How to Be Black Read online

  “How to Be The Black Employee” prepares you for life as one of the few minorities in an office setting, reminding you that you actually have two jobs—the one on your business card and being black—and offers key dos and don’ts for the all-important office holiday party. Here’s a hint: dancing is involved.

  Other chapters include “How to Be The Angry Negro” (because sometimes it’s necessary) and “How to Be The (Next) Black President”—it could be you!

  But wait, there’s more!

  The idea of a book that claims to cover “how to be black” is, of course, preposterous, but I’m doing it anyway, and I’m not alone. Because the topic is so large and because my experiences can’t comprehensively represent those of millions of people, I recruited a few other voices to help this book live up to its title.

  I interviewed friends and colleagues I felt were strong new models of “how to be black.” These are seven people who do blackness well, and together they form The Black Panel I call upon throughout the book to weigh in on important issues.

  Cheryl Contee is the cofounder, with me, of the blog Jack & Jill Politics and a partner at Fission Strategy, where she specializes in helping nonprofit organizations and foundations use social media to create social good.

  damali ayo is a conceptual artist, author, and comedian. She created Rent-A-Negro.com in 2003 and is the author of How to Rent a Negro and Obamistan! Land Without Racism. She is also the creator of the participatory performance piece National Day of Panhandling for Reparations.

  Jacquetta Szathmari is a comedian and writer and creator of the one-woman show That’s Funny. You Didn’t Sound Black on the Phone. She’s also a Libertarian.

  Elon James White is a comedian and creator of the Web video series This Week in Blackness and the Web radio show Blacking It Up.

  W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and creator of the one-man show The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. He offers a two-for-one ticket deal to those who bring someone of a different race to the show.

  Derrick Ashong is a musician, entrepreneur, and television host. He cofounded the band Soulfège and hosts The Stream on Al Jazeera English. He was raised in Ghana, Qatar, Brooklyn, and suburban New Jersey.

  Christian Lander is the author of Stuff White People Like. He isn’t black. I had to include one white person to defend against the inevitable lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination, and also to establish a control group.

  As you can see, this is a rock-star panel. To its members, I posed questions such as “When did you first realize you were black?” “How’s Post-racial America working out?” and “Can you swim?”

  They have done more than provide color commentary for this book. They have helped me find the heart of it.

  In the final chapter, “The Future of Blackness,” I combine my own conclusions with those of the people I interviewed and humbly lay out a complete Grand Unified Theory of Blackness with a vision for a people and a nation. I did not set out to do this, but it happened, and it’s kind of awesome.

  If you are black, many of these stories and lessons and hopes will ring true to you. Maybe you prevented a race riot in your school by employing diplomatic back-channels to ease tensions between black and white students. Maybe you renounced your blackness for a few hours after being told by other black people that the thing you do so well makes you not black. Maybe your coworkers think you’ve just got to have an opinion on every single move President Barack Obama makes. This book is yours.

  If you’re not black, there is probably even more to be gained from the words that follow. They may help answer the questions you’d rather not ask aloud or they may introduce a concept you never considered.* You will get an insider perspective, not only on “how to be black” but also on “how to be American,” and, most important, how to be yourself. This book is yours as well.

  Finally, just in case you were wondering, no black people were harmed in the making of this book.

  Yours in blackness,

  Baratunde Rafiq Thurston

  @baratunde on Twitter. And the book’s hashtag is #HowToBeBlack

  Where Did You Get That Name?

  Barry. Barrington. Baracuda. Bartuna. Bartender. Bartunda. Bartholomew. Bart. Baritone. Baritone Dave. Baranthunde. Bar— Brad.

  This is a representative sample of the world’s attempts to say or re-create my name. For the record, it’s Baratunde (baa-ruh-TOON-day).

  I’ve trained for decades in the art of patiently waiting for people to butcher my name. It’s often a teacher or customer service official who has to read aloud from a list. I listen to them breeze through Daniel and Jennifer and even Dwayne, but inevitably, there’s a break in their rhythm. “James! Carrie! Karima! Stephanie! Kevin!” Pause. “Bar—” Pause. They look around the room and then look back at their list. Their confidence falters. The declarative tone applied to the names before mine gives way to a weak, interrogative stumbling:

  Barry? Barrington? Baracuda? Bartuna? Bartender? Bartunda? Bartholomew? Bart? Baritone? Baritone Dave? Baranthunde? Bar—? Brad!!

  The person who called me Brad was engaged in the most lazy and hilarious form of wishful thinking, but all the others kind of, sort of, maybe make some sense. This experience is so common in my life that I now entirely look forward to it. Like a child on Christmas morning who hasn’t yet been told that Santa is a creation of consumer culture maintained by society to extend the myth of “economic growth,” I eagerly await the gift of any new variation the next person will invent. Can I get a Beelzebub? Who will see a Q where none exists? How about some numbers or special characters? Can I get a hyphen, underscore, forward slash? Only after letting the awkward process run its public course do I step forward, volunteering myself as the bearer of the unpronounceable label and correct them: “That’s me. It’s Baratunde.”

  I love my name. I love people’s attempts to say it. I love that everyone, especially white people, wants to know what it means. So here’s the answer:

  My full name is Baratunde Rafiq Thurston. It’s got a nice flow. It’s global. I like to joke that “Baratunde” is a Nigerian name that means “one with no nickname,” “Rafiq” is Arabic for “really, no nickname,” and “Thurston” is a British name that means “property of Massa Thurston.”

  In truth, Baratunde is derived from the very common Yorubwa Nigerian name “Babatunde.” A literal translation comes out something like “grandfather returns” but is often interpreted as “one who is chosen.”* Rafiq is Arabic for “friend or companion.” And Thurston, well, that really probably is the name of the white guy who owned my people back in the day.

  Of all the groups of people who react to my name, I’ve found that white people are the most curious about its meaning and origin. Upon hearing of its origin, they want to know when I last visited Nigeria. Other non-black people are nearly as curious, assuming “Baratunde” to be a family name that goes back generations, that was passed to me through a series of meticulously traceable biblical begats. Black Americans, on the other hand, rarely even pause to ponder my name. Considering how inventive black Americans have been with their own names, that’s not very surprising.

  Where I never expected any particular reaction, however, was from Nigerians themselves. Nigerians have very strong opinions about my name. They don’t like it, and they want me to know. Constantly.

  I call this phenomenon the Nigerian Name Backlash. Rarely does a week go by without a Nigerian somewhere on the Internet finding and interrogating me. I first encountered the NNB when I was twelve years old. I called my Nigerian friend, who went by “Tunde,” on the phone, but he wasn’t home. Instead, his extremely Nigerian father answered, and our interaction proceeded as follows:

  “Hello, who is calling?”

  “Hi, sir, this is Baratunde.”

  “Where did you get that name!?”

  Let’s pause the exchange right here, because you need more context. Father Nigeria did not simply ask where I got the name as one might ask, “
Oh, where did you get those shoes? They’re really nice. They’re so nice that I need to know where you got them so I can possibly get myself a pair.” No, that was not the tone. The tone was more along the lines of “Who the hell do you think you are coming into my house, stealing my gold, priceless family jewels, my dead grandmother’s skeleton, my porridge, and attempting to walk out through the front door as if I would not notice? By all rights, I should kill you where you stand, you thieving, backstabbing boy.”

  Shocked by the question, but determined to be both honest and respectful, I answered.

  “I got it from my parents,” I told him.*

  “Do you even know what it means?” Father Nigeria asked me in the same way you might ask a dog, “What model iPad do you want?” Fortunately, I knew exactly what it meant, and I proudly answered, “It means grandfather returns or one who is chosen.”

  He reacted swiftly and loudly. “No! It means grandfather returns or one who is chosen.”

  As I was about to explain to him that I’d just said the very same thing, he launched into a tirade: “This is the problem with you so-called African-Americans. You have no history, no culture, no roots. You think you can wear a dashiki, steal an African name, and become African? You cannot!”

  Remember, when this self-appointed Father Nigeria decided to indict, judge, and reject all of African America for its attempts to rebuild some small part of the ancestral bridges burned by America’s peculiar institution, I was twelve years old and not in the best position to argue that maybe he should calm down and stop acting like a bully.

  His reaction stunned me, but it also prepared me for the regular onslaught from members of the Nigerian Name Backlash community. While he made a sweeping dis against all black Americans who sought cultural identification with Africa, most other Nigerians I’ve encountered have more technical complaints. Every few weeks a new batch finds me on the Internet, usually Twitter, and swarms with the same basic set of questions and challenges:

  “Are you Nigerian?” they excitedly ask.

  “No. My parents just wanted me to have an African name.”

  “You know your name is Nigerian, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it is wrong, your name. What is this ‘Baratunde’? You mean ‘Babatunde,’ right?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get that name?”

  Sigh.

  My name has served as a perfect window through which to examine my experience of blackness. For non-blacks, it marks me as absolutely, positively black. However, most of the vocal Nigerians I’ve met (which is to say, most of the Nigerians I’ve met) use my name to remind me that I’m not that black.

  When Did You First Realize You Were Black?

  For Americans, some days are unforgettable: the day JFK was assassinated, the day Osama bin Laden was killed, the day Flavor Flav’s Fried Chicken restaurant went out of business. For many black Americans, a similarly unforgettable experience takes place the day you realize you’re black, and if it’s not a moment of black self-awareness, it’s probably—nevertheless—the moment you were introduced to the idea of black as something negative.

  I recall three moments of black self-awareness.

  The first moment occurred in kindergarten.

  My mother worked in Washington, DC’s, L’Enfant Plaza at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.* Across the street, the Department of Housing and Urban Development ran a kindergarten in its child-care center. The HUD building has a distinctive design: a curved concrete structure in the shape of an elongated X with evenly spaced, recessed windows arrayed in a precise grid. When seen in conjunction with the storm trooper outpost–looking parking attendant booth, it felt as if we were on the set of Star Wars. Tucked away at an interior corner of a courtyard was the child-care center’s playground. That’s where I developed a crush on a little girl in my class (insofar as a four- or five-year-old even knows what that means).

  I would demonstrate this by throwing things at her and singing Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” in her general direction. She was white.

  I don’t remember anyone making a big deal of our racial differences, but I remember noticing them myself. Also, I sang “Ebony and Ivory” at her, which I still can’t believe. The next year, she and I had moved on to different worlds, and I became obsessed with the song “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel. Not until writing this book did I realize how perfect for the situation the lyrics of that song are. Essentially, she was living in her “whitebread world” and I was her “downtown man.” Could you imagine a more perfect metaphor? I don’t think so.

  The second moment of black self-awareness came courtesy of my mother and her sense of interior design. Our household was stocked with images of proud blackness: a Malcolm X portrait, stacks of jazz, soul, funk, and R&B records, and two massive paintings, one integrating a set of ankhs* and the other of a Black Power fist. It’s hard not to know you’re black when you’re physically surrounded by it on a daily basis.

  This painting loomed over me on the walls of my early childhood home.

  The third moment of awareness occurred on a childhood camping trip with my mother and my friend Reginald somewhere in Virginia, I think. Reggie and I were playing alone in the nearby lake when a little white boy approached us from the shore and loudly announced, “There’s niggers in the water! Look at the niggers!” I like to imagine that our first reaction was to spin around, searching and frantically yelling, “Where!? Niggers? Let me at ’em! Where are they?”

  Reggie and I had a hard choice to make in that moment. The reason we knew each other is that we were in karate classes together back in DC, and we were very good at karate. We conferred on whether or not to use our combined karate skills to kick this little racist’s ass, but considering our location in the Who-Knows-Where Woods of Probably, Virginia, we decided against it. In that moment, the black pride I absorbed in my home was balanced by the embarrassment, rage, paranoia, and self-restraint that often accompany blackness in the outside world of America.

  Most black people have their own coming-of-blackness story, and in the process of putting this book together, I conducted interviews with several friends and professional colleagues I thought could lend an alternate, and often more eloquent, voice to the questions raised by How to Be Black. Here are the members of The Black Panel recalling their first realizations of being black or what blackness meant.

  W. KAMAU BELL

  I first realized I was black when I was in first grade at a small, private school in Boston. I was playing doctor with a bunch of kids and this one girl, it was her turn to kiss me, and she didn’t, and she ran away laughing, and the other kids ran away laughing. And the thing I realized at that point [was] that I was black and they were all white.

  That was the first time I remember feeling like black was somehow separate from the norm. I think I knew I was black before then, because my mom would not have let me not know I was black. There would have been no way that she would have let that information slip. “It’s cold outside. Take a jacket. And you’re black.”

  CHERYL CONTEE

  I first realized I was black in nursery school, when a little girl told me that I was black. And I told her, “No, I’m beige.” I knew what beige was, even though I was four, because I went shopping a lot with my mother and grandmother, and so I knew taupe, beige, and the difference between the two. And I could read, and I knew from crayons, I knew the color beige. I used it a lot to draw myself.

  So I was really disturbed, because she held her ground. She was fairly certain that I was black. So I came home, and I remember I couldn’t really move past the entrance of the house. And I needed to talk about the fact that this little girl said that I was black, and that I, in fact, found myself to be beige. [My parents] reacted like any black intelligentsia: we went to the library.

  I would actually call it a series of seminars for my brother and me, in terms of African-American culture through the ages, go
ing back to Egypt, actually. And I remember the Saturday when we went to the big library in Wheaton. We didn’t go there except for special occasions.

  ELON JAMES WHITE

  I first knew I was black when I was a child and my mother and my uncle yelled at me because I had a broken thought process on race. They were talking about how the cops were dealing with black people, and I started to explain to them that “Maybe if black people stopped committing so many crimes, then the cops would leave them alone,” and they stared at me. Then I was like, “Well, I’m a black male, and I haven’t been arrested for anything, so obviously it’s not just being black.”

  And then they cried.

  DAMALI AYO

  My first memory of realizing I was black was told to me by my mom. There’s two. I remember being in tap dance class when I was two years old, and apparently I had a concern that the teacher would turn me white. So I was very aware early on that I liked being black and I wanted to stay that way.

  And then my mother tells a story about going out to dinner at some point, and our family’s out and I’m just a baby. And the waitress, white waitress, comes over and says, “What a cute little baby!” And I just go, “Ahhhh!” So my mother interprets that as a racial tension. I mean, maybe it was her perfume or something. But you know, my mom’s read was, “My little daughter knew what was up.”

  DERRICK ASHONG

  I didn’t know at first. I was born in Africa, so everybody was black. We don’t really think about it like that. Here, everyone’s like, “Is he black? Is he white? Is he black?” In Africa, you don’t ask. The assumption is that you’re black. Therefore, what becomes more important is other things. What your name is, where you come from, what language you speak, what’s your culture, what’s your tribe, et cetera. So I didn’t know I was black.