In another installment of his series on hip-hop culture, Questlove considers what it means to be “cool,” arguing that “black cool, when it comes right down to it, is everyone’s cool.” He cites a passage from the anthology Black Cool to make his point:
When I read through the book, I locked into an essay by Helena Andrews. It’s called “Reserve,” Andrews’s piece, and it’s about the mask that black women learn to wear as girls. She imagines a black woman moving through a city, negotiating the looks of others on the subway.
She seems to be doing more than everyone else by doing so much less. Your eye is drawn to her. She acknowledges your presence by ignoring it. She is the personification of cool by annihilating your very existence.
What drew me to Andrews was these four sentences, which articulated, in a different way (gender-specific, subway-specific), something that I have thought about black cool for a long time, which is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Black cool is part of society in general, part of white society. Black cool is the tip of African-American culture’s engagement with the broader white culture. Black cool only works the way it works because it’s part of a relationship. Look at Andrews’s scene more closely. The woman, getting attention, rejects that attention, and as a result gets more attention. Cool has an additional dimension, too, which is that it buys time. In an uncertain social situation, where the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences, cool lets you stay a beat behind while you settle on the path of least destruction. Taken to the extreme, cool can be sociopathic; taken to the right levels, it’s a supremely intelligent mix of defense mechanism and mirroring.
The Dish 