My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 5

My Take

By

QUINCY TROUPE

It is October 2014, and
the absurd notion we are
living in “a post-Black”
era in America has finally
been put to rest — at least
for me — by two events
that occurred over the
past several months.

o
Michael Brown

Now, I am not a Black nationalist per
se. I like all kinds of artistic expression.
I like figuration as well as abstraction.
I like diversity and variety and a little
controversy to keep the juices flowing.
What I don’t like is the lack of
continuity among African American
artistic and literary and culture
t hinking inherent in the notion of a
“post-Black” national idea that spawns
something like Kara Walker’s mammy
sugar sculpture in Brooklyn.

Most notably what happened in
Ferguson, Missouri in early August of
this year and the unveiling of Kara
Walker’s “sugar mammy” sculpture.

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The murder of Michael Brown, an
unarmed 18-year old Black teenager, by
a White policeman, was for me “the
nail in the coffin” of the idea that the
United States was in “a post-Black”
moment of racial equality, especially
after the nation heard a tape of the
White cop, Darren Wilson firing 10
bullets at Brown, with a three second
interval between the first six shots and
the final four.
The notion of a “post-Black” nation,
a phrase coined by museum curator
Thelma Golden, which was quickly
co-opted by savvy corporate marketers
to suggest that both racial and social
inequality were no longer relevant
issues; that the progressive political,
cultural and social gains of the
Civil Rights and the Black Power
movements of the 1950s and ‘60s no
longer mattered. The goal? To short
circuit the important political thought
and art that emanated from this period
and because, if in fact we are living in
a “post-Black” era, Americans don’t
need to hear angry voices of protest
from Black activists and poets (or
anybody else with a legitimate gripe,
for instance: women, union organizers,
gays, immigrants and oppressed people
around the globe).

Instead convince young African-American
organizers and versifiers to write and
talk about non-political ideas, silly
social issues, personal petty bellyaches,
and redirect their energy towards
individual consumerism run amok.
Instead of maintaining the continuity
of the ideas that sparked the Civil
Rights Movement and the 1960’s
protests; instead of popularizing the
rappers who model the consciousness
expressed by groups like Arrested
Development, let’s just get everybody
to sing Kumbaya, hold hands,
congratulate each other on our Ivy
League degrees and focus on frivolities:
Black women should exchange their
natural hairdos for wildly colored wigs
and hair weaves; rappers should write
gangster lyrics celebrating money, Rolls
Royce cars — while wearing gold and
platinum teeth — or rap about Black
women as whores, men packing guns
and blasting each other into eternity,
while their pants sag below their asses
maximum security prison style, instead
of writing words of uplift for the
poor communities from which many
of them sprang. What?

What is so disappointing for me about
the affirmative response of many
African-Americans to Kara Walker’s
giant artwork, “The Subtlety or The
Marvelous Sugar Baby,” a 40-foot tall
nude sculpture of an African American
woman exhibited at the now defunct
Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn is
that the work itself was just so retrograde,
so backwards looking and depressing.
In one response to the piece, a White
New York Times art critic raved about
the work, as did another Anglo critic
from npr. Does anyone really believe if
a Jewish artist were to make a caricature
of a Jewish woman of the Holocaust
that that artist would be celebrated
in the manner Ms. Walker has been
today? I don’t think so. So why is Kara
Walker depicted in mainstream White
media as some kind of genius? After
attending this show during the summer
of 2014, Nicholas Powers (I don’t know
if he’s Black or White) wrote about
Walker’s sculpture: “You are recreating
the very racism this art is supposed
to critique.” I absolutely agree with
this analysis.