Michael Eric Dyson (14 page)

To be sure, strong traditions of black conservative morality make it hard to write the black elite off as mere tokens of white consciousness or pawns of white control. But there was a measure of ethical substitution involved, as the ideals of white society were part of a reverse invasion of black life: Having endured the occupation of blacks in significant, though largely destitute, social spaces, white authority struck back with a black hand. Every time the black aristocratic finger pointed at poor black folk’s pathology, four more fingers of white moral unease folded into its palm. There is little doubt that Afristocrats were mercilessly prodded into their reactionary pose by white society, and that they were themselves the subject of extraordinary scrutiny. But it must be acknowledged that in the black elite’s strained relations with poorer blacks, white supremacy got two for the price of one. The overly watched black aristocracy over-watched the black poor, themselves already fixed by a damning white gaze in the optics of racial paranoia. No matter how each clothed itself, whether in elegant concession to white culture or in extravagant
resistance, black aristocrats and the black poor were stitched together in the fabric of white rejection.

Up north, the black poor and struggling weren’t interested in performing deference to whites in public with demeaning rituals like those practiced by their southern kin. There would be little hat holding, eye averting or brim tipping to accommodate white authority. Instead, blacks on northern streets riotously explored jubilant performance through fashion, song and recreation, wringing as much joy as possible from a harsh existence of constant toil and meager wages. The black elite were frightened and enraged by the refusals of the black poor to color their lives with white values and black bourgeois demands. The black aristocracy used newspapers and pulpits to whip the black poor into order, to shame them, if they could, into acting right, which often meant acting white.
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Not only did black aristocrats fear that jubilant performance would be seen as too aggressive, but they felt that poor and struggling blacks confirmed every stereotype of uncouth behavior. The conflicts among blacks of different classes were nearly as bruising as those between the races, blasting the delusion that, before segregation’s demise, black folk of every station were knit together in harmony.

There was great harmony, and melody, too, in the triumphant musical notes that black folk blew into the midst of their struggles. Besides relief from doldrums and despair, black musicians supplied an example of what could happen when black expression was unfettered by self-doubt or cultural sneering. To be sure, there were many cultured despisers of popular black art, especially jazz, on both sides of the racial
divide, but black musicians outlasted and outplayed their opposition with their colossal gifts. They performed a vision of excellence in which their people took enormous pride. Their talent often extended to elegant and stylish dress as well, and in the 1920s, as now, black musicians were “arbiters of fashion, as well as its avant garde.”
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Their styles ranged from the formal, well-coiffed elegance of Earl Hines, decked out in tuxedo and Chesterfield overcoat, to the sharp-as-blades sartorial extravagance of Cab Calloway’s colorful zoot suits. Black musicians often blended aristocratic bearing with jubilant performance in elevating the illicit meanings of the streets (one thinks of the zoot suit’s political meanings of resistance to white fashion and values and how its literally outlawed extravagance came into play in prestigious artistic circles and beyond).
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In the art and clothing of these musicians, black urban culture marked the cultural landscape in unforgettable fashion.

Today, the relation between the streets and art holds steady. Developments in black life, technology and race relations over the last few decades have only increased the influence of black urban culture in the nation. Black artists still shape the world’s perception of black street culture, except now, instead of jazz, they draw from the bravado and flourish of rap music. Rarely has a secular black culture as proudly, and defiantly, embraced the extravagant excesses and exaggerated poses of poor black identity as they do hip-hop. Even more than their predecessors, hip-hop artists play a critical role in circulating the meanings and messages of urban black culture. Hip-hop stars and impresarios like Sean “P. Diddy” Combs
(Sean John), Jay-Z (Rocawear) and Russell Simmons (Phat Farm) have branded their products—compact discs, films and especially fashion lines—across a number of media, proving that black urban styles have global reach in the international marketplace. Like all youth subcultures, black urban youth shape their identities through style and appearance.
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Black youth both embrace and resist the mainstream in finding their place in the aesthetic ecology, the living environment of style and image that thrives on organic forms of self-presentation. The working class, in particular, became a locus of youth rebellion against social convention; their clothing expressed outrage, alienation and distrust of the sartorial and moral standards of adult society. Moreover, by selecting clothes whose style was associated with lower and working classes, youth were able to express antiestablishment attitudes through “garments that are unclean, unkempt and disordered.”
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Black youth explore their cultural roots through clothing because they have “a much greater awareness of fashion and being in style” than their white peers.
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Black male youth also define their masculinity through their clothes more readily than do white male adolescents.
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This may have something to do with the social stigma black youth still suffer. Like their forebears in city streets, black youth embody jubilant performance. They experiment with styles, and transform their identities, in a culture still skeptical about their aims and skills, except where playing fields and entertainment arenas are concerned. When black urban youth style their bodies, they do so within the limited social choices they face. Fashion is a default mechanism of self-expression—and social
control. The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies as battlefields of fierce moral contest.

Fashion is one of the truly democratic options of self-expression left to urban black youth; while they may be as tyrannized as the rest of us by name brands and exorbitant prices, they are neither passive victims of style nor its oblivious dupes. As consumers with limited options but sometimes expensive tastes, black urban youth style their identities by shifting emphasis away from individual, and original, items—a Versace dress, Gucci shoes—to a style that incorporates knock-offs of those items in its eclectic street repertoire. By making a virtue (a style trend of ghetto extravagance) out of necessity (little money and less credit), black youth discovered “ghetto chic” and “ghetto couture.” Poor black youth transformed the market from their positions as imaginative, if restricted, consumers, igniting a widespread trend of “individual customization. Tailors . . . took the most expensive and conservative designs of coveted labels and added an extra twist of ‘street flavor.’”
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Of course, neither ghetto chic nor the black youth who created it are exempt from the same sort of disdain and embarrassment that dogged the styles of their urban forebears a century earlier. Hip-hop has been accused, rightly so, of misogynistic lyrics, though other sectors of the culture that purvey patriarchy’s poisons are spared such relentless condemnations as hip-hop has garnered. Hip-hop culture has also been blamed for giddily embracing consumerism, a
charge that is true, again, but even truer of whiter and richer segments of the culture. Similar to the Air Jordan myth discussed in Chapter 2, the perception of black youth consumption is often blown way out of proportion to its actual occurrence. And of course hip-hop has been nailed for casting glamour on thuggish behavior and for heartlessly painting violent portraits of urban life. It’s all true, but still, the whole truth of hip-hop isn’t contained in these charges of moral corruption and, nearly as often, racial betrayal. The sheer vitality of hip-hop as art form and, because of the generational lag, as agitator of adults, must not be overlooked. Many black elders claim that hip-hop is all macho posturing and stylish bluster in the service of social pathology.

But it is not
merely
posing, and the ethically questionable gesture, that form the culture’s base of appeal: At its best, hip-hop summons the richest response in the younger generation to questions of identity and suffering. They may not be as elegantly crafted as were the urban horrors depicted by Wright or Baldwin—after all, we are speaking of different genres, and different modes of intelligence, literate versus postliterate, that is, if the word is narrowly defined and selectively applied—but Scarface and Nas, and, before them, Tupac and Notorious B.I.G., have sketched characterizations of black male angst and moral striving as haunting and beautiful as anything we’re likely to read from social critics of the black ghetto. We need not romanticize these pavement poets to appreciate their art. Neither can we deny that the furious resentment that hip-hop evokes—which, curiously enough, often overlooks battles within hip-hop about its future and
direction and about whether it has sold its soul to the devil while claiming to lead youth to the Promised Land—is still largely a matter of bourgeois disgust for the economically humbled.

Street fashion is once again at the heart of the war against the urban black poor. Black adults, including Afristocrats like Cosby, have been engulfed in moral panic over baggy pants that sag almost beneath the behind. For these folk, baggy pants express a conscious, or, perhaps worse yet, unconscious, desire to return to the scene of their stylistic origin: the prison. It is true that baggy pants, which often hang on the hips low enough to reveal the color of one’s undergarments, are adapted from prisons. Inmates had to discard belts from pants so they wouldn’t harm themselves or others by turning leather or buckles into weapons. The style was popularized by California gangs in the ’90s. (In the NBA, no less a luminary than Michael Jordan was the first to wear baggy shorts, the sure sign to purists that basketball, too, had become a sport of thugs with tattoos and cornrows.) Some black adults think that black youth are heading for moral suicide when they align themselves with a prison subculture that praises and practices death.

There is no denying that black youth are in deep trouble. The aesthetic ecology in which they are nurtured surely contains poisonous weeds and quicksand, glimpsed in sexist tirades on wax and the hunger to make violence erotic. Alarmist narratives also mirror the worries over working and struggling urban bodies throughout the twentieth century. The extravagant stroll down the street has been supplanted
by the gang cruise, the low-riding ESE or the corner-hugging homeboy, whether that corner is for consumption (the mall), creativity (the recording studio) or carnage (the drug den). It is easy to understand why in many instances baggy pants might be fearsome. (Of course, in thousands of crime reports from the media and police, the suspect is often described as wearing such gear.) If this style of dress emerged on streets where black and brown male youth played or preyed, it may be that they decided to adorn their bodies in the styles forced on the men they love, family and friend alike, who have gone to jail or prison. This may be understood as
sympathy dress,
fashion that draws from the overidentification of black and brown youth with their terrorized, or terrorizing, kin, who may have been caught up in bloody urban dramas. Just as one shaves his head because he identifies with a loved one who loses her hair when afflicted by disease, youth may adopt the clothing and style of those who are critical to their survival. It’s a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from its demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom to walk on streets from which it has been removed.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too literal, either; if that was the origin of the baggy aesthetic, it need not be its exclusive, or by now even its primary, frame of reference. Most youth who wear baggy pants and oversize shirts are probably not even aware of their origins, and when they find out are not likely to give up the fashion because its beginnings don’t determine their uses of the style. Many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel they are already in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream and by their dismissive,
demeaning elders. The baggy pants style may symbolize, consciously or not, their restricted mobility in the culture. Baggy pants, and oversize clothing in general, may also cover black bodies subject to unhealthy surveillance. Maybe black youth who can’t hide in their skin are forced to hide in their clothes. The more they are swallowed up in a sea of denim or cotton, the less likely they are to drown in naked scrutiny of vulnerable limbs. And while the clothes also mark them for suspicion of crime, they no doubt recognize that they are already marked by color and class and age. Why Cosby and more elders don’t get this is regrettable and sad. Some argue that Cosby’s assault on the bodies and names of our youth is a sign of love. If it is, it is a callous and derisive love.

One supposes the same love shows in Cosby’s sarcastic slap at the body modifications of black females. The piercing of ears, noses, tongues, eyebrows and navels (and, less noticeably in public, the labia and nipples) sends Cosby into spasms of disgust. Despite what Cosby implies, many young people do modify their bodies with Africa, and other ancient civilizations, in view. Many non-Western cultures practiced the art of changing the body through extravagant self-styling. As is true with fashion, body modifications—both the temporary sort, including facial makeup, hair removal, coloring of teeth and body painting, and the permanent kind, such as stretching the neck with rings and cosmetic surgery—suggest that the body is both a signifying battlefield and an “unfinished project.”
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The modified body, to a degree, challenges Western myths of beauty and self-image. Body modifications that borrow from ancient cultures get under the skin of civilized
body ideals: that the body should be ordered and controlled; that the skin should be free of foreign agents, an ideal that discourages tattooing and body piercing; that the body should never be deliberately marked by signs of trauma, a move against acts of scarification; and that the body should be subject to ideals of public presentation that embody restraint and modesty.