Afrika Bambaataa and Holding Multiple Truths When Death Comes

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault. There is something we do with the dead that we would never dare do with the living. We edit them.

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Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

There is something we do with the dead that we would never dare do with the living. We edit them. We take a life that sprawled and ached and contradicted itself across decades and we fold it down into something we can hold, something that fits the size of our grief or our rage, and we present that folded thing to the world as the truth. But the truth has never been that small. Afrika Bambaataa, born Lance Taylor in the Bronx River Projects, dead this morning from cancer at 67, gave us Planet Rock and the Universal Zulu Nation and a philosophy rooted in peace, unity, love, and having fun. He also, according to multiple men who were boys when it happened, took something from them that no philosophy could ever give back. Both of these things are real. Both of them sit in the same chest, breathe the same air, belong to the same man. The difficulty is not choosing which one is true. The difficulty is accepting that we don’t get to choose.

What we do when a complicated person dies is reveal something about ourselves, not about them. We sort ourselves into camps. Those who lead with the music and those who lead with the harm. And we dig in, and then we have the audacity to recruit others to our position, to insist that there is a right way to remember, a morally correct arrangement of the facts. But memory is not a courtroom. It does not require your consensus or your approval. The woman who did the Wop for almost five and one half minutes straight to “Planet Rock” at seventeen, who felt her body become architecture, who heard in that synth-heavy collision of Kraftwerk and the Bronx something that rearranged what she thought music could do is not obligated to foreground the allegations when she closes her eyes and goes back to that dance floor. And the man who sat across a settlement table from Bambaataa’s lawyers, who had spent years trying to make the world understand what was done to him at twelve years old, is not obligated to acknowledge the genius while he grieves the boy he used to be. Both of these people are right. Both of them are carrying the full weight of what actually happened.

The danger in telling only part of a life is not simply that it’s dishonest. It is that it treats human beings as arguments rather than as people. When we flatten a legacy into a single thesis, we don’t just misrepresent the dead; we betray the living who loved them, and we betray the living who were hurt by them. The survivors of Bambaataa’s alleged abuse did not survive a symbol. They survived a specific man with specific hands and a specific name, a man who was also, in some other room of his life, building something that mattered to millions of people. To erase either half is to insist that the world is simpler than it is, and the world has never once agreed to be simple. If he had wanted us to know only the music, he would have given us only the music. He gave us everything else too. The contradictions, the wreckage, the decades-long silence, the organizations built and the boys broken. That full and terrible and real life is what we inherited. We do not get to return parts of it.

So remember him how you need to. If you need to put on “Planet Rock” and let it be about the music and nothing else for the length of the song, then let it be that. If you need to sit with the accusations against Afrika Bambaataa, to hold the weight of what the boys said happened in the dark, to refuse to separate the art from the man who made it and from the man who committed harm, then do that too. I haven’t learned to separate art from artist and I don’t want to. I no longer watch The Cosby Show because Bill Cosby’s face, voice, and being turns my stomach, and I say this as someone who learned to write in the light of that show, who sat in front of tv when Rudy wrote that fairy tale and felt something clarify in me, who walked onto an HBCU campus because his vision of what Black excellence could look like pointed me there. What none of us gets to do is stand at the threshold of someone else’s mourning or someone else’s reckoning and tell them they are doing it wrong. Grief is not a public performance that requires your stage direction. Neither is justice. We are each moving through this with what we were given, with what we personally lost or personally survived, and those of us on the outside of both things ought to have the humility to be quiet. He was all of it. Let the people who need him to be a pioneer call him that. Let the people who need him to be an abuser call him that. The truth, in full, contains them both and it will outlast every argument we have about which half mattered more.