Daughters, Your President is Black!

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR
Letter to My Daughters: Your President is Black
by Mark Anthony Neal

Dear Daughters,

Your president is Black.

I never thought that I'd ever say those words to you; in fact I can't say that I even imagined what it would be like to say those words to you. For so many of us, a Black president was just some far off wish, but no more far off than those once and always proud New World Africans who dreamed of freedom by "climbing into their heads" as the late Sekou Sundiata once described it. Perhaps that is why so many little black boys and girls have been told over the years, that they too might grow up to become President. And guess what babies--one of us did.

When I was your age, the world was in transition, but filled with the promise of a "new day" ("can you feel it, it's a brand new day" as they sang in the Emerald Cities of Chocolate Lands all across the nation). Two of our great soothsayers (so many of whom we so wish were earthbound to experience this day) captured the expectations of that era with a song called "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" (and I know, you've heard it many times. When I was your age though, the song was one of the great gifts given to those of us who were expected to most benefit from the struggles of that moment. Years before on-line social networks existed, it was the music that was our social network, and Ms. Simone and Mr. Irvine's "Young Gifted and Black" went viral, finding resonance throughout the culture. As a testament to the song's power, so many of our worldly geniuses paid tribute to it, including the late Donny Hathaway, Les McCann (who years before asked the question "Compared to What?"), and Ms. Aretha Franklin, who was simply regal singing "My Country Tis of Thee" on this great day. It was like there was collective desire for my generation to always be reminded of our birthright: "You are Young, Gifted, and Black."

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InnerVision

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR:
Elizabeth Alexander's INNERVISION
by Mark Anthony Neal

In a cultural and commercial world largely defined by the myopic pretensions of a largely invisible white male elite (the more visible they are, the less powerful they be), the contours of blackness--that amorphous, stasis-bending "giant" that is always in the room--can rarely be deciphered. In her book, The Black Interior (2004) Elizabeth Alexander--the recently tapped Inaugural Poet--observes that blacks are "too often prisoners of the real trapped in fantasies of 'Negro authenticity' that dictate the only way we truly exist for a mainstream audience is in their fantasies of our authentic-ness." (7) Alexander's observations seem perfectly pitched for a historical moment, that she will be largely remembered, for helping to frame for the American body politic. Throughout The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander posits a "dream space"--"the black interior"--where African Americans and others of African descent counter the debilitating and truncating affects of "mainstream constructions of our 'real'." (5) Alexander describes "the black interior" as "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." (x)

Within black everyday life Alexander finds the black interior most powerfully expressed in the living room--the "literal 'black interiors,' inside the homes of that black people live in." [9] She extends this metaphor in examining the careers of poets Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper and the 19th-century intellectual Anna Julia Cooper, as well as in considering black masculinity and Jet magazine (still ghetto-fabulous after all these years). She cites the latter, the largest circulating weekly aimed at black readers and the sister journal of the popular monthly Ebony Magazine, for its role in constructing and circulating "race pride"--a "handbook for a logic that understands the primacy of race, the primacy of blackness," observing the ways that the weekly pamphlet was "important for me to understand as I grew up in an era in which the happy rhetoric of integration was gospel." (95)

"Race Pride" is a term that Alexander also applies to Hughes, noting that his work presents a " 'race-pride' moment par excellence. He is 'our' poet laureate, our 'Shakespeare in Harlem'." (21) The essay on Hughes examines the poet's role in creating a canon of African-American poetry, notably through his editing of the anthology New Negro Poets: USA ( 1964). As published, the anthology was very different from the one that Hughes had originally envisioned. Whereas Hughes envisioned a collection that captured the embryonic energies of the still unnamed Black Arts Movement of the early 1960, his publishers were more interested in a collection that catered more to the taste sensibilities of mainstream readers. In Alexander's view the book was an example of how the "best of intentions can also be thwarted by the very real exigencies of the publishing companies--almost always white--that enable words to make their way to us." (40) Ironically Hughes is also a figure that also exemplifies Alexander's observation that the "black interior" is also a space "that black people ourselves have policed at various historical moments"--the space where race pride collides with Hughes's sexuality and the "troublesome" identities of so many other black bodies. (x) One of the best examples of this dynamics are the difficulties filmmaker Isaac Julien experienced during the making of Looking for Langston, where Hughes's estate denied the filmmaker use of Hughes poetry, because the film explicitly addressed the poet's sexuality.

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