Fatherhood Quote by Andre Benjamin

Andre Benjamin frames style as something you inherit socially when you cant inherit it at home. The line starts with a blunt diagnosis - absent fathers - but quickly pivots away from moral panic and toward a more precise cultural mechanism: when nobody initiates you into the small codes of presentation, you learn from images. Dressing becomes a secondhand education, mediated by magazine spreads and the soft propaganda of movies.

The specificity matters. Cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood, Cary Grant: a lineup of American mythologies where Black kids are rarely centered, yet constantly addressed. Benjamin is pointing to an odd kind of adoption. These boys borrow the silhouette of masculinity from icons that werent made for them, then remix it into something new. Its not just about clothing; its about learning how to be seen, how to take up space, how to perform adulthood in a society that often withholds models of Black male gentleness, elegance, or ease.

The subtext is a critique of scarcity - not only economic scarcity, but representational scarcity. If your primary tutors are glossy images, you absorb both aspiration and distortion: you chase polish while also internalizing who gets to look effortless and authoritative. Coming from an artist whos built a career on collage and reinterpretation, the observation doubles as a quiet origin story for hip-hop fashion itself: an aesthetic born from gaps in guidance, filled by imagination, cinema, and the hunger to self-author.