Cool like Me and This Is How We Lost to the White Man - Essay Example

The essay, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man” by Ta-Nehisi Coates is written as a short biographical account of Bill Cosby, from his early days as a stand-up comedian, when he famously said, “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to get a social message into my act,” to the “afristocrat” who make the “pound cake speech” that served as a wake-up call to many middle-class black Americans. Another essay highlights important issues in middle-class black societies: absentee fathers, deteriorating family structures, soaring crime rates and lack of education, and tries to shed light on the “angst” among the African Americans, and the havoc it is wreaking on their social and economic standing. 

It epitomizes the paradox presented by the black male due to his dual representation in popular media, as the embodiment of “cool” on one extreme and “a cop-show menace” on the other.

I find common ground with the essay “Cool Like Me” because of a number of reasons. Firstly, the tone of the essay is humorous and satirical, making it a far more inviting read than the former essay. Secondly, I find that this essay represents aptly the duality of the African American culture in the American people's perception today. Alexander tries to explain how the heritage of the African Americans from the time of slavery has led to their dual role in society today, making them the role models for young whites who try to copy their “coolness” on one hand and shun them as “niggas” on the other. “

According to Alexander, the line of differentiation among the African Americans came to be drawn as a result of monetary discrepancy. “There came to be a growing chasm of privilege” that caused the African Americans to be divided into the Blacks and the niggas. The blacks are everything that is cool: “Michael Jordan and Chris Rock and Will Smith and bell hooks and Li'l Kim”; and the niggas are everything that is not. “Oprah interviewing the celebrity du-jour is a black woman; the woman being handcuffed on that reality TV show is a nigga.” The author maintains that even the cool blacks that the whites try to emulate are hemmed in and kept in their place. They may be a part of the mass media but in everyday life, the white population would rather not mix with them. The blacks are unable to change this situation in which they find themselves because of the conditioning from their days of slavery, when “a bird in the hand no matter how small was damn near everything.” So they persevere under this label of coolness that has been attached to them and fear to break away from it and actually step up and demand their equality, remaining “woefully wedded to the bowed head and blinders.”

Thus Alexander believes that the social fabric today has been woven with careful attention to the synthesized “coolness” that has been ascribed to the blacks which function as effectively as the shackles of the bygone days of slavery in keeping the blacks as “undereducated bottom feeders.” However, he ends the essay with a message of hope, that some may one day be able to break away from the “coolness construct.”