BLACK & GOTH

My initial attraction to Goth subculture was not a musical love of Fill-in-the-Blank Wave (that came later as I learned about the history of the subculture) but a love of the aesthetic. Even as a kid, I liked things that were considered dark, mysterious, or esoteric. Batman was my favorite superhero, black was my favorite color, Phantom of the Opera was my favorite musical, and I didn’t want to pretend to be happy and light all the time. My parents were skeptical but understanding and I think my mom was just happy that I finally had an interest in makeup and dressing up, even if what I wanted was to dress strangely.

However, at the same time that I was learning to appreciate my ‘darker’ self, I was also becoming more aware of myself as a Black American woman and was learning how to understand and express myself in relation to race. The European focus of the Goth and Industrial scenes—the emphasis on pale skin as beautiful, the nostalgia for a past I would never want to visit (Goth), the almost complete absence of people of color from imagined futures (Industrial), the emphasis on white musicians, artists, and philosophers, the general ignorance… it grated on me. Particularly when one of the mantras of the subculture that had appealed to me was acceptance of the Other(worldly). I’m not the first person of color to express dissatisfaction with the level of awareness about race and ethnicity in Goth subculture and I’m not going to talk a lot about that (see References and Resources for more info). (1)

What’s been important for me is the development and widespread discussion of such concepts as Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, etc. that has fostered a creation of Black-centered alternative spaces. I no longer have to be a Black goth in a white space, but can be and am a distinct entity, a cultural artifact that appears to be parallel to the white Western goth, but is grounded in a completely different worldview. In March 2015 Black Girl Nerds tweeted an article titled “Is it accurate to consider certain Blacks alternative?” Both the article and the online discourse explored what it means when someone calls themselves a Black Alternative. For me, the title of Black Alternative was and is about unifying the aspects of my person that are considered disconnected and even contradictory by those subscribing to a white supremacist Eurocentric worldview. (2)


The aesthetic that I see developing understands a new expression of mystery, of darkness as nearly unknowable knowledge, this illusive ~Blackness~. The music, (doom soul, goombawave, sadtrap, ghetto gothic, gothicrnb, etc.), the style, the art, the urban futurism, the afro southern surrealism, the reimagination—I'm trying to put to words a very diverse but somehow cohesive visual and auditory experience.

In April 2015, I was listening to The Black Tribbles podcast, during the Octavia City event, during which Afrofuturist authors who have been inspired by Octavia Butler read their work. Ras Mashramani was commenting on her first-person time travel story, "A Young Thug Confronts His Own Future" (a beautifully fluid short story: 10 out of 10, will read again) when she made the following observations:

"Paranoia has been used in different decades as a mental illness that has been used to stigmatize people... But there a real reason that you [Black people] feel that there's a target on your back all the time..."

"I think that a feeling of death and doom is something that a lot of people—poor people, people of color—in this country really have to get used to. And they get used to it real quick and real early, unfortunately. It's like being in high school and wearing t-shirts of people that you know that have died? And it's like, Damn that's a nice t-shirt. It's like, these are the only ways you're allowed to acknowledge publicly what you've been through." (3)

It's (more than) the difference between black creepers and black Tims, it's (more than) the difference between sampling a Gregorian chant and sampling a gospel song for the phrase "Jesus, my king". It's a textural and contextual aesthetic that resists white as default; that creates over, around, through cultural theft; that recognizes both the physical death and the soul murder we live with, subverting it and wearing the melancholy it produces as a badge of pride and that critiques oppression instead of venerating or ignoring it. It's the resonance of hearing the history of your own people's sadness, horror, triumph, and transformation and producing a Goth aesthetic that could only come from the center of Blackness.

REFERENCES AND RESOURCES

1. Goths of Color by Lucy Furr, Morbid Outlook Magazine, February 2001 http://www.morbidoutlook.com/lifestyle/articles/2001_02_gothocolour.html 
2. Is it Accurate to Consider Certain Blacks Alternative? by Latonya Pennington March 27, 2015, http://blackgirlnerds.com/accurate-consider-certain-blacks-alternative/ 
3. Black Tribbles Prime Ep 184: Octavia City, April 2, 2015, http://www.gtownradio.com/content/view/4895/134/ // http://blacktribbles.podomatic.com/entry/2015-04-02T21_48_23-07_00