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

If you were to thumb through the book, you would notice other things, too: margins overrun with ink, questions demanded, allusions uncovered, arcana circled and defined, arguments digested and broken down, rebuttals and counterarguments sustained and advanced—you would see a probing mind, the mind of what society had designated a nigger, waging intellectual warfare.You would see acts of civil disobedience (whether they were violent or not would only depend on your perspective). If you were to walk several paces beyond Pappy’s study, back into my bedroom, however, and sift through the stacks of Vibe magazines, the towers of CDs and mountains of Nike Airs, and come upon some of my books, you would see something else entirely. You would see pristine texts that had not been hard-won but that had been given to me (Plutarch’s Lives, say). Inside the cover there would be the same familiar handwriting (“To—Thomas Chatterton Williams; From, Pappy, with best wishes—always! Dec. 6, 1995, Days at Fanwood, New Jersey *Note: These are lives worth studying carefully.”) If you were to flip through the pages, though, you would see only evidence of absence, a lack of marginalia and wear and tear, a kind of apophatic argument, a mind unaware of what so recently was at stake, a perfunctory mind, the mind of a comfortable and pampered teenager who just happened to be black—the way he happened to be skinny and happened to have long fingers—and against whom society hardly could be said to hold a...

Very few of us had anything like a real desire to be ourselves, to create ourselves. It was so much easier to receive direction from “above,” and where I was from, above was the street, and the direction came from the rappers and thugs and hoes who were the grand inquisitors of the Real. They were the high priests and priestesses of hip-hop culture, which had become our religion and our opiate—really, our master, our new and terrible master. I had never known anyone my age and who looked like me who had read Dostoyevsky, but in his strange Russian world, I caught unmistakable glimpses of my own.

For Heidegger and Steele, the stifling of individual freedom by the collective will of the group poses a grave existential threat in itself. It is not a threat that is restricted to the black community by any means. Quite the opposite, it is characteristic of all communities and herds.

I couldn’t help but feel that it was one thing to give yourself over to the service of a worthy and moral cause, to lose yourself in your group when your group is engaged, against all odds, in a battle for its very survival. It was one thing to keep it real with your group when your group’s reality is that their children are being firebombed in church and hosed down in the streets, torn apart by German shepherds and broken up by billy clubs. That was a sacrifice of personal freedom that I could understand. But it was something else entirely to realize that you have lost yourself for absolutely nothing, that you have been manipulated and dictated by a posture, an attitude, a pose, by BET, Trick Daddy, Puff Daddy, and the Junior Mafia.

Whether that lie is born of simple ignorance masquerading as arrogance—a seductive ignorance, yes, but still only ignorance—or, worse, actual malice, matters little at the moment of your realization. All that matters at that moment is the lie itself, this fiction that says that for you and your kind alone an authentic existence is a severely limited one. You have been lied to (and for how long?) and now you know that you have been lied to and you can’t deny it and you are naked.

Since the dawn of the hip-hop era in the 1970s, black people have become increasingly freer and freer as individuals, with a wider range of possibilities spread out before us now than at any time in our past. Yet the circumstances of our collective life have degenerated in direct contrast to this fact, with a more impoverished vision of what it means to be black today than ever before.

My generation, if we are to make it and to make good on the debt we owe our ancestors, must find a new vocabulary and another point of view. We have to reclaim the discipline and the spirit we have lost. We have to flip the script on what it means to be black. We have to think about what is and is not beneficial to our own mental, cultural, and even physical health. As a people, we have emerged from centuries spent in the dark woods of slavery and racism only to come upon an ominous forking path. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our survival will be determined by the direction that we take. If we can’t change our ideas, if we fail to cultivate future generations of personalities that are something more than just cool—or hard—if we fail to realize that certain values are better, and worse, than others, then what we are doing is presiding over our own gradual destruction. And that is something, for my father’s generation, that not even the most fanatic Klansmen could have hoped to achieve.