Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams (pub. 2010)

  It’s a young man’s book full of self-exculpation and rationalisation.  The writing is flat and shows the signs of that evil fairy, the purging editor, that watched over its cradle.  Nevertheless it is interesting to such as I who has often wondered about that American one drop doctrine. Young Thomas Chatterton went with the hip-hop identity with its abrogation of all sumptuary laws and de rigueur potty mouth.   His father Clarence was black married to  Kathleen a white woman.  Thomas and his brother Clarence were both taught to think of themselves as black because that is how they would be treated and they might as well learn to adapt to it.

My brother and I were black, period. My parents adhered to a strict and unified philosophy of race, the contents of which boil down to the following: There is no such thing as being half-white, for black, they explained, is less a biological category than a social one. It is a condition of the mind that is loosely linked to certain physical features, but more than anything it is a culture, a challenge, and a discipline. We were taught from the moment we could understand spoken words that we would be treated by whites as though we were black whether we liked it or not, and so we needed to know how to move in the world as black men. And that was that.

That makes sense yet the father rented a house on the white side of town.  He was born in 1932 in segregationist Texas and was tired of being told where he could live.  His mother was unmarried and he never knew his father.  By superhuman determination he ended up with a doctorate in sociology.  His story might be more interesting than that of his son, a rather cossetted lad who swanned about in garments that have always looked to me like high end curtain material.   From a culture that produced jazz, blues, spirituals and so on hip-hop seems a severe declension.  Williams blames the value system that it promotes on the anti-school, underachieving, criminality and thuggism of those that take it as their gospel.  At a certain point Williams discovered that in his private Catholic school being black with menaces was an effective way of facing down challengers.  His brother Clarence and Clarences’s friend Michael abetted him in this.   They deal with Bobby who is going to beat up young Thomas.  

“Walk over to my car, Bobby,” Michael said, and Bobby obeyed. Then Michael stepped around to the trunk and opened it, and inside there was a wooden Louisville Slugger and a big white tube sock. “Look into the trunk, bitch,” Michael said, and he picked up the sock by the open end and let it dangle from his hand. It had a large bulge weighting down the bottom, which Michael explained to Bobby was a padlock.“Which would you prefer,” Michael asked, “that I beat your faggot ass black-and-blue with this padlock or with that Louisville Slugger?” Bobby, alone on the corner with the three of us and deserted by his friends, didn’t say anything, just started to cry—to sob, really, in big heaving breaths like he was hyperventilating or suffering from the severest case of hiccups. He looked as if his bowels might move.

Williams life was in a no man’s land in the fraught borders between black and white, between  dismal hip-hop and the nest of culture in a house with 15,000 books all underlined and annotated.  His father gave him a lot of tuition which resulted in his getting a place in Georgetown University.   There the move away from ‘street nigga’ was completed.  He took his degree in philosophy and moved to France to teach English in a secondary school where he resides to this day.  

His story is very one off and as we are told inference from a single example is unsafe.  I blame rock and roll, I blame hip-hop, I blame the parents, are commonplace ways of dodging agency.  His summary judgment of his old girlfriend Stacey is cold, final, and unbecoming of a gentleman who knows the difference between a baguette and a brioche.  

On the whole informative.  I annotated between the lines.  If you come across it remaindered pick it up (after washing your hands).