This is Rene’ Jones.
This is Mike McDaniel
Both have been highly touted in recent years as being signifiers of success. Black success. Jones is one of 4 black CEOs in the fortune 500. There have only been 19 black CEOs in the history of the f500 and Jones gets more press than any of them. McDaniel has been hyped for years as the next great head coach. Now he’s being called an exemplar minority coach. Until recently nobody really talked about him being black. It wasn’t until the Dolphins needed to hire someone black in order to fulfill what looks to be a PR mishap based on the Flores firing that McDaniel’s race even became an issue.
What I find interesting about these men is that while being black, they don’t appear at all representative of black culture. That is the larger argument for me. The black people who are being put in front of us are, Black-ish. I use that term pointedly given the fact that the show itself ended because it was getting too black. Often our overarching American culture likes to pigeon hole black culture in a way that highlights the creativity and energy of the people as something sub-general to our reality. In other words, black culture is cool to look at and talk about but it isn’t to be integrated into the mainstream beyond fringe. Consider this: Billboard compiled a timeline of hip-hop performances at the Super Bowl. The timeline begins in 1998 and includes 8 different performances that include hip hip as a side piece to the main performance. In fact the only representations of Black American performance would be the 1998 Motown tribute, the Black-Eyed Peas performance, and the Weeknd performance. Except the Black Eyed Peas aren not black outside of Will.I,AM and the Weeknd is Canadian.
All of this is to say that Black remains a negative in American culture and a part of the reason is because it is and always has been shadowed by another version of blackness–a black-ish version characterized by Carlton and Urkel and everyone else capable of passing as a non-aggressive version of what we call black in America. All of this exists to preserve the idea of the aggressive black male because, in some way, we need that to be a part of our cultural identity as it always has been.