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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle.

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.

The history of the line itself was born out of the Stroll, a dance that gained popularity in the late ’50s and extended to the late ’60s. “The Stroll” was a 1958 song by the Diamonds, and it hit big on American Bandstand, where the dance craze gained momentum.

the rest of the way, locking eyes with the camera. I consider, often, the difference between showing off and showing out. How showing off is something you do for the world at large and showing out is something you do strictly for your people.

Every time I take to a dance floor and can’t keep up, I am looking back and praying you all will open up a path with some unbreakable light at the end.

An affection born out of having to make a home out of the confines of dance, or of physically holding up another person.

And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal.

Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted out our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”

Beloveds, I come to you today in a month when I have buried no one! I come to you having buried no one for a whole year, and this is worthy of celebration, too!

I think about the small but important distance between gospel as popular music and gospel as a vehicle for salvation: how it is possible to take in the music without much concern for salvation, but still be carried off to a place that feels holy.

I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us.

Those of us who were Black were mostly there to play sports and pass knowing looks to each other in the cafeteria line or shuffling from one class to the next. Some of us bonded, of course. But it was a bond formed through a need for survival.

I was there during the practice, I was there with the ball on my foot, or when someone needed tape to secure their ankles. But then, just like that, it would be as if the wind kissed me into translucence.

There are many ways to vanish, and there are many ways to reappear somewhere else.

Due in part to America’s comforts with slavery and violence, he stated, there is a universal distrust in anything other than individualism as a pathway to survival in the country. The path to success for the American, he observed, meant to carry a healthy desire to set oneself apart from the ideals of others.

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.

One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.

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

The album’s title, Whitney, is scrawled across the upper left corner of the cover in a font that can best be described as Miami Vice Cursive.

There is truly no person or thing that exits the room in one outfit and returns anew in an entirely different outfit like the butterfly, who first crawls listlessly along the landscape before spinning itself a bed, inside which it can become beautiful. A winged creature, even. What a mercy it must be, to be able to sleep oneself into both beauty and flight. A world that knew you, but then not at all.

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.

In order for her to take on the pop world like no Black woman musician of her era ever had before, she had to be written about in a way that placed her above and outside the narratives of other Black musicians. Consumers know when they aren’t a part of the intended conversation, and they opt in or out, depending on that knowledge.

By that point, some Black radio stations had decided not to play her otherwise all-over-the-place hits, claiming Houston wasn’t “Black enough” for their listeners. The understanding was that if the establishment was choosing to place Houston outside the circle, she could stay outside the circle.

I first learned to code-switch through the musical movements of my people, and done among my people in this way, it didn’t feel like a shameful burden. It felt like a generosity—a celebration of the many modes we could all fit into.

A better and more interesting conversation to have, I think, is the one about how we are all outside the borders of someone else’s idea of what Blackness is. To someone else Black, I am either too much of something or not enough of something else.

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.

Here, without being present in front of a person, it was still assumed that I was not of the land that happened to me. That I had to be returned to somewhere else.

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.

But Meredith Hunter was Black at a festival where not many people in the crowd were Black, and so there was no space in the audience where he could have found some saviors to blend in with. It is the old problem of being invisible until you are the only thing that someone can see.

I am interested most in a reparations that is rooted in the structural: abolition, reformatting and reimagining ways to build a country on something other than violence and power. But if I can’t yet have that, I just need a place to be afraid and comfortable in my fear until I can bury it with another emotion.

Excellence, too, is showing up when it is easier for you not to be present, especially when no one would notice you being gone.

There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

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.

I can’t live as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through the language and see that I was in pain. I am called to remember this today, in this moment where I am still breathing and can deliver the news of my living, which is sometimes good and sometimes not.

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?