The "badass motherfucker" problem in the Black community

With John McWhorter

In the following excerpt, John McWhorter and I talk about the dire consequences of idealizing hyper-masculine “toughness.” John dubs it the problem of trying to be seen as a “badass motherfucker,” and for me the experience is quite personal, besides being of concern to the broader Black community. My own need to assert my status as “authentically Black” very nearly cost me my career, and it could have cost much more than that.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: You know, it's this redneck Tom Sowell point that I tend to avoid—because I don't know what to do with it—which is in the Black community, there is a value placed on being a badass motherfucker. Some of this is that a critical mass of people salute these men for the resistance, the idea being that that's the Black thing. You don't put up with any shit. I don't know what to do with that. Does it come from hillbilly culture? Probably. Are there cultural differences among people? Yes. And that clearly is an element in the water in Black culture: crazy motherfucker. Okay. Richard Pryor, in the benign sense.

But then it comes out with this business of resisting arrest and people saluting, it as an indication of your masculinity, that you're kind of saluting Black oppression in the past. Are we supposed to say that Black men need to get over that? And then the question is, would there be a point? It's kind of like saying that people need to stop using the n-word as a term of affection.

You know, you can have a nice panel about it. I remember once I was talking to a Black audience in D.C. And I was suggesting that this business of going to pieces every time somebody uses the n-word, one way that we might get past that is to just stop going to pieces and have the pride to understand that some word cannot make us cry. And it wasn't a tough session, but one Black guy said, "Well, I hear what you're saying, brother, but you know, I'm a tough motherfucker. I like to get up and get angry," and he stood up. And the whole room starts clapping, especially the women.

And I get it. I understand the humor. I understand the cultural strain. No, I'm not that deracialized. But the other side of that is something like Ahmaud Arbery trying to take the gun, or Daunte Wright trying to jump into the car instead of just standing there and taking what he was about to be given. He shouldn't have been killed, but still. If the idea is going to be, it's the proper Black thing to resist and how dare you kill somebody when they do it, there's just nowhere to go from there.

And yet I can tell that part of it is the idea that to resist arrest is to be a soldier. That's what somebody with balls does. That's the Black thing to do. He's not some namby-pamby white guy who just says, “Yes, officer.” I don't know what to do with that. I don't know whether there's any point in saying that something should change. I'm not a badass motherfucker. Clearly. And so I'm certainly not the one who's going to say stop acting like one. I don't know what to do with it, but clearly that's part of it. It's the Black guy's thing to resist. I don't know.

GLENN LOURY: I'll tell you, John, I'm working on the memoir. I really am, John. I'm trying to catch up with you. Maybe if my book sells more than the sum of your books have sold, I will feel like I have pulled even with you. I'm praying, I'm praying. I'm just kidding. But I am in the grips of writing the memoir, so here's one thing that I've discovered about myself. And this is by way of supporting what you just said about badass motherfuckers.

So in the 1980s, I got into trouble with cocaine. I got into trouble with an extramarital affair. I was in the habits of roaming the streets of inner city, Boston: Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, buying drugs, hooking up, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. The most benign of it was playing chess until three o'clock in the morning on the street corner with a guy called Eddie who used to make his living by selling little trinkets off of a tabletop in front of a Korean greasy spoon. Me and Eddie were buddies, and he loved to play chess. He loved to play five-minute chess, and we'd get out there and we'd play.

But that was the most benign of it. I was hanging in the hood with my peeps. I'm a professor at Harvard, 35 years old, hanging in the hoods with my peeps. 37 years old, 40 years old, hanging in the hood with my peeps. Because I was a badass motherfucker, because I could negotiate a seminar room over in Cambridge at the Kennedy School of Government by day and a housing project where just about anything you want, it could be purchased for a price by night. And no one was the wiser.

I was badass motherfucker. I was like Superman. I would go into that telephone booth, and I put on my uniform, cock my hat to the side, pull my collar up, get my walk together, get my slang, my code switching thing. You know how it is. And I could hang. I was authentically Black, John. You wrote a book with that title. I was authentically Black because I could hang in the hood.

Now how fucked up was that? Okay. That's why y'all need to buy the memoir. W.W. Norton & Company, spring of 2022. How messed up was that? So I am familiar with the syndrome, all right. I know what you're talking about. It's a disaster, is what I have to report from my own experience! It is an absolute disaster. Suppose I had been gunned down? I was robbed several times at gunpoint in those years over there on the streets of Boston. Suppose I had lost my life to some trigger-happy, coked-up idiot trying to get the $20 out of my pocket. It could have easily happened.

What a tragedy that would've been, what a waste that would have been. So important to me was my sense of continuity with my life from Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s, that once I had become a tenured professor at Harvard, indeed the first African American to hold the position of tenured professor of economics in that university's history, I was willing to throw it all away just to have the internal sense of authenticity that came from being a badass motherfucker.

I'm here to tell you it is a deep and profound problem in our culture. I'm talking about African Americans, this tendency. It should be renounced. It should be denounced. It should be called out for what it is. There's no glory in it. You think this is politics? You think you're representing the angst of your enslaved ancestors? This is idiocy. It's infantile. It's a mistake.

And yet ... see this stuff is so hard. Orlando Patterson talks about this.

My good friend. And he's right.

And I have seen self-appointed guardians of the race saying that he's just making all that up. The strategy is, "Well, it's more complicated than that." But of course, nobody ever explains the nature of the complexity. But obviously that's there. And it's not as if Black men in the United States starting in the twentieth century are the only people who became dominated by that idea. You can see that in the history of many people, including the Irish, including Italians. You can see it in people other than Black people today.

Good point, John.

But it is a problem. And I find it highly likely that an awful lot of Black people, deep down, like it. They think of it as swagger. They think of it as our way of dealing with a bad hand. Unfortunately, that thing gets a lot of people killed. And that kind of person hears me say that, and they jump and say, the person didn't deserve to die. We agree, folks. I'm human. I know the person shouldn't have died. The point is if only he hadn't resisted, he would still be alive. But there's no room for that point.

We are in such a fucked up place here in 2021 about race. Worse in many ways than it's ever been, because so much of this stuff is based on lies and self-indulgence masquerading as science and morality. And I am genuinely frustrated this month, in particular. Because it's beginning to be clear to me that we can call this a conversation. And we're heard. We're not being muzzled. It's not that anybody's keeping us from saying what we're saying. Nothing of the sort.

What we're saying is always going to be kind of a minority taste. We're heterodox. It's not going to be what the people out there are thinking. It's not going to stop these street protests based on a lie. Maybe that's as good as it gets. Maybe we're expecting too much. We are heard—and I'm very gratified by it—by a great many people, and it is not just white conservatives.

Then every time you have this mob out on the street and the New York Times writing the usual piece, I just think to myself, this is never going to change. It hasn't changed since Rodney King. And here we are. Rodney King, that was a travesty. But it hasn't changed since the early 90s. And I think we just have to be satisfied with it being the way it is here. But sometimes I just wonder, we heterodox people, sitting around and clinking glasses and knowing that we're right doesn't serve the purposes of the community.

And if these riots are going to keep happening, the fact that you and me and Coleman and people like that can go have dinner somewhere and tell our war stories, it doesn't help anything. I'm improvising here, but what is the point of this public intellectual post? I sometimes wonder. I think I'm just getting a little impatient. Things happen slowly. But in this case, I'm not sure the needle is budging at all. Think about last spring and George Floyd, and think about now. I don't know that anything's budged except that you and I were heard by a few more people. And I'm so happy that we're being heard, but still. Maybe I just need to be more patient.