Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Inspired by a president who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage, we are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness. In this provocative new book, iconic commentator and journalist Toure tackles what it means to be Black in America today.Toure begins by examining the concept o... Full description
Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness
Chapter 1
Forty Million Ways to Be Black
Once, I went skydiving. For about four minutes in 2007 I was above—and plummeting rapidly toward—a small town in the middle of the Florida panhandle. Jumped out of the plane solo at 14,000 feet. I did it for a TV show called “I’ll Try Anything Once” in which every week I accepted fear-inducing challenges. On the way to the skydiving center the production team stopped for lunch at a restaurant where three middle-aged Black men who worked there recognized me from TV and came over to our table to say hi. We got to talking and they asked what I was doing there. I told them I was on my way to go skydiving. Their faces went cold. They were stunned. One of them said, in a conspiratorial tone and at a volume meant to slide under the sonic radar of the white people sitting right beside me, “Brother, Black people don’t do that.” The other two nodded in agreement. They quickly glanced at the rest of my team and then back at me as if that clinched their point: The only people doing this risk-your-life, crazy foolishness are some loony white boys and you. As they saw it I was breaking the rules of Blackness. I was afraid but not about breaking the invisible rule book.
The plane was old and small with only a seat for the pilot, barely enough room for five adults to sit on the floor, and not enough height to stand. There was one clear, thin, plastic, rickety door that didn’t look strong enough to keep people from falling through it. The walls of the little plane were so thin that the sound of the engine permeated them completely. In order to be heard you had to yell. The plane did not move with the efficiency and grace you want from a plane, it reminded me of an old dying car that sputters and wheezes and makes you pray it’ll start and keep running until you get there. As it climbed into the sky it seemed to be saying, “I think I can, I think I can.” If I hadn’t been scheduled to jump out for the sake of television, I would’ve listened to the voice inside me yelling “Bail!”
At 14,000 feet the thin plastic door—which recalled a grandmother’s couch protector—was pushed up and through the open maw you could feel the oppressively fast, hard, uninviting wind slashing by, daring you to play deadly games. You could barely see the Earth below, large buildings now smaller than ants, acre-sized fields tinier than a baby’s palm. My eyes were saucer wide, my palms were soaked, my heart was banging in my chest as if looking for a way out, saying, “You can go, but I’m staying here in the plane.” The breathless terror enveloping me as a jump virgin was not assuaged by my macho divemaster, Rick, a former cop and Marine with a military-style buzzcut who owns the drop zone, jumps twenty times a day, and finds the fear of newbies funny. Rick thought gallows humor was appropriate at that moment. With the door open he said, “Just remember, no matter what happens ... I’m going to be all right.” He laughed. I did not. He was going to jump out after me but he wasn’t going to be on my back. I was going solo. Or as he put it, I was going to have the chance to save my own life.
As I scooted on my butt toward the open door—the wind vacuuming angrily like one of those horror movie vortices that’ll suck you into another world—my mind said, “No! No! No!” I was directly violating my constitution as a human, which places a very high value on survival, minimization of physical risk, and not dying. Sliding toward the open door of a plane hovering at 14,000 feet was overriding the instinct in my reptilian brain. Still, I got in the doorway and grabbed hold of the sides of the plane. I could feel the wind smacking me in the face. I could barely see the ground. I could not imagine letting go. Then Rick began to count down from three. I told myself, “You will let go when he says go. You will not hesitate.” I needed to tell myself those things because my body was semi-paralyzed. Rick said two. My frontal lobe tried to veto the whole thing. Can’t we just wimp out and let the plane take us back to the ground? Then Rick said go. And I just let go. And I was falling.
Freefall does not feel like falling. It feels like floating but without the peace we associate with floating. Things are moving at supersonic speed and the virgin skydiver’s mind can’t keep up, can’t process all that’s going on, so it’s a chaotic blur with the wind so loud you can’t hear yourself think and can’t hear yourself screaming. I think I was screaming for about ten seconds before I even realized it. And I kept trying to grab on to something, anything, but there was nothing, just air.
They tell you to keep your head bent upward and to not look down at the Earth because the view is awesome, and more important the weight of your head will send you into a spin or at least into the wrong dive position. But I looked down. Couldn’t help it. And that sent me spinning heels over head and then hurtling down back first for a tumultuous forty-five seconds of twisting and turning and upside-down plunging, falling toward Earth with everything happening too fast to realize how screwed up everything was and how terrified I should’ve been. I pulled the cord but because I was in the wrong dive position—still falling on my back—part of the parachute coiled around my arm and did not unfurl. I looked up and saw this thread wrapped twice around my right forearm as I kept falling to the ground. If I did nothing I would’ve died eight or nine seconds later. But reader, I promise you, I was calm. I did not panic one bit. The voice in my mind was cool. With the same inner tone I might use to say to myself, “Hmm, we’re out of pretzels,” I said to myself, “Hmm, the chute’s wrapped around my arm.”
The day before my dive, during my eight-hour training class, Rick told me what to do if this happened: just shake your arm and the cord should come loose. So at about 5,000 feet from the ground—which skydivers know is next to nothing—I shook my arm as if shooing off a fly. The cord came loose and the chute went free and unfurled above me, breaking my fall.
Suddenly, the sturm und drang of freefall gave way to peace. I was floating gently, like a snowflake. All was quiet. I could look up and see the sun playing peekaboo amidst the clouds and below I saw tiny cars and buildings and fields. I felt like a speck of dust blowing in the cosmos at the whim of a much, much larger force conducting a massive, magnificent opera. And in that moment, the perspective I gained from being thousands of feet in the air made me fully grasp how small a part of this world I am. It made me as absolutely certain of the presence of God as I have ever been. That bird’s eye view of Earth and the soul-stirring meditative quiet I was wrapped up in made me feel like a tiny dot in His awesomely sculpted world, a minute particle floating through a gigantic universe that will outlast me by a long ways. This is His world, not mine, I’m just a visitor and should be thankful for the few days I have. It was the most deeply spiritual experience of my life. I went skydiving and ended up in church. If I’d turned down the opportunity to skydive because “Black people don’t do that” I would’ve robbed myself of an experience I needed to get closer to God. And who would deny me that? If I never go skydiving again I’ll always carry with me the more tangible and concrete belief in Him that I got from that day. That’s a profound gift. If I’d let being Black hold me back from skydiving I would’ve cheated myself out an opportunity to grow as a human.
To be born Black is an extraordinary gift bestowing access to an unbelievably rich legacy of joy. It’ll lift you to ecstasy and give you pain that can make you stronger than you imagined possible. To experience the full possibilities of Blackness, you must break free of the strictures sometimes placed on Blackness from outside the African-American culture and also from within it. These attempts to conscript the potential complexity of Black humanity often fly in the face of the awesome breadth of Black history. If I’d believed that Blacks don’t skydive I would perhaps have disrespected the courageous Black paratroopers of World War II—the 555th was an all-Black unit that valiantly jumped over twelve hundred times. Some Blacks may see the range of Black identity as something obvious but I know there are many who are unforgiving and intolerant of Black heterogeneity and still believe in concepts like “authentic” or “legitimate” Blackness. There is no such thing.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard’s DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, says there has always been a multiplicity of ways to be Black but now because of the economic and intellectual diversity in Black America there’s “a multiplicity of multiplicities.” There is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black—or is inauthentically Black—is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser Blackness. “My first line in my class,” Gates told me in an interview in his office at Harvard, “and the last line twelve weeks later is if there are forty million Black Americans then there are forty million ways to be Black. There are ten billion cultural artifacts of Blackness and if you add them up and put ’em in a pot and stew it, that’s what Black culture is. Not one of those things is more authentic than the other.”
Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown, agreed. “There’s been an exponential increase in both the modes and methods of Blackness,” he said in an interview at his apartment in D.C., “and the ways in which Black people are allowed to be legitimately Black. It used to be much more narrow. When I hear Black people tell me “Black people don’t” fill in the blank—scuba dive or be gay in Africa or whatever—I think, you’re ignorant. Because the beautiful diversity of Blackness is the most remarkable feature of a Blackness that we continue to try to quarantine. We’d rather quarantine Blackness but the beauty of Blackness is that it’s a rash that breaks out everywhere. The moment we shatter those artificial encumberances of race—a stereotype from without or a rigid archetype from within—and feel no need to respond to either is the moment we are vastly improved, profoundly human, and therefore become the best Black people we can become. And we maximize our humanity. I mean, the irony is, the greater we maximize our humanity the greater our Blackness becomes.”
I see a small-scale representation of Black collective identity expansion in hiphop. As a recorded medium it began in the late seventies and early eighties as a showcase for New York Black male working-class symbols, tropes, and signifiers. Almost all of the songs, clothes, attitudes, and purveyors of very early hiphop culture were about life in the streets and clubs of New York City for Black men. Even when the Real Roxanne emerged she rhymed about her relationship, or refusal to have one, with Black men, rather than what she did with her girls when no men were around. There were many sorts of Black people around New York—and around America—but hiphop did not show them.
Modern hiphop does: its identity politics are much more complex. New York’s hegemony has given way to a national culture, and the language and performance of Blackness of MCs from Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Detroit, Chicago, L.A., and other cities is different than that of New Yorkers. The expression of class mores has also broadened within hiphop: There are still many MCs playing exclusively with working-class signifiers, but in the wake of mid-eighties Black bohos like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest we now have Kanye West, André 3000, Common, Questlove, Lupe Fiasco, Kid Cudi, Drake, Pharrell and others whose personae are filled with middle-class and/or culturally avant-garde signifiers. There are also figures like Jay-Z and 50 Cent who grew up working class but joined the extreme upper class and now give us identities filled with a mixture of class signifiers. There are many women in hiphop expressing identity through their own point of view (as opposed to in relation to what men think). And, quiet as it’s kept, there’s a national gay and lesbian hiphop underground scene, showing us how far hiphop has come from being a site for Black, male, working-class, heteronormative identity. If hiphop were a person and you asked it what does it mean to be Black in 1983 and again in 2013, the answers would be far different. Still hiphop fails to capture the full complexity of Black America—there are many Black identities not represented in and by hiphop. But I think a similar broadening of the collective identity—and/or a broadening of the acceptance of it—has occurred within Black America. Blackness is a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form, just like the chameleonic agents in The Matrix or the T-1000 or the T-X in the Terminator sequels that are made of a mimetic polyalloy that allow them to take on any appearance. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that both of those memorable examples of infinitely mutable figures are villains because for the shape-shifter that power equals freedom: Be anyone you want at any time. As the artist William Pope.L says, “Blackness is limited only by the courage to imagine it differently.”
Melissa Harris-Perry, a Princeton University professor of Politics and African-American Studies, believes Blacks are aware of and proud of our diversity. “We have a homogenizing media culture that makes all of us more alike than we might like to suggest,” she told me. “That dominant discourse does present pretty limited possibilities of what it means to be a Black man or a Black woman. But in Black peoples’ actual lives, in their families, in their churches, in their neighborhoods, they actually do know a lot of different kinds of Black people. And are not particularly surprised to encounter artsy Black people and gay Black people and, you know, perfect-English-speaking Black people, and hoodish. I mean, I think we are more aware of our fundamental humanity and the variation that goes along with it than we let on in public spaces. Now, do we have a way of saying to each other, ‘This is an insufficiently Black or crazy thing that Black people don’t do’? I mean, sure. But, we also go to poetry slams and are excited when one of us plays tennis and somebody else plays violin. I guess I’m just convinced that there’s actually a lot more room in our conceptions of Blackness, particularly on a very interpersonal level, then we tend to let on. I’m saying I’m not yet convinced by the discourse or the evidence that I have out there that we really don’t make room for each other.”
Such is the intellectual diversity of Black people: We can’t totally agree on whether or not Blacks have a collective awareness and acceptance of Black diversity. I know Professor Harris-Perry is correct that many of us are cognizant and tolerant of our diversity but I also know from personal experience that there are self-appointed identity cops in our community—people who are like Sergeant Waters in A Soldier’s Story—policing the race and writing Authenticity Violations as if they were working for Internal Affairs making sure everyone does Blackness in the right way. But what is this right way? And who chose it?
“Sometimes Blackness is threatened,” says Kehinde Wiley, the visual artist, “by a desire to go outside of a colle...
