Confidence, Grace And Underneath It All, the Need to Be Recognized
Donna Britt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Years ago on a summer day, I was driving along the Detroit riverfront and saw a black man strolling down a wide downtown sidewalk.
Long, lithe and fluid as the river by his side, the man seemed to be gliding. Bareheaded, he wore a white, ankle-skimming djellaba from some sultry, equatorial nation. Yet something whispered that he was African American, something about his utter nonchalance as his garment whipped in the breeze and insinuated itself around his calves. Trust me:
He couldn't have been hotter -- or have seemed more chilled out.
Cool.
Over the years, I've seen plenty of striking men. But when someone mentions "cool," I hearken back to that strolling stranger. It wasn't his distinctive garb that burned his image into memory but his confidence. Flanked by skyscrapers and businessmen, he wore his exotic ensemble with such authority, the sweating corporate types around him seemed out of place.
Confidence is cool's most essential element. Perhaps that's why black men -- for whom the appearance of assurance can be a matter of life or death -- so often radiate it. Perhaps that's why in the United States, where men as different as Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, Bruce Lee, Sean Connery, Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp have been deemed cool, black men remain cool's most imitated, consistent arbiters. I mean, there's cool -- and then there's brothercool.
Think of Barack Obama's instantaneous ascension to "coolest man in Congress." Observe Denzel Washington's loping stride. Ponder Dwyane Wade's sweet-as-a-caress ball-handling, Terrence Howard's slumberous gaze and Mos Def's straight-ahead poetry and crooked grin.
Know what else is vital to cool? Authenticity. A whiff of falseness or visible exertion chases it away. (Who else thinks Diddy tries too hard?) Cool is also economy of movement and speech. That's why Eddie Murphy's cocksure '80s screen persona out-cooled Chris Tucker's more recent motormouthed flailing.
Cool is grace made masculine, the seamless melding of emotional authority with physical poise. It's so innately male that its association with black men -- whose masculinity and sexuality have for centuries inspired fear and fascination -- seems inevitable. The connection is so strong that any honest examination of cool must have black men at its center.
No wonder so many black men seek to develop the wardrobe, attitude and facial expressions to telegraph cool. No other group's identity is as steeped in the necessity of appearing cool, or in the expectation that they instinctively bring coolness to the table. That expectation is fueled by black men's outsize influence on music, language and culture, and by white artists -- Elvis, Eminem, Justin Timberlake -- who mimic them.
Every time middle-aged buddies anywhere share a knuckle-clasping handshake or slap their palms in agreement, they're demonstrating brothercool assimilation. Brothercool took fashion's most boring garment, the basic white tee, and inflated it, tossing it over baggy jeans worn by poor youths. The look was copied from Tulsa to Tokyo. A white Minnesota cardiologist recently told me that his T-shirt-sporting 17-year-old son "really thinks he's a poor black kid from Compton."
We think cool emanates from a man's innermost soul, but it has strong physical and sensual components. Yet it's never just about the physical.
University of Pennsylvania music historian Guthrie Ramsey believes it's about control -- over " something, whether [it's] the basketball court, a musical instrument or just your wardrobe." Cool is so individual that one man's cool won't work for other men, in other times. Exuberant 1930s singer Cab Calloway, suave '40s crooner Billy Eckstine, and "extremely insular" '50s jazz icon Miles Davis were notably different -- yet "all were considered cool," Ramsey says.
* * *
Each One Teach One
Cool looks instinctive, but growing up with three brothers and raising three sons taught me something surprising:
Cool is learned.
I've seen boys for cool's sake squeeze easy smiles into scowling submission. I've snickered as youths altered perfectly serviceable gaits the way my oldest brother did at 14. One day, Steve was just walking. The next, he was lowering his right shoulder, bending his left knee and dragging his right foot with each step before adding a barely perceptible bounce. Steve's schoolboy shuffle became what we called a "pimp walk." Every wanna-be-cool kid had one.
Art Mallory of Northeast learned early that looking cool isn't determined by a man's profession. His dapper dad, Artie, was a Detroit janitor who would sit with his son before the TV "watching old movies from the '40s and '50s, seeing how those guys dressed," Mallory recalls. By high school, the son had joined a "fashion club" whose members competed with stylish black boys from neighboring schools. Today, Mallory, 42, is a Verizon technician and entrepreneur who recently traded his trademark bow ties for handmade silk ascots.
Some black youths struggle with cool's demanding curriculum. As a New York preteen, former TransAfrica president Bill Fletcher, 52, of Mitchellville, labored "to emulate the brothers I saw who were cool. . . . They had the walk, they could dress, they could dance. . . . It didn't work."
Then at 14, Fletcher read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which sparked a penchant for activism and "quasi-military" sunglasses and leather jackets. Suddenly, "I was at the cutting edge," says Fletcher, a visiting professor at Brooklyn College. " Cool is being at the cutting edge, whether it's politically, musically or artistically."
How about intellectually? Ramsey is also a jazz pianist whose dual roles as academic and hipster suggest to him that cool-wise, "the life of the mind" is less appreciated.
"As Professor Ramsey, I get afforded a certain amount of 'deference,' " he says. But at his piano gigs, "as soon as I start moving the crowd . . . I'm building a different kind of power -- where I can walk off the stage and get [women's] telephone numbers."
Yet the mystique that empowers men can disempower them, too. What's cool among some black men today too often suggests coldness -- a distancing from their feelings, for which a heavy price is paid: By women more drawn to chilled-out shells than to warm, accessible hearts. By children whose fathers are less concerned with raising them than with fighting to the death for "respect." And always by brothers who reject the stereotype.
* * *
The Roots of Cool
Men everywhere find cool a tough taskmaster. But its particular burden on black men is explained by an all-American trifecta: Slavery, Jim Crow and ongoing institutional racism. Society "didn't allow them to be men in the traditional sense" as providers and protectors, says Duke University associate professor of African and African American studies Mark Anthony Neal. Style became "where [black men] could express their masculinity."
During slavery, Neal continues, "the only thing [black people] could claim as their own was their style. What else could they bring uniquely to [the] world, whether it was in how they'd sing in the fields, how they played games, the way they danced?"
I may not own my body, slaves' distinct style hinted. But I can make you look at me, envy me, and be revolted by me. Whatever you take away, I'll make something amazing from that which remains.
But it was tricky, putting a personal stamp on slaves' dangerously circumscribed world. Displays of insubordination and rebellion were punishable by whippings, separation from loved ones, even death. Keeping cool -- masking your intellect, rage and affection -- didn't just make you less vulnerable. It could save your life. Black men's dual mastery of the hidden and the flamboyant became so compelling it spilled into myth, making the combination -- cool -- something people unconsciously sought from them.
Black British designer Ozwald Boateng creates narrow-cut suits worn by Jude Law and Jamie Foxx, and is fascinated by African American men's devotion to style. Boateng, whose parents emigrated from Ghana, can trace his family history for "centuries -- my confidence is rooted in that," he says.
African American men's comparative rootlessness explains their fabled confidence, Boateng, 39, suggests. "To be honest, I'm not even sure black men have as much confidence as they have the appearance of it, which can be a way of compensating" for a painful past, he says.
Or as my younger brother once put it: "Sometimes, cool is all that we have."
Fast-food restaurant manager Tony Blount of Greenbelt won't cut his foot-long dreadlocks, even though he is convinced they have cost him job opportunities. His locks remind him of "my ancestors," Blount, 31, says. "There's stuff only me and my hair know about. . . . If I change myself for every job, I'll be changing forever."
Brothercool runs so deep that black professionals in corporate America smuggle cool like contraband into their wardrobes. "You learn to be distinctive in the little things -- your ties, cuff links," says Jack "Rusty" O'Kelley, 38, a black manager at Katzen Bach Partners, a Manhattan firm that advises Fortune 500 companies. On Madison Avenue, "all the brothers I see . . . have that sense of individuality," he says. Balancing style with substance means "never getting mistaken for the copy guy or the doorman."
* * *
Cool's Dangers
Of course, there are worse things to be mistaken for than the doorman. Washingtonian Kenny Barnes's rasp of a voice sinks to a whisper when he says: "My son being cool may have contributed to his murder." His only son, Kenny Barnes Jr., 37, owned a Northwest urban clothing boutique where he was shot to death during a robbery on Sept. 24, 2001, by a neighborhood 17-year-old.
With his brightly colored, custom ensembles and "huge" diamond necklaces, his son "seemed like someone with lots of money in his pockets," Barnes, 61, says. "He wasn't a basketball player or a rapper. What image was he portraying?"
Barnes answers his own question: "A gangster way of life . . . that can be a death sentence."
"Once, cool wasn't about violence, it was about being dapper," explains Barnes, who after his son's death founded the anti-gun-violence group ROOT (Reaching Out to Others Together).
"Now, I work with kids who think it's cool to have a gun around."
Hip-hop, whose beats provide cool's most recent soundtrack, has plenty to do with that. Though it now markets everything from cars to computers, hip-hop has always been anchored in rebellion and social consciousness. Certainly, no one foresaw early gangsta rap's thuggish performers sparking a billion-dollar industry and becoming heralds of a powerful outlaw form of cool. Gangster images weren't new in black communities. Neither was the misogyny in videos that reduced women to glistening body parts. But gangsta made both so lucrative that other rappers "had to embrace them to be bankable," Neal says.
It's no coincidence that hip-hop ascended as the blue-collar jobs that had sustained families and paid for working-class kids' college educations disappeared. Increasingly, poor black kids saw three clear roads to cool-conferring success: sports, music and crime.
Computer technician and student Will Boykin, 25, of Greenbelt, knows some young men are drawn to the harsh side of cool because they "don't have a father, or any parent who cares. The only way to have recognition, to feel important, is to have people say, 'Look at you.' "
Cool is coolest when it's a facet of -- not the purpose of -- a man's existence. As a doctoral student in psychology five years ago, Barnes knew white youths fixated on hip-hop cool who still "got their degrees and became part of the mainstream," he recalls. But for black boys who see education as unobtainable or irrelevant, cool often becomes "a way of life."
* * *
Cool to Come
It's tragic that the cool that represented freedom to black men has chained them to images of death and degradation. But brothercool has always been bigger than the music, clothes or attitudes that inform it.
The decision of what's in "is made by youth," says Andrew "Dru" Ryan, 30, who teaches hip-hop culture at George Mason University. Thanks to the Internet, Ryan says, what's popular doesn't always show itself in the mainstream media.
It shows itself in bars and clubs, where Kanye West's pastel polos and Pharrell Williams's skateboard chic thrive. It's revealed at schools, sporting events and shopping centers like Westfield Montgomery, where Greenbelt's Will Boykin recently noted the rising number of brothers under 21 who favor "Goth and skateboarder looks, fitted pants and bright jackets . . . looks that are more artistic, more individual."
Attitudes, too, are changing, he said, as thug-life cool becomes less brutal and "more materialistic." "Now it's about 'I drink this, I smoke that, I do what I want with women.' It isn't violent. . . . But it . . . makes you blind to other things that matter."
While commercial hip-hop's negativity reflects artists' "limited experiences," Ryan says, the Internet expands people's vision, recognizing international underground artists such as France's MC Solaar and Toronto's Kardinal Offishall who "show less objectification of women, fewer drugs, guns." Ryan also sees this "movement toward normality" in stars like popular Tappahannock, Va.-born singer Chris Brown, 16, who show "you don't have to be gangster.
"We're seeing a new type of cool."
It's demonstrated by actor Will Smith, whose insistence on promoting his films overseas ensures his box office invincibility. You see it in Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, 25, the underground phenom whose hit album "Food & Liquor" features toys and art items from Britain, Japan and Singapore that he keeps in his book bag.
Brothercool is demonstrating black men's increasing diversity in income, interest and attitude. The "new cool" that black men are forging could be more like the old: deriving its edge from the risks that accompany growth, expansion, the embrace of other cultures, the hot breath that signifies life.
It could reflect what Ryan says fuels ex-scowler and Fiasco producer Jay-Z's recent tour of South Africa and his activism to address the world's clean-water shortage: the desire "to find some . . . joy in all this."
Anyone who has trouble connecting cool's edginess to joy should consider the man Boateng cites as the ultimate embodiment of cool, a global icon who understood black men's struggle but whose rage never doused his joy: Muhammad Ali.
The boxer "always looked fantastic," Boateng says, but it was his persona that "spoke to everyone -- Ali had a magic." Ask for a younger example and you can almost hear Boateng's transatlantic shrug. Real cool "stands the test of time," he explains. "It has to be earned."
And learned. And expanded, for it -- and the men who most embody it -- to survive.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.