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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

A country is something that happens to you.

History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage. Someone finds a place where they think themselves meant to be, and they stop moving.

There are streets named after Black people situated throughout America’s cities. Most of the times, the Black people are dead. Sometimes the street bearing the dead Black person’s name doesn’t have many living Black people on it. And yes, it is so often Martin Luther King, Jr.’s name painted on a green sign in a city far from where he lived and far from where he was murdered.

Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May 1917, requiring all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft, regardless of race. Young Black men signed up in droves, assuming that if they showed a willingness to fight and die for their country, their country might just love them back.

But for a majority of other Black soldiers, they were simply relegated to menial and often isolating roles: as gravediggers, cooks, mechanics. Pushed to places where they could play a part in keeping the machinery of war going but still be out of the way, barely visible beyond the loud and trembling landscapes of war.

Even after many of the Black soldiers went home to America, back to a country where they were not the heroes they were in France. Back to a country where they quickly remembered that being willing to bleed for a land doesn’t mean the people of that land will require or desire your presence outside of that willingness.

Paris became obsessed with American Black artistic culture, right as the Harlem Renaissance started to kick off in the States. Parisians were mimicking American Black culture, but also, after World War I, word got back to the States that Paris was a place where Black folks were treated well. Because the Black soldiers who fought in Paris were deemed heroes, the city revered its visiting Black artists as well. Black jazz musicians who couldn’t play in all parts of America traveled to Paris to do a stretch of shows.

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.

You are burdened with a place, and then, by the time you realize that exit is a possibility, the options for exit can seem distant, or insurmountable. I love Columbus, Ohio, and wince when I speak the name into the air.

Remember: Paris had saturated itself with ideas of Black art, Black minds, but not many actual Black people. For as liberal as the city was, there were still some who thought Black people were, by nature, primitive beings.

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.

Another side of this was brought out nearly twenty years later, during the Vietnam War. American troops believed that the Vietnamese feared the symbolism of the spade, that they thought it signaled death and ill fortune. So the military had the United States Playing Card Company send them crates of just aces of spades and nothing else, so that soldiers could scatter them throughout the jungles and villages of Vietnam before and after raids. The dead bodies of Vietnamese were covered in aces of spades. Lands—entire fields pillaged and burned down to the dirt—were littered with the card. Power, as always, misused in the wrong hands.

by the start of the ’50s, Shirley came to the realization that there might be a lack of upward mobility for Black musicians with a deep investment in classical music (stick to jazz, he was told), and so he went off to study psychology at the University of Chicago, and then he worked in the city as a psychologist.

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.

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.

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...

movies have been so relentless in their quest to sanitize race relations in America that it has almost become its own genre entirely.

The Help is sort of like white savior Inception, as it is a story written by a white woman about Black workers telling their story to a white woman writer, who sells the book containing the stories to great success.

racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power.

The Green Book was about a communal passing of information to shepherd people to safety through autonomy, not about the watching over of a Black person by a white person in the role of savior. The Green Book was compiled with sometimes hollow hope, but an understanding that no one could save the Black people reading it from the world outside.

I would like roses to come out of the ground somewhere any time a person’s voice cracks under the weight of what it has been asked to carry.

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

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.

it is true that I arrived here and asked to be made into a new image & what is that if not an act of love

It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad.

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.

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. 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.

My loves, I want to know if heaven is real only if you are promised to be in it. I do not fear death as much as I fear the uncertain dark.

I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing.