By Mark Anthony Neal | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Wednesday, February
11, 2015.
“Could you be love, and be loved?”—Bob Marley
“Oh, in another
life, I bet you wouldn't know that”—D’Angelo
It was one of most genuine Loving Black moments
that we’re likely to see in American cinema this year; Niecy Nash, portraying
Coretta Scott King’s childhood friend Richie Jean Jackson, welcomes into her
home, or quite literally her kitchen, a group of hungry Negroes.
The group, which included Martin Luther king Jr, Ralph Abernathy, James
Orange, Hosea Williams and James Bevel, would use Jackson’s home to strategize
the Selma campaign. That scene though, with the free flow of grits and
gravy...bacon and biscuits was a reminder of the ethic of Loving Black;
you can’t be on the front lines with your belly empty.
History don’t often remember who was cooking it up in
the Kitchen—unless it’s a tireless Black domestic praying for a new day—and yet
Ava Duvernay gave us this small glimpse of Loving Black, to not only
acknowledge the labor of women who were on the first line, if not the front
line, but as a gesture of love to us.
I’ve thought often about such gestures recently with
regards to corporate media production. The occasions where we truly feel loved,
by and within, that enterprise, are few and far between.
Ava DuVernay’s SELMA and D’Angelo’s BLACK
MESSIAH are visuals and sonics of Loving Black—an ethical
practice in which you never have to question that they (our artists) and
theirs (their art) are all in for us. Loving Black is not simply
the act of loving Black (though that’s something to aspire) but a
something else, as in a politics in loving, as only Black can love itself, in a
world where Black is so often perceived as absence, deficit and pathology.
A something unconditional.
Loving Black are those women like Diane
Nash, Jackson, Coretta Scott-King, Amelia
Boynton (who still walks the earth at age 103), and Ella Baker, who held tight the
movement, even through the benevolent patriarchy and homophobia of its male
leadership. Baker, for example, might not have appeared in the film, but her
spirit clearly informs DuVernay's filmmaking; Baker is in that kitchen with
Jackson; she is on that bridge being beat with Lorraine
Toussaint’s Boynton. Loving Black.
It is in the spirit of Loving Black, that I
have been fundamentally stunned at the rancor and disparagement directed at SELMA
and BLACK MESSIAH. In a media landscape in which our
humanity is regularly assaulted--and often enough at the hands of those who are
ostensibly us--SELMA and BLACK MESSIAH are nothing short of open
arms; D’Angelo’s mumbling sweet nothin’s in our collective ears—come
a little closer.
Lacking in ridiculous claims for refunds for BLACK
MESSIAH (as if the standards of art and love, wouldn’t demand refunds for
much of what passes for commercially viable Black music) or those Historians of
the trained and arm-chair variety, who apparently attended screenings of SELMA
with historical reference volumes sitting in their laps—is what Historian
and Cultural Critic Treva Lindsey calls a “critical generosity.”
Loving Black is about loving back what
loves you, and loving it enough that when it don’t feel like love, it is love
that delivers that message.
Almost two generations ago, Bob Marley asked—in the
midst of the first post-Civil Rights era nadir—“could [we] be love and be
loved?” The question remains as relevant during this second nadir.
While we claim that #BlackLivesMatter, perhaps the relevant point should
be do #BlackLivesLove?