Losing My Cool (27 page)

Of course, I immediately recognized the song he was quoting because I also listen to the music. I don't think it's possible to shut your eyes and ears completely to a culture as pervasive and aesthetically seductive as hip-hop—and I wonder whether it would even be desirable to do that. I don't fault this man for being aware of what is simply around him. I do, though, find myself contemplating and feeling sorry for the guy. It is precisely this intangible smallness of mind and inability to transcend skin-deep superficiality, this moral childishness and sheepish conformity, that is the root problem in black life today and the true subject of this book.

The fact is that this problem can never be solved simply by smashing up all the Snoop Dogg albums, as the Reverend Calvin Butts has tried to do, or by banning the most offensive hip-hop fashions, as the city of Baltimore once considered. The better approach—if the far more difficult one—would be for us to learn, once and for all, how to interpret and navigate the world around us, and to stop confusing the shoes on our feet or the songs in our ears for ourselves.

 

 

 

A book does not belong to its author alone—many people give shape to it. Which is not to imply that anyone listed below necessarily shares any of the views advanced in this work. Rather, it is simply to say that without these people's presence, the book and I would have been far poorer.

I want to express my deepest thanks to my parents, who have worked so hard and of whom I am so proud. Both of you inspire me to want to be better than I am.

Truman Capote wrote, “Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.” I am indebted to my teacher, mentor, and friend Katie Roiphe more than I could ever possibly say or repay. In those fragile early phases of writing when a little class assignment attempts to become an op-ed, which then somehow attempts to become a viable book proposal, it was Katie who gave me the confidence to believe my goals were not beyond my reach. In addition to being brilliant, she was kind and tremendously generous with me. I cannot imagine this book existing without the insight, guidance, reassurance, and encouragement she provided along the way.

I need to thank my agent, Elyse Cheney, for taking a chance on me, for refusing to send out my proposal until it was ready, and when it finally was, for schlepping all over New York City with me in the rain while fighting off a wicked cold. I could not have asked for a better person to work with. Many thanks to Nicole Steen and Hannah Elnan at Cheney Literary Associates.

Toni Morrison once said that editors “are like priests or psychiatrists, the wrong one can do more harm than good, but the right one is worth searching for.” I consider myself very lucky to have found mine. Eamon Dolan is not only a diplomat and a gentleman, but something like a cross between a Neapolitan tailor and a gadfly, trimming and trimming, prodding and prodding, until somewhere along the line a bloated and unruly Microsoft Word document comes to resemble a finished work. Thanks also to Nicole Hughes and everyone else at Penguin who worked so hard on this project.

I am indebted to my big brother, Clarence, who bought me my first laptop and who opened his home to me when I badly needed a room of my own in which to write. I'm proud of you, Clarence. On the topic of rooms, I need to give special thanks to my brothers-from-other-mothers, Carlos Larkin, Joshua Yaffa, and Shahin Vallée, each of whom at various stages of the writing process kept me company, lodged me, and sometimes even fed me in London, Boston, Brooklyn, and Paris. All of you I need to thank for your candid feedback, encouragement, and critical engagement with this book. Josh, especially, I need to thank you for the constant use of your ears, eyes, and apartment; Shahin, for personally making my dream of living and writing in Paris come alive; and Carlos, for all those things that had the two of us in tears that night at the bar in TriBeCa, and much more besides that. Godspeed, brothers.

This book may never have got off the ground without the extraordinary help on so many levels that I received from Berthsy Ayide. Thank you so much for everything.

Many thanks to David Howell, Katherine Howell, and Karen Moore, my second family, for their love and support. Many thanks to Charone and Chamir Shivers, my little brothers, for their belief in me.

I want to thank Noah Eaker for his early encouragement and very helpful feedback, as well as Ashley and John Paul Lech in New York and the Roussell family in Los Angeles for their supreme hospitality.

I am grateful to the faculty at the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU, specifically the late Ellen Willis and the current director, Susie Linfield, for the generous fellowship they awarded me, which made graduate school a possibility; and to the distinguished writer in residence Paul Berman for the hours of stimulating conversation he gave me free of charge. I also want to thank my CRC classmates for creating a thought-provoking and lively atmosphere in which to fall in love with words and writing.

Finally, I have to recognize three very special professors from Georgetown, Marcia Morris, Patrick Laude, and Wilfried Ver Eecke, each of whom taught me at crucial junctures how to think and that I could think. Thank you.

 

 

 

Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Georgetown University and a master's degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He has written for the
Washington Post
and
n+1
. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.