The Hall of Mirrors part I

"That's lame"

Lame. Meaning uncool. Meaning out of the loop. Meaning socially remedial. And most of the time, meaning not in accordance with what everyone else is doing. Now of course take this with a grain of salt, this is my opinion, and we all know what opinions are like. Feel free to disagree. But I think this concept of "cool" is one of the defining factors in black culture. I want to examine this and how it effects the cycle of black culture and alternatively how it affects the majority culture of America.

Lame. used to be a constant retort during my high school years. Black kids talk shit about each other, it's just the way of the world.  It's fun. It's funny. "Heating","Flaming","Roasting","Throwing bars" whatever you want to call it.But it's also the way that we enforce social pecking order and what trends or social norm and mores are acceptable. You come to school wearing something wack, you might get heated. You say something stupid, you might get heated. So on and so forth, until you learn how to stay under that radar or adapt to the trend.

This is pretty much how it is in both white and black culture. However, the deviation is that often time black culture has a very rigid idea of what "black cultural identity". Now of course there are outliers and deviations, but just like in all social culture there is a mainstream and then there are subcultures. In America's case, mainstream culture is defined by what we see/hear/read/  in the media for the most part. In black culture this is even more so the case.

Often times in black culture-once again this is my opinion- white culture is considered, for want of a better word, lame. The general understanding is that white people are at best slightly out of touch with cool, and at worst Screech from saved by the bell. Black culture,stemming from African slave culture and then evolving from there began by setting itself against the then, and perhaps still now, oppressive white mainstream.

 By setting itself at odds against them they could then reevaluate and define their own self worth outside of the norms white racial social constructions and norms. Because of this ideal, I think that the opposition to whiteness became ingrained into black society. You see this kind of opposition in most cultural revolutions; the Beat Generation, Hippies, Yuppies,Emo,Gangsta,Scene,Goth, etc. Every subculture is created in opposition to some contrary ideal. In the case of black subculture, which of course evolved into Black Mainstream culture, the contrary ideal was whiteness.

Now were are coming to present day black culture. Which like almost all of mainstream American culture, is fueled by fossils and materialism. Early on, business found that advertising is the best way to sell their products. That's the way business works. People buy things because they think they are good, or necessary.
But as with fashion and trends, this concept has evolved, and morphed and taken root in the American subconscious. To go back to the concept of being "lame", it is centered not around buying things but around the idea of social inclusion. Human beings are social creatures, we want to feel like we belong. Companies exploit our insecurities and needs to shill us things.Black culture, built on the remnants of slave culture has an especially large slice of the insecurity pie. Our identity was stolen and thrown away, we had no homeland to unite us and at first no common language or ideals. So we created one, as I said earlier, based on our opposition to white oppression. But the  irony is that we had no raw materials to work with in America to create a "new" culture,so we had to adapt things and ideas from white culture. And therein lies the birth of  what I like to call "the Hall of Mirrors".

Let me add preamble by saying that I don't believe black culture to be unoriginal or completely borrowed. What I am saying is that many concepts found in black cultural identity are either taken from white culture and morphed or placed in a parallel opposition with some ideal from white culture.

In white mainstream culture today. Black culture is often "misappropriated" to sell things because black culture is seen as adversarial to the white mainstream. And as I have demonstrated, counter culture is usually seen as revolutionary and new or cool.  Because black culture often times finds itself in an adversarial relationship with the white mainstream, this has in effect created something of a perpetual coolness device. Throughout history, black culture has strives to revolt against white culture and not assimilate. In contrast white culture, in certain sectors, has attempted to emulate black culture which then causes the trend/idea/style to become ubiquitous in mainstream American culture, and then "lame" in the eyes of  black culture, causing a social upheaval and change resulting in a new trend/idea/style.


Of course one could argue that this happens within any culture. This is how the cogs of society turn, by revolution of convention. But I think that the American public, and black society have a special relationship with one another. I want to further examine these ideas in my next post.

Herein lies the problem.