How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston

  Cheryl Contee: [It] was a fantasy.

  damali ayo: That phrase cracked me up!

  Elon James White: I can’t discuss [it] because it doesn’t exist.

  Jacquetta Szathmari: [It’s] kind of like a unicorn, maybe, or a leprechaun. There’s an idea that it exists out there, and some people believe in it, but really, it’s not there.

  Derrick Ashong: I’m sorry. Post-racial America is bullshit.

  The people have spoken! And even though my statistically significant panel was unanimous about the nonexistence and bullshit nature of “Post-racial America,” they had different ways of thinking about why that was and what it meant.

  Let’s hear from the white Canadian (Christian Lander) first:

  Obama was supposed to bring about Post-racial America in one election, which is fantastic, if it could happen. I think the reaction since then, just looking at how people react and to the anger people feel, the inability to believe that he is actually an American, just kind of proves we’re definitely not post-racial.

  The rage people have to [Stuff White People Like] recognizing differences, just recognizing it’s there, is just another signal that [America] is not post-racial, and it’s a huge problem.

  The idea that some people see post-racial as meaning we don’t see race at all, that everyone is exactly the same, there are no cultural differences to anyone anymore, that’s even worse. That’s just as ignorant and just as terrible.

  The harm I see from ignoring racial differences fundamentally comes down to stupidity.

  [I], as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Canada, and a first-generation Chinese or a third-generation Chinese person in Canada—even though we grew up literally three blocks apart, went to the same high school, had all the sort of socioeconomic checkboxes that you would think defined a completely level playing field—we have totally different life experiences. They’re not the same at all.

  To not recognize that not only is stupid but it also demeans the experience of those other people. I don’t think you can ever achieve cultural understanding by pretending that cultural difference doesn’t exist.

  Both Kamau and damali had direct experiences around Obama’s election, guaranteeing they would see Post-racial America as a fantasy.

  Kamau:

  I remember the night that Barack Obama was elected. I was in San Francisco walking around, and there was a buzz in the city and people were all excited. You just heard people have conversations in the street. I was walking down the street, and I turned a corner, and it was weird. These white people were [excited about the result, yelling,] “Barack Obama!” I turned the corner, and they went, “Oh!” It was this weird thing where they were so excited about that black guy being president but not excited about this black guy right here. It was clear, and they responded as if I caught them saying “nigger” or something. It was just this weird gasp . . . and this is living in San Francisco.

  The idea of discussing Post-racial America . . . seems dumb. It’s like talking about Reconstruction. That period is over. It’s a historical thing that we’ll cover. We’ll be like, “There was this thing called Post-racial America for two weeks,” and then they’ll realize, “Oh? No.”

  damali:

  Two weeks before [Obama] was elected, somebody called me the N-word on my street in my neighborhood back in Portland. So, it was really clear that this was not going to happen. But the country has been trying to push black people under the carpet for a while.

  The art world went through this phase where they were calling things post-black, which was insanity. I think it’s the same thing that is happening with this. If you’re not saying, “We’re post-race,” then we don’t really want to hear you, because you’re bumming us out. So, it just, it’s crazy.

  Human beings have this infinite potential for courage that they rarely tap. And if people would just dig down and be genuinely honest with themselves, we would all be living in a much better culture. But instead, we’re very much addicted to avoidance and cowardice, I think.

  Jacquetta’s point seemed to flow naturally from damali’s belief that post-racial anything is about avoidance.

  I don’t understand what post-racial means. Does that mean that I’m not going to be black anymore? Or are they just going to get rid of affirmative action? That’s what I thought would happen. When they said post-racial they’d be like, “All right, pull up the ladder. Everything is done. Bootstrap your way through. We’re finished. There are no more races anymore. We don’t have to help you out, and we don’t have to acknowledge that there’s any difference between white people and people who aren’t white.”

  That’s really the issue, right? It’s about white people trying to get rid of race so they don’t have to deal with their issues with it. That’s what I thought was post-racial. I don’t think any black people think that there’s post-racial unless you went to Oberlin or something.

  Meanwhile, Cheryl and Elon acknowledged that the ideal of post-racial may originate from a positive place and not just from a “cowardly” White America, even if its reality eludes us.

  Cheryl:

  Post-racial was a fantasy. I think it’s something that people really want, I think there’s an urge and a healthy aspiration to becoming a Post-racial America. I would love to see that day. I don’t think we live in that world right now.

  Elon:

  I understand the idea. I understand that even for black people, sometimes you just don’t want the struggle anymore. You don’t want to discuss struggle, you don’t want to discuss oppression, you don’t want to discuss all the dumb shit that has happened for years and years. You don’t want the feeling of burden when you turn on the television in February. God forbid you go near the History Channel, and you find out about all the shit that happened to all of your people! You don’t want it. So, the idea of this time when it’s all over is very intoxicating. It’s easy.

  In a weird way, I would love to argue for it because I wouldn’t have to discuss the dumb shit. But it’s also putting your head in the sand, and it’s also not understanding the idea of repercussions and ripples of events happening in our country. And that’s my issue with it.

  I don’t blame white people for Post-racial America . . . I believe that the idea probably wasn’t negative. It was probably this idealized concept, and it probably came from a sense of privilege . . . It never happened. And two years later, after Post-racial America was ushered in, we are more racially tense now than we’ve been probably in the past twenty years. So, you know, post-racial can suck it.

  That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to say things that sound like deep and intelligent, and at the end of it I’m just going to go, “And they can suck it.”

  I’m going to leave it to Derrick Ashong to close out this assessment of Post-racial America. He agrees with others that it isn’t real, but he also sets forth a direction that resonated with me.

  America is not now post-racial, and America will likely not be post-racial anytime soon, and America will have a significant problem so long as she is interested in being post-racial as opposed to getting to the point where race is no longer a problem.

  People will always find ways to determine who is in and a part of us, and who’s an outsider. And part of that is because . . . I define me to some degree in the context of you. I’m not just me existing in the world. I am, in part, me because I’m not you. We are part we because we’re not y’all.

  So folks will always find ways to create differences. The question is how much do those differences matter?

  There was a time in this country when it was a big deal if you were a Catholic. That was a problem. There was a time in this country when it was a big deal if you were a Jew. Problem. Right now in this country, it’s a big deal if you’re a Muslim. Problem. But, you know, you go down the street, you go in to eat in a little place and you’re a Catholic, a Jew, who cares? Everybody’s marrying each other, making little brown babies that don’t know whether to go to c
hurch on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so they just be at the club.

  So basically, it’s one of these things where what was a problem ceases to [be] as much of an issue. That is what is also happening with race, and it will continue to happen with race. Now you see a lot of beef right now because people who are used to, and whose worldview has been created in the crucible of how things once were in this country, they hearken to the good old days, which were not necessarily that great, even for them, frankly. But they hearken to those days, they yearn for those days of yore.

  They forget that, yes, fifty years before the 1950s they were killing Irish people in New York. Their memory is limited. They forget that, yeah, you might persecute somebody for being Muslim here, but the Puritans who came out here back in the 1600s showed up to escape religious persecution.

  So I know that societies and people tend to have a short historical memory, but that history happens anyway. We are moving and we will continue to move to a point where race will not be the primary issue that binds or divides us. We’ll find something else, and we’ll combat that, too.

  So if the future is a United States in which race is no longer the primary issue that binds or divides us, then (a) why have you read this far in a book called How to Be Black, and (b) what’s the future of blackness in America?

  The Future of Blackness

  This book has been my chance to explore a theme that is essentially personal, necessarily political, and often hilarious: how to be black. Based on what I’ve learned through the process of putting this book together, I’m going to put forth a plan for the future of blackness in America. This plan is mostly prescriptive in that it’s full of ideas that I and those I interviewed want for Black America, but it’s also descriptive because it’s based on things that are already under way.

  The Grand Unified Theory of Blackness consists of three major components.

  1. New Black History: teaching a more complete and honest history of black people and, thus, America in far more interesting ways

  2. Distributed Struggle: spreading the burden of fighting oppression more broadly across society

  3. The Center for Experimental Blackness: opening up the doors of blackness by passionately embracing the eclectic, the nonracial, and whatever else suits your fancy

  1. New Black History

  Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!

  Let’s face it, given most of what is commonly taught as black history and how it’s communicated, the subject can be depressing. The quick viewfinder perspective is: snatched from Africa, dragged across the sea in the least accommodating of accommodations, delivered into slavery, stripped of language and religion, freed (reluctantly), terrorized for generations and, generally speaking, treated like crap. My people, this is not an uplifting story. It’s a downer.

  Derrick spoke to some of the psychological harm that can come from internalizing this image of yourself as a loser, saying, “I think that black [Americans] need to love ourselves more. There’s a lot to love, and part of the problem we have is that our history is not adequately taught.” He continued:

  If you look in modern-day history, and the modern world—the West, New World, Africa, the Old Worlds, whatever—and you remove the historical context, it’s easy to believe that you’re less than. African-Americans make less money; they live shorter life-spans; they have higher health risks; they have lower general economic outcomes and lower expectations. You would think, “Oh, well maybe they are less than, right?”

  He described a girl in Ghana who said to him, “You’ve got to admit that white people are better than us . . . I mean look at them. They have everything,” as well as a group of black Americans who frustratingly asked why more slaves didn’t fight back and escape. Both cases represent people who don’t know the full story, the history of the compound effects of advantage and white privilege over time as well as the history of never learning the stories of your people who fought and succeeded in breaking out of their circumstances.

  But Derrick wasn’t the only person to describe this tragedy of an exclusively negative understanding of black history. Elon spoke of it in the context of watching the History Channel during February, and Jacquetta complained that anytime she was told about black history, it was generally along the lines of “Things suck for us!” Accepting such a negative spin on your own history necessarily affects your view of your own self-worth, your potential, and your place in this world, not to mention the view others have of you.

  At the same time, I believe we need to make room in these lessons to acknowledge the pain of our upbringing in House America. There are long-term psychological effects of long-term abuse, and the constant dehumanization and attacks on families won’t be erased just by telling positive history tales. Those tales need to include the dark side and maybe an American Therapy Program, not just for black people as the victims of abuse but for the entire nation.

  The New Black History Course aims to address these massive gaps, and it isn’t simply some repackaged Afrocentric curriculum that says, “Black people were kings and queens back in the day, and The White Man is terrible!” Instead, it’s just an honest and more complete version of events.

  But at the heart of this new education plan is the story of the critical place black people occupy in American history.

  America. Fuck yeah.

  The United States is a pretty special place, in a good way. Growing up with knowledge of this country’s significant imperfections and the cost black people have paid for those errors, I always looked askance at the notion of strong U.S. patriotism. I wasn’t prepared to wrap myself in the Stars and Stripes and sing loudly of the land of the free and the home of the brave. I didn’t hate America, but let’s just say I was skeptical of its awesomeness. I often felt as Frederick Douglass did when he said in his 1852 Fourth of July speech, “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!”

  Of course, there’s a difference between his perspective on America and my own. He was an actual former slave. I’m the great-grandson of one. Yet as I look at my own story and that of my family, even as I write this book, I recognize that this is an impressive and bold country whose ideas of what it means to be a country are still, over 230 years after its founding, revolutionary.

  The missing link for many inside and outside of Black America has been to fully understand the role black people have played in helping make those beautiful ideas more tangible and more real.

  Our early existence in America exposed the nation’s shortcomings from the start, and thanks to our struggle, America has become more of what she has the potential to be. As Derrick put it, black people in America “have literally been the physical embodiment, the manifestation of the ideals that the Founding Fathers said they believed in, thought they believed in. But they didn’t exist until us. That’s something to be proud of.”

  True black pride is also American pride, and black people truly are the most American of people in this country. We have nowhere else to go! So as much as we might feel some distance between us and the U.S., and as much as others may try to push us away and claim directly or indirectly that we’re not “real Americans,” that line of thinking is patently false and is a disservice to everyone.

  This country is our home, and we helped build it both physically and morally. The struggle of black people in America, therefore, is the struggle of America itself to, as damali put it, “get behind its own dream.”

  So that’s a sampling of what the New Black History Course might consist of: a broader story of the Diaspora with a special focus on the Americanness of black people in America. In addition to what we pass on to each generation, it’s also important to change how we teach these lessons. Looking toward other ethnic groups in America may provide a partial model.

  Jacquetta elaborates:

  [My husband and I] have a lot of friends who are Chinese, Jewish, whatever. On Saturday morning, they get to go up to their ethnicity school and learn about them. We don’t ha
ve that. They make it fun. They make it exciting. There are games with Hebrew. There are games with Chinese, et cetera.

  When I was growing up, people were always like, “You’ve got to be black. You’ve got to be black.” But they made black sound like it sucked. It was always about getting into trouble or fighting or being oppressed. It was never, “We’re going to get together and be black, have some awesome food and tell stories . . .” They never put a face on black that was like, “Yeah! Fun!”

  What do we do? I don’t know. We complain about it. But why not have a Saturday school program where you can go and learn about us? It doesn’t have to be just African-Americans, okay? Anyone can go. But put a nice face on it.

  Then, when you turn a certain age, you get to have a ceremony or something, and then you’re black! And then no one else could ever take that away from you, no matter what you do. No matter if you go and work for Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Doesn’t matter.

  I love the concept of a Certificate of Blackness that you’d get upon completing the special Saturday school, but the larger point of making the story of black history more attractive is a point well taken. Once we’ve got that down, we can free ourselves even further.

  2. Distributed Struggle

  What do we do about today’s struggle against racism? Do we need a “national conversation on race,” as many mainstream media figures tend to think? No, according to Elon:

  I’m not interested in having a national conversation on race. I don’t believe a racial conversation can actually happen and be meaningful. I believe that every time this stuff happens you’re either preaching to the choir or you’re talking to people who don’t understand or don’t care. The only thing you can do is put out information, and put out as much information as possible. And when people hear the information, they will go back to their own world, and they’ll think about it, and they’ll figure it out, and that’s how it will grow.

  That’s what the Republicans are doing. They’re not having a “national conversation” around conservative ideals. They just keep saying shit, and then eventually people come along with it. The same [is true] with the Tea Party. They just keep talking, and talking, and putting it out there, and then people will go back home and they’ll think about it themselves. And then they’ll either join your cause or go completely against you, and want you in the street choked, like me. But that’s what’s going to happen.