What is cool?

by Marlene K. Connor

Forget everything you know about what is cool. In Marlene Connor's provocative book, What Is Cool?, she examines an important phenomenon that is often overlooked or, worse, dismissed as rebelliousness. Cool has its roots in the Black community of America, and it plays an important role in shaping a definition of manhood for young Black boys, based on the significant obstacles the male child finds in his community. These Blacks, from whom much of America takes its cues, perceive, acknowledge, define, and reflect cool in a way that society in general has yet to comprehend. Cool, at its most basic, is a way of living and of surviving in an inhospitable environment. Cool is a rational reaction to an irrational situation, a way of fitting in while standing out, of gaining respect while instilling fear. Chronicling cool from its birth during slavery to its development during the jazz era, the civil rights and revolutionary movements, the influx into corporate America in the seventies, and to