How to Be Black (18 page)

There are some cultures which are like, “No, that is not Jewish, and that is what we do not do.” I have a lot of Jewish friends, and every single one of them have told me that their parents are like, “Jews do not run.” So then they don't do sports, because there's five thousand years of a wonderful tradition that they feel like is telling them that. We don't have that. You can do whatever you want.

There's no road map for being black.

So where do we want to go, black people?

3. The Center for Experimental Blackness

This is the fun part. I just want you to know that when I started this book, I had no idea it was going to become a program for the Evolution of Blackness, okay? But it is, so pay attention.

One of the most consistent themes in my own experience and those of The Black Panel is this notion of discovering your own blackness by embracing the new, the different, the uncommon, and, simply, yourself.

For Kamau, it was finding an eclectic mix of pop-cultural role models that allowed him to “assemble my own version of blackness.”

Growing up, because I didn't feel black the way society told me I was supposed to be black (and I think I was squeezed out by white people and by black people where I grew up), [that] really allowed me to sort of find my own way. In that sense I felt like I've always leaned towards an eclectic way of putting things together . . . I feel like that's one of the strengths of the way that my approach is. I don't feel closed out of things.

For Elon, it was about embracing his passion for putting information into the world.

Black people define blackness with everything we do. So, right now I'm shooting this video and someone's sitting there in their house thinking, “Ah man, black people love shooting videos on green screens,” because I'm defining it. People are like, “Why do you have servers in your house?” I'm like, “Because I need information, this is how I put stuff out there.” Because black people like computers, son! We love server farms, we like LAN gaming, and we define it every time we do something.

For damali, it was about connecting blackness to themes far beyond race, such as sustainability and eco-living.

Black people can be more than professional black people. I had an eco-friendly clothing company for a while, and I'm really passionate about sustainability issues. These things are not separate.

My role model for the sustainable community is the Sea Island settlers, who were the black people who moved to this island after slavery. Because, of course, what were they really good at? Farming. They set up a community, grew their own food, had their own schools. They were separate. They were a nation unto themselves, and then the government shut them down. It was too threatening.

That is something that black people own, that self-sustained community. That's my history, so it's always connected for me and I get really excited about that.

So be open-minded. We are too young a people to accept the limitations placed on us by some in our own community or especially by those outside of it. As Jacquetta said well, “There's no perk in being closed-minded as a minority. It's never, ever, ever going to help you, ever. It's not your world . . . We're 12 percent. We're a minority, so get off it.”

Jacquetta also took this idea of pushing the envelope of blackness even further than being open-minded. She has a program in mind.

If I had a lot of money, you know how Jewish people have birthright? I would give every African-American boy or girl, when they turn sixteen, one year somewhere else, wherever they want to go, to go and experience what it feels like to be black somewhere else.

When I went abroad as an African-American, when I went to Western Europe, when I went to Eastern Europe, and particularly when I was in Hungary, I had people come up to me and go, “Oh, you're American! Are you a teacher or are you dentist or doctor?” I thought I was going to fall on the floor.

Don't believe what you see here. The way that people want you to see yourself through the media, and that's pretty much all you're getting, is not really the way that we are seen everywhere. Go and meet African Germans, African British people, African Dutch people, African Chinese people, African African people.

Go outside and see what is out there in the world. Do not be trapped in this incredibly narrow definition.

One of the challenges emerging in an era of Open Source Blackness (you like how I keep creating new big labels?) is a growing gap in the common experiences of the black community itself. As Jacquetta put it:

All of a sudden, black people just start doing crazy stuff, like that guy who was doing speed skating. When did brothers start doing that? Just crazy. And then they'll want to go to Harvard, and then they'll want to travel, and then they'll start doing mad stuff. And then what do we have left there? What will be the common experience?

However, that reality exists today. That's part of the point of this book, right? Being black can be a different set of experiences. Jacquetta acknowledged this case of “the center not holding” in her own story.

My husband is white. He is a Cyprian-American, and we have more in common than I do with black people I've met who are just from LA. I just can't understand where they're coming from, because they are from a different region of the country . . .

Or people from Chicago, who I don't get. African-Americans from Chicago, they have a whole different way of living that, for me, for a black person from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, it's difficult to bridge that gap. There should be an app for that, I think.

The app would allow African-Americans of different classes, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation to communicate [with] each other without beef, kind of like a Rosetta Stone situation to eliminate beef and misunderstanding.

I hereby dub this app the “Negretta Stone.” Yes, I went there. And now you wish you had thought of it. Check your local app store for downloads.

Are you keeping up? We've got experimental blackness abounding at this point, but how do we make it stick? How do we replace the overwhelming media images of limited blackness with a more expansive concept?

It's already happening. You've got the Afro-Punk movement and Black Geeks and the black people who love nature, and more. You look at what people like Elon are doing with media production, and they are getting new ideas, new images, and new expectations out there. It's not enough just to be black in your own way. We also have to tell the broader story of blackness to counter the damage inflicted on us by the narrow tale told by others. That's where Cheryl's vision comes into the picture.

I think that we're living through almost a second Harlem Renaissance. But I would say that the scope of that Renaissance is much bigger than it was in the 1920s, and it's powered by social media, so it can reach a lot more people than it could before. In the 1920s, when you're talking about Harlem or Paris, it was a very small group of intellectuals, artists, poets, singers, dancers that were in conversation with each other, and ultimately it had a ricochet effect over time in the popular culture.

But right now, we're starting to drive that culture in a contemporary way, and in a way that they couldn't before, because they couldn't really reach that many people, given what they had at that time. [But] right now, we've got this thick stew of people in heavy conversation not only with each other, as you saw in the Harlem Renaissance, but with the larger group . . .

That is really exciting for what it means for the future of African-Americans in this country and the cultural impact, the economic impact, the social impact that we can have in a positive way that also is shared with the larger culture.

I think that the people who are coming up behind us are even more literate with these tools, are even faster communicators. We are going to see this amazing uprising in a positive way of African-American thought and music and art that will astonish the world.

Booyah! I can see it, too, and my skin tingles at the thought. In many ways what led me to the people I ultimately interviewed for this book was the faster-than-history communications network we have nowadays. Elon's videos, Cheryl's blog posts, Derrick's music, et cetera. All of these are part of this more global, collaborative resurgence of black culture and thought (what Derrick would call “Afropolitan”), and when it comes from the bottom up like this, it challenges the prevailing and limited images of blackness peddled by our major media but also the limited expectations of many black people themselves.

So, black people, let's repeatedly put out information about our own images of blackness, be it fighting for justice or making videos on a green screen or hosting TV shows on Al Jazeera or camping or writing books about the infinite possibilities for how to be black. As Elon put it: “Don't let someone tell you what you should do because you're black. You do what you want to do, and then you open up the doors of blackness.”

As Shakespeare wrote, “There are more ways to be black than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
*
Dream bigger. Just be, and the blackness will follow.

A
FTERWORD

Race Work and Art—The Black Panel Speaks

I
grew up watching and listening to all sorts of comedy, most of which was introduced to me by my mother. On our budget vacations, we would tear through Old Time Radio comedies on the car stereo:
Lum & Abner
and
George Burns & Gracie Allen
; Garrison Keillor's
A Prairie Home Companion
; and stand-up comedy tapes of Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, and Richard Pryor.

We never had cable television in our home (I didn't get cable until after graduating college), but we loaded up VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy, obviously supported shows like
The Cosby Show
and
A Different World
, and my mom got me into British sitcoms. Thanks to PBS, we could get shows like
One Foot in the Grave
,
Are You Being Served?
,
Keeping Up Appearances
, and my favorite,
Chef!
, which starred a black man as a perfectionist chef whose command of his kitchen was powered by a seemingly inexhaustible fusillade of verbal putdowns.

In high school, I expanded on my own performing life and began doing plays and musicals with social messages. My time at Sidwell Friends was a big part of this experience. Every year I attended, we put on a Black History Month musical review, and out of this experience, I discovered the youth activism and theatre group City at Peace.

My childhood, as designed by my mother, didn't just feature an introduction to comedy and art, but it also introduced me to the concept of art as a communications medium for ideas and even activism. My stand-up comedy has always been political at its core, and even my Web-based performance art pieces have a component of advocacy and social message (I once treated a mayoral contest within the mobile application Foursquare as a real-world political campaign).
How to Be Black
exists very much in line with that tradition, and while I definitely intend for it to be funny, there is a message in it.

Along my own artistic road, I have encountered others similarly engaged, people who tell stories but in a style far more accessible than straightforward lectures. It was from this group that I selected my interview subjects for The Black Panel. I knew that the topic “How to Be Black” was bold, massive, and possibly presumptuous on my part. I recognized that many people could write a book with such a title, and some have and more will. After all, being black is just
being
, right?

So to augment my own limited experiences and voice, I wanted to recruit my comrades in the arts to this mission. In addition to the questions you've seen them answer throughout the book, I asked them directly about their writings, videos, songs, and performances. I wanted to know why they chose that path to say the things they thought needed saying about race and politics in America.

It has always been my goal with this book to shine a spotlight on people who I thought were “doing blackness well,” and so in the spirit of show-don't-tell, I want to more fully introduce you to the work of The Black Panel. Let's start with Christian Lander, the white man from Canada.

CHRISTIAN LANDER

The website
Stuff White People Like
swept through America like a sort of political tract. “Have you seen this website?” people would ask. I'd get e-mails from friends and strangers, “Yo, check this out. It's a site about white people!” It was through this word-of-mouth Internetting that I discovered Christian, but when I really gained respect for him was the spring of 2010.

We were both slated to speak on a panel at a conference on Internet culture, called ROFLcon. Our topic was “Race and the Internet.” Along with Terese and Serena Wu (purveyors of fine Asian-American family satire sites
My Mom Is a Fob and My Dad Is a Fob
), we discussed how we played with race online. Christian and I hit it off big-time, and by the end of the panel, people in the audience were demanding we do a show, any show, together.

For this book, I visited Christian in his Los Angeles apartment. He really does love Asian food and really does live in Koreatown. In his living room, with him seated in front of a map of North America, I asked him how white people had responded to
Stuff White People Like
.

Anything I write about, people are going to be furious about, and more often than not, it's white people who are angry about it. They're angrier than anybody about it.

They're angry that “just because I'm white doesn't mean I can't like this.” I'm not saying that, I'm saying you do like it. And so they sort of contradict themselves a little bit. But they get angry and say that pointing out that race even exists IS racist. That's their theory.

I don't even know how to react to how angry they are about saying that recognizing that we're different is racist. No, judging based on the differences is racist, but recognizing the difference is there is not racist at all.

Continuing on the theme of people's reactions to
SWPL
, I wondered if he had heard from non-whites who identified heavily with the site's listing of all things white. Indeed he had.

People who aren't white come to me all the time after [completing the test in the back of the
Stuff White People Like
book], and they'll go, “Oh, my God, I'm white. I can't believe this!”

Humor was the top priority [ for
Stuff White People Like
], and I never denied that, but there was a message behind it: all of the things in the list, aside from having black friends and stuff like that, for the most part (Whole Foods and living by the water, and all this sort of stuff ) they're just things, and anybody can participate in it.

These things are definitely class-based more than anything else, and it's a class that's overwhelmingly white, no matter how much we don't want to recognize it. We want to believe that the middle class is perfectly balanced. It's the perfect mix. No, it's disproportionately white. Absolutely, without question.

Because Christian's work is explicitly comedic and particularly satirical, I asked him how important satire was to his message.

The role of satire in talking about race is essential. I can't stress enough how important it is. I spent a lot of time in graduate school, and what I found so much in an academic setting is that people are petrified to say the wrong thing.

At the end, nothing emerges, no progress has been made. If people aren't talking, there's no progress.

So if you're talking about any sort of racial issue—it doesn't matter what it is—and you're so scared that you're going to offend the entire room with what you actually believe, you won't say it.

And you won't see that “wait, you're not completely wrong, or you are completely wrong,” and you bottle it up and you won't say it.

When you set the room for satire, and you set the room for humor and sort of that ability to say kind of whatever you want, people feel much more comfortable talking about it. I think that that just puts everyone so much more at ease, to actually talk about this idea of cultural difference. And the idea of race and class still being fundamentally tied together.

I know from teaching in grad school for four years that a lot of undergrads are still kind of figuring out things and some of them are very angry at race. They still really see affirmative action as a huge injustice against them, and they have all this pent-up rage that they won't talk about, because they're petrified of being seen as racist.

So when you bring this up in a context of humor, there's so much more comfort, on their side, to talk about it, and to let it out. And then as they're doing that, you can kind of point out:

“Why do you think this list of stuff counts as white?”

“Because most people who consume it are white.”

“Well, what do you need to consume it?”

“Well, money.”

“There you go!”

And so you lead the horse to water and you let it drink.

I think humor is absolutely essential. When you come at somebody to talk about race, especially if you have an ax to grind as a white person who is angry, or as someone who is not white who is angry, the audience you're speaking to will be petrified. They'll be petrified to say anything. They will agree with whatever you say and nothing has gone forward.

Finally, I wondered what Christian thought of truly hateful people who utter some nonsense but then try to cover it up by saying, “I was only joking! I kid! I kid!”

People trying to hide behind the shield of satire are interesting. For me, who makes a living making fun of race, making fun of white people, it's hard to say what exactly is acceptable and what works and what doesn't. It's like the old ruling on pornography where the judge says I can't define it but I know what it is when I see it.

You don't really have to be that smart to tell when someone's satire is coming from a place of intelligence and not a place of hate. It is so hard to disguise the hate that comes out of people who try to call it funny.

When I started
SWPL
with my friend Miles, we always thought it would be funny if people took the idea and went in the right direction with it. So there're sites like
Stuff Black People Like
, written by black people;
Stuff Asians Like
, written by Asians; S
tuff Black People Hate
, which is hilarious. It's sort of done in this way. It's done from the inside, it's done with love, it's not done with hate.

But people have done all these horrible sites where they'll do Stuff Black People Like with all the old, horrible stereotypes: watermelon, fried chicken, crime, all that sort of stuff. And it's awful.

But there's the difference, right? You see it. I think it's really easy to tell when it's coming from hate and when it's coming from satire.

W. KAMAU BELL

I had heard about Kamau years before I finally met him. People on the West Coast said things like, “He's like the you of the West Coast!” which is actually an odd thing to hear, but I know folks meant it as a compliment. When I finally saw him do his one-man show at the New York Fringe Festival, I was hooked.

When Kamau, Elon James White, and I had brunch together the following day, it was an official bromance. Kamau has been doing stand-up the longest among members of The Black Panel. I wanted to know how he started, and what role race played in his performance.

I feel like the same thing that is in black comedy is in black radio. We call it black radio, but what we really mean is hip-hop and R&B radio, because black radio does not encompass all of black music. I feel the same way about black comedy. That's like R&B and hip-hop comedy, and it's just like a stylistic thing that I don't do.

I can play there but sometimes it's like when they play Lenny Kravitz on a hip-hop station. Sometimes it's, “That's a refreshing change!” Sometimes it's, “Get this bullshit out of here!”

[I did an audition stand-up set] for Comedy Central. It was a mostly black audience, all black performers, and I went up first or second and I did a joke that referenced Gandhi and everybody just [went silent].

I hate when audiences are purposefully dumb, because I know everybody in the room knows who Gandhi is. And if you don't, that's you. That's not me. That's you. And I hate when audiences do that thing when they come to comedy clubs and they turn their brains off. This is black audiences, white audiences, Latino audiences . . .

There's a thing where audiences just leave their brains outside. So when you say something like Gandhi—I'm not doing anything eloquent about Gandhi; I'm just referencing him as a cultural reference that we all know—you could just see them go, “Nah, we don't do that. We left that outside.” And so I got off stage . . . and the MC said, “Give it up for Kamau. You can tell that he reads!”

And he followed it up with, “But I don't!”

And the crowd went, “Ahhhh!!”

I talk about race in my comedy a lot because it was the subject that when I started doing comedy was the most verboten. Especially in Chicago and performing in white rooms, I could talk about anything, but if I talked about race they would tighten up.

I think it was because of the way I talked about race. I wasn't doing it from a “Kings of Comedy” perspective. I've never been a big proponent of “black people do stuff like this, and white people do stuff like this.” It usually ends up that the black people do things poorer than white people.

He started really committing to discussing race in his comedy when he considered how much time he is actually on stage.

You only get to be on stage for a very short percentage of your life. If you think about it as far as a job that is being done, people work eight and ten hours a day on their job. If you're on stage an hour, five times a week or seven times a week, you're one of the best in the country at it if you have that much stage time, and that's seven hours a week.

So I feel like you're only on stage a short period of time, you might as well talk about something you care about and you might as well talk about things that you feel you bring something to that nobody else does.

I also asked him about the history of his show.

I have a one-man show called
The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour
. If you bring a friend of a different race, you get in two for one. It started as a response to the fact that I would go to comedy clubs and talk about race and racism a lot, and I felt like after about twenty minutes people go, “Next subject!” It's not that they even mind the jokes necessarily all the time. But they just sort of, they get fatigued by the subject, which I think is bullshit.