The Invisible Presence of Blackness in American Art

how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.

do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use

These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my Blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my Blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race [is] the inescapable robbery of time.”