Assert Yourself: Show Some Style

‘Basic Black,” a new book by Karen Grigsby Bates and Karen Elyse Hudson, is simplistic and out of step with the times. That’s why I like it.

To peruse it is to hear grandmother’s voice giving one of those lectures she saved for when she was straightening your tie or brushing your hair or otherwise had you trapped. Indeed, the subtitle says it all: “Home Training for Modern Times.” Because this is a book of please and thank you, of common sense etiquette for daily life, covering everything from first dates to job interviews to funerals. All from an African-American perspective.

I can hear your double-take from here.

Wait a minute! you say. Why do we need an “African-American” book of etiquette? Aren’t good manners universal?

Of course they are. And much of what this book has to say knows no color. On the other hand, I’ve yet to see Miss Manners address how to handle poor service in a snooty restaurant when you suspect race is the cause. Nor, to my knowledge, has Emily Post ever taken up the question of what to say when an acquaintance from Lilywhite, USA, is just dying to touch your hair.

But the basic value of “Basic Black” is not that it offers black folks specialized advice for refined living. Rather, it’s that it reminds us that refined living matters. It’s not a reminder we needed once a upon a time, back before we lost style and abandoned grace.

That struck me recently as I watched “Soul of the Game,” a cable-TV movie about Negro League baseball in the 1940s. I could have drowned in the crowd scenes, the forgotten elegance of black life in those years. With their hat brims turned to rakish angles, long coats cinched about their waists, shoes bouncing light back like mirrors, black folks were just so … it.

I know that what’s happened to blacks since then only mirrors what’s happened to the rest of the republic. As Newsweek noted in a cover story some months back, we have become a slovenly nation. Our president flashes acres of flesh as he goes jogging by. Our matinee idols look like vagrants. And our social graces are for the birds.

We’ve all forfeited elegance, but it’s a forfeiture I would argue is felt with a particular keenness in black communities by dint of the fact that it meant more there in the first place. Style was, for us, a line of defense against denigration. Segregated, barricaded and Jim Crowed we might have been, but damn, we looked good. And we moved through our lives with a self-possessed elegance, an attention to detail and ritual that gave the lie to allegations of subhumanity and took the edge off everyday humiliation.

Uncombed hair? Unshaven faces? Drawers visible above the beltline of our jeans?

Not on your life.

But something happened on the way to the millennium, didn’t it? Gangsterism and defeatism came to town. Being “real” came to mean dressing, acting, speaking, moving like some thug from the streets. And in some quarters of our community, at least, style got the boot.

I find that I miss it. Me, the original T-shirt and blue jeans guy.

I mourn the days of shiny shoes and thank-you notes, salad forks and rakish hats. More, I mourn the sense of order that came with them, the feeling that these were graces we each owed one another. Owed our grandmothers, if no one else.

What’s happening in America is not just a change of fashion but a change of mind-set, a rejection of the idea that we have an obligation to the greater us.

In black America, it’s even more: a rejection of something we once knew like we knew our own heartbeats. When the world thinks you are less, you do not assent, you assert.

“Basic Black” is, gently, a manual of assertion. Meaning that it lifts the values we once commonly held. Reminds us that in harsh times, grace becomes more important - not less. And so it is, in its quiet way, valuable reading.

Because some of us have forgotten, and others never heard, the things that grandmother said.

xxxx