A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you? Sun Ra

this wasn’t exactly practicing dance moves as much as it was learning the different directions my limbs could flail in

there is no church like the church of unchained arms being thrown in every direction in the silence of a sleeping home

there would be no sin greater than the sin of sitting idle while a chance to carve your name into immortality was available.

Desperation is the great equalizer, after all.

After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor?

people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome.

Cornelius had a vision for Black people that was about movement on their own time, for their own purpose, and not in response to what a country might do for, or to, them.

If people could leave the world in the way they gave to the world, I wish for a path to heaven lined with Black people clapping their hands. I wish Don Cornelius at the center, all by himself, showing out with all the moves we knew he was stashing the whole time.

Death simply opening its mouth to a wide yawn and drinking in a life that certainly had more to give.

I think about the small but important distance between gospel as popular music and gospel as a vehicle for salvation: how it is possible to take in the music without much concern for salvation, but still be carried off to a place that feels holy.

Throughout, you are transfixed by Aretha herself, wearing an immovable and immaculate afro like a crown, that tricky and generous light once again dancing on each hair like a concerned parent, keeping it in place.

I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us.

It took white people loving Chappelle’s Show for it to become worth as much as it was to a network, but it took white people laughing too loud and too long—and laughing from the wrong place—to build the show a coffin.

There is a reason the idea of white people bringing up a Black friend when faced with accountability for some small or large racism doesn’t resonate. It’s because the Black friend exists only to give permission, and then absolution. Not that this would offer absolution, but it is never about the framing of a relationship’s interior, or gratitude for having loved and being loved by, paired with grief for whatever trust has been portrayed. It is just the naming of someone who has breezed through a life in some past or current moment.

If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual person. The magical negro is so replaceable that there is nothing left of them to mourn.

The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact.

Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.

No one I love is immune to looking upward on a clear night.

If this conversation were happening elsewhere—behind a screen where I couldn’t see the faces of the people speaking—I might insist, loudly, that there is no such thing as a good president. That this country has been careening toward new hells with each passing year, and all that’s happening now is a slight acceleration.

The all-Black combat divisions were the 92nd, 93rd, and the 369th infantries—the last of which nicknamed themselves the Harlem Hellfighters. These divisions were sent to fight primarily in France, alongside French soldiers. The idea was that the French would be more tolerant and open to fighting alongside the Black soldiers, partially because they were in such desperate need of assistance to hold back overwhelming German assaults deep in the forests of France. Black soldiers fought bravely and were showered with praise by the deeply thankful French nation.

There were concerns about recruiting Baker as a spy, as France was only twenty-two years removed from the execution of the Dutch dancer Mata Hari, who, during World War I, was convicted of working as a double agent for both Germany and France, something that caused the deaths of at least fifty thousand soldiers.

I am not particularly sad, or angry, about incidents like these, but I have been thinking about what it is for a person to shift in worth depending on who might be doing the looking and in what city they are doing the looking.

Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power.

Even if the performances are singular, to push those performances to the forefront prioritizes a cycle that gives value to the roles Black people play when they are a part of work that reframes and recasts racism in service of white comfort.

The Black relatives of Don Shirley had to take a back seat to the coronation of the film’s white creators, one of whom was Nick Vallelonga, the son of Tony Lip.

The thing that drags a listener to the edge of a cliff, holds them over, and asks them to choose what they think is safer: the unknown of floating to the bottom of some endless height, or the known chaos of solid ground. I like my albums to start by asking me what I think I can stand.

When I told people that I’m from Ohio, they wanted to know where my parents are from, or where their parents are from. It is amazing, the weapons people disguise in small talk.

The newest thing that cloaks me in fear is the idea that I’ve become too numb to a world that increasingly demands furious engagement.

There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality.

Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery.

When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.

If I’m being honest with myself, what I like about bands like FUPU, Big Joanie, the Txlips, the Muslims, and others now is that they fly in the face of what my younger self seemed to be asking for on stages.

The punk scene is a soft target, sure. Your scene is too white and will probably stay too white because when the Black kids come to your shows, people make sure to include them in the photos but shove them outta the way once the songs start. Your scene will stay too white because all shows are is a negotiation of space, who deserves it and who doesn’t, and there’s no way you and your crew are gonna make space for people who don’t look like you when most of the room already looks like you.

When Donika won the award for her book, she gave thanks for the fact that she had survived all of the things that have tried to kill her, including herself.

I’m going to be honest about my scorecard and just say that the math on me being here and the people who have kept me here doesn’t add up when weighed against the person I’ve been and the person I can still be sometimes.