One of my favorite paintings of all time is Bid Em’ In/Slave (Angie) by Barkley Hendricks. It is in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Nebraska Lincoln. It was acquired by the collection in 2009 which makes me believe I saw it before starting college. Angie is over six feet tall, she sits on a pink backdrop with her hand on her hip and the text “SLAVE” spelled out on her tank top. For the longest time I didn’t realize SLAVE was a band so I believed the words were their purely to contrast the freedom of the woman who stood before me.
Another one of my favorite paintings of all time is Untitled (2009) by Kerry James Marshall. The painting shows a hyper black woman sitting for a portrait as she also sits and paints her own portrait. Behind her is her canvas which shows a paint by numbers self-portrait with her skin not yet filled in. Her hair sits tall on her head and her painting smock mimics the oranges and lines in the painting behind her.
So often we talk about the color black as a shadow, a cover, and a void. In this portrait we see the nuance of black; the facets of it. In the same way we flatten the color black, we also flatten the black identity. Here we see the visible spectrum of blackness within a woman who dares to paint it.
When I saw this portrait I wished this fictional artist were real and that I had learned about her in art history books. I would have liked to have seen her amongst the white male art giants we tend to write about exclusively. After seeing this painting I wanted my own woman; to be her, to see her, to write about her with scrutiny and diligence.
When we have a conversation about black folks it’s often the folks on the coasts and in the cities who live in communities of other black people. As someone who has largely been isolated from black meccas I often see narratives of black folks but I don’t see mine.
In order to talk about my experience as a black woman, I have to acknowledge that often times the lightest, most eurocentric black women - women who look like me - are tokenized from the black community. In the 20th century the brown bag has been used within the black community to discriminate against people who were darker than a paper bag. Beyond this, light skin African Americans formed what was known as Blue Vein societies, that could only be entered if members skin was light enough to see the blue vein in their arm.
While the number of women of color in magazines might grow, have we really stopped participating in discrimination if we still make women who have darker skin tones invisible?
We all deserve to see ourselves reflected in the world which we inhabit.
Who I am cannot be discussed without confronting the fact we are discussing me, and not someone darker than me. I do not want to center myself in the conversation on blackness, rather I want to broaden the conversation on blackness so that the ambiguous bodies who have something to contribute to it, might.
I am a descent of African slaves, German immigrants and British colonialists. I am a slave and a colonizer, a native and immigrant; I am in contrast with myself. I believe we are all in contrast with ourselves. America, and white people in particular, need to acknowledge contrast. We can only be accountable when we recognize both what we have suffered and the suffering we are capable of imposing.