When Being Black Actually Mattered

By Andy — 2026-08-09 — Literary News

I watched a kid get nervous about his own visibility. That's the entire opening to James Spooner's new memoir, and it doesn't sound like much until you sit with it.

The scene is Pool Bar, a dump underneath Bleecker Street in 1991. Spooner's fifteen, a few months into New York, tartan plaid and a mohawk, waiting to hear if a doorman will scratch his name off a list for a show. The bouncer's actually sorting through genuinely clipped attendance marks—each one a five-dollar ticket. Spooner's on it, his name's there. "I see it," the guy says, dead as a floor. Purple stamp on the hand. Down the stairs.

That's it. That's the whole world-moving-on-its-axis moment—being invited, being on a list, belonging somewhere that mattered.

What struck me reading this wasn't the nostalgia. It's that Spooner refuses to make the moment bigger than it was. No metaphor about finding home or some graceful arc. He just got stamped and went in. But the reason this moment lands is what he was circling: "This wasn't the first time Black punks had existed, but it was the first time I felt that presence in my own body, in my own moment."

That's the actual story.

Through the 1990s, before James Spooner came along, Black punk rockers were relatively few in number and otherwise overlooked. The punk scene existed. The music existed. The community did too. But there was a distance built into it, a way of being that required you to fold your Blackness into whiteness, or pretend that part of yourself wasn't there. Spooner didn't have to do that at Pool Bar. He just had to be on the list. The rest came after.

Spooner is the award-winning filmmaker and graphic novelist behind the multimillion-dollar AFROPUNK Festival—beginning not with big stages or brand sponsorship, but with one Black kid's search for belonging in the nineties New York City punk scene. His new book is published through Pantheon, and it's technically an excerpt from a longer memoir called "It Starts with Anger." But this excerpt is doing something different than memoir usually does. It's not explaining punk to you, or race in punk, or even Spooner's arc from basement shows to running a festival that now exists in multiple countries. It's just showing what happened when a kid got stamped.

The actual historical weight here—the part worth sitting with—is that Spooner didn't invent Black punk. The all-Black band Pure Hell was part of New York's punk scene in the late 1970s alongside the Dictators, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Bad Brains existed. The music was already there. What Spooner did was document something else: the alienation of being in a room full of people doing the exact same thing you were doing, and still being invisible in it.

"Meeting Black punks who weren't compromising their Blackness for their punkness, it blew my mind," Spooner told NPR years later, talking about that New York visit. He found people who didn't have to choose. That's not revolutionary on the surface. It's just... basic. But in 1991, in a basement on Bleecker Street, it meant everything.

There's a temptation here to make this about progress, or how things are different now, or to turn Spooner into a corrective force who fixed what was broken. The memoir doesn't do that. It explores themes of identity, alienation, race, and the formative influence of punk culture in Spooner's adolescence, which is to say it's about what it felt like to be there, not why you should feel good about it being there. The actual craft of the writing is clean—short sentences, the kind of specificity that doesn't announce itself. He tells you about a bouncer. He tells you about a stamp. He doesn't tell you what it meant.

You figure that out yourself, standing in a basement, waiting to see if anyone wrote your name down.