Kick, Push (Belated Thoughts on Afropunk 2016)

In August I went to my first Afropunk. I would’ve written about it sooner, but I needed time to process. I had all of the feelings about it.

Glad to be among my tribe. Sad that it took so long to find them. Annoyed to feel like a fish out of water. I was at least 20 years older than most. Were it not for me, and the handful of other older black folk scattered in ones and twos throughout, there wouldn’t be an Afropunk, because Afro + punk would not be a thing. We were alternative black people before there was an alternative.

I was a skater kid; I was a black skater kid but, according to the world at large, I thought I was white. No I didn’t. I loved skateboarding. I did what I loved, and I paid the price. And today skateboarding is part of hip-hop. The first time I heard Kick, Push I couldn’t believe it.

I know that the “whiteness” thing is still a thing. But it is nothing like it was 30, 35 years ago. In 1982 there were six kinds of black people. Total — men and women. You might think that Spike Lee movies are, like, parables, but they are not. They are 100% accurate. Drop Squad is only barely fiction. Six types, tops. Then there was me. And my college girlfriend, and a few others, alone and crazy.

Then six weeks ago I was surrounded by thousands of beautiful young black people with piercings and tats doing hippie circus arts stuff that would definitely have got your ass beat back in the day. And they thought nothing of it. They seemed to have absolutely no sense of context, of what it took to get there. At a two-day festival celebrating black people who rock, the only image of Jimi Hendrix I ever saw was on the t-shirt I was wearing.

Moving through the thick crowds, people gave me wide berth. In part, I am sure, that was because I suffer from Resting Murder Face. But also I think it was because I wasn’t the smooth shiny new model of alt black person but rather the clanky old unfrozen ’90s caveman T-800 model. It seemed like many there regarded me like Ew, old and I regarded them like I am your Maker. (I’m projecting, of course, but perhaps not entirely.) That was Day 1.

On Day 2, I started to see it differently. I didn’t expect to. But, staked out in a good spot waiting for Skunk Anansie, watching a tiny perfect young lady hula hoop, it occurred to me that this is what progress looks like. The first fish that crawled out of the water died. Then a fish didn’t die but was really unhappy. A few million years later, some bird flew over the water and thought: Ew, fish.

And, that night, Bad Brains (with Living Colour and Fishbone all on stage jamming together) reminded me that I was not the first. In the beginning, there were Chuck and Bo. And it was hard. Then there was Jimi, with his struggles, then Bad Brains, and sometime, a long time ago but still much later than Bad Brains, there was me rapping over hard rock back when that still made everybody mad. I wasn’t that first fish; I was just one of the unhappy ones. One who lived long enough to see birds.

And that’s the way it goes. And that’s the way it should go. The pain of not being one of the six kinds of black people should die with me and my generation. The new ones shouldn’t think about it. They should take it for granted. By the end of the Day 2, I was grateful to see so many black people doing their own thing and not even really knowing it. We paid for it, so they don’t have to.

I wonder if this is how my socioeconomic privilege looks to my parents. I will ask them.

~Balm