#black performance

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown -- Betty Allen

Review: A Little Devil in America

Abdurraqib also notes that there has never been a shortage of Black people willing to perform their Blackness for the right audience. Bert Williams, the vaudeville comedian, wore blackface to get a job at the Ziegfeld Follies, performing his Blackness so well that white critics said he “transcended race” and seemed “almost detached from his race altogether.” Abdurraqib recalls an episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” in which Carlton is rejected from a Black fraternity by its president because he is “Not Like the Other Blacks.” Abdurraqib points out that by the end of the episode, the audience is left wondering if it is Carlton, the Tom Jones-loving prep, or the dashiki-wearing fraternity president who is the one performing his Blackness. Here’s where the book gets more interesting. Abdurraqib acknowledges that he knows what it’s like to be in Carlton’s position and “dislocated from a specific set of Blackness.” The more challenging issue, he confesses, is that he has also been the fraternity president, forcing other Black people to hew to his expectations when, as he puts it, “we are all outside the borders of someone else’s idea of what Blackness is.” It’s one of the more powerful observations in the book, and it’s reinforced by each of the lives Abdurraqib captures so well. “The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world,” he writes. It’s a lonely proposition and Abdurraqib doesn’t pretend to have any solutions. Rather, he is left thinking “how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them. Even when that indictment is not out of love (which of course it sometimes is), but out of them clocking you for a standard you are not capable of rising to.”