Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that—but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.
The man raises some questions that are worthy of reconsideration: If blacks were to become rich and powerful, just what, exactly, would we want from life? Would that something be more than “the most powerful of motor cars”? “Pushed aside as we have been,” would we exhibit a “distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant”? Would we seek to create a new sort of world, a world where men realize themselves?
Some of the finest minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contemplated these same questions and could not imagine that the slave consciousness—that modest vessel for the progression of human spirit—would evolve into the petty, limited, money-hoes-and-clothes-obsessed consciousness of today, that Malcolm X’s “By any means necessary” cry for dignity and freedom would, in just three decades’ time, get butchered into Kanye West’s soulless “Buy any jeans necessary” claptrap. That black life in America has suffered a tremendous loss of discipline and spirit in the hip-hop era is a fact meticulously documented throughout the culture.
III
Nietzsche believed the greatest deeds are thoughts.“The world revolves around the inventors of new values,” he wrote. For more than thirty years the black world has revolved around the inventors of hip-hop values, and this has been a decisive step backward. My generation, if we are to make it and to make good on the debt we owe our ancestors, must find a new vocabulary and another point of view. We have to reclaim the discipline and the spirit we have lost. We have to flip the script on what it means to be black. We have to think about what is and is not beneficial to our own mental, cultural, and even physical health. As a people, we have emerged from centuries spent in the dark woods of slavery and racism only to come upon an ominous forking path. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our survival will be determined by the direction that we take. If we can’t change our ideas, if we fail to cultivate future generations of personalities that are something more than just cool—or hard—if we fail to realize that certain values are better, and worse, than others, then what we are doing is presiding over our own gradual destruction. And that is something, for my father’s generation, that not even the most fanatic Klansmen could have hoped to achieve.
“Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” Du Bois asked that gathering of descendants of slaves. This was a serious concern for forward-looking blacks in the 1920s, but today it feels anachronistic. Just imagine, however, if the only black American who survived one hundred years from now was that cartoonish thug of the past thirty years, so vividly wrought on the canvas of hip-hop music and culture. Would that not be equally depressing? Would that not be worse since, after all, we have drawn this grotesque with our own hand?
IV
On the day before the MTV Video Music Awards this past September, I found myself walking on the Lower East Side of New York City. Manhattan, the downtown portion of it at least, was overflowing with the kind of moneyed young blacks the rap industry has produced in startlingly large numbers over recent years. I was walking along Rivington Street with an attractive girl and we were approaching a tall, thirtyish black guy who was dressed from head to toe in brands you would find at Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys. He was struggling with several bulging shopping bags from Louis Vuitton, and as we passed he noticed us and turned, peering over his Tom Ford frames to say to my date, “I just throw it in the bag; I just throw it in the bag!” He was referencing one of the most popular and ubiquitous rap songs of the moment, Fabolous’s vapid ode to shopping without looking at price tags, which was surprising, since he did not, on first glance, appear to be confined by the categories and thought processes of hip-hop at all. He had on the kind of tight-fitting, ultra-expensive European threads Playboy wore in college, gear that has as much to do with keeping it real and ’hood living as Sub-Zero kitchen appliances do. What was so striking to me about this man the more I thought about him—even more than his lovely and costly garments—was the fact that wealthy and seemingly worldly as he may have been, as flush with resources and credit as he may have been, he was actually living the inane lyrics of a rap song as unthinkingly and literal-mindedly as the most hard-core and insulated thug.
Of course, I immediately recognized the song he was quoting because I also listen to the music. I don’t think it’s possible to shut your eyes and ears completely to a culture as pervasive and aesthetically seductive as hip-hop—and I wonder whether it would even be desirable to do that. I don’t fault this man for being aware of what is simply around him. I do, though, find myself contemplating and feeling sorry for the guy. It is precisely this intangible smallness of mind and inability to transcend skin-deep superficiality, this moral childishness and sheepish conformity, that is the root problem in black life today and the true subject of this book.
The fact is that this problem can never be solved simply by smashing up all the Snoop Dogg albums, as the Reverend Calvin Butts has tried to do, or by banning the most offensive hip-hop fashions, as the city of Baltimore once considered. The better approach—if the far more difficult one—would be for us to learn, once and for all, how to interpret and navigate the world around us, and to stop confusing the shoes on our feet or the songs in our ears for ourselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A book does not belong to its author alone—many people give shape to it. Which is not to imply that anyone listed below necessarily shares any of the views advanced in this work. Rather, it is simply to say that without these people’s presence, the book and I would have been far poorer.
I want to express my deepest thanks to my parents, who have worked so hard and of whom I am so proud. Both of you inspire me to want to be better than I am.
Truman Capote wrote, “Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.” I am indebted to my teacher, mentor, and friend Katie Roiphe more than I could ever possibly say or repay. In those fragile early phases of writing when a little class assignment attempts to become an op-ed, which then somehow attempts to become a viable book proposal, it was Katie who gave me the confidence to believe my goals were not beyond my reach. In addition to being brilliant, she was kind and tremendously generous with me. I cannot imagine this book existing without the insight, guidance, reassurance, and encouragement she provided along the way.
I need to thank my agent, Elyse Cheney, for taking a chance on me, for refusing to send out my proposal until it was ready, and when it finally was, for schlepping all over New York City with me in the rain while fighting off a wicked cold. I could not have asked for a better person to work with. Many thanks to Nicole Steen and Hannah Elnan at Cheney Literary Associates.
Toni Morrison once said that editors “are like priests or psychiatrists, the wrong one can do more harm than good, but the right one is worth searching for.” I consider myself very lucky to have found mine. Eamon Dolan is not only a diplomat and a gentleman, but something like a cross between a Neapolitan tailor and a gadfly, trimming and trimming, prodding and prodding, until somewhere along the line a bloated and unruly Microsoft Word document comes to resemble a finished work. Thanks also to Nicole Hughes and everyone else at Penguin who worked so hard on this pr
oject.
I am indebted to my big brother, Clarence, who bought me my first laptop and who opened his home to me when I badly needed a room of my own in which to write. I’m proud of you, Clarence. On the topic of rooms, I need to give special thanks to my brothers-from-other-mothers, Carlos Larkin, Joshua Yaffa, and Shahin Vallée, each of whom at various stages of the writing process kept me company, lodged me, and sometimes even fed me in London, Boston, Brooklyn, and Paris. All of you I need to thank for your candid feedback, encouragement, and critical engagement with this book. Josh, especially, I need to thank you for the constant use of your ears, eyes, and apartment; Shahin, for personally making my dream of living and writing in Paris come alive; and Carlos, for all those things that had the two of us in tears that night at the bar in TriBeCa, and much more besides that. Godspeed, brothers.
This book may never have got off the ground without the extraordinary help on so many levels that I received from Berthsy Ayide. Thank you so much for everything.
Many thanks to David Howell, Katherine Howell, and Karen Moore, my second family, for their love and support. Many thanks to Charone and Chamir Shivers, my little brothers, for their belief in me.
I want to thank Noah Eaker for his early encouragement and very helpful feedback, as well as Ashley and John Paul Lech in New York and the Roussell family in Los Angeles for their supreme hospitality.
I am grateful to the faculty at the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU, specifically the late Ellen Willis and the current director, Susie Linfield, for the generous fellowship they awarded me, which made graduate school a possibility; and to the distinguished writer in residence Paul Berman for the hours of stimulating conversation he gave me free of charge. I also want to thank my CRC classmates for creating a thought-provoking and lively atmosphere in which to fall in love with words and writing.
Finally, I have to recognize three very special professors from Georgetown, Marcia Morris, Patrick Laude, and Wilfried Ver Eecke, each of whom taught me at crucial junctures how to think and that I could think. Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He has written for the Washington Post and n+1. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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