In the mid-2000s, when I was 18 or 19, I had a talking point that I clung to almost pathetically. In an alley behind a crusty venue or in the corner of a Chinese restaurant doubling as a rock club, I’d lament the old days just a couple of years earlier, when you could tell what music someone was into just by what they were wearing. My jeans, painfully skinny and tucked into platform boots, once suggested that I liked loud guitars and thrashing drums; now they merely signaled that yet another H&M had opened its doors.
This early foray into cultural theory was earnest, but it was also a way for me to justify my presence in a lot of rooms where I was often one of just two or three black people. I was lucky enough to feel confident in my identity early on, but I could still feel the questions in people’s stares. The code I’d relied on—clothes, music—to telegraph a part of myself had been, thanks to the internet and globalization, transliterated well beyond my imagined community. If not under threat, my cultural identity felt in flux. It was all consuming, and yet I hadn’t thought about this chunk of my experience for what feels like years, until reading Black Card, a new satirical novel by the writer and former punk singer Chris L. Terry.
The book, which follows a conspicuously unnamed narrator through his adolescence and early adulthood, is on its face an exploration of racial identity. The plot follows the self-discovery journey of a sometimes-white-passing biracial man—black dad, white mom—who is a bassist in a punk band and a barista at a Richmond, Virginia, coffee shop. But it’s also a story about a unique moment in time, from the ’90s and into the early ’00s, before the concept of “identity politics” was mainstreamed but also before the idea of a mythical post-racial future populated by mixed-race babies had been fully debunked.
In the temporal landscape of Black Card, to think of someone as having a “black card”—in this case, a literal card, laminated and denoting membership to some amorphous black community—wasn’t outrageous; for the narrator, it is aspirational. And yet from the vantage point of 2019, the narrator’s identity struggles feel almost facile, like closing the chapter on an era of American culture we’ve collectively moved on from. Though aesthetics and politics are almost inextricable these days, stereotypical notions of “acting black” versus “acting white” feel like relics of the ’90s and ’00s. Skateboarding or listening to rap are no longer considered the exclusive domain of any one race. Being black is being black. And so you can’t help but want to send the author a link to James Spooner’s Afro-Punk, the 2003 documentary that launched the global festival brand.
Terry’s protagonist agonizes over his racial identity, guided by a confidant named Lucius, who pops up right on time, as if by magic. Lucius plays the role of gatekeeper, the measure of “black enough,” though it’s clear he finds the project almost unserious. The narrator’s obsession with checking off the boxes of blackness is juvenile, but deeply sincere. And that may be Terry’s point in zeroing in on the years bookending the turn of the century—that the racial-identity anxieties that were once acutely overpowering are considered, in many spheres, outdated. The stakes are raised when the narrator is suspected of committing a violent crime he’s innocent of, and is suddenly confronted with his blackness as political, not merely aesthetic. The same is true for his crush and coworker Mona, who, as a victim of the attack in question, receives poor treatment from the police herself. All of a sudden, it doesn’t really matter how tight your jeans are or what 7” is under the needle. It’s almost a cynical plot device, to refract racial identity through police interaction, but it’s an effective one.
Also effective is how Terry weaves in musical references, possessing the plot-advancing magic of a good music supervisor. While song titles or albums can often feel shoehorned into a book or film that’s trying to get a subculture, here they feel plucked from reality. In one scene, the narrator is awkwardly roped into a karaoke performance of “Baby Got Back” and “The Humpty Dance” for a white, maybe-hostile audience. Decades after their release, the songs mean something resoundingly more cool for white people than they do for black people, and Terry mines that subtlety effectively. “I was a black man dancing for the white folks,” he writes. “I was a white guy cheekily doing black dances from 10 years ago. I was blacking up by singing a song off the record credited with bringing rap to the suburbs. Even my attempts at acting black were white.”
In another scene, perhaps inspired by Terry’s own experiences as a teen in Richmond, there is the kinetic magic of an introductory punk show. He writes: “With the music in the club louder than my dad’s stereo, I couldn’t feel the worry that was always reverberating off my folks. I didn’t stress about if I looked geeky when I ran up to crowd-surf. I didn’t hesitate when I grabbed two strangers’ shoulders and pushed up. And as hands pressed my back, my calves, and ticklish sides as they passed me above the crowd, I forgot everything else. I wasn’t a skater. I wasn’t black. I was someone new with louder music. And I didn’t have to try too hard to do it.” Music, especially when you’re young, can be everything.
The need to belong is a fundamental human motivation. We require meaningful social bonds—so much so that, according to one study, the threat of rejection can prompt reactions comparable to physical pain. So while intellectually, it’s easy to dismiss the narrator’s self-pity and desperation to embody stereotypical concepts of blackness, it’s impossible to ignore the real and deep place they come from. Black Card functions like a manifestation of this innately human drive to connect.
