Losing My Cool (22 page)

Charles didn't have these problems—he had a real talent for economics and had gotten himself into a prestigious exchange program at Cambridge. He was gone, too, and now I really felt left behind. To compensate, I got a passport of my own and arranged to visit him and Josh and Rusty in London that spring break. Having not yet completed Georgetown's basic foreign-language requirement, I also enrolled in a study-abroad program in France for the summer. I could have taken all the coursework I needed at Rutgers and saved myself a lot of student-loan debt in the process, but I had been living with a gnawing sense of unease that semester—a feeling my trip to London would only intensify—a kind of vague, undefined longing. A longing for what, I couldn't say. All I knew was that I had to go abroad and that it would cost me far more if I did not go.

Back at what seemed to me a very quiet Georgetown, I bided my time playing pickup basketball with Pup and endless hours of chess with my old roommate, Bryan. Academically, I pushed myself harder than ever. I met a very kind and serious philosopher from the Flemish-speaking side of Belgium, a Hegel scholar named Wilfried Ver Eecke. Dr. Ver Eecke—a balding man with thick accent and jowls, who looked anachronistically like a philosopher, always in a gray three-piece suit and almost always in his office, working— took me under his wing and agreed to teach me
The Phenomenology of Spirit
on a one-on-one basis. He cautioned beforehand that it was, in his opinion, “probably the most difficult book in the world.”As such, we agreed that we would focus our attention those months on one section in particular, a section I wanted badly to comprehend, a section Hegel called the Master-Slave Dialectic.

The Master-Slave Dialectic begins as a kind of imagined narrative or myth, which Hegel devised in order to explain on a highly abstract level how mere life, conscious life, might have made the staggering leap to become
self-conscious
life—or life that is aware of itself, subjective, “I.” It develops into the story of what happens when two “I”s meet each other, when “the-I-that-is-I” encounters “the-I-that-is-other” and both attempt to assert themselves. It becomes the story of a life-and-death struggle, of a fight for
recognition
, of an unequal relationship that necessarily ensues.

To say that this is heavy stuff is the definition of understatement. I labored for months with Dr. Ver Eecke as my guide, trying to follow Hegel's elusive thought around the darkened Teutonic woods. The pursuit exhausted and challenged me in ways my teacher, a European man, could not understand. It challenged me emotionally. As a descendant of real slaves, my interest in the topic was instinctively more than academic—whereas Dr. Ver Eecke, through no fault of his own, felt it all in his head, through no fault of
my
own, I felt it in my bones. I felt, perhaps, a touch of ancestral shame. Above all, as a black student of philosophy at Georgetown, I felt profoundly alone. I had no one, not one black person I could talk to about what I was reading and thinking, about Hegel's concept of bondage in particular and about philosophy in general. I was the only black person in the department—student or faculty—and that was that. It is difficult to take a topic that hits home the way slavery does for blacks and twist it around in your mind theoretically, dispassionately, in the abstract, counterintuitively, but that is what I ended up having to do in the absence of anyone to speak with emotionally. This, though, I think, was ultimately for the better. I pried myself from my emotion and my history and let Hegel have his say. What he said turned me upside down.

For Hegel, it is actually
the slave
who comes out on top in the long run. In that initial life-and-death struggle, which sets the terms going forward, one “I” experiences what Hegel calls the “fear of death” and submits to the other. This “I” decides he “loves life” and concedes the fight. And this initially submissive consciousness, the slave consciousness, on pain of death, now serves the other's will and
works
for him. But it is through this very work that, eventually, he will come to surpass his master, Hegel reasons. On a basic level, this is so because it is the slave who masters objective reality, or nature. The slave takes the plants and animals and transforms them, through work, into meals; the slave transforms, with his hands, a tree into a table; the slave is most alive, becomes necessary, develops his spirit. The master, on the other hand, is parasitic, decadent, dependent. Without the slave's recognition, he is not even a master; without the slave's work, he cannot prosper.

I realized that Hegel was not really thinking about flesh-and-blood men and women here, nor was he probably concerned at all with the curious case of the American Negro. On the contrary, he was thinking about such abstractions as the progression of Mind through History toward the Absolute. The particular and the personal were of little consequence to him. He was contemplating societal evolution on an extremely grand scale, and he was seeing the Master-Slave Dialectic as on the verge of finding its resolution not through a man like Abraham Lincoln, but through a man like Napoléon Bonaparte, through the imperial implementation of constitutional monarchy in Europe. In other words, Hegel was thinking about men becoming citizens, but he was not thinking about black folk marching in Alabama.

Of course, it was hard for me to see how my great-great-grandfather, Shadrach—a man bought (or bred, who knows?) and legally owned by a certain Jones family of Louisiana, like a head of cattle—would not have taken exception to Hegel's reasoning here, were he given the opportunity and ability to read and rebut. Could a slave ever reach this kind of conclusion? I wondered. The idea struck me as either insane or a joke. And yet, the more I thought about it—that those who have been subjugated might actually over time be able to
gain
something from that subjugation—the more I struggled with this idea from my comfortable swivel chair, armed with the space and perspective I was fortunate enough to have been granted, the more I found it difficult to dismiss as simply false.

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, hip-hop music remained my daily bread, same as always. I woke up to the beat, and it was on when I went to sleep at night. Even as I drifted further and further away from the culture and its priorities, the music I found to be much more difficult to escape. When Jay-Z's
The Blueprint
album dropped earlier that year, my roommates and I got our hands on a leaked copy a few weeks early and knocked it all day, every day for a month or two. I pumped it as hard or even harder than my friends did, listening to “Girls, Girls, Girls” so many times some of them asked me to stop. But by that point something basic had changed in my response to the music, and irreparably so. Whereas before I could whittle away entire afternoons with Charles, marveling at Jay-Z's perspicacity, at his cleverness with words or his unflinching insight into the human condition, I now found I could no longer get myself so worked up about it, as many of my friends—including my white friends—still could do. I listened to the music, and I listened to it a lot, but it became nearly impossible for me to be impressed with it on anything approaching a deeper level, to see rappers like Jay-Z and Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan, or even Mos Def and Talib Kweli, in the light I used to see them and so many still do: as something
more
than entertainers and petty egoists, as something akin to autodidact philosophers and thinkers, as role models and guides, as “black people CNN.” I couldn't do it, not once I actually had some philosophy under my belt and was getting into the habit of thinking for and informing myself. In fact, the only thing that amazed me anymore was the idea that I had ever been so taken by these people in the past or had thought that they were somehow “kicking knowledge.”

As the year wound down, I used to stop by at Bryan's apartment on Wisconsin just about every day. The place, a two-bedroom walk-up, with a futon, a TV, a PlayStation 2, and two turntables and a mixer in the living room, was small and sparse but always a good time. Bryan shared it with a recent Georgetown grad named Ted. As far as I could tell, Ted's life revolved around four things in no particular order: smoking ganja, playing chess, listening to rap, and studying for the LSAT. I didn't know anyone else who wanted to play chess as badly as Ted did, and over that we bonded. The three of us—Bryan, Ted, and I—used to hold down marathon sessions with Ted's rollout chessboard, which he bought at the U.S. Chess Center over in Dupont, and which Bryan would spread out over the cardboard box he used as a table on these occasions. Mainly, Ted and I played game after game and Bryan provided the soundtrack.

An infectious and indefatigable bedroom DJ, Bryan would light up a spliff or two or three and weave together hours-long mixes of Boot Camp Clik,Wu-Tang Clan, and Rawkus Records tracks from his booth in the corner. Over the course of these evenings, Bryan and Ted would say things to each other like: “Yo, God, what's the science?” They talked about “chessboxin'” and “the dun language” and “blessing poly sessions.” In certain ways it seemed to me as if they were even more into hip-hop than my black friends were back home. But both of these two white boys were also strong students with significantly higher GPAs than mine. I wondered how they could compartmentalize their hip-hop experience so neatly, not let it interfere with their schoolwork or their careers, in a way that many of my black friends and I couldn't do. Bryan was from a background no more privileged than mine and certainly far less elite than Will's. How come he had never tried to smack a bitch or pack a gat? I asked myself. How come he didn't think that homework was wack or have a baby like Stacey did? How come he didn't have the same problems so many of us were having?

One of the main reasons, it dawned on me, is that too many blacks do not approach hip-hop
ironically
. Whites and other non-blacks like Bryan and Ted enjoy the very real pleasures of the music while avoiding the many pitfalls of the culture precisely because they listen with a sense of irony. For my black friends and me, there was nothing ironic about the business of keeping it real. Quite the opposite—this is what many of us were most sincere about.

When Bryan speaks of “keeping it thorough” or “holding it down” or “representing,” it means something very different from what it means when someone like RaShawn says the same thing. In one case it is funny and innocuous,
metaphorical
; in another it is
literal
, terrifying, and homicidal. RaShawn, that childhood idol of mine, was not being ironic in the least when he bumped
The Chronic
in Forest Road Park and Dr. Dre rapped evocatively about letting the hollow-points pop. The violence and criminality of RaShawn's life-style went hand-in-hand with the rap lyrics he earnestly embraced, and with the miserable street culture those lyrics evoked in such garish detail. RaShawn had none of the necessary psychological detachment and emotional remove that Bryan could bring with him to the interaction. RaShawn saw himself in these songs, whereas Bryan simply came to appreciate hip-hop in the way that, say, someone not from India might come to appreciate yoga. Regardless of his enthusiasm for hip-hop, there could never be any question of whether Bryan might actually belong to the street culture that produced it. The truth is that he couldn't, and no one would ever expect him to—hence the irony of his adoption of this peculiar language and set of manners. No, Bryan was into hip-hop, I realized, but he wasn't of it; sadly, RaShawn was of it even more than he was into it.

 

 

 

 

Without intending to, I had begun to listen to hip-hop with the ears of a stranger. I first realized this in a car coming back from the Jersey Shore with Charles and Betrys and a friend of Betrys's from Tokyo named Jenny. The four of us were in good spirits after having spent the afternoon sipping cold beers on the porch of my friend Chris's beach house and lying on the sand. Chris was two years behind me at Georgetown and we had become friends that summer in France, where we both took language courses in Tours. The girls and Charles and I had taken our leave of Chris, and I was inching along the Parkway, stuck in the crush of Sunday evening beach traffic, with Betrys up front next to me, and Charles and Jenny in the back. Jay-Z's
Reasonable Doubt
played on the stereo and we all were quiet, listening to the rapper who called himself “Jay-Hovah” as if to the Sermon on the Mount.

This had been one of my favorite albums as a teenager. I played it so much in high school on my Walkman and in my bedroom that I eventually snapped the tape in the cassette. This afternoon the record still sounded good to me in the way that only a record that embodies all the mixed-up hopes, dreams, emotions, lust, swagger, naïveté, arrogance, innocence, and aspiration of a specific, irreproducible youthful moment can sound good. Which is to say, it had the sweet sound of nostalgia in it. But when I heard it now, heard “the god MC” narrate the glories of street life and state so matter-of-factly that “all us blacks got is sports and entertainment” and “thievin',” and when I heard him boast about his underworld ties and how the high price of leather and fur had him “deeper than ever” in the drug game, I must have kind of chuckled or something. It seemed to me to be silly on its face now.

The fact that until that moment I had been nodding my head along in solemnity also struck me as, well, ironic. What did Jay-Z's gritty take have to do with our present reality? Charles had just come home from half a year spent in the company of Cambridge dons and was starting a lofty summer internship on the trading floor at J. P. Morgan, Betrys and Jenny could read kanji, for heaven's sake, and I had just returned from a two-month stay in the
hôtel particulier
of an old French aristocrat who cooked steak dinners for me. Of the five of us that day, Jenny and Chris were not black; Charles and Betrys and I were. I could see very little distinction among any of our lives right then: We all had prospects beyond sports or thievin' or drug hustling. Yet somehow for Charles and Betrys and me, that was what was supposedly “real.”