LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Steady Gaze (Huxtables, Mom and Me, 2008) for MoMA Magazine

This photograph’s punctum—the subjective effect of an image—is the Huxtables. The family printed on Frazier’s T-shirt is my starting point because Denise, Theo, Vanessa, Rudy, Clair, and Cliff were also my neighbors. I was a poor kid whose single mother worked multiple jobs, and the television was my part-time caretaker, allowing me to vicariously live the Huxtables’ saccharine dream to escape my own bitter reality. The studium—the part of image-reading determined by historical and cultural experiences—is also the Huxtables. Frazier gives this away in the picture’s title and reinforces this idea in her reflection on it in her book The Notion of Family: “Between my background and my foreground I am not sure where I stand. Impacted by the Cosby effect society looked away in contempt while the Reagan administration sent its troops, cops, and K-9s to raid my home and classroom.”

These are Frazier’s incontrovertible terms for understanding her family’s real experiences against that of this fictional and idealized one, their positions within a white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, and American anti-Black violence. Rather than prioritizing our chosen punctum, she asks us to make space for herperspective, to try to find her standpoint.

To find that common ground, we must disambiguate the “Cosby effect” of 2016 and the 1980s. The former is the rise in the reporting of rapes in New York City, partially attributed to the visibility of Bill Cosby’s sexual predation. The latter—where we meet Frazier—is the effect, theorized by author Mark Anthony Neal, of the Cosby Show’s success serving “the political function of diverting attention away from the harsh realities of Reagan-era social politics.” The Huxtables’ performance of the model Black family gave rise to a flat, conservative representation of Black life. The struggle for the rest of us was real, while their elites-only uplift overshadowed the corrosive anti-Black effects of Reaganomics, union busting and labor offshoring, tough-on-crime policies, and mass incarceration.

This was class warfare and should come as no surprise given Cosby’s pop-cultural record along the color line (see his infamous “pound cake” speech). Some may conclude that Cosby’s legacy is “complicated,” given all that he did for the politics of representation for Black people (see the history of Black stunt workers in Hollywood). But attempting to determine how dirty or clean one’s slate is only serves to keep the hardest truth ungraspable. He was fulfilling white supremacy’s role for the Black bourgeoisie: to be both an aspirational model for, and an overseer and gatekeeper of, the Black proletariat.

Frazier’s request that we employ standpoint theory—and our actions, if we follow through—is the engagement of Black feminist cultural analysis vis-à-vis authors, activists, educators, scholars, and artists: Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, bell hooks, and Faith Ringgold (may she rest in power). Frazier is an interlocutor of these speculative free-thinkers: individuals who dared concern themselves with the complicated matters of Black self-determination and the omnipresent systems of domination that seek to undermine our power at all costs.

I’ll Die Happy Knowing I Left It All on the Court

Written for Tay Butler’s exhibition A Friendly Game of Basketball at the Lawndale Arts Center (Houston, TX)

“All you want is Nikes, but the real ones. Just like you, just like me…”

—Frank Ocean

One of my earliest memories involves basketball. My Momma asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I responded, “A basketball player.” She wrinkled up her face and laughed slightly, “You’re too sensitive for that.” Looking back, it’s hard to distinguish nature versus nurture. I’m not into sports because competition has always turned me off. Is that an inherent response or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Basketball has a significant presence in my life. It exists innocuously: one of the few surviving pictures from my childhood is of Momma, my brother Andre, and I playing in our bedroom. A Michael Jordan poster hangs on the wall above us. Profoundly, the sport has shared adjacency to essential moments in the development of my masculinity. Dad tugged the tongue of my fresh-out-the-box Nike Air Flight Huaraches (released in 1992). He tied the laces until they fit just so. During our square-off, I tripped over my feet and onto my knees; my skin and eyes turned liquid. Dad scoops me into his arms, and I tell him I want mommy. He pulls his face back from mine and says, “You a sissy, huh?”

Do not show your pain. Do not externalize your fear.

On long summer days, Roxy and I would meet at the court behind school to play one-on-one. I walked through the heat carrying my Nike Air Garnett IIIs (released in 1999). Our awkward bodies would dance against one another across cracked asphalt, playing until that delightful sting of exhaustion filled our lungs. We never kept score. Sometimes, we’d sit under the hoop to hold hands and steal kisses. It wasn’t a romantic love, but that curious exploration of the concept with someone safe. At the beginning of the school year, I asked her to go out with me. When the guys caught wind, they teased me mercilessly because she was a “dusty.”  One of them said I had to pick a side. Roxy and I met at the courts because we came from the same place: lonely latch-key kids looking for a connection to pass the time. I can’t forget the devastation in her eyes when I said I didn’t pick her.

It’s supposed to be bros before hoes.

I was standing near the free-throw line wearing my Nike Shox BB4 OGs (released in 2000). I watched, mesmerized, as Antonio took off, weaving the ball singlehandedly and in a serpentine fashion. He effortlessly glides and rolls the ball off the tip of his fingers into the hoop. Hydrating from a shared bottle of Gatorade, I mention how graceful he is. “Nigga you gay? That’s some faggot shit.” I was confused and looked at Andre, who casually shrugged and kept sipping. The rest of the guys break out into laughter. I giggle a bit because I don’t know what else to do. I feel shameful for the rest of the game and keep running Antonio’s words through my mind; I jam my finger catching a hard chest pass I wasn’t prepared for. As we walk home, limping in the blue light because of our heavy, over-exerted legs, I ask Andre what those words mean. I don’t get the joke. He tries his best to explain, but I still don’t understand. He tells me to gently pull on my finger to alleviate the pain.

Pause. Exchange of affection isn’t welcome between us.

It’s the day before my first solo exhibition in New York City. I call Momma to tell her I’m appreciative that she allowed me to be my sensitive self. My sensitivity is where my creative drive lives. My wife, Rana, and I stop at Kith to kill some time. She sees them first: the Nike LeBron 18 Low in Mimi Plange Daughters Floral (released in 2018). The cashier asks me if I ball as he slips the box into the bag.

Not really, but in a way…