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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I am wondering always how one comes to love a country. Depending on who you are, or what your background is, or what trauma(s) you’ve inherited, it seems too complicated to unravel. It was not complicated for me to perform for a while, when I’d convinced myself in my teens and early twenties that my performance of love for a country would open itself up to some kind of safety for me and the people I held close.

To look a familiar place in the eye and detail all of its old and unattractive blemishes—that, too, is a type of love for a place. A love not wedded to permanence or wrapped up in the memory of times past, as so much of my love is foolishly wrapped up in. To return to the site of the world coming into focus for you and offering newer, better eyes.

And of course it bears mentioning that my mere presence in this city—even in the parts of it I’ve long loved—is an act of painting over. Gentrification is undoubtedly a sin that comes with very tangible consequences. I have not loved to watch the way a city shifts at the whims of those with wealth and power. But the corner store I miss wasn’t always a corner store. The basketball courts where I learned to shoot were built upon land that looked different than it did when they were completed. Much of our living is an act of painting over an existence before ours, and my understanding of that doesn’t dim the pain I feel at the new unfamiliarity of spaces I’ve been in.

It is true that to love a place is as complicated as any other relationship, romantic or platonic. Perhaps even more so. A city’s flaws can be endless, and reflect the endless flaws of the people who populate it. To attach identity to love for a place you didn’t ask to be in, and a place that was not ever and will never be “yours,” is a fool’s errand, but it is one I have taken to. Because oh, how I adore knowing the corners of a place. Oh, how I love knowing a story of a building or a park or a church parking lot. A story that only a handful of people know. How I love hearing those stories from other people, from other pockets of this exhausting and dismantling city.

Oh, friends—I most love who you become when there are cards in your hands. How limitless our love for one another can be with our guards down. When the first bit of shit talk rattles the chest and then gives permission for more, and more, and more until the talking of shit, too, is a type of romance. Anyone worthy of being taken down is worthy of hearing all of the ways they are being taken down. I meet my enemies with silence and my friends with a symphony of insults, or jokes that cut just deep enough for people to see them for a short burst of time but not so deep as to leave a scar. Dearest siblings, even in an ass-whupping, there’s no place else I’d rather be.

As I write this, it is almost election time in America again, and politicians are singing the old familiar song: America is better than anything their political enemies do. The separating of children from their families, the waves of drone strikes, the very violence beckoned by the presence of borders, any casualty that is the logical conclusion of the relentless desire to expand an empire. America is better than all of it, we’re told. America, of course, is not better than this. When the entire architecture of a land is built on a chorus of violences, it takes an unnatural amount of work to undo every lineage of harm and then honor the harmed parties with anything resembling equity. Some of the first steps in that direction almost certainly rely on an honest assessment of not only the history, but the ways that history has generational impact.

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. There are people who talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., as if he lived a long and healthy life and then chose to die peacefully at the end of it. There are those who treat the political landscape as if it has only local ramifications rather than the global ones it has had for the majority of my lifetime. The very concept of “choosing love” is privilege, based on an ability to have the idea that there are only two options: love and hate, as Radio Raheem had emblazoned in gold across his knuckles in Spike’s Do the Right Thing. But the very concept resting at the heart of Do the Right Thing is that all this love ain’t created equally. The love I have to give is malleable, but it has its limits. All of our love has its limits, and it should. I choose to love my people, and their people. And sometimes I might also choose love with your people. But other times, I choose whatever keeps me safe, and that isn’t necessarily hate, but it might be if it gives me a comfortable enough distance.

And since we are talking about movies, after all: the whole thing I’m kicking around here is how movies have been so relentless in their quest to sanitize race relations in America that it has almost become its own genre entirely. Period pieces, usually. Some story about a time when violent racism was permeating every corner of a community, except for the one where a Black person and a white person learned to get along by toppling the odds and seeing the shared humanity in each other after being forced to share proximity because of work or love or an altogether accident. These movies don’t really work to deconstruct the design of racial superiority, or how a country arrived at the point it arrived at. They’re films that start a few inches away from a perceived finish line and then spend two hours slowly crawling across it before throwing up hands while the waves of applause rain down from the sky.

Green Book won a whole lotta awards too. And, like clockwork, people wrote about how the movie winning awards was a signifier for what was possible if America could just piece together some kind of bridge for its tricky and persistent divisions. Whenever these films triumph, the bill of goods that gets sold is that the country triumphs. It isn’t that America loves films like these because they think the films themselves will fix racism. It seems, instead, that there is a love for these films because they make Americans believe that racism being fixed is something that can happen with a journey through some idyllic half-retelling of history. That it is a matter of proximity, or the shared need to solve some problem on the periphery of racism. 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. But that doesn’t make for as much of an interesting film as having a white person joke with a Black person about chicken.

And there are Black actors often at the center of these movies, many of them showered with awards and nominations, along with the films themselves. There’s a tricky negotiation here, I imagine. The recognition Black actors receive from the public after these performances goes a long way in validating not only the actors themselves, but also the film. 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 awards, the notoriety, it all aims to soften the landing. History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.

Of the many things America loves to pat itself on the back about, one of the things is an obsession with exploration, or the desire to seek places beyond the places you are from or the places you have been. It is one of the many parts in the overwhelming collage of American Freedom that Americans are told was fought for and won. The Green Book is fascinating as a not-so-distant relic because it pushes back against that particular American notion. For whom is exploration treacherous? When is it a good idea to maybe not venture out into the vast unknown, and what is the return on the investment of curiosity?

To shout “Black women are going to save us all!” might feel good to type out to send in a tweet, but it reads as less good when one stops to consider that Black people—specifically Black women in this case—are not here in this country as vessels to drag it closer to some moral competence. The American obsession with immorality and a willingness to push its hardest labor off on its most marginalized is integral to the Black American experience, and so it occurred to me that maybe Black women were simply attempting to save themselves. That many Black people in the country have to go to jobs they don’t love, or deal with waves of microaggressions at work or at the coffee shop or at the gym, and still know that voting won’t save or stop any of this but did it anyway because the bet was already bad but the dealer had the cards in his hand to make it worse, and so many of us knew it.

And I know, I know I said that clocking in to a job or casting a vote isn’t the same as performing at the Super Bowl or opening a school in the name of Black Liberation or the messaging of laying one’s body against a police car, slowly vanishing into dark water at the end of an expensive music video. 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.

Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

At the end of the night, I hug my boys and tell them I love them. The words come out easy and the hugs linger with the knowledge of not knowing when the next hug will be given. We punch each other’s chests after hugs, lightly, before getting into our separate cabs or cars and speeding off toward a few hours of sleep before our separate airport trips. From the back of my car, underneath waves of glowing neon lights flooding into the windows, I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.

And so I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.

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

I am called to remember all of this when I think of how my brother knocked and did not leave, knowing that I was sitting on the floor, holding the doorknob with a trembling hand and refusing to turn it. I am called to remember how, when I finally did turn it, there was my brother, who did not bother to ask whether or not I was doing all right. Who knew only that he couldn’t get hold of me in a week where things went bad, and I mean the kind of bad that feels insurmountable. And I remember, most of all, how my brother—larger than me in every way—held me while I cried in his arms and did not speak at all, not even to reassure me that things were going to be fine. Rather, in silence, to help me understand that things were not fine, but this was him, dragging me back from the brink. Holding me until the ledge became solid ground again.

But isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t? The possibilities for my exits have been endless, and so the gratitude for my staying must be equally endless.