And now, as Paul Beatty had put it, everything and nothing was multicultural. It was the air everyone breathed. It was the mercury promise of freedom for all always slipping away.
“Humor In Hue” from Black World, April 1971. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
We only see what we look at.
To look is an act of choice.
—John Berger
PART THREE
THE COLORIZATION OF AMERICA
1993–2012
After Identity, What? by Hank Willis Thomas. 2012. Aluminum letters on wood and inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
CHAPTER 11
I AM I BE
IDENTITY IN POST TIME
But if I have to choose between I choose me
—Erykah Badu, “Me,” New Amerykah Part One: (4th World War)
There was a joke that was everywhere at the turn of the millennium. It had started long before, among high-school friends, back when the saying was, “It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand.” But this post–“Black thing” thing was much smaller than that, even more impenetrable, a sub-tribal sign.
The joke had begun with a group of Black guys at a diverse high school in West Philly. It first surfaced in a two-and-a-half minute film short Stone had made with some of those same friends, called True.
It opens with a shot of Stone lying on the couch watching a football game. The cordless rings and it’s his friend Paul, lying on his own couch watching a kung-fu flick.
“‘Sup with you?”
“Nuttin’ man, just chillin’.”
“True, true.”
The other characters don’t do much either: Dookie draws comic book characters, Fred picks up the phone and buzzes his friend Porto Rock into the apartment. The dialogue amounts to maybe a dozen words, the most meaningful of which is simply “Wazzzaaaaauuuuuup?!” When each says it, he stretches out the “aaauuuuuuuuh,” wags his tongue, bobs his head, improvises his own stupid faces in his own way.
By the end, Paul has changed the channel to the game, and he and Charles watch together, still having a non-conversation conversation.
“So what’s goin’ on, B?”
“Chillin’. ’Sup with you?”
“Nuttin man, just chillin’.”
And that was it—a group of Black men at rest, not called upon to perform, just being who they be. The short was like what an anthropologist might call “thick description,” what a psychologist might call “the opposite of microaggression,” what a comedian might call great material. Years later, when director/actor Charles Stone III’s “Whassup?” commercial for Budweiser debuted in the 2000 Super Bowl, it seemed that millions were let in on the joke, too.
Multiculturalism had allowed artists of color to toy with the possibility of no longer having to play a role already scripted for them. After multiculturalism, they might move beyond the aesthetics of uplift and respectability, be freed from the burden of representing positivity or confirming oppression. They could aspire just to be. They might still choose to represent identity, race, difference, and inequality. But they wanted to consider it a choice.
“Individuality,” wrote the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in his 2005 post-multiculturalism book The Ethics of Identity, “is not so much a state to be achieved as a mode of life to be pursued.”1
Stone had been a music-video director, making videos like A Tribe Called Quest’s Bonita Applebum and the Roots’s What They Do that had slyly subverted Black male stereotypes. By the late 1990s the industry was changing. This short was Stone’s bid for new work. He knew he had something good, so he took his time. He spent two years writing it, and one more to shoot and finish the edit. He debuted True at a music video short festival in the summer of 1999.
An Irish-born-and-raised copywriter at agency DDB Chicago named Vinny Warren spotted True at a festival and brought it to Budweiser. Stone had worried about how the ad would play in the real world. “When people do it and do it badly, it’s like some old Blaxploitation shit, like straight-up minstrel,” he said.
True required context and specificity to work. Saying “Wazzzaaaaauuuuuup?!” to each other was an act of recognition. I see you. You and I are together in this moment. The ad had to be made by a Black director featuring an all-Black cast. Stone knew there would still be objections that his concept was “niche market.” Warren’s Irishness, his foreign-ness, Stone felt, allowed him to understand the nuances and see the big picture.
They still needed to pitch the concept to all the confused marketers, casting agents, and execs. In those sessions, Stone decided to describe it in gendered terms. “Look, it’s really simple. It’s men holding hands through the phone,” he would tell them. “It talks about that wonderful nothingness that men do that is actually quite complicated.”
One day DDB execs told Stone they wanted to try out a “multicultural” cast. By this, they meant that they wanted to try white actors. Maybe it was progress that whites could now see themselves in the “multicultural” thing. But wasn’t that still kind of missing the point?
On the last day of casting, Stone and Warren asked to bring back four of the five actors from the original True cast, just to compare them to the “multicultural” cast. Stone recalled, “Sure enough, they were like, ‘What are we doing? We should just stay with the original cast.’”
And so Stone turned up the lighting, put bottles of Bud in each character’s hands, and further slashed an already haiku-length script into what would become the commercial called “Whassup?” At the end the word “true” rested over a Budweiser logo. Six months later, he and his homies were partying in Cannes after receiving the Grand Prix, the global ad industry’s top award.
Fred Thomas—Stone’s old buddy turned international star—told a British reporter, “It was strictly our thing. Strictly our clique. It never went all over Philadelphia. Now the whole world is part of our clique.”2 One of the Cannes judges agreed, “It’s not just an ad campaign, it’s a movement.”3 Who in the history of advertising could have predicted that a sixty-second spot featuring a group of bored Black males would become the first globally viral ad of the millennium?
The joke among friends had become a joke shared around the world. But what was the world seeing?
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE, AND THEIR DISCONTENTS
Some years before, amid the heated campus debates over multiculturalism, the white Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor had written an influential piece entitled “The Politics of Recognition.” He wrote, “Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”4 In a society dedicated to equal dignity, he argued, it was reasonable for marginalized minorities to expect equal access to having their stories told, their books read, their cultures respected. “It is only arrogance, or some analogous moral failing, that can deprive us of this,” he wrote.5
But he also argued that minorities did not have the right to demand that their cultures be deemed equally worthy. If that demand was granted, he argued, one ethnocentrism would replace another. Some sort of aesthetic judgment needed to prevail or else, he wrote, “[T]he politics of difference can end up making everyone the same.”6
Taylor’s argument almost sounded naive to a young generation raised on Frederick Douglass’s maxim that power would concede nothing without demand. Who was this “us” he was referring to anyway? Stone and his hip-hop-gen peers had approached the culture industry as insurgents. They were not wrong.
Not long after Cannes, the execs told Stone they wanted to expand the Whassup? concept. They would do it with Italian mobsters, Star Wars characters, squawking parrots, and weird extraterrestrials. Stone, who had already cut fifteen spots and was preparing to direct Drumline, was insulted. It was as if they were saying, “Everyday Black guys, talking parrots, weird extraterrestrials—they’re all funny to us!”
Both Taylor and the hip-hop-gen
insurgents were right. Difference was not only in danger of becoming Benettonized, it was in danger of being stretched to the horizon, leaving all the old inequity and inequality in place. “Whassup?” was being restored from a new kind of joke—one that let everyone in—back to the old kind—enjoyed by the majority at the expense of the minority. Change the joke and revert the yoke.
Not long afterward Dave Chappelle would have a similar revelation while working on his own set for his own wildly successful breakthrough comedy show. His success had brought him a $50 million contract from Comedy Central. But he began to worry about the price of that success.
The breaking point came when he shot a skit in blackface. The scenario was of a public incident of awkward Blackness in a colorized world. Chappelle-the-star is seated in first class, being asked by the airline stewardess if he wants fish or fried chicken for dinner. Suddenly Chappelle-the-blackface-pixie is tap-dancing and cane-stomping across the headrest, crying, “Hooooo-wee! I just heard the magic word—chicken.” Chappelle-the-man-of-color frowns and orders fish, hoping to avoid looking like a stereotype.
The skit captured the micro-pressures of the post-multicultural moment. If the world had indeed become colorblind, history’s burden might truly feel pixie-size. But it had not, and the only consolation was irony borne of acute self-consciousness. The problem of invisibility had been replaced by the problem of visibility—what did you see when you looked in the mirror? What did they see?
As Chappelle acted out his part in blackface, a white crew member laughed in a way that terrified him. What if all of them weren’t laughing with him, he wondered, but at him? What if it had been that way the whole time? Suddenly he felt guilty, he later told Oprah Winfrey, “socially irresponsible.”
He fled the show and his family into a surreptitious pilgrimage to Africa. In the aftermath, he would blame the network, his coworkers, himself. “I feel like they got me in touch with my inner coon,” he concluded, that empty third-person plural indicating both phantasmal conspiracy and despairing confusion.7 The burden of representation had ripped the swagger from him.
You might tag that wall. You might kick down that door. You might even pull off an Ali shock-the-world upset. But were you prepared for what came next? Where would you draw the line? Even if you had been compensated very well, better than anyone who had come before, had you really changed the game? In the face of such questions Chappelle had torpedoed his own brilliant career.
By comparison, Stone was lucky. “The truth about True is that these are real dudes and a lot of the ideas are still grounded in a reality,” he said. “So I ended up pulling myself out as the director and as the character.”
Artists often apprehend something genuine about the world long before the language coheres enough to allow change to sweep through it. But what if what we needed to have was a conversation about race and history and equity in the new millennium? What would we say to each other after “Whassup?”
A JOKE THAT GOT SERIOUS
In the late 1990s Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon had their own joke. Not really a funny ha-ha kind of joke, more like the kind that made you smile and say “True,” shared between two friends who had made careers of defying others’ expectations and denying the names with which others wanted to bind them, a joke between two who, in that sense, were something like escape artists.
No one understands the power of fetters better than the Houdinis who try to convince an audience that they can be slipped. The illusion lies in presenting escape as inevitable. Success lies in convincing the audience that in some small way reality itself has been changed. Sometimes a magician is able to break through, enabling a kind of mass unshackling. But most mornings they simply wake up to confront the restraints of the everyday and the work of creating their next fictions. That is the life of a creator.
The joke began like this. After two spectacular performances in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 1994 Black Male exhibition, both before the age of thirty, Thelma Golden found herself at the top of the art world but in a tenuous position. “[The critique of multiculturalism] really changed the discourse among visual artists,” the curator Lydia Yee said. “Artists also were concerned about being labeled as a Black artist, as a woman artist, as an artist who deals with AIDS.”8 What was true for those artists was true for her, too.
By 1998, her embattled boss David Ross was leaving the Whitney for dot-com-booming San Francisco to run the Museum of Modern Art there. The nasty backlash against the uprising of the early 1990s was settling in and soon she and Elisabeth Sussman had both resigned from their curatorial positions at the Whitney. Their departures felt like the end of an era. To the formalists it was like the last emptying out of a particularly noxious, entropic party.
At the turn of the millennium Golden reemerged uptown, as the deputy director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The generation of artists of color she had introduced to the world—including Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Gary Simmons, and Ligon—were all entering rich periods of creativity and rising quickly in the art world. It was time for Golden to turn her attention to the next generation of artists. “Post-Basquiat and post-Biggie,” she would call them, and in fact most of them were also post-conceptualist and post-MFA.
Golden and Ligon had come from different backgrounds. She was the granddaughter of Afro-Caribbean immigrants and the daughter of an insurance broker and a civic leader who grew up in the Black middle-class neighborhood of St. Alban’s in Queens. He was the son of an autoworker and a nurse’s aide who grew up in the Forest Houses projects in the South Bronx.
But each had been one of precious few Black faces at their white, progressive schools in Manhattan. Both had matriculated from elite East Coast liberal arts colleges, she from Smith, and he from Wesleyan. They came of age at a time when Basquiat was becoming a superstar, Black galleries were on the rise, and campuses were exploding in protests for diversity in the faculty, the student body, and the canon. They entered the art world as its doors were being forced open to artists of color for the first time since the late 1960s.
Some older Black artists and curators would charge that Ligon’s and Golden’s—and by extension, an entire generation’s—subsequent success appeared to be rootless. The suggestion was that they had bypassed “the community” on their way in to the white museums and galleries. These accusations rankled and bored Ligon and Golden. Both had interned at the Studio Museum in Harlem and worked under legendary Black curators. They knew their Black history and their Black art history. They also both had resolutely future-oriented personalities. “Every generation has the thing that they react against,” Ligon said. “We were a different generation than the people who had picketed MOMA or the Met.”
Working within, instead of outside, the white art-world elite, Ligon and Golden knew their rise meant accepting that they were delivering a kind of performance. “[It was] as if identity was this thing that artists of color had the most immediate access to. There’s the bucket and you just dip into it. There’s your content. Throw it on the canvas,” Ligon recalled. They both resolved not to take the easy way out.
Golden’s Black Male exhibition was anchored by Ligon’s Richard Pryor text paintings. To Ligon, Pryor had been as incisive as anyone in the Black intelligentsia. The comedian was, he said, “‘ha-ha’ funny, but … also scary.”9 In the paintings, Ligon reproduced some of Pryor’s lines, like the one from his “Cocaine” bit that went: “Niggers be holding them dicks too.… White people go ‘Why you guys hold your things?’ Say ‘You done took everything else motherfucker.’”
Pryor’s comedy was conceptual from jump. His jokes started with what people saw, but they ended up really being about what people thought they saw and what they thought about what they saw. So the paintings often shocked many white audiences silent. But they bitterly divided Black audiences. Was it proper for the N-word and cultural stereotypes to be displayed in a place that some artists of color were still calling the Whitey Museum?
Li
gon recalled the heated discussions the paintings catalyzed:
“Don’t you like Richard Pryor?”
“I love him at home, on my stereo, not on the walls of this museum. Where are the portraits of Frederick Douglass that we were expecting?”
Negotiating identity between the formalists who wanted their art colorblind and multiculturalists who wanted their art uplifting had been the burden of Golden’s and Ligon’s generation.
But toward the end of the 1990s, during the half-decade after the Biennial and Black Male, something had changed. The emerging generation of artists—people like Mark S. Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Sanford Biggers, Nadine Robinson, Kori Newkirk—seemed less encumbered by those vexing questions and the debts due their forebears. Crossing over gave them no angst. So one day when Golden was talking to Ligon about all of these new magicians, he said to her: “Oh yeah, those are your post-Black children.”
That was where the joke started. “Post–Black Art” was what they meant at first. “Post-Black” was the intimate shorthand, the most inside of inside jokes. It may have captured their ambivalence about their positions in the worlds they straddled—the joys, the bothers, the troubles, the transcendence. It also compressed a vast body of shared knowledge, something that outsiders—that is to say, most of the known art world—had never bothered to learn: the artist biographies, works, values, and positions within the sprawling century-old debate over Black art.
Among the moments still lost: George Schuyler mocking his friend Langston Hughes’s call for artists to uplift the race, calling the whole idea of Negro Art a “hokum”;10 Alain Locke’s retort to W. E. B. Dubois’s argument that all art was propaganda: “My chief objection to propaganda, apart from its besetting sin of monotony and disproportion, is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it”;11 Bay Area painter Raymond Saunders’s 1967 pamphlet “Black Is a Color,” opposing the Black Arts movement with these words:
Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Page 26