Introduction
Where Are We Going?
In the late summer of 2016, I was in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention. The convention was muggy and miserable. The weather, on the other hand, was pretty nice. Getting into the convention center was a shit show, and with Michelle Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders being two of the closers on the first night, anticipation was sky high. The theme that night was “United Together.” Me, being the misanthrope I am, took a two-hour trip through the packed crowds back to my hotel so I could fully absorb their words in peace.
That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.
—FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA, JULY 25, 2016
I felt the first lady’s speech in my soul. She talked about going high when others go low—and people have gone low against her, saying ugly things about her body, her private relationships, and even dissecting her facial expressions and features. She is the embodiment of the type of grace, intelligence, and strength I see in my mother. The climax of her speech rocked the house, and you could feel the electricity of the convention center through the TV:
And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.
By the time she told the story of the American Dream fulfilled—her daughters playing out on the front lawn of the White House—I was in full-out ugly cry. I wanted to believe brighter days were ahead. But deep down I didn’t think that would happen regardless of the outcome of the election. Though I did think one option was light years better than the other.
So, look, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!
For eight years, the Obamas had painted a striking picture of the Black American Dream—an idyllic representation of Black success combined with political and cultural power. They had presented a fairy-tale bootstraps narrative and leaned into the belief that we can all make it if we try. The Obamas’ message was that the American Dream is for all of us; we just need the audacity, grit, and intellect to reach for it. And, in some ways, this was true. New doors were open for Black people, and anyone who had been implicitly and explicitly told that they could not make it to the White House because they didn’t look the part.
The Obamas’ message was also that if we work within the system together, pushing through lingering challenges, we can make it truly work for us. That you get what you earn. That those who previously held power can’t keep us all out, and those of us who are able to break through will come back for the rest of us. That the public and private systems that shape our everyday lives aren’t broken. That the real problem is those who control the systems and the people who don’t show up to vote. Here’s where they start to lose me a bit.
As aspirational as that moment of seeing Michelle Obama onstage was, symbolizing passing the baton from the matriarch of the first Black First Family to the presumed first woman president, her story wasn’t a reality for many Black families. The success she had achieved by working within the system was still out of reach for a lot of Black Americans.
Going into November of 2016, we had been told that everything was fine, that America was working for everyone, and that the American Dream was attainable for all. But, in reality, everything was not fine, and nothing showed this quite as starkly as the election of Donald Trump as Barack Obama’s successor. Shock and dismay reverberated through the media. How had this happened? Who had voted for Trump? How had such a seemingly seismic shift occurred overnight?
But for those who had been paying attention, there had been warning signs that the Obamas’ version of the American Dream wasn’t working for everyone. That it hadn’t been working for many white Americans was immediately and loudly discussed, but the truth—and what I set out to write this book about—was that it hadn’t been working for many Black Americans either. For many, President Obama’s vision had been more illusion than reality all along.
As I set out on a journey to get to the heart of Black political identity, a process that involved extensive interviews with Black people from all across the ideological spectrum, the voices of Black Trump supporters loomed larger than most. They haunted my dreams, telling a different tale about Black politics and Black America, one that countered white America’s long-held assumption that Black voters will always vote Democrat—and even that the Democratic Party is the best bet for Black Americans.
For me, the true canary in the coal mine was also perhaps the most unlikely: musician Kanye West, who had been trying to tell us for years. In Kanye’s own journey, I found the perfect allegory to tell the story of how the once unshakable Black Democratic voting bloc has become increasingly fractured. In Kanye, I found a way to tell the story about a Black America that had become disillusioned with the failed promises of their country.
LOST IN THE WORLD …
The 2010 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) were MTV’s highest rated in seven years. That year boasted a strong performance lineup—Rihanna, Eminem, Drake, Mary J. Blige, Bruno Mars, and Lady Gaga, among others. But for many, the most anticipated performance of the night was the closer: Kanye West. He was there to premiere his song “Runaway” off his upcoming album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
The album is still his most critically acclaimed work to date. It’s a gorgeous album, from its musical composition to its lyricism. Its power is in its lush musical composition and seamless melding of music samples and sounds that in no way should go together. Sonically, it changed the direction music was heading in and even ideas of what music could be. And despite—or maybe because of—the ridiculous number of guest features and producers, it provided a soundtrack to emerging feelings of alienation and loneliness in an increasingly digitally connected world.
The album, and the feature film he released with it, was a deep dive into the pitfalls of excess, celebrity, consumer culture, race, sex, wealth, self-aggrandizement, and the death of the American Dream. But on a personal level, the album was also a voyeuristic and devastating look at the turn his life had taken since his mother, Donda—a massive influence in his life—had passed away unexpectedly in 2007, a day after undergoing several cosmetic surgery procedures. Her death and the manner in which she died would have a profound impact on his life and artistic trajectory.
In the years that followed, Kanye felt like he’d lost everything, especially after he famously interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs. In the backlash to what became colloquially known as Taylorgate, public perception turned against him. A scheduled coheadlining tour with Lady Gaga—Fame Kills—was immediately canceled, and Kanye felt the financial fallout. He received death threats. Even Joe Jackson—father of Kanye’s idol, Michael Jackson—said publicly that Kanye should be blackballed out of the industry. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend, and then quickly experienced the crash and burn of a high-profile relationship with model Amber Rose.
The final blow seemed to be the hot mic moment when President Barack Obama referred to West as a “jackass” in a room full of laughing media people.
The country’s first Black president had built his career in Kanye’s hometown of Chicago. Excited by his candidacy, Kanye had produced celebratory songs that name-checked Obama, including rapper Common’s 2007 track “The People,” which had helped elevate the then-underdog presidential candidate to a pop-cultural icon with lyrics like My raps ignite the people like Obama. The instant summer anthem had not only been produced by Kanye but was released on the record label Kanye founded (G.O.O.D. Music) as well. The accompanying music video was on repeat on MTV back when MTV still played music videos, giving free round-the-clock promotion for the campaign going into the 2008 election. Though not the only one, Kanye had essentially used his own celebrity to help elevate the then-senator’s profile in youth and pop culture. Now, that same person was telling the world that he didn’t hold Kanye in the same regard.
In response, Kanye retreated into self-imposed exile in Hawaii in 2009. He called out to his community—the people he trusted, the people who held him down—and brought them together in Honolulu to record what would become My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. These were people from across genres of music, across genres of art. He brought together artists who hadn’t broken into the public consciousness yet and people who were already well known. He, and they, created something as beautiful, dark, and twisted as advertised. I don’t love how he publicly dogged Amber Rose—the misogynoir is hard to ignore—but the music is undeniable.
That night at the 2010 VMAs, one year after Taylorgate, over 11.4 million people tuned in to see an introspective, if chaotic, Kanye perform. Dressed in an extremely bright-red suit, he stood by himself on a minimalist black-and-white stage, playing the intro on what looked like a really high-end Casio keyboard. As the bass dropped, ballerinas surrounded him, and eventually rap artist Pusha T, all dressed in muted pink. Kanye performed with a focused intensity—aware of the audience that surrounded him on all sides but also clearly in his own world.
Kanye’s lyrics fluctuated between apologetic and unrepentant—like the kind of begrudging apology people give when they say, “I’m sorry if you were offended.” But the lyrics also showed self-awareness.
In “Runaway,” he welcomes douchebags, scumbags, and jerkoffs instead of rejecting them. He didn’t throw in jackasses, but he didn’t have to because the message was clear. And in case it wasn’t, in his song “Power,” he raps the lyrics, they say I was an abomination of Obama’s nation, well that’s a pretty bad way to start the conversation. In that same song, he grapples with his desire to be childlike in his creativity and honesty while also falling deeper into the power trip that comes with success and wealth. He then flips it, calling out the broken education and criminal justice systems that have left people with nothing left to lose.
The album’s final full song, “Lost in the World,” a lyrical reflection of Kanye’s suicidal thoughts, revealed that even in a moment when he was surrounded by people, he still felt alone. He felt misunderstood by voyeurs to his hard times, misrepresented by the media, and ultimately alone. He had become disillusioned.
It was a personal album, but Kanye had also laid bare the deep traumas of Black America, unafraid to lean into the darker and more complex side of the human experience. At times, he seemed to serve as a warning sign for the reckless desperation that can emerge when something or someone goes ignored for too long.
If Kanye was beginning to explore these themes on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, on his 2013 follow-up, Yeezus, he was in full swing. In the years between the two albums, on the outside, it seemed like Kanye’s life had become a fairy tale. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy had been a resounding success, spending more than two years on the Billboard charts. He got bigger; he dropped music collaborations that were hits. He released the Nike Yeezy sneaker—which broke sales records—and he married his dream girl Kim Kardashian.
But all was not well. Kanye, as an artist, wanted to break into the fashion industry. He’d worked as a low-paid intern at Fendi, putting hours and hours into learning the craft, but in corporate fashion houses, he was still seen as a joke. He was the biggest star in the world, and he had the biggest shoe at Nike, but even Nike wouldn’t give him a long-term contract.
Kanye was incensed, voicing his frustrations with the company. The outburst seemed crazy to some people, childish even, but Kanye wasn’t just talking about fashion. He was talking about the frustration of fighting to make it. The frustration of being willing to put in the work and still being denied access. Of being humble and spending entire nights in the Nike offices learning and perfecting the craft and still not being able to break through in corporate boardrooms that didn’t see him as good enough. He had gone millions of dollars into debt ($53 million by 2016) to pursue his dream and the dreams of others, and he felt undercompensated in relation to how much money pursuing those dreams made for others. He was experiencing the broader exasperation of what it meant to be told all you have to do is work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, do the right things, and say the right things, only to be told it is not enough. He was experiencing what it means to realize the American Dream is a lie. I’m not working with a multimillion-dollar budget, but that aspect of his diatribe was something I could relate to; perhaps it’s a relatable feeling to many of us.
He went back into the studio and brought all that energy and frustration to his music—ultimately releasing Yeezus. The album was messy, chaotic, and dark. It mixed classic soul and the sounds of the ’60s and ’70s Black Power movement with techno and distorted rock sounds. He rapped lyrics like, I am a God / So hurry up with my damn massage. He premiered music from Yeezus by using guerrilla marketing, working with Black, cutting-edge, streetwear designers and beaming the first music video on a wall right outside of the Manhattan Prada store, like a fuck-you.
Yeezus took the themes of his previous album—excess, celebrity, consumer culture, race, sex, wealth, self-aggrandizement, and the death of the American Dream—and made that shit even darker. It sounded damn-near unhinged. To me, it’s his Blackest album to date on multiple levels. Maybe that’s why it’s the one I still listen to the most.
The vision Kanye painted of himself and of America on both My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus sat in direct contrast to the Obamas’ Black American Dream. Through his music, Kanye was telling a different story of what it means to be Black in America. He told the story of striving, yes, of putting in the work, doing all the things you are supposed to do, being great at what you do—perhaps even being the best at what you do—and still not gaining access into the halls of power. A story about having all the supposed cultural and social power that one could garner and still being told you don’t belong in that White House, that you will never truly belong in that White House. That you could never earn that right, no matter how much you fought for it.
Kanye argued it was a lie to think we could get ahead by merely doing better and working harder within systems not built for us. The problem, Kanye said, was all the government and corporate institutions that maintain carefully groomed racial and class inequities. The realization he was having, we would later learn, was leading him increasingly toward economic libertarianism and a type of social conservatism that was further away from the Democratic Party he had once supported. He no longer needed Nike—Adidas was more than willing to place a higher premium on his products. He didn’t need the government, either, and fuck them for trying to take taxes out of his hard-earned money.
To me, it was on these albums that Kanye became that canary in the coal mine. And it’s also when he became what I have come to identify as a Black skinhead.
WHAT IS AND WHAT COULD NEVER BE …
In 2016, in the aftermath of that hopeful Democratic Convention and the radically different election outcome that would soon follow, I began to think more about disillusionment in Black America. If the Obamas’ American Dream was an illusion, then what was the reality, and how were Black people reacting to it?
From the beginning, before I knew what twists and turns this book would take and before I knew I had a full book to write, I knew I wanted to call whatever I was doing the Black Skinhead project. It’s a direct reference to a song from Yeezus. But also, the pairing of Black with skinhead—while seemingly counterintuitive—made sense as a way to describe how Black culture and nationalism have shapeshifted with the loss of community spaces. It made sense as a way to describe a declining faith in our individual or collective ability to move government.
“Skinhead” today is often associated with white nationalism. But the term was originally used in the 1960s to define an emergent post–World War II British multicultural working-class subculture rooted in Black—primarily Jamaican—music. The subculture presented a type of working-class counter to the whimsical, happy-go-lucky and high-end mod version of England (think the TV show The Avengers) being culturally exported around the world. Buzz cuts and a preference for Doc Martens reflected the rugged practicalities of youth who were working industrial jobs and manual labor.
Beyond aesthetic and musical taste, skinheads were united by a frustration with the status quo and a sense that the working class was being left behind. This resulted in a movement that, while cultural, was also inherently political. As economic conditions worsened and the rhetoric of scarcity ramped up, ethnonationalism increased, driven by a rising fear of being replaced by a new labor force—the Windrush generation and their children. This is how skinhead came to carry the connotations it has today. But at its core, the skinhead movement was about being a disillusioned outsider, and it is this definition of the term that I have found so useful in understanding the current state of Black political identity.
This disillusionment was the sinking feeling I felt watching Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. As much as I wanted to believe in her assertion of a Black American Dream, I knew that for so many it wasn’t a reality. And it was this disillusionment with the status quo that I saw in Kanye West—perhaps the archetypal Black skinhead—over the course of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus.
In this book, I tell the story of the Black skinhead, to explore what this shift has meant for Black culture and politics. Through stories and anecdotes, I show how we’ve arrived at the present moment and what it means for our collective future.
For our purposes, I define Black skinhead in three ways:
Black skinhead (noun)
A disillusioned political outlier who is underrepresented in mainstream media discourse.A Black voter who is only defined by their voting history and not their expressed ideology.A Black person who rejects their societal value or cultural identity being defined by their willingness to vote for the Democratic Party during presidential elections.As I see it, Black skinheads live in the cracks and uncertainties of the dominant American national culture. They live in our shifting understanding of what it means to be Black (especially politically). They live outside of the bounds of fetishized Black political identity. Though not yet a fully formed subculture or community, these people are finding their way into various microworlds or alternative political factions in response to a mainstream story of Blackness that they don’t feel a part of.
While a Black skinhead mindset manifests itself strikingly in terms of political ideology—and we will spend a lot of time exploring that—at its root, it is about rejecting a status quo that does not serve Black people. This status quo permeates all aspects of society, from music to economic opportunities to sex work to media representation, and so we will spend time exploring these avenues as well.
This book is as much an attempt to understand Black skinheads as it is to answer the crucial questions they raise. When someone tells you everything is fine, but around you, you see evidence it’s not, where will the quest to find answers lead you? Moreover, how are Black people being led away—not toward—each other, and what do we lose when we lose each other, when we lose Black spaces and Black community? When we feel lost in the world.
In 2016, months after the Democratic National Convention had projected the comfortable idea that everything was fine and we were all now “with her,” Trump’s election revealed things were definitely not fine, and that many people did not feel secure within the boundaries of political norms. Four years later (or eighty-four in Trump years), as we waited for the results of the 2020 presidential election battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, things were still not fine.
* * *
November 7, 2020, was an unseasonably warm Saturday in Baltimore. My husband, David, was enjoying the last traces of summer on our rooftop deck. I had slept in later than normal, drifting somewhere between dreaming and waking. It had been five days since we had done our civic duty and voted for a ticket topped by former vice president Joe Biden and former senator Kamala Harris. I hadn’t been particularly happy about it. From the beginning, I hadn’t been interested in Joe Biden as a presidential candidate. My vote was definitely an “anti-Trump vote,” not a “pro-Biden” one. My gut said the election would be called for Biden, but I couldn’t shake the 2016 PTSD.
By then, I had been working on this book for months, and sound bites from all the interviews I had conducted drifted through my mind. I couldn’t shake the voices of Black Trump voters and their zealot-like fandom. The physical signs of white anxiety that littered the highway from Chicago back to Baltimore had sent cold shivers down my spine. I wondered if it would bear out that Trump, not Obama, was the manifestation of a “post-racial” president in a multicultural society. I wondered if my mind was playing tricks on me.
As news flooded in from across the country, county after county set new records for voter turnout. Absentee ballots poured in; youth turnout skyrocketed. Despite orders from the head of the United States Postal Service and ongoing budget cuts, the disproportionately Black fleet of postal workers around the country had worked extra shifts, fighting to make sure every ballot cast would be counted. The loser of the 2020 election would still pull more individual votes than President Obama had in 2008.
I lay in bed mulling over these things, half awake and half dreaming. I was feeling paranoid, the four walls closing in despite the mounting evidence Biden would win by a fairly wide margin. Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, I heard the pounding of a djembe, raucous honking, and yelps of relief. My husband popped his head in, having come down from the roof.
“They called it. Georgia.”
Georgia. Huh. Who knew? I had been putting all my eggs in the Pennsylvania basket.
“Want to go for a walk?” David asked.
“Sure, let’s get outside!”
We masked up and ventured out into the Baltimore sun. It was November, but you would’ve thought it was the Fourth of July the way people were celebrating. We walked through the park among the large group of people celebrating. It was a multiracial cornucopia of relief, elation, and unapologetic joy. There was BMORE LICKS ice cream on tap for everyone. “Fuck Donald Trump” by YG, featuring Nipsey Hussle, played on cell phones, drifted out of cars passing by, and floated out of the windows of the row houses that populated our neighborhood.
In a lot of ways, it mirrored the euphoria of election night in 2008, when the first Black president had been voted into office. Biden’s victory seemed to say we weren’t the monsters we thought we were. That democracy had been saved, and all was right with the world. I almost expected a cartoon bluebird to land on my shoulder and start chirping the words to “Fuck Donald Trump.” But I couldn’t stop the uneasy feeling that, much like 2008, the dream would not live up to the reality. Despite Donald Trump looking like a monster from the worst corporate shark-infested waters, he had still gotten more votes than any of the last nineteen presidents.
So even as I walked through our neighborhood, smiling with my eyes at all of the shiny, happy people and enjoying the sun tanning the upper half of my face, I still felt thoroughly unsatisfied, thoroughly unsettled. Despite the election of my “chosen” candidate, as a voter, I felt more alienated than ever. Those feelings of alienation would only increase as I watched Biden’s victory speech later that night.
I’ve long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America. Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It is time for our better angels to prevail.
—PRESIDENT-ELECT JOSEPH BIDEN, NOVEMBER 7, 2020
I listened as the future forty-sixth president talked about uniting the country in the face of adversity. He spun a beautiful story of America—the America we could be and the America we always were. He talked about bipartisanship, the middle class, and the restoration of America’s soul. It was a lovely vision, one that flowed as beautifully as a sermon from a Southern Black preacher.
But it bothered me that what he was saying sounded an awful lot like a more palatable version of Make America Great Again. He was presenting himself as a welcome alternative to Trump, but both men painted a picture of an idyllic time when America made sense. They both offered promises of delivering a political and moral time machine that would take us back there. But going back in time actually sounded like a complete nightmare to me. It made me wonder where that left people like me, people who thought America needed some serious home improvement and not just a return to the past.
As a country, we had won, or so everyone kept on telling me. Black people were the heroes whose votes had saved our country’s soul, or so liberals kept on telling me. So why did it feel to me like we had lost? Why did I spend the rest of the night searching online for Black women psychiatrists who specialized in primal scream therapy while listening to Yeezus and my Tears for Fears playlist?
And why would a bunch of Trump-loving psychos storm the United States Capitol months later, chanting racist shit while wearing Yeezys? Why would one of their leaders, Nick Fuentes, fan the flames of racial animus, xenophobia, and damn near any phobia you could think of while blasting Kanye songs on his internet show?
I have a lot to say about that stuff, but this is (mostly) not a book about that. This is a book about Black people and our political future.
I hope to show readers that the instinct to dismiss 2016 as a fluke and embrace 2020 as an unmitigated success—particularly when it comes to Black voters—obscures the crisis at hand within the Democratic Party. I hope to show readers just how much the Democratic Party has taken Black voters for granted, and why that fragile alliance is beginning to fracture—and the ramifications this has for us all.
But while this book is about Black political identity and electoral politics, it is equally about Black culture, media, economics, and community building. In each of these spaces, I’ll show you where hope ends and disillusionment sets in.
Because politics and culture are so intertwined, we will chart the rise of Black skinheads through both, understanding that to only look at one or the other misses the full picture. Politics is culture, and culture is politics. It is why we started with both the Obamas and Kanye.
One final note is that while this book is an outward look at Black America, it is also deeply personal. And so, as I interrogate the systems around us, I will keep returning to my own experiences, charting the course of my own disillusionment. Embarking on this journey awakened me to certain hidden and forgotten truths about our country and its institutions, challenging me to ask myself, am I a Black skinhead, too?
While this book will take us to many places, ultimately, it is a warning about the threats to Black culture and identity, the fracturing of communities on and off-line, and what losing our safe spaces will cost us as individuals, as a community, and as a society.
BLACK SKINHEAD. Copyright © 2022 by Brandi Collins-Dexter.
