The Painter's Hand is Black

The following was published in Issue III of Kahf Magazine (print edition) earlier this year, on the theme "color". An earlier post was the inspiration for this piece.

The rest of Kahf is beautiful. I think of it less as a magazine and more of a meeting place. Do read them. Their photo-essays are also brilliant.

America is a nation of severance. In the pursuit of land, it committed genocide, separating itself from longstanding indigenous civilizations. In the pursuit of labor, it committed slavery, separating Africans from their civilizational homelands. These twin atrocities rendered America as a contradiction, an anomalous advertisement of civilization underwritten by a willful amnesia of how its creation obscenely violated the concept of civilization itself. Like a stubbornly blank canvas, America's founding and persisted character is, was, and remains white.

Long suffering from a profound confusion, White America perverted the meaning of civilization. Bengali poet and humanist Rabindranath Tagore wrote that "simplicity is the product of centuries of culture"^{Tagore, Rabindranath. "Civilisation and Progress", Talks in China. April–May, 1924.}. In contradistinction, White America privileged superiority and hierarchy, and suffocated longevity and mutuality. Language, cuisine, music, religions, architecture, sport, and literature are each a domain of endless human study—and represent, in their totality, a civilization. They form a singular aesthetic that speaks to what it feels to be in—and part of—a place. Civilizations are long, textured threads traced into the past and painted into the future. Civilizations look both forward and back. This raises a question. Is America, barely a few centuries old, a civilization?

America has seen many technological changes born from science and enterprise. These changes are often touted as the nation's progress, and therefore greatness. This march forward is said to herald an American civilization. Hardly everyone agrees. Betrand Russell, for example, took issue with diminutive views of progress, asserting "much of what we call progress is only restless change"^{Russell, Bertrand. "The Problem Of China". 1922.}.

By the 1860s, nearly 20% of the country was of African descent. For many of America's earliest chapters, the population was split between a White majority and substantial Black minority. Nonetheless, the rewards of progress were not enjoyed by Black America in any way commensurate with their contributions to civic and economic life. Exclusion, not change, was constant within America's character.

W. E. B. Du Bois, America's most towering 20th century public intellectual, studied post-Reconstruction America. In this, he looked to, among many places, post-revolutionary Russia for inklings of what could be. Accusations by colonial powers of being a financed Russian agent for his Pan-African activism only inflamed his curiosities about that distant land:

Du Bois visited the Soviet Union in 1926, the salad days of the Russian experiment. Reflecting on his trip, he noted how the fledgling communist polity endeavored to convince a nation that "work … is a necessity of human life at present and likely to be in any conceivable future world".^{Du Bois, W. E. B. Russia and America: An Interpretation. 1950.} Importantly, Du Bois saw parallels with Reconstruction, when newly emancipated Black labor mobilized to rebuild a nation destroyed economically by war and poisoned spiritually by the sin of slavery. They built schoolhouses, post offices, hospitals, and rails. John Henry—the man who beat machine and mythologized in song—epitomized Black labor, rather than technological innovation, as the driver of America's recovery:

Behind this all-encompassing endeavor of state-building was not allegiance, but aspiration. Labor makes "civilization possible and should determine what civilization is to be"^{Du Bois, W. E. B. Russia and America: An Interpretation. 1950.}. The "emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black."^{Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. 1935.} Just as John Henry and his hammer carved great tunnels through even greater mountains, Du Bois hoped the grand contributions of emancipated Africans—and their still grander potential—would carve a way out for America.

Du Bois' dream was systematically sabotaged by segregation and persecution. Labor alone wasn't enough to direct a new civilizational charter. Amidst the unfulfilled, if false, promises of Reconstruction and the violent reactionary racism that followed, the project of an affirming American civilization more than stalled. Alain Locke, witnessing the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, went further than Du Bois. The Black person in America had "contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well."^{Locke, Alain. "Enter the New Negro", Survey Graphic. March 1925.} Locke observed how Black America's contributions went beyond labor to include novel art, literature, thought, and music. The artists, writers, thinkers, musicians, and aesthetes of the Harlem Renaissance and elsewhere, Locke collectively called "the new Negro"—a character that would, on their own terms, become "a collaborator and participant in American civilization."^{Locke, Alain. "Enter the New Negro", Survey Graphic. March 1925.}

But what did it mean to be a participant? America—or more accurately White America—had stubbornly, violently shut out the African. Even in trying to weave elements of Western civilization into their own, the Black person would encounter an inherent inaccessibility.

The writer James Baldwin, after visiting the small Swiss village of Leukerbad in 1951, keyed in on this feeling of disenfranchisement, writing:

For Baldwin, civilization contained a notion of inheritance. Those who claimed part of a lineage were the rightful gatekeepers. In line with its nature as a severed place, America kept the gate more than closed to Black Americans.

Systematically shut out of America's attempt at civilization, Baldwin pitched an alternative for Black America. More specifically, to "make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life"^{Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. 1972.}; to share their works with the world in a spirit of open humanity.

Baldwin's proposal wasn't without historical precedent. From the late 19th century onward, Black America undertook the practice of civilization building. Creating in loving force, Americans of African descent found inspiration in their history of tribulation in a country still hellbent on their oppression, but also in their rediscovered African histories. Out of this merger came the narrative paintings of Aaron Douglas, the haunting sculptures of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, the spiritual symphonies of Florence Price, and the realist poetry of Langston Hughes. Jazz and swing, American artforms at their heart, were unbounded by borders, experiencing popularity around the world.

Coupling these domestic fruits, sojourns abroad by Black Americans deepened connections worldwide. Du Bois found recognition for his scholarship in China. Rev. King found validation for his political philosophy in India. Paul Robeson found comrades in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, singing for soldiers as they fought against fascism. (But I keeps laffin' / Instead of cryin' / I must keep fightin' / Until I'm dyin'^{Robeson, Paul. "Ol' Man River", Paul Robeson at Carnegie Hall (Vanguard Records). 1959.})

Duke Ellington found captive audiences in France. Nat King Cole found fans in Japan. Maya Angelou found communal refuge in Ghana, as did Assata Shakur in Cuba. The Black Panthers stood in solidarity with Palestine and while others found shared struggle in Algeria, linking their own experiences of racism to those of imperialism. Along the Bosphorus, Baldwin found himself renewed in Istanbul. As for Brother Malcolm, he found universality in Mecca:

Locke prophesied that "persecution is making the Negro international"^{Locke, Alain. "Enter the New Negro", Survey Graphic. March 1925.}. This forecast came to pass. Black Americans elevated their struggle from resisting subjugation to building civilization. Through labor and culture, Black Americans contributed to a perennial dialogue between the world's people—and nestled within that colloquy was an invitation.

Rev. King saw in America "a genuine civilization struggling to be born"^{King, Martin Luther Jr. Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. December 10, 1964.}, if only it could rid itself of racism, poverty, and war. The Black Freedom Struggle was a desire to undo America's self-inflicted wounds borne out of severing itself from the world's masses. White America would be the canvas, the painter's hand Black, and the painting itself colorful, messy, and incomplete. Black America has only just begun offering brush strokes.