Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

There is no such thing as being half-white, for black, they explained, is less a biological category than a social one. It is a condition of the mind that is loosely linked to certain physical features, but more than anything it is a culture, a challenge, and a discipline. We were taught from the moment we could understand spoken words that we would be treated by whites as though we were black whether we liked it or not, and so we needed to know how to move in the world as black men. And that was that.

“Then you’re a philosopher, son,” he would tell me, and I would laugh, embarrassed because I didn’t feel at all like a philosopher, whatever that was I could only imagine. I felt ignorant, which is what I confessed to him. And he would tell me that ignorance is the beginning of knowledge and talk of men named Socrates and Confucius.

Rather than know ourselves, we cloaked our ignorance—like the rappers and thugs that we adored—in the rags of self-importance and faux-empowerment. It was so much easier to mime stereotypes than to invent ourselves as individuals.

To relinquish this reconfiguration is to open oneself to a shitstorm of pain and insecurity; it is to allow someone else, possibly someone who has done more and seen more and received more than you have, to participate in the setting of criteria, in the determination of what is and is not good; it is to strip your feet of a life’s worth of callus and step willingly onto the scorching pavement. And that is scary.

On the other hand, I could try something new, new for me: I could swallow my pride and allow myself my curiosity and permit someone else to put me on to something unfamiliar. That day, I realized I wanted more—to know more, taste more, see more, experience more. I was tired of trying to keep it real—real provincial—all the time.

The way philosophy worked, it occurred to me at some point, was the exact opposite of the way the black, hip-hop-driven culture operated. Whereas the latter dealt strictly with the surfaces of things—possessions, poses, appearances, reactions—the former was nothing but the penetration of facades. The more I read in philosophy, the more I felt like that escaped slave from Plato’s cave. I had been mistaking shadows for reality all along. The fact that this was such a sophomoric, clichéd revelation to come to in light of all my father’s efforts to expose me to learning only illustrates the degree to which hip-hop culture—that invisible glue that stuck me with RaShawn—had placed a barrier between me and even the most universal aspects of intellectual life.

though, I failed to anticipate the extent to which daily exposure to serious ideas and methods of thinking would alter me. I didn’t realize that once you leave home and see new and more complex things, you might just lose the desire to measure yourself by the old, provincial standards; they cease to motivate you even when you want them to; you set your eyes on new and higher (though they used to seem lower) sights.

I suspected, however, that on many other levels, on the level of lived experience for example, Will and I were far freer than Shadrach and Cora and Pappy and all those generations of blacks who came before us. That this was true seemed tough to deny, and the more I thought about it, the more the matter produced in me feelings that were not unlike guilt. Not the guilt you have when you do something wrong, but the guilt you have when you are given something you don’t necessarily deserve or haven’t earned by your own efforts.

Was it foolish of Clarence to speed and get a ticket in the first place? Yes, it was. And it was probably also exceedingly bad judgment on his part to attempt to enter the house—regardless of whether there was proof inside of a change of date—after the policemen instructed him not to. I cannot dispute that. But try as hard as I can—and I have tried—I fail to see any way that this could have happened to any of our white neighbors, in their own homes and over an infraction so venial as a traffic ticket. It is simply unimaginable.

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.

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.

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.

I was aware now that I had floated in the Mediterranean and sipped an orange pressée at the Closerie des Lilas and seen the sun set in Montmartre. I was aware, above all, and at long last, that the world was a broad and grand place and that I was equal to and worthy of my surroundings wherever I went. I was also aware that no one, white or black, could take that from me. I cannot overstate the importance of this realization.

My adherence to Pappy’s interpretation of philosophy led me to take whatever it was that I was reading much more seriously outside of the classroom than even inside it. And this is probably why I was never able to become very interested in analytic philosophy, that cloistered, academic esotery that denies the possibility of deeper truth, and which all too often has given up asking the question “How ought I live?” “How ought I live?” was really the only question I wanted to find an answer to, and I looked for it in everything I read.

Distantiality is something like the pressure people feel to keep it real, a pressure that puts all of us, as individuals, in a state of constant subjection to others, the They, who decide what is and is not acceptable in the community. When we try to determine who They are, we realize that They are nobody. They are not definite. Like agents in The Matrix, anyone in the group can be the They at any given time and the They is never anyone in particular. It is generic and, as a result, extremely difficult to pin down or challenge. And this is decisive: The sheer inconspicuousness of the domination—most of the time we don’t even notice it—is what makes it so powerful.

I was also realizing that we simply do not often see ourselves very accurately on our own and it is only through other people that we glimpse or comprehend our own situations or selves.

The better approach—if the far more difficult one—would be for us to learn, once and for all, how to interpret and navigate the world around us, and to stop confusing the shoes on our feet or the songs in our ears for ourselves.