Throughout my short lifetime as a Black woman I’ve encountered a variety of different definitions of what it means to be that. I’ve been told that I’m a Black girl because I don’t put up with bullshit (especially from White men), I’ve been told that it’s because I’m stubborn, because I clap my hands when I’m trying to make a point, or because I know every word to “Burn” by Usher. I possess all of those qualities, sure, but whether or not they define my Blackness is up for debate. There’s this perception of Black people as angry and hard that I’ve encountered my entire life, and through my discussions with other Black people, specifically my family, I’ve found that said perception has been incorporated in mainstream thought as a process of creating the popular culture in opposition to our anger.

Within the Black community is a tenderness and softness which is completely ignored by mainstream culture. Our identity, which is one of support and love, has been portrayed as a culture of desolation, trouble, and danger. In an essay called, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall writes, “What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think.” (p. 21) So, our perceptions of ourselves as Black people is going to differ by default from what an outsider would interpret our society as being. That fact mixed with the institutionalized racism prevailing in Western society creates a schism which supports an “Us vs. Them” ideology which is so deeply engrained in mainstream thought it can be summarized by, “You’re not like other Black people.”

Stuart makes the point that Western society has attempted to push their definition of the Black identity into Mainstream thought as well as into the Black community. Mainstream society is built in direct opposition to Black culture and dismisses the Black identity, yet with examples such as my third grade teacher telling me that we live in America where racism ended with the Civil Rights movement, it’s obvious that there’s an agenda (intentional or unintentional) that projects oppressive images of our Blackness onto us. On the subject of cultural manipulation Hall writes, “They [Europeans] had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other.’ Every regime of representation is a regime of power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet ‘power/knowledge.’ But this kind of knowledge is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge,’ not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm.” (p.23) When I think back on all of the Black people I’ve met who hate their Blackness, who invest in skin bleach and tell me my hair needs “work” because it’s natural, it all comes down to their subscription to the knowledge being imposed upon us by White people in our lives and in the media, and the incorporation of White supremacist ideals into our consciousness.

I recently went to see Cornel West speak, I’ve always been a fan of his rhetoric. What captured me the most about his speech was his definition of Blackness as soulfulness. Our music touches the heart just like our food – we are a community of emotion.

That idea was something I had been struggling to convey for a long time. My idea of Black Culture is going over to my Grandmother’s house with the whole family there, my uncles talking over one another at deafening tones; Blackness is loud, joyous and spiritual. My idea of Blackness is sitting on the floor between the thighs of someone pulling my hair with a comb, me crying because I’m tender-headed, and being soothed by the smell of coconut oil and the cold of the air hitting the scalp between my braids. It’s going out tanning and having no discussions about tanning lotion, it’s smiling at every Black person I see on the way to wherever I’m going because we have an assumed shared experience.

For the most part we know we are not in the mess of Western expansion alone – we have each other. We are hard on one another, constantly striving for the best for our loved ones and ourselves to prove to everyone else what we are capable of. It’s my understanding from my experience and the experiences of other Black people I know that we do not have a culture of individualism. When one of our own dies by the gun of a cop under suspicious circumstances we don’t write it off as another tragedy. We grieve. We aren’t mourning because it could have been any one of us, not because so many of the Black people who were being murdered were under 25, but because it’s a limb being severed off of our collective body. Except the limb is being chopped off every eight hours. Living in a society where the rate of Black people being killed is nearly, (if not completely) genocidal has a tendency to push the oppressed together.

Dr. West also pointed out the way our ancestors reacted to their oppressors. When my ancestors were taken from their country and sold into slavery they did not revolt and kill their masters, not many slaves did. They sang and they asked God to come down and tremble the water for them. They asked for movement, and they kept hope alive instead of succumbing to the terrible conditions they were living in. I tell my friends that the difference between White Christianity and Black Christianity is that Black people love talking about Jesus, but White people love talking about Satan. The Devil is always around the corner to White Christians, always lurking in the shadows that are dark like Black skin. They talk about “Evil” as if they’ve never dabbled in the subject, their histories are clear of any wrongdoings because they colonized the world under a “God appointed Queen.” Black people, on the other hand, have seen evil. Black people have seen what it can do. Evil take us from our home into a foreign land under a whip, evil has displaced us, hosed us down in the streets. Evil shoots at us for buying skittles and then becomes a millionaire and nationally recognized “celebrity.”

An important part of Black culture is art (painting, drawing, music, dance, all of it.) Our art is something which conveys our struggles as well as our livelihood. Black people aren’t typically associated with the artistic trends we’ve created (ie. rock and roll, rap, jazz, blues, gospel, just to name a few music genres,) and we are very rarely seen as artists. Throughout my education, the Black artist has been presented to me as a rarity. As if it wasn’t expected of us, as if the aspects of our culture like dancing and graffiti aren’t relevant or sophisticated enough to fit into the mold of what the Western mentality deems beautiful. Our creativity and how it’s expressed strikes the outsider as fruitless because our experience and where our inspiration comes from differs greatly. As Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, “I am Black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos— and the White man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am Black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth. Fanon, Frantz (2008-09-10). Black Skin, White Masks (pp. 27-28). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition. “ He’s communicating the oneness with the soul involved in being Black in juxtaposition with “White culture”/Western thought. Being a “drop of sun under the earth” summons a different kind of art than being of European descent.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Philadelphia in 1859. Being of mixed race he was accepted into the art scene in Paris where he spent most of his life. His work was fairly successful amongst the French elite who have a long history of Orientalism and fetishization of “Other” cultures. Boime writes, “The White attitude constituted in large part both a dilemma and advantage for Tanner, whose intellectual achievements and even physical appearance so closely approximated the ‘norm’ of the dominant elite.” (416) Although he was accepted into the art community Tanner wasn’t quiet about his experiences as a Black American and his role in the art world. He was quoted as saying, “I believe it, the Negro blood counts and counts to my advantage – though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow – unlimited ‘kick’ and ‘cuffs’ – but that is the source of all my talents (if I have any) I do not believe, any more than I believe it all comes from my English ancestry.” 417 Boime goes on to write, “Tanner undertook his series of genre pictures so late in the century in an effort to counter the negative stereotype of the Black and to revive genre painting by seeking to transform its original origin.” (417)His mission was to showcase the beauty he saw in his own people as accurately as possible. Tanner was attempting to capture memory-like scenes of childhood that the viewer could relate with by representing the warmness of nostalgia with Black people. That theme is apparent in paintings such as, “The Banjo Lesson.” In This portrait of rural life a boy is on the knee of who we can assume to be his father or a father figure. The little boy is almost the same size as the banjo. He’s small but trying and the father is keeping a watchful eye over the boy’s movements. Tanner’s brush strokes are reminiscent of those in Impressionist paintings – their shortness causes the painting to look blurry and in motion. The painting has the quality of something one remembers – the shadows and the art fading into the wall make the viewer look at the human interaction as opposed to the entirety of the painting.

Henry Ossawa Tanner wasn’t the only Black artist to depict Black people in a thought provoking way. Jean Michel Basquiat used his graffiti style to create a counter narrative in juxtaposition with the rest of the art made during the 20th century. Know for his colorful and unconventional paintings, Black people and our history were often subjects of his pieces.

Basquiat’s painting All Color Cast (Part III) exemplifies the evaluation of Black history by the artist. On a mustard yellow background a crudely drawn Black man bears his teeth. His chest is labeled “Chest” while his hand is labeled “Paw” – this is Basquiat’s humorous but honest way of acknowledging the dehumanization of Black people. On the right of the male figure is “China” above “Haiti” with arrows drawing a path between them. Above the man is written, “Home: Two Visitors: One” which could be an allusion to the Haitian Revolution seeing as on the left in small letters connected by an arrow to “Jersey Joe Walcott 2004” is, “Toussaint L’Overture,” the man who, like Joe Walcott, became famous for fighting. Toussaint L’Overture, however, fought during the Haitian Revolution and became governor of Haiti.

Basquiat is presenting Black history (or fragments of it,) in a way which accurately depicts the complexity of our collective past. There are so many layers to this painting, so many things that are written are connected to each other in ways the viewer wouldn’t have thought; one gets the sense that though this painting is chaotic, not a single thing is out of place or accidental.