From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances

18 "Boojie!”: A Question of Authenticity

309 BRYANT KEITH ALEXANDER 18 “Boojie!” A Question of Authenticity This collection is an articulate intellectual space for exploring the interplay of class and blackness under the traveling, if not transformative , construction “from bourgeois to boojie.” It is a space of both empowerment and entrapment. So, as a relatively articulate black/teacher/ performer/scholar working inside both the comforts and confines of the academy (the white ivory tower), I cannot address the issue of boojieness, in any manner or in my own defense without seemingly succumbing to the very critique to which the statement is directed. The criteria that are used to evaluate and determine the charge of being boojie establish a trap for all black people in that they restrict the range of performing blackness to a limited space of what is socially, if not culturally , acceptable. For many black people such limitations actually threaten the possibility of their exploring the range of black performativity: What new and expansive ways could they perform themselves within their own skin? This is particularly challenging if the accusation of being boojie is reductively linked with educational attainment, where black people live, their social engagements, class distinctions, attitudes toward social issues and relational interactions with other black people, or the ways in which they 310 Bryant Keith Alexander speak and carry themselves in the world. In many ways the performance of culture, as described in the aforementioned categories, is conflated with a performance of race. This conflation threatens to limit the interpretive frame of what it means to be black both within and outside communities of social recognition, that is, groups of individuals who share cultural understanding, without the need for translation of behavior, words, speech, and the like— they can easily recognize and interact with one another. Cultural and racial performances expand to upli and inform both individuals and communities. The performance of race neither shis nor fades with class elevation; it modulates, tuning itself to different environs but always with the undercurrents of historical truths that conduct the rhythms of bodily actions in time and space. It is, in fact, the wish that black parents often have for their children: the earned dexterity of performative accomplishment to transcend location and circumstance, to achieve, without forgetting the meaningfulness of home and the substance of black character. The subtitle of this book refers to both “black middle-class performances ” and the actuality of invited performances by middle-class blacks. The project then becomes a space for middle-class blacks to engage in both writing about being and expressing being in writing, using performance practice as a site of opposition. Such performance practice coalesces in ways evocative of black culture’s use of performance as acts of resistance and protest, as well as modes of social and cultural maintenance. These are key strategies used by E. Franklin Frazier in his monograph but used as a standard to pathologize the rising black middle class, who in his construction seemingly resist the performative tropes of a delimited black authenticity. He writes that middle-class blacks are trying to become what they could never be, and, “living largely in a world of make-believe, the masks which they wear to play their sorry roles conceal the feelings of inferiority and of insecurity and the frustrations that haunt their inner lives.”1 Here he speaks of performance as faking, not making, a presence of what is actual versus the realization of possibility. In this passage Frazier writes of performance as a subterfuge without acknowledging the transformative nature of performance : performance as a transcendent rehearsal and a dexterous enactment of revealing one’s own possibilities.2 Such expansive performance possibili- A Question of Authenticity 311 ties are reflective not only of the individual but also of the racialized categories that they claim and those communities that claim them. In this essay I offer three critical autoethnographic movements in which I loosely address Frazier’s concerns of/for the rising black middle class as it relates to issues of gender and sexuality, performances of professionalism, and racial authenticity. In this project I find that I might be operating in a defensive mode against the accusation of being called boojie by actually engaging a boojie performativity. For me a boojie performativity references those perceived repetitive actions performed by black people, plotted within grids of power relationships and social norms that are presumably...