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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

A 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.

I’d carved both of our names into one, a fool for the romantics of permanence. On the day I found the bird it was in the

Every movement around death I’d come to understand in my youth told me that the acknowledgment of it needed to be somber and silent. Something one moves through with decorum and then never looks back on again. A funeral was a task, not something to make a memory of. 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. To offer gratitude for the fullness of whatever years someone chose to have their life intersect with your own.

This is how one should be laid to rest, I thought. Loud, and with memories of their voice making the sky tremble.

There is the putting down of the metaphorical corpse, and then there is the carrying of the physical, but the hesitation to part with both comes from a similar 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.

I like this idea—that it’s noble for Black people to react viscerally to work that is created for us, and to respond in a language we know well. There is something valuable about wanting the small world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return.

Or the commitment to killing off your whole self so that another version of you can live for an audience’s approval. Until people don’t think of the physics of it all. Until the people who have been aching for a vision see only that vision and nothing else. You know that trick. I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times.

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.

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.

Consume what you can never become, and then kill it before it continues to remind you.

Ones that demand witnessing, and not participation. Tell that to the world. There is some movement too golden, too precious to be interrupted.

The thing I find myself explaining most vigorously to people these days is that consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.

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

I am maybe not the best spades player in the world because I am the youngest of four, which (in my case) means that I cannot conceal the excitement that comes with having some small bit of power over an outcome. I cannot conceal the joy of anticipation that comes with wanting to open my palms, draw someone close, and show them something I believe to be miraculous.

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.

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.

It is that in the moments in between, he likely led a life that was very normal. And that is spectacular too.

Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see.

In the moments after these shootings, when Black people say, “I am afraid the country is trying to kill me,” a rebuttal from people without this particular fear is often rooted in what the country has given, and not what it can take away without consequence.

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.

But it turns out I’m not the fighter I once was, and I was never much of a fighter in the first place. It turns out all of my fears have become immovable.

I am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. I am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. I am in love today but am afraid that I might not be tomorrow. And that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse. People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty.

I found myself trying to fill the space of violence born out of discord. I didn’t particularly understand the calm of harmony that blanketed the oldest relationship I knew, and so I found chaos elsewhere.

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.

But another thing I learned long ago is that scenes benefit from the appearance of diversity, because that appearance gives them a space to not change any actual behavior on the interior of the scene.

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

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. 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.