Michael Eric Dyson

by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

  Black youth explore their cultural roots through clothing because they have “a much greater awareness of fashion and being in style” than their white peers.18 Black male youth also define their masculinity through their clothes more readily than do white male adolescents.19 This may have something to do with the social stigma black youth still suffer. Like their forebears in city streets, black youth embody jubilant performance. They experiment with styles, and transform their identities, in a culture still skeptical about their aims and skills, except where playing fields and entertainment arenas are concerned. When black urban youth style their bodies, they do so within the limited social choices they face. Fashion is a default mechanism of self-expression—and social control. The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies as battlefields of fierce moral contest.

  Fashion is one of the truly democratic options of self-expression left to urban black youth; while they may be as tyrannized as the rest of us by name brands and exorbitant prices, they are neither passive victims of style nor its oblivious dupes. As consumers with limited options but sometimes expensive tastes, black urban youth style their identities by shifting emphasis away from individual, and original, items—a Versace dress, Gucci shoes—to a style that incorporates knock-offs of those items in its eclectic street repertoire. By making a virtue (a style trend of ghetto extravagance) out of necessity (little money and less credit), black youth discovered “ghetto chic” and “ghetto couture.” Poor black youth transformed the market from their positions as imaginative, if restricted, consumers, igniting a widespread trend of “individual customization. Tailors … took the most expensive and conservative designs of coveted labels and added an extra twist of ‘street flavor.’”20

  Of course, neither ghetto chic nor the black youth who created it are exempt from the same sort of disdain and embarrassment that dogged the styles of their urban forebears a century earlier. Hip-hop has been accused, rightly so, of misogynistic lyrics, though other sectors of the culture that purvey patriarchy’s poisons are spared such relentless condemnations as hip-hop has garnered. Hip-hop culture has also been blamed for giddily embracing consumerism, a charge that is true, again, but even truer of whiter and richer segments of the culture. Similar to the Air Jordan myth discussed in Chapter 2, the perception of black youth consumption is often blown way out of proportion to its actual occurrence. And of course hip-hop has been nailed for casting glamour on thuggish behavior and for heartlessly painting violent portraits of urban life. It’s all true, but still, the whole truth of hip-hop isn’t contained in these charges of moral corruption and, nearly as often, racial betrayal. The sheer vitality of hip-hop as art form and, because of the generational lag, as agitator of adults, must not be overlooked. Many black elders claim that hip-hop is all macho posturing and stylish bluster in the service of social pathology.

  But it is not merely posing, and the ethically questionable gesture, that form the culture’s base of appeal: At its best, hip-hop summons the richest response in the younger generation to questions of identity and suffering. They may not be as elegantly crafted as were the urban horrors depicted by Wright or Baldwin—after all, we are speaking of different genres, and different modes of intelligence, literate versus postliterate, that is, if the word is narrowly defined and selectively applied—but Scarface and Nas, and, before them, Tupac and Notorious B.I.G., have sketched characterizations of black male angst and moral striving as haunting and beautiful as anything we’re likely to read from social critics of the black ghetto. We need not romanticize these pavement poets to appreciate their art. Neither can we deny that the furious resentment that hip-hop evokes—which, curiously enough, often overlooks battles within hip-hop about its future and direction and about whether it has sold its soul to the devil while claiming to lead youth to the Promised Land—is still largely a matter of bourgeois disgust for the economically humbled.

  Street fashion is once again at the heart of the war against the urban black poor. Black adults, including Afristocrats like Cosby, have been engulfed in moral panic over baggy pants that sag almost beneath the behind. For these folk, baggy pants express a conscious, or, perhaps worse yet, unconscious, desire to return to the scene of their stylistic origin: the prison. It is true that baggy pants, which often hang on the hips low enough to reveal the color of one’s undergarments, are adapted from prisons. Inmates had to discard belts from pants so they wouldn’t harm themselves or others by turning leather or buckles into weapons. The style was popularized by California gangs in the ’90s. (In the NBA, no less a luminary than Michael Jordan was the first to wear baggy shorts, the sure sign to purists that basketball, too, had become a sport of thugs with tattoos and cornrows.) Some black adults think that black youth are heading for moral suicide when they align themselves with a prison subculture that praises and practices death.

  There is no denying that black youth are in deep trouble. The aesthetic ecology in which they are nurtured surely contains poisonous weeds and quicksand, glimpsed in sexist tirades on wax and the hunger to make violence erotic. Alarmist narratives also mirror the worries over working and struggling urban bodies throughout the twentieth century. The extravagant stroll down the street has been supplanted by the gang cruise, the low-riding ESE or the corner-hugging homeboy, whether that corner is for consumption (the mall), creativity (the recording studio) or carnage (the drug den). It is easy to understand why in many instances baggy pants might be fearsome. (Of course, in thousands of crime reports from the media and police, the suspect is often described as wearing such gear.) If this style of dress emerged on streets where black and brown male youth played or preyed, it may be that they decided to adorn their bodies in the styles forced on the men they love, family and friend alike, who have gone to jail or prison. This may be understood as sympathy dress, fashion that draws from the overidentification of black and brown youth with their terrorized, or terrorizing, kin, who may have been caught up in bloody urban dramas. Just as one shaves his head because he identifies with a loved one who loses her hair when afflicted by disease, youth may adopt the clothing and style of those who are critical to their survival. It’s a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from its demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom to walk on streets from which it has been removed.

  But perhaps we shouldn’t be too literal, either; if that was the origin of the baggy aesthetic, it need not be its exclusive, or by now even its primary, frame of reference. Most youth who wear baggy pants and oversize shirts are probably not even aware of their origins, and when they find out are not likely to give up the fashion because its beginnings don’t determine their uses of the style. Many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel they are already in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream and by their dismissive, demeaning elders. The baggy pants style may symbolize, consciously or not, their restricted mobility in the culture. Baggy pants, and oversize clothing in general, may also cover black bodies subject to unhealthy surveillance. Maybe black youth who can’t hide in their skin are forced to hide in their clothes. The more they are swallowed up in a sea of denim or cotton, the less likely they are to drown in naked scrutiny of vulnerable limbs. And while the clothes also mark them for suspicion of crime, they no doubt recognize that they are already marked by color and class and age. Why Cosby and more elders don’t get this is regrettable and sad. Some argue that Cosby’s assault on the bodies and names of our youth is a sign of love. If it is, it is a callous and derisive love.

  One supposes the same love shows in Cosby’s sarcastic slap at the body modifications of black females. The piercing of ears, noses, tongues, eyebrows and navels (and, less noticeably in public, the labia and nipples) sends Cosby into spasms of disgust. Despite what Cosby implies, many young people do modify their bodies with Africa, and other ancient civilizations, in view. Man
y non-Western cultures practiced the art of changing the body through extravagant self-styling. As is true with fashion, body modifications—both the temporary sort, including facial makeup, hair removal, coloring of teeth and body painting, and the permanent kind, such as stretching the neck with rings and cosmetic surgery—suggest that the body is both a signifying battlefield and an “unfinished project.”21 The modified body, to a degree, challenges Western myths of beauty and self-image. Body modifications that borrow from ancient cultures get under the skin of civilized body ideals: that the body should be ordered and controlled; that the skin should be free of foreign agents, an ideal that discourages tattooing and body piercing; that the body should never be deliberately marked by signs of trauma, a move against acts of scarification; and that the body should be subject to ideals of public presentation that embody restraint and modesty.

  In contrast to practices in ancient cultures, body modifications have been dramatically altered by consumer culture.22 In many ancient societies, body modifications had many functions and were imposed on tribal members. Body modifications were used to mark one’s age, social rank or status as a slave, or one’s relation to a tribe; to signify mourning and to ward off disease and evil; to secure one’s life in the afterworld and to possess magical powers; to intimidate opponents; and to enhance one’s appeal to the opposite sex.23 Body modifications were also used to marginalize tribal members and to mark criminals with stigma and shame. Contemporary practitioners of modifications, including tattooing, scarification and body piercing, seem to invite or underscore their marginal status. One may be resisting conventional notions of “normal,” “beautiful” and “appealing,” or one may be rejecting the mainstream’s views of culture and politics. Whatever their motivation might be, it is clear that those who practice body modification can now signify on their bodies, through their bodies, with their bodies, thus liberating themselves from certain Western norms.24

  The freedom to experiment with one’s body enhances the artistic elements of body modification. Tattooing in the contemporary vein may be seen as the body’s graffiti, encouraging participants to paint maps of identity on the body’s surface. Scarification in the modern context may be seen as the body’s Braille, inspiring participants to raise the flesh’s surfaces to read messages others are blind to. And piercing may now be seen as the body’s crochet needle, allowing participants to embroider the skin in striking patterns of self-disclosure. Of course, as was true with disco music, body piercing, which thrives in gay and lesbian cultures, represents the “homosexualization” of American expressive culture while underscoring the exhibitionist impulses of consumer culture.25

  Body piercing allows some black youth to adapt jubilant performance to their skin and to improvise their identities. Their improvisational identities inspire black youth to use body modification to gain surer self-understanding. Even as black youth applaud and embrace the modified body in white cultures, they must remember that their black skin is already a permanent marker of difference. (Of course, Michael Jackson’s chilling reversal of pigment suggests the elasticity of the epidermis, but even so, the disappearance of his color has not kept Jackson from finally being treated like the black man he was remembered to be.) To be sure, black skin is sometimes loved as an exotic fetish, but it is more likely viewed as an uninhabitable and disfiguring border. This fact is undisturbed even as body modifiers adopt “Modern Primitivism” to reject the materialistic values of Western culture and to incorporate the ideals of “primitive” cultures.26 This concept, quite useful in curing Western myopia, carries cataracts of its own. Some whites fail to see how they have a choice whether to be identified as “primitives,” while for black folk, the batteries are always included and the primitivism is always assumed, or, rather, there is what can be called a civilized savagery ascribed to even the most postmodern, body-modifying black subject around. Black youth can tap into the broader history of revulsion to the modified body in the West. But they can also embrace urban black identities that are scarred by cultural disdain and tattooed with racial disgust.

  For an example, one need look no further than Cosby’s cynical insistence, all in the tone of his voice, that the body piercing of black youth is both a sign of their African ancestry and a signal that they have no idea what that ancestry means. His words resonate in simple blackness and drip in contradiction. On the one hand, Cosby seems to suggest that black youth are both dramatically and irreversibly alienated from their African roots (“What part of Africa did this come from?”); on the other hand, he suggests that black youth have no idea about their African roots because they are not African. (“These people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa.”) Of course, one might reasonably levy that charge at Cosby as well, given his stereotypical misrepresentations of black youth and his ignorance of the African origins of their jubilant performances on skin and streets. Body modifications do have roots in African and in many other civilizations. Scarification and body painting were practiced in Sahara in 8000-5000 B.C.E.; Egyptian mummies of Nubian women had a series of tattoos across their abdomens in 4200 B.C.E.; and in 4000 B.C.E., men in predynastic Egypt wore decorated penis sheaths while the women were tattooed.27

  In today’s Africa there is overwhelming evidence of body modifications, enhancements, adornments and decorations that suggests at least a provisional link to African American culture. As Cosby’s comments reveal, there is still a great deal of ambivalence about the role of Africa in black American culture. The romantic view of Africa has rightly been rejected; it feeds on ignorance or denial of the continent’s complex identities and conflicting values. But there is startlingly little appreciation for African cultures and ideas, even among black folk. While we worked to free our bodies from white supremacist rule, and our kin of color from colonialism, we often failed to decolonize our imaginations and update our images of the world that birthed our ancestors. The last frontier of bigotry toward our ancestral homeland to be conquered may lie no further than the mirror.

  One need not subscribe to National Geographic to learn how Africans have adapted the ancient art of body modification to their current situations. They have largely spurned the stigmas and tribal traumas of the past, with notable exceptions, including female circumcision, an act whose brutality Alice Walker helped bring to the world’s attention.28 Perhaps one of the young women Cosby thinks has no knowledge of Africa may know of Turkana women from Kenya who sport multiple piercings along the rim of their ears; or Suri women in Ethiopia who display scarifications, large ear plugs and body painting; or the young Dinka women whose facial scarification can be read as painful elegance; or the Iwam warrior from the upper Sepik river in New Guinea with a pierced nasal septum.29

  If Cosby’s views on fashion and body modifications prove his disinterest in straying too far from the comforts of his insistent bias, a trait he shares in common with millions more, his take on unique black names is especially dispiriting. Behind those colorful and sometimes extravagant, even outlandish, names is a history of black subjugation that has rattled the black psyche with ungodly precision. There is nothing those names could ever mean that could begin to approach the offense that brought them into existence. Shaniqua never enslaved humans as chattel.30 Taliqua never tore a child from her mother’s breast to rape or sell her. And even though Muhammad isn’t in the same class, a slip we may ascribe to Cosby’s general disdain for non-European names, even he, in black skin at least, never benefited like his owners from the savage pleasures of white supremacy. Whatever acrimony Cosby has for the unique names of the black poor—and he is surely not alone—he should at least learn, as should we all, even if in the briefest fashion, the story of how black names were dragged through mud and used to denominate us as beasts and fools. But we fought back with a homespun ingenuity that pitted our imaginations against the ghastly terrors of chattel slavery and we took back our dignity, or at least our self-determination, one syllable at a time.

  When
African slaves got to American soil, their spirits were broken and they were robbed of their identities, a fact most memorably glimpsed in the stripping away of their names and their bleak renaming by their owners. The new names the owners bestowed often bled with the contempt they felt for the slaves; many Africans were named after animals, inheriting monikers like Jumper, Bossey or Postilion.31 In other instances, Africans were given biblical or Puritan names, or named after classical deities, as if to conjure the distance between their wretchedly inferior beings and the ideals and achievements those names summoned. They were given names like Hercules and Cato, or Othello and Claudius.32 If an owner thought a slave particularly dumb, he was sure to stick him with Plato or Socrates; if, hypocritically enough, a black female was deemed promiscuous, she would get the name Diana, all the more to pour derision on their heads.33 Africans were also given names of titles that marked their exact opposite status: General and King. (In the generations after slavery, blacks continued this tradition in various ways, but, of course, without the vicious signifying that accompanied it. My grandfather, born in the late 1800s, for instance, was named Major Leonard.)

  Later, slaves were named after geography, and received place names like Quebec and Senegal, Bristol and Cambridge. Or they were named after famous personages like Byron, Washington, Lafayette, Napoleon, Lincoln and Madison.34 As slavery expanded, African Americans began to win back the freedom to name themselves—sometimes overtly, sometimes in more subtle ways, but largely by refusing to tie their identities to the names their owners gave them.35 In the instances they were in control, Africans named their infants seven days after birth, a sign that they took naming seriously and that a great deal of thought went into naming each African child.36 Some slaves secretly held on to their African names and referred to themselves by their “country names,” suggesting the provisional control that slaves on predominantly black estates were gaining over some important matters.37