The Black Artists Leaving America (Published 2021)

Look anywhere where there is a preponderance of Black achievement, and graduates of Morehouse and Spelman are disproportionately represented in that number. Unsurprisingly, those campuses that produce the Black leadership class in this country are also sites of the growing pains of Black America, places where sexuality, gender, and class are played

The Princeton and Slavery Project, replete with documents, plays, and paintings, was an answer of sorts. It told the university’s sordid history, in part. There are now historical markers on campus and special tours. But the full consequences of the slave past haven’t yet been unearthed. They reached far beyond 1865. In the ’50s, James Baldwin felt

We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different. Now the fugitives are from Central America, and the unfree laborers are in prison. Some kids are still hungry, even so many years after the breakfast programs and Head Start and all of the gains fought for by Black elected officials, because the gag is in the mo

blacks “were rather weird creatures dedicated to nonviolence in the midst of a nation as violent as America is, has been, and will be.”

Atlanta is over 50 percent Black, it is luminous with Black celebrity and iconography, but the unbearable Whiteness of its being—and by that I mean a very old social order grown up from plantation economies into global corporations—still leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable. No matter how it might look, Atlanta still comes out white as snow.