Crip-Walking at the Commencement: Jerald Walker on the Shifting Significance of Black Gestures

I was robing for commencement when two Black colleagues informed me of my slip. “You were working it,” one said, before the other added: “Don’t work it too hard, though, or you’ll scare the white folks.”

I had no idea what they were talking about, but scaring the white folks, unless by intention, was something I preferred to avoid. I asked what I had done, causing them to break into laughter that abruptly ceased when they realized I was not joking. With expressions of curiosity and concern, they recounted seeing me a short while earlier, as I made my way across campus, doing the gangster walk.

Not to be confused, I should stress, with “the gangsta walk,” a dance made popular by the Memphis-based band G-Style in the 1990s. Apparently, I had been walking like the actual gangster I had once been—not a good one, certainly, but I had mastered the look of a good one in motion. Or rather in slow motion, my pace being that of a ninety-year-old with a leg wound.

I also did this thing where I dipped one swaying shoulder slightly lower than the other and fanned the air behind me with my cupped hands, unless they were holding, as they often were back then, a forty-ounce and a joint. “The only thing I was missing,” I said, to my colleagues, “was a forty-ounce and a joint!” This time we all laughed, but in truth, I was mortified. I think they were too.

I resumed robing, already beginning to fret over how my body, unbeknownst to my brain, had spoken in the manner I had trained it as a teen, telling onlookers, “Do not mess with me” and “I’m a killer” and “There’s a bullet in my thigh.” But it is not often these days that my body needs to say such things. In fact, the only real occasion is when my class ends at 9:45 pm and, to reach the underground parking garage in the Boston Common, I must, regrettably, enter the Boston Common.

The Boston Common is not safe at 9:45 pm. It is not safe at many other times either. If faculty must enter it, our campus police recommends that we use their escort service. I never have, though, because that would be at odds with my body when it tells onlookers, “I’m cool.”

On a gangster-walk scale of one to ten, “cool” would be a two. Two is my normal. Based on my colleagues’ reaction, I must have crept up to three, maybe four. Four is what I reserve for the Boston Common. I never go above four unless I am visiting my old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, in which case, having largely aged out of being seen as a threat by threatening people, a six is sufficient.

But there was that time I visited a few years ago when my twin brother coaxed me into going with him to a liquor store, and just to play it safe (it was night), I ratcheted it up to eight. My brother was impressed. I still had it, he said.

And now, I feared, it had me. How often, I wondered, had I unknowingly exceeded a level two? Could it be that as I advanced into middle age, my body, as a precursor to my mind, was regressing to an earlier time and place? Was I destined to do a high-level gangster walk with a walker?

I was picturing myself in a nursing home, scaring the elderly white folks, when an announcement came over the intercom: procession was about to begin. I put on my mortarboard, tilting it just so, and then joined the other faculty assembling by the door, making sure to be in front to secure the best seat.

Soon thereafter, as the band started to play, we were ushered into the auditorium. The crowd rose and applauded at the sight of us, and I willed my body, like never before, to speak only of my coolness as I moved down the aisle. Was this my life now? I wondered. Being extra careful, figuratively, and in due course, literally, not to slip?

I tried to stop thinking about it in order to enjoy myself. Commencement, in my opinion, one shared by very few of my colleagues, was the best part of being an academic. The ceremonies were endless, my colleagues complained, and more often than not the speeches were boring, trite, and clichéd. All of this was true.

And yet I loved every minute of it, perhaps only in a way a Black high school dropout from the ghetto could, for I knew firsthand the transformative power of education. Had I not abandoned the streets and enrolled at a community college, I, like so many of my family and friends, would have gangster-walked to prison or an early grave.

It was unlikely that any of the few Black students at the private college where I now worked were high school dropouts from the ghetto, but it was a good bet that their journey to this point had been more difficult than their white peers’. That was why my enjoyment of commencement increased when I saw Black students all decked out in their regalia, faces beaming as they mounted the stage and waited for their names to be called, and then, once they were, to proudly march forward, pausing, after a few steps, in the case of the young man there now, to do the crip walk.

Which was to be confused with the gangbangers’ dance of that name, for it was a gangbanger, Robert “Sugar Bear” Jackson, who, in Compton, California, during the 1970s, had started it. But I assumed the student was doing the dance’s pop-culture version, the one being performed by all manner of people the world over, and even once, in 2006, on PBS by a Teletubby.

I had even attempted it myself a number of times and might have succeeded but for my patellar tendonitis. Unfortunately for me, the dance involves a series of intricate steps, executed at the speed and rhythm of the dancer’s choosing, with slow and smooth being the choice of the student onstage as he inched toward the diploma in the president’s hands.

It was the student’s own hands that suddenly brought into question which version of the dance he was doing; his index fingers and thumbs appeared to be formed into a C, the Crips’ gang sign. It was possible, it occurred to me, that the young man was saying more than that he was ecstatic. He could have been saying, “I’m a killer.” If that were the case, it would have been no truer of him, I was certain, than of me.

But there had been a time when crip walking, with or without the hand gesture, would have spoken truthfully of the performer’s propensity to kill, since the dance was decidedly limited to Crips, and Crips were decidedly killers. Its members crip-walked at parties to show their gang affiliation, but they also were known to do it at murder scenes, a gruesome ritual whereby the dancers spelled “CRIP” with their feet near the deceased victim, who more often than not was a member of the Bloods, a rival gang.

But inevitably, the dance seeped into the broader Black culture, from which it inevitably seeped into broader American culture, and then, inevitably, into world culture. The seep became a gush in 2001 after the gangster rapper Dub-C’s rendition of it at the Up in Smoke hip-hop tour and later in his music videos. MTV, aware of the dance’s origins, refused to air his or anyone’s videos that contained it. Many elementary and high school administrators, also aware of this origin, added it to their lists of prohibitions.

The 2012 Olympic organizers might have also added it to their list of prohibitions, had they known that Compton native Serena Williams would crip-walk on Wimbledon’s Centre Court after defeating Maria Sharapova for the Olympic gold medal. Serena did not flash the gang sign, of course, but even if she had, she was no killer either.

And yet for all the criticism she received, one would have thought Sharapova had bled out near the net, the handle of Serena’s racket protruding from her chest. “Yup, that’s what we need representing America,” one critic said, “a gold medalist who, upon winning, glorifies hardened criminals who murder each other—and innocent Americans—for sport.” Another critic called her “immature and classless.”

Serena, regretful, it seemed, for the manner of her celebration, appeared to sense the coming heat during her post-victory press conference and sought to avert it. “Actually, there is a name,” she responded, when reporters asked what the dance was called. “But I don’t know if…it’s inappropriate. It’s just a dance we do in California.”

Finding it quite appropriate, however, was Snoop Dogg, also a Compton native, who, eight years later, would crip-walk during the 2020 Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show and receive no heat for it. “Shout out to Serena Williams,” Snoop tweeted. “C walking at the Olympics Cpt style hahahahah! Go girl.”

For another of Serena’s other supporters, a shout-out came in the form of a reasoned defense. “She didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. “It was a moment of unbridled joy. She pumped her fist, jumped up and down, looked into the crowd, then did her ill-timed dance.”

When my colleagues had informed me of my ill-timed gangster walk, I had assumed it was an unbridled response to some threatening incident buried deep in my subconscious, but as I watched the student crip-walk, it occurred to me that wasn’t the case. My body, on its own accord, as I was sure had been the case with Serena’s, and very likely the student’s too, was simply performing an act of homage, paying respects to a place where the flames of violence and hardship often consume lives, yes, but more often than not, as the writer Albert Murray observed, those flames forge lives into steel.

The student at last reached the president and received his diploma. He waved it at the applauding crowd before exiting the stage. The next student was called, and the next, and the next.

I cheered each one, but a little less robustly, I admit, near the end. The ceremony lasted a new record of four hours. I was relieved and grateful for it to be over. My bad knee, bent for so long, had begun to throb.

As my row was directed to process, my body, this time with my brain’s full awareness, spoke to all who saw me limping down the aisle. “I’m not trying to scare the white folks,” it said. “I’m just getting old.”

Excerpted from Magically Black and Other Essays. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2024 by Jerald Walker.