SIX
YOU CAN’T TELL ME NOTHIN’
The typical telling of why style is so essential to Black survival would begin with the violence of the Middle Passage. It would conjure up brown skin cracked and almost silver with ash, hair matted with dust and dander, clothes too tattered to protect violated bodies from the heat, cold, fleas, and burrs.
Of course, that story—one of strength to be sure—is true. But it is incomplete. Take the magic of our hair. Before the European narcissists kidnapped us and dragged us across the world, we used our cornrows, braids, thread wrapping, and ornaments to communicate to one another who we were. Ayana Byrd and Lori L. Tharps’s Hair Story, the definitive social history of African American hair, lays it out:
In the early 15th century, hair functioned as a carrier of messages in most West African societies. The citizens of these societies—including the Wolof, Mende, Mandingo, and Yoruba—were the people who filled the slave ships that sailed to the “New World.” Within these cultures, hair was an integral part of a complex language system. Ever since African civilizations bloomed, hairstyles have been used to indicate a person’s marital status, age, religion, ethnic identity, wealth, and rank within the community. In some cultures a person’s surname could be ascertained simply by examining the hair because each clan had its own unique hairstyle. The hairstyle also served as an indicator of a person’s geographic origins.
And of course, our style isn’t limited to hair. We put our babies’ freshly bathed and oiled bodies into quality garb so that this hostile world won’t assume that they are not loved. Our big geometric hats, high heels, and skirt suits are part of how we honor the divine. Steve Harvey suits, Carmelo Anthony suits, and our favorite, Mahershala Ali suits, tell the world that we intend to act good and grown and very sexy. Our shoe game defies reason and sometimes budget, which isn’t so great, but it feels great and pleasure is something we deserve.
We also stunt on haters with our cleverness and our pride in our intellect. How many times have you seen that article about Michael Brown, the Black, Houston-based senior who applied to twenty colleges and got free rides from all of them? Who is more wicked with Photoshop than our freelance meme-makers who skillfully mocked the Oakland White woman who called the police on two Black men barbecuing? For us, style is more than capitalist materialism and unhealthy competition. The creators in this chapter show us why.
Michael Arceneaux on Shade as Resistance
Michael Arceneaux is a Houston-born writer for Elle, New York, the Guardian, Ebony, and Complex and the author of a comedic memoir about being unapologetically Black, gay, and sexual called I Can’t Date Jesus. Akiba and Kenrya chatted with Arceneaux about the art of employing shade as resistance and why a little disrespect just might save us all.
If you ruled the world and everything in it, what would you change?
Student loans are the bane of my existence. I basically took out a payday loan to go to Howard. So if I ruled, I would start by making higher education free.
What else would you do?
Well, if I could bippity-boppity-boo one thing for everyone, it would be to make them less concerned about what other people think. People forced a lot of stuff on me early on. Now I’m more myself.
So you stopped caring?
Well, a lot of people would call it “no fucks given,” but I find that it can be a false premise. We typically care what other people think, no matter what. It’s just that we can’t let what people think control us. We should just have this kind of openness, this embracing of doing whatever we want. I wish I could be as free as like a Cardi B or Joseline Hernandez. People try to trivialize what they do, but they remind me of people I grew up with. Even though they’re broken in some places, they’re rewarded for being who they are.
So to take that to the macro level, how can not caring about what other people think help Black people to resist?
Sometimes, when we talk—even if we’re talking about ourselves and identity and race—we are being reactive to what White people think. If I ruled the world, I would free Black people from ever having to think about White people in a way that centers them.
How does this play out for you?
If I’m around White gay people and they ask about dating, they want me to talk about it within the context of “White men don’t want me. It’s sexual racism.” Because I’m a Black gay man, they assume that I’m broken and miserable and that I’m walking around so burdened by their prejudices. But I don’t give a fuck about White people like that. I’m very much aware of politics and what’s going on, but I don’t wake up every morning thinking about what White people like or what they’re going to do to me.
How did you grow up?
Growing up, I was mostly around Black people and Latinos. I dealt with Latino racism to an extent, but it was just different from having to deal with White racists. So I’ve always had a Black center. I didn’t grow up with money, but I knew that Black people could become doctors and lawyers. So even though I’m the first man in my family to go to college, I didn’t think anything was impossible.
You grew up Catholic, right?
Yes. I got approached for the priesthood at twenty by a Black priest in a curly wig! The only things I associated with being gay were “the AIDS” and hell. Literally, that’s all I knew. My book is like my education about how to be what I am now: a semiconfident, secure, Colored sissy.
One thing we appreciate about your writing is that you’re haughty and petty as fuck.
Am I?
Yes, in the best possible way! Once, after 45 tweeted something late at night, you responded, “Go to bed, thot.” You called the president of the United States a thot.
I don’t know if I’m petty! I just be talking. I be saying my shit. But I do think how I deal with people like him is very disrespectful. I give him as much respect as he gave the first Black president or as he’s given Black people throughout his whole life. Personally, it’s cathartic, because I get out my aggression. And I also think it’s cathartic for the Black people I’m writing for. I never say his name in my writing. That disrespect is a form of resistance for me, because I don’t think he deserves any of our respect.
What made you call a powerful man a thot?
I know there’s usually a sex assigned to words like “thot,” but I’m a gender-neutral bitch basher. I call men “bitch” a lot. I almost got in a fight with my dad for calling him a bitch. So I treat “thot” the same way. Technically, if you go by the definition, there is no bigger thot than a man who walks around talking about how he grabs people’s pussies.
I fight White supremacy each day by living outside of the invisible boundaries of my racial identity.
—Stephen Benson II, police officer
… And Look Good While Doing It!
Tai Allen
often fashion marries form with function
it armors the confidence for the coming fights
| clean shirts | white sheets |
| fly suits | ugly blues |
| slick kicks | pigs’ feets |
the smart selves dress like history is an ongoing affair
coffee & pray their flesh will stay free of/far from law & weapons
| costly threads | shell cases |
| dry cleaning | steel ceilings |
| new jordans | smaller checks |
| for schools & potholes | |
| makes it bumpy-hard | |
| to ease along roads | |
| or avoid standing | |
| under dirty-light(posts) | |
| while the pipes | |
| and the lines | |
| are tracking | |
| & chaining | |
| the poor | |
| to potters, plots | |
| & prisons |
every avenue & address change, comes with both casual & “good” clothes
the iron stays burning & steaming, some jobs include interviews that outwit the bosses
| african names | day-job voice |
| black hard shoes | foreign soles |
| two degrees | good pay means |
| just a wee bit | |
| below the mediocre | |
| line of the all-americans |
| getting ready for work | |
| has to mean a mirror | |
| that smiles | |
| nods and approves | |
| when you model turn |
Tai Allen is a creative who makes things pretty. His first book of poems is No Jewels.
Writer and Editor Penny Wrenn on Making Space Where There Is None
I fight White supremacy by being big Black in my small White town. I fight though I appear not to fight. My weapon is radical self-acceptance, a personal hospitality that lays down the I-am-because-we-are welcome mat of Black reception wherever I enter. I show up—proudly, unselfconsciously, loudly, jauntily—to streets and sidewalks where I’ve no explicit permission or invitation to be. I turn up my Black Music to drown out the White Supremacy soundtrack of Americana and folk songs on loop. I am an uproarious pedestrian, singing Walter Hawkins’s “Thank You” at the top of my lungs and head-nodding Black passersby while running errands. When I’m behind the wheel on windows-down-driving sunny days, my joyful resistance is a bumpin’-ass bangin’-ass Bose sound system reverberating the horns, keys, and bass of “Black Man” from Songs in the Key of Life.
In small towns, noise ordinances against loud music and the many other law-enforcing ways of so-called well-meaning White people are the nigger-calling, dog-unleashing, and face-spitting racism of our time. In small towns, the superiority complexes have a way of masquerading as White shame sans atonement, as a fake kind of humility, as piousness in the wake of “well, we tried” failures, as hands-up exasperation that believes it is we who haven’t shown up. So with my Black self, not only do I show up, but I show off. Big time.
Liberation Playlist
DJ Monday Blue
“I resist White supremacy by rejecting the notion that I should be anything other than my whole, unadulterated self; a self of my choice and creation.”—DJ Monday Blue
“Black Maybe,” Syreeta
“Woman of the Ghetto,” Marlena Shaw
“Otherside of the Game,” Erykah Badu
“Golden,” Jill Scott
“Blacks’ Magic,” Salt-N-Pepa
“Pure (Jay’s Original Vocal),” Blue Six, featuring Monique Bingham
“System,” Labelle
Tracy M. Adams, also known as DJ Monday Blue, is a licensed and registered physical therapist by day and a DJ by night. She believes that twirling on the dance floor is as therapeutic as planks.
Beverly “Bevy” Smith’s Formula for Flyness
Bevy Smith has a long record of subversive fabulosity. In the mid-’90s, when hip-hop was still a subculture, the Harlem native broke ground as Vibe magazine’s fashion and beauty advertising director. High-end brands were not interested in marketing to audiences they perceived as ghetto. Smith helped change their minds.
She went on to serve as a fashion advertising director at Rolling Stone, bringing fashion and hip-hop stars together for Dinners with Bevy, co-host Bravo’s Fashion Queens, host morning satellite radio show Bevelations, and co-host Page Six TV.
One thing that Smith’s résumé may not tell you is that she is a dark-skinned, curvaceous, self-described “Blackity, Black” woman over fifty with short hair. By most measures, she is not supposed to be in the room. So Smith creates the room. In this as-told-to, she offers some of her ingredients.
On Fashion
“I’m from Harlem, and growing up you only had two options. Be fly or be a bum. Either you were at the lowest rung or you were appropriate for business. Business could mean that you were ready for the cookout, or you were ready for a conference room.
“Fashion was a natural interest, as was advertising. So between loving advertising and being innately fly, it was like heaven to get one of my first jobs at a fashion advertising agency.”
On White People
“At the firm, I met these magical White people, who became my patrons. Although my parents were raised in the Jim Crow South, I never heard any negativity about White people in my house. Some people grew up with very woke parents. My parents were like, ‘Work hard. Take care of your family.’ End of fucking story.
“My mother grew up in Durham, North Carolina, in tobacco land and went to work at thirteen. My father grew up in Yemassee, South Carolina. He lost his mother and father very early on and was raised by his aunt. Plus his little sister died of polio. One time I asked my father why he didn’t march in the Civil Rights Movement. He was like, ‘I was too busy working.’ Interestingly, his family never worked for White people.
“My parents were just not concerned about what some White person was doing. I never heard that I had to be two times better to get half as far. I didn’t grow up thinking of them having something that I should want.”
On Creating an Image
“I would be lying if I said I didn’t care when certain people have snubbed me. But mostly I care about whether people see me as nuanced. Some people think I’m just firing on one cylinder. But I am actually very aware. I like a kee-kee and a cackle as much as anybody else. But you have to understand that this is an educated approach. I’m saying something witty, and wit takes intelligence.
“On Page Six TV, I’m set up as the queen of the scene, the person who’s traveled the world and been a business executive. I didn’t tell them that that’s how I wanted to be seen; they discerned that fact. I’m never going to do a show that casts me as the single, big Black bitch who says things like, ‘If only I could stop eating!’ I’m not doing the self-deprecating thing. I think that’s a dangerous trope that a lot of Black women over the age of forty who are curvy and dark-skinned fall into on television.”
On Self-Determination
“This is so sappy, but I believe that everybody’s got their something. You’ve got to look in the mirror and find it, find what draws other people to you. I do this thing called Life with Vision that’s going to be the basis of a self-help book. I’m really trying to teach people to dig deep and figure out what the fuck they really want to do. Most of us are shrouding, hiding, running from what it is that we really want to do, for fear of rejection, failure, and fear, but we’re wasting time.”
“I want to reconstruct the idea of art for people who grew up in situations similar to my social and economic background. I don’t believe art should be intimidating or only for the privileged; it’s an outlet for everyone. As a writer and an artist, I want to show how an object can tell a story and share an experience. It makes the experience universal and hopefully through this form of vulnerability creates necessary conversations. I don’t think art will save nations, but it can reflect current events and ideas and hypothesize the future.”—Diamond Stingily
Diamond Stingily is an artist and poet from Chicago, based in Brooklyn, New York. Stingily has exhibited and read at numerous galleries, fairs, and museums, including the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) at the Grand Palais, the New Museum in New York, and the Serpentine Galleries in London.
I fight White supremacy by building and supporting Black political infrastructure in the South.
—LaTosha Brown, philanthropic strategist
A Poem in Which No Black People Are Dead
Hanif Abdurraqib
here, the bouquet of bullets
instead find a patch of fresh dirt
and just like that,
it is spring again.
in this poem, I speak of the grandmother
but not of time’s eager shadow
reaching for her legs.
instead, there is no ancestor
that cannot be touched
by a hand four generations younger.
in this poem, we weaponize joy.
gospel is sung during the week
without burying anyone,
because it is what the living demand.
no one dead looks like anyone’s child here,
because there is no one dead here.
there is no child who is not called a child,
even when they have sinned against the earth.
all of our heroes are still living,
their statues bronze and tall on street corners.
jamal from the barbershop. ms. rose who put her foot
in some fried chicken once, and ain’t never pulled it out.
here, no one asks for permission to celebrate their living
and so it is:
the night pulls back its black mask and gives way to more black.
the type that turns the speakers up loud and runs into the streets.
the type that don’t know how to act,
but ain’t here to impress nobody.
a whole city opens its cracked palms and holds the buzzing within.
in this poem, it sounds like a prayer.
not the hushed kind, but the one that arrives on the lips
after a lover trusts you with their undoing.
the kind that comes from a table
where the spades are up and the tea is sweet.
here, everyone black is a church that never burns.
everyone black is the fire themselves.
eternal light, blood still hot and never on the pavement.
if heaven is a place of no pain, let this be heaven.
here, the god of bulletproof rapture is washing a boy’s feet in the river.
the boy looks up, summons every black bird from its nest.
commands them to cover the sky.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in 2017.
Blackness is obviously lit, but to live as a Black person in America is to be bombarded with the bias and bullshit of other people. Here we consider: how many fucks do you give at this point?
Akiba
I have the rare problem of people believing that I don’t give a single fuck when I am out here giving anywhere from 65.789 to 1,000.955 fucks at all times. People who like me describe this misperception with positive words like “direct” and “outspoken.” Those who can’t stand me err toward “shady” and even “evil.”
The truth is, my feelings are easily hurt and I’ve been trained by life to respond to that pain with anger rather than vulnerability. I don’t tend to yell at people (anymore). I now use weaponized sarcasm, which is more efficient, funnier, and lets you give a fuck without admitting it.
My sarcasm serves me well enough in most hostile environments. But it has, at times, foiled my attempts to resist racial microaggressions in a healthy way. In these sunken places, molehills become mountains, puddles become pools, a single cheese curl becomes a 26-ounce barrel of Chex mix.
For instance, I, like many a talented Black girl in publishing, was once underemployed as a freelance fact-checker at predominantly White outlets. Regardless of race or class, fact-checkers are the media version of undertakers. We are the ones who drape bangs over bruised foreheads and speak softly when everyone else is screaming and falling out.
At these workplaces, many of the people I was tasked with correcting behaved like the Molly Ringwald character in The Breakfast Club. They weren’t exactly mean. They just confused their privilege for talent and thought they were a little better than people who were browner, larger, and less wealthy.
At one place, my coworkers not-so-secretly called the fact-checkers’ section of the office “the ghetto.” They would also respond to me correcting their errors with bizarre, stupid, or irrelevant utterances. “Have you ever counted your dreadlocks?” one once asked as I tried to get her to focus on percentages. “But you have a swayback!!!” another remarked after I told her that it is physically impossible for 99 percent of grown women to lie flat on the ground with “zero” space between the floor and their backs.
Most of my coworkers weren’t conscious of what was happening. But I knew I was being cast as an extra in an early ’80s movie where the homeboys spend their days stripping cars and menacing unlucky honkies with switchblades.
Even worse for me were the raised voices, snatched papers, and tears. While I would try to defuse these tantrums with an even tone and a gentle pat to the shoulder, my inner self would declare, “I am a Black girl who was hired to be right. You are a fucking dumbass. Do the math.”
That combination of outward calm and inner rage inevitably resulted in, you guessed it, sarcasm. “I know I am soooo annoying,” I once heard myself say. “I could totally be wrong. But I’m pretty sure the secretary of state isn’t in charge of ordering the president’s paper clips.” (Okay. I never had to tell anyone something that obvious, but I came very, very close.)
In these moments, the value of barely masking my hostility with “jokes” was that the tantrum-thrower recognized that she was being clowned but couldn’t call it out because I hadn’t actually said anything wrong. The problem was that I stayed very angry and my feelings were still hurt. Conversations about lipstick and cheese were never really about lipstick and cheese. They were about what Miss Millie did to Sofia on Christmas.
Today I like to think that better employment helps me give fewer fucks about winning stupid power struggles and forgiving microaggressions. I do actually say, “I am hurt,” sometimes. But that petty, shady, sharp-tongued, sarcastic girl is always on the ready for a battle of wits. Plus, she tells better stories.
Kenrya
None, maybe.
So here’s the thing: I’m a food co-op–shopping, cloth-diapering, aluminum-free deodorant–wearing, birth doula–working hippie. I’ve led more workshops on the power of vision boarding and daily affirmations than I can count, and I never met a low-effort craft project I didn’t like (I’m tired, y’all). So I greeted 2017 crammed into one of my daughter’s tiny wooden fold-up chairs so I could sit at her teeny wooden table with poster board and Crayola’s finest to create an intention board to guide me through the next twelve months. It’s massive and colorful, and it has sections for all the big areas in my life—parenting, career, friends, fun. You get the picture. In the section that details how I want to upgrade my lifestyle, alongside “Be kind to myself” and “Walk by faith,” I wrote “Give fewer fucks” (see “Exhibit A”).
I made the mistake of telling my bestie, Erica, about my plan to hoard my fucks.
Her response: “Bitch, you don’t have any more fucks to give.”
She’s not wrong. But that’s a relatively recent development. I used to have an abundance of fucks. I cared so much. I worried about being perceived as aggressive when correcting folks who said my name wrong. I worried that Black men wouldn’t find me attractive when I big-chopped and freed myself from Saturdays trapped in the salon waiting for a touch-up. I took great pains to be polite, even when my manners hadn’t been earned. I was a miniature version of my daddy, extra concerned about keeping the peace and saying “Yes” even when I wanted to say “Hell, no,” like my mama.
My life of caring too much put me in a bad place. I’m empathetic by nature, but when I found myself making a life with a man who was so threatened by my success that our marriage was only comfortable when I dimmed my light, I knew I’d taken this caring thing way too far.
But, as usual, God intervened, and I walked away. Away from the marriage, away from the constant weight of other people’s expectations, away from consistently putting myself last. Let me tell you: the confidence that comes with being forced to learn hard lessons is phenomenal. Once I realized how great it felt to be my whole, unrelenting, brilliant self, fretting about what other people thought about me ceased to be an option.
And my recovered glow informs the way I move through the world as a Black woman. I center my work around dismantling White supremacy. I never do that whisper thing—you know what I’m talking about—when talking about race or White people in public. I teach my daughter to value her impressive intellect and her strong body and her natural sweetness and her loud voice and her fluffy hair, and I show her that shrinking and giving a fuck about the opinions of people who wish her harm is neither healthy nor natural.
So why the “maybe”? I figure we’re losing the game when we assume we have it beat, so I’m ever-vigilant, lest a fuck creep into my pocket.