Trading Nostalgia for a New Black Activism - News & Views - EBONY

Trading Nostalgia for a New Black Activism - News & Views - EBONY

 

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
It's not hard to understand why some Blacks in America today long for the icons of the past.  The readily available images of “vintage Blackness” have allowed so many of us to be blessed with the sight of Harry Belafonte, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s brotherhood, Eartha Kitt’s uncompromising fierceness, and young SNCC activists fearlessness as they stared defiantly into a segregationist’s camera. Hair and suits finely pressed, Black cool and resistance made real in the photographic image. The consumption of such images of undeniably, unabashedly Black glamor is in many ways an act of Black self-recognition, a declaration something like, “We’ve always been this fly, and we’ve always known it.” Black power as aesthetic, self love as revolution.

When I gaze at these elegant Black bodies, frozen in black and white, I cannot help but experience an aching desire to have been there in the thick of an important period in Black artistic production and struggle. The distance between my historical F.O.M.O. and a real belief that we have seen the last of grand Black men and women is small, so I understand when some look at the photographs of these previous versions of ourselves and lament how far we’ve fallen from grace.

The recent deaths of representative figures of this era of supposed Black nobility -- Ruby Dee, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, and Nelson Mandela -- have predictably invited unfavorable comparisons between “us” now and then (the memes say it all). A sense of grief over a fading era of visible, Pan-African, unbought and unbossed Black activism accompanies the loss of these luminaries. Grief turns into condemnation when we who are living are accused of being unworthy recipients of the legacy of Black struggle. Black people in the 21st Century are cowards, the argument goes, sacrificing radical politics for the enjoyment of the few pleasures that we are afforded in a White supremacist society. The public spat between a then 86-year-old Belafonte and Jay Z last year was reduced to this intergenerational conflict: the arrogant young son who thinks his "presence is charity”, and the esteemed elder asking the son to do more, be more.

When we look at our current state of Black activism through the lens of that dispute, then the argument is a seductive one. Who can look at that popular 1991 photograph of Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dancing—no, getting down—over the ground that holds Langston Hughes’ remains and not feel a sense of gratitude at having been allowed to experience even a little of the magnificence of these people? Perhaps it is this sense of awe that prompts some to turn back to everyone else with an accusatory finger, asking, “Why can’t we look like that today?” (Oh, right. It’s because too many of us sag our pants and wear weaves).

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