This morning I'm doing a blackness tour in my online reading. Same old stuff. Feeling a pinch odd that I could be hanging with Jimi at The Root if I tried and cared enough. Kind of pissed that I may have become perennially difficult to understand and thus always something of an outsider. Wondering how long I can do it all without becoming a caricature of myself. I mean, I don't have to make any excuses about sleeping with little boys or hitting the crack pipe, but then again I'm not Michael Jackson or Marion Barry. If I were to hype up the Cobb personna I could get away with being perverse. The thing is, I'm not perverse, I'm actually just achieving knowledge and some wisdom at an accellerated pace. It makes me move on.
So the subject at P6 is Martha's Vineyard and which section the Obamas might find most comfy for their summer vacation. The same-old is the same, 'it doesn't matter how rich you get...' observation that their likely choice will be Oak Bluffs, the ink-welliest spot on the isle.
My favorite parts of the Vineyard are Menemsha Bight, West Chop and the Katama beaches south of Edgartown. I hadn't made it out to Gay Head, but would prefer that because I don't see what the point of living on the water is if you can't see the sunset. To read the NYMagazine article that spurred all this talk, there is a distinct racial geography to the joint and social and psychological incentives not to buck the trend.
The Only Ones deal with glass ceilings at work, unfortunate misunderstandings in their neighborhoods, condescension from blacks who think their education or class makes them inauthentic, and identity crises in their kids. When they get to their Vineyard vacation homes, they want to escape that casual, institutional, and intra-black racism and be around people who help them feel less anomalous. Trey Ellis, who wrote the script for The Inkwell, the notoriously bad film about the black Vineyard experience (Ellis himself called it terrible), says, “The black part of the Vineyard is like, I would imagine, being gay and going to the Castro. It’s this mecca where you can be yourself and be with people who have so much in common with you. No one has to feign some street cred when they’re playing tennis.” It’s a source of communion and of pride. “When you see a beautiful black family with their kids, it makes you feel really good about being black,” says Chrisette Hudlin, wife of Reggie and a lifelong Vineyarder who travels there every summer from L.A. “As a person who’s high-achieving and striving for the best for their family, you’re looking at these other black people who have the same goals, and it makes you feel good as a black person. You don’t feel out of place.” Several Only Ones say there’s nowhere in America that makes them more proud of black people.
This is particularly true among parents, who talk about the importance of introducing their children to other black upper-class families so they can know they’re not as peculiar as they might feel. “Black kids need to be around successful black families, because other blacks from humble beginnings want you to apologize for being successful,” says psychiatrist Carlotta Miles. “On the Vineyard, you don’t need excuses or self-consciousness or defensiveness.” Drew Dixon Williams grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother, Sharon Pratt, served as mayor, and she spent summers on the island. “It’s sort of embarrassing to say this, coming from Washington,” she says, “but I used to say with a straight face—because I was too young to know better—that I would get my black experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I didn’t have to be defensive about not being black enough or being black in the first place. We were all from The Cosby Show.”
Only Ones. I'm not sure that I don't like that. There have got to be more OOs like me, who tend not to break a sweat over our OO factor. But I hear what Drew Dixon Williams is saying. The thing is that I don't particularly care a great deal about my kids' black experience. I'm not trying to psychologically prepare a racial Maginot Line in their consciousness in defense of The Insult. There is no Black Experience(tm). There used to be one, but an old man died with the recipe, and now everybody thinks they have it right - like the drama over the recipe for the perfect hamburger. Sometimes it's better to just have a hot dog and call it a day.
But there was a time when I thought I was a Big Mac in my odd situation of being in the black upper middle class all by my lonesome, which was to say 30 and single and trying to pull the perfect babe. The rarefied atmosphere of Oak Bluffs was exactly what I was looking for - a bunch of Cosby kids looking for another bunch. And yet I still needed to play volleyball, because that's what I did. And so when I did that, I ended up at Katama among kids who didn't work. I mean to say white kids who shuttled between the Vineyard and Palm Beach depending on the season. Trust funders, social specimens to us in the real world, or at least that was my assumption at the time. But back in Oak Bluffs, the more urban setting, last whites night (as in post Labor Day dress codes) resulted in more dancing in suits, the same phenomenon I had grown ill of years before.
The irony was that when I came to the East Coast originally, having broke up with my progressive girlfriend, there was a great expectation in me that I would find in New York the very equivalent of a dense, upscale black community on whose margins I could dance my New World Afrikan dance. In the advanced bohemian brashness I considered my pose to be, I could speak to the artistic expression doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and sportos could not approach without being so crass as the lot of entertainers we suffered in the degrading state of hiphop. I wanted the audience of the new black progressive novel, the people who went to BAM and who dug Wynton. I wanted the people who were looking for the creative blacks now unleashed parallel to Spike Lee who would inherit the mantel of August Wilson without caving into what eventually became the Black WB. It was a narrow ledge that needed broad support, and it turned out that there was little such concentration in the Big Apple. Deciding against all that after a couple frustrating years in recognition that ex-gangsta drug dealers and their coteries were bankrolling all the new black cultural production, I was too through with it all. By the time I got to the Vineyard, it John Singleton and Terry McMillan were the king and queen of black highbrow which was all actually just middlebrow, and the likes of George C. Wolfe belonged to... well the same people who made The Blue Man Group rich. What we got was Diddy, Dre & Jay Z. Three new Barry Gordys living three times as large. What we didn't get was one theatre on Broadway or playwrites to replace Jones or Hansberry, no new Paul Robeson or Leontyne Price.
That little black community simply wasn't wealthy enough, and I think today it probably still is not. And so I predict that it never will be because none of us will survive the inflation of the post-Obama world who aren't already wealthy today. The hamburger will stay hamburger and never move to the black cultural filet mignon of my dreams. Not a raisin in the sun, but a jerky beef that produces hard little turds of frustration no matter how much water you drink it down with. Mine is all shat out, but it took years to comprehend both the size and cost of this failure. In the end I have to live with our history, of having Michael Jackson's death celebrated as if he were our new black shining prince.
The fool's errand is pumping the old fighter of blackness full of steroids and painkillers to fight another round of the Culture Wars. And you wonder why a people who should have found quite enough in their humanity or even Christianity generations ago are still tied to minding the color line and carving out discursive space around Obama, the Great Black Avatar. As if he could be.
This morning I read that the NSA is building a new data center just south of Salt Lake City. I think I could retire there in 15 and do some consulting until my fingers become too arthritic, white as that joint might be. Still, I'd prefer Boise, where at least they drink vodka openly. Nevertheless I pause to think of all the undiscovered countries too non-black for the OO taste not to mention that of the average middle class black Americans. I understand the desire to perfect a black aesthetic which stands above the dysfunctional fray of the multifarious legacies of slavery, and racial brownian motion of American society. I understand my generation's deep desire to accomplish the Beloved Community, to have an unassailable elite black vanguard with the social clout of the voice of Thurgood Marshall in the wake of the Brown decision - all black Americans backing him no matter their class status. But nothing is so monolithic and sure. Rather we are black mothers and fathers to Benjamin Buttons whose adventures lie in foreign lands beyond our experience. It's good enough to make home right, a home right with God.
The Only Ones, those who deign to be that and stay that, would be a lonely bunch. As Steven Pressfield says, a tribe has no law so much as it has a code of honor. America and the West are not tribal, but black Americans are perhaps the last tribe here, still trying to get it all together. Looking for unity in all the wrong places, as victims, as leaders, in the meritocracy, in the rarified moral arena of our stentorian politics. Everywhere we are reminded that our code of honor stands for jack in the social marketplace. It's only the head bob on the street, the appropriated high five, pound and now fist bump all forever lost to the leveling heat sink of transparent American culture. Nobody cares enough to learn Swahili and so the heat death of black American culture is inevitable. It can only be sustained by physical proximity and along the same lines of fear and distrust as Jim Crow ever established.
The distinction of being from the best and brightest of these, the least of my brothers, is being played out now, five steps over my head in Obama's house. His election was the last leverage our black social capital will ever aggregate. We'll go down finally, like the Irish after Kennedy. And no fat headed, thick accented brothers of our sort will remain stock characters in our popular entertainments and consciousness. There will be no future Charlie Rangels just as there are no future Tip ONeils. There will only be the same-old, the dialog that becomes a lonely monologue.
