On Blackness In The Arts

February, the shortest month, was declared Black History Month in 1926 in the United States and made official by Gerald Ford in 1976. Since then, other countries like the Netherlands and Canada have adopted the practice of designating particular months as periods when we reflect on the histories and ongoing contributions of Black people across the globe.

This is an important project, given the complex history of Blackness and its relationship to the currents of art, culture, capitalism, everyday life, and more. It’s deeply necessary to have an official and nationwide — and global — reminder that Black people don’t merely exist in so many parts of the world, but that understanding Black history is crucial to understanding human history itself.

But as I reflect upon the extent to which Black History Month has in any way brought about a complex notion of how Blackness has functioned historically, I’m struck by how little is ever gained beyond an often simplistic kind of celebration. In the arts in particular, appraisals of Black artists — whether filmmakers, painters, singers — do little more than exclaim, “Here’s the work of This Black Artist and it is magnificent!” When the writing is by brown and white critics — all of whom appear to be weighed down by some version of White Guilt — the pieces are particularly embarrassing reads, consisting of little more than worshipful reveries. Rarely, if ever, is there any critique, even a sidelong one. The emphasis is often on the personal history of the artist, which is dredged for all and any signs of trauma and suffering, of course (as I’ve written, often, marginalised people have to perform trauma in order to be recognised as even human).

If I don’t name individual critics here, it’s in part because this method of approaching Black art is ubiquitous and apparent in nearly every piece you’ll read on the subject of Black art and artists. And in part because naming individual critics only turns all this into yet another occasion for some social media teardown, preventing us from actually engaging the very real problems that result from this uncritical approach to what we might broadly term Black art (too many people mistake trolling for a useful deployment of their minds).

A major problem with a recent turn to celebration of Blackness is that, increasingly, Black history is seen as somehow formed by and emanating from the United States’ part in consolidating and extending slavery: in our minds, slavery and Blackness pool within the geographic bounds of this country. But as scholars like Hazel Carby, Stuart Hall, C.L.R. James and countless others have pointed out, implicitly or otherwise, this is a troubling erasure of a vast and complicated set of histories, particularly in the Caribbean and many parts of Asia and elsewhere (I especially recommend listening to Hazel Carby’s conversation with Adam Shatz).

When George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, the world exploded in protests. As I watched the marches in cities as far away as London and Berlin, I felt conflicting emotions: on the one hand, yes, people everywhere were finally taking notice of the genocidal police state that is the United States. On the other hand, what exactly was the history of Blackness being cemented here? Blackness in Berlin has a different history than, say, in London, and certainly one that’s very different in Delhi or in Beirut and Americans seem incapable of understanding how it has functioned historically elsewhere. In England, for instance, “Black” has been used to describe people of both Asian and African descent, and each community has historically different routes of entry, including indentureship. Complicating this — and proving a source of bewilderment for many Americans — is that many Asians in England and elsewhere identify as Africans because that’s where they and they and their families are from, through long and complicated histories of migration. What this means is that when it comes to the appraisal of Black art, the cementing of Blackness as one particular identity rooted in very specific experiences and the firm belief that it has only one very particular history has meant that critics are often bewildered by work that does not partake of the American narrative.

The problem for Blackness in art is that it has historically been erased, often brutally and viciously. The study of art is itself awash in whiteness, whether in material ways like the literal whitening of the Elgin Marbles, or in the fact that art from Africa, for instance, has historically been designated as “primitive” and unworthy of anything but exploitation (the fact that Indian and Chinese art has historically been elevated above African art is a topic worth considering). Black filmmakers struggle for funding, while even mediocre white ones can find more than enough. But the widespread response among critics, admittedly after centuries of the debasement of Black art everywhere, has been to overcompensate with the aforementioned worshipful appraisals. This has also meant that Black art is only seen ând recognised as such when it can be read as a distillation of “Blackness” — which means that Black artists must always somehow perform towards a subterranean but persistent cultural expectation that they be “Black,” in very particular ways (always with a narrative of early hardship, preferably laced with trauma, and an uplifting story of fortitude and resilience).

The other and perhaps more insidious problem is that we aren’t developing any real and meaningful ways of appraising and engaging Black art. As anyone who has even been mildly critical of Amanda Gorman, for instance, understands too well: anything other than fulsome praise is immediately defined as “anti-Blackness.” Write a piece about a Black painter or singer that might perhaps question whether she really is all that, and one is likely to be hurled into the Void of Nothingness, doomed to sputter quietly on an unvisited Substack somewhere.

I write this because I am weary of reading endless articles about Black artists that read like admonitions to consume a daily bowl of watery oatmeal dusted with a dry protein powder because, damn it, it’s good for me and I should eat it because, well, it’s good for me and I should stop asking questions because, really, how else will I grow (so says the angry art nanny voice in my head). I’m also weary of white and brown critics being entrusted with the task of appraising Black art, and refusing to do so with the same critical acuity they bring to their writing on non-Black art.

The flip side of this is that we also end up with tepid representations of Blackness by non-Black artists. The artist Dana Schutz’s representation of white bodies is cutting, sarcastic, and sometimes startling, flaying the very skin of whiteness, presenting it like a sheet to be exposed to our contempt. But when she chose to represent Emmett Till in what became a controversial painting, she defended herself by saying she painted him empathically, as a mother (I suspect this was hogwash, an explanation blurted out in sheer terror at the controversy that arose: when in doubt, hide behind motherhood). While the Schutz matter is now part of recent history, it has had the effect of ensuring that we are doomed to only the most sterile representations of Blackness.

Is there no way out? I suspect not, at least not for the near future. There’s an increasing call for more work by Black artists to be covered, in a range of fields, and publications are making attempts to rectify centuries of neglect. But at what cost? While the work being examined and written about is often stellar, the approach so far has been to tiptoe around it carefully, and only speak of it in reverential tones. This kind of critique — which is really just a sophisticated form of ass-kissing — has the effect of actually making it impossible for truly explosive and radical work to exist, except under rare and exceptional circumstances. Boots Riley has addressed the issue of why Sorry to Bother You wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar, and his explanation is that he and his team never bothered to perform the usual rituals of campaigning for nominations (the dark secret of the Oscars). But it’s also worth noting that Black Panther, a tedious slog of a movie that performed a mythological and overly celebratory version of Black History, did really well at the Oscars, bolstered by critics who prostrated themselves in front of a text that functioned (for this critic) as something more like a stern lecture. Or a bowl of tepid oatmeal.

Which is fine. Riley will continue to create work that puts the terror of horses in us while also creating a text that eviscerates racialised capitalism in devastating ways. Black Panther will exist in multiple sequels, each more expensive than the last, and millions will attend screenings: those million include the many Chicago schoolchildren who were treated to free screenings because adults around them understood how devastating it is to not have such representations around them.

So, it’s complicated: there are no simple diagnoses or solutions available and we need all kinds of representations, as many as possible. But while we might comfort ourselves with the idea that excellent and truly transformative and radical work will find a way to exist, we might want to consider that those who make it have to toil and struggle in the shadow of the sort of work that is more easily recognisable as worthy of recognition. Art, however we define it, sits both comfortably and lopsidedly within a capitalist framework whose rewards must be coaxed out of it by various forms of pleading and even debasement: we do what we can, with the resources we’re given, and we struggle to build an alternative world where even “bad” art (who defines that?) has a right to exist without its creators having to debase themselves in multiple ways. But how do we get to that point, where the requirement of an artist is not to perform a very particular form of identity but to simply make something? And perhaps more importantly, we might want to ask ourselves about the cost of worshipful discourse itself: if we only know how to approach a work of art with nothing but reverence, can we really trust ourselves to dismantle capitalism itself, a structure that brooks no resistance and demands endless capitulation in order to reproduce itself?

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