The Annihilation of Black Creation
Frank B. Wilderson III, the father of Afropessimism, said, “Human life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its coherence.” I would take that a bit further after observing what happened at Kevin Hart’s roast. I would posit that the ability to make fun of Black death in public has become a successful way of reinstituting the thought processes within the minds of the populace that were so successful during Jim Crow. Vaudeville made jokes out of Black suffering. It enlisted White performers drenched in Black shoe polish doing their worst impressions of newly freed Black people, portraying them as lazy, stupid and subhuman. It was, and apparently still is big business. While there has always been a faction of the oppressed that work for the oppressor, it infuriates me to see it happen for something so soul destroying as a paycheck. By reducing the terror experienced by Black people at the hands of systemic racism, powered by police and other institutions, to a joke told during the roast of a very successful Black entertainer, the “joke” serves to desensitize us to the destruction of an entire people. Quite frankly no one needed any help dehumanizing the Black body. The way we react to this type of manipulation will inform the perpetrators of how well their plan will succeed. The horrible truth is that society did not pass this particular test at all.
So many things went wrong in this scenario. This was approved on multiple levels. No one immediately shut down the joke. No one, not even the Black man being roasted, objected. Not to mention giving the joke and the person saying it airtime in the first place. Even other Black comedians on the deus, I’m looking at you Tiffany Haddish, patting this fascist on the back after he sat down. Then claiming afterwards that you didn’t hear the joke because you had to pee, but saying it was only comedians that weren’t invited that didn’t like it. I’m not a comedian, I wasn’t invited, and I was disgusted. What Kevin Hart did later was even worse. He then proceeded to appear on The Breakfast Club, a show known for supporting toxic and questionable behavior, and defended the fascist. He said that he knew what to expect from him and wasn’t surprised. Maybe I’m missing something, but why would you allow someone who you know to be a fascist appear as part of a roast for a Black man? As a Black man, why is that a decision you make? What it tells me is that Netflix made the decision and in order to have his little moment he had to go along with it. As much as we want to believe someone like Hart has power in the industry, we also have to realize who runs Hollywood…old White men. The same old White men that greenlit thousands of vaudeville shows all across the country.
It would be one thing if this were the only type of attack Black art was facing, but it is not. A theatre in London just had the production rights for a show pulled due to casting. They were producing Dreamgirls with all three title roles cast as White women. Even in the UK, it should not be lost on anyone that this musical is about the Supremes. The musical was created to talk about a particular time in Black music history that was dominated by Black women. The theater laments all the time and effort put into the show saying the cast, crew and staff, “did nothing wrong”.
In fact, they did everything wrong. They chose a show that they obviously did not understand, and instead of trying to understand it, they decided that casting it inappropriately was fine. Then when they were called out on the mistake, all they can talk about is the work put into something that never should’ve happened in the first place. Why is this a big deal? It’s just a musical. If we get upset about this then what’s wrong with people being upset about a Black Little Mermaid? There’s a lot wrong with that. The two White men, Tom Eyen and Harry Krieger, who wrote the words and music, first conceived it as a vehicle for Nell Carter. She got the lead in a TV series, Gimmie A Break, and the project went on without her, attaching Loretta Devine, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Jennifer Holiday as the three dreamgirls to the project. If you think anyone would have to slog through a library of sources to find this information, you’re wrong. You can find all of that info on Wikipedia in three seconds. It has always been a Black show. It was conceived as such. If you undertake the direction or production of a show, the first thing you do is look up its performance and creation history so you get a feel for what the original intention was before you muck around with it. These people obviously didn’t do that. Or if they did, they ignored it. The Little Mermaid is a Danish fairytale published in a volume of stories in 1837 by Hans Christian Andersen. It has been retold and changed countless times since its inception. In the original text the mermaid saves the prince, and he marries someone else. Rather than kill him to become a mermaid again she throws herself off the ship and becomes an earth bound spirit. The story was changed to be more palatable for a Disney audience, who can’t abide anything other than a happy ending.
Also, there’s nothing that says a Black woman couldn’t be a mermaid. It’s fantasy, a literal fairy tale. Meaning something made up. Very different from a story written with specific people and history in mind.
So how do these two things collide? This is how the established system or industry is choosing to erase the contributions of Black artists, and denigrate their good name simultaneously. Jean Paul Sartre said, “freedom is what you do with what was done to you.” What are we gonna do with this? How do we fight it? We fight it by standing up and saying when something is wrong. You fight it by creating art that celebrates the very people being denigrated. You fight it by making sure the industry that condones and supports it, hears your voice clearly saying that they are wrong. This is not just about Black art. It’s about all art. In times of strife art has always been the last and brightest bastion of truth, of justice, of refuge for the voice of the people.
Specifically in America, that means Black art, as Black culture is the foundational culture of the country. If we allow it, and the people who make it to be denigrated, if we don’t turn away from the artists who would rather cash a check than stand up for something as fundamentality important to our existence as art, then we have learned nothing from the past, and we know nothing about what to do with freedom.
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