African-American comedian Dave Chappelle has a recurring feature on his Comedy Central show, Chappelle’s Show, called “Ask a Black Dude.” During one segment, someone asked the Black Dude (aka Paul Mooney) why black men walk with a certain attitudinal swagger. Mooney responded that black men have a style that makes us the most imitated people on the planet, a style that tells the world that we are somebody, even if no one else hears or cares. Ironically, Mooney added, “Everyone wants to be a nigga, but nobody wants to be a nigga.”
Mooney’s quip points to one of the most enduring conundrums of American history, one that becomes painfully clear every February during Black History Month: America’s passionate embrace of black culture and its simultaneous disdain for black people (particularly black men). During Black History Month (which, interestingly, occurs during the shortest month of the year), we get our token moments. And then, like an artificial Christmas tree, our history gets stowed away till next year, while our “yo”s and “wazzup”s continue to get imitated and co-opted, assimilated and mainstreamed.
The truth is, ever since we got to this country, white people have exploited the way we walk, talk, sing, and dance. Our style, an amalgamation of African rhythms seasoned with our bittersweet and tumultuous New World experience, is vibrant, rebellious, funky, and edgy—in a word, cool. To take only the most obvious example: If there’s a reigning musical genre today, it would have to be hip-hop, which, besides its artistic value and innovations, is also blessed with legions of young white gangsta-wannabe fans. However, many of those same white hip-hop consumers know little or nothing about the history of the people who spawned the culture that created the hip-hop beat.
Why does America continue to diss our history while devouring our culture? Because America’s founding fathers had to strip us of our history, and thus our collective humanity, in order to reconcile African slavery with their pronouncements that “all men are created equal.” Since we were “property,” our “owners” could freely exploit the things we produced. Should that “property” start to act like a “people,” with both a history and a future, then the whole corrupt system would collapse. Any threat to that system—such as a strong black male who could conceivably lead an uprising—had to be crushed. And today, despite the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and “diversity training,” we remain an object of fear and derision for most non-black Americans, who, despite their affinity for “nigga” culture, would never willingly trade places with us.
Joseph, my eighteen-year-old eldest son, and I have had a running discussion about this phenomenon. Joseph’s biracial heritage has provided him with a Tiger Woods-like complexion that, by day, keeps white folks guessing. They thereby feel safer around him. By night, however, white people’s behavior leaves little doubt that they view him as a “soul brotha,” which is how he views himself.
Joseph has learned firsthand that for many white Twin Citizens, black + male = threat. Recently, he had dropped off a friend late on a Saturday night in a well-to-do south Minneapolis neighborhood when a white cop drove up, shined a flashlight in his face, and yelled, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” Joseph told me, “I thought about what you have always said—be very polite to the cops and do not argue with them. So I told him where I lived. But I knew I was being treated badly for nothing. So I politely asked him for his badge number. He muttered something under his breath and then sped off.”
I have always counseled Joseph and his younger brother to not become paranoid about white people—after all, his mother and stepmother are white, as are many of his relatives and friends. And let’s be real—a disproportionate number of African-American men are involved in the kinds of activities that we all fear. Yet I fully understand and share my son’s ambivalence about being a “man of color” in a society that loves what “niggas” can do but has a hard time dealing with where we came from and who we are. Especially during Black History Month.
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