Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness ed. by Rebecca Walker (review)

Rebecca Walker’s edited collection Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness is an exploration of how a wide array of authors account for their lifestyles, self-definitions, and worldviews under the larger umbrella of what might be considered “Black identity.” Given the complexity of navigating and negotiating shifting subjectivities and multiple, varied, and complex Blacknesses in a “post-racial” society, the book is fresh, timely, and engaging. Feminist perspectives, including male voices on Black masculinity, as well as modes of writing and consciousness that foreground the personal, artistic, and the process of remembering that both embrace and challenge stereotypes, are found here. This collection, although short of “one thousand streams of Blackness,” does present at least seventeen (including Walker’s Introduction) compelling and provocative first-person essays about the contemporary Black experience. Academic in nature, this collection is inspired by an aesthetics of cool, if you will, that Walker recognized and admits being drawn to in a photo of President Barack Obama. This coolness—“distinctly Black”—prompted her to “want to know if that ineffable quality can be decoded, understood as the sum of its parts” (xiv, xv.)

In her third-wave feminist fashion, Walker invites readers to “add your own elements to this collection” and to embrace “Hybridity. Fluidity. Harmonious dissonance” (xv). Each essay’s one-word title indicates an element in her intentionally incomplete encyclopedia of Black coolness. Essentially, the collection is varied in representation, perhaps to a fault: sometimes it lacks cohesion, the essays seemingly connected only in their abstract, individual uniqueness. Several essays focus on the role of music in the formation of Black cool; another group takes aim at childhood experiences shaped by social-class status, parental relationships, and institutional and popular racism. Another subset of essays hones in on being “different” or “not fitting” into dominant narratives of what Black identity is, does, and looks like—of being displaced within status quo but ultimately imagined Black communities. Overall, each interrogates or takes to task stereotypes and expectations about Black identity. As author/novelist Mat Johnson contends in his contribution “The Geek,” “African American identity was forged in an environment of the external violence of white supremacy. Everything African was belittled, devalued, demonized, disregarded. When the Black middle class had a lesser role within African American self-definition, traits of underclass life were misconstrued as elements of Blackness itself” (15). Arguments like these represent major theoretical paradigm shifts in how and why popular notions of Blackness are narrow, negative, and, in some respects, uninformed.

The book opens with dream hampton’s “Audacity” in which she discusses her refusal to allow herself to be raped by some neighborhood boys, while her brother stands by mute—an unwilling conspirator, paralyzed by fear. Her commitment to telling this story of her eighth-grade self is a complex one, tied to “survivor’s guilt,” since she was not “actually” raped (although she was targeted for sexual assault/sexual violence) and due to her inability (perhaps justified unwillingness?) to reconcile the contempt she holds for her brother and one of the would-be assailants. Interestingly, the attempted rape portion of the story is not the point: hampton’s self-discovery that “there’s nothing I fear too much to fight” is the moral. What makes this Black cool? The aspects of her narrative that elucidate her ability to share her understanding of others’ perceptions of and contempt for her: a smart, middle-class, light-skinned female who deserved to be “punished” for such “privileges.” Also in this essay, hampton displays her adeptness in connecting the incident to her demeanor and identity within a larger framework of race, gender, and class discourses from a feminist perspective, and to find strength to overcome all-too-familiar sexual-violation scripts, is a triumph—and that is Black cool. Also in a feminist voice, Esther Armah’s “The Posse” provides a moving, philosophically oriented account of the impact of trauma and the...