I'm the son of a black father and a white mother. As a child coming up in the 1980s and '90s, I immersed myself in hip-hop style and culture, excelled at sports, rocked aerodynamic hairstyles, and spoke in the same florid body language that the older brothers at the local black barbershop were fluent in.
I played basketball fiendishly, and on the asphalt, other black players addressed me without thinking as nigga. Once or twice, some white person referred to me (also without thinking) as a nigger. I was black back then, period.
As I've gotten older, however, my clothes have started to fit slimmer and my interests have widened. And I can't help but notice that I've become less black to others. Even before Barack Obama's election made ours a supposedly "post-racial" society (the one-drop rule is so 20th century), the truth is that the criteria we use to designate someone as acting, or even being black in the post-civil rights/hip-hop-era often has little, sometimes even nothing at all, to do with a person's actual racial heritage or physical characteristics. Rather, this particular designation is often an assessment of behavioral traits, a judgment of cultural values and a subjective projection of what is "real."
The more I've thought about it, the more I've found it's at the very margins of race, in the shadowy figure of the mulatto, that the notion of blackness can be most poignantly illuminated. This is because mixed-race blacks—while occupying a position in the culture that is at once privileged and cursed—are the physical incarnation of a racial dilemma that all blacks inevitably must confront: To sell out or keep it real? That is the question.
Consider, for example, two of the most visible mulattoes living and working today: the president himself and the rapper Drake. Both of these men are the direct offspring of black fathers and white mothers. They both proudly define themselves as black. And they both have benefited in large and tangible ways from the fact that much of the rest of the world sees them as such—despite the fact that both were raised mostly by the white sides of their families and in staggeringly un-black settings (Honolulu and Toronto, respectively).
Obama, who has darker skin and rounder features than Drake, looks blacker to my mixed-kid eye. (Drake, who is half-Jewish, looks kind of Sicilian, with thick, bushy eyebrows, a perpetual Fred Flintstone mal razé, and a nose full of character.) Beyond just looking black, though, Obama has, as we all know at this point, also done some significantly black things in his life, such as moving to the South Side of Chicago, working as a community organizer, marrying a dark-skin black woman, joining a passionately black church, raising black children, and publishing Dreams from My Father, a veritable bildungsroman of blackness.
Drake, on the other hand, dropped out of high school and played Jimmy Brooks on the television show Degrassi: The Next Generation before turning his attention to rap. So why, then, has Drake—in spite of his foreign passport (he's Canadian), TeenNick pedigree and all-around not-very-real upbringing—able to effortlessly ingratiate himself with black America, whereas Obama struggled mightily to convince us to accept him as one of our own? (Think back to the primaries; it was only in victory that Obama became black.) The answer to this question speaks to one of the most heartbreaking aspects of black life today.
We have been, for a while now, caught up in a vexed zeitgeist in which, for African Americans, racial integrity overwhelmingly equates to embracing the narrow values of the black street culture of the past three decades: hip-hop culture. Or, to put it another way, to be black in a "real" way nowadays is to more closely resemble Jay-Z or Carmelo Anthony than James Baldwin or Thurgood Marshall.
Ours is a novel time in the history of America, indeed, for today the most culturally influential, financially successful and globally visible blacks ever—those of the hip-hop generation (which, to be precise, is now really in its second or even third iteration)—are also the greatest disseminators of the most abysmal anti-black stereotypes conceivable.
Drake, in his professional choices and his public demeanor—and most certainly not in his inherent physical attributes or ethnic background (he had a bar mitzvah!)—has packaged himself to fit neatly into the contemporary vision of what blackness must be—or, at the very least, must worship. And though he is more thoughtful in his lyrics than many of his colleagues, and seems like a thoroughly decent guy on a personal level, his presence on the black scene, unlike Obama's, has done next to nothing to challenge the ingrained prejudices of a culture that consistently prizes street knowledge over book learning, being cool over being disciplined, and elevates hustlers and criminals to the highest positions of cultural importance.
How will the perpetuation of this self-defeating mindset ever relent? The only way it will, I'm convinced, is if we in black America begin to have an honest and deliberate conversation about just where it is we want our culture to go in the next generation or two. The election of a gifted and brilliant black man to the White House has done more than anything to warrant that conversation. And yet, more than a year into the Obama era, we still haven't begun to have this dialogue in a serious or sustained way.
Black writers, intellectuals and public figures have an obligation to resist and speak out against such limited forms of identity as we see around us today, and, more than that, to find ways to reconnect the community on a broad scale to the rich legacy of mature cultural achievement within the black tradition. It is a legacy that stems from slave times in figures like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, courses through W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson, and can be found in the not so distant past in James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.
Obama, for his part, has tried to spark this discussion on several occasions, most recently last July when, speaking to a crowd gathered for the NAACP's 100th anniversary, he rightly pointed out that "our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne." But the president can't just talk to himself all the time. Where are all the other voices? The silence is deafening.
Meanwhile, Drake's first studio album, Thank Me Later, will be shipping to stores and dominating the airwaves soon enough, and it's my guess that it's going to sound pretty cool. But it won't do much more than that. For my part, I'd be more than willing to thank him right now if he would do something serious to steer this culture in a new and more intelligent direction, and not just trade in the same worn-out clichés and patterns of thought our parents and grandparents marched to overcome. That would be realer than real.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture. It will be published on April 29 by The Penguin Press.