I remember the day I decided to kill whitey.

It was a late spring afternoon in 1981, and everybody in my 8th grade class was restless with the coming of summer. So the teachers opened up the shared area between the classrooms, turned down the lights, and let the kids spin records and dance.

Columbia, Maryland was America’s first fully planned city, an experiment in economic and racial integration that was only 13 years old, like me. So while there were wildly different groups of kids, the cultural combat wasn’t quite as acute as I’ve seen in other suburban convergences.

Sylvester Burke, our social studies teacher, was the referee. He was a gentle guy, but he was built like a linebacker, so even the toughest kids were scared to mess with him.

First, he let the “preppies” play their favorites: Bill Joel, Hall & Oates, and Supertramp. In Columbia, preppies were multi-cultural: the Izod-wearing children of both white and Black families who occupied the houses and condos of Harpers Choice. So you had Jewish and Italian kids, but you also had Black kids like my classmates Kyle Prioleau and Suzanne Malveaux — both of whom went on to Harvard, one of whom you can now see on CNN almost daily.

The shitkicker-wearing cigarette-smoking “freaks” were going to riot if they heard Air Supply one more time. Sensing this, Mr. Burke regulated and turned the wheels of steel over to them for a while. The “Freaks” —from the rural outskirts of Columbia —had a surprisingly multicultural tinge too. Maryland, I found, had both white and black rednecks.

Fifteen minutes of AC/DC, Led Zepplin and Lynard Skynard, however, had sent most people off the dance floor, and Mr. Burke had had enough. Now he gave the Black kids their shot. The Black children reflected the class divisions of their parents: half of them middle-class, the other half from lower income developments or section 8 housing, all cleverly nested within the careful geography of Columbia. Almost everyone could agree on Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and the floor filled up again.

I danced alone. I had recently been expelled from Kyle’s preppy clique, and was back to being an outcast. I had myself to blame: a short, geeky kid with glasses and buckteeth who had flown too high in the social spectrum and got shot down.

But fuck them, I thought now, as I danced. Their whole shit was weak anyway: the oxfords, the docksiders, the polos, their stupid parties, their mean-spirited feathered-hair girlfriends and their music. Especially their music. Billy Joel? ELO? I even stopped listening to The Beatles because that shit wasn’t gay enough for them.

It was a moment of self-awareness, the kind so rare in life, where you let go of what people think of you, and see things as they really are.

I open my eyes and realize I’m the only white person dancing. This isn’t Stevie Wonder anymore. They’re playing a song I’ve never heard before, one that had a sinister bass line, only adding to the sensation that all 4 feet of me could run up to Kyle and punch him dead in the jaw.

“Mo-O-o-or Bo-O-o-unce….”

After the dance, I found Missy, who had brought that record from home, and peered over her shoulder to see who had made it. It was my initiation into the post-disco world of funk and soul. It was the best shit I ever heard. I wanted more. But in that pre-Prince, pre-Thriller era, you couldn’t just turn on a pop radio station and hear it.

I went home and changed all the presets on my radio. From that point on, I listened only to the Black stations broadcasting from the twin hearts of Baltimore and Washington: V-103, OK-100, WKYS, and WHUR (Howard University Radio).

Now here’s the thing. I had grown up with Black music, because of my mother. She played Marvin Gaye and Main Ingredient and The Crusaders damn near constantly, while she read, or cooked, or hung out with friends. I had every Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind & Fire album already. But for me, it was all music, undifferentiated.

Then something happened at that dance. Something that made me dive completely into the world of Black music. To me, it was as if I realized I had been listening to the cheap imitation for too long, and I had found the original. Like Al Jarreau once sang, “Once you’ve had sweet potato pie, you don’t want no pumpkin no more.”

And here’s the other thing. I had grown up with Black people, too. At least a quarter of my town was Black. Half of my teachers were Black. And Columbia was sandwiched by two Black metropolises.

But soon after I began embracing funk and soul with the fervor I reserve for the things I truly love, I became aware of how this unsettled white people. You know, stupid, nervous suggestions from them that I should join the “Black Awareness Club.” Why? Because I liked Trouble Funk and E.U. and Rare Essence? How did that make me Black? And what was so wrong with that anyway? So Rick Springfield is okay for me, but Chuck Brown isn’t?

Where white kids were hostile, black kids were amused. When I noticed that a classmate in world history honors had written the names of those three D.C. bands on his textbook cover, I started a conversation, and his jaw dropped. We remained friends for years, and he became one of my most important musical mentors. (His name was William “Kip” DuVall, and years later he would go on to write the hit song “I Know” for Dionne Farris.)

So you see, it wasn’t like I was running from a white crowd to a Black crowd, or from a lilywhite world to a Black one. Kyle, my main preppy tormentor, was Black. Kip, my new friend, was also Black. I had the benefit, unlike most white Americans, of seeing that something was really screwy with people’s rigid perceptions of race and culture in America.

It was the dawn of my racial consciousness, one that led me to major in African-American studies in college, and ultimately to working in hip-hop.

These were my choices. And I know my choices are suspect to many Black people, because most Black people don’t have the luxury of making them. That’s why it’s hard to tell the difference between Elvis and Eminem. It’s hard to tell whether a white person is honoring or fetishing Black people. Some Black folks say it doesn’t matter anyway. Since whites will never experience racism, all our actions will ultimately benefit the system, and a well-done appropriation is just as bad as a horrible one.

I cannot speak to all of that. I don’t know what Eminem’s intentions are, I don’t know what’s in the mind and heart of “The Pumpsta.” All I can speak about is me.

And for me, “Blackness” was not about being cool, not about trying to imitate some image of Black people I had in my mind, and definitely not about trying NOT to be white or Jewish.

Looking back, I can see that Black culture and Black people came to represent two things I wanted in my life.

Passion. Who would you rather hear sing the National Anthem? Debbie Boone or Aretha Franklin? Who would do more with it? Who would extract every possibility from every note and leave people feeling like they just witnessed something
spontaneous and beautiful, even though they’ve heard the tune a million times before?

“Melisma” is the musical term for taking a note, bending it, stretching it, and taking it through a few loop-de-loops before you move onto the next one. It is also a metaphor for the cultural gift of Africans and their descendants on this continent. It’s about coming from your heart and not your brain. It’s about being creative rather than being programmed. It’s about making something out of nothing. That’s how I wanted to live my life. And naturally, I would want to be around people who lived their lives in the same way.

Truth. Once you start realizing that, for example, r&b; is the original recipe for rock and roll, other things become apparent. Not simply that Black culture had been stolen by whites. Not even that Black people continued to be oppressed and murdered in America.

For me, the truth was more epic: America was a nation in denial. Why, for example, were my white friends running from one type of Black music only to listen to another dressed up in “white” clothing.” It was all from the same source. Just as we were. That 8th grade dance began a trail that led ultimately to this revelation, which I would write years later:

In a sense, white Americans can never know who they really are, never fully come to grips with their own cultural and social and historical identity if they do not acknowledge or recognize how much African-American culture has touched them, how much of their own American identity is fused with the African. Our hypocritical denial of black culture and black expression makes it much easier and much more convenient to deny black people themselves.

As Charles Keil pointed out in the 1960s, “It is simply incontestable that year by year, American popular music has come to sound more and more like African popular music.” In concurring with this point, we are not saying that whites and blacks now have the same culture, or share the same experiences; but the more white Americans appreciate how “Africanized” their own expression has become, the better we whites can bridge the cultural and social gap that has ensnared us for too long in prejudice and ignorance. Loving that which is “mulatto” is not enough; we must love the thing that is uniquely black, or we cannot love ourselves.

That, in the end, is what killing whitey means to me.