Black Excellence/
UNAPOLOGETICALLY BLACK

Let’s begin with black excellence.

Black excellence is not like racist forms of white excellence, which manifests itself as exceptionalism—as in US foreign policy, as in demagogues like Donald Trump.

Black excellence is engaged in the process of what Stuart Hall has described as “the decolonization of the minds and peoples of the black diaspora.” This project of decolonization emancipates black folk from the sense of inferiority and the “less-than-human” status brutally ascribed to them in the ship’s hold during the Transatlantic Passage.

Black excellence is the black arts—blues, jazz, and hip-hop—because black excellence creates collective joy in collective struggle.

• Amiri Baraka says:
• We are unfair
• And unfair
• We are black magicians
• Black arts we make
• In the black labs of the heart
• The fair are fair
• And deathly white
• The day will not save them

And we own the night

For some, black excellence equals black respectability: it is the Obama’s in the White House, Clarence Thomas in a robe on the highest court ruling against affirmative action, Condaleeza Rice playing Chopin at her Steinway after leading the country into war. Black excellence in these instances is well behaved, well mannered, and forgives any racist slights or attacks.

Black excellence is not supposed to be “unclassy.” It is not supposed to marry a white woman, it is not Kimye in the pages of Vogue, and it is not supposed to be filled with swagga, to jump onto stages and pump its fist, to state boldly, in the words of Kanye West, ''That's what it is, black excellence, baby.''

black excellence con’t

What if America loved black people as much as we love black culture?

This would require us to love Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and Laquan McDonald, but also: Aura Rosser, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Mya Hall, Janisha Fonville, and Natasha McKenna – Black women killed by police in 2014 and 2015. The African American Policy Forum's new report #SayHerName documents the stories of Black women who have been killed by police and who have experienced gender-specific forms of police violence. It highlights black women's experiences within the narratives of racial profiling and police violence, including broken windows policing, the war on drugs and stop and frisk. But it also demands that we look at other forms and contexts of police violence, including sexual assault, abuse of pregnant women and profiling and abusive treatment of lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gender nonconforming black women.

What might it mean to love black women and to love hip-hop?

In a now infamous interview that appears in her book Outlaw Culture, bell hooks challenged and broke the codes of white feminism and black masculinity with respect to political and cultural engagement, and interviewed and got thick into it with West Coast rapper iceCube for the sake of truth, understanding, and most importantly, transformation. As an intellectual and a black woman, hooks asked him with critical generosity:

“Why do you say the things that you say about women in your music and in your life?”

• We might ask Kanye too, Why are there so many bitches, perfect or otherwise in his lyrics?
• or
• Why is he slut-shaming Amber Rose on the radio?
• and
• Perhaps we might read into his troubled life and lyrics and offer an apologia because of his lost-ness after the loss of his adoring mother Dr. Donda West who unfailingly called him on his shit and always believed he could become the man he could be.
• or
• We might also ask ourselves in a world that historically undervalues women in general and black women in particular how can we expect Kanye to be any less misogynistic and patriarchal than the everyday world that we live in?
• or

We might also embrace the sex in hip-hop and insist freedom can exist, but only when individuals are no longer oppressed by a socially constructed sexuality based on sexual puritanism, repression, guilt, and shame.

But really, understanding the context doesn’t make it acceptable, it is inexcusable. Ye needs to be called on his patriarchal misogynistic shit, and hip-hop itself as an institution 40 years old—a grown ass artistic movement, needs to be called out all day, all day on all that.

But not just hip-hop—all institutions need to be called on their racism and misogyny.

Over the last decade every report about cultural participation and the diversity of our cultural institutions in Chicago has been an indictment, a cultural calling out of the lack of race, gender and ethnic representation—in the art on the walls and artifacts in the collections, the lack of diversity in board representation, and the whiteness of the staff and the lack of women and people of color in positions of leadership.

Our cultural institutions are tragic and inexcusably racist and sexist, and should be

'apologizing for their lateness.’