Losing My Cool

The 2010 memoir Losing My Cool tells the story of author Thomas Chatterton Williams’s decision to reject the hip-hop lifestyle and its narrow definition of black identity and instead, to follow in the footsteps of his deeply erudite African-American father. The journey is highlighted in the book’s original hardcover subtitle: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture. Nonetheless, William’s thesis isn’t the simplistic idea that hip hop culture is bad. Instead, he argues that its cultural dominance has repressed black people’s individuality – something that comes across more clearly in the paperback subtitle of the book: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd.

Much of the book is a love letter to Williams’s extraordinary father, an autodidact who had had to hide in closets as a child in the segregated south in order to read Aesop and Plato to satisfy his intellectual hunger. Going on to earn a PhD in sociology and collecting a wide-ranging library that filled ever-expanding shelf space in his house, Williams’s father named his son after Thomas Chatterton, a favorite eighteenth-century English poet. In this symbolic act, Williams now sees the poignant scope of his father’s hopes and dreams. As one critic put it, the memoir is at its best when it is examining “the tender and complex ways that fathers who care deeply about their sons’ development as intellectually curious and compassionate human beings negotiate their own powerful influence over their sons’ lives with the equally powerful influence of their sons’ peers and popular culture.”

Unlike his father, Williams has an easy childhood in the upper-middle-class suburb of Fanwood, New Jersey where he attends a private school where he starts to fully embrace the ideas and ideals of what he calls “hip hop culture.” By fifth grade, he has stopped listening to any other kinds of music. By high school, he has committed to embodying it as much as possible: outwardly demonstrating a lust for materialism through clothes such as Air Force Ones, baggy pants, gold chains, while also adopting a disdainful attitude towards books and education as somehow “inauthentically black.” His relationships with male friends now turn on deference – the “harder” he looks, the more white students seem to fear him and the more black peers respect him. Meanwhile, his relationships with girls are rife with misogyny and distrust. In one example, Williams feels pressure save face when his girlfriend cheats on him by hitting her. Their romance has been poisoned by hip-hop’s insistence on machismo above all else, and by its characterization of all desire and love as purely transactional.



Nevertheless, while his school life revolves around hip-hop, at home, Williams is in a different world altogether. Worried, his father has created an alternative education, complete with a challenging reading regimen that includes everything from literature to history to philosophy that he crams into his son during enforced after school and summer study sessions. His father perseveres even in the face of his son’s clear lack of interest or enthusiasm. Williams rejects his father’s intellectualism. Instead, he willfully mocks Charles Dickens as “something that swung between your legs” in an attempt to continue being seen as cool.

Nevertheless, already, the cracks in Williams’s façade start to show. He is taken aback when white peers are surprised by his good grades, by the fact that his family isn’t poor. He observes that white classmates, who also love hip-hop, nevertheless listen to its lyrics with a sense of irony and an understanding that the world they describe is a fantasy. Many of his black friends, however, seem to take the messages in the songs to heart, as things to enact and embrace without question. The result is a gradual narrowing of identity options for black teenagers: “At bottom, it is a deeply nihilistic ideology, born of a very real despair – poverty, racial oppression, mass incarceration, early death – but whose only antidote to that suffering is acquisition: money, hoes, clothes, gold chains, and fast cars.”

After high school, Williams is admitted to Georgetown University, where he still attempts to cling to his hip-hop persona. Soon, something inside him shifts, and he rebels against what he now sees as a straightjacket that is preventing black people from becoming everything they could be. He now comes to see his father’s journey and his dedication to education as the selfless and generous action of a loving parent. This internal process is completed when, deciding to major in philosophy, he wrestles with Hegel's master and slave dialectic. The theory is so intellectually thorny that Williams is no longer impressed by the supposedly higher-brow hip-hop he used to prize: “It became nearly impossible for me… to see rappers like Jay-Z and Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan, or even Mos Def and Talib Kweli, in the light I used to see them and so many still do: as something more than entertainers and petty egoists, as something akin to autodidact philosophers and thinkers, as role models and guides.”



Williams throws off the oppressive yoke of this culture with positive consequences. He also tries to show us what would have happened had he, instead, continued in its thrall through the story of ReShawn, one of his neighborhood childhood heroes. While Williams is in college, ReShawn descends into a spiral of crime, stints in jail, and drugs. However, it is here that the memoir comes in for the large share of criticism it received. Williams is incisive when dissecting his own story, but he doesn’t consider the larger context of ReShawn’s life when explaining his choices. Could poverty, abuse, and an absence of strong parental figures have also contributed to this young man’s downfall rather than simply a genre of music? Critics point out that Williams makes the classic mistake of assuming that his autobiographical anecdote can and should be applied to all other young black people.

The memoir ends by taking us to where Williams is today. After Georgetown, he graduates from New York University with a master’s degree in journalism; he also spends an extended amount of time in Paris, the city where “so many black intellectuals and artists have flourished,” and where he finally feels completely free to actually be himself.