The Invisible Presence of Blackness in American Art

White people love black art until it forces them to see or engage black pain beyond caricatures and stereotypes. To avoid confronting black pain, white audiences turn to white artists who appropriate black art without substance.

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

The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white.

black people have often been figured as essentially feeling bodies and bodies that in turn hail more feelings to life: