I moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.
In a symposium Du Bois organized through the Crisis magazine in 1926, he asked, “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written?” To these, we can readily add film and TV, or simply media. Du Bois’s question were part a speech honoring fellow historian of the African diaspora—decades before the phrase was used or popularized—Carter G. Woodson. I cannot prove it, but I am confident Boseman, like myself, read Du Bois and Woodson. Also, we all share Howard in common—Du Bois lectured and Woodson taught there, and Boseman spent his undergraduate and (part of) my graduate years there. And because Howard was and is a space of blackness and pan-African spectacle, what better way to think about our guiding question than through Woodson and Du Bois?
Is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? My view is that blackness as a category of belonging and identification, and even around which one organizes, should be abolished. In its place should stand the answer to a simple question: does one stand with the direct descendants of the people who chose to leave Africa in antiquity—populating Eurasia and rest, becoming culturally different peoples—or those who chose to remain in the region dubbed Africa? The operative word here is “choice.” For centuries, our brightest scholars and thinkers have debated this very question, drawn ideological lines in the sand, pushed their positions, but none framed this matter as a choice. Once a choice is made, then most or all would know who will fight for what. Under the rubric of blackness, this prerequisite is stillborn. Naming and from whom it comes from matters. Without an internal sense of who/what kind of people we ought to be, impossible will be the task of organizing targeted political and social action—call it pan-Africanism reimagined—across wide geographies and even more treacherous socio-political hierarchies of race, gender, class, (dis)ability, etc. Metaphorically, we cannot simply pluck weeds choking the life out of nutritious plants; the entire field must be burned to prepare the lands for planting anew. These “prescribed burns” improve the health of the field.
We live in plantation societies, domiciled on different estates. Under the banner of blackness, we protest, march, picket, boycott, unionize, form cooperatives, build impermanent institutions, vote, pay taxes, join the armed forces, serve in levels of government, and more. We do so with the hope provided by blackness—the hope that individual, then perhaps some collective condition will improve by an invitation to their party. And yet the empirical evidence of our lived experiences in doing these and more to survive amounts to plucking weeds here and there. We know the weeds will return, will be more resilient, will not rest when we are tired. One of those colossal weeds is cultural identification—what kind of human beings are we? Blackness, being black or its synonym negro, describes a thing. It is an adjective, not a noun. Tucked away in the appendix to Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro is a short piece entitled “Much Ado about a Name.” In it, Woodson engages in a sidebar conversation about “what the race should be called. Africans, Negroes, colored people, or what?” Bear in mind, he is writing in the early 1930s. Woodson is unconvinced a name will “solve the race problem.” “It does not matter so much what the thing is called,” Woodson continued, “as what the thing is.” If there was any doubt about Woodson’s argument and his preference he wrote, “The word Negro or Black is used in referring to this particular element because most persons of native African descent approach this color. The term does not imply that every Negro is black; and the word white does not mean that every white man is actually white. Negroes may be colored, but many Caucasians are scientifically classified as colored. We are not all Africans, moreover, because many of us were not born in Africa; and we are not all Afro-Americans, because few of us are natives of Africa transplanted to America.”
For Woodson, “There is nothing to be gained by running away from the name” Negro. S/he must learn to accept it, as the peoples of African ancestry he met in London and Paris had done with apparent pride. And then s/he must “struggle and make something of himself and contribute to modern culture, [so] the world will learn to look upon him as an American.” Woodson was wrong. Ancestors do not die. There is a spirit or force animating bones, brain, and blood plasma, and that spiritual force transcends notions of materiality, time, and physics. And so, one can be born anywhere with “African” ancestors, bundled with millennia of archived knowledge, conditioned genetics, and the burden of a composite, yet countless cast of ancestry determining more than skin complexion. And for those who cherish their white or other ancestry, this is not a debate (where one must choose sides). It is an IQ test. If spiritual force or energy cannot be destroyed/dead, and only remade, then this too is a choice between relatively small sample size of “white” genetic input and deep pools of “African” ancestral forces, especially for descendants of those who chose to remain in Africa. To settle for black/negro is a lazy shorthand for finding comfort amongst the weeds, while testifying one is an American too—whatever “an American” is supposed to mean. Colored or Afro-American/African-American leads to the same dead-end. What about African? Though not rooted in skin complexion or color, it comes from the same womb as black, negro, and the like. At best, “African” might serve as a bridge, a transition point, between now and the choice to be made. And the proposition in front of us is less an actual name, though that might matter. Unlike those disqualified candidates, what is at stake is that a name, a choice, emerge from the people for which those monikers were crafted.
Woodson transitioned in 1950—and recently I had a dream with this ancestor, standing in a kitchen talking—and so he would not have experienced the upending of the term negro, during the Black Power era. Whatever we remember or think of that era, undeniable was its reminder we have, since those monikers were hoisted upon us, pushed back against them in search for self-(re)definition, a peoplehood beyond the literature and laws of host societies that render us damned. And yet, during that era, what did organizing around blackness or even in multiracial coalitions substantially give us? Jailed, assassinated, exiled, and the like. Alliances evaporated, self-interest paralleled the drug and gang regimes, while those who were never really invested in Black Power politics survived as best they could under the rubric of being black and occasionally African American. In the post-WWII era, what appeared, then, was what I call the curse of the first—blacks/negroes considered “first” achievers in white-authored societies. A common qualification is that these were individuals and that were or remained non-threatening to the established order. These individuals were weaponized, used as foils to not address systemic tyranny and violence in housing, health care, schooling, etc., by propagating them as evidence society is just, that it works, and that those who suffer could achieve the same if they work hard and along the same non-threatening lines—there is a potential place for them at the country club. Though this is not what James Baldwin meant when he wrote, “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America,” the category of the black/negro, “the Negro painted by white Americans,” remains the indispensable scaffold that holds U.S. society together. Without the black/negro, it collapses.
Boseman’s first movie, The Express, featured him playing the first black person to win the Heisman Trophy, a role updated in Draft Day, then followed by another first, Jackie Robinson, in 42. Not long after we got Marshall, yet another first. Though he played these firsts, further weaponizing their reach and authorized value, his embodiment, his interpretation of their lives gave them something they ought not have without white consent: dignity. It is easy to forget Jackie Robinson helped build low-income housing and co-founded a bank in Harlem or that his pan-African-minded son David Robinson moved to Tanzania decades ago and works with over 300 coffee farmers in a cooperative. Boseman’s interpretation of Thurgood Marshall, who lived in Harlem, focused on his life and personhood before his joined the Supreme Court and the cast of “first blacks.’ This embodiment with dignity was evident in 21 Bridges, where Boseman’s character became a police officer to honor his slain father, or Get On Up, where he channeled James Brown’s cultural import or the soul and funk of black folk, or Message from the King, an action thriller premised on kinship—finding his estranged younger sister. But most significant of the firsts was Boseman as T’Challa in Black Panther, because if we put the “first major black superhero movie” aside, Boseman and cast were pan-African blackness amplified.
We can rightly or wrongly debate the propaganda streamed through his movies, how the cloud of the “first” black/negro hovers over all, but Boseman stood in the aura of Paul Robeson: “The artist must take sides,” Robeson said, “He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice.” Boseman made his choices, consistently, about which roles he would play and how. We also have a choice to make. I hope we chose to abolish blackness, the black/negro. In doing so, we clear the fields for a reimagined pan-African synchronization and action. Pan-Africanism is less an intellectual or whatever movement, or even a series of international meetings, than it is a political strategy of coordinated action. Whether we are working with real or fictive or transitory bonds of solidarity—to get us over the hump of atomization—that strategy hinges on a shared, working definition of the whom that action is to be coordinated. At stake is addressing the collective who(m), before the what and how. Until then, we will continue to live out the fictions we call lives, on estates, and as “the Negro painted by white Americans.”
Sources
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed: A Symposium,” The Crisis 31 no. 4 (1926): 165; 31, no. 5 (1926): 219-20; 31, no. 6 (1926): 278-80; et seq.
Raoul Peck, I am not your Negro: A major motion picture (New York: Vintage, 2017)
Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, and Interviews (New York: Citadel Press, 1978)
Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1933)
Film: I Am Not Your Negro (2016)