We Real Cool: An Outsourcing

Preface: For the 2nd time in as many weeks I'm apologizing for another case of WWBWS (Writing While Black...While Sleepy). Please forgive any incoherence. I've been up 21 hours at this point, but I wanted to attempt this before I forgot it. One of these days I'll get back to day-time writing, I promise. But for now, slog through this /end of preface

I need this one explained to me: Why, with all of the cultural power in this country, is it that white America has outsourced "coolness" to us black folk? Is it some sort of cultural masochism? Why not define the term such that you are in fact cool, and others are less so and their youth strive to be like you, and not the other way 'round? Is it because 'cool' has to be something different/better/other than mainstream (otherwise, why name it at all?) and so the very otherness of being (stereotypically) 'black' is uncritically accepted as 'cool', just because it's different? If so, why don't other majority social cohorts find 'coolness' in minority groups. Then again, maybe it's as simple as Miles Davis naming an album "Birth of the Cool" and no one ever dared question that he and his entourage were cool (and a risk a trumpet upside the head? Thanks but no thanks), and thus anything he thought cool must be cool.

When it comes to coolness as a motivating force, perhaps you've simply missed Gwendolyn Brooks' poem 'We Real Cool', on the revelries and dangers of self-serving cool-seeking:

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.