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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.

It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.

It dawns on me now that the funeral—particularly the Black funeral—is a way to celebrate what a person’s life meant and to do it as if they’re still here.

There is no trick to this, no deception. It is continuing in the tradition of Black Americans attempting to protect and enlarge their own narratives. A tradition that has been present since being forced into America, knowing that there were stories and history and lives to be honored beyond this place.

The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.

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 conversation about Black art and Black audiences is often flattened, in part because it is hard for a people to articulate what they know they know. A people who are surely not a monolith, but are also not fools. Yes, Blackness is vast and varied, and there is no singular Black experience. But there are certainly Black people who know when they aren’t being spoken to by a marketing campaign for a person who looks like them.

But if Blackness and the varied performance of it are to be embraced, then what also has to be embraced is the flawed fluidity of it. How the performance is sometimes regional, sometimes ancestral, often partially forged out of a need to survive some place, or some history, or some other people who didn’t wish you or your kinfolk well. And yes, sometimes forged out of an ambition to appeal to the limited imagination of whiteness. The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world. There is not always a way to prove (and possibly no way to trace) the how and why of your personal performance, until it becomes calculated. And in trying, high-profile figures often spiral further into being scrutinized by their doubters.

Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when those settings are rooted in the past,

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.

To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future.

But the idea of this Black Excellence that I keep returning to is what a person does when faced with these alternatives. What better living is seen beyond the living currently constructed. Beyond the job, or beyond the emails, or beyond the days where some of us must take walks to shake off the hovering specter of fear, or beyond the videos of how quickly a life can be swept away, or beyond a voting system that fails everyone underneath it, but some of us more than others.

Blackness, or a proximity to Blackness, is America’s favorite balm for a painful conscience.