Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother

Introduction

There’s a sullen and brooding six foot two, 240-pound presence in my parents’ house, and his shadow looms large over the otherwise placid nest. The presence is among the most timeless of American bogeymen—a black male in a state of rapid physical maturation. My folks regard the presence in a fashion that is heritage in their country of origin, which is to say, the presence is making them nervous. Having already reared three boys and one girl to satisfactory adulthood, my folks fancy their home as a factory of black excellence, and the lone remaining straggler on their well-trodden conveyor belt defies the troubleshooting best practices they’ve developed over thirty-four years on the job. My youngest brother, Gyasi, is a capable but disinterested student. Where other teenage boys chase girls and alcohol, Gyasi predominantly lurks indoors like some Wi-Fi–empowered Boo Radley. His communication with my parents is minimal, and when he does deign to acknowledge them, he alternates between withering sarcasm and charged silence. Gyasi teases my parents with glimpses of his intellectual and artistic potential but is recalcitrant when pushed to put his talents to use. Fourteen years apart in age, he and I are respectively the second- and fifth-born children of five and have always enjoyed a strong rapport, but even I have been of marginal help in allaying his malaise.

The familiar chorus of my mother’s vexation is I’m worried he’ll be living in my house until he’s forty. In fairness, it was not long ago that my mother fretted over a similar prognosis about me. I, too, was an academically withdrawn malcontent with an allergy to authority. My angst was both formless and easy to explain. I don’t presume that Gyasi and I are exactly the same per se, but I can imagine he might be suffering from a crisis similar to the one that afflicted me as a teenager: an inability to envision a future in which a person such as he can fit comfortably into a ruthlessly competitive, anti-intellectual, anti-black society.

He could not be blamed for sensing the jarring discontinuity between the climate beyond his front door and the one in which he has been carefully incubated. Our father is an author and writing professor and our mother is a playwright, actor, and homemaker. Being raised by artists has not only shaped my and Gyasi’s aesthetic leanings but also framed our perceptions of the American story. Our parents, both products of inner-city St. Louis, dropped out of Northwestern University in the late 1980s to return to the ghetto to raise my eldest brother and me. When not evading gunfire, Mom and Baba wrote and produced plays, organized poetry readings, and published literary magazines with their young sons playing at their feet. Our household was a fecund micro-bohemia situated incongruously within a warzone. As my parents’ creative triumphs accumulated, our circumstances improved enough to move to the comparatively posh suburbs of Silver Spring, Maryland. Gyasi was born there. He’s in some ways a beneficiary of a middle-class upbringing but is acutely aware of the Herculean feats it took for our family to produce such an environment and the precarity of sustaining it. After the economic downturn of the late aughts, our family relocated from Silver Spring to urban Baltimore. Gyasi briefly attended a public elementary school there until my parents grew so frustrated with the threadbare curriculum that they pulled him out in favor of homeschooling.

For the Asim children, living at the mercy of the economic peaks and valleys of my folks’ artistic lives yielded a kaleidoscopic view of excess and indigence, oppression and opportunity. As a result, a grasp of heterogeneity is seared into all of our makeups. Gyasi and I, especially, are native dwellers of liminal space, and our experiences have often involved the exposure of unlikely confluences between distinct traditions, cultures, or ideologies.

My youngest brother and I lean on each other as intellectual sparring partners, creative collaborators, and confidants. We can’t really afford not to. We’re a generation apart but identify more with one another than anyone in either of our respective peer groups. The Asims are not unlike a twenty-first-century edition of J. D. Salinger’s Glass family. Like the clan that starred in Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, we’re a close-knit but contentious family of bookish eccentrics struggling to reconcile our bohemian sensibilities with the prevailing norms of our era. My mother’s unease about Gyasi’s prospects for assimilation recalls Bessie Glass’s concern for her youngest daughter in Franny and Zooey. When I reflected on Gyasi’s coming of age, I thought of the Glasses’ parallels and noted how the critical intervention of Franny’s like-minded older brothers helps Franny to recover from an existential breakdown. In the book’s conclusion, Zooey comforts Franny by explaining that even if no one around her appreciates her attempts to defy the insensitivity and superficiality of 1950s Connecticut, Jesus notices, and she must continue to lead a virtuous life to maintain the smile on His holy countenance.

Cue record scratch. That’s not the kind of sentiment likely to galvanize my stringently empiricist baby brother. So what might our own version of the game-changing sibling-to-sibling pep talk look like? Even our parents seem to underestimate the vastness of the chasm between the value system of the house we grew up in and the broader culture in which we reside. Navigating that divide is no small task, but punk rock has been my unlikely lodestar.

I am not compiling a mixtape for the sake of indoctrinating my brother, of turning him into my mohawked spitting image. I’m making the mixtape because punk is fun, because a robust engagement with counterculture can serve as a vital antidote to soul-sucking normalcy, because remembering that you have predecessors who wrestled with many of the same riddles that you may wrestle with can help you feel that a roadmap to self-actualization exists. The result is part Nick Hornsby, part Ntozake Shange: my All-Time, Top-10 Angst-Neutralizing Punk Songs Because the Rainbow Clearly Isn’t Enuf, Bruh.

Africa Has No History

An Annotation of Anti-Flag’s A Start

Subject: The History of White People

Africa is not an historical continent; it shows neither change nor development, and whatever may have happened there belongs to the world of Asia and of Europe. . . . Nothing remotely human is to be found in the African character . . . their condition is capable of neither development nor education. As we see them today so they have always been.

—GEORG WILHELM HEGEL,

German philosopher, 1854¹

At present there is no African history: there is only history of the Europeans in Africa, the rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not a subject of history. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.

—HUGH TREVOR-ROPER,

British historian, 1961²

Africa has no history.

—JOHN KING,

sixth-grade history and English teacher, 2012

As Joan Didion famously observed, we tell ourselves stories in order to survive. The plausible corollary to this assertion is less often entertained: some especially durable fictions are designed to protect the prosperity, security, and psychic peace of some members of our civilization at the direct expense of others. Public high schools are a primary means by which such tall tales are transmitted. I got the above email from you on December 10, 2015. I was familiar with the last quote already, as you’d shared it with me a few years before. It was your instructor’s curt reply when you had asked why your class had sections on Asian and European history, but nothing devoted to the continent your ancestors hailed from. Your inclination to constellate these quotes confirmed what I’d suspected all along—that some part of your underwhelming academic performance came down to a principled distrust of received wisdom. Where our mother, the Black Momba, might look at your middling freshman year report card and declare it trifling, I’m tempted to call it discerning. One factor that is always either overlooked or obscured in all interpretations of the low academic performance of Negro pupils, Albert Murray writes, is the possibility of their resistance to the self-same white norms that they are being rated by.³ Like Murray’s intransigent rather than incapable Negro pupil, it was becoming increasingly clear to you that these slanted readings of history underwrote a distorted four-hundred-year-old reputation. I know what it is to experience public school as the crucible by which we forge a bleak status quo. Why open your mouth and say ahhh when the story at the end of the airplane spoon is tailored to ensure the survival of its authors while streamlining your own annihilation?

The ham-fisted excision of African history in your schooling doubles down on an identity vacuum that you are already fated to contend with. To haunt the halls of a high school as a black teenager is to be perceived as someone who is both dangerous and endangered. In the eyes of even your more generous stewards, your identity makes you a person uniquely vulnerable to threat and an embodiment of it.

A 2015 New York Times analysis of census data determined that for every one hundred unincarcerated black women aged twenty-five to fifty-four, there are only eighty-three black men between those same ages. The Times study casts those seventeen absent men, who for the most part are either incarcerated or casualties of violence, as missing. This disparity is both raced and gendered, as the study found that only one white man was missing for every hundred white women. Of the 1.5 million black men missing from daily life, more than one out of every six are in jail.⁴

My suspicion is that adults who are even dimly aware of this sociological context see you as facing a problem so massive that you must, in some way, be complicit in it. If you are the same race and gender as these spectral figures, then surely you share other unseemly qualities with them that portend incarceration and untimely death. In his essay collection The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem addresses what he calls the crisis of being so fraught with peremptory feelings in approaching a thing—a book, a movie, another person—that the thing itself is hardly encountered.⁵ You don’t need me to tell you that that crisis afflicts people like your sixth-grade history teacher. It may be only beginning to dawn on you, however, how often you will be the thing hardly encountered.

Black personhood remains a condition of unbecoming synecdoche. I say personhood rather than manhood because although gender shapes how we experience this substitution of the part for the whole, no black person is exempt. A black person is less often received as a singular being of unique dignity and value than a shadowy composite of vices and deficiencies.

I emphasize unbecoming because we aren’t all getting a bounce in the polls from Barack Obama’s or LeBron James’s exploits, but we incur demerits per the alleged misdeeds of black people we’ll never meet. The symbolism of that AWOL 1.5 million men overshadows you without being a physical presence. Those missing brothers lost to violence or incarceration take up more psychic capital in the social imaginary than people like you and me, people who have not disappeared, people in the flesh before their very eyes and actively pursuing full, vibrant lives.

For these reasons, your email was a non sequitur and yet right on time. You were fourteen years old. Aw, look at my baby brother shrewdly identifying Hegel, Trevor-Roper, and his sixth-grade teacher as links in a chain that binds him and me and others like us to the mirage of black pathology, I’d thought sardonically. They grow up so fast!

That kind of critical engagement with received wisdom is not only legible to me as resistance. It is the essential ingredient in the mortar with which I’ve built a self.

The power of the stories others tell about us to survive is not unlimited. If dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows what the reader doesn’t know, then post-conventional identity occurs when a character knows what a story’s omniscient narrator does not. Post-conventional identity is what I see as a kind of practical triangulation between Charles Cooley’s looking-glass self, Lawrence Kohlberg’s post-conventional morality, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness.

Cooley tells us we develop self-perceptions based on how others see us. How we are treated becomes the measure of who we are. Via his own coinage of double consciousness, Du Bois points out that this method of identity formation is treacherous for subordinate groups because our social interactions are more like fun house mirrors. To be black is to be privy to largely unreliable indicia of who you are.

I’ve come to think of identity the way Kohlberg writes about morality. He conceived of morality as something that exists in three stages: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Children nine years old and younger occupy the pre-conventional stage, during which morality is shaped largely by the punishments and rewards doled out by adults. Most teenagers and adults, on the other hand, are in the conventional stage, where they absorb normative values without much reflection or examination. That’s the phase I would liken to Cooley’s looking-glass self—passive acceptance of society’s judgments. Kohlberg’s third stage of morality is the one with the fewest adherents. Most people never reach it. Those who do attain the post-conventional stage choose their own principles and think through moral views for themselves.

To be to the point, Gyasi, I began to transpose Kohlberg’s third stage to the question of identity as a matter of schoolyard necessity. A lifetime of being called oreo and white boy by people of all races demanded a consolidation of my blackness at a tender age. To view one’s racial identity as beholden to a specific set of aesthetic tastes seemed a tacit concession to some of racism’s most pernicious fictions. If racism is a force that organizes not just economic and political realities but social ones, it follows that the prevailing understanding of black identity might not be the one that best serves the pursuit of a fulfilling life.

It is, of course, adaptive to internalize what the mass cultural looking glass tells you about blackness. Survival necessitates some awareness of the four-hundred-year-old reputation that precedes you. But post-conventional identity provides a kind of metaphysical sustenance no less important: a vision of the self that is not self-evident.

When I think about the genesis of my personal investment in post-conventional identity, I think about an inside joke I had with myself in high school. By senior year, I still had yet to earn a driver’s license and the void in my Dickies wallet irked me. So I filled the space where a license might go with a self-styled form of identification. I carried around a three-by-five index card on which I had scrawled with a black Sharpie,

*Card-carrying member of the radical punk rock intelligentsia*

The kernel of this joke was convoluted, but I figure it tickled my teenage funny bone for some combination of the following reasons:

1.   As the unrepentant owner of a 2.2 cumulative GPA, I had no objective basis to count myself among any intelligentsia.

2.   I earnestly felt that the card offered a concise articulation of my aesthetic and ideological leanings, but I didn’t actually think that a radical punk rock intelligentsia was something anyone recognized. Certainly no one who I knew associated fast, aggressive mosh music with intellectualism. What was more, business cards—even homespun ones—are flagrantly unpunk.

3.   I wanted to skewer the idea that an institution could tell you what you are. If the vague invocation of something official or certified cemented the reality of a given assertion, truth was up for grabs.

4.   The index card was a means of wryly affirming things about myself that, according to an all too pervasive view, belied my physical appearance. Right, right, I get it—black people aren’t rockers or thinkers, but look what it says on this card! Booya.

The membership card was a miniature subversion of the master narrative, one I could periodically take out of my pocket and stare at, laugh darkly at, and then carry on with my day. The joke was in keeping with my ongoing incredulity toward the notion of reality as something ratified by popular vote. My email sign-off at the time was the Allen Ginsberg credo death to van Gogh’s ear. The phrase is both the name of a Ginsberg poem and a mantra that he and his various Beat associates embraced. As the Beats see it, van Gogh’s ear is the symbol of the artist as pitiable lunatic. Proclaiming its death is a way of celebrating the artist as visionary, as possessor of insight so keen as to be confused for madness. All of this laid the groundwork for my conception of post-conventional identity. It also made me a major pain in the ass to have in class.

Ms. Thompson was the sort of jubilantly eccentric English teacher who might intervene in the life of a wayward protagonist in a coming-of-age novel. We may have each intuited the other’s coherence with these respective archetypal roles, but I wasn’t looking for the kind of salvation she was eager to provide. Prior to enrolling in her AP Literature course in my senior year, I had wandered into a film studies elective she taught and discovered a kindred spirit. Ms. Thompson had been impressed by my voracious interest in the Beat Generation. She even charitably praised my high school band’s (s)crappy performance at the homecoming pep rally junior year. I admired her as well, as much for her ability to quote Keats from memory as for the quirky, thrift-store chic ensembles she wore to class every day.

The first week of my senior year, I’d bought a bag of apples and handed one out to each of my teachers. Most of them had received the fruit with appreciative smiles, a blip of bewilderment briefly visible in their eyes. I wasn’t surprised that Ms. Thompson’s reaction was different.

Ms. Thompson, this is for you, I told her after class one September day, producing a glossy Red Delicious from my backpack. As a kid I feel like I was always aware of this pop cultural association between apples and teachers, but I’ve never actually seen anyone give a teacher an apple. So it seemed like something I should eventually do.

Ms. Thompson stared at the apple in silence for a few moments before accepting it. I could almost hear the tinkling piano music that must have been playing in her head.

Oh, I know, she said in a pinched voice. It’s fun to play with signifiers and tropes like that, isn’t it? She sniffed. Her watery blue eyes grew wetter than usual. They threatened to leak outright.

Thank you so much, G’Ra. This really means so much to me. She hugged herself and bowed slightly. More than you know.

It wasn’t long after the apple gift when I realized my mistake. I had misled Ms. Thompson, charmed her into assuming that I was a student whom she could expect to meet the basic expectations of a competent pupil: completing the assigned reading, attending class regularly, contributing to discussions. In reality, my adolescent unease was in full bloom, and I quickly established myself as the worst performing student in AP Literature. The sense of urgency that animated my high-achieving classmates escaped me. College admissions season loomed, but get-it-together speeches from our parents, from guidance counselors, and eventually Ms. Thompson herself were less persuasive than the Anti-Flag lyrics blaring from my headphones. My approach to public education answered the call sounded in A Start, the first track on your mixtape.

Look, singer/guitarist Justin Sane might not have anticipated that any egghead black teenagers would take the brisk, minor-key, critical-thinking fight song on 2001’s Underground Network literally, but this was shortsighted.

Your prison warden is your school

Training you to be a social screw

Stage a jailbreak, swim against the flow

Show those motherfuckers what you know!

Tension arose between