Designated Cheerleader

I got so much trouble on my mind.

In 1990, I was nine years old, months away from turning ten, when Public Enemy ended any musical debate I would ever have and summed up every mental state I would ever inhabit for the rest of my life.

I was a Black kid with a white mom, growing up on the campus of Iowa State University. We lived in graduate student housing, largely surrounded by African and Desi families. Years prior, my kindergarten teacher had suggested I repeat the grade after spending my first year of formal schooling reading instead of participating in formal activities; offended, my parents got a district exception and sent me over to an elementary school full of largely white students on the west side of town. I was one of two Black kids in my grade.

My father was a former college football player. He lasted two years on Iowa State’s football team before the coach who recruited him, Earle Bruce, left to go coach at Ohio State. I would have the good fortune of meeting the late Coach Bruce in fall of 1990; to this day, he remains the only white man to whom I’ve ever seen my father show sincere, unvarnished, deferential respect. My dad as I knew him was a quiet, bookish man, who largely disdained people and who used his B.A. in English to do whatever he could get a job doing. In his youth, he had been initially placed in what would later be called “Special Education” classes for being “hyperactive,” until a counselor had the presence of mind to have his IQ tested. He subsequently was bused to white schools as what would later be called “talented and gifted,” which also described his skill on the football field. By high school, dad was a 6’5” phenom who ran a sub-4.5 40 and could play literally any position on the gridiron. Since this was the 1960s-70s in Peoria, Illinois, “any” did not include “quarterback;” when, as a freshman, he asked his high school coach why one of the few white guys on the team had that honor and not he, his coach told him “because this is going to be the best he’s going to ever be, and you’re going to go on to play college ball,” and subsequently played him at nearly every other position. As a nominal tight end who also played defensive end, linebacker, safety, running back, and kick returner, dad would spend his physical prime as a literal do-it-all complement in the background of the greater glory of lesser, white athletes. Even worse, he had the presence of mind to understand what that insult truly meant. Nonetheless, he became a High School All-American; I saw the notice in a scouting magazine once, with my dad’s name next to the likes of Cris Collinsworth, Jim McMahon, and Danny Ainge (yes—the basketball player). After an assistant coach at Alabama (one of Bear Bryant’s) told him during a recruitment visit “I hope you’re not one of those [n-words] who thinks he’s getting paid to go to school” while serving him fried chicken and watermelon, Dad decided he’d had enough of football. But it was the only way he was going to get out of Peoria, and at least Earle Bruce respected him enough to start him, so to Ames he went.

At Iowa State, it was more of the same; he was strong enough to play offensive line, smart enough to play linebacker, big enough to play tight end, and fast enough to return kicks and play defensive back. This last attribute was a uniquely memorable trait. My sister, who was an Associate Producer for a variety of major sports news networks, once met legendary Texas coach Mack Brown in the late oughts while on the job. When he attempted to condescend to her about football (relatively common for women in sports journalism), she politely replied with “oh, I understand, Coach Brown—you actually coached my dad at Iowa State.”

When he asked her the year and last name, she told him; Brown, immediately and off the top of his head, rattled off my dad’s full name, hometown, and scouting summary. “Big, but can run. I remember your dad—he was fast.” (He had been wide receivers coach at ISU.)

Dad’s football career ended as ignominiously as most college football careers do. After Bruce took the Ohio State job—he’s the last Iowa State coach to leave the school with a winning record, although Matt Campbell is off to a good start—his successor, Donnie Duncan, told my father that the only way he was going to stay on the team was to play offensive tackle. After twelve years of being told to accept complementary positions to help lift mediocre white men to glory, Dad had finally reached his breaking point, and he walked away from the sport—and, most crucially, his athletic scholarship.

He didn’t walk away empty-handed; he and my mother, a scholarship cross-country runner whom he’d met on a recruiting trip, soon were married in May of 1979. A year later, three months after my mother graduated from with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics, I was born. As an infant, I attended classes with my dad, who had been briefly dismissed from ISU after the beginning of what would be a lifelong battle with clinical depression; he would finish his degree, but struggled to find work. An enormous, quiet, deceptively articulate, very dark-skinnedBlack man who did not suffer fools was intimidating on the football field; in a 1980s office, it was simply unheard-of. Dad did a little bit of everything—construction, factory work—before landing a position at the Iowa Department of Transportation.

I idolized my dad and followed him everywhere I could; he wasn’t quite sure what to do with me after I learned how to speak and think for myself, but he was content to allow me to observe him doing what he did. I would often hear him complain, usually on the phone, usually speaking to either one of his four brothers or to his only real friend in the world, an equally-quiet, similarly intelligent, equally-reclusive man who eventually moved to Omaha. His complaints were usually the same; he had to take orders from white men who didn’t know the difference between their, they’re, and there, and correct the work of white women who would forever outrank him despite only having high school diplomas. With football out of the picture, Dad turned to the artistic pursuits he had been forced to neglect while manhandling opponents; he had already been a voracious bibliophile to the point of majoring in literature, but he also quickly found those in the know about film, comic books and, especially, music. He was omnivorous and insatiable in everything he consumed, and music was no exception; in addition to the soul, funk, and R&B of his youth, Dad also loved psychedelic rock, jazz-rock fusion, and especially punk and new wave. At his side from the moment I could walk, I took in music as a genreless, expansive universe, from Motown and Funkadelic to Santana and Mahavishnu Orchestra to the Tom Tom Club, the Clash, and (especially) Fishbone.

And, of course, there was hip hop. I loved Run-DMC, sharing a name with one of its members, but I also enjoyed Joeski Love, Kurtis Blow, and the Beastie Boys.

When I was in first grade, Yo! Bum Rush the Show came out, and Dad immediately became enamored with Public Enemy. As a Black man raised in the 1960s, he was familiar with H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and other Black radicals; too young to join any militant organizations during their heyday, and too busy with sports to join any during his adolescence (which may have been a calculated move on his parents’ part to keep him alive), Dad found comfort in the image of a Black man undaunted by the fear of white society, unencumbered by the shackles of ignorance, addiction, or lack-of-education, and unrestrained by white men who would otherwise profit from his labor. PE joined the list of bands in regular rotation in my dad’s collection; when It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back dropped a year later, the tape never left the family vehicle (much to my mother’s exhaustion).

Apart from wanting to emulate my father, I was fascinated with PE. I was beginning to study the viola by ‘88, adding classical and bluegrass to what I learned at my dad’s knee. As a fan of everything from Stravinsky, Peter Alsop, and Willie Nelson to George Clinton, Sesame Street, Prince, and Frank Zappa, it blew my mind to hear something that sounded like literally all of that, thrown in a blender and pieced together by someone with little concern for how the source material might have originally sounded. It was simultaneously grating, frustrating, exciting, soothing, and hypnotic; I was old enough to pick out the samples I recognized (“hey, that’s ‘Angel of Death’! Hey, that’s ‘Funky Drummer’”) and young enough to appreciate the wild tonal shifts. Like most people, I was enamored with how different it sounded; like fewer people, I was interested in the substance of the politics. I was growing up around kids that looked kinda like me who treated me as something of an outsider, either because of my white mom or, more often, the fact that I was akata (a derisive Yoruba word for US-American Black person), which, to Africans, made me no different from white people. However, I went to school with white kids who made it very clear that, while I was certainly socially accepted, I was nonetheless an Other. Still, at the end of third grade, right before summer break (“Nineteen-eighty-nine”), when one of my white classmates expressed an affection for Public Enemy, I was pleasantly surprised and took it as an excuse to bond with them.

That bond lasted all of a week. I remember on a Monday, talking to my newfound friend at recess; he had a different, colder look on his face.

“I don’t like Public Enemy anymore,” he said. “They hate Jews and they hate white people.”

At home, Dad explained to me about the Professor Griff interview. He’d already taught me a bit about the Nation of Islam when we’d talked about Malcolm X; I hadn’t made the connection at the time, but that helped me see the link between Black Muslims and the other things I’d been hearing all throughout virtually all of the rap music that blared from my dad’s speakers. The tension between Blacks and Jewish people was largely lost on me; because I was educated in white schools, I knew all about the Holocaust, but since all the Jewish people I knew were white, I simply chalked that tension up to an added degree of resistance to white supremacy. (Because, again, I was educated in white schools, I learned virtually nothing about Israel & Palestine other than that Palestinians were “terrorists,” but that’s a story for another day.) Dad reminded me that Jewish people used to not be considered white, but that part of their path to whiteness involved their participation in the marginalization of Black people. Since I knew both white people and Jewish people, I knew and understood the difference between interpersonal injustices and systemic ones, and knew not to consider the larger struggles against systems the personal failings of individual people. I knew that criticizing white supremacy wasn’t “hating white people.” “Jewish people aren’t secretly controlling the world or anything like that. Those are just dumb conspiracies,” Dad said. “But fighting white supremacy is hard, and sometimes people want to fight battles they can win, so sometimes we [Black people] will get mad at other people.”

It all made sense to me, but didn’t seem to make sense to the media, who turned the Professor Griff situation into a larger examination of hip hop culture and rap music writ large. Dad was careful enough to point out how this was a very calculated effort on the part of white society—until Public Enemy, white people had generally dismissed rap music as an inferior form of art that was mindless, atonal, and overly sexual (using the same language that they’d used 30-ish years earlier to dismiss rock’n’roll), but now that the ostentatious, party-centric, fun-loving rapper was giving way to the more aggressive, overtly political activist with a clear message in his lyrics, the music was a genuine threat. Run-DMC had been hugely popular, but they offered no real threat to white supremacy; Public Enemy, on the other hand, was so named for a very specific reason.

As a latchkey kid and a dutiful consumer of MTV, I followed the ensuing controversy; Griff either quit or was fired, or never left, or was fired, or left again, and the band were recording their follow-up. Meanwhile, my nascent understanding of politics began to grow as I began fourth grade in fall of 1989. My dad began working in a different department of the DOT, and his contempt for his Reagan/Bush-loving, incompetent white boss became the featured attraction of all his post-work tirades. I was angry for my dad, and angry that he was stuck in his situation, in the middle of Iowa, surrounded by white faces that either feared or hated him—and, for that matter, Black faces, in particular Black women, who resented him for marrying a white woman. What few Black American women there were in my hometown were simultaneously fascinated by my father—who was handsome, articulate, and exceedingly talented—and repulsed by him. Many people would tell me as I grew older that the Black women in my dad’s classes fawned over me as a newborn and infant. I never saw that appreciation as I grew older; my memories were of Black women (in some cases, the same ones from when I was a baby) openly belittling my father, me, and my little sister when they would encounter us in public. My dad was called a “traitor” and my sister and me “half-breeds;” one cold winter afternoon, after excoriating my dad for my sister’s hair (which had been collected in two puffs—she was maybe five or six at the time), two sistas later asked my dad for a ride home in the snow. To my surprise, Dad obliged them; the ride was largely silent, the woman who told my dad to “find a real sista when you want your daughter’s hair to look better” sitting between me and my sister, a mocking smile on her face. After he dropped them off, I asked my dad why the women were so mean.

“They’re just angry,” he said. “They have a reason to be. The world ain’t nice to them. But they’re our sisters, and we have to take care of each other.”

(I nursed that thought for decades afterward, particularly as many of the Black women I would try to date would accuse me of being “too white,” while white women would be surprised to find I had a white parent. But that’s a story for another album. Damn, I’ve been bouncing through time in this story. Sorry about that.)

In January of 1990, my dad brought home a cassette single: “Welcome to the Terrordome,” and I eagerly sat by his side as he put it in the deck. The first sample was charmingly familiar but, after Terminator X’s scratch gave way to that klaxon-blaring, boomshakalaka beat, I realized I was listening to something truly unique. I’d heard “Fight The Power,” of course, but “Terrordome” was something completely different, a paranoid, ferocious collage of uncomfortable frequencies that, well, felt more like a heavy metal song, an impression that only deepened when Chuck D’s inimitable baritone comes roaring in with what is still, for me, the greatest opening line of any song in history, simultaneously mission statement and plaintive cry, the gathering of an energy that began with the trace elements of a culture beaten, raped, and brainwashed out of a brutalized, genetic/cultural experiment people, and the most concise summary of the inside of every Black man’s consciousness, not the least of which being my beautiful, intelligent, struggling father.

I got so much trouble on my mind.

I asked my dad for a copy of the single; he dutifully obliged me.

Spring of 1990 brought a lot of change in my life. In March, my mother, who was about to graduate with her Master’s, went to a job fair; she interviewed with the Hawaii Department of Education, who offered her an elementary school guidance counseling job practically on-the-spot. Rather than immediately agree to move more than four thousand miles away, she sat for another interview at a school in Joliet, Illinois; as Joliet wasn’t far from my dad’s hometown, the whole family made the drive with her during Spring Break. According to mom, she had the interviewers eating out of the palm of her hand; they were incredibly cordial with her…until they walked her out of the school and saw my dad, my sister, and me waiting by the car. I wouldn’t know this for decades, of course.

Everyone in the family was excited for the new move. My mother, who was and remains the cheapest person on the planet, sold pretty much everything we owned (including, to my considerable fury, my extensive collection of Masters of the Universe figures, G.I. Joes, and original, metal-base Hot Wheels cars, an act that scarred me so much that I resolved to never get rid of any of my toys ever again, which I cling to three decades later)–except for the 1979 Camaro that my father determinedly refused to relinquish ownership of. One would think that, amidst the excitement of an impending move, the release of Fear of a Black Planet wouldn’t make an impact.

It did.

I remember when dad brought the CD home from Peeples Records & Tapes; the longbox made the album cover look even more interstellar, evoking Star Wars as much as Do The Right Thing. The cover image did little to dispel my 9-year-old mind from thinking Public Enemy were rock stars on the highest possible level; the idea of a black—no, Black—planet eclipsing the Earth was some Fantastic Four-level shit, and I immediately fancied myself Norrin Radd, an emissary of what I thought, at the time, was a new and different kind of Blackness, telling white people that their hegemony would be consumed, particularly by their own hubristic creation of a Blackness that made people as light as Walter F. White and Thurgood Marshall and as dark as my father equally marginalized.

The album itself was just as future as the cover. The world ended with a whimper—the opening breeze that begins “Contract On The World Love Jam,” and the jazz and funk-lover in me sat in bliss. I remember listening to every second of the album with my dad in our living room as he dubbed the CD to tape; the shrieking highs (“Brothers Gonna Work It Out” and its adroit repetition of Prince’s searing guitar solo at the end of “Let’s Go Crazy,” something I also recognized) and the throbbing quiets (“Pollywanacraka,” which, along with the title track, hit close to home). We then went and listened to it in the camaro.

(Over three thousand words into this essay, and I’ve only now reached the album itself, and the honest truth is that I could write for three thousand more. Let’s try to wrap this up.)

We moved to Hawaii on August 9, 1990, and one of my first acquisitions there was a cheap, thrift-store cassette player/radio that would arguably be my best friend during the five years we lived in the state. I received a dubbed copy of Fear of a Black Planet and would wear it out over the first year we lived there; I made a copy of that copy every year, yet somehow the gradual degradation in fidelity didn’t make me enjoy the album any less. There were other albums I listened to at the time—many (Sex Packets by Digital Underground was arguably equally landmark), but Fear of a Black Planet was a singular, unique experience, one that would come to define my musical tastes writ large. The genre-hopping, genre-blending, genre-disregarding sonic collages fit my mind state; the straight line traveling between the Bomb Squad, Bill Laswell’s early-90s Praxis albums, Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings, all the way to Atari Teenage Riot’s Delete Yourself! (although I first heard the US reissue Burn, Berlin Burn!) was shorter than anyone could really articulate. And Chuck D’s politics, his uncompromising, furious deliver, and his indomitable presence—well, it reminded me of my dad, or at least what my dad was when he was comfortable. I have never gone longer than two weeks without listening to Fear of a Black Planet, even after PE put out other albums; I liked Apocalypse ‘91, and really all of their subsequent work, which they continue to produce, but none of it captured the essence of what I was feeling quite as much.

Of course, this was by design. Hip hop had become a global phenomenon, and any potentially subversive voices in it needed to be silenced—by any means necessary. The precedent set by the Turtles/De La Soul lawsuit let to the Gilbert O’Sullivan/Biz Markie lawsuit—and, suddenly, sampling became too expensive; Nelson George would later correctly describe it as “anti-hip hop vindictiveness,” and he was right. While sample clearances wouldn’t end Public Enemy’s career, it certainly ensured that an album as sonically dense as Fear of a Black Planet could never exist unless someone was willing to pony up a lot of money (see: Since I Left You, by the Avalanches).

My family eventually left Hawaii, and eventually I made my way back to Iowa State, this time as a student. I was the Program and Music Director at the campus radio station, and had the good fortune to meet Chuck D my senior year of college; he lectured at my school one evening, and I happened to be last in the autograph line. He was kind enough to talk to me about college radio, rapping over rock guitars (this was a couple years after the Confrontation Camp album he’d done with Kyle Jason and a full rock band), and the weirdness of Ames, which he hadn’t been to since the late 1980s. I had him autograph a piece of paper for my dad; he doodled the “black man in crosshairs” PE logo on it. My dad never had much use for things like autographs, so, since he and I have the same first name, I ended up keeping the framed piece of paper, which sits above my Mace Windu ForceFX lightsaber.

I still listen to Fear of a Black Planet with a constancy that borders on obsession, still picking out the layers of the music. Over the thirty-three years since its release, I’ve listened to more albums than I can count, but I always come back to it, and “Welcome to the Terrordome” in particular, mostly because I still, three decades later, can’t get over that first line, if only because it’s depressingly still relevant after all these years, even—perhaps especially—after the election of the first Black president, which showed how much this country truly did, in fact, fear a Black planet. But that’s a story for another day, even if it is for this album.

I’ll end this here, because I’ve got a paper to write. I’m a PhD student now, and the father of two Black sons with a white mother; I can’t help but notice the parallels between their lives, sorting out their ethnic and racial identities, surrounded by the children of African and Desi grad students in a sea of white Iowans. Post-Obama life is weird in the US, especially if you’re Black, especially if you’re what some people call “mixed.” It’s even weirder if you have a modicum of social consciousness. I’d like to think that, especially in the wake of pop culture events like Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther films or, more importantly, the Spider-Verse films, which show a multi-ethnic Black boy as the hero in a way we never really got before, that my sons will have a clearer path toward feeling comfortable as the Black boys and men this country will never let them be anything other than. My oldest is borderline-white-passing; my youngest is not, and having to explain to them constructs of privilege and marginality as matters not only of political awareness, but literal survival is difficult.

I got so much trouble on my mind, I suppose, but the solution appears in the very next line:

Refuse to lose.