We Celebrate Black Culture One Minute, and Crush Black Lives The Next

BY   Rebecca Carroll
PUB   The Guardian [perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”16″]Poet Claudia Rankine’s ‘genius grant’ win is a victory for African Americans. But there’s something devastating about the context in which it was awarded[/perfectpullquote]
Black Americans are in challenging, critical times. We matter enough to sell out concert stadiums and win prestigious awards touting our intellectual prowess – as Claudia Rankine did this week, when she won the MacArthur genius grant. But we don’t matter enough to keep us from being murdered by the police. There is something devastatingly perverse about that fact.

Claudia Rankine’s win is one of the best things to happen to black folks in 2016. Her award, along with those of her fellow black recipients in this year’s MacArthur crop – the art historian and curator Kellie Jones, the film-maker Barry Jacobs-Jenkins and the sculptor Joyce Scott – signals a moment of nationwide reckoning. It is also a reminder that we cannot – and will not – stand for the routine violence or the default dehumanization of black bodies.

Rankine is not just seeking to shift the cultural dialogue, although that is important too. She is “trying to change the discourse of black people being equated with criminality and murdered inside a culture where white fear has justified the continued incarceration, murder of blacks and other people of color”. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″]

Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

CLAREMONT, CA – SEPTEMBER 26, 2014 – Poet Claudia Rankine at her home, September 26, 2014. (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times)