Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (11 page)

First and foremost, rock and roll is black music, and the only real evolution from rock and roll—hip-hop—is also black. Yes, I’m aware I’m breaking new ground here, but I’m getting to a point, I think. Bear with me, black readers about to throw up.

This is when a hack like me throws in a quote from a movie where a black character elaborates on my point. Here, a passage from the flick
Be Cool
.

Yeah—what he said.

Now, I’m not saying cool didn’t exist before blacks invented it. They just invented it
better
.

Think about what was epitomized as “cool” by white kids in the 1950s. James Dean? I remember him coming across as sulky—a walking pout, an A-ha band member in a tight T-shirt. And what the hell was he so cranky about? Guy walked through his life like his underwear chafed him. Jim Backus should’ve just slapped him and told him to “shape up!” (It worked for Gilligan.) Maybe blacks didn’t become the touchstone of “cool” until a bit later. I’m not sociologically savvy enough to know, but rock and roll definitely had a part in it. Then white deejays grabbed it and delivered it to the white masses. From small clubs to stadiums, rock music changed what teenagers did with their free time and how they spent their money. Hence peace sign decals, posters by
Peter Max, and lava lamps (things no World War II vet would ever buy).

But cool, since then, has changed. Behaviors that are self-destructive at their core—criminality, illegitimacy, rejection of work—are not simply accepted, they are encouraged. And if these cool behaviors kill, as I believe they do, they kill nobody as much as they kill those who originally helped make cool ubiquitous: blacks.

What do I know? I’m a middle-aged white guy who listens to doom metal on a stair-climber. I’m no more an expert on black culture than Cornel West is on the Melvins. (Professor: Start with
Houdini
.) Ask me about Killer Mike and you might as well ask a four-year-old about German beer. (I’ve tried this—it doesn’t work.) So I have to draw on my limited history, and scholarly journals I found on the Internet, to figure out a coherent point.

Let me draw on my past first. When I was a kid I had a best friend, who I’ll call James (because his name was James). In kindergarten we got on like two peas in a pod. We weren’t aware we belonged to different teams, with different skin colors. All we knew was that we laughed a lot, perhaps only because we sat next to each other. Really, that could have been it. When you’re five years old and eat boogers for a living, you aren’t picky (well, I guess you are, actually). I spent a year being friends with James. And then our friendship disappeared.

In first grade he went to one school and I went to another. When we ran into each other some years later (maybe sixth grade), he was different. I’d like to think I was the same (I’d grown an inch, but now I had a crossword of acne on my forehead and an unnatural obsession with Lee Majors), but he treated me oddly, not like an old friend but like a faceless ghost. A disposable
stranger. To him, perhaps, I was suddenly just another white kid in a white world, and he was black. I didn’t get it at first, but over time I sensed it had to do with me not being like him anymore. I accepted the new reality sadly, for no other reason than that there was no alternative.

His rejection bothered me, and I guess, since I’m writing about it now, it still does. Yeah, I know—when you’re kids you don’t know racism or the reality of life. But we were friends, and suddenly we weren’t. For a forty-five-pound pile of good-natured energy, I was miffed. I was hurt. I drowned my sorrows in Mr. Pibb and Pop Rocks (together they give you x-ray vision).

I saw James a few years later. We were now officially strangers. On a few occasions, I would say hi, and he looked at me like I was a billboard for discount electrolysis. He walked right by me, cooler things in mind.

This episode with James was my first glimmer of a separation that became more common as I experienced more of life. If blacks believe we judge by color, why shouldn’t they return the favor?

George Elliott Clarke, from Duke University, explains that cool, “though an amorphous quality—more mystique than material—is a pervasive element in urban black male culture.”

He quotes other academics, Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, who say that blacks employ cool “as a tool for hammering masculinity out of the bronze of their daily lives,” or rather a way to “tip society’s imbalanced scales in his favor.” My take: If you are born powerless, you create your own power through a detached, “third rail” cool persona that others dare not touch.

It also means, quoting Majors and Billson again, that “coolness means poise under pressure and the ability to maintain
detachment, even during tense encounters.” I’d like to think that that was behind James’s response when he ran into me, but maybe he just forgot who I was. If I go with the latter, I would have no chapter. SO …

These academics cite the dunking of basketballs, the end zone dance, and high-five handshakes as the epitome of cool. The “cool aesthetic” puts “importance of personal control over a situation,” to a point that it “involves a willingness to engage in violence.”

The other key element, which makes me think of my old friend who no longer acknowledged me, is detachment. With James that was the first sign that things changed, his decision to “suppress emotion,” while valuing expressiveness and “verbal dexterity” elsewhere. In that sense, “coolness” means “cold.” All of us do this—toward coworkers, relatives, and exes. But it’s directed at
them
, not at their
skin
.

Coolness is a code that says, at least to me: “Greg, you are not part of my community, and for good reason.” And this creates a force field that prevents dialogue between whites and blacks about the destructive behaviors that affect all of us, even if they harm blacks more. Whites cannot possibly discuss dependency, self-reliance, gangs, or lack of fathers without invading a space they believe they do not belong in.

How did something that seems positive (a dignified method of elevating you above an unfair surrounding) become purely a defensive reaction, for the sake of, well, being defensive? And what does being cool, ultimately, do to those who adopt the “cool pose”?

Research suggests it sucks in the long run, that it contributes to the underachievement of black children, boys especially.

I found a pretty interesting paper in the
Journal of Negro Education
(not my normal Friday night reading, but there you go). For those of you at home, the title is “Unraveling Underachievement Among African American Boys from an Identification with Academics Perspective,” and the author, from the University of Oklahoma, is Jason W. Osborne. In it, you’ll find out how acting cool ends up being a dead end for so many young, once-promising kids.

The cool pose often leads to “flamboyant and nonconformist behavior,” which ends up, for its practitioners, as a road to detention, suspension, or expulsion in most schools. Being perceived as cool, for blacks especially, becomes incompatible with being a good student. Reading is for losers. Math is for geeks. Social studies is for both (i.e., me). Being highly motivated to excel in school is denigrated as uncool. To use the academic vernacular: “African American boys adopt a strategy for coping with their membership in a stigmatized group that is oppositional identification with academics,” Osborne writes. In regular language: Book learning is for losers. It’s not laziness. It’s a determined effort not to be perceived as trying. The thing is, this pose is probably just as hard to maintain as working hard at something is. It’s not lazy. Just wasteful.

The end result: Cool dictates that a large group of kids flunk out because it’s uncool to try. Achieving success means adopting pursuits that are considered “white,” which could lead to rejection by their friends. In short: School doesn’t rate. It’s just a game for whitey. Blacks aren’t buying that road to success. The road is paved with an appeasement to lame authority with no promise of immediate reward. Better to shoot hoops and pursue rap—exhilarating areas far more amenable to black achievement (unless you count the New York Knicks).

What is a “cool pose”? Hell, how do I know? I’m about as cool as Jell-O. A cool pose for me happens when I’m alone, flexing in my bedroom while listening to Mannheim Steamroller. But Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, in a
New York Times
piece from 2006, describes the modern version in this paragraph:

Hell, even I admit that sounds pretty fun.

Returning to the denigration of scholastic achievements, he notes “that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.” In other words: they’re failing but still feel cool.

There it is again, the bane of all existence: self-esteem. What I would give for a nation with low self-esteem. (I think it’s called China.) Nothing bad ever comes from feeling bad, trust me. If I didn’t feel bad, I’d get nowhere. The last time I felt really good and was completely stress-free, I was drunk. If I got drunk every day, though, I couldn’t afford to get drunk. Feeling bad enables me to do the work that allows me, financially, to get drunk so that, periodically, I feel good. (That’s pretty much a blueprint for life.) In the end the self-esteem movement only benefits the “experts” in self-esteem. They get book deals, TV spots, and academic grants. The rest of us get a generation of sullen blamers. It’s beneath a lot of kids of every color to work at
McDonald’s, yet they wonder why no one wants to hire them for anything else.

Patterson calls this cool adaptation “the Dionysian trap for young black men.” But I might add that it’s a trap for
all
men. It just hurts black men more because they’re afforded fewer options for escape when it doesn’t go well. A typical white kid can stop acting cool, and do something else, because he has the options to do it. And both end up working for the Asian kid who dropped the pose first.

And so cool culture has enlisted a generation of young men who need that decaying culture the least. It’s a quickie feel-good antidote to a longer, harder path toward pride and self-respect; it cuts them off from the dedicated work that results in long-lasting achievement. Worse, it’s so damn attractive that its destructive nature is clouded over by its appeal. And let’s face it: It’s fun. How do you fight that? Only one way—stigmatize it.

Because cool, for everyone, is a bad thing. It’s a value-removal machine, a champion of reverse achievement. But, judging from recent history, for kids enduring the hell of inner cities, cool is worse. It’s another version of crack. Offering immediate appeal and pleasure, it is a gateway drug to nowhere, a one-way ticket to the fruitless decades that follow. This is true not just for blacks but for everyone. What of white kids who start wearing their pants low and then end up having to drop their pants for
real
in prison? Every day I pray for the return of the belt.

We’ve come to a point where teens mock avenues that lead to achievement while they pursue roads to ruin. Evil finds the path of least resistance, and that path is almost always labeled “cool.” Cool encourages the abandonment of effort that wins respect, degrees, and jobs. Cool allows evil in all its shapes and forms to take you to places you never thought you’d go. Or would want to
go. If life offered mulligans, I’d bet every single person who opted for “cool” as a teen would jump at the chance to opt out of the lifestyle that swallowed a decade of their life, or more.

I wonder where the hell my old friend James is now. Unfortunately, statistics say that it’s six times more likely that he’ll be in prison than I will. That ain’t cool.

If you’re looking for the worst person in the room, find the guy wearing the “Free Mumia” button, as a show of support for a cop killer. Odds are he never wears that piece of flair around cops. That sort of brave political stand is better suited to a Bad Religion concert than a funeral for a fallen officer.

When I wrote this book, a homicidal maniac named Christopher Dorner was on the loose, somewhere in the mountains of Southern California. The former LA cop, Navy reservist, and murderer who was charged with killing three police officers and leaving three others wounded, posted a rambling “manifesto” elaborating on his murderous plans of revenge against a society that shortchanged him, a manifesto that also contained rantings about his favorite news personalities, politicians, and musicians. (I mean, couldn’t he have just started a blog?) So, what do you do when a cop killer is also a cop? If you’re a prick, you root for him!

I read his manifesto, fourteen pages that re-created the experience of sitting next to a caffeinated goofball on a bus who just saw an Oliver Stone movie for the first time (which is not much
different from sitting next to Oliver Stone, actually). The diary was at times coherent, other times bitter, and the sum total of the mess was an angry guy with a score to settle, and perhaps suffering from an undefined mental illness. Sort of like an MSNBC anchor. In fact, exactly like an MSNBC anchor.