot of black people who didn’t find it shocking that folks like Geraldo Rivera and others said that a number of seemingly inconsequential variables could have spared Trayvon, and that it had been incumbent upon the young man to control those variables.

Few people understand “code” or “signifiers” the way black folks do. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote over a century ago, touching on a salient feature of black American life since slavery: Self-preservation has often been dictated by what the dominant culture (white American culture) wants us to be or feels comfortable with us being. And, of course, what’s most comforting to any group of people is what it knows best. Hence, the least threatening black people likely are ones who most mirror white Americans, be that mirroring speech, appearance (hair weaves, straightened hair), education, dress, etc. Trayvon was “code” for “trouble” to George Zimmerman. Start with being young and black. Add on to that an archetype — “thug wear” as Geraldo Rivera called it — and Zimmerman doesn’t need much more evidence in his mind.

Young. Black. Hoodie. Random characteristics leading to one conclusion: The Boogeyman is in my neighborhood, and I have to stop him.

My parents knew that could be my fate too. Heck, at 37 I sometimes wonder if that could still be my fate, that despite being a college educated professional with an advanced degree, some trigger-happy cop or yellow-bellied, easily-threatened and unconciously-racist average citizen might misread “The Matrix” and view me as someone who could do them harm — all while I’m minding my own business.

Sadly, that enduring fear leads to the often exhausting excercise of putting people at ease.

I smile. A lot. Not in a Stepin Fetchit kind of a way, but in a seriously-I’m-a-nice-guy kind of way. I’m (overly) conscious of what a white person, especially a white woman, might be thinking when they step on an elevator alone with me. I shouldn’t care if he or she feels uncomfortable. But I do. In stores, it’s a major annoyance to be sweated by salespeople, so I actually avoid shopping. Or when I’m asked if I need any help, I answer with a pretty patronizing, “No, ma’am, but I’ll let you know if I do.”

I don’t do these things because I’m looking for acceptance. This isn’t is about people liking me. But I do feel like, as Dubar wrote, I must “wear the mask” for my own sanity at times. I just don’t want the hassle. I don’t want to hear it from folks who only deal in archetypes and stereotypes. I don’t want to have conversations I probably shouldn’t have to have or be talked to a way I shouldn’t be talked to as a grown man.

And I don’t want to be seen as a threat, a menace, a danger to your person, for being perceived that way could be a matter of life and death.

Earlier today, one of my students, came in. He’s a smart, handsome kid. Really gifted athlete who could serve as your prototype if you were asked to design an NFL linebacker. Kids on campus call him “Megatron” because, at 6-foot-4, 240 pounds, he looks like a machine.

He was wearing a hoodie. I was in the middle of writing this.

I know there are plenty of people who see him the way I do: a bright, charming black kid who is making the most of an opportunity at one of the best universities in the world. But I couldn’t help but think of the folks who wouldn’t be able to give him that much credit, unable to see that he’s much more than a hooded Boogeyman.

My student deserves that. So did Trayvon.

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THE GREATEST DAY (IN THE GREATEST YEAR) IN HIP-HOP

November 9, 1993 is a remarkable day for something I didn’t do as much as it’s noteworthy for something I did. Just after midnight on a typically mild fall evening in Chapel Hill, Schoolkids Records reopened their doors, allowing me to buy “Midnight Marauders,” the third LP by A Tribe Called Quest.

Also on sale that night/early morning was a record I completely ignored. Some joint called “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).” It wasn’t that I hadn’t been hipped to Wu-Tang Clan yet. “Protect Ya Neck” and “Method Man,” the first two singles from the yet-to-be released album, had dropped over the summer, adding to the soundtrack of an ever-so-magical time between my high school graduation in June and leaving for my first year in college in August. But Wu-Tang was somewhat baffling to me. There seemed to be like 50 of those cats, first of all. And they all seemed to be playing different characters. Some dude named Ghostface Killah wouldn’t even show his face. And while “Method Man” was an extremely hot song, I was confused why a group would single out one member and let him shine like that.

In other words, Wu-Tang Clan broke convention. And despite feeling as if I was a very unconventional 18-year-old, I probably wasn’t ready to digest all that.

Ironically, the CD I did buy that day was created by a group that had broken convention years earlier. ATCQ, along with fellow barrier-breakers The Jungle Brothers and De La Soul (collectively known as the Native Tongue), helped steer hip-hop to what I believe to be the last great thrust of true musical ingenuity in the genre. That’s not to say that the Native Tongue was hip-hop’s zenith creatively. But like Jazz, hip-hop has seen only a handful of sonic schisms (early Def Jam, Dr. Dre-fueled Cali gangsta rap, the jazz-loop-heavy early 90s hip-hop). The Native Tongue, in my estimation, was Miles’ modal or Bird’s bee-bop — so influential that folks spend decades referencing those sounds and sensibilities but have difficulty moving on from it or creating something completely new.

Anyways, “Electric Relaxation,” the clip in this posting, became my favorite track from “Midnight Marauders,” an album that nearly prompted a fight with my roommate after he called it “repetitive” and “boring.” It was that serious. To me at least.

I’d long forgotten that the debut of Wu-Tang came out the same day “Midnight Marauders” was released. I was prompted to look up the release dates by what should be a fascinating ongoing series by NPR on hip-hop in 1993, easily the greatest year in hip-hop’s history. About two months prior to that fateful day 20 years ago, my all-time favorite group De La Soul — surely a posting about how De La Soul changed my life is forthcoming in this blog one day — came out with its third album, the underheralded “Buhloone Mindstate.” It holds perhaps my favorite hip-hop lyric ever: “Fuck being hard…Posdonous is complicated.”

Also released that year: “Doggystyle” by Snoop Dogg, “‘93 Til Infinity” by Souls of Mischief, “Enta Da Stage” by Black Moon, “Return of the Boom Bap” by KRS-One, “Here Come the Lords” by Lords of the Underground, “Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)” by Digable Planets, “Bacdafucup” by Onyx, “In God We Trust” by Brand Nubian.

And there was this hip-hop band from Philadelphia that made their first album that year. But most folks wouldn’t hear The Roots’ “Organix” until years later.

Of course, I know I should qualify my romanticizing of hip-hop produced in 1993. No doubt that was a special year to me. Twenty years ago today, I would have been suffering through the throes of senioritis sitting in a classroom at Camden Catholic High School. I may or may not have gotten an acceptance letter to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just yet, but I know that by early April of 1993 I’d decided that was where I was going to school. I spent the summer in between graduation and starting college working what may still be my all-time favorite job (IMAX theater usher in a science museum) and hanging out with my good friend Anthony DiMeglio and girlfriend, the late Kimberly Bailey. And then getting to Chapel Hill that fall, starting work at arguably the best college radio station in the country there, WXYC…all of that being such a rich and meaningful time in my life helps fuel my love affair with the hip-hop music I heard that year.

But 1993 was still dope regardless.

Postscript: Before I left The Fayetteville Observer and just a few short years before I retired from journalism, the paper afforded me the opportunity to write a blog. I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. I told the editor at the time that I wanted to write about black people. Whatever that meant. I called it New Now Know How after a Charlie Mingus song I’d never heard…I just thought the name sounded cool. I still don’t know what I intended to accomplish with the blog or if I ever did accomplsih anything with it. But I did notice that while I didn’t necessarily always write about black people in culture or politics or sport, I was writing about things that meant something to black people in America. Often I’d get reminders from borderline racist readers who loved to comment anonymously on my blog that what I was writing about wasn’t “blackness.” This, of course, was meant to be a dig at me. But it helped me realize that there is no true determinant of “true” blackness. Certainly, black Americans have shared experiences and histories and cultures. But we don’t have homogenous experiences and histories and cultures. Toure’s novel “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness” explores this notion. Especially younger black Americans, folks like me who grew up after the civil rights movement and enjoyed the opportunity, for the most part, that this country is MEANT to offer all of its citizens, traditional notions of “blackness” just don’t work anymore. Unintentionally, I think that’s what the original New Now Know How was illustrating. I think I’ll be a little less unwitting about it in this version. Enjoy.