MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (April 25, 2022) — What is, or what should be, Black art? The question at first may seem a strange one to ask in the twenty-first century, but, given the continued African struggle for acceptance as equals in a world built upon a foundation of white European hegemony over people of color, there remains much to discuss.
The conversation began in earnest more than a century ago with the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the question of whether or not there was such a phenomenon as “Negro art,” or “Black art,” or, more specifically, “African American art” (to use a more precise and more modern term). A conservative African American pundit, George Schuyler, dismissed the notion of distinctive Black art in The Nation in a notorious essay, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” in 1926:
As for the literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframericans—such as there is—it is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans: that is, it shows more or less evidence of European influence. In the field of drama little of any merit has been written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. … This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon (Schuyler 1926).
Schuyler argued that an African American was no more than a “lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” no different than any descendant of European immigrants assimilated after several centuries of immersion into the dominant Anglo-American society.
Schuyler’s assertion that the concept of Black art—or a specifically African American culture—is hokum is difficult to justify and would not have passed muster even then among his contemporary cultural anthropologists and geographers. African American artists may work with the same raw materials—language, colors, images, clay, stone, et cetera—but differences in inspirations, themes, manifestations of expression, and the like warrant recognition of differences among artistic genres. Consider something as basic (to an American) as barbecue. No matter where you are, barbecue tends to be based on the same raw materials. But, if one made the argument that all barbecues are the same, one might end up going missing without a trace in a holler in the mountains of North Carolina, a swamp in southeast Texas, or under a crop of corn near Kansas City. The sudden absence of one so obtuse would not likely be noted, at least not without relief.
Langston Hughes, in his response to Schuyler, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which was published in The Nation the following week, eloquently dismantled Schuyler’s argument. To Hughes, there was a distinctive Black art. He argued that the Black middle class—which presumably included people like Schuyler—was so preoccupied with measuring quality and success by white standards that they ignored the beauty and wonder of what was being produced in their own communities. Hughes wrote, “… the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds” (2014, 1321).
While he long battled the entrenched racism of white society, he did not disparage white culture. Instead, rather than dismissing Black art, celebrated it. He, unlike Schuyler, recognized African contributions to American culture. Even if there was a synthesis as, for example, in musical forms like jazz, the collaborations among Black and white musicians did not negate the uniquely African contributions to the art. It did not negate the uniquely African perspective in and nature of the art:
Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. … jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile (Hughes 2014, 1323).
One can argue that there are no intrinsic reasons for the existence of a distinctive African American art, much as one can argue—with overwhelming scientific justification—that there is no such biological entity as a human “race” (Lawrence 2004). “White” art and “Black” art are entirely cultural constructs, but the differences between them are no less real than if they had been encoded in the artist’s DNA. Richard Wright, in his essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” argued for the existence of the unique African American culture that Schuyler so readily dismissed. “There is … a culture of the Negro which has been addressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action,” Wright (2014, 126) wrote. “This culture has stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro church; and (2) the fluid folklore of the Negro people.”
Instead of questioning the existence of a unique African American culture and art, Wright spent the bulk of his essay interrogating what the purpose of that art should be: “Shall Negro writing be for the Negro masses, moulding the lives and consciousness of those masses toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?” (127)
Wright stressed that there was a nationality otherwise known as the African American people. Despite the desire, as Hughes noted, of many members of that nationality to be assimilated into white culture, Wright argued that African Americans—and especially African American artists—should resist such desires:
Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness (128).
Wright adopted a Marxist critical viewpoint and urged other African American writers to do the same. He felt that, unless they understood how class and race affected Black lives, they would be unable to produce work that resulted in a change to a better, more equitable society. He also advocated for cooperation with fellow, socially conscious, travelers among the white artistic community:
By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices, liberal writers of all races can help to break the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted plants of Negro nationalism grow. And, simultaneously, Negro writers can help to weed out these choking growths of reactionary nationalism and replace them with hardier and sturdier types (132).
The notion of cooperation had largely evaporated by 1969 when Amiri Baraka wrote “Black Art.” Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and a newly enlightened Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a Black Power salute on the medals podium at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing everything it could to destroy the Black Panthers and was instrumental in a police raid in Chicago that led to the killing of two of its leaders. African Americans provided the bulk of the troops and bore a disproportionately high portion of the casualties in the war in Vietnam, and the election of Richard M. Nixon as president of the United States was transforming the March-on-Washington optimism of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” to the post-Woodstock pessimism of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”
Into this morass of anger stepped Baraka. While he believed in the concept of Black art, he had given up on the power of peaceful protest. He embraced violent revolution and believed that Black art should be weaponized to further such revolution. The imagery in his poem “Black art” is violent and disturbing, almost fit for his purpose except for where his forays into anti-Semitism reveal a prejudice no less revolting that the white prejudice against African Americans that he deplores.
Here is one example of Baraka’s verbal violence:
… We what ‘poems that kill.’ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. … (Baraka 2014, 19-23)
Baraka’s anger is not limited to whites. He has plenty to spare for African American leaders—presumably also the recently murdered King—that he feels are too deferential to white sensibilities and interests:
There’s a negroleader pinned to a bar stool in Sardi’s eyeballs melting in hot flame Another negroleader on the steps of the white house one kneeling between the sheriff’s thighs negotiating cooly for his people (31-36).
Toward the end of the poem, Baraka turns more positive, calling upon African Americans to realize the beauty of their heritage, much like Hughes had done with his work nearly a half century earlier. Finally, he closes with a call for African unity—again, much like Hughes and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
Contrary to Schuyler’s assertion, it is clear that writers like Hughes, Wright, and Baraka firmly believed there is a phenomenon known as “Black art,” and that—again contrary to Schuyler—it has value in and of itself. For Hughes, “Black art” should focus on and celebrate African American life while also addressing the injustices African Americans face. For Wright, Black art should be a tool used for improving the understanding and improvement of African American life. And for Baraka, it should be a weapon in the revolution against the system keeping African Americans down.
Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on April 25, 2022.
References
Baraka, Amiri. 2014. “Black Art.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 703-704. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hughes, Langston. 2014. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1320-1324. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lawrence, David. 2004. “A rational basis for race.” The Lancet 364 (9448):1845-1846. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(04)17459-X.
Schuyler, George S. 1926. “The Negro-Art Hokum.” The Nation, June 16, 662-663.
Wright, Richard. 2014. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 125-132. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
When suitably inspired I will write something, maybe about a breaking story in science, maybe about my career as a scientist (specifically, a biogeographer). I may wage war against the forces of ignorance from the dubious bully pulpit of this blog. Or I may just tell some war story from my past in which I should have ended up dead as a result of my own stupidity.
What Is, or What Should Be, Black Art?
Posted by AbyssWriter on 4/25/22 • Categorized as Art,Commentary,Literary Criticism,Music,Race
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (April 25, 2022) — What is, or what should be, Black art? The question at first may seem a strange one to ask in the twenty-first century, but, given the continued African struggle for acceptance as equals in a world built upon a foundation of white European hegemony over people of color, there remains much to discuss.
The conversation began in earnest more than a century ago with the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the question of whether or not there was such a phenomenon as “Negro art,” or “Black art,” or, more specifically, “African American art” (to use a more precise and more modern term). A conservative African American pundit, George Schuyler, dismissed the notion of distinctive Black art in The Nation in a notorious essay, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” in 1926:
Schuyler argued that an African American was no more than a “lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” no different than any descendant of European immigrants assimilated after several centuries of immersion into the dominant Anglo-American society.
Schuyler’s assertion that the concept of Black art—or a specifically African American culture—is hokum is difficult to justify and would not have passed muster even then among his contemporary cultural anthropologists and geographers. African American artists may work with the same raw materials—language, colors, images, clay, stone, et cetera—but differences in inspirations, themes, manifestations of expression, and the like warrant recognition of differences among artistic genres. Consider something as basic (to an American) as barbecue. No matter where you are, barbecue tends to be based on the same raw materials. But, if one made the argument that all barbecues are the same, one might end up going missing without a trace in a holler in the mountains of North Carolina, a swamp in southeast Texas, or under a crop of corn near Kansas City. The sudden absence of one so obtuse would not likely be noted, at least not without relief.
Langston Hughes, in his response to Schuyler, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which was published in The Nation the following week, eloquently dismantled Schuyler’s argument. To Hughes, there was a distinctive Black art. He argued that the Black middle class—which presumably included people like Schuyler—was so preoccupied with measuring quality and success by white standards that they ignored the beauty and wonder of what was being produced in their own communities. Hughes wrote, “… the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds” (2014, 1321).
While he long battled the entrenched racism of white society, he did not disparage white culture. Instead, rather than dismissing Black art, celebrated it. He, unlike Schuyler, recognized African contributions to American culture. Even if there was a synthesis as, for example, in musical forms like jazz, the collaborations among Black and white musicians did not negate the uniquely African contributions to the art. It did not negate the uniquely African perspective in and nature of the art:
One can argue that there are no intrinsic reasons for the existence of a distinctive African American art, much as one can argue—with overwhelming scientific justification—that there is no such biological entity as a human “race” (Lawrence 2004). “White” art and “Black” art are entirely cultural constructs, but the differences between them are no less real than if they had been encoded in the artist’s DNA. Richard Wright, in his essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” argued for the existence of the unique African American culture that Schuyler so readily dismissed. “There is … a culture of the Negro which has been addressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action,” Wright (2014, 126) wrote. “This culture has stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro church; and (2) the fluid folklore of the Negro people.”
Instead of questioning the existence of a unique African American culture and art, Wright spent the bulk of his essay interrogating what the purpose of that art should be: “Shall Negro writing be for the Negro masses, moulding the lives and consciousness of those masses toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?” (127)
Wright stressed that there was a nationality otherwise known as the African American people. Despite the desire, as Hughes noted, of many members of that nationality to be assimilated into white culture, Wright argued that African Americans—and especially African American artists—should resist such desires:
Wright adopted a Marxist critical viewpoint and urged other African American writers to do the same. He felt that, unless they understood how class and race affected Black lives, they would be unable to produce work that resulted in a change to a better, more equitable society. He also advocated for cooperation with fellow, socially conscious, travelers among the white artistic community:
The notion of cooperation had largely evaporated by 1969 when Amiri Baraka wrote “Black Art.” Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and a newly enlightened Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a Black Power salute on the medals podium at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing everything it could to destroy the Black Panthers and was instrumental in a police raid in Chicago that led to the killing of two of its leaders. African Americans provided the bulk of the troops and bore a disproportionately high portion of the casualties in the war in Vietnam, and the election of Richard M. Nixon as president of the United States was transforming the March-on-Washington optimism of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” to the post-Woodstock pessimism of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”
Into this morass of anger stepped Baraka. While he believed in the concept of Black art, he had given up on the power of peaceful protest. He embraced violent revolution and believed that Black art should be weaponized to further such revolution. The imagery in his poem “Black art” is violent and disturbing, almost fit for his purpose except for where his forays into anti-Semitism reveal a prejudice no less revolting that the white prejudice against African Americans that he deplores.
Here is one example of Baraka’s verbal violence:
Baraka’s anger is not limited to whites. He has plenty to spare for African American leaders—presumably also the recently murdered King—that he feels are too deferential to white sensibilities and interests:
Toward the end of the poem, Baraka turns more positive, calling upon African Americans to realize the beauty of their heritage, much like Hughes had done with his work nearly a half century earlier. Finally, he closes with a call for African unity—again, much like Hughes and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
Contrary to Schuyler’s assertion, it is clear that writers like Hughes, Wright, and Baraka firmly believed there is a phenomenon known as “Black art,” and that—again contrary to Schuyler—it has value in and of itself. For Hughes, “Black art” should focus on and celebrate African American life while also addressing the injustices African Americans face. For Wright, Black art should be a tool used for improving the understanding and improvement of African American life. And for Baraka, it should be a weapon in the revolution against the system keeping African Americans down.
Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on April 25, 2022.
References
Baraka, Amiri. 2014. “Black Art.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 703-704. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hughes, Langston. 2014. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1320-1324. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lawrence, David. 2004. “A rational basis for race.” The Lancet 364 (9448):1845-1846. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(04)17459-X.
Schuyler, George S. 1926. “The Negro-Art Hokum.” The Nation, June 16, 662-663.
Wright, Richard. 2014. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 125-132. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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