I clicked to view the lecture at C-Span online. The subject is Black culture, Black culture in the FDR Era. The author of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era, is young, an Assistant Professor at South Carolina. She’s white and the subject is Black culture. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised to listen to a young sister, like the two I meant in Ethiopia (currently unemployed as scholars), sitting on the edge of her seat, explaining her 10 years of research on our elders. I wanted to see the two white young women I encountered 10 years ago, brave enough to challenge the posture of innocence in their lives and in the lives of their compatriots in the U.S.

As a white faculty/administrator once asked me after he glanced at my proposed syllabus for a course on U.S./American literature, “what’s your perspective?” - I want to know - what’s Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff’s perspective?

Black Culture examines the New Deal programs during the 1930s and 1940s and the ways in which these programs “address racial issues of the period.” The administration and the Democrats attempted to “reach out to Blacks,” most of whom voted Republican. But what had the Republican Party done for Blacks “greatly affected by the Depression”? Blacks recognized in the Democrats “the party taking more positive steps for social change,” and while the Roosevelt administration considered ways to help Black Americans, it had to be cognizant of the Southern Strategists. The administration couldn’t effect “real structural legislation” that would alter the racial barriers Blacks faced in the U.S. “But overtures were made to African Americans by 1935.”

“It’s nothing like we see now.”

Now? What overtures are made to Blacks now - in this colorblind era?

The Roosevelt administration reached out to Black celebrities, writers, artists, and intellectuals by offering cultural programs such as the Federal Theatre and the Federal Writers projects. The mission of these cultural programs was “to provide art to the masses.” More Black Americans than ever before were able to see a Black play. Others were able to examine a work of art up close. The Roosevelt administration hoped that the New Deal’s cultural programs would “uplift Americans” and at the same time, “democratize culture.”

Asked to name some of the beneficiaries of funds from the federal projects, Sklaroff mentions Lena Horne, Butterfly McQueen, Ethel Waters, and Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance period. However, she adds, lesser known Black artists, writers, and intellectuals could benefit from scholarship.

Who is Sklaroff talking to as she looks into the camera?

What interested her, Sklaroff, in this subject? “I was interested in white fascination with Blackness, with creating it and disseminating it.” Often such “images were “derogatory and demeaning and [these images served] only [as] a way for white men and women to elevate themselves.”

Were? Has the commodification of derogatory images and their profiteers been outlawed now?

Sklaroff continues: Executive Secretary of the NAACP, Walter White, becomes interested in the New Deal cultural programs. He sees these programs as a way to take on what he calls “representational agency.” White told the Black community: “You control how people are going to present you. Grasp it and change it.” For Sklaroff, It was “important to see how people feel about their own representation.” Yesterday? In a past era when we were alive and fighting? When, as James Baldwin observed, we Blacks staged an insurrection? The Civil Rights era, Baldwin said, represented the insurrection of the enslaved. We became visible to America whose response was to effect counter-insurgent tactics against Black Americans.

Whites’ statement said “something” to her. What? For Black people, culture is significant! She understood, then, “where culture fits in the Black political agenda.”

Pause. Pause. Pause!

Memphis residents past them in the streets, and yet didn’t see human beings at all. Then two of the men were crushed, yet Memphis didn’t hear the widows or the co-workers. Normally, the garbage workers would have silently mourned the invisibility of justice. But the men contested the narrative in which humans were defined as universally white. Suddenly, the workers assumed responsibility for their own representation and declared Black was human. I am sure you saw the “I Am A Man” placards each man carried as they waged a political protest against the city of Memphis.

For a people whose governmental institutions continually support the dehumanization of Blackness, culture is the primary site of our political, social, and economic struggle for justice.

Was it difficult, Sklaroff is asked, for you a, white, to sell a book on Black culture to a publisher?

Was it difficult, and I would have added - in a post-racial, colorblind era, was it difficult for you to sell a publisher (a white publisher) a book about Black Culture?

“Most of my colleagues are white now. The nature of the field has opened up to whites.”

When did it close? Who was controlling the images of Blacks, even in the 1930s and 1940s while Langston and Hurston fought their white patron to represent “authentic” Black life?

All of my colleagues are white - NOW! Now!

Natural. Normal. All my colleagues are white now!

“We have to take a certain amount of liberties with what we write, what we understand!”

Sklaroff said that too! Take liberties with what we understand!

She’s pleased that question “doesn’t come up.” “I think we are coming to recognize the complexity of human experience.”

“The complexity of human experience”! Oh, what innocent language! Watch it dancing on the tombs of our ancestors while each syllable blows us living descendants into oblivion.

If we aren’t Gatekeepers, the liberties we’d take would be guided by our connectedness with and intimate knowledge of our experience as a Black people oppressed and in continual struggle - another perspective on the complexity of human experience.

But that’s the power of Kulture in the service of politics for you! Take us out with gunpowder and lock us up behind prison bars. Teach our children to chant, “get rich or die trying.” Then bring on the wide-eye innocence. Soft and mellow appropriation of our way of life removed in places too high to see until it’s too late and all the “colleagues are white.” All the children of the “colleagues” hear the message and see the world is theirs, once again. Christopher Columbus again, only now he’s turning pages of our narratives, hunting for our ancestors and placing them on auction blocks as objects, once again.

Nothing we own, we can call our own, can be kept from the free market. Doors closed can be opened wide on objects. A price tag is already made up and a wide-eyed innocent is waiting to consume us.

There are plenty of whites doing Black studies, Sklaroff argues. It’s like doing Medieval Studies. No one doing Medieval Studies lived in the Medieval Era. But scholars in the Medieval Era are white, predominantly, most investigating the life and works of their ancestors. Scholars of Shakespeare are predominantly white; scholars of the Enlightenment period are predominantly white. Now - increasingly, the scholars of Black Studies are white scholars. Will white scholars dominate Black Studies one day? Does the thought of living Black writers, artists, and intellectuals in Black Studies disturb this young scholar? If she truly admired our people, if she truly is concerned about the fate of our representation in history, and if she truly loved my people, she would have considered the question she seems to reject and hopes she never has to answer again. And the question is why her? What is her interest in Black culture? Will any of these post-racial scholars and teachers empower young Black students by validating their current but silenced experience of being Black and young in the U.S.?

Sklaroff ends by saying that she would love to know what the Blacks she featured in her book would think, but, alas, they’re dead!

I fail to hear empathy here. Where’s the challenge to the claim of a democratized culture now in the 21st Century? I hear the now familiar race-neutral jargon disguising a sense of entitlement, institutionally legitimized in our racially controlled society. Where is the Struggle here? For Sklaroff and her colleagues, the Black struggle is over, for justice is over. There’s no line to cross because it doesn’t exist. No line to cross because Black people as an oppressed people don’t exist. The line and the oppressed don’t exist!

Don’t mistake blind whiteness for the convictions and commitment of a Howard Zinn!

This is what counts as diversity in the U.S. now!

No, I haven’t read the book, but haven’t I heard enough? Haven’t we all heard too much of this? Nonetheless, Sklaroff is free to elevate herself by offering images of Blackness without ever having to concern herself about why her colleagues are all white now? How did a people decide that their representation was not important even while confronted by corporate-created images portraying Blacks as gangsters, pimps, whores, and bitches?

I once taught under a European-born chair of English. She, too, was a younger white woman whose similar response, equally as defensive, offered that anyone could learn of the Black experience as expressed in Black literature written by Black women. It’s all about the human experience, and Blacks, she believed, weren’t the sole authority (academic jargon) on the Black experience. And, I guess, we Black women weren’t the sole authority on our experiences as Black women! So you, Black woman, with your experience of being Black and woman, return to the margins established for your kind, margins established prior to 1964 and 1965. We’ll be the authority selecting and tweaking images of the Black experience suitable to our interests in maintaining the appropriate images of Empire for the appropriate markets.

Do you want my experience of oppression as a Black in the U.S.?

In race-neutral language, the hunters maintain their position as authorities on the hunted. The resurgence of innocence in the 21st Century paves the way for white and Black scholars to collaborate in the corporate-led corruption for the ultimate vanquishing of our cultural heritage and our cultural caretakers. The enslavement of Blacks and Black insurrection in the 1950s and 1960s is a usable legacy for the American Empire. Our evolution as human beings hasn’t any value to the Empire.

However powerful the forces of these imperialist truth-grab institutions today, some of us still hear and feel the pain of Sojourner Truth crying in the wilderness. Nurtured innocence, manufactured in secluded libraries in these high places of learning, will never understand why Langston and his song - “Black/As the gentle night/Black/As the kind and quiet night/Black/As the deep productive earth/Body/Out of Africa/Strong and black” - angers us now. Or why thinking about the “tiredness” of a Fannie Lou or of a Martin King drains us now. And less and less we experience what Alice Walker referred to when she wrote of the Joy of Resistance, but we are witnesses to Manifest Destiny masquerading as innocence, even if our perspective has no bearing on the institutional structures that maintain white supremacy.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.