Black culture is indefinite. We all have conceptions of it: basketball and football players, crunkified rappers "walkin' it out," shapely women donning scraps of fabric "pop, lock, and droppin' it," big afros, the ghetto, affirmative action and slavery. Oh - and let's not forget about the ex-convict thugs with baggy pants, white tees and corn-rows who chain smoke (blunts, that is). Then there are the few reputable figures we commonly hear about: Martin Luther King, Jr., Condoleeza Rice, Reverend Al Sharpton, Barack Obama - and Flava Flav.
Nonsense.
Mainstream society perpetuates negative - and limited - elements of black culture. This poses a problem. I have pondered the origins of perceptions of "blackness," affirming that they have, in a sense, stemmed from representations of slave culture. Stereotypes that blacks are unintelligent, have low socioeconomic positions and are only ingenious at displaying emotion reflect the continuing existence of systemic oppression - generalizations made from the establishment of laws denying blacks education and, consequently, the potential for upward mobility the "American" way.
At the outset, American black culture emerged from an effort to preserve African cultural elements and blend Eurocentric ideas to which the general population of blacks - slaves - had become adapted. African slaves - tribes from various parts of Africa - were driven to create an identity that embraced African cultural values while unwittingly sustaining an imposed white-black binary. This creation was not conscious but, rather, socially incited and then psychologically embedded. "Blackness" represented barbarism, inferiority, irrationality and ignorance. It dehumanized Africans and set the emerging concept of "whiteness" as a standard to be achieved. Both realms of the white-black binary require simultaneous denial and acknowledgment of blackness in order to thrive within a racialized social hierarchy. While whiteness is premised on renouncing blackness as a culture, it must simultaneously recognize blackness, because it determines that whiteness is the norm. This recognition, however, is manifested in negative forms throughout the media - a clash between obscure identities hoping to assert some sort of distinctiveness.
Redefinition is a vital quality of black culture. It reflects the constant evolution of the black identity, the unending search for authenticity and ownership of a culture that emerged from enslavement. Blacks remain on a journey, a struggle between self-awareness and understanding, to conceive of blackness in its myriad forms and prove its significance - be it through political awareness, economic success, technical innovation or, most notably, artistic expression. It is through this artistic ingenuity that stereotypes created and internalized by white-dominated mainstream culture have been reinvented to shed light to the reality of blackness and, to an even greater extent, humanness. Since slavery, blacks have remained unacknowledged as fully human and unclearly defined within the confines of neither fully African or American worlds. Black culture must be understood as a Europeanized, Americanized and Africanized identity - the intertwining of cultures dominated by a racialized psyche.
This psychological struggle of blackness begs the question of whether it is possible to exist within the realms of a passive identity - one that has been created for blacks, but not by blacks.
After having internalized a white-black binary, black culture has sought to prove its humanity. This involves having to both embrace the binary and reject it. Blackness as conceived by whites (and internalized, to some extent, by blacks and other groups) is pigeonholed by nonsense on the television and radio. I question if it is even known that black culture has made a plethora of material contributions to American society, especially in the form of technological inventions that facilitate common life.
Black culture has birthed language, religion and performing arts. These cultural elements arose as coping mechanisms - as ways of preserving belief systems while handling systematic and psychological oppression. However, black culture has sought to take ownership of the white-black binary, reinventing stereotypes and internalized identities through cinematic representations, theater productions, magazines, cartoons and practically every other aspect of 'American' commercialized culture. Black culture is now deemed "urban culture," as it combines an indefinite melange of elements to assert its presence.
Blacks, as an oppressed group whose identity was initially defined by non-Blacks, have had to view themselves with double consciousness. Formed and stifled by an artificial identity, blacks must internalize and understand whiteness before they understand their true selves.
The issue lies in the fact that "whiteness" - whatever it may be - is as indefinite as "blackness" and that these two imprecise binaries define each other. Moreover, other marginalized groups in America - Asian ethnicities, Latinos, Native Americans, and Africans, for example - find themselves having to negotiate an identity that has been neutralized by an obscure white-black binary. Misrepresentations of all groups simplify the complexity of race relations in the United States. Perhaps this is why we rely on them so much, why we are reluctant to acknowledge that racial oppression remains a prevalent issue, why we are disenchanted with racial discourse, why we believe it cannot exist in realms of politics, economics and science. It is disturbing when images of certain groups are saturated by the media in a manner that the neglects their reality. Commercialization delineates the disapproving aspects of black culture, which leaves groups unexposed to blacks to believe such aspects as holistically true. It even leaves blacks unexposed to positive elements of their culture deluded. Rather than "walking it out," we need to be opening our minds - to change.
Renata Sago '10 is boldly brown.
