From outside a black hole, all the infalling matter will emit light and always is visible, while... [+] nothing from behind the event horizon can get out. But if you were the one who fell into a black hole, what you'd see would be interesting and counterintuitive, and we know what it would actually look like.
Jul 30, 2015. It's unpredictable. Most children would look white or white with a few black features, but once in a while a child would inherit mostly black features and would appear black. There is no way to tell which child would look which way, although.
Andrew Hamilton, JILA, University of ColoradoThere are many terrifying ways that the Universe can destroy something. In space, if you tried to hold your breath, your lungs would explode; if you exhaled every molecule of air instead, you'd black out within seconds. In some locations, you'd freeze solid as the heat was sucked out of your body; in others it's so hot that your atoms would turn into a plasma. But of all the ways the Universe has to dispose of someone, I can think of none more fascinating than to send someone inside a black hole. So does Event Horizon Telescope scientist Heino Falcke, who asks:
[W]hat is it like to be/fall inside a rotating black hole? This is not observable, but calculable... I have talked with various people who have done these calculations, but I am getting old and keep forgetting things.
It's a tremendously interesting question, and one that science can answer. Let's find out.
An illustration of heavily curved spacetime, outside the event horizon of a black hole. As you get... [+] closer and closer to the mass's location, space becomes more severely curved, eventually leading to a location from within which even light cannot escape: the event horizon. The radius of that location is set by the mass of the black hole, the speed of light, and the laws of General Relativity alone. In theory, there should be a special point, a singularity, where all the mass is concentrated for stationary, spherically-symmetric black holes.
Pixabay user JohnsonMartinAccording to our theory of gravity, Einstein's General Relativity, there are only three things that determine the properties of a black hole. They are the following:
- Mass, or the total amount of matter and the equivalent amount of energy (via E = mc2) that went into both forming and growing the black hole to its present state.
- Charge, or the net electric charge that exists in the black hole from all the positively and negatively charged objects that fell into the black hole over its history.
- Angular momentum, or spin, which is a measure of the total amount of rotational motion that the black hole inherently has.
Realistically, all the black holes that physically exist in our Universe should have large masses, significant amounts of angular momentum, and negligible charges. This complicates matters tremendously.
When a massive enough star ends its life, or two massive enough stellar remnants merge, a black hole... [+] can form, with an event horizon proportional to its mass and an accretion disk of infalling matter surrounding it. When the black hole rotates, the space both outside and inside the event horizon rotates, too: this is the effect of frame-dragging, which can be enormous for black holes.
ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. KornmesserWhen we typically think of a black hole, we imagine the much simpler kind: one described by its mass only. It has an event horizon that surrounds a single point, and a region surrounding that point from which light cannot escape. That region is perfectly spherical, and has a boundary separating the regions where light can escape from the region where it cannot: the event horizon. The event horizon is located a specific distance (the Schwarzschild radius) away from the singularity in all directions equally.
This is an simplified version of a realistic black hole, but a good place to start thinking about the physics that occurs in two distinct places: outside the event horizon and inside the event horizon.
Once you cross the threshold to form a black hole, everything inside the event horizon crunches down... [+] to a singularity that is, at most, one-dimensional. No 3D structures can survive intact.
Ask The Van / UIUC Physics DepartmentOutside of the event horizon, gravity behaves just like you'd conventionally expect. Space is curved by the presence of this mass, which causes every object within the Universe to experience an acceleration towards the central singularity. If you were to start off a large distance away from this black hole, at rest, and allowed an object to fall into it, what would you see?
Assuming you were able to remain stationary, you'd see this infalling object slowly accelerate away from you, towards this black hole. It would speed up towards the event horizon, remaining the same color, and then something strange would happen. It would appear to slow down, fade away, and get redder in color. It wouldn't completely disappear though; not quickly, and not ever. Instead, it would just approach that state: getting fainter, redder, and harder to detect. The event horizon is like an asymptote for the object's light; you'll always be able to see it if you look hard enough.
This artist’s impression depicts a Sun-like star being torn apart by tidal disruption as it nears a... [+] black hole. Objects that have previously fallen in will still be visible, although their light will appear faint and red (easily shifted so far into the red they are invisible to human eyes) in proportion to the amount of time that's passed since they crossed the event horizon.
ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. KornmesserNow, imagine the same scenario, but this time, don't imagine you're observing the infalling object from afar. Instead, imagine that you yourself are the infalling object. The experience you'd have would be extremely different.
The event horizon appears to get much larger far faster than you'd expect, as the curvature of space gets severe. Around the event horizon, space is so distorted that you begin to see multiple images of the outside Universe, as though they were reflected and inverted.
And once you crossed inside the event horizon, you'd not only still see the outside Universe, but a portion of the Universe inside the event horizon. The light you received would blueshift, but then redshift again, as you inevitably fell towards the singularity. In the last moments, space would bizarrely look completely flat.
The physics of this is complicated, but the calculations are straightforward, and were most elegantly performed by Andrew Hamilton of the University of Colorado in a seriesof papersspanningthe late2000s tothe early2010s. Hamilton has also created a series of spectacular visualizations on what you would see as you fell into a black hole, based on these calculations.
There are a number of lessons we can learn from examining these results, and many of them are counterintuitive. The way to try and make sense of it is to change the way you visualize space. Normally, we think of space as a stationary fabric and we think of an observer as being 'plunked' down somewhere. But inside an event horizon, you're always in motion. Space is fundamentally in motion — like a moving walkway — continuously, moving everything in it towards the singularity.
Both inside and outside the event horizon, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall,... [+] depending on how you want to visualize it. At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center.
Andrew Hamilton / JILA / University of ColoradoIt moves everything so quickly that even if you accelerate directly away from the singularity with an infinite amount of force, you'll still fall towards the center. Objects from outside the event horizon will still have their light encounter you from all directions, but you'll only ever be able to see a portion of the objects from inside the event horizon.
The line that defines the boundary between what any observer can see is mathematically described by a cardioid, where the largest-radius component of the cardioid touches the event horizon and the smallest-radius component terminates at the singularity. This means that the singularity, even though it's a point, does not inevitably connect everything that falls in to everything else. If you and I fall into opposite sides of the event horizon at the same time, we'll never be able to see each other's light after the horizon-crossing takes place.
When you fall into a black hole or simply get very close to the event horizon, its size and scale... [+] appear much larger than the actual size. To an outside observer watching you fall in, your information would get encoded on the event horizon. What happens to that information as the black hole evaporates is still unanswered.
Andrew Hamilton / JILA / University of ColoradoThe reason for this is the always-in-motion fabric of the Universe itself. Inside the event horizon, space moves faster than light, and that's why nothing can ever escape from the black hole. It's also why, once inside the black hole, you start seeing bizarre things like multiple images of the same object.
You can understand this by asking a question like, 'where is the singularity?'
From inside a black hole's event horizon, if you move in any direction, you'll eventually encounter the singularity itself. Therefore, surprisingly, the singularity appears in all directions! If your feet are directly pointed in the direction you're accelerating, you'll see them below you, but you'll also see them above you. All of this is straightfoward to calculate, even though it's tremendously counterintuitive. And that's just for the simplified case: the non-rotating black hole.
In April of 2017, all 8 of the telescopes/telescope arrays associated with the Event Horizon... [+] Telescope pointed at Messier 87. This is what a supermassive black hole looks like, where the event horizon is clearly visible. Only through VLBI could we achieve the resolution necessary to construct an image like this, but the potential exists to someday improve it by a factor of hundreds. The shadow is consistent with a rotating (Kerr) black hole.
Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.Now, let's come to the physically interesting case: where the black hole spins. Black holes owe their origin to systems of matter, like stars, which always spin at some level. In our Universe (and in General Relativity), angular momentum is an absolutely conserved quantity for any close system; there's no way to get rid of it. When a collection of matter collapses down to a radius smaller than the radius of an event horizon, the angular momentum gets trapped inside there, just like the mass does.
The solution we get is now much more complicated. Einstein put forth General Relativity in 1915, and Karl Schwarzschild derived the non-rotating black hole solution a couple of months later, in early 1916. But t
he next step in modeling this problem in a more realistic fashion — to consider what if the black hole also has angular momentum, instead of mass alone — wasn't solved until
he next step in modeling this problem in a more realistic fashion — to consider what if the black hole also has angular momentum, instead of mass alone — wasn't solved until
Roy Kerr found the exact solution in 1963
.
.
The exact solution for a black hole with both mass and angular momentum was found by Roy Kerr in... [+] 1963, and revealed, instead of a single event horizon with a point-like singularity, an inner and outer event horizon, as well as an inner and outer ergosphere, plus a ring-like singularity of substantial radius.
Matt Visser, arxiv:0706.0622There are some fundamental and important differences between the more naive, simpler Schwarzschild solution and the more realistic, complex Kerr solution. In no particular order, here are some fascinating contrasts:
- Instead of a single solution for where the event horizon is, a rotating black hole has two mathematical solutions: an inner and and outer event horizon.
- Outside of even the outer event horizon, there is a place known as the ergosphere, where space itself is dragged around at a rotational speed equal to the speed of light, and particles falling in there experience enormous accelerations.
- There is a maximum ratio of angular momentum to mass that is allowed; if there is too much angular momentum, the black hole will radiate that energy away (via gravitational radiation) until it's below that limit.
- And, perhaps most fascinatingly, the singularity at the black hole's center is no longer a point, but rather a 1-dimensional ring, where the radius of the ring is determined by the mass and angular momentum of the black hole.
Shadow (black) & horizons and ergospheres (white) of a rotating black hole. The quantity of a,... [+] shown varying in the image, has to do with the relationship of angular momentum of the black hole to its mass. Note that the shadow as seen by the Event Horizon Telescope of the black hole is much larger than either the event horizon or ergosphere of the black hole itself.
Yukterez (Simon Tyran, Vienna) / Wikimedia CommonsWith all this in mind, what happens when you fall inside a rotating black hole? The same thing that happens when you fall into a non-rotating black hole, except that all of space doesn't behave as though it's falling towards a central singularity. Instead, space also behaves as though it's getting dragged around along the direction of rotation, like a spinning vortex. The larger the ratio of angular momentum to mass, the faster it rotates.
While the concept of how spacetime flows outside and inside the (outer) event horizon for a rotating... [+] black hole is similar to that for a non-rotating black hole, there are some fundamental differences that lead to some incredibly different details when you consider what an observer who falls through that horizon will see of the outside (and inside) worlds. The simulations break down when you encounter the outer event horizon.
Andrew Hamilton / JILA / University of ColoradoThis means that if you see something fall in, you'll see it get fainter and redder, but also smeared out into a ring or a disk along the direction of rotation. If you fall in, you'll get whipped around like you're on some maddening carousel that sucks you towards the center. And when you reach the singularity, it will be a ring; different parts of your body will encounter the singularity
--
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at the inner ergosurface of the Kerr black hole
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--
at different spatial coordinates. As you approach the singularity from inside the event horizon, you'll gradually become unable to see the other parts of your own body.
The most profound piece of information you should take away from all of this is that the fabric of space itself is in motion, and the event horizon is defined as the location where even if you're able to move at the ultimate cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — in whatever direction you choose, you will always wind up encountering the singularity.
The visualizations by Andrew Hamilton are the best, most scientifically accurate simulations of what falling into a black hole truly looks like, and are so counterintuitive that all I can truly recommend is that you watch them over and over again until you fool yourself into thinking you understand it. It's eerie, beautiful, and if you're adventurous enough to ever fly yourself to a black hole and cross inside the event horizon, it'll be the last thing you ever see!
Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!BLACK
I’ve been black since about 1988, when I was colouring in pictures of priests at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic primary school in Brixton Hill, south London. I remember it well. We were sharing tables and colouring pencils and I looked up to find that there were no more “skin colour” pencils available in the pencil pot. By “skin colour”, I mean a shade of pinkish beige that was a pretty spot-on facsimile of what we can call “white”, European skin. Caucasian colour. With a hint of tan. Tea with an overgenerous splash of milk, if you want to talk beverages. Anyway, a girl whose name I’ve long since forgotten started asking around for a skin-colour pencil, keen to get her priest finished before playtime. Being the ever-helpful people pleaser that I am, I shrugged and offered her a brown pencil, thinking, in all my six-year-old wisdom, that illustrated priests could have skin the same colour as mine.
“That’s not skin colour,” she said.
It’s my skin colour, I thought. But I didn’t say that. What I did do was proceed to colour my priest in with the brown pencil, secretly very unsatisfied with the outcome. I wanted a skin-colour-skinned priest, too, you see. Turns out the improvisation wasn’t a solution. Hello inadequacy. Have you met otherness? Pleased to make your acquaintance.
I’m not black. No matter how dark my skin is, no matter how dark I appear to be in racist digital cameras with dodgy ISO settings, my skin is not black in hue. I’m probably something closer to raw cocoa, or coffee, or flat Coca-Cola. I’m beverage colour. Black, as a description of skin, is a label. As a description of racial identity it’s a pretty lazy referent not to any actual blackness, but an essential non-whiteness.
The second problem with being black is that it is absolutely, at least symbolically, true. Because, if nothing else, one thing I can confirm is that I am not-white. Which means that I am whatever “not-white” is. I’m the other thing.
Black people undoubtedly have a shared sense of identity stemming from otherness, probably because “black” is racially political far more than it is racially descriptive, with the potential to be irrevocably divisive. As an adjective, the word black comes with a terrifyingly negative list of connotations, pretty much equating to pure evil and hopeless misfortune. Deriving from the Old English word “sweart” (surviving in modern English in the word “swarthy”), it’s almost an exclusively negative concept. The only positive connotation I can find is that of being financially “in the black” – ironic when you consider the enduring link between blackness and poverty.
Call me black and I’ll get a complex knot of pride and insecurity tightening in my psyche. It’s a word that reminds me that I’m lesser than and different from, but it’s also a source of self-affirmation. Call me black and I won’t even flinch because I’m so used to calling myself black that it’s become the invisible lens. A perspective that has hardened into an objective truth. Call me black and I’ll welcome the definition, despite the fact that it denigrates just as much as it defines.
ETHNIC MINORITY
The phrase “ethnic minority” has to be the biggest oxymoron since “crash-landing” or “casual sex”. If you take “ethnic” as meaning culturally or genetically non‑European, then most of the world is ethnic. Which makes an ethnic minority a global majority. If you take it at dictionary value, however, as in relating to cultural, racial or genetic origins differing from those of a dominant group, then it becomes deeply subjective. You can only get an ethnic minority where there is some kind of majority, and that majority has to be culturally dominant, ie, white. Hello friend. We meet again.
The anticlimactic truth is that “ethnic minority” has evolved into a politically neutral way of saying “other”. Just when we thought we were out of the labyrinth. Ethnic? Minority? Other. Non-white. Back to black. Ah well. It actually felt like progress for a second.
AFRICAN
In 2018, the film Black Panther very quickly established itself as a cultural phenomenon. Let’s not underplay this: in 2018, the coolest superhero out was African, accent and all, and he just happened to have the same name as a revolutionary organisation that sought black empowerment and social justice. In this, Black Panther is an echo of a very particular type of black anger, an anger that has seared the black experience through the fight for civil rights, by any means necessary, through black power and right up until that simple fact turned provocation: Black Lives Matter.
MIXED RACE
You see words such as “nigger”, “coon”, “wog” and “darkie” and you freeze up in anticipation of the big kaboom. Then you see “mixed race” and it’s sigh-of-relief time. Something mild, something easy. A respite from all the spiky abrasions and explosive taboos. But “mixed race” is an improvised explosive device in disguise.
Its suggestion is that there is something we might call an “unmixed race”. It implicitly upholds ideals of racial purity that reinforce deeply problematic racial hierarchies. In the black community, mixed race tends to refer to black and white mixed. Note, we are not even talking countries here – just basic colour of skin stuff. One white parent, one black parent, one mixed-up kid. I’m currently living this scenario out in real life.
Me: black, my wife: white, my kids: mixed race.
Through no fault of my own, I have the kind of name reserved for white men who wear stiff jeans and nod out of rhythm to guitar-based soft rock
That’s the cartoon version of the story. In reality, my white wife is a combination of English and Scandinavian, with God knows what else thrown in along the way. Meanwhile, both my parents grew up in the same patch of universe in rural Ghana, west Africa, but if you look at my mum’s hair and fairer-than-cocoa skin, it’s obvious that she’s got a bit of something in her going back to whenever. So “black” and “white” start to look inadequate, while “mixed race” buckles under the pressure of even the slightest interrogation.
WHITE-SOUNDING FORENAME
Through no fault of my own, I have the kind of name reserved for white men who wear stiff jeans and nod out of rhythm to guitar-based soft rock. I have the name of a British or American white male born in the early to mid-20th century, despite having two parents who list English as a second language.
When my parents, two black Ghanaians (who had decided to make a go of it in the UK in light of economic and governmental instability during the 1970s), stared down at a fat, black newborn baby on 22 March 1982 and decided to call it “Jeffrey”, they were making a cultural statement tied to a complex socio-historical web.
Now I’ve got my own kids and the pattern is repeating itself. My first son is called Finlay, while boy No 2 is called Blake. Both names are very white, Finlay deriving from Gaelic, Blake from Old English. Why didn’t I buck the trend?
Much has been written about the socioeconomic fate of black people with black-sounding names, and the obvious conclusion is the correct one: that it has less to do with the name itself and more to do with systemic prejudice and black impoverishment. Taniqua and Terrell are less likely to find themselves rising through the ranks of Fortune 500 companies – not because of the inherent quality of their names, but due to the limited opportunities afforded to the black working class and to structural racism.
BLACK-SOUNDING SURNAME
Pronouncing my surname is a challenge that most people fail. At worst, you get some variation of bo‑ah‑kie, with a hard “k”; understandable if you don’t realise that the Ashanti pronunciation of “kye” is actually “chi” as in chips.
Next best is “bo-a-chee”, which is almost there, but not quite right. This is the one I have settled on in my professional life. It’s kind of an anglicised version that strips out the African essence. Because to say my name properly, you kind of need to say it in a Ghanaian accent. Bwaaaaah-ch, is as close as I can type it. But outside of my family and the Ghanaian community, you won’t hear this correct pronunciation.
Unlike first names, which can be chosen and decided at a parent’s whim, surnames reach back into ancestry. A black-sounding surname is a reminder that black roots aren’t in British soil. On this level, I’m very proud that a growing number of people are having to wrestle with Boakye. It feels like a win for Ghanaian identity in the mainstream, an ongoing battle for recognition in which I have fought on the front line.
COLOURED
Here’s a joke I remember from the hazy, pre-Googlable corners of my childhood:
When I was born, I was black. When I got older, I was black. When I’m sick, I’m black. When I go out in the sun, I’m black. When I’m cold, I’m black. When I die, I’ll be black. When you were born, you were pink. When you got older, you became white. When you’re sick, you go green. When you go out in the sun, you turn red. When you’re cold, you’re blue. When you die, you’ll be grey. And you’ve got the nerve to call me coloured?
I’m terrible at remembering jokes, but I’ll never forget that one ... How it pokes fun not at black people or white people, but at the blunt binaries of racial definition, drawing humour from the absurdity of race-labelling in the face of human commonality.
Why was I singled out by a hen party and asked to do a strip? The answer, I fear, is generations of racist ideology
EBONY
As far as pornography goes, “Ebony” might just be another category, but the view of black sexuality in the white gaze is deeply problematic. For white men and women interested in black sex, the black body is taboo. That’s where the intrigue comes from, surely, that the black sexualised body has an illicit appeal. Historically, this perception of black sexuality can be read as an act of violence against black humanity, a hypersexualisation that says we are less civilised and therefore exciting. It’s a mindset that supports racism, built on stereotypes of insatiable, well-endowed black men and sexually acrobatic black women. In the context of transatlantic slavery, black sexuality was an intrinsic part of the breeding of slaves, further promoting the view of black people as animalistic beings undeserving of basic dignity.
Fetishisation plus objectification plus dehumanisation is a messy, tangled threesome. I remember going to meet friends in a bar somewhere in my early 20s, and, not having anything else to do, I was uncharacteristically early. Out of nowhere appears a flustered, tipsy woman in a sash and I think tiara, quivering with all the giddy excitement of a kid being dared by their friends. Clutching a cocktail in both hands, she blinks through the neon glow and asks me if I’ll strip for her and her friends who are out on a hen party.
“What?”
It’s her friend’s hen party, she explains, and they were wondering if I would strip for them, in the bar, for money. Behind her, a group of young women are huddled round a table giggling over mojitos in my general direction. They are white.
I have no way of knowing exactly why I was singled out for an impromptu strip; if it was because I was alone, or if I look like an off-duty stripper. For the record, I was wearing a Zara suit with a T-shirt and slip-on canvas shoes (don’t judge me: it was the early 00s). Regardless, the encounter felt racially charged, as though my blackness was an open invitation to sexual objectification. What gave that woman permission to approach me like that? The answer, I fear, is generations of racist ideology.
COOL
The Cool Black Myth helps the white mainstream to understand and handle black identity. There’s something enigmatic about blackness that, coupled with the illicit appeal of black culture, makes black people seem cool by default, without even really trying. In my short time on this planet so far, I’ve had people congratulate me on how cool my hair is (after feeling its texture) and applaud how cool I look in sportswear (my trainers do match my running top actually, so I might give them that one). All of which makes me wonder: am I cool? Depends. Are black guys cool?
The answer, of course, is yes. In fact, I sometimes surprise myself by how cool I am. Last time I looked, I’d written a book about grime. Which is cool multiplied by cool. And I dress cool, if you think The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Carlton Banks dresses cool, which he does. And I don’t look stupid when I dance, which only cool people can really get away with, not to mention that fact that all black people can dance, which makes us automatically cool and me cool by proxy.
ANGRY
Could you tone it down a bit? You’re being a bit aggressive. Do you have to be so loud? It’s quite overbearing. You do realise you can sometimes make people feel a bit uncomfortable. You need to be a little softer. You’re passionate, I understand, but your manner can put people off. Stop shouting. It’s a bit … intimidating.
So goes one of the most common criticisms levelled at black women, from people, might I add, who are not actually black women themselves, usually in some kind of “professional” context. It happens in the office, the classroom, the staffroom, the email thread, the photocopier room, the pub after work, and probably in the subconscious of the interviewer sitting across the big desk. I’ve seen it up close – black women being highlighted as some combination of aggressive and angry that ends up in the bracket “intimidating”. An idea that black women have an innate aggression that intimidates conservative, polite sensibilities, making them a threat to social decorum.
LUNCHBOX
As a child, I can remember the feverish excitement with which the media spoke of Jamaican-born British sprinter Linford Christie’s lunchbox, an alliterative euphemism designed to provoke elbow nudges, winks and grins from white society. I remember because growing up, it was patently obvious to me that one of the big black stereotypes was that black men have big black penises. There were playground jokes about it, comments you’d overhear, and, as in the case of Christie, celebrities who would be readily targeted for this kind of sexualised banter. Usually the physically impressive ones.
Thing is, I never found it all that funny. I found it uncomfortable. I could feel the objectification, the belittling, the basic disrespect of reducing an entire person to the sum total of their genitals. It felt like bullying.
It’s ironic that a race label designed for one black man can reveal so much about prevailing attitudes to black men plural, lifting the lid on white male insecurity in matters of the crotch. As far as I know, I’ve never been called “Lunchbox”, but I definitely have faced many indirect comments about having a big penis, never in malice, always from people I know, always in the name of banter. Further evidence of the nervous affinity between dominant whiteness and a blackness it doesn’t quite understand.
POWERFUL
Whenever a commentator calls a black athlete powerful, my Twitter finger starts itching. I feel the need to jump head first into call-out culture and highlight me some racial stereotyping. It’s not that these black athletes aren’t physically strong. They often are. And it’s not that being physically strong isn’t a good thing. It often is. It’s the defining of blackness according to basic physicality that I have a problem with.
The Williams sisters are a good example. Like the rest of the world, I watched as they entered the professional tennis circuit at the turn of the century and proceeded to dominate the scene, racketing their way into the record books with an impressive list of grand slam titles to date. Both have been ranked women’s No 1 and both have taken home the most prestigious titles in tennis, introducing black excellence to a typically white sport. Watching their performances year on year, I’ve always been struck by how they were described by an awestruck media. It was often something about how powerful they were, how strong, how they were powerhouses, formidable, unstoppable. As if their raw physical power was the sole cause of their success, as if skill, determination, wit and tactics don’t come into it.
SMOOTH
If everything goes according to plan and I am as successful as an author as I think I could be, I will be on a trajectory that will end with, one day, an invitation from the BBC to star in Strictly Come Dancing. We all know the expectation is that black people can dance. It’s a stereotype, one that is so pervasive that I think we all believe it, myself included. But there really is nothing to say that I am smooth, on the dance floor or off, due to my being black.
Black smooth is on the spectrum of black cool, which is part of the defence against black insecurity. And like all 7 billion of us, I’m insecure. Being smooth is the attractive shield; empowering but defensive and exposing vulnerability as soon as it slips.
COCONUT
Much like the pantomime gladiators who were defined and characterised by colour, I’ve often felt as though my blackness is projected upon me by context. I’m black because I’m black, yes, but my blackness is also created by the fact that I’m surrounded by whiteness. This means that my ability to integrate depends on how “normal” (ie, white) I appear. How I dress and talk, who I mix with, what my tastes are and how my values play out.
I’m just not enough of a rebel to have ever been a rudeboy. I was a prefect. I have a mortgage
Of course it does. In my entire time at school, from the ages of four to 18, the only time I came close to instigating a fight was one time in sixth form when I heard some kid from a lower year group mumble something about me being a Bounty. A Bounty is a chocolate bar that is white on the inside, brown on the outside. It’s made out of coconut, which is also white on the inside, brown on the outside. Growing up, Bounty was a term commonly levelled at black people who “acted white”. When I heard that kid say it in my general direction I was incensed. I was furious. That he would denigrate my black identity, knowing nothing about me. I was deputy head boy at the time, so he obviously knew me in that regard. I swivelled to face him with 100-watt intensity and demanded that he repeat the accusation. I dare you. Say it again. He faltered. Nearby teachers tried to intervene but I was deaf to their appeals. I was ready to switch. The kid melted into a corner and I stormed away to English.
RUDEBOY
For a black boy growing up in Britain in the 90s, this might have been the ultimate accolade. To be called a rudeboy was to be adorned with the highest order of street credibility. When I was at school (I went to an all-boys’), everybody wanted to be a rudeboy; it meant you were cool, powerful, influential, and enough of a rebel to warrant sufficient notoriety to make you someone worth knowing.
Like most people (including, believe it or not, many black men), I’m just not enough of a rebel to have ever been a rudeboy. I operate within the establishment. I play by the rules. I have a natural revulsion against criminality. I was a prefect. I’m very polite, which is the opposite of rude. I have a mortgage. And yet I have a profound respect for the rudeboy, largely due to codes of blackness that shaped my consciousness before I was even aware it was happening. Maybe the simple truth is that we have all been conditioned to seek self-empowerment through some level of outlaw status, and for black men, there is a corresponding archetype that remains well within reach. It doesn’t take much to be rude; you just have to have a level of disdain for authority, and pay more attention to the codes of the street than laws of the land.
WOKE
Adjective. Colloquial. Informal. Political. A distinctly black Americanism that has worked its way out of 20th-century rural, working-class black America all the way to the 21st-century world stage. I’m pretty certain the first time I heard it I just thought it was a quirk of that African American vernacular sometimes referred to as “ebonics”, itself linked to pidgin dialects stemming from 17th-century slave communities in southern states of the US. Key grammatical features include the warping of tenses for emphasis. So, “I’m awake” can swiftly evolve into “I’m woke”, meaning: “Yo, I’m really awake.” Next thing you know, woke is turning up in broadsheet newspapers as a referent for millennial black activism. How did this happen?
I see the relish with which black culture is consumed, but it stops short of real engagement with black history
The big myth, the great lie, is that we as a species are on our way to being post-racial. That we are somehow past the racism of our collective history. Not true. For many non-black people the hashtagging of #black is a millennial wake-up call. It’s a cold water splash reminding us that racial and social injustices exist and persist. Hashtags give visibility and digital momentum to ideas that might otherwise fade. For example, pre-2014, I’m sure a lot of people had an inkling that black lives mattered, but the hashtag #blacklivesmatter turned a moral given into a societal juggernaut. It woke people up to structural racism and racially motivated prejudice, zeroing in on the nothing-new shock of police brutality in the US and soon encompassing racial injustices worldwide.
In my classrooms, in the playgrounds, I see the relish with which black culture is consumed, but it stops short of real engagement with black history and heritages of black intellectualism. As a teacher, I’ve been exposed to the deep shortcomings of a curriculum that is hopelessly Eurocentric. No number of exciting black cultural artefacts can fight the pervasive gravity of default whiteness.
I can feel the cynicism creeping in so it’s important to remind myself that woke is essentially an earnest position of social awareness. It’s something to believe in, waking up to racial injustices that are quite literally life and death, concerned with not only state violence and the killing of black people by police, but the wider conditions of poverty and incarceration that contribute to black oppression and deprivation of human rights in the so-called “developed” world and beyond. Engagement with this ideal can be as flimsy as a retweet or as heavy as facing down riot police in a protest. Either way, it’s a call for action stemming directly from the black experience. It’s an alarm. A wake-up call.
•Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored by Jeffrey Boakye is published by Dialogue (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.