On Conflict
by Hanif Abdurraqib
I do not recall a time when my mother disciplined me in public. I say "public" here, and black folks who grew up in a neighborhood with largely only other black folks know the divide between what is public and what is Public. In my neighborhood, everyone was someone's parent, even if they weren't a parent themselves, even if they were only four or five years older than the person they found themselves urgently needing to put in their place. If your elders weren't around, someone's were. And this is a different kind of public. The Intimate Public is not the same as The Expansive Public, where the act of getting someone together might fall upon the eyes and ears of those who couldn't translate it.
And so, in grocery stores, if I was acting a damn fool (as I often did in grocery stores), grabbing things and pouting when I had to put them back, crashing a shopping cart into a display, being a reckless and overly desirous child, my mother would give me a look. The look was a placeholder, something that, yes, those who don't know a look as language couldn't translate even if they did know a look as language, but something I knew well. Something that said ok, keep that shit up, but we gotta go back home sometime. And that's all it took to straighten me out, instantly.
I can romanticize this now, untethered by the urge to correct what it ignited in my younger self. I can also romanticize this now because most days, I cannot remember the sound of my mother's voice. She has been gone for so long, nearly three decades, that her symphony of living has grown increasingly into large waves of static where tangible sound once lived. This is especially devastating because my mother was such a loud woman. In joy, in grief, in rage, she was a woman of immense volume. She was the loudest person I have never feared. When my mother was angry with me, when she wanted to communicate that anger, it is hard for me to say that she raised her voice; it is more accurate to say that her voice was always at a raised point, operating in different pitches or tones. The volume wasn't to inflict fear as much as it was to express a kind of exasperation, a demand to get me to the place that she knew I was capable of getting to, even if I had to be dragged there by a sharp look, by a wave of noise.
What I love most about Toni Morrison is how she so frequently seemed to act against the concept of genius. What she seemed to understand was that for black people to embrace the concept of genius, in a world that, broadly, does not have much of an understanding of black cultural abundance, is to create a concept of scarcity that gets pushed into the mainstream. And then, there are only a handful of recognized black geniuses. And then, even black folks feel like that genius must be clung to, fought for even when it goes astray, even when it veers into the indefensible, it must be defended, because if not for the success of the so-called rare black genius, what will become of everyone else's underappreciated brilliance?
But what I believe Morrison also knew is that this additionally affords us, as a people, the ability (and I would say the requirement ) to be course-correctors in the face of those who simply cannot be trusted to adequately care for and grow the black brilliance they have in their orbit. The record label executives or book editors who just want to cash in on the momentum of an art-maker, even if that art-maker has shown a clear decline in vision, or passion, because to be at the whims of an industry who declares you a genius is to, at times, lose touch with the hunger that propelled you in the first place.
I am most interested in the diss for how it appears in this way: a course-corrective. A look, a remark, a comment. Something that can be understood by the audience it is meant to be understood by. The type of thing that might make a victim of the diss stand up a little straighter in the presence of those doing the dissing. In short, something that, even temporarily, reminds someone of where they once were, and asks them if they'd consider getting back to that.
There is a challenging line to walk between critique from a place of concern, and critique from a place of cruelty, and I am not necessarily speaking to the advantages or disadvantages of either, and I am also speaking as someone who fully understands that at times, one must begin on one side of that line and leap to the other, or at least dance between the two. But what I do know, or at least have witnessed, is that the broader the audience, the more challenging it is to present a rigorous attempt at correction (regardless of which tactic(s) are chosen) and have them be received as anything beyond spectacle.
This is where I have found the modern mode of the diss track, from a purely musical sense, lacking. So much of it is tied up in spectacle, which is tied up in capital, which can cloud both motivations and response. And look, sometimes you gotta just say "I don't like this nigga" in as many different ways as you can fit over an instrumental and I've got no issue with that, I suppose. Just don't try to sell me on the diss track, in its modern sense, as a kind of morality play, something where one rapper is operating on a higher moral plane than the other. And I do hate sounding every second of my age, but I grew up with diss tracks where niggas did not like each other and that was enough for entertainment. I grew up on a block where niggas sometimes didn't like each other and that, too, was enough for entertainment. Some fists thrown on a basketball court, some empty threats about who has what stashed in a trunk or a sock drawer at the crib.
I believe what I'm saying is that whether the aim of the diss is effectiveness or entertainment often depends on who is witnessing, and how many are witnessing, and through what lens the witnessing is happening. Sometimes people just want to settle a score, and there will always be someone eager to see a score settled.
When I mention my mother not disciplining me in the Expansive Public, I mean to say that I grew up with the understanding that there are some things that happen in-house. And I don't believe all disagreements between skinfolk need to be kept to our beloved and understood blocks, or played out only on songs or in books that the majority of our folks hear or read. But I do love the diss as an act of up-close intimacy. An action that says "I see something about you that you do not see yourself, and I am going to alert you to it, and then we'll go from there." To attempt to clean a stain off of someone's collar, for example, one has to be close enough to the collar to notice the stain. They have to know the person well enough to reach for the garment currently being worn.
This doesn't mean that all acts of the intimate diss are carried out intimately, or with care. But I do find myself most compelled by intimacy as a starting point. The beef as played out through the written word, most commonly through a back-and-forth correspondence. There is no shortage of this throughout the history of black literature and activism—the one that comes to mind most often for me is the exchange between Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune. Terrell was among the class of black elites in Washington, while McLeod—who labored in South Carolina fields with her enslaved parents—was interested in fighting for and changing the living conditions for the non-elite, the so-called everyday black folks. Bethune was dismissive of Terrell, who would urge the former to go slower, to be more calculated in her approach (additionally, Terrell criticized Bethune for relying too much on the support of powerful white people like the Roosevelts). Bethune believed that the work she was doing was too urgent to wait on anyone or anything.
On February 16, 1926, Terrell wrote a letter to Bethune. In it, she implored: "We should not try to spread ourselves over too wide a surface and thus dissipate our influence and strength," among other directives, presented gently, but firmly.
In response, Bethune wrote with a palpable sarcasm: " [I thank you] for the corrections you have made. I am always happy to have my friends point out my errors. I know how full of them I am."
The two remained friendly in public, though. They believed the stakes were too high for their disagreement to be played out in front of white people.
When Toni Morrison urged black people to consider a world (and an interior imagination) not governed by Whiteness, she was also asking for a world and imagination where we govern ourselves, and are not governed by the gaze of whiteness, or even the idea of it. Which isn't to say that I would have appreciated my mother dressing me down in the dairy aisle of a grocery store, but it is to say that sharp and incisive intercommunity critique cannot always (or even often) rely on who is watching, even if who is watching alters the approach. To say that we must imagine ourselves free from a world governed by whiteness isn't speaking individualistically of the sole white person or board room full of white people. It's talking about the ways that we might otherwise restrict ourselves as if we have something to lose by presenting our observations to each other.
The reason I return to McLeod and Terrell so often is because the two of them didn't have vastly different ideas for the future of black people, they had differences in the approach, in the pace at which it happened. Theirs was a somewhat honorable back and forth, with the knowledge that they ultimately needed each other, they saw something in each other that was needed, and they were fighting to drag each other closer to a place that might get it done more efficiently. Like our elders, like the people on our blocks, who might—with smaller stakes—fight through their disappointment and demand we see the potential in what our collective capabilities are.
To put this another way: There is an interview with Sade Adu in the 1988 issue of Interview that I love, because she takes aim at Prince in a way that is firm, but gentle, and also indicts herself. She mentions that she watches Prince closely, and admires his bravery. She goes on to say that he charges into everything, horns down, and the results are sometimes mixed. "I think much of what he does is quite trashy and [I] don't like it at all," she adds, before returning to mentioning the kind of bravery she saw in him that she wished she held herself.
I find this soft diss, if it can even be called that, beautiful, because it exists as a self-indictment as much as it does an admission of distaste. Yes, Sade was saying. Prince produces too much music and I don't like most of it, but God, he's so fearless. I wish I had that in myself. I would do something different, perhaps better with it.
And that, too, is the beauty of close looking. Of intimate critique. We get to say, I love what you have. I close my eyes and I dream that what you have might be something I could have, but I do not have it.
I need you to use it better.
Photo by Kate Sweeney.
Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) was a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.