These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
Taken Jan 9th, 2016 at the Perez Art Museum by me.
“the black interior”
I remember the first time that I heard that both Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald would paint President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle for their official White House portraits. I remember thinking that this was historical, just as historic as the first Black family. I was familiar with Kehinde's work and had the pleasure of taking in his art in person at the Perez Museum here in South FL. The same Wiley portrait that was in the Perez was also a fixture on a billboard on US1. That billboard marked a very particular part of my queer development. For a time, I would travel between my home in downtown Miami and the Grove to see my partner at the time. While I was in the car, I would wonder if the white people understood how lucky they were to look at a Kehinde Wiley piece while they sat in that treacherous US1 traffic.
I was dating a Black woman who thought she was Beth Porter from The L Word *eye-roll please*. In essence, I was dating one of those quintessential "I like art types," and I got a crash course in contemporary Black art. Looking back on it now, I am grateful for this lesson that is about the only thing I learned without pain in that relationship.
Confession: I, too, am one of those "I like art types." As Jay-Z said, "you are who you are before you got here."
The thing that I love so much about Kehinde Wiley's work is that he paints Black people in his image. Meaning he paints Black people as sees us and not how whiteness has tried to train Black people to see ourselves. In Kehinde's Black imagination, Black people are majestic, take up space, have an inner world that is very present in the eyes, and we are a sight to behold.
Black people also live freely and unencumbered by the white gaze in Amy Sherald's imagination. In October of 2019 one of my favorite Black culture writers and podcasters Jenna Wortham, interviewed Black women artists Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, and Simon Leigh. In the interview, Sherald introduced me to an idea that would intellectually set me free and give me a new language to talk about my work, which is the same experience she described having when she came across this language. Sherald says this about her work,
I think my work represents and connects to the journey that I'm on as a woman and as a black woman, and as a Southern black woman, because that's a separate identity as well, and trying to shed all these external directives — from social norms, from expectations from my family, from my all-white school, from religion and popular culture — that influenced how I think about myself. My work was a way of processing an identity that was given to me. Being told whom to worship, what to wear, how to act in front of white people. All those were things that were projected on me. A lot of my identity was performed. I realized that I wanted to do away with all that, and then I tried to figure out who I really was — who am I outside of all of these things?
I think that's essentially what my paintings are about. A reflection of something other than what's projected out in the world. I'm focused on the way that we experience ourselves, our interiority. It's that private journey, the interior space, and stepping away from the public journey of Blackness, and how people consume who we are, what we make, food, culture and all of that.
Interiority noun
the quality of being interior or inward.
inner character or nature; subjectivity.
Finding this word turned on a switch in me and gave my understanding of Blackness more depth, weight, nuance, and textures.
The interior lives of Black people is a subject matter that haunts me. At the core of anti-Blackness is the belief that Black people are subhuman and subhuman beings do not have complicated interior lives. Therefore Black people cannot have nuanced understandings of life and have philosophical answers to the quotidian mundane violence of white supremacy that Black people must metabolize daily.
You see, this comes up when conversations about defunding the police enter the conversation. Many white people cannot fathom that Black people have loved ones who are officers, have complicated feelings about the criminal justice system, or that safety is an issue that also concerns us. People think Black people who practice abolition do so because we somehow are not tethered to the real material conditions of life. It is because Black people have made a home with our actual material circumstances under white supremacy and know our interior selves intimately is why and how we can imagine new worlds. The Black woman scholar who gave Amy Sherald the framework and language to describe her work is Elizabeth Alexander, who defines the black interiority as,
"The black interior is not an inscrutable zone, nor colonial fantasy. Rather, I see it as an inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn't, or should be."
I often think some non-Black people of color and white people who call themselves antiracist believe that Black people have interior lives similar to dogs. When a dog looks at you intently, every human has had the experience of thinking to themselves, "I wonder what the dog is thinking?" but you do not worry about it too much because you understand and accept that you are the human being. You are the superior one in this equation, and whatever the dog is thinking would not be essential or would matter to your life. Besides, the dog exists to comfort the human. It is best for this relationship rooted in dominance that sometimes involves care that the human does not know what the dog thinks because it would probably fuck up the human's vibe. This is what white paternalism feels like to me. I exist to make white people better, but my real thoughts and concerns do not matter because it will always fuck up the vibes. I have been in the presence of white and non-Black people of color who I knew cared about my physical safety and who would never want me to come to a tragic end similar to #BreonnaTaylor. However, these people were unable to reconcile that I, too, had a rich interior life and that I also could feel like them and, in most instances, feel much more deeply than them.
The black interior is that place and space that is not touched by anti-Blackness or defined by it. The black interior is that space inside Black people where we know ourselves to be intrinsically valuable, worthy, and powerful. That space gave us The Haitian Revolution, where Harriet Tubman went in her dreams to find the coordinates of freedom, the place where Thriller, Purple Rain, and Lemonade were born.
So much of what we know about Blackness is rooted in the external. What the state does to Black people, what the white gaze thinks of Black people, what non-Black people think about Black people, and on those rare occasions when we listen to Black people we listen to them talk only about how their Blackness is poked, prodded, and provoked by white supremacy. Blackness under the white gaze is bound up in costumes and performance. This is what gave rise to Rachel Dolezal and her sister-in-scam Jess Krug. These white women believed that donning hoop earrings, wearing braids, speaking in African-American vernacular (AAVE), majoring in Black Studies, and sleeping with Black men is all that is needed to be Black.
The black interior is what I see when I look at Amy Sherald's work. Black people look and feel different in her paintings, we look like our inner selves. These days I only want to spend my time with non-Black people who do not struggle with the idea of the black interior and its existence. The kind of people who understand that Black people's inner world needs protecting just as fervently as our bodily sovereignty.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS
I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom- I have never experienced the feeling of picking up a book and saying to myself, “this author wrote my book.” I literally texted a friend these words and she lovingly walked me back from the ledge. I recommend this book to people who are serious about living in integrity and bringing honor to their practice of social justice.
As Black As Resistance Finding The Conditions of Liberation by Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson -for Black August I read this book that is critically important to those who want to further understand why liberal notions of freedom will never bring about Black liberation. This book reminds us that Black Leftist politics has a long tradition in this country and it must be studied and taken seriously to ensure that Black Lives Matter.
On The Record [LINK]- is a documentary available for free on YouTube and is produced by HBO MAX it is chronicling the Drew Dixon a former A&R executive who is accusing Russell Simmons of sexual assult. This documentary is well done and does a good job trying to grapple with the nuances of racism, white supremacy, and sexual assault. Drew Dixon is a musical genius whose career was killed by Russell and L.A. Reid. Drew Dixon built the culture and the culture did not protect Drew.
Cripping The Resistance: No Revolution Without Us by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasimha [LINK]-Sometimes during the fascism/ Covid/ racism/ ableism quadruple pandemics it’s hard for me to think about what my goals are because I’m frozen in fear. But when I stop and can feel into my core, my primary goal as a disabled queer person of color is to survive, and to work to keep my disabled kin and communities alive. “To exist is to resist” is a saying many of us say- all the ways we survive a world that wants to kill us as disabled people is resistance.
White Women for Defunding the Police by Showing Up for Racial Justice [LINK]- We declare our commitment to abolition feminism and solidarity with gender-oppressed Black people. As white women, we are abolitionists because we feel a moral imperative to abolish the systems that uphold the horrors of white supremacy. We are also abolitionists because we know that the world being built through Black-led abolitionist struggle is one in which our younger selves would have been safer, where our families would have gotten the support we needed to thrive.
The Invention of Ibram X Kendi and the Ideaological Crises of Our Time by Anthony Monteiro [LINK]- The book’s title, How to Be an Antiracist helps to explain what it’s about. It is a self-help book; a genre preferred by marketers of “cures” of all types. The more recent variant of this genre is the self-care books, marketed to petit bourgeois professionals confused by the chaos and contradictions of modern capitalism. Like most books in this genre they are highly autobiographical. The author himself has been cured of the malady of racism and wishes to share his cure to a wider audience. Kinde optimistically announces, “We can be a racist one minute and an anti-racist the next.” Astonishingly for a Black person, he declares: “I used to be a racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be ‘not racist.’ I am no longer speaking through the mask of racial neutrality. I am no longer manipulated by racist ideas to see racial groups as problems. I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist.” (my italics added.
Black Women Are Topping The Bestseller Lists. What Took So Long? by Roxanne Fequiere [LINK]- Diversifying our collective bookshelf can’t be something done as a one-time event—we’ll need to relish today’s bright young talent while simultaneously excavating the work of that of several past generations. Without this crucial context, we’ll only ever be partially well-read.
LUTZE SIGHTINGS
Creating Inclusive Spaces with Gabriela Guzman and Lutze Segu [LINK]
The Full Set with with Didi Delgado [LINK] (if you want to watch the conversation link here).
Deconstructing LatinX Identity with Priscila Garcia-Jacquier [LINK]
For Real, For Real [LINK]- I am currently hosting a weekly show on FB live with the homie Krystina Francois and you can catch past episodes on my IGTV
LISTENING
Drew Dixon’s Impact [LINK]- this is a Spotify playlist of all the genius that Drew Dixon helped create this women was the TRUTH.
Unholier Than Thou Reverend Warnock and the case for the Religious Left [LINK]-I appreciate the way this episode troubled our understanding of religion and who gets to lay claim to it politically. I for one would be very excited about a religious left movement.
How To Citizen with Baratunde Prelude: Revolutionary Love is How to Citizen with Valerie Kaur [LINK]- I appreciated this very hopeful conversation about how to expand our understanding of citizenship.
At The Intersection: Gene Demby and the Anti-Blackness of Black Exceptionalism [LINK] -This title says it all.
Toward Black anarchaism [LINK]- “The interview is essential listening for anyone who desires the abolition of the state and white supremacy alike.”
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Brielle’s Protection Fund [LINK]- A Black trans woman is still in need of our monetary support.
I am guest editor for a literary journal that is wanting to highlight the mutuality of Black and Native futures [LINK]
Steps To End Prisons and Policing: A mixtape on Transformative Justice [LINK]- I bought this course, I have not started it yet, but I am exctited to make time and dive into it.