In my exploration of black America, I’ve been forced to face many ugly realities. Like Adrienne Rich in her poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” my exploration has allowed me to explore the wreck that is black America, see the damage and look for treasures that may have prevailed. Black America is in desperate need of an artistic, cultural and political resurrection similar to the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, which spanned from the 1920s to the early 1930s. In 1925 scholar Alain Locke stated, “The Negro of today [must not] be seen through – the dusty spectacles of past controversy. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on.”
The New Negro Movement challenged black America to redefine prescribed racist constructions of blackness and take control of their racial destiny. Black artists were central to its success. W.E.B. Du Bois once stated, “It is the bounded duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of beauty … and the realization of beauty.” One of the biggest misconceptions about the Harlem Renaissance is that this period was a utopian atmosphere for blacks and the art reflected this. But as the renaissance was at its peak, Harlem itself was mired in abject poverty. Harlem’s death rate was 42 percent higher than any of the city’s other boroughs, and the unemployment rate hovered around 50 percent. However, artists still painted portraits of blackness that were full of life.
Black America has made significant gains since the renaissance, yet we still face a similar batch of social realities. A recent groundbreaking study discovered that now more than ever a vast majority of inner-city black men are becoming more and more disconnected from American society. The study goes on to say that in urban centers, more than half of all black men do not finish high school, legal work is rare and incarceration is routine. It also states that incarceration rates have risen for black men even as crime rates in urban America have fallen. What is the future of the black family when black men become socially obsolete? And how long can black women continue to carry the entire burden of the black race upon their shoulders?
Just as during the renaissance, blacks face serious social ills. But what is different about our current dilemma is that black artists have failed to discover the black “beauty” DuBois spoke of. Many hip-hop artists have put on the “dusty spectacles of the past” and portray a black America that is founded upon hollow notions of sexuality, violence and nihilism. I will continue to defend hip-hop as a crucial cultural medium that has brilliantly used realism to pull back the curtain on the ugly realities of poverty in America; but I have been disgusted by hip-hop artists, especially Southern rappers, who embrace historical racist constructions such as the “buffoon” and the hyper-sexualized black “savage.” If artists during the New Negro Movement, who faced a level of structural poverty and racism we could never imagine, found a way to discover beauty in the midst of the wreck, why can’t our modern-day artists do the same?
The next biggest challenge for black America will be attempting to address whether we want to spend the majority of our political and economic capital to combat the remnants of historical structural forces that have caused our plight and the cultural forces Harvard professor Orlando Patterson calls “a poverty of the mind.” I am hopeful but not optimistic about the future of black America, but I strongly believe that reaching back to the New Negro Movement for inspiration could help us recover what treasure has been left in the wake of this great wreck.
Kevin Pitts is an English literature graduate student. He can be reached at kpitts2@umd.edu.
