Writers Explore What It Means To Be 'Black Cool' - NPR

…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.”

She tells NPR’s Neal Conan: “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 says the book started to write itself when she was a student at Yale University in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Studying under the art historians Sylvia Boone and Robert Farris Thompson, and the writer bell hooks (who uses lowercase letters in her name), first inspired her to explore the myriad meanings of blackness in the United States today….

 

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