The Social Struggles of Contemporary Black Art

Critical Context

The paragraphs below provide contextual information for the theories on race, aesthetic debates, and political history that inform the unit content as well as consideration of the social-emotional relevance of the unit to students.

In her introduction to Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), feminist theorist, bell hooks articulates the theory behind dominant and oppressive representations of blackness:

There is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in this society and the institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all black people. Long before white supremacists ever reached the shores of what we now call the United States, they constructed images of blackness and black people to uphold and affirm their notions of racial superiority, their political imperialism, their will to dominate and enslave. From slavery on, white supremacists have recognized that control over images is central to the maintenance of any system of racial domination.³⁸

Constructing blackness as inferior, then, is essential to the establishment and continuation of a society that depends on the enslavement and/or economic exploitation of disempowered groups to function. Escape from a disabling dominant ideology requires the replacement of self-hatred with love: “Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.”³⁹ The idea is not a new one, but hooks expresses her shock at the “fascination [. . .] with black self-hatred”⁴⁰ she sees regardless of race and finds it to be a measure of the continuing power of white supremacy. Finally, despite the efforts of Civil Rights and Black Power movements to celebrate Black identities, hooks finds that white supremacist ideology in mass media and public education as well as the privileging of material success over political protest have obscured efforts to establish alternate Black identities.⁴¹

Thirty years after the publication of hooks’s Black Looks: Race and Representation, I struggle to draw conclusions about challenges to institutional racism, particularly given social media and the kinds of communication, activism, and self-representation they do and do not foster. Attempting to reflect on internalized racism, I first recall the Clarks’ “Doll Test,” which I have discussed with juniors reading excerpts from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Students viewed a CNN video about the network’s 2010, modified reenactment of studies conducted by Drs. Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark during the 1940s: Though the bias of children (regardless of race) toward lighter skin was less consistent and extreme in 2010 than in the 1940s, it continued to dominate.⁴² The same bias was evident in a more recent, small, qualitative study of the behaviors of Black preschool girls at play conducted by researchers Toni D. Sturdivant and Iliana Alanis and published in 2020.⁴³ The provocative title of Sturdivant and Alanis’s article—“‘I’m Gonna Cook My Baby in a Pot’: Young Black Girls’ Racial Preferences and Play Behavior”—begins with a small child’s statement about one of the consistently-rejected-or-abused Black dolls. Sturdivant and Alanis conclude that “anti-bias adult intervention” during early-childhood education is essential to the disruption of racism (internalized or interpersonal) that small children both perceive and communicate.⁴⁴ The researchers’ literature review includes discussion of the occurrences of racial “awareness,” “identification,” and “preference” between infancy and age three years; dozens of studies over decades documenting pro-White bias in Black children; and the impact of negative “racial identity development” on the subsequent academic success and mental health of Black children.⁴⁵ Interestingly, although the results of the Clarks’ research had been cited in Brown v. the Board of Education as evidence of the consequences of segregation, Sturdivant and Alanis’s study was conducted at a racially and culturally diverse school, showing the persistent presence of anti-Black bias regardless of setting;⁴⁶ Sturdivant concludes that children require overt and positive messages about racial difference at home, in their communities, and at school—the mere presence of diversity in school books an inadequate intervention.⁴⁷ In conclusion, I borrow words spoken by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark during a 1995 New York Times interview that were reprinted in his 2005 obituary: “‘There’s no question that there have been changes’ he said then. ‘They are not as deep as they appear to be.’”⁴⁸

Aesthetic and Political Theories of Black Art and the Black Arts Movement

In an address to a group of Black writers on March 1, 1959 at a conference organized by the American Society of African Culture, Lorraine Hansberry situates the work of Black writers in a deliberately international and historical context: Hansberry opens and closes her essay with references to Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, and uses a quotation from James Baldwin while describing the work of Tennessee Williams. Further, Hansberry claims that Black Americans (Hansberry, following the conventions of the time, writes “American Negroes”) and Africans are “inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever.”⁴⁹ Like other artist-activists of the period, Hansberry recognizes the need to “reclaim the past if we would claim the future”⁵⁰ and understands art in communal terms: “Isolation,” is the “foremost enemy”⁵¹ of Black intellectuals, and the nature of art is inescapably social. Just a few years before Hansberry’s talk, the first international conference of Black writers and artists met in Paris to determine common goals given the cultural changes occurring in the wake of African decolonization and the growth of mass media.⁵² European culture was identified as problematically “individualistic”⁵³ and alienating and would have to be replaced by a socially conscious, world culture of all peoples—regardless of technological advancement—serving “political action” while protecting “freedom of expression.”⁵⁴

In both Hansberry’s talk and the earlier Presence Africaine report, we find ideas consistent with those of Black Arts Movement (BAM) thinkers like Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) and Larry Neal, who—we will see below—influenced the aesthetic and ideology of the AfriCOBRA group. In his 1968 essay on “The Black Arts Movement,” Neal describes it as “radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community.”⁵⁵ The movement’s art—rather than voicing a protest aimed at White spectators—“speaks directly to Black people”; the movement’s artists seek a “Black aesthetic” with cultural values to replace those of a sterile and oppressive Western one.⁵⁶ In establishing a Black aesthetic, both Neal and Baraka saw the work of the BAM as “nation building.”⁵⁷ Baraka writes: “‘The purpose of our writing is to create the nation.’”⁵⁸ [Jeff Donaldson—AfriCOBRA founder and important artist, critic, and teacher—alludes to Baraka’s poem, “It’s Nation Time,” in his “AfriCOBRA Manifesto,”⁵⁹ even addressing the poet directly by name: “And yes, Imamu, it’s Nation Time.”⁶⁰ Forty years later, the words permeate interviews of the AfriCOBRA artists.⁶¹] Where the Black Power movement sought political liberation, the BAM sought “cultural and spiritual liberation.”⁶² The movement, Neal argues, is also an “ethical” one: “Ethical, that is, from the point of view of the oppressed. And much of the oppression confronting the Third World and Black America is directly traceable to the Euro-American cultural sensibility.”⁶³ Here, we again see an overt pairing of Black Americans and a global community of colonized peoples. Neal returns to this pairing in his essay’s conclusion: “Afro-American life and history is full of creative possibilities, and the movement is just beginning to perceive them. Just beginning to understand that the most meaningful statements about the nature of Western society must come from the Third World of which Black America is a part.”⁶⁴

Though I have thus far described ideas either of or consistent with the Black Arts Movement, it is important to acknowledge that many opposing perspectives were articulated by Black artists and critics during the impassioned debates on Black art of the 1960s and 1970s. Martin Kilson, for example, did not believe in the existence of a Black aesthetic: He found aesthetics and ideology to be incompatible and equated attempts to join them with the state-sponsored propaganda of Communists and Fascists.⁶⁵ For Kilson, the sole purpose of art was to engage the viewer’s “‘contemplation.’”⁶⁶ Similarly, David Driskell argued that artists who included social commentary or political activism in their works had confused ethical concerns with aesthetic ones.⁶⁷ For Driskell, a Black aesthetic could exist, but it would have to be one that attended solely to the artwork’s “‘formal organization’” and its capacity to fascinate the viewer.⁶⁸ The “Revolutionary Art” of Black Panther Minister of Culture and lead newspaper illustrator Emory Douglas, on the other hand, served overt political action both in its attack of “‘tyrants’” and its modeling of forms of resistance.⁶⁹ Douglas’s illustrations for The Black Panther newspaper were deliberately designed to provide “visual instructions” for revolutionary acts while also documenting the circumstances that warranted those acts.⁷⁰ Though his illustrations of revolutionary Black women, in particular, were powerful and empowering, Douglas rejected the kinds of “positive” images valued by the AfriCOBRA group.⁷¹ In contrast, Frank Bowling’s understanding of Black art focused more on method, including the “‘ability [. . .] to rearrange found things.’”⁷² Meaning, Bowling argued, should be covert and layered, with varying messages for mainstream (White) and Black viewers.⁷³ As the BAM declined in the mid-1970s, with Baraka and other leaders moving from Nationalism to Marxism while feminist and queer theorists disrupted the notion of a singular “Black” identity, many artists moved toward more covert content and an increasing engagement with the spiritual or magical.⁷⁴ The AfriCOBRA artists, however, maintained their group’s aesthetic and ideology for decades, even as they experimented with new materials and forms. As Jae Jarrell, remarked in a 2010 interview, “Well, once you in AfriCOBRA, you’re always in AfriCOBRA.”⁷⁵ An argument for the group’s continuing relevance—with its focus on communities (both local and international), positivity, and an empowering Black identity engaged with its past and intentional about its future—is persuasive.