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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Americans love to say that things that are distinctly American are not American at all. You get what I mean, or if you don’t, wait until the next time someone commits a hate crime or shouts out something racist or otherwise phobic during a TV interview or on a press tour for an album or a movie. Within cycles of frustration or outright rage or comedic coping, there is inevitably a person or set of people who come out and decry the original sin with some boilerplate language about unity and choosing love over hate. These messages are oftentimes punctuated with some version of the same sentiment: This is not who or what America is. 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.