THE

AFROFUTURIST
V O L U M E ONE I S S U E ONE
The Afrofuturist
Danielle Katlin Winter

Inside This Issue

In Search of Home……………………..4
Monique Fumongi-Booth

Wakanda Forever, For All……………12

Anne Afua Avery

Tweets from the Plantation….………..22

Lorice McKenzie and Josica Gann

The New Culture Makers……………28

Barry Armstrong
 Editor’s Note

Imagine that you suddenly wake up with little to no recognition of your distant past.
Not your childhood--those memories remain untouched--but rather, your ancestral past
goes missing, fluttering in a vestigial limb.

Now, imagine that in that loss, you were deeply robbed. Your ancestors were elegant,
genius, revolutionary, first. They were world-beginning philosophers, songwriters,
psychics, travelers. But, you know none of it. In fact, you have been so dispossessed
from it that you may even have trouble believing this. But, for better or for worse, it is
all true.

This magazine, The Afrofuturist, is a multi-media project working to plow a path through
the pains and joys of African diasporic futurism as it plays out in American media, often
organized within the broad genre of Afrofuturism. This productive movement provides
Black creators a way to assert their claim to, visions of, and places within the future.
The best work within the genre weaves the actual and the potential into a dizzying mix
of problematic and ideal, demonstrating that creative work may interrogate the
structures of our society just as deeply as more straightforward work.

Through this cultural lens, creators are allowed to “pick up where they left off,”
producing art and knowledge without the limiting weight of centuries of colonialism,
violence, and theft. Their work is marked by recurring themes of survival, reclamation,
and adaptation, developed by characters captured tightly in masterful allegories. These
perspective transforming moments are, above all, presented with unmistakable soul.
Afrofuturism allays the problem of public dismissal of Black work with more Black
work, and hearty celebration of it.

All of this is in pursuit of a richer canon of speculative fiction, one that decolonizes the
present by asserting existence, purpose, and expertise in the future rather than merely
chromifying the same. It always goes beyond imagining what the future will hold if we
continue as we are. Instead, it fearlessly bends time to give memes to cotton pickers and
imagines worlds beyond.

Afrofuturism isn’t an insulated genre—viewers may gain a new understanding of global

history and a new realm of potential for the future no matter what identities or
specialities they bring to the table. This project, at its core, is an attempt to display the
depth and breadth of the cultural property of Black Americans.
 IN SEARCH OF

HOME

Lucille Charles, the famous Black American astrophysicist, is a big fan of journals. They
line her bookshelves, sandwiched between planetary bookends. In one corner, flat-
bottomed Saturn’s rings reach out and prop up an accordion of composition book bindings.
In another, Jupiter leans against a hydrostatic pressure model. Mars valiantly keeps watch
over a row of textbooks on the shelf below, all diligently arranged according to the Dewey
Decimal System.
I intended to spend only two hours at Mrs. Charles’s home in the thick forest of Baxter,
Maine. I wanted to ask her about one aspect of her life: her friend and colleague Abenyi
Fumongi, who mysteriously disappeared in space. I ended up spending two days with her.
In those two days, my understandings of the boundaries of our cosmos were shattered and
then reassembled again. This, never before told, is the story of Lucille Charles.
Lucille went to Spelman College, a part of the first graduating
class of astrophysics majors. “I had no clue any of this was
going to happen. I was just a girl from the Florida Gulf trying
to go to a good school.” Her parents were the proprietors of a
state-line bar and yacht club named Flora-Bama, predictably
found on the border of Florida and Alabama. They raised
prices one summer to get enough cash for their daughter to
make the drive north to Atlanta. Locals donated extra change
for bedding and books.
When Lucille finally arrived at Spelman, the campus was in
tumult. At the beginning of the summer, famous Nobel Prize-
winning scientists Lawrence Barron and Christine Bone
released a breakthrough in modern reference, a user-friendly
dictionary of genes. Luckily for them, consumer-level genetic
science was still trendy, and they were set to make billions.
Freelance interpreters sprang up like opportunistic weeds.
Earlier that week, preeminent anti-Eugenics scholar Dr.
Zuheily Fresquez released her own version of Barron and
Bone’s dictionary. Rather than listing genes by anatomical
region, she ordered them based on their prevalence in modern
racial groups. She’d arranged the pieces of Barron and Bone’s
work into an image of the fundamental parts of a global
population, frozen in all of its unstoppable and minute motion.
Individual genes, now infused with the verve of community,
danced on the page. In the final section, Dr. Fresquez
encouraged us to make sense of it all ourselves, a sudoku
puzzle of the soul. The combinations unearthed suggested that
who we are and who we were primed to be are two very
different people.
Soon after, Dr. Fresquez’s lab assistant released her graduate
thesis, A Genetic Portrait of the African American Woman. The final
page revealed an incredible conclusion: Black women in
particular were specifically and broadly suited to space travel
and the disciplines surrounding astrophysics. Among many
others, increased bodily resistance to g-forces, and significant
abstraction skills are shown as early as two years of age.
This new information rocked the campus. There were so many
questions. Were these genes tied to specific tribes on the
African continent? If so, did the mess slave owners made of
African lineages dilute such acute ability? Were the Spelman
students who scored poorly on aptitude tests or had little
interest in space denying their true abilities? Could they peel
back years of neglect that buried such spectacular nature?
Spelman students pressed the institution to make it possible for
them to explore these predispositions on campus. At the time
Spelman, still the only American college dedicated exclusively to
educating Black women, offered only one scientific major:
General Science. The College, well aware that it could not afford
to build a space program, appealed to an aging Mae Jemison,
who miraculously assembled a fierce program in a month. Soon,
the Jemison Launchpad at Spelman College was holding free
classes for the community and getting grants from Texas
Instruments for telescopes and calculators. Within a few years,
girls whose SATs barely scraped 1200 were calculating the torque
of footballs in midair. Their success laid waste to the ruse that our
education methods and accreditation systems are functional—
that program was churning out the country’s best and brightest
aerospace engineers, regardless of background. They were all
Black women. In time, so were their teachers.

As Spelman’s reputation continued to grow, construction crews

broke ground on a SpaceX factory in Atlanta, right across the
street from Main Hall. Business analysts and real estate
watchdogs were perplexed by the location choice; Atlanta did not
have an advanced enough power grid to support greedy
production robots, nor sufficient water access for cooling
processes. Unfazed by the questioning, Musk denied connections
to the College and cited only practicality as an influence; the
location was the perfect distance from the Cape Canaveral
launchpad they’d bought from the government when NASA was
defunded. Regardless of his reasoning for settling in Atlanta, the
army of sparking Spelman minds was just what Musk needed to
edge out the competition. It was just what Lucille needed, too.

“I spent all of my time at the Launchpad,” she mused. “A day

without going there felt like I was half awake. I just thrived on
the constant challenge. Normal life felt like doing one-handed
pushups. You wouldn’t want to do pushups with one hand, would
you?” No, but I got the sense that if she wanted to, even at 78,
she could. She finished her degree in Aerospace Engineering one
year early, top of her class. After the graduation ceremony,
instead of enjoying dinner with her parents, Lucille drove herself
to the lab to complete the final portion of an advanced fission
equation that would allow the ship to go twice as far with half the
fuel. She’d been stuck on one co-variant stem, but a solution
appeared to her in a daydream during President Poyner’s
commencement address.
Two days later, backed by an armada of intellectual property
lawyers sent by the newly formed Black Futurists Labor Union,
Lucille sold the rights to that equation to SpaceX for half a
million dollars.
Musk made sure the ladies at Spelman knew that there was
plenty more where that came from. After all, the competition was
gaining. With global fossil fuel stores dried up, luxury automotive
companies consolidated and shifted their operations to
aeronautics. To keep the SpaceX edge, Musk’s savvy
communications engine goaded the ratings-crazed American
media toward frenzy. Round-the-clock anchors covered progress
at the Launchpad with the intensity of the Olympics, making
celebrities out of the most charismatic scientists. It seemed like
the entire country was cheering Spelman on.
Before long, Lucille’s rocket was finally ready to be assigned to a
research mission. She leaned back in the hand-carved rocking
chair she’d been seated in as she remembered. “I was excited, but
I was so worried that the rocket would just explode in midair
with the whole world watching. I really did have faith in our
work, but I knew that if something went wrong, everything we’d
gained would fall away and they’d stop investing in us just like
that.” She snapped to punctuate her idea. “In a lot of ways,
nothing changed—society always depended on Black women for
rescue, for revolution, all of that. But this time, the public really
believed we could do it. They bankrolled our ideas, hired us,
supported us. What an unimaginable thing for all of American
society to get behind its most subjugated participant, the Black
woman.”
“Was the Blackness of space exploration seen as a panacea for
racial struggles?”
“Oh, for sure. It couldn’t truly be, though, because the respect we
were given was based on our exceptionalism. It was certainly a
step, but we needed a movement that focused on the power and
wellbeing of all Black girls, regardless of what they offered
society, space geniuses or not. But, at the Launchpad we told
ourselves that if we worked hard enough we could create that.
Space exploration was our activism.”
Lucille paused, rose slowly, and motioned for me to follow her.
Through a narrow hallway we passed into her bedroom, where
she showed me a wall-sized print opposite her bed. It was a still
photograph of the Sisterhood rocket, captured weightless in midair.
She placed her hand over the glass frame with reverence, her
nails lacquered a brilliant cobalt that blended
with the blue gradient of the upper mesosphere. The shuttle, a
proprietary single unit shell, had a remarkable 1,427 parts. The
last rocket NASA launched before it was shuttered had over 2.5
million. The most visible difference between the Sisterhood and its
predecessors was its appearance; the Sisterhood was finely
decorated. Elaborate laser etched Okavango patterns adorned the
body; wide panels of royal purple paint striped the craft from fin
to cone. In the photo, the Sisterhood twisted elegantly in the sky,
appearing to the eye as a small, glowing red-orange ball. The
bright trail of it continued, at a shallow angle to the horizon. I
could see in her face, especially in the well-worn troughs at the
corners of her eyes, that she had spent a lot of time squinting into
the sun, admiring her work.

By that point, I’d already spent my two scheduled hours with

Lucille, and we’d only scratched the surface of a life more
enthralling than I could have imagined. This pace did not bode
well for the part of the story I’d been wanting us to get to all
along, the story I knew was bound up in those notebooks on the
shelves, the story of my mother Abenyi. By then, it was well into
the afternoon. Lucille had gone into the kitchen to open the bottle
of wine I brought as a thank you for the interview. As she
poured, I probed. “Ms. Lucille, would you like to talk about
Abenyi?” I could see the set of her lips ease toward fondness
through the archway. She delivered two bowled wine glasses and
settled next to me on the couch.

“Abenyi was on board the Sisterhood when it went up. She was
known for her curls. She wore them in a glorious crown that she
referred to as her god-given space helmet.” At Spelman, she took
a particular likening to particle physics and wrote her senior
thesis on manipulating energetic solar particles using an unlikely
force—soul. She found that for the most part, solar particles were
just like our bodies; they could be moved on some instinctual
level to dance in the presence of the right sound waves. From this
discovery, she posited, music could be used to focus particles into
an energy collector, spinning turbines that would eventually beam
energy back to Earth. This research busted up old intellectual
logjams at SpaceX.

As the research team grew, the whole operation was quickly sent
into basement quarantine because the music, endlessly thumping
against the concrete, drove everyone nuts. Every day down there
was a concert; the bass groove in Superstition, the hollow
reverberations of djembe drums, always accompanied by the
singing and tambourines of the researchers themselves.
The noise complaints were worth it; with each test came more
nuanced understandings of the smallest units of our universe. Her
findings presented excellent solutions to the American energy
crisis. The next step was a trip to Venus for a set of sensitive solar
readings. These readings, if favorable, would place the final piece
in the solar energy puzzle that a desperate America needed to
keep the lights on.

“Her team was assigned to my ship, and we became fast friends. I

remember her calling me in the middle of the night from her lab
after a breakthrough, yelling over the music that ‘these particles
must be Black, Lucille—nothing that isn’t moves like this.’ We
grew very close.” The beads at the ends of her long, graying
braids clinked against the wooden back of the sofa as she spoke
with fondness about her friend.

Despite Lucille’s earlier fears, the launch was seamless. “I guess I

just hadn’t considered that she would make it, you know? It’s so
hard to have faith when there’s no precedent to lean on.” In the
absence of precedent, Abenyi and Lucille leaned on each other.
From liftoff, they were in constant communication for the 180-
day mission. Lucille gave Abenyi a taste of home, playing George
Clinton through the comms speakers so she could listen during
long and perilous spacewalks. Abenyi and Lucille were the
perfect foils—one a reckless explorer, the other a methodical
facilitator.

After a successful six-months, with only 12 hours left in her final

day in space, Abenyi disappeared from all communications. “We
began the 10-hour redocking countdown without her. We were
all just praying that something knocked out our contact and she
was just going to show up fashionably late.” At just 48 minutes to
go, there was a bang and a glint in the sky as her capsule broke
the sound barrier during atmospheric reentry. The hexagonal
reentry pod landed like a feather as the countdown crashed to
zero. When they opened the hatch, the pod was empty. All of her
clothing was in a heap on the floor, signature star-shaped hairpins
nestled on top. Panic ensued. Every screen in America was
trained on this landing; it was being streamed live across the
world. Abenyi, the media’s funky space girl, singular hope for
American energy, was nowhere to be found. She very truly
disappeared. Angry at the stars for holding her friend and the
future of her sisters hostage, Lucille abandoned her post at
SpaceX and isolated herself in this tree-covered cabin in Baxter,
Maine. In the solitude of the forest, Lucille grieved.
The next morning, the sun was just cresting the army of fir trees
that surrounded us. Lucille, bathed in the golden light, was
reading one of the journals from the bookshelf at the kitchen
table. When she heard me stir, she ambled leisurely into the living
room where I had slept. Something that looked a lot like the
peace of closure had melted over her face; the lines by her eyes
had softened. It was her turn to question me. “Why didn’t you tell
me Abenyi was your mother?” She sensed my reluctance. “I saw
the name inside your journal when I covered you up on the couch
last night.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be honest with me.” Lucille considered

my words carefully before speaking.

“What I’m going to tell you is going to be hard to believe. Are

you sure you want to know?” I nodded my acceptance and she
continued cautiously.

“When Abenyi was powering up the speaker, she accidentally

found the right frequency that undid the glue that held her body
together. She said she looked down, and her hand had vibrated
apart. There was just a blur where her hand used to be. It must
have been like a glass being shattered by a note. She said the
feeling spread across her body like a foamy wave. As I
understand it, Abenyi became formless consciousness and was
somehow able to transcend time and space.” My brow furrowed.

“She said these things? How can you know that?”

“Abenyi learned how to communicate with me. It took about two

months for her to figure out how to get past knocking things over
in the house. After a few more weeks, she was able to inspire
thoughts in my mind. She was tuning into my frequency.” Lucille
described the sensation of their connection as feeling full, her
body too small to contain the both of them.

“The first full sentence she spoke to me was ‘get to work.’ She
wanted me to finish her research. We started working on the
equation together.”

Lucille would allay my incredulity with proof. She plucked

another journal from the shelf and pointed to a paragraph. “Start
here.” I consumed the journals ravenously. I learned that my
mother had been traveling, traveling, traveling across the
universe since the moment she fell apart, but she never stopped
trying to reach back to Earth. She got better and better at
organizing herself and strengthened her connection with Lucille.
The two of them began working on a final
equation, each woman’s work on its own side of the journal.
Lucille had been envisioning the particles as balls floating atop
water’s surface, Abenyi as a tightly packed crowd moving as a
group. On one side, Lucille’s page was covered margin to margin
in equations in error-free blue ink. On the opposite, a hasty
diagram of a large crowd passing through what looked like a
drain gate. Flip once and the next page reveals a query
—“better?” Right below, three letters underlined five times: “yes”.

As the last few electrons bumbled down wires in suburbs across

America, they finished the equation. Abenyi’s research held up.
Now, all they needed to do was fabricate the converter panels and
send them up. Lucille prepared herself to leave Baxter for the
first time in almost a year. She booked a flight to Atlanta and
would go straight to the Launchpad from the airport.

The next journal page was blank. And the next, and the next. I
turned the last page so hard I ripped it. The sound sliced through
the silence in the house. Startled, Lucille reappeared. “Where is
the rest of them?” I couldn’t hide the worry in my voice. She
replied, “you’re holding the last one.” I felt slighted, my questions
coming out too sharply. “Why did you stop writing? Did she stop
talking to you?”

In that moment Lucille saw the link between us: two women
Abenyi had left behind, searching for reasoning. I wondered what
was beyond that we were missing out on. What out there was so
good that it was worth more than this? Sympathy moved her to
further explanation. “I was afraid she would go quiet. Abenyi
never told me why she’d chosen to stay in space and I was
worried that she was only talking to me to help me finish the
equation. But, I realized that after being presented with the
infinite possibilities of an expanding universe, unfathomable
knowledge and perspective, I couldn’t expect anyone to stick
around. Even though the space program changed our futures, it
didn’t erase our histories.”

Lucille and I sat on the balcony attached to the living room. The
same telescope she used to watch the Sisterhood crawl across the
horizon pointed over the railing, expectantly trained at the sky.
As we waited for dawn, I asked her if she still heard from Abenyi.
Lucille broke into a true, full-faced smile and gestured toward the
telescope. “All the time. And you will, too.”
 Understanding Afrofuturism Series
Installment One

WAKANDA
FOREVER
FOR ALL
Last month I went to an science fiction conference in Detroit with my
daughter, Jane. You may know her from her latest novel, Creating Clarisel,
currently up for a Hugo Award. The first novel in a series of two, Creating
Clarisel imagines a society where the population has hit ten billion and
reproductive sex has become a privilege. Developing countries have been
forcibly transitioned to what is essentially digital reproduction—parents
use touch screens at Replacement Centers to create their children. It is an
excellent story that critically examines many parts of our society. She was
appearing at the conference as part of her book’s promotional tour. The
keynote panel, like always, was a conversation between the three Hugo
finalists. For the first time, they were all black women.
 E
E
E
E
E
E
During the open Q&A portion, the first question came from a young fan: Why did you set
Creating Clarisel in Lesotho?” Jane smiled, likely noticing the girl’s braids, done up to match
the protagonist on the cover art of the book. “I set my novel there because I wanted to
explore how white involvement in the fertility of the “developing world” might change with
greater technological advancement. As in all other things, colonialism hasn’t ceased. It has
been continually reinvented to more efficiently and insidiously dominate. It just feels
different now because it happens through technology. Blackness, and I argue this in the
novel, is the unique technology developed in response by Black Americans to survive.”

Next, a buttoned-up professor stood and asked, “Dr. Avery, in a recent article, you wrote
that Afrofutrism serves as Organizing and Activism 101 for young people. But so much of
this work, because of the youth of its leaders, happens online. After writing a book about
parents saved by their children, how do you envision the next steps of liberation for an
aging generation?” That question was like a punch in the gut. It poked at one of my basest
fears—the geezer in me knows how useless I am around screens. If liberation comes to us
that way, it will likely miss me.

Still, I can’t help it. I’ve been my daughter’s greatest antagonist at times. The realist in me
wants to see all of the imagination laid out, its numbers run. In those moments, I remind
myself frequently that change is a staircase. You take one step, and then the other, never
out of order. Black folks post-emancipation fought for the right just to own themselves.
Segregation era, for social equality. Civil Rights era, for economic equality. The Millennial
era, for their minds. Each generation found the previous group’s methods incomplete and
inefficient. That’s how we know we’re on the right path.

Right path or not, as I type this, I see Black liberation movements moving online. We were
worried about artificial intelligence replacing our jobs when we should have been
concerned about missing the boat to the future. Our trepidation is justified. I think the
unknown scares us as a people. It’s hard to imagine ideas protecting you from water
cannons or dogs in the street. So now, when we are asked to embrace digital activism, we
are inherently distrustful, especially when the platforms it relies on and their distribution is
controlled exclusively by white people.
But, through Jane, I’m coming to understand that this reluctance is a form of self-harm. I
think us Boomers avoid these youthful movements because they require us to submit our
methods to the judgment of our children. We, colored shades from humbled to humiliated,
have to reckon with the fact that in one way or another we failed, or at the very least,
stymied progress. That exact feeling has inspired me to begin this series.

This is the beginning of what will be a series of essays that try to make legible the cultural
products of Afrofuturism and digital activism, the Civil Rights Movement of this
generation, for those who do not feel comfortable with or have access to it. (This may
include the poor, the rural, and my peers—the getting a bit old.) In this first installment, I
will explore notions of diaspora and community as they play out in the world of Wakanda
presented in Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster film, Black Panther. Despite being a part of
Marvel’s award winning cinematic universe, this is certainly a superhero movie like none
other. Black Panther is a powerful and accessible allegory for the crossroads the global Black
community faces in the 21st century. When we analyze the movie, we analyze what it
stands for. It is my goal for these installments to be honest, interesting, and collaborative. It
leaves collaborative space for the reader to converse with me and my thought process. I
encourage you to mark up this text and add your ideas and questions in the space at the
margins. I look forward to learning with you.

—————
Who in the world do you feel responsible for? When you see black children starving on TV,
do you feel guilty as their kin? Or, maybe obligated as a person of comparative means? Just
now, did you imagine I was talking about Africa or Detroit? Are our own forgotten citizens,
in their state-designed deserts, more or less culpable than those on TV? Our fidgeting at
these questions indicate that the contours of obligation are complicated by distance, history,
and dollar signs.

In Black Panther, the African Diaspora is largely collapsed into two poles, Western and
African. Better put, those that experienced chattel slavery, and those who experienced
colonial occupation. As that Diaspora grows, ever complicated by each individual’s life
choices, we search for more intimate, manageable communities that share our specific nexus
of pain. Thus, the communities we define for ourselves along the perforations of the
Diaspora generally only include those within arm’s length. As some groups become marked
for preferable treatment, in-community stratifications ensue.

But now, closely connected by social media and global exchange, the Diaspora is
discovering itself like an infant finding its feet. Young people have more access to and are
more excited about their Africanness than I’ve seen in a while. Women are reverting their
hair back to their natural curls, indulging in locs and twists and cowry shell adornment at
the risk of their jobs and widespread ridicule. Even men are growing their hair long enough
to see curls crop up, new and fertile fields to tend. After this external exploration, they
begin to go deeper—Ancestry spit kits, group travel, Yoruba on Duolingo. These small
shifts open minds. When folks ask them where they’re from in Africa, some will say
Wakanda. In the absence of a “real” history, they make one up, and it becomes just as real
as anything else.
Continental Africans, however, rightfully sensitive to notions
of Western takeover, act as wary sentries for their cultures.
THOUGHTS
Reckoning with the definitions and boundaries of identities is
fearsome, uncomfortable work for all involved—every time a
Black American finds their heritage, that national identity
expands, shifting ever so slightly. How you feel about those
nudges depends on your perspective. But, possessive
perspectives might soften, grow sympathetic to the persistent
daughters and sons of chattel as they are seen carving out
homes in an alien land, despite prevention and dispossession
being woven into every stitch of its flag.

Consider this short poem by Richard Siken:

Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now

imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where
everything goes wrong, where everyone has their
back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and
acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die.
Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need
against need against need, where everyone is at
cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.

According to Siken, when the burden of fault is heaved out

of the way, we can finally discern our desires, however
conflicting and counterintuitive they may be. This is exactly
what Black Panther does over the course of its runtime—
identify the warring needs and dare us to negotiate them as if
we were all part of the same community, rather than separate
ones in conflict. It is no mistake that it takes T’Challa’s kin to
make a difference in his worldview. Inspired by the death of
his brother, laid prostrate between a splintered American
dream and the unattainable royalty of Africanness, T’Challa
pivots Wakanda’s public policy. Isolationism, he regretfully
agrees, is as bad for Wakanda as it is for the rest of the
world.
So then, what does Wakanda’s changing policy teach us about the boundaries and borders
of the Diaspora? It’s worldview is teased in the final lines of the film when T’Challa
addresses the United Nations. The King says, “We must find a way to look after one
another, as if we were one single tribe.” It’s interesting wording, if somewhat syncretist.
Given the tribal structure of Wakanda, for people to really be in the inner circle, to reap the
benefits of familial care, they likely have to be close both physically and ideologically. This
becomes a difficult worldview to manage in global diasporic terms. I imagine that if
Wakanda truly wanted to, it could have easily developed a method to allow people to
immigrate quietly. They might have even stopped the assassinations of King and Malcom X.
But, they refused involvement in order to protect themselves, deciding to shelter in place
from the colonial earthquake. As the world clashed around them, Wakandans likely looked
at Flint and the Ninth Ward the same way we look at widespread starvation and poverty in
the Congo and Malawi—with pity, distance, and gratefulness. When framed like this, can
we really blame them for bowing their heads and moving on?

Let us not cast the first stone if our own house isn’t in order. Black Americans have not
modeled kind treatment either. I was a senior in high school when Roots aired. That
Monday, I never had so many white people open doors for me. Even the cops were nice to
us on our way out of school. But in the halls, I noticed no difference in the interactions
between me and my Black peers, those I knew and those I didn’t. Everyone was certainly
angry, but we were showing no additional compassion toward each other in light of the
brutalities we had been introduced to the night before. I remember wondering why the two
couldn’t coexist, the anger and the compassion. In the absence of guilt or blame, was there
no other impetus to be nice to each other?
Black Panther, a premiere of similar significance,
accomplished the knitting together that Roots attempted. It
THOUGHTS
was one of the first successful, mainstream Afrofuturist
works that asked us to look forward rather than backward. It
served as a true call to imagination and reminder of the
validity of incongruent kinship, the things we should learn
fromm others, the things we miss during assumptions. On
the way out of the theatre, we whooped and dapped,
throwing up the Wakandan X, happy to belong to something
that was made with us in mind. Black Panther and Roots, when
read together, extend into the past and into the future,
converging solemnly somewhere on the other side. This
preference for Black Panther is not to say that probing history
is bad for us, only that it should never trap us. Focusing only
on retribution and redress fixes only the problems of the
past. After all, what did Roots tell us to do with all of the
strength it told us we possess?
Today’s Panthers, our upstart millennial activists, must
identify heartily with Okoye, leader of the Dora Milaje. She
represents the struggle of those deciding whether to follow
democracy to the letter or to the spirit. Throughout the film,
she considers whether she should remain loyal in a country
that has become difficult or lead the rebellion against its
corrupt architects, embodying the classic struggle between
reforming the system and destroying it to make it anew. She
decides to stay, using her power and experience to influence
the new, crooked leader. That crooked leader is Killmonger, a
half-Wakandan American who has come to assert his right to
the throne.
As an American, his storyline is familiar to me, his feelings of
abandonment understandable. He is of Marvel’s most
sympathetic villains. Killmonger is motivated exclusively by
the goal of addressing his own pain. In his final scene, he
kneels painfully as he dies, watching the Wakandan sunset
his father told stories of at bedtime. Even when T’Challah
offers to heal him, his American perspective still rules him.
He chastises his half brother, “Why, so you can lock me up?” The next part of the quote is
telling: “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships.” He makes a
distinction there between him and T’Challa that goes beyond politics, pointing to a bifurcation
of the family tree that he feels separates them irreparable. Instead, Killmonger chooses to
identify with his mother’s ancestors, Black Americans who passed through the long shadow of
slavery before settling in Oakland.

This dramatic exchange only serves to further characterize a tragic American remnant, turned
away from by their country and their ancestors. Painted as irreverent, disrespectful of
tradition, destructive and narrow minded. It seems that nurture beats out nature. Killmonger
does not cry for his father’s death because “that’s just part of life around here.” This budding
rage is a desirable trait at work as an esteemed member of the American Special Forces. It is
unfortunate that Killmonger’s blackness is difficult to separate from his time in the military
when he speaks. Agent Ross reveals the backstory of Killmonger’s nickname, “He worked
with our CIA to destabilize foreign governments during election cycles.” Killmonger
participated in the American-led destabilization of Wakanda’s neighbors, conflicts that likely
drove the country deeper into isolation. While he is angry at his country for the ways it treats
him and his community, he is not angry because they’d ransacked countries with much, much
less. He chose T’Challa and Wakanda as singularly culpable for not protecting them from
destitution at the hands of the white man, but never mentions the white man himself. This
thought process makes me wonder if Killmonger would be fighting so earnestly for his roots if
they connected him to less spectacular ground, perhaps a poorer country with less to offer.
In fact, tradition is his specific target—he murdered an important tribal elder in front of the
country and wantonly burned the the garden of a mystical heart-shaped herb. This a
process of culture snuffing reeks of what went on in the first plantations with the banning
of tribal languages, drumming, and hair braiding. Simply put, is Killmonger in search of
history or power? When we ask these questions of Killmonger, we also ask them of
ourselves.

Later, in his final battle with T’Challa, Killmonger finally reveals who he thinks is to blame
for all of this suffering—Wakanda. It began with witnessing the death of his father,
N’Jobu, the younger brother of T’Challa’s father T’Chaka, who sent him to the U.S. on a
spy mission. Taken aback by the treatment of Black people in the country, he began selling
the vibranium weapons he was meant to protect in hopes that they would make a difference
in the right hands. From N’Jobu’s perspective, racial liberation movements were failing
because “our people don’t have the tools to fight back.” But his plan is a global regime
change, not a mindset change. But, Black radicalism is still radicalism, in all of its harmful
chaos. After being confronted by his brother for his misdeeds and overcome by rage at his
brother’s disinterest in the American plight, N’Jobu charged T’Chaka, who killed him
without hesitation.

Killmonger seems to subscribe to the theories of apocalypse studies that maintain that large
scale disasters throw societies into voids where they, stripped of their systems, are laid bare.
Ideally, from the chaos, these societies see the error of their ways and replace the mindsets
that led to the apocalypse with better, more humane ways of living. But only unleashing
war and instability on the glob will what’s underneath come to light, a process that will
likely cost millions of lives. Regimes and citizens alike will realize how dilapidated things
really were, in an awakening that should improve everyone’s lives. However, more often
than not, it is merely a race to be at the top when the status quo returns. In many ways,
Killmonger and his father’s perspectives are aligned with much of science fiction today in
that the works critique and seeks to destroy dominant ways of being without suggesting
anything significantly better to take it’s place.

This is where Coogler really invites us in, identifies us as participants in the problem we’re
seeing on screen. What do we think is the right way to handle these issues in an uneven and
ever-moving diaspora? Send me your annotations at @oldafrofuturist and we will work it
out together.
E
E
E
E
E
E
 Episode 353: #tweetlikethe1600’s
February 1, 2018
0:00 27:56

Josi: Salutations black people, welcome to another episode of Tweets from the
Plantation, your morning podcast source for the shit you have no business laughing
at. We have a very special edition of the show for you today—we’re going to be
talking about #tweetlikethe1600s, the hashtag we started yesterday. Basically how
the Black table stays the most lit in the cafeteria. Lorice, tell them how this all got
started.
Lorice: So yesterday, the whole Afrofuturist publication team went for a company
outing in to the new Black museum in Washington D.C.. We can really only be
serious for twenty minutes a day, so bringing us was a bad idea in the first place.
I’m not sure how many of y’all had a chance to get there yet, but you start in the
basement and work your way up. The very bottom level really feels like the belly of
a ship. We all walk in, we’re reading, we’re solemn, we’re watching the reactions of
the white people next to us to make sure they be looking guilty.
J: Most of them looked truly shook. It really is very deep. I don’t think I ever
physically felt the weight of history like that. They sure know how to put you
through it. I could only do a little at a time.
L: By the time we finish the first section, I was tapping out. I found Josi and we sat
on a bench near the ramp to the second gallery level.
J: One of the things I loved the most about the museum was how so many Black
parents were bringing their children and explaining the exhibit to them. They were
really trusting them with the subject matter. But y’all know kids will be kids and
they just do not care about whether they embarrass you in front of everybody.
L: This sweet little boy and his mother sat down on the bench next to us. He looked

like he was maybe six. Mom was unwrapping a snack and he’s got this look on his
face like he’s really working hard to process what he’s just seen. Then he opens his
mouth and says, “Hey mama? How much is forty acres and a mule?” Before she
even has time to answer, he asks, “Is that like a Bethesda and a Bugatti?”
J: Y’all, I fell out. How the hell did this little boy know what a Bugatti is but not a
mule?
L: His mom refused to raise a fool.
J: So the three of us are on this bench really laughing at this kid. This lady comes
over, and we assume it’s security asking us to quiet down but it’s just the regular old
coon police. [Imitating the old woman:] She was talking about our generation being so
disrespectful for coming in here and making fun of what happened to all these
slaves. Cause if we had it as bad as they did, we wouldn’t have made it. Her
generation took milkshakes to the face at lunch counters so we could even have this
museum—we were just pitiful, no better than white people. We should be grateful.
L: So what, because she and her friends sat nicely for milkshake facials they
decided to give us a museum?
J: Old folks are wild, sis. Anyway, we managed to keep it together for another two
hours. On the way out, we were thinking about how being in the museum was a lot
for all of us. While we were in that, laughing made us feel better about what was
going on. Like there was some joy to be had along the way.
L: I noticed that none of that lightness was never shown until you got up to the top
floors that focused on pop culture. The slaves in the basement looked like they were
in a constant state of dying. Don’t get me wrong, they were definitely dying, but
there was joy and resistance and laughter in that struggle, too.
J: What we’re saying is the least the curators could have done is added a joke or
two. It’s like, you’re telling me, in a few hundred years of slavery, all the hundreds
of slaves that told massa his hairline was atrocious at one time or another, and
nobody wrote that shit down? Since I couldn’t say any of that out loud down there,
I tweeted it with the hashtag, #tweetlikethe1600’s.
L: I get the notification
when Josi posts it, and
when I tell you I died, I
mean very truly died.
J: There was a significance
to what we were doing
beyond just trying to find a
vent. In one sense, we
were adding another
dimension to the voices of
our ancestors. We never
hear from them, only about
them. They rarely have
agency or choice or mental
autonomy. When white
folks tuck their kids in they
can tell them stories about great-great-great-great grandma being the baddest bitch
on the Mayflower. If we went that far back it would just be a book about somebody
getting whipped for a light basket. Nobody’s reading that to their kids.
L: And we’re not really allowed to make guesses about what they were really like
because the old heads are so worried that if we don’t take our oppression seriously
(what they think looks like being sad all day), white people won’t either. Our
attitude shouldn’t dictate whether or not we’re treated like humans.
J: That woman didn’t understand that we were engaging with the material in a—
yes, very unintended—but really interesting, personal way.
L: The hashtag blew up that night. It’s still trending, with something like 36,000
tweets and counting. Josi, why do you think it caught on so quick?
J: Comedy on the internet is just so much more raw than anything you get
anywhere else. I think it’s forced us to get down to the essence of what’s really
funny. On the internet you can’t hide behind your inflection or 20-minute leadups.
You just have to make the joke and let it fly. If it’s funny, you might be famous in a
few months. If it’s trash you better delete it fast.
L: For facts though, anyone and everyone can be a comedian online. All you need is
a good observation and the right delivery. It helps that Black women in particular
have an unadulterated view of how much of a hot mess society is from where we are
on the ladder. It’s like saying hey—we are so painfully aware that this system is so
completely wild that there’s nothing else we can do but laugh at it. We can’t cover
this stuff seriously because it’s a joke to begin with. Trying to give such headassery
real analysis is like trying to pull meaning out of Migos bars. Just unfruitful work.
J: Jokes and humor are the only way to deal with absurdism properly. When
things are crazy, we have to talk about it crazy. Bringing seriousness to it gives it
too much credit. The medium has to fit the message. That’s why satire shows are so
popular now that Cheeto Satan is in office.
L: So in a lot of ways, tweeting has become this hilarious open source coping
mechanism. It’s simple, it’s free. Things piss you off and then you tweet about them.
When you can’t afford therapy, there’s twitter. When we’re in the classroom and we
don’t get called on even though we’ve had our hands up for the whole period,
getting eyeballs in stores, we can share the experience in a way that brings
happiness to other people, makes us feel connected.
J: Next time someone stops me in a store like that I’m going to tell them that the
Wakandan Embassy will be in contact with management. Instead of turning up I’m
just going to laugh at them. White people hate when Black people laugh at them.
It’s a conversation ender. Thats why these tweets are so satisfying.
L: Joking about the struggles we face is a unique part of the Black community. I
have a Jewish friend, Sam. She’s not devout or anything, but her Bat Mitzvah was
lit. Her and her friends are always on social media talking about how hard it is to
find cheap kosher rosé, but you never see them joking around about their
intergenerational trauma. You don’t see them making memes about Moses or gifs of
Barbara Streisand punching Hitler.
J: In any bad situation, there’s the shitty situation itself and the person going
through it. I think a lot of white humor puffs up the protagonist, but most Black
humor is focused on making the situation look dumb to begin with.
L: It’s also that this shit is still going on, you know? If we were holding our breath
until all the racism stopped and we could start being funny, we’d be dead and
boring. I find it funny that we can tolerate fairy tales and easily see how they can
have something to say, but jokes have to be meaningless dead space. A lot of these
tweets are us exchanging wisdom, letting people know that it’s not them, it’s
probably the structures around them.
J: You know the ‘ops never looked twice at pop-pop telling jokes outside of the
bodega when they were rounding up activists. They invalidated the worth of his
message because of its delivery.
L: I bet they also just didn’t have a
clue what he was saying! So much of
our humor is insular. It’s not really
legible to people that don’t have the
context of living in the same place or
at least consuming the same media.
And I don’t think it’s our job to make
it understandable for other people, it
serves a purpose for us. If you think
we’re talking about you, good. As my
grandmama says, hit dogs holler.
J: At the end of the day, humor is one
of the strongest forms of resistance
because it doesn’t require any control
of the situation, just the ability to point something out. And now, for all the folks
that don’t think the internet can actually accomplish anything, we have two words
for you here at TFTP: Cambridge Analytica.
L: The gag is that all of this work we’re doing on the platform literally keeps
Twitter going. They’d be deader than vine with us.
J: Well, Jack Dorsey, I’m expecting a stock package soon. We’re ready for our
next hashtag hit—this week we want to hear your conspiracies with #hoodtheories.
L: We’ll get you started. #hoodtheories: Mom’s know y’all be forgetting to take the
chicken out. They only do that so they can blame you for them not wanting to cook.
J: This is Tweets from the Plantation, and we gotta get back to work. See y’all next
week.
THE NEW
CULTURE
MAKERS
One week ago, I was on assignment at the Yeezy Boost
launch at the Adidas workshop in New York City. My draft
for that has been due for days, but I have something else to
say that wants out.
In the uber there, I was thinking about how strange the
situation was. I, a black gay man from Meridian,
Mississippi who, after attending the world-renowned
Landon Institute of Fine Arts in Cork, Ireland, landed a job
as a Fine Arts Correspondent at the global pacesetter of
modern language, The New York Times. With a background
like that in a country like this, I can be a lot of things, but
humble is no longer one of them.
So, you can imagine that when Hannah Haaga, our current
Fine Arts Editor gave me this assignment, I was more than
a little ruffled. Not because I think Kanye doesn’t produce
Fine Art, and not because I don’t know or care anything
about sneakers, but because I’m the only Black writer on
this team.
I asked my roommate about it. He said, “I mean, from a
pure efficiency standpoint, having you write this article
makes the most sense.” His reasoning concluded that I,
having been privy to the inner regions of Black culture,
would not need to do much external research and would
likely pick up on things another reporter might not. It was
guaranteed racially sensitive, and would need much less
culture-filtering. And this is a Black man speaking.
Look, I know why Haaga really gave me the
assignment. It’s because Oxford named me
the best classical sculptor every year I
entered work. My eye for structure and
form is, according to them, unparalleled.
According to critics and collectors, Yeezy’s
sneakers are some of the most innovative,
architectural pieces of footwear anyone can
buy. She wants an expert voice to write a
traditional article, reaching down and
elevating the “mundane” to the honor of
lofty assessment. After all, this kind of
perspective is the reason people read the
Times.
I know why because she wrote
all that in the note section of
the assignment sheet. I’m still
not convinced.
Swallowing my pride, I went
anyway. After an eternity on
the FDR, the traffic relented
and I met up with Siddiqi, one of
my closest friends from Landon, outside
of the building. After being plucked from
the Pope’s recital by Kanye West himself to
play violin in his latest music video, Sid was
flown out from Los Angeles to attend the
launch tonight as a courtesy. He insisted it’s
because they’re best friends.
Sid gave me a hug. “You never told me,
why are you here?” I told him that I was on
assignment. His right eyebrow raised. “On
assignment? They’ve got you writing
culture pieces now?” The satisfaction of his
incredulity matching mine was an oasis in a
desert of self-doubt.
We sat down for the show. To a wall of
cheers, West appeared midstage to wax on
about Yeezy being the clothing line of the
future. His music gives us a window into
his mind while his apparel shows us his
vision of coming times. To be honest, his
vision is bleak. The future’s palettes are
neutral and largely colorless, applied to
exaggerated, undulating silhouettes. In a
more succinct phrase than I could ever
construct, fellow rapper Ice-T described the
tattered clothes that accompanied the
footwear line as “future slave gear” in a live
tweet from a few rows ahead. My
characteristically verbose tweet
r e a d : We s t b a s t a r d i z e s ,
repackages, and sells back the
athleisure trend, one always
rooted in the basketball
shorts and sweatbands of the
Brooklyn basketball scene, as
an elevated version of the same. I
think Ice-T and I both really do
respect Kanye, but we agree that he should
stick to music. Despite musical talent of
great magnitude, these extreme, self-
worshipping, celebrity-crazed events
confuse, even dominate his image.
Where his persona as a celebrity fails, his
production and lyrical power are
undeniable. Kanye creates new instruments
within the layers of his tracks—screwed
sirens that play like flutes, police boots as
kick drums, Kim’s moans as hi-hats, Coke
can cracks as cymbals. They each speak in
their own language that swirl around the
listener like a Rothko.
This is evidence that Kanye’s soul comes need exactly what he says he is, a bringer of
alive in a recording studio, not here. Youintellectual deliverance. But, like all faux-
can really feel it through speakers; his visionaries, West is fueled by recognition
tracks are speared with the strange trident
rather than advancement. A few years ago,
of the Black experience, god-like bravado,he went on a twitter rant because Pitchfork,
and academic sophistication. But then, he a poorly considered “white
raps shit like this over top of it: “Your publication,” (implicated alongside other
titties, let 'em out, free at last/Thank God
offenders such as Rolling Stone and The New
almighty, they free at last.” This irreverent
York Times) rated his new album, Life of
plucking of Black history, it’s like me Pablo, a 9 out of 10. He firmly insisted that
sculpting a heap of garbage from fine it was a “30 out of 10.” The source of their
cotton marble, high and low art duking it misjudgment? Racism: “The system is
out in the brutal ring of popular culture.designed for colored people to fail, and one
As if it couldn’t get any worse, he of our only voices is music. One of
our only ways out is music.” This
“”
closes that song, “I’m In It,”
with a fifteen-line dash of a is a fine, if limited, observation
finishing verse where he raps, POP A on it’s own, but it was
“Pop a wheelie on the followed by this head-
WHEELIE ON scratcher of a tweet: “I love
Zeitgeist/I’m finna start a
new movement.” Incidentally, THE ZEITGEIST love love white people but
this quote sums up my issues you don’t understand what it
with Kanye well: it’s not what he means to be the great-grandson
does, it’s what position he thinks he of ex-slaves and make it this far.”
occupies in the Black community as a That needs a little unpacking.
visionary leader. Firmly, Kanye West is not Kanye believes that there are barriers he is
a visionary. He is an example of what capable of transcending, but his
happens when a gifted musician untouchable talent is stymied by a global
experiences life as a Black man. Dizzied by preference for white art. I agree that music,
celebrity, his priorities are disordered: “I his specific talent, because of it’s unique
liberate minds with my music. That’s more revolutionary power, is a particularly
important than liberating a few people from powerful site of oppression. But if I’m
apartheid or whatever.” I’m assuming that reading him right, the subtle sound that
to Kanye, again from the same track, white Pitchfork couldn’t detect, the secret
“Imma put my fist in her like a civil rights sauce if you will, is Black struggle. He takes
sign” is his version of a call to action. what ails him and processes it through the
I might sound like your average Kanye vocoder of white expectations. It’s ironic
hater, but he frustrates me so deeply that he looks to white institutions for
because we, as a generation, desperately approval when his goal is freedom
for oppressed Black people. But, it’s kind of
his thing, so when he gets rejected, it hurts. uncovering. I’d been drafting a new work
Money, talent, connection—Kanye seems to
forget that none of that trumps the
blackness of his skin. Grind Black talent
along the surface of White judgment long
enough, and you’ll end up with a very
different object than the one you started
with. Does this sound like a pioneer?
Maybe once, but not anymore—where is
the Kanye, an arrogant curtain puller who
angrily proclaimed on national television,
“George Bush doesn’t care about Black
people”? Either way, whatever’s
left of him is on this stage in
Manhattan, feverish under the
spotlights. The show
“”
NONE
concluded in a roar of
applause and shutters, Kanye TRUMPS
looking out at us looking back BLACKNESS
at him. His arms were
outstretched in paradoxical praise
and imitation of Jesus, his savior and
idol. On the train home, I opened my
notebook to see what I’d written down, but
there was nothing there, not a single note.
I was frustrated with myself. I just wasted a
night watching people take pictures of
shoes, and I had nothing to show for it—so
I’d guaranteed myself another hike to the
Adidas store to ogle at them through the
glass. Knowing I’d be unable to sleep, I
rode an extra stop on the 6 and headed for
my studio. As always, when words fail, I
sculpt.
A m a n ’s h e a d e m e r g e d f r o m m y
workstation, one eye gradually opening to
the world while the other awaited
since the summer. Like reaching for a face
in a dream, I carved slowly and aimlessly,
adjusting poorly to the pressure of
conservatory being lifted. Most of my
artistic life was spent at Landon, I trained
there for six years and produced 17 full-size
works. The first time I saw professional
sculpture in person, it was in middle school
at the Meridian Museum of Art, an old
whites-only Carnegie library. The local
hospital sponsored a show of the work of
Edmonia Lewis, a famous Black
Civil War-era sculptor. When I
walked into the exhibition, I
felt like I did in the candy
OF THAT
shop on the corner, watched.
HIS
After considering the forms
for a long time, I asked the
curator why everyone was white
if it was all done by a Black
woman. “They’re not!” She was excited to
have a question to answer. Taking me
gently to a tall figure finished in
unblemished, snow-colored marble, she
pointed at the label. “This woman is Hagar,
from the bible story. She was Egyptian.”
Right.
Since that moment, I knew I wanted to
sculpt, and I wanted to sculpt Black people.
In all of my professional work, I use
Chinese Sandalwood marble. When I’m
drafting, I add obsidian powder to my clay
and ceramic mixes until they are the color
of the night sky. Like the Dahomey priests
at the feet of their bocio, I rub coconut, shea,
and palm oil into their malleable bodies,
building up a layered, lustrous shine over
time. Beyond the color of my medium, my
work is very traditional Classical sculpture.
My most recognized piece to date, Ayinde
(one who emerges), took me over 2,200
hours to create. She is eight feet tall,
constructed from a single brick of Chinese
Sandalwood marble hewn by pressure deep
in the Earth. She is based on the scaled
measurements of my older sister, Zora. Her
nose is wide, flat, generational. Across her
face is a broad, gap-toothed smile. The
interior of her mouth has such
depth that you can see the
contour of her tongue,
dancing in laughter. When we WHAT MAN
were kids, I’d shave patterns SEES, MAN
with razors into the fade at
the back of her neck. I did the
SCULPTS
same on her twin over a period
of seventeen days. On top, she has
short, tight coils, the tips of which I
chiseled mostly with the end of a paperclip.
But, the goal of sculpture is to have all of
that work melt invisibly into the final
product. My shows felt like slave auctions,
white couples circling life-size Black figures
on pedestals. In my final critique, one of my
professors attached a post-it to my sister’s
face. The yellow tag read: poor projection of
the nose. A few days later a package arrived
from my sister, a graduation present. In a
padded box lay a miniature figure of Hagar,
die cut from flat white plastic. The
accompanying note read in quick script,
“keep working.” I affixed the yellow tag
to her small face, a reminder of the
subjectivity of perspective. The figure
earned a permanent place on my
workstation to remind me why I took up
this ludicrous medium in the first place and
why I stick with it on nights like these.
But, Kanye-induced frustration was far was
too large a block for a sentimental figurine
to move. I stared passively at the clay and
wondered if the popular canon would ever
have room for my work, if I would ever
reach the status of culture maker, an artist
whose work impacts a generation,
occupies it, forces it from center. I
“” felt doomed to straddle two
worlds, that of Classical white
sculpture and that of Black
American culture. I hated
being called the First Black
so-and-so when I won an
award. I always thought that
moniker said more about the
climate of the industry than my work. In
European exhibitions, my work was called
out as revolutionary and groundbreaking
left and right just because I chose to sculpt
Black people from black stones. I received
praise not for my technique, method, or
skill, but only for the subject matter. To the
technical eye, my work isn’t much different
than David and Caesar done in pillow
marble. What man sees, man sculpts.
But let’s say that I am very truly an
exceptionally visionary artist—the label still
does not bode well for me. My skill is too
threatening for the traditional White art
circles, but not relatable enough
to be patronized by the people I sculpt and
sculpt for. I would have killed to come up in
an industry as part of a renaissance of
Black art, to have catalyzed and sponsored
prodigies. I want to be known as a leader in
a field of excellence like that. What sets me
apart as an artist in my mind is simple: all of
the kids that sat to the left and right of
Kanye and Jay in middle school can afford
their masterworks. How powerful their
positions at the pinnacle of a medium that
can reach everyone right now. For my work
to be consumed by the people I make it
for, the whole system must change.
I wondered frequently if my
speculative project of
convening Black figures from
past, present, and future into
the gallery space was
finished. This time, it made me
remember the Kanye I had seen
earlier bitterly, pursuing his chaotic
pseudofuture dreams with the entire
world behind him.
The irony of white folks loving his version
of Black culture more than mine is not lost
on me. I wonder what his ultimate goal is,
when he’ll be satisfied.
—————
The next day, the February sky dumped a
thick foot of snow on the City, and I
decided not to go into the office. While I
was making coffee, my phone rang—it was
Siddiqi. His flight back home to Los
Angeles was grounded indefinitely and he
wanted to see if I was around to kill some
time while LaGuardia thawed out. He
proposed a reckless nine-mile hike to the
Whitney to see Carter’s House, a new
installation featuring Jay-Z and Beyonce’s
personal art collection displayed in a stitch-
for-stitch recreation of their Calabasas
living room.
As we rode up the elevator to the
experimental galleries an hour later, I
elbowed Sid and asked, “Is this how
celebrities do moving storage?” He
laughed, amused. “Do you still hate
e v e r y t h i n g t h a t i s n ’t c l a s s i c a l
sculpture?” Before I could defend
myself, the lift doors opened
and Sid made a beeline to
“Mecca,” the Jean-Michel
Basquiat painting Jay-Z
famously bought at a
Sotheby’s auction for $4.5
million in 2013. It hangs
toddler-height in the gallery near a
simulated window. In his recent song
“Picasso Baby,” he encourages Blue to “go
ahead and lean on that shit.” Honestly, it
looked like Blue could have painted it
herself. If I was a realist, Sid was a
bombastic abstraction. He was certainly a
good enough musician to be at Landon but
he never responded well to the
traditionalism of European conservatory.
He was a refugee of the Syrian War who
had settled in London when he was ten. He
picked up violin at the charter school his
host family enrolled him in. He was an
immediate prodigy. After his stint with
Kanye, he leveraged new connections and
tried his hand in the rap world.
In a few months, he had racked up samples
and features across Def Jam and Sony. He,
unfriendly to the too-classical professional
title of violinist, now called himself a
culturalist. Culturalists, according to Sid,
couldn’t care less about the art objects
themselves, their forms, values, or
aesthetics. Their only significance lies in
their importance within the zeitgeist, what
they teach the world indirectly through
relationships with other objects and
people’s public interpretations of them.
Now, he stood in front of the canvas
and pulled at his beard, extracting
importance from the details. I
studied the work, too. I saw a
starless black sky
background, three badly
drawn white buildings, one
badly drawn orange building,
a crown, and the word Empire
with three kinds of added
emphasis. After a few minutes of me
trying to see what Sid was seeing, I broke
down and asked for interpretation. “Okay,
tell me why the lines are bad.” He sensed
the hostility in my voice and assembled his
answer quickly. “It’s not about lines being
good or bad. It’s about how the work
functions as an intertextual cultural object.
He spoke without looking away from the
canvas. “You know Barry, recognition is
not a finite resource. The acceptance of rap
and scribble as fine art in no way
diminishes your work.” Easy for him to say
with his waterfront apartment bankrolled
by Sony.
Sid volleyed a question of his own: “Why
do you think Jay-Z bought this painting?”
I guessed it was because Jay-Z felt
connected to their similar origin stories.
They both grew up in Brooklyn, were
confined by the unrelenting structure of
school, and rode their raw talent and
creativity—against all odds—all the way to
stardom.
His answer sparked a conversation that
deepened my perspective on the situation:
Sid: But, also because it was expensive! I
think it bothers you that it took Jay-
Z an entire career to be able to
buy his peer’s work, and with
all that fuss, it’s not even what
you would call good art.
Barry: If he was really that
good, Basquiat wouldn’t have
had to be bought by a rapper to
be relevant. I find it funny that it’s
the musicians whose work possesses
uncontrollable duplicability who are adding
relevance to artists whose work is valued
by its distinct singularity. Do you think the
value that Jay-Z’s ownership confers is
greater than that of Basquiat’s early white
patrons?
Sid: When we make art we also have to find
a few people those who will arbitrate the
definition. Without that, everything is art,
so nothing can be. Somewhere along the
way we started letting monetary value do
that work for us. Look, Basquiat was
talking about some heavy stuff in his work.
He was critiquing the social ills that Landon. It was wild so it could weed out
affected his life. The people the work the weak. It turned off a lot of the fans
resonated with couldn’t buy it. The people West didn’t really want to have—the
it implicated showed their status by holdovers from 808’s and Graduation that
displaying it in their homes. weren’t interested in him as an artist. When
he came back with Life of Pablo and the
Barry: If Jay-Z had made it a few years
people he spent an entire album trying to
earlier, maybe Basquiat wouldn’t have been
carried out of his studio dead by get off of his back were still around making
paramedics who couldn’t distinguish him bad comments, he wasn’t happy.
from the next crack addict. Patrons are Barry: Then white patronage is
much more preferable than customers. I synonymous for all of the listeners he
guess it just bothers me that the themes of doesn’t want to have? True visionaries want
poverty and decay have become more enlightened peers, but he
authenticity stamps on black wants fewer.
work. It seems like we always
have to reference our struggle “”
HE WANTS TO
Sid: This is all absurd to you
because you’re a sculptor.
in our work. I hate the idea
BE A VISIONARY. The market for your work is
that my success is somehow
more profound because my
NOT A BLACK so small. The last thing you

great-great grandfather was a VISIONARY. need to do is pare down your

slave. What do you think Kanye
values more, his first BET Award or
his first Grammy?
Sid: Grammy. More artists he respects have
won Grammys. BET would never
recognize someone like Justin Vernon. He
wants to be a visionary, not a Black
visionary.
Barry: Then why produce all of his work
from the perspective of a Black man? He
was angry that white institutions were
passing judgment on his work.
Sid: That’s the only perspective he will ever turned art dealer Jay-Z…” I wondered if
have. He seems to want to whittle his fans
down to a mass of career listeners. Think of Whitney was introducing them.
Yeezus was like the first few months at
audience.
Sid’s ringtone broke out in the
gallery. He fumbled in the frenzy. The
West family travel agent got him on a flight
leaving from Stewart about an hour north.
He’d have to run to catch a car from Grand
Central. He was gone, racing off to catch
the 4.
Disinterested in the exhibit without Sid as
my guide, I decided I’d gotten my
admission worth. On my way out, I read
the wall text I hadn’t gotten a chance to see
on the way in. It began, “Drug dealer
Jay and Bey knew that was the way the
—————
The next morning, likely some voodoo
punishment for my still unwritten Yeezy
article, I was sent to cover the Sotheby’s
contemporary auction. The highlight of the
night was a Japanese billionaire’s purchase
of Basquiat’s “Untitled” for $110.5 million.
It was a watershed moment; no work
created after 1980 had ever sold over $100
million. At the close of the auction, Basquiat
was not hailed as the Black artist, but the
first American artist to ever sell that high.
It was the first time in a while I’d seen a
Black artist in domestic press just called
American, without the African- conditional.
The hierarchy of identity in the art world is
etched in stone. Kanye would have likely
been proud.
At the buyer’s reception afterward, as I
stood in front of the record-breaking
painting, I found it to be both commanding
and messy. I felt confronted, energized,
sympathetic. The background looked like a
quilt of coverups, dry white brushstrokes in
the middle ground cover what look like
chalk scrawlings on a wall. It reminds me of
the alleys near my high school, janitors
armed with brush rollers losing the battle
against tagging teenagers. That frenzy is
somehow balanced by long moments of
placid blues. They cradle the tar-black face
in the center partially, offering a semblance
of solitude and protection, but not quite
enough. All this seems to appear set back in
the wall, a recessed portal to another world.
This piece transports the viewer, for better
or for worse, into Basquiat’s world. All art,
to some extent, is a window into the world
of the artist, and the medium of music
happens to be particularly conductive wire.
On “New God Flow,” Kanye brags on his
position; “I believe there’s a God above me,
I’m just the god of everything else.” In a
freestyle, Jay-Z feels called to a higher
purpose; “My spirit remains vibrant, I will
lead the flock.”
I wonder how we ended up with these men
as our culture makers. All of their bodies of
work invite the viewer to see the world as
the artist does, but fail to transmit a vision
of the future beyond the struggle, the come
up, or the cocky plateau. Their individual
progress is erroneously yoked to broader
racial progress. Holding the attention of
billions, these culture makers imagine
worlds in new colorways but refuse to
change silhouettes. Why not imagine a
world where Black success is mundane, and
unworthy of celebrity, like the anonymous
billionaires who share Jay and Kanye’s zip
code? Unfortunately for Jay-Z, West, and
Basquiat—struggling Blackness is profitable
Blackness. It is their individual contrast
against that broad condition that makes
their success remarkable. As their collective
influence grows, a new generation accepts
that only a few of us will make it, so you’d
better choose a path that allows you a
chance to be one of them. These artists bind
Black imagination by calling attention to the
absurdity of our low place on the ladder,
rather than considering the ladder itself.
The very conception of the ladder, this
plotting on how to get higher rung by rung,
prevents us from wondering where it leads
or questioning whether this is even the right
way up.
Contributors
Assistant Editors // Peter Antelyes, Alex Mendelson
Historical Consultants // Yvette Winter
Design Specialists // SOCO2 Graphic House

VASSAR COLLEGE
PUBLICATIONS
THE AFROFUTURIST