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Losing My Cool
Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd | Thomas Chatterton Williams
2 posts | 2 read | 6 to read
A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the author and how his father drew him out again-with love, perseverance, and fifteen thousand books. Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different-"money, hoes, and clothes." The teenage Williams wore Medusa- faced Versace sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if necessary. But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles- "keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between Williams's street life and home life threatened to spin out of control. Ultimately, Williams would have to decide between hip-hop and his future. Would he choose "street dreams" or a radically different dream- the one Martin Luther King spoke of or the one Pappy held out to him now? Williams is the first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it powerless. Losing My Cool portrays the allure and the danger of hip-hop culture like no book has before. Even more remarkably, Williams evokes the subtle salvation that literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a burgeoning bond between father and son. Watch a Video
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Pickpick

How literature and hip hop culture shaped his childhood and helped him become the man he is today.

A juggling act between acting one way on the streets versus studying for the SATs and preparing for college at home. How to be cool without losing street cred for loving literature. How to embrace hip hop when the media bashes it constantly. How to fit all the different pieces of yourself together without losing who you are & what shaped you.

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Third semester teaching this book, and just as I'm about to change the books, I think I'll miss this one. The story of a young mixed boy who falls prey to the negative messages in mainstream hiphop, but through the guidance of his father and literature, is able to find himself both within and outside of the culture that shaped him. #mixed #diverselit #mixedremixed #diversebooks

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