I was twelve years old the first time someone called me a poseur. I’m sure I’d heard the term before then – maybe through a television show or something – but never in reference to me. I’d just taken up skateboarding when some friends and I were exploring the neighborhood and came upon another group of skaters. Even from across the street they looked bigger and scarier than us. They had to be in high school. Like all teenage boys, they wanted to see how they measured up against us. What better way to do that than to track us down and give us the third degree?
My friend, who’d been skating for a number of years, was good. Good enough to inspire me to take it up before we even became friends. Though I rode with him, and even used some of his old equipment, giving me an appearance of legitimacy, I never got to his level. My greatest achievement was clearing a six stair, and that wasn’t for another couple of years. You can imagine, then, the response of the older kids when they were scoping out our equipment, asking what tricks we could do, and I came up empty.
But it wasn’t just the fact that I couldn’t do any tricks really. It was that, in a moment of nervousness, I mispronounced the name of a relatively famous skateboarder. Skateboarding, like all sports to an extent, is one of show and prove. It’s not enough to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk, and somehow, I managed to fail at both. I was a poseur, and as brief as that interaction was, that moment, for better or worse, has defined so much of my life.
These days I’ve been thinking about the nature of revolutions and how prophetic countercultural movements die and it occurs to me that if you wanted to kill one, you don’t need to use force. Certainly you could, but I wonder if the most effective way to kill a revolution is to commercialize it to the point it loses its edge, to commodify it to the point its relic to be packaged and sold. To make it so pedestrian it’s no longer prophetic.
Take the Christian faith, for example.
For the first four centuries, Christianity was a subversive, countercultural movement that afforded you no social standing. In fact, “Christian” was meant to be an insult. Early Christians were considered atheists because they didn’t believe in the gods of their day and deemed political enemies because they claimed Jesus as Lord (an inherently political statement). They cared for the sick, the poor, the orphans, and the widows and were persecuted for it. Anyone who sought to join this group understood that to do so was to do it at your own peril. You only joined because you became convinced of something fundamental about reality.
Then Christianity became the state religion and suddenly Jesus and political power became synonymous. Instead of being persecuted by the empire, Christians became the empire. For the first time ever, it was possible to be “born a Christian” and that status gave you social standing. Of course, there were good things about this. Because Christians spent the first few centuries trying to survive, this era held creeds and councils that crystallized Christian belief. But, at the same time, something was lost.
Part of what makes revolutions so revolutionary is the way they stand apart from the cultural moment. Rather than adopting it wholesale, they think critically about the culture and fight for an idea/l. But what happens when the counterculture becomes the culture and those who enter into mainstream society can enjoy the harvest of the revolution without having gone through all the tribulation that forged the initial core? As great as it is, it becomes possible for swaths of people to say they believe in a cause without having done the homework. The movement becomes diluted and poseurs become a possibility.
Lots of people have asked me how I’m processing the recent events in America regarding race and for the longest time I didn’t have words for it. On the one hand, this isn’t new. It’s so unsurprising to me, in fact, that it’s hard for me to grieve it like it’s the first time. What is new to me is the outpouring of solidarity, in my city no less. I’ve seen marches on my street, people who’ve never talked to me about race have initiated conversation, and there’s a general sense that silence means complicity – even the NBA announced its plan to add “BLM” to their basketball courts. As exciting as this may be, I can’t help but be skeptical. Black Lives Matter was a cry and a hashtag that evolved into a movement. To say it implied something. You knew it came with a cost. By making it a household name, the bar for entry is low. How long before the phrase collects dust and loses it meaning? Will we be tempted to settle for signs over the real systemic change revolutions call for? What happens when the call for racial justice stops being prophetic and starts being pedestrian?
Even as I write this, I recognize the flaw in my own thinking. Commercialization doesn’t kill movements. It just sparks another one. Usually when the idea/l has been muddied, a group emerges to fight for the original intent. Christianity had the monastics. Racial justice will have its own rebirth. After all, calling yourself a Christian isn’t revolutionary, actually being a Christian is. Similarly, believing in racial justice might not always be revolutionary, but actually fighting for it might be. What separates the two is the willingness to pay the costs.
The reason I was never a good skateboarder was because I was too afraid of breaking bones. I wasn’t willing to suffer for it and you don’t make it very far in skateboarding (or anything for that matter) if you aren’t willing to suffer for it.
I’ve often wondered how Kurt Cobain would feel seeing Nirvana t-shirts in department stores. If the kids I see randomly wearing Misfits or Iron Maiden clothing can name three songs, let alone three albums from them. Substance and meaning gets turned into a symbol to be co-opted for style. Of course, you could make the argument that all this is very elitist thinking. Who gets to define what’s real? One person’s bar for entry is still considered child’s play to another person. Doesn’t this elitist behavior generate more toxicity that also will eventually kill a revolution?
The reality is that revolutions are volatile, instable by nature. They emerge for a time and a place in response to a particular issue. Either people grow hardened to their cries or adopt their message and it either gets normalized or commercialized. Yet in mechanics, a revolution is nothing more than the completion of a cycle. This is to say that while they are volatile, they are also cyclical by nature. In that way, it reminds me of Hegelian philosophy. The revolution/prophetic movement challenges the way things are until it becomes part of the way things are. Then new problems emerge, and the cycle begins again. The revolution continues.
I don’t have time to unpack it here, but perhaps what actually kills movements is when they fall victim to the same critique they leveled at everyone else and wither under the weight of their own scrutiny. That’s a big thought. One I’ll save for another post.
Tomy Wilkerson 