Post-blackness
Post-blackness is a philosophical movement with origins in the art world that attempts to reconcile the American understanding of race with the lived experiences of African Americans in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Origins of the term
Post-blackness as a term was coined by Thelma Golden, director of Studio Museum in Harlem, and conceptual artist Glenn Ligon to describe, as Touré writes, “the liberating value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation, the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the entire race.” In the catalogue for "Freestyle", a show curated by Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she defined post-black art as that which includes artists who are “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”In his book Who's Afraid of Post Blackness? What it Means to be Black Now, Touré uses this term to describe black identity in the 21st century. According to Touré it is nowadays difficult to find a clear definition of what is black in terms of African-American culture. The post-black generation differentiates itself by the former one in the way they grew up. Their parents grew up in segregation, having to fight for equal rights. Touré claims that blackness became a constructed identity, to defend themselves efficiently as a group. He calls it “boxed into niggerdom”.
The attempt to define it results most often in the mixing up of definitions to find an identity in culture or in biological terms. This results often in racial patriotism, racial fundamentalism or racial policing. Additionally, post-blackness has not only to deal with the definition of being black, but with the authenticity of blackness. Touré comes to the point that blackness is too difficult and is too wide-ranging to have a simple definition. However, he does not say that post-blackness signifies the end of blackness, but allows for variation in what blackness means and can mean to be accepted as the truth. He differentiates between post-blackness and post-racial: in his opinion race still does exist, and he warns against conflating it with post-racial: post-racial would suggest colorblindness, and the claim that race does not exist or that society would be beyond the concept of race; in his opinion, this would be a naïve understanding of race in America. Touré sees post-blackness as such: “We are like Obama: rooted in but not restricted by Blackness”.
Duke Literature and African-American Studies Professor Wahneema Lubiano defines post-black as the time when “you are no longer caught by your own trauma about racism and the history of Black people in the United States”. UC Santa Cruz professor Derek Conrad Murray claims that there was a “dogmatic transference of trauma”.
Today there are identity liberals as well as identity conservatives, who still try to define and preserve a chosen definition of blackness. According to Touré, this search for an identity derives from being constantly reminded, as a black person, of the status of the other. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a famous literary example of this.
Facts and statistics
In 2003, Forbes magazine proclaimed Oprah Winfrey the country's first black woman billionaire, but still most of the black middle class was in this period part of the lower middle class. Since the election of President Barack Obama, Darryl Pinckney claims, it has become apparent that being black middle-class is not as elitist as it used to be. The new black elite has become so large that being middle-class has become quite normal.Eugene Robinson states in Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America that it is not the black poor who are trying to redefine black America. He claims that “pre-civil right one-nation black America” does not exist anymore, and that blacks do not share anything more than a few symbols left over from civil rights history. The black mainstream is now part of the economic and cultural mainstream of America.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the other hand, states in the 2010 report that the median income of blacks had fallen from $32,584 to $29,328, compared to the national median income of $49,777. So while 43.7 percent of whites were categorized as middle-class, the percentage of black middle-class fell to 38.4 percent. The rest of the black population was divided into 29 percent working-class and 23.5 percent living in poverty.
Definitions of blackness
Blackness has been defined in many ways. The following are examples which tried to define Blackness through inheritance or political or cultural rules.Authenticity of blackness
This term is used define the division that is being made by blacks themselves, in terms of what is authentically or genuinely black. Sexual orientation, regional variety, geographical diversity, class location or religion can be a reason for exclusion from a particular black group and their beliefs. A single “black identity” may have served well in times of slavery but is in his opinion not sufficient to serve as a means to define race.Blackness, or who and what is black, has been tried to define in sociological, biological or political terms.
Authenticity of blackness in hip-hop music
Authenticity in hip-hop music refers to whether or not artists exhibit exemplary identification with blackness as it pertains to historical struggle. The idea of authenticity in hip-hop is fluid and ever-changing. An artist's authenticity is inextricably linked with the artists' blackness. A fluid depiction of whiteness causes there to be more defining and re-defining of what blackness is as black people are marked as a racial "other" by the changing parameters of whiteness.The Kinship Schema
In Race and Mixed Race ''The Kinship Schema, Naomi Zack attempts to explain why a person is considered black or white:“If a person has a black parent, a black grandparent, or a black greatn -grandparent, then that person is designated black. But if a person has a white parent, or three white grandparents, or Z white greatn -grandparents, then that person is not thereby designated white.”
According to this definition, a person is white if no black ancestors exist, whereas one black person in the line makes or person black, or at least not white anymore.
This is a rather new development; Willard B. Gatewood writes that between 1850 and 1915, white America moved from overlooking “some blackness in a person” to classifying persons with “one iota of color” as black. Naomi Zack concludes thus that according to this Schema, since white is also defined in terms of blackness, American racial categories are interdependent:
American racial categories are, since they thus do not give any positive definition of blackness, groundless and have no empirical foundation. She argues that racial designations refer to physical characteristics of individuals, which were for one inherited from their forebears but also inherent in people in a physical way. So if someone is being called “black” in common American usage, this does not only refer to the looks of the person defined but about the looks of all black people and how the person resembles them. What is perceived as typically black is what scientists now view as the mythology of race which is nowadays closely intertwined with the historical conditions under which the now-disproved scientific theories of race were formulated.
W.E.B. Du Bois, suggested that the black race was a concept made up by white people. However, du Bois and other important writers in the black emancipatory tradition resist racism on the basis of their own acceptance of the concept of race. “
They argue that their educational, moral, social, legal, and economic deficits in comparison to whites are not physically inherited or necessarily acquired. But there is no sustained objection to ordinary racial designations within the tradition of black emancipation.”
The Kinship Schema can also be witnessed in popular culture. Famous actresses who are considered as being black, therefore representing African American Culture, are often only partly black, proving the Kinship Schema. Pam Grier and Halle Berry are both considered as black actresses and connected in some ways as well to Black pride, but both are only partly black: Mia Mask writes in Divas on Screen that Grier served both as a phenomenon of consumption, as well as a phenomenon of production. Therefore, Grier was both an object of the gaze and a subject of narrative action in films, promoting the image of African American Women. This image was partly constructed by white people in addition that Grier was only partly black, in fact a mixture of American, Indian and African American heritage. Halle Berry is partly German, Irish, English and African American.
Their careers show another side of post- blackness; if Obama and Winfrey show the post- blackness in their multi-linguality'', Grier and Berry are signifiers of American Popular Culture and how black women are being perceived.