How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston

  When I was eight, I moved to the Middle East. I think the Middle East is the first time I discovered I was black, because people would come up to you, and they’d [say something in Arabic,] which translated to, “Hey, this is a black guy.”

  Then I went to a British school in Doha. British people let you know you’re black. They still were trying to hearken back to them old days. I’m like, “Dude, we is all free now, we are all free. You have nothing but this little island and the Falklands. You have nothing else.” But they will remind you.

  I started to understand what it meant to be black insofar as an American context when I moved back to the States. I did [my last two years] of high school in suburban New Jersey.

  I’m a city kid. I didn’t know what the suburbs was like. I discovered it was not that nice. That’s when I discovered that apparently being black is not good. Things like, “Black people are not supposed to be smart.” I had no idea. I’m messing around, getting As. Stupid ass. I thought you were supposed to be good. Little did I know that I should play more basketball, read less books. But this I learned when I got back here.

  JACQUETTA SZATHMARI

  I think I’ve always known I was black. I mean I grew up in a black neighborhood; it was never like a process of discovering I was black, but I can say I remember [the first time I was] insulted about being black. That’s when I realized that maybe black could suck a little bit.

  I was doing swimming lessons at 4H camp or a day camp kind of thing, I was going to go dive in the water, and some white kid made a comment about grease in my hair and how it was going to ruin the entire Chesapeake Bay. I was like, “Wow, okay, that’s racism, and that’s what it’s going to mean for a little while for me to be black.”

  CHRISTIAN LANDER

  My whole life in Toronto, I was very, very aware of being white at a really young age. The [black] experience in Toronto is very different, because of the way immigration patterns worked. So most of our [black] population is actually Afro-Caribbean, people who moved up from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana. My understanding for most of my life about black culture was really more Caribbean-based.

  I’d say I learned fairly early on from the Toronto experience, and the rest is really the American black experience, which came from media, television, and so forth.

  You like how I included a white Canadian? Booyah. Diversity in How to Be Black? Check.

  Mama Thurston

  My family has been black for a long, long time.

  While I have yet to pursue Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s crime scene–investigating, genealogical origin-hunter project,* I can go back a few generations based on stories my mother shared and documents my sister and I discovered after she passed in 2005.

  My great-grandfather was named Benjamin Lonesome, and he was born in 1870 in Caroline County, Virginia. According to my mother, he was part Native American,* born a slave,* and taught himself to read. According to his obituary, he moved to Washington, DC, in 1896 and started working for the Highway Division of the DC government in 1900. He died at the age of ninety-six.

  Based on the photos I’ve seen, he was tall, thin, and handsome. My mother held her grandfather in extremely high regard, so much so that I was named in his honor.* Benjamin Lonesome fathered two daughters, one of whom was my maternal grandmother, Lorraine Martin.

  I don’t have many memories of my grandmother. By the time I came along, she and my mother had an extremely frayed relationship, so I only saw her a few times. What I do remember is that she liked vodka and smelled of cigarettes, and her house had the aroma of their mutual accumulation. What I didn’t know until after my mother’s passing was that in 1954, my grandmother was hired as “the first colored clerk in the U.S. Supreme Court building,” according to the Washington Afro-American newspaper. When asked by the paper what she thought of working in the Supreme Court building, my grandmother described it as “sort of awe-inspiring.” The woman for whom she worked was a personnel officer named Catherine Waddle. When asked what she thought of my grandmother, Waddle described her as “just fine.”

  My grandmother was highly respected in her community, directed the Sunday school choir at her church, and loved to travel. She didn’t always love being a parent, though, and took the extraordinary step of sending my eight-year-old mother to an all-black boarding and reform school in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania. The Holy Providence School was founded by Katharine Drexel of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic religious order created to recruit Native Americans and blacks. Attending the school, though a year behind my mother, was Ed Bradley, who would become one of America’s best-known journalists through his work on 60 Minutes. Within ten years of my mother’s time at Holy Providence, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would also attend. I remember my mother talking about her time at this school, but I don’t know if she ever realized that some of her schoolmates went on to become some of the most prominent and successful black people in the country.

  You don’t need to have special qualifications in child psychology to imagine how being shipped off to a Catholic boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia would make a little DC girl feel. This letter written by my mother to her own mother captures the reality perfectly:

  Dear, Mother

  I am having fun but? I do not like it here. I am mad at you. Please send me some cookies and a Sparkle Plenty doll. They can have dolls here. Please send it because I do not have anything to play with.

  Yours Truly,

  Arnita

  But the best part of the letter comes in the form of a note added by someone clearly not my mother. Written in a large, perfect script at the bottom of my mother’s note is simply the word “Over,” and on the other side of the page in the same script is:

  If your little girl is dissatisfied, we’d be glad to have her bed for children who are anxious to come.

  Sister

  A letter from the very young Arnita Thurston to her mother from boarding school.

  Wow. That letter might as well have been signed “Warden.” These sisters weren’t playing! They got all Patriot Act on a little girl’s letter to her mother.

  My mom didn’t attend Holy Providence for long. After returning to DC, she went to Benjamin Banneker Junior High School and McKinley Technology High School, and for a while seemed to play and dress the part of the appropriate, God-fearing Negro woman my grandmother wanted her to be. I even have a photo of my mother sitting on the National Mall wearing a dress (below the knees) and holding a basket! How quaint. But my mother was also questioning her church’s missionary activities to “save the heathens” in Africa, and she began socializing and politicking with blacks from across the Diaspora who lived in DC: Nigerians, Eritreans, Caribbean people, and black American activists.

  Soon she was partying with brothers named “El Dorado”—picture a smooth, lanky brother with leather boots, blue-and-white-striped bell-bottoms, polyester dress shirt, and an afro that shone like the sun—and protesting in streets and on radio stations for black liberation. My mother was turning our family even blacker!

  Arnita Thurston as Appropriate Negro Woman.

  El Dorado aka The Coolest Dude Ever.

  Arnita Thurston (center) as Revolutionary Black Woman.

  My sister was born into the eye of the Radical Mama Thurston storm in 1968. She lived her first nine years with my mother in one of many centers of black cultural and political activity: the Envoy Towers apartment building on 16th Street in Northwest DC. My mother partied and played music in clubs and smoked reefer,* and her parenting style could be rough, relying heavily on the same corporal punishment she had received growing up.

  I had a slightly different version of Arnita Lorraine Thurston. Shortly before my birth in 1977, my mother found a row house in a listing of estate sales, and she delivered phone books and sold home-cooked dinners to help raise the down payment for my childhood home at 1522 Newton Street. By the time I came along, eighty-one years after my great-grandfa
ther had moved to DC, my mother no longer smoked, had mostly given up physically disciplining her children, and would increasingly become committed to an often-annoying health-food diet.

  I recall her many experiments in healthy eating with some pain. We often shopped at a health-food cooperative, purchasing items like rice cakes; Grape-Nuts cereal, which was essentially gravel; and skim milk, which is like a watered-down version of the milk you know and love. I’ll never forget waiting at the checkout counter of the Takoma Co-op and seeing “carob-covered” doughnuts, which should have been called “infuriatingly not-chocolate” doughnuts.

  On nearly every trip to the co-op, we were the only black people in the market, and when my friends visited our home, they would notice that instead of Cheerios cereal, I had some absurd healthy alternative called Tasteeos. If the cereal were actually tasty, its name would not be Tasteeos. It was embarrassing!

  My mother also had a deep affection for the outdoors, and she planned many family activities around long car rides, hiking, biking, and camping. Whoever said black folk don’t go camping forgot to tell Arnita Thurston, who thoroughly enjoyed spending a Saturday afternoon tent-shopping at Recreational Equipment International (REI). My mother was constantly organizing field trips for me and my friends: hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, biking along the C&O Canal, camping on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The thing is, it’s not like she would just drop us off and tell us to “enjoy the nature.” No, she was hiking and biking and camping right alongside us. Her own peers thought she was nuts.

  Without spending much of her very limited funds (I wouldn’t own a video game console or subscribe to cable television until I graduated college in 1999), my mother concocted activity after activity to engage my mind and body. She enrolled me in the DC Youth Orchestra Program, where I learned to play bass and performed at the Kennedy Center and in Knoxville, Tennessee. She enrolled me in tae kwon do after some kids jumped me and stole my bike. She enlisted (yes, enlisted) me in an all-black Boy Scout troop, the highlight of which wasn’t the camping trips but rather the field trip we took to a DC Masonic temple, where we grilled the tour guide on the Masons’ liberal use of African symbols, all of which he denied.

  Under my mother’s tutelage, I was becoming a miniature black activist myself. When I was eight, she gave me a book about apartheid, because, you know, how else am I supposed to learn how the world really works? She made me learn all the countries in Africa and quizzed me on them using a map on the wall of her bedroom. I accompanied her to community organizing meetings and stop-the-violence vigils and black cultural festivals on a regular basis.

  My mother’s parenting strategy was consciously designed to pass on the lessons she’d learned in her life. For example, unlike her own mother, she encouraged spiritual belief but religious flexibility. When I decided to switch from the Catholic church four blocks away to the Episcopal church across the street merely because it was closer, she was fine with that. She just insisted that I be part of some community. The QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker that would grace my lockers and notebooks from seventh through twelfth grade is one she gave me, always reminding me that just because someone has authority over me does not mean they deserve my respect. This was clearly counter to the programming she’d received in her own upbringing, and she was determined to break the cycle.

  Otherwise, she simply kept me so busy that I couldn’t get involved in the increasingly troublemaking activities outside our front door. As the 1980s progressed, so did the breadth and destructive effect of crack cocaine on Washington, DC. I had seen friends’ older siblings go from selling lemonade to selling crack and then watched as many of them were carted off to prison. I witnessed an addict brutally beaten with the stones from our front yard, likely because he couldn’t pay. I observed as my mother took hundreds of photographs of drug deals going down across the street, not to turn over to the police but because she sensed the historical significance of this terrible transition. Having preserved most of her collection, I’m glad she documented the environment of my early childhood so comprehensively. I was a little black boy living in a war zone. Our own mayor was a crackhead.

  When the HBO show The Wire came out, I recognized so much of what was on my television screen from my memories of my own neighborhood. As I’ve reflected back on both, I realize that my neighborhood was just like The Wire. We had the drug dealing, the police brutality, the murders. Well, it was almost a perfect match. We had everything The Wire had except for universal critical acclaim and the undying love of white people who saw it. Of course, eventually white people would fall in love with my old neighborhood as development and gentrification have led to its supporting a subway station, wine bars, and even a Target. Back in the day, I lived in a black neighborhood under siege. For a single black woman raising a boy, this was a terrifying environment. In a 1992 Washington Post series about mothers raising black boys in the inner city, the caption on the photo of my mother and me states:

  Arnita Thurston says she acted like a crazy woman trying to protect Baratunde from the streets.

  Thanks to my mother, I survived that war. At twelve years old, I was a bass-playing, tofu-eating, weekend-camping, karate-chopping, apartheid-hating, top-grade-getting, generally trouble-avoiding agent of blackness.

  How Black Are You?

  This book was almost called How Black Are You?

  In the summer of 2009, I bought a bottle of wine in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn. I didn’t know much about wine and still don’t, but I didn’t want to ask the shop employee and then pretend like I cared about her in-depth description involving earthy hints of nutmeg and subtle karmic rainbows of frankincense or sadness or whatever. Instead of admitting my ignorance and seeking help, I browsed the bottles and waited for a sign.

  That’s when I spotted the label “Negroamaro.” This was the sign! I would buy this bottle because it had the word “Negro” on it. I did not know what “amaro” meant, and I did not care. Clearly, this was a red wine created for a discerning black connoisseur.

  Later that week, I got up early to catch a flight, and as I rummaged through the kitchen counter of my friend’s apartment, looking for something to eat, I spotted the empty bottle of Negroamaro. I thought, “That’s pretty black of you, Baratunde.”

  As with most of my thoughts, I decided this was something I should share with the Internet, so I fired up the Twitter app on my phone and instigated a battle of blackness with my friend and fellow Brooklyn-based comedian Elon James White.

  On Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 7:32 a.m., I pressed “send” on the following message:

  this weekend i picked my red wine because it was called “Negroamaro.” that’s how black i am. @elonjames #HowBlackAreYou

  Two minutes later, Elon responded, “Challenge, son?” and it was on. For the next several hours, we went back and forth trying to prove our blackness in a game of satirical one-upmanship. Others saw the #HowBlackAreYou hashtag flying across their screens and decided to join in. Before long, thousands of #HowBlackAreYou tweets had been generated.

  I later retold this story in a technology conference keynote address called “There’s a #Hashtag for That,” and got the attention of an editor at HarperCollins. After I met with her and her team, the title “How to Be Black” was born. I thought an entire book on “How Black Are You?” was a bit much. (But “How to Be Black” felt just fine!)

  Still, that original question interests me. It is an inextricable fact of blackness that one will at some point be referred to as “too black” or “not black enough” by white people, black people, and others. I’ve yet to meet the Negro who is “juuuuuust right” to everyone. So I turned the question over to The Black Panel. Here’s some of what they had to say in answer to the question “How black are you?”

  W. KAMAU BELL

  I guess we need to know who’s on the scale. I would probably say I’m in the middle. I’d say I’m solidly in the middle. I think I’ve spent most of my life in th
e middle of blackness, maybe just north of the middle as I’ve gotten older. I think I get more reason to be black the older I get.

  It’s like everything. The older you get, the more you get calcified in whatever direction you were going in. I feel about racism the way a lot of guys feel about male-pattern baldness. “This was supposed to be done by now!” Which makes me more black, like “Okay, then I’m going to really step up my game, my black game.”

  CHERYL CONTEE

  I’m pretty black on the inside. That said, genetically, it’s obvious there’s a little bit of a mix here. And that’s something that I’ve gotten to know over time more extensively through the oral histories of my family, very quietly learning the large extent to which people actually chose to live in the black community to be with the people that they love, which is really awesome and amazing. So I do pay homage to those other heritages, but I feel very much, very strongly, rooted in African-American culture.

  That said, I think that there is a stereotype that you’re not really black unless you grew up dodging bullets, or eating food stamps, or . . . I don’t know, actually engaging personally in rap battles or break dancing. I didn’t do any of those things. I may have witnessed some break dancing and some rap battles. Okay, that may have happened. But I didn’t personally do that.

  Sorry, eating . . . Did I say that, eating food stamps?

  ELON JAMES WHITE

  How black am I? It depends on the day of the week. It depends on who you ask. It depends on what situation I’m in. It depends on if my white girlfriend shows up. It depends on what topic happens to pop up.

  I’m fairly black to people. I’ve gotten blacker. Like, I wasn’t that black for a while, but then I got really, really black. And apparently when I got really black, it wasn’t because I did anything specifically black, like I wasn’t all of a sudden rocking hip-hop and wearing a hoodie.