There is an underground secret being held by a lot of black artists at this time. A secret that we dare not speak in public. We would be hounded, castigated, thought of as coon and sellouts. I receive these calls late at night, I get texts, DMs, messages sent on Instagram. It's usually a black artist I know who has no one else they can share these thoughts with and no way for it to be air on social media without a backlash. The secret is intersectional, complex, and composing various thoughts that goes something like this...
-first off, they fucking hate the social media protest of black square profile. They hate the silence and obtuse symbolism of Instagram activism. It's virtue signaling co-opted by Amazon and Starbucks. It's Nancy Pelosi kente cloth cosplay. Yet, it was mostly unquestioned in media and corporations, which is scary. It is a sign of an unthinking, herd reaction from people not seeking change, but seeking a false equivalence of equality through superficial gestures of 'likeness.' It is the flexibility of amoral capitalism and thirsty individual clout chasers who adopt the fashions of the time, while maintaining its core problematic nature.
-while well-intentioned, a lot of the neoliberal work on race feels infantilizing toward black people. The idea that blackness has to plead and beg whiteness to live, to breathe, to be acknowledge. That idea many strong black outliers find to be deeply insulting to their independence.
- there are actually a lot of black thinkers and artists who are independent minded. They became like that through training and survival. They are deeply suspicious of both right- and left-wing media pushes and activists trying to galvanize them in any way. Some of them have carved out a very difficult existence by avoiding the waves of public opinion, avoided speaking on diversity panels at white institutions, hosting workshops. These independent black thinkers are very wary of becoming 'professionally black' and 'performative black' for white liberals. Yet, in a time of crisis this is what black artists and thinkers are often called on to become...a free, unpaid, full-time race counselor to white people and then a spoken-word rage artists.
- many independent black thinkers were educated at white institutions that gave them small or large portions of black art. This was the art handed down by white professors to the class and a little wink toward the young black artists as if to say 'don't worry, soul brother! I got you.' And usually the black thinker was left an uneasy feeling, as if he was being listened to without consulting. A lot of times these black pieces meant to signify blackness in America were written under times of crisis and upheaval. Some of the work is good and nuanced. Many of the art is not. Not because the black ancestors were bad artists. But because they were trying to address a crisis in a direct way. Their mortal souls were in danger, fire was in the street, sirens were ringing out in the neighborhood...and it's very hard to be nuanced and layered while surrounded by war. But the truth of their protest spoke to the moment and became famous. The truth of all good protest art speaks to the moment. The problem is that -outside of that moment and time- the art feels dated, thin, screechy, and preachy. This is true for most protests art, regardless of color. The problem is that black art in white institutions is almost solely defined by protest art from the 60s and 70s. The education received is that to be a black artist is to protest and here is the narrow avenue of expression to protest. But the same is not true for white artists. No one would ever say that Clifford Odets left-wing socialist plays represent white protest art. And furthermore, most of Odets plays are terrible. With the exception of "Waiting for Lefty" his work has fallen out of favor because it strikes a hollow strident tone in protesting class inequalities. It spoke to the moment but has not aged well. Meanwhile Arthur Miller and Paddy Chayefsky were one generation removed from Odets and were able to take his politics, sit with calmer heads and slightly more detachment, and produce classic pieces of art that are still studied today. "All My Sons" and "Network" rest on the back of Odets voice and politics, but it built on it so that the politics didn't overwhelm the craft and tastes of the individual.
- if you are raised on bad protests art and told that your blackness is in direct proportion to the extent you support and want to continue this genre...then you hesitate. Is your white professor gaslighting you? Are they intentionally sabotaging your future by getting you to commit to a form that feels dated, hollow, and thin? Do they not see your complexity? Or are they trying to say your complexity is too...complex to be black? It will not get validated and rewarded. Will one have 'perform a version of blackness' for white audiences to eat? And isn't that just another form of racism...neoliberal racism...infantilizing racism that forces us all to become the children of Richard Wright's "Native Son?"
- James Baldwin wrote a famous essay "Notes on a Native Son" in which he blasted Wright for making this very kind of protest art filled with cheap caricatures that made white liberals feel guilty. The gist was that it wasn't art...it was a pamphlet. Some people said Baldwin was just jealous. Other people made in personal...what right does a gay black artist have to tell Wright about blackness? And the swordsman pary from the other side: what bearing does Wright have to publish from the luxuries of Paris with his white wife a piece written to inflame people with such claptrap...with such cheap racial maneuvering...with a viewpoint that Wright doesn't even believe because how could he marry a white woman and hold these thoughts about her race? How could the author move to the artistic epicenter of whiteness and craft "Native Son." Well he was performing for white audiences and they loved it.
- 75 years later most high school students have to read either "Black Boy" or "Native Son." It is the requisite black art novel you get in high school. Almost no one outside of lit majors still read Baldwin's criticism. And yet, the criticism seems more valid that the original art. The criticism seems to offer more nuance, tone, and tastes then this portrait of a murdering/raping hulking black man whose literal name is Bigger. It's as if Wright was giving his character a name to remind himself of the man thrust of story...bigger crimes, bigger hopelessness, bigger archetypes, bigger and more operatic tragedy.
- As Ayana Mathis wrote in the NYTimes.... “Native Son” sold an astonishing 215,000 copies within three weeks of publication. Thus, a great many people received a swift and unsparing education in the conditions in which blacks lived in ghettos all over America. Of course, black people already knew about all of that, so it is safe to conclude that Wright’s intended audience was white. And, in any case, I don’t imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. Bigger Thomas is a rapist and a murderer motivated only by fear, hate and a slew of animal impulses. He is the black ape gone berserk that reigned supreme in the white racial imagination. Other black characters in the novel don’t fare much better — they are petty criminals or mammies or have been so ground under the heel of oppression as to be without agency or even intelligence. Wright’s is a bleak and ungenerous depiction of black life.
Wright knew this, of course — his characters were purposely exaggerated, in part to elicit a white audience’s sympathy and to shock it into racial awareness and political action. But where does that leave his black subjects? Let us consider some other works published in roughly the same era: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Ann Petry’s “The Street.” Like Bigger Thomas, the protagonists in these books are black, suffering under segregation and, for the most part, poor. Unlike Bigger Thomas, they are robust and nuanced characters — not caricatures endlessly acting out the pathologies of race. Much of the black literature of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, explicitly or implicitly, was concerned with race in America. How could it have been otherwise? For better or worse, many of the characters in the literature of that period were representational to some extent — black people in the real world were the correlative to black characters on the page. And this is significant, because when black writers affirmed their black subjects’ full humanity, the scope of their novels included the expectation that the real world would change radically so that it too could affirm and acknowledge that humanity. I am led to wonder, then, about a character like Bigger Thomas. What future, what vision is reflected in such a miserable and incompletely realized creature?
- What many black artists and thinkers are confiding with each other in private is that we fear the next wave...the pandering black art that will be created after this moment. We worry about the silencing of complex artists of color by both gatekeepers who are white, brown, and black. We worry that future generations will read the art and artists that represents this moment and find us cheap and hollow and pleading toward white gatekeepers.
- So what does it matter? We are talking about the survival of black voices and souls. What does it matter if the art isn't as complex, if the novels are pleading urgently. Our political movement IS pleading urgently and rightfully for life. How can art compare to such an urgent cry? If Black Lives Matter, then all of them do...the nuanced ones, the biracial ones, the ones who are right-wing, left-wing, the sarcastic ones, the cynical black voices that stand askance the political correctness and feel castrated, the black voices who don't want a white liberal pet or to be treated like a baby needing protecting. The full scope and dimensions of black voices matters, not just the ones performing blackness for white media.
- The final shame in this moment is that no one is uniting the two key elements to the entire game. It is race AND class. White socialist artists like Odets made the same mistake but they emphasized the brotherhood of all classes, while failing to address the deep-seated racism amongst many of his poor characters which would prevent them from uniting with black and brown workers. Conversely, BlackLivesMatter art makes the fight about race when deconstructing capitalism is key to fighting inequalities in race. Black Lives Matters but it will matter even more so with universal healthcare. It will matter even more so with universal income, abolishing prisons, abolishing bail. It will matter even more by defunding the police, but not as punishment. It will matter because in defunding the police you are sapping the primary punitive weapon used against black, brown, and lower class people and then taking those resources and putting them into the community. You are taking energy away from the fear police instill in disempowered groups, which is the fear of unjust punishment by the government for both small and large offenses. They know the system of punishment is unfair because they see millionaire pedophiles walk away from our courts with a slap on the wrist while black people end up in jail for year because they can't afford bail before their trial. Due to lack of economic opportunities, many innocent black people lose their jobs while just waiting for the chance to see a judge. Many poor white people will also rot in jail waiting for trial simply because they are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford bail.
Coronavirus is killing a large swath of black people because the virus is playing on capitalist inequalities. Black people -on average- have poorer healthcare, less insurance, and less security. This not an accident. The labor pool of capitalism depends upon cheap and desperate class willing to put their bodies in harm's way. Disproportionately these bodies are people of color. But there are also many many older Americans and white people are dying because they have to go work at the meat processing plant or the Amazon shipping facility. Capitalism feeds on the vulnerable. And then racism makes sure that the white and black co-workers suffering in factories never fully talk to each other. So the system continues, the unions weaken, the fear is stoked. Race and capitalism go hand-in-hand, but liberalism seems to think it can address the problems as separate things.
The very concept of race was created by white settlers entering into the 'New World.' They needed a divisive tool to implement harsh, colonial capitalism with free labor. For added complexity, colonial added a third element to the mix: White Christianity. So faith in God, race, and capitalism is the lethal triangle.
Black thinkers and artists of alternative minds creep around the edges racial upheaval. They see the changes needed, support fighting racism but are also scared of losing their independence. They are worried about performing blackness for whiteness. They worry about blanket statements, racial caricatures, and mediocrities. And they don't want to pandered, infantilized, castrated, and turned into helpless victims. But more than that...they are scared of losing their freedom and individuality. They are scared of that most American concept of pursuing their own happiness and setting forth their own unique voice. It's difficult to do that when all people want is a performance of what they think all black people must be feeling. They don't want to speak on your diversity panel, listen to white liberals on instagram crying about their privilege, or placate corporate America with a black square on a social media profile.
