Black on Both Sides, Vol. 9

On T’Challa, Drake’s and Kanye West’s rap beef, writing “The Scar of the West,” and Blackness.

Almost two weeks ago, I had a bowel movement that felt like I was passing razor blades. I groaned through the entire process and saw bright red blood when I wiped. So I took that painful bowel movement seriously and texted my wife immediately. I immediately thought of the night Chadwick Boseman passed and how it saddened my wife and me. For my son’s first Halloween, we got him a Black Panther costume. We ordered him a customer Black Panther teddy bear from Build a Bear that we called T’Chadwa.

In his acting choices, Boseman stretched into past, our present, and our future. His death showed that Black grief would spread “throughout history and into the future.

It ended up being my first case of hemorrhoids, y’all. With my wife’s treatment plan (she’s a doctor; I ceased powerlifting training and added fiber and stool softeners to my diet), I began having regular movements rather than crimson. Still, we both paid apt attention to the lessons of Boseman’s ancestorhood. It was enough to make us afraid. Very afraid.

Drake and Kanye are at it again.

In a bizarre series of events, Drake is the most battle-tested rapper in the mainstream game today. He utterly defeated Meek Mill in their conflict with a combo of music and memes. Kanye, however, remains a more elusive target. More of a producer than a rapper, Kanye doesn’t climb upon any rap aficionados radar for lyricism or battle raps. Instead, ‘Ye has delegated the music aspect of rap beef to the lyrically reputable Pusha T, who got the better of Drake with his “A Story of Aididon.”

Pusha T showed a deep understanding of how rap beef works. The nuances matter. In revealing to the world that Drake was hiding a child, Pusha stepped right to the edge of what Black personhood considers an automatic surrender condition. If you have to go after someone’s child in a diss song, you’ve run out of ammo. Your opponent won by attrition.

Jay-Z was declared the loser of his beef in Nas when he disrespected his daughter in “Supa Ugly:”

I came in your Bentley backseat (Damn)/ Skeeted in your Jeep (Woo)/ Left condoms on your baby-seat (Woo)/

Jigga only survived the beef because of “The Blueprint,” a classic album of undeniable quality.

Another example is 50 Cent’s and Ja Rule’s beef, which eventually encompassed many rappers signed on Aftermath and Interscope Records. The entirety of Murda Inc. and its affiliates such as the Terror Squad also was pulled into the fray. In “Loose Change,” Ja Rule stepped over the child line when dissing Eminem:

Em, you claim your mother’s a crackhead And Kim is a known slut So what’s Hailie gon’ be when she grows up?

Eminem raged in an interview afterward, demanding his child be kept out of the beef. Public opinion soured on Ja Rule afterward, giving 50 Cent and his crew the victory. Ja’s defeat also saw the waning of Murda Inc’s influence in the hip-hop scene.

In a world where white supremacy tries to get the world to believe lies about Blackness, hip-hop became the latest artform to push back. To internally police the rappers who repped our communities, diss tracks evolved to testify to the skill and character of the dueling artists. The character assessment is most important. And going directly after children in your song is a sign of weak character, of a person who would potentially forsake the future of their community to score a few points over a competitor. It’s gauche.

So why didn’t Black personhood turn against Pusha T? It’s because his observation of how Drake was treating his son was a harsh revelation concerning Aubrey Graham’s character:

A baby’s involved, it’s deeper than rap/ We talkin’ character, let me keep with the facts/ You are hiding a child, let that boy come home/ Deadbeat mothafucka playin’ border patrol, ooh/ Adonis is your son/ And he deserves more than an Adidas press run/

Drake’s success comes from music and moments he can meme. From the dances to “Hotline Bling,” to the Toosie Slide, he has shown a calculating character that’s propelled him to great fame and billions of music streams. But you are not supposed to behave that way with children. You are to love them and to enjoy quotidian existence with your sons and daughters. The memes of Blue Ivy being Beyoncé’s manager do not come from calculated photo opportunities, but the regular love and attention a momma dotes on her daughter. Busta Rhyme’s hyper-masculinity does not prevent him from having tender moments with his son.

Pusha T’s diss to Drake begged the question to his fans — are you OK with a man who behaves that way toward his child? I expect it to come up again in the upcoming lyrical war.

The Scar of the West: On Blackness and Space, Personal and Cosmic was the first of the four Medium Writers Challenge essays I completed.

I read the prompt and was puzzled about how I can write about space in a way that also conformed to the mission of Established in 1865 — exploring Black personhood. In my initial outlining, I honed in on the metaphor of a black hole. I didn’t know what to do with it yet, but I attached to the word “black” and was determined to fit it into the story somehow.

For me, creativity is a geyser. Smaller stories build pressure until a larger one, the tale building in your heart, erupts. Before I completed the outlining process, I re-read some of my earlier essays for inspiration. These were the works that provided me the gristle to create:

This was one of my earliest Medium posts. One of my lines stuck with me;

The thing, the Big Thing, that happened to America — its genesis and what will be its apocalypse — is slavery. No nation that so intentionally affixed freedom to bondage would be able to escape or survive its contradictions.

If I were to write about space, I would have to write about how we have been forced to share it with bondage. I realized that I could interpret the space prompt as “personal,” and I ought to focus on the things I have experienced with my five senses.

That attention to personal space popped up many times in the Challenge essay by honing in on Black hair and how the coronavirus denied us the ability to tend to our curls and locks:

Despite my attention to my outfits, the sparse amount of Black people I ran into at Kroger knew I was going through it because of my obtusely-angled hairline. Barbershops were a no-no. My fellow Black folk sometimes dressed as nice as I did, fancy with no place to go. But there were also mothers caught up in the family flow with t-shirts and leggings picking up frozen meals for their school-age, homebound children; elderly Black folk in the supermarket’s scooters who kept far away from us but wanted to be closer. At this time, there were no Black kids in public; given that I’ve spent my entire career up to the pandemic working in public schools, I was perturbed. All of our hair was out of place and out of line. It would be some time before we felt safe attending to that aspect of our bodies.

Boseman’s passing was the second story that helped me hone my ideas for the challenge:

My family mourned Boseman hard. The night he passed, my family all called each other in disbelief and pain.

Upon his burial, I wrote my eulogy for him and began with:

The body of Chadwick Boseman — the avatar of a future where Black people could politically self-determine — was laid to earthly rest in South Carolina this week, a state in which nearly 60% of its population was enslaved on the eve of the Civil War.

Boseman took roles that honored Black personhood. Our children know him as T’Challa, but their parents know him from the Black men he portrayed. In his acting choices, Boseman stretched into the past, our present, and our future. His death showed that Black grief would spread “throughout history and into the future.” In rereading this story, I realized that I was beginning to develop ideas on the cosmic significance of Black personhood, that our sense of self is “a cosmic energy that stretches into the deceased’s past and toward our future.”

I concluded by saying that:

We pray for a future where his energy, pulling from centuries of bondage, and centuries more of moral agitation, reincarnate into another artist to inspire another generation of children so that Blackness may never leave the Earth.

Rereading this story gave me the cosmic angle that pops up frequently in the Challenge essay:

Old Glory has always had stars on it to communicate the cosmic aspirations of white supremacy. Each star represents a state, or white people’s aspiration to project their views of freedom and democratic government onto the celestial bodies. Space is black. They wanted to write the future of their nation on Blackness.

“White people do not have a coherent sense of ancestral pain. They crib ours and misuse it,” I stated in this story I wrote for Gen about the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland. Based on U.S. Census information, Portland’s Black population is 5.8%. Why the hell was such a white city enraging itself over Black Lives Matter?

In the story, I discuss the concept of ancestral pain that I discovered from another blogger and how white supremacy cannot ever have a unifying sense of it. When you have one half of a nation voting for a party that seeks to destroy Black personhood, and the other that is so spiritually estranged from their history that they need to draw pain from the struggles of my people, then there cannot be a shared sense of grief and needed reparation from white people. Even our supposed white allies were getting it wrong. They want to fight for us when they need to fight for their own souls.

“For white people, Blackness is the wormhole toward their redemption and the black hole for all their fears,” I wrote in the beginning section of the Challenge essay. Rereading this story helped the thesis of the essay click within my soul. And thus I wrote some of the coldest words I’ve ever written:

To them, there is only one way to be Black. It is the theme writ upon the cosmos. Look up at night. Space is black. White people call my people Black. Our skin color, our political identity, is the parchment of the universe. Our diaspora is linked solar systems, our homes, planets. All white supremacy can do is try to throw up stars. Some want to join us and shine. Others want to burn us. We cannot have space to ourselves, no matter how hard we try. Our only purpose for them is to write their story upon us.

I will continue next week with analyzing the Work challenge essay. Until then, you can read them below: