A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“[Music] acted as both a call for people to take to the streets and a reprieve after a long day of protest, or marching, or working some despised job.”

Abdurraqib’s understanding of music will be more fully explored throughout the collection. Music’s expressive qualities allow it to function as a medium for both personal and political feelings. Here, as throughout the collection, Abdurraqib contrasts the exceptional with the mundane.

“The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.”

Memory and remembering are important topics for Abdurraqib, as history has often forgotten Black Americans. A Black funeral, then, becomes the site of insistent remembering of the deceased. The image of a sinking body also summons up the image of Africans thrown into the sea during the Middle Passage. Remembering the dead becomes a radical act of reclamation.

“I like this idea—that it’s noble for Black people to react viscerally to work that is created for us, and to respond in a language we know well. There is something valuable about wanting the small world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return.”

This visible reaction is another example of performing—its overt physical nature does not mean it is inauthentic. Rather, it is the embodied performance of infectious and community-centered emotion that spills over to those around.

“& why he wasn’t like everyone else who looked like him & some would say we’ve all got a little magic inside & it just takes the wrong mix of people and imagination to bring it out & this one goes out to both the magic performance itself & the audience, waiting with held breath & not realized they’re in on the ground floor of the trick.”

Using the more confessional, personal style he has developed in the first essays of the Movements, Abdurraqib mimics how his subject internalizes the racist commentary he hears at school. He ironically uses the word “magic” to illustrate exactly how white people can treat Black people as “Magical Negroes” in real life. Alluding to the Vanishing Man trick from the movie The Prestige, Abdurraqib describes how this pressure changes young Black people.

“There are a lot of things white people get wrong about blackface, but the one I think about is the way they slather the makeup on their faces, as if they’ve never seen a Black person before, usually pitch black and wildly uneven, or smeared haphazardly over the skin, with no attention to detail. I have thought before about how this feels like an additional insult positioned atop the obvious one. How even an attempt to mimic cannot be done with enough care for the skin of the mimicked.”

Abdurraqib’s refusal to use metaphors when analyzing blackface leads him to emphasize the physicality and practical reality of the make-up. The sloppiness of the application mimics the depersonalization of Black people and reveals the callousness of appropriation.

“The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact.”

One of the themes of the collection is the impact of American history on Black people—how they perform their identities, create their art, or mourn. Approach to history “by distance and not by impact” is at the core of the divide between white and Black Americans. Through his interconnection of historical and contemporary examples, Abdurraqib demonstrates that temporal distance is much shorter than American institutions and people admit.

“I guess I have tricked you into reading about my mother again, and how I do not know if she wanted to go to space but how I still wanted that for her. How, from time to time, I would catch her gazing at the stars. How, of course, I’ve held that old Labelle photo close because it reminds me of a sky my mother might be occupying now, picking out her black afro until it blooms and blooms, an endless dark. No one I love is immune to looking upward on a clear night.”

Abdurraqib’s confessional style links the personal and the collective. Here, his desire for his mom to go to space reflects both his grief at having lost her and his argument about Black people’s relationship with astronomy, science fiction, and possibility. As symbolized by Labelle, outer space is a place where Black women can take up room and celebrate their Blackness.

“I give thanks for Octavia Butler, who still wrote Black people as human even when they were something greater.”

Octavia Butler’s writing contrasts with Toni Morrison’s in many ways. Abdurraqib opens the collection with a quote from Morrison that emphasizes the specificity of Black identity and demands that writing reflect that. Morrison’s novels center Black people, especially women, drawing attention to historical trauma. In contrast, Butler’s books argue for a Black future. Butler treats Blackness as a strength—an integral part of a person’s identity that allows them to survive and thrive.

“A country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to the lineage.”

Abdurraqib’s definition of a country reflects his argument about America’s treatment of history. The place holds the impact of history, no matter its temporal distance. Countries are symbols of violence and oppression, which means that contemporary bodies carry both the stress and the physical marks of difference from many generations.

“This is one of the biggest tricks of them all. You are burdened with a place, and then, by the time you realize that exit is a possibility, the options for exit can seem distant, or insurmountable. I love Columbus, Ohio, and wince when I speak the name into the air.”

Abdurraqib considers the paradoxical hate and love for a birthplace. Leaving is both possible and impossible, and staying is both a burden and a gift. A place can feel like a home and a prison. This desire to be accepted by a place that rejects Blackness is reflected in his personal experiences, his description of Black veterans, and Josephine Baker’s life.

“And so the spades player must be versatile and willing to go with any rules laid down, even if they seem absurd, or unfair, or entirely whimsical.”

Spades players here become a metaphor for the code switching expected of Black Americans. Just as a skilled player must adapt to changes in rules, a Black person must be willing to adapt to the changing expectations of white institutions and people—unspoken rules that can be just as absurd, unfair, or whimsical as card game rules.

“For that, I love this small sliver of the life Don Shirley lived. That in a country still obsessed with Black people solving problems they didn’t create, Don Shirley walked away, answering only to himself and his own musical curiosities.”

Abdurraqib praises Shirley for living a life centered on his desires and preferences. Shirley is positioned as a foil, or even an antidote, to the “Magical Negro” trope into which the movie version of him has been flattened in the Green Book. Shirley’s real life was not defined by his relationship to a white man or his ability to impart wisdom that makes the world better—he was a real person, not a racist stereotype.

“America, of course, is not better than this. When the entire architecture of a land is built on a chorus of violences, it takes an unnatural amount of work to undo every lineage of harm and then honor the harmed parties with anything resembling equity.”

Abdurraqib hopes to hold the US accountable and to make it acknowledge its full history. He emphasizes that historical and ongoing violence informs all of the systems of the country as he points toward the country’s foundational moments. His choice of the word “unnatural” suggests how foundational racist violence is to the US.

“And since we are talking about movies, after all: the whole thing I’m kicking around here is how movies have been so relentless in their quest to sanitize race relations in America that it has almost become its own genre entirely.”

Building upon his analysis of the invisibility of Black performers and the “Magical Negro” trope, Abdurraqib points to Hollywood’s insistent and persistent appeasement of white audiences, suggesting that the only “bad” people were individual racists. This denies the reality of American history, which has to be acknowledged before the country can heal. Movies that “sanitize race relations” support Abdurraqib’s claim that many Black artistic performances, and many daily expectations for Black people, are expected to comfort and please white audiences.

“It is why, in response to ‘Black Lives Matter’—as a statement, not even a movement- a chosen response was to break apart the sentiment and apply it to all things. Not just different races or individuals, but foods or shoes or hair products. Commodify into silence. And so when there were Black people who decided to use their platform to not so subtly reclaim that which had been commodified and sanitized in the name of American Comfort, the pushback was often irrational, coming loudest from those who were the most afraid.”

In one of his few direct mentions of the Black Lives Matter movement, Abdurraqib calls attention to capitalism’s role in devaluing the movement, the commodification of which echoes the sanitation of period piece movies for white audiences. Beyoncé serves as an example of how the commodification of labor is used to silence political speech, made inoffensive for all audiences. By speaking out on the job, she disrupts that expectation for both mainstream musical artists and common workers. Anger comes from this disruption to the status quo.

“It’s amazing, the weapons people disguise in small talk.” 

Small talk becomes a site of violence as white speakers perform politeness while pointedly Othering non-white interlocutors by commenting upon a name or asking where someone is from. If a Black person responds by expressing their feelings of insult or displeasure, then they are chastised for not performing according to respectability politics.

“The end result isn’t the excellence, even if it is excellent. The excellence, for me, rests in the mundane fight for individuality, or the excellence rests in the moments before the moment. Excellence, too, is showing up when it is easier for you not to be present, especially when no one would notice you being gone.”

Abdurraqib’s definition of excellence underscores his argument about the mundane fight for individuality. Notably, Abdurraqib does not include prominent Black activists and historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or Sojourner Truth in his illustrations of Black activism or excellence. Instead, he highlights Black people simply showing up in their everyday life or doing their jobs. Excellence can be drawing attention to your presence and celebrating your visibility as a Black individual when you could just as easily be invisible. Insisting on individuality is a radical statement.

“It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad. And so, there is beef, the concoction of which at least promises a new type of relationship to fill the absence.”

Abdurraqib positions tenderness and violence as foils. While appearing to be mutually exclusive, they are deeply similar: In Black masculinity, physical contact, whether tender or violent, establishes a relationship. The metaphor of a waltz emphasizes the performative nature of love and anger and the rhythm of movement. The divide between words and actions reflects Abdurraqib’s consideration of how the two work together to create identities.

“One of the many problems with beef-as it has been constructed throughout history-is that bystanders are used as a currency within the ecosystem of the disagreement. [...] Beef is sometimes about who has and who doesn’t have, and with that in mind, even people can become property.”

Explicitly, Abdurraqib draws a connection between feuding and the historical objectification of Black people. Words such as “currency” and “property” recall the enslavement of Black people. In making this connection, he suggests the dangers and extensive ramifications of fighting. The intersections of Blackness and masculinity can have an impact on Black women. This aspect of Black history, he suggests, has its own difficulties.

“It is easiest to think about gentrification in terms of what once was standing and what no longer is. But I think of it more often as a replacement of people and their histories.”

Abdurraqib extends his examination of place to the idea of gentrification, which he sees as a violent act of erasure. The invisibility it creates also echoes his argument about the erasure of historical Black figures and the erasure of Blackness in contemporary mainstream pop culture.

“Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality.”

Abdurraqib takes issue with willful and purposefully inauthentic performances of Blackness around whiteness. Building upon his critique of American Comfort, he positions this fake hope as the continuation of performing comfort for white people. Without acknowledging the past, America cannot change.

“I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.”

Abdurraqib extends his consideration of the connectivity between tenderness and violence to self-love. He connects societal and cultural violence to the violence Black people often commit against themselves, as exemplified by Abdurraqib’s personal struggles with depression.

“And so I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.”

Abdurraqib ties the duality of tenderness and violence to the wider treatment of Black people, especially men, in America. The country claims to be for everyone, but systematically and consistently oppresses and abuses non-white bodies. Making this connection also suggests that violence has an important role in Black survival that cannot be overlooked.