Beyond the Culture: Black Popular Culture and Social Justice

The extracurricular event I attended was the “Beyond the Culture: Black Popular Culture and Social Justice” conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, in collaboration with the Georgia State University Department of African American Studies, hosted the conference. The purpose of the conference was to critically examine the utility of popular culture for social justice, specifically the ways in which black artists, scholars and activists have used popular culture to interrogate, raise awareness, and improve the African-American social condition. Various media forms were examined, namely music, comic books, literature, film, television, and social media. Negrophilia was an overt theme in the conference. In fact, many of the presenters highlighted the paradox of the spectacular consumption of black culture, finding that while the popularity of black culture has proven the most powerful tool in combatting racial injustice, it has simultaneously undermined the experiences of marginalization that informs this injustice. The conference itself opened with a screening of the documentary Death to the N-Word, which essentially argues that rap music’s mass consumption has increasingly delegitimized the N-word’s racial premise. This event contributed immensely to my research by presenting scholarship that engages critical considerations of black representation with popular culture.