You know when your friends are singing along to something on the radio, but you have to mumble-whisper because you don’t actually know the lyrics? You feel anxious, uncool and even a bit guilty. Take that feeling, imagine it lasting eight years, and you have my Awkward Black Adolescence. It included all the trauma of puberty with the added guilt of not being “black enough”.
My only middle school friends were Limewire and a pirated copy of Photoshop – partly because of my awful personality, but largely because I felt like a pirated copy of a black person. I couldn’t measure up to preconceived notions of blackness, which, according to author Baratunde Thurston, includes “hip-hop, crime, prison, fatherless homes, musical talent, drugs athleticism, affirmative action, poverty and the civil rights movement.” I grew up poor and fatherless, but I have limited musical talent. I was thin, so people assumed I was athletic, but all I played was video games.
It was confusing and embarrassing to feel like an outlier at the time, but I’m far from alone in chafing against the limits of “blackness”. It’s time we acknowledge that there are an infinite amount of ways to be black.
We all know stereotypes are unfair, even dangerous, but many black people feel anxiety when we don’t measure up to them. In her Huffington Post essay Black Folk Don’t Like to be Told They’re Not Black, writer and actor Issa Rae recalls being one-upped in a middle school rap battle by a white boy. It wasn’t pretty, she recalls: “He managed to make me feel as though my credibility as a black person relied on my knowledge of hip-hop culture.”
Barack Obama, whose blackness is questioned as a matter of national security, similarly had this to say on being “black enough”:
Sometimes African Americans, in communities where I’ve worked, there’s been the notion of “acting white” – which sometimes is overstated, but there’s an element of truth to it, where, OK, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly? And the notion that there’s some authentic way of being black, that if you’re going to be black you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes, that has to go.
He’s right – blackness as an identity is policed as heavily as black bodies are, particularly by other black people.
Drake’s Hotline Bling video had him looking like everything from a grandfather that stubbed his toe to a tennis player, a jedi and a Pokemon trainer – anything but what rappers generally look like, with a very rigid set of ideas about blackness and masculinity. He doesn’t fit any stereotypes, and he doesn’t have to.
Neither do any of us: no one’s identity is 100% “authentically black”, because so many of the well-known stereotypes are contradictory and absurd. Going to a good school because of affirmative action is black, but so is hating school, dropping out and not going to college at all. Actor and comic Aisha Tyler recounted a story on W Kamau Bell’s Totally Biased where an acquaintance told her that black people don’t eat bagels: “Black people don’t eat bread with holes in them? What are you talking about?”
Rather than trying to call out black people for not having some type of racial credentials, we should instead start calling out the person demanding them. We need to learn to differentiate between the many parts of the culture black people have created and what we consider essential to blackness itself. As Rae put it: “As I grew older and Ma$e found his calling as a Reverend, I realized there was more to being black than a knowledge of rap music, and that I didn’t have to live up to this pop cultural archetype. I began to take pride in the fact that I wasn’t a stereotype and that I didn’t have to be.”
That’s why awkward blackness is important: it’s transgressive. It’s the first step in redirecting social stigma away from black people “not measuring up” and onto the person doing the measuring.
So rejoice, nerds: join swim teams. Dress up as your favorite Gilmore Girls character. Go camping. Put mayonnaise on your sandwiches. Your awkward blackness is trangressive, valuable – and bankable. Rae just inked a deal with HBO to produce a show based on her life, ABC’s Blackish was renewed for a second season, Thurston’s How to be Black is a New York Times bestseller, and Drake’s Hotline Bling will be spoofed, vined and memed – all expressions of love – well into the New Year.
Perhaps the one true way not to be black is to limit how other people do it.
