Writers Explore What It Means To Be 'Black Cool'

"And, you know, I always give the example we don't celebrate - we don't separate yoga from India or Hinduism. We don't separate French cooking from the French. We don't separate the art of war and strategy from Chinese culture. And so the result of that is that all of these cultures have a kind of social currency on the global stage, but if blackness is separated from this aesthetic of cool that comes out of our culture, that represents our culture, that is transformative and is the lingua Franca around the world, then we lose - you know, as black people we lose respect, we lose financial support. And most of all, in our own lives, we lose the understanding of how much we are actually giving to this world."

Transcript
WALKER: Yes, dream's piece is really lovely. It's called "Audacity." One of the things I wanted to do with this book is to excavate all of the different elements of black cool, so that when we look at things that we think, oh, wow, that's cool, you know, I wanted to go beneath the surface and see what actually transmits that idea of cool, that notion of cool, that vibe of cool.

In  a new collection of essays, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, writers explore the definition of coolness within African-American culture. Writer Rebecca Walker edited the book and compiled a series of essays aimed to build a "periodic table of black cool, element by element."

Writer Rebecca Walker set out to create a "periodic table of black cool." She is the editor of a new collection of essays, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness.

"I really wanted to name 'black cool' specifically because I think that the more it's appropriated, assimilated, commodified, the more distant ... the cultural contribution to global discourse becomes from actual black people. If blackness is separated from this aesthetic of cool that comes out of our culture ... we lose the understanding of how much we are actually giving to this world."

Walker stresses that though there are a lot of objects that have become symbols of cool, there's an aspect of "black cool" that should be internalized. "The moment at which we think as a people or as a community that we have to look outside of ourselves for this cosmology that expresses itself through this aesthetic, we're lost," says Walker.

It can be used to describe the artistry of a Miles Davis, or as the ultimate drug that keeps black men addicted to their status quo and in their place, that from bell hooks.
Mat Johnson
Tricia Rose
Kara Walker
Dream Hampton
Michaela Angela Davis
Helena Andrews
Miles Marshall Lewis
Hank Willis Thomas

I read this book because Kola Boof kept talking about it on her Twitter. I knew by the title it would be some type of affirmation essays by people I've mostly never heard of.