Book Review - Piccolo Is Black: A Memoir Of Race Religion And Pop Culture By Jordan Calhoun

I usually review books that are more directly focused on racism in the UK, or ones with themes that apply to UK society, but as a lifelong nerd I knew I had to read this book based on its title alone. Many of my fellow millennials will instantly know Piccolo as Gohan’s best stepdad but for the uninitiated Piccolo is a character from the long running Dragon Ball franchise. When I picked this book up with no prior research as to its contents, I thought it would be an analysis of the intersections between race and nerd culture. Upon reading it I found a book who’s focus, and attention goes far wider than that. Piccolo Is Black is a memoir of writer Jordan Calhoun’s life so far, and an examination of the interplay and melding of pop culture and religious iconography. It is not just a commentary on the importance of representation in the media, but the importance of finding representation where it might not exist.

While the title might be a reference to black coding in media one thing which immediately became clear is the importance religion has had on Calhoun’s life. Calhoun was raised as a Christian, more specifically a Seventh Day Adventist. This was the dominant external force in his life particularly when he was a child and had less agency. His religion affected everything from what schools he attended, to what food he ate. As someone who had a secular upbringing, seeing how big of an impact religion can have on someone’s childhood was eye opening. This is made more so by Calhoun’s choice to write the book from the perspective of whatever age he was at the time. He removed the distance from the subject matter that can sometimes exist in memoirs. It’s the difference between an adult telling the reader stories he remembers from his childhood, and the reader being in the head of a child going through those experiences as they happened. The shame he felt about masturbating as a teen for example isn’t shame he remembers feeling years ago, its shame he’s processing and struggling with in the moment. His stepfather Cliff isn’t an abusive adult who used to be in his life, he’s a looming shadow constantly cast over everything until his mother finally breaks free of his control. It’s a small shift in perspective but a highly effective one as it left a big impact on me as a reader.

Going hand in hand with religion, the other major influence in his life from early childhood was the media he consumed, especially as he became more adept at recognising Black coding. Black coding is the subtextual coding of a character in media (most commonly animation or comics) who is not actually, visually Black. Coding like this is done through character traits, appearance, their voice actor, and other cultural signifiers. Piccolo from Dragon Ball is one such example of this in action as he is Black coded despite being a green alien. Calhoun is only about two years or so older than me, so while his life experiences are worlds apart from mine many of his pop culture touchstones and references were in parallel with my own. The main differences being that I didn’t watch any of the Christian themed shows he grew up with, and I was allowed to watch Pokemon, and read Harry Potter. There were many instances throughout the book where Calhoun wrote extended passages about Gargoyles, or Beast Wars and the enthusiasm with which he wrote reminded me of the enthusiasm I felt watching them. The importance of that feeling of seeing yourself represented on screen in a character for the first time is one I can only understand in the abstract. It is not something I can truly feel in my gut because as a white man, the media has always catered to me, giving me a wide array of representation. I didn’t have to search for representation the way he did, and as a result Black coding is not a skill I had to develop. I didn’t even know Black coding was a thing until I read about it on the internet well into adulthood and discovered a lot of characters were Black and I didn’t even realise it. In the 90’s the big solution white people embraced on how to deal with racism was to pretend “I don’t see race” and unfortunately the ‘kid’ me was a product of that. Where Calhoun searched for any representation he could find, I was obliviously watching cartoons and our understanding of those shows vastly differed. To me Gargoyles was a cool cartoon to watch that felt a little more grown up than most, to Calhoun it was the show that gave him one of the first Black couples he saw on TV.

Recognising Black coded characters is not the only skill Calhoun had to learn from childhood. Many of his stories involve dealing with racism and having to learn how to code switch in order to safely exist in white majority spaces like the Seventh Day Adventist schools he attended. While at first, he focuses on maintaining an invisible line between his life at school and at home as he aged, and moved through the Adventist school system that stopped being enough. Successfully navigating these majority white spaces meant letting his classmates’ racist jokes pass unchallenged in an attempt at getting along to get along. He writes in unflinching detail about the shame he felt at letting these so called ‘friends’ see how many objects they could hide in his hair for example. As Calhoun put it himself, “The best I could do was pretend that I wasn’t bothered, because taking offense would only result in them saying how they were only joking, and the only person who would suffer consequences would be me.” It is a testament to the importance representation can have, that when learning to navigate these spaces and handle overt racism he didn’t turn to his family for help. He turned to the examples set by 90’s Black family sitcoms like The Cosby Show, Family Matters, or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. These sitcoms presented Black economic success with the Black middle class in America at the time and tended to be more socially conscious shows. They regularly had episodes that dealt directly with racism, racial slurs and drugs in a way contemporary majority white sitcoms would avoid. These shows, along with the character Azeem from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, were some of the more prominent examples of positive Black representation in live action media at the time. Azeem in particular, became a source of strength while weathering the storm of racist jokes from his classmates with Azeem’s line, “You whine like a mule. You are still alive.” becoming a kind of personal mantra whenever he faced anything challenging.

Ultimately while I may have chosen to read this book on a whim based on its title, I’m glad I did. It illustrates the Black nerd experience of loving something that might not necessarily love you back, or think to include you at all, of having to make invisible connections, and of actively searching for the good while filtering out the bad like ignoring the racist Black fish while watching The Little Mermaid. There is much more to this book than I have written about including a dive into the history of racist caricatures in animation, the censored eleven, or the unofficial one in five rule for Black characters in media. This is a book about a man who grew up walking a tightrope between two worlds, a book about how faith can become harder to reckon with as a child ages, and much more besides. I could probably write about it for a long time but I will conclude this piece here, both to avoid this review becoming unwieldy in length, and because I don’t want to give away everything it has to offer. One thing that all nerds know to take seriously, no matter where they’re from, is the importance of avoiding too many spoilers.

You can buy this book here: https://tinyurl.com/ycknuwfe