Negrophilia: A double-edged infatuation
how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
The advocates and defenders of the black jazz avant-garde and the emergent black cultural nationalists had to distance themselves from what they took to be the threat to their project of black freedom—bebop as jazz authenticity, and cultural assimilation as the solution to black cultural subordination.
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream.