In 2016, American actor Jesse Williams, best known for his role as Dr. Jackson Avery on Grey’s Anatomy, found himself at the center of a media storm following his impassioned yet controversial speech at the year’s Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards. The recipient of the organization’s humanitarian award, Williams called for an end to racial inequality and police shootings in a nearly five-minute speech received with thunderous applause by an audience of Hollywood’s black elite, including Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar. Arguably the most climactic moment of Williams’ speech came with his denunciation of the increasingly visible appropriation of African-American culture in the wake of even more visible racial inequity:

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though, the thing is that just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.^[i]

Referencing Billie Holliday’s famed 1939 single, “Strange Fruit,” Williams declared American society’s culpability in what he essentially alludes to as the cultural lynching of African Americans.

While Williams’s words may have been a summation of contemporary American society, it also proves indicative of another global hegemon’s historical relationship with black culture – 1920s France. Following World War I, France experienced a sizable influx of Africans and African-Americans who began immigrating to Europe in search of improved economic and social conditions. The influence of these newly arrived immigrants on white European society was substantial to say the least, with an unfiltered passion for black culture quickly sweeping through Paris in what became termed “Negrophilia.” Black personalities, such as Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker, became idolized by the avant-garde “for their sense of style, vitality, and ‘otherness’.”^[ii] Some of the most influential artists of the time, such as Picasso and Man Ray, eagerly collected African sculptures and wore tribal clothes and jewelry.^[iii] More importantly, they adopted these black cultural forms into their own work. This soon “influenced a larger audience anxious to be in vogue,”[iv] sparking a modernist vision that would evolve into a number of commercially successful styles.^[v] Like 1920s France, cultural modernity today is overwhelmingly defined by black culture, particularly African-American culture, informing a wider, global popular culture. From music and fashion to sports and social media, black culture’s seduction of mainstream America has brought contemporary meaning to Negrophilia while simultaneously posing compelling questions as to the sustained marginalization of African Americans.

Theorizing “Negrophilia”

Although scholarly insights into Negrophilia typically appear in discourse centered on the study of twentieth-century European art, the courses I have taken throughout my CMAP journey have allowed me to reconceptualize it within the context of my research, namely contemporary American society and popular culture. The term “negrophilia” itself is informed by “the craze for black culture that was prevalent among avant-garde artists and bohemian types in 20s Paris, when to collect African art, to listen to black music and to dance with black people was a sign of being modern and fashionable; in the same way that, today, aspects of black culture such as hip hop, reggae, gangsta rap, locks and Afro hairstyles proliferate, in the 20s the craze was for dances such as the charleston, the lindy hop and the black bottom, for Bakerfix hair paste, and for wearing African-inspired clothes and accessories.”[vi] In a journal article I read for Professor Gorman’s course, Race, Rap and Power (ENGL 189), Bill Yousman, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Literacy and Digital Culture graduate program at Sacred Heart University, coins a similar term, “Blackophilia,” to describe the hyper-consumption of African-American culture, specifically that related to hip-hop, by White youth, characterized by what he says is a simultaneous fascination and fear.[vii] In Professor Abusharif’s course, he characterized the mainstream as the predominantly-white American middle class as they are typically the chief consumers in most major markets; I will also assume this definition of the mainstream going further. Cornel West, another prominent scholar we covered in Professor Gorman’s course, also denotes White youth as the primary perpetrators of African-American culture’s mainstream hypervisibility in what he terms the “Afro-Americanization of White youth”:

The Afro-Americanization of White youth has been more a male than female affair given the prominence of male athletes and cultural weight of male pop artists. This process results in White youth–male and female–imitating and emulating Black male styles of walking, talking, dressing and gesticulating in relation to others. The irony in our present moment is that just as young Black men are murdered, maimed and imprisoned in record numbers, their styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture.[viii]

This irony affirms Yousman’s contention that “Blackophobia lies behind much Blackophilia, and that both may be representative of the continuing ideological and cultural power of White supremacy in the 21st century.”[ix]

West’s mention of White male youth and Yousman’s of White supremacy invokes bell hooks’ famous concept of the “White supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” which served as one of our central theoretical frameworks in Professor Christopher-Byrd’s course, Media, Race & Gender (WGST 236). The White supremacist capitalist patriarchy can be understood as the interlocking systems of domination that function simultaneously at all times in our social experience.[x] According to hooks, “There is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of White supremacist [capitalist] patriarchy in this society and the institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, [and] of Blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all Black people.”[xi] This notion can be reapplied to the “negrophiles" of 1920s Paris, who publicly declared their love for black people and black culture, yet demonstrated sentiments closer to inferiority in their actual treatment and relationship with blacks.[xii] Yousman characterized contemporary American society’s relationship with African-American in similar contradictions:

White youth adoption of Black cultural forms in the 21st century is also a performance, one that allows Whites to contain their fears and animosities towards Blacks through rituals not of ridicule, as in previous eras, but of adoration. Thus, although the motives behind the performance may initially appear to be different, the act is still a manifestation of White supremacy, albeit a White supremacy that is in crisis and disarray, rife with confusion and contradiction.[xiii]

Negrophilia is thus, according to British art historian Petrine Archer-Stra, “about Western culture exploring its perceptions of difference in such a way that best reflects white people rather than their exoticized subjects. Such reflections are often highlighted in sport, the arts and popular entertainment.”^[xiv] It is precisely through these facets of contemporary American popular culture that I will interrogate this conceptualization of negrophilia.

Black Magic, White Myth

It would be impossible to define what it means to be “cool” in today’s America without immediately referencing African-American culture. Within the past decade, American popular culture has become overwhelmingly dictated by African-American cultural products, figures, and identity. From music, fashion, and dance to vernacular, sports, social media, and even our natural mannerisms, it seems that the African-American experience is embedded in America’s collective cultural DNA. Rappers and other urban artists represent the bulk of entries on the Billboard charts; urban streetwear dominates the runways of New York City Fashion Week; black athletes lead the nation’s major sports leagues by a far and wide margin; black comedians consistently outsell their white counterparts; nearly every viral dance trend finds its creator within America’s black urban youth; words like “swag” and “bae ” are as stationary as elementary phonics ; Hillary Clinton proudly touts that she carries ‘hot sauce in her bag’; and names like Beyoncé and Lebron James command more respect than royalty. Yes, the past decade in American popular culture has seemingly been marked by seismic shifts in the direction of African-Americans.

Among the greatest of these shifts was the election of Barack Obama in 2008, ushering in a historic era as the first African-American president. In Dr. Alonso’s course, Political Extremism in Europe (IPOL 389), we learned about the theory of mediatization, which asserts that “the media shapes and frames the processes and discourse (conversation) of political communication as well as the society in which that communication takes place.”[xv]

In line with this theory, Obama’s election also marked an effective shift in the racial consciousness of the United States, specifically within the discourse surrounding the nation’s racial climate: “Across the nation, pundits and politicians, bloggers and celebrities made tentative and dismissive statements about the [supposedly] declining significance of race.”[xvi] Although it had only been less than fifty years since the dissolution of Jim Crow – the effects of which many, if not most, African-Americans were still forced to endure – many saw Obama’s election as proof that the racial injustice and systemic inequality that had long been a stain on America’s history had finally ended. To these people, arguably a majority of Americans, Obama’s election ushered in a “post-racial” America: an era where privilege based on skin color was no longer a reality as a minority was now the most powerful person in the land. “White Americans, primarily Democrats, suddenly started expressing dramatically higher levels of concern about racial inequality and discrimination, while showing greater enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration; note, however, that white Democrats dramatically shifted their views of the centrality of racial discrimination in American life after the election of a black man to the highest office in the land.”[xvii]

Another seismic shift a few short years after Obama’s election, however, would quickly redefine the relationship between mainstream America and black America: the 2012 murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Sporting a hoodie on an evening walk in his gated community, Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who ignored police instructions to not engage with Martin. Although Martin was unarmed, Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Martin’s murder, particularly the lack of justice for such, unmasked a disheartening paradox of black America – that institutionalized racism would not only persist but prosper in American society, regardless if a black man held the highest office in the land and regardless if African Americans informed the cultural hegemony. Martin’s shooting and Zimmerman’s acquittal also shined a searing light on the ignorance that informed the myth of post-racial America. This was further exposed by the domino effect seemingly set off (or rather finally acknowledged) by Martin’s death with the widespread and routine murders of unarmed African Americans, particularly by law enforcement. This seemingly never-ending bloodbath of injustice, that claimed the lives of those such as Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, heralded a reckoning from the African-American community, voiced by those such as Jesse Williams, who confronted America with its tyrannical dominion over their Blackness.

Bleaching Black Culture

While many have assumed that the extent of African-American influence within American popular culture indicates a positive shift in America’s racial power structure, “the consumption of ‘Blackness’ has not resulted in reduced anti-Black prejudice, discrimination, attitudes, habits, feelings, or actions, but in fact it has worked to perpetuate them,”[xviii] both an affirmation and consequence of hooks’ aforementioned White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Mainstream consumption of black culture and its producers has demonstrated behavior closer to appropriation rather than appreciation, the problematic nature of which lies in its disproportionate acceptance of White displays of black culture versus that of actual blacks. According to Yousman, this stems from a “tendency to conceptualize the world as ‘them’ and ‘us’,”[xix] essentially ‘Othering’ blacks – a historical trend deceivably reimagined within contemporary American popular culture: “[Just as] White identification with African American cultural styles has been noted since the first White performer burned a cork and darkened his face, we see the contemporary manifestation of the ambivalent consumption of ‘Blackness.’”[xx]

Hip hop (or rap), among the most consumed outputs of African-American culture, has proven a reflective medium of this racialized ambivalence. Although rap music originated as a form of protest in the 1970s, it has long been criticized for its controversial lyricism. What many of these critics fail to recognize, or rather acknowledge, is the extent to which the racial and class identity of African-Americans, specifically that informed by their historic marginalization, influences everything from hip hop’s style to substance. For example, trap music – perhaps the most consumed subgenre of rap today, popularized by artists such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, and Travis Scott – largely (but not solely) revolves around themes of drug use, wealth, sex, fame, and street life, to name a few. A closer sociological examination of this seemingly debauched art form, however, would reveal the enduring effects of black America’s historic socioeconomic marginalization as a result of institutional racism, including poverty, disproportionate susceptibility to the 1980s crack epidemic and contemporary opioid epidemic, resultant mass incarceration, and destabilization of the black family unit. To quote Jay Z, “if you escaped what I escaped, you’d be in Paris getting fucked up too.”[xxi]

At its core, rap music is a cultural expression of “life on the margins of postindustrial urban America.”[xxii] White mainstream’s inability, and at times unwillingness, to understand the fundamental interconnectedness of black culture and black marginalization results in an oversimplification of the culture that molds it to fit their largely privileged idealizations, undermining the significance of African-American societal marginalization and reinforcing the White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In fact, hooks herself likens White consumption of rap to colonialism: “We think of rap music as a little third world country that young White consumers are able to go to and take out of it whatever they want. We would have to acknowledge that what young White consumers, primarily male, often times suburban, most got energized by in rap music was misogyny, obscenity, [and] therefore...rap came to make the largest sum of money.”[xxiii] It is precisely this privileged oversimplification, for example, that too often finds these white suburban youth protesting their ‘right’ to say the N-word and dismissing its historical context as contemporarily mute.

This sense of ownership and ambivalence that comes with the mass consumption of black culture extends into sports as well. In his course, Sports, Media & Society (JOUR 390), Professor LaMay spoke of perceptions of black athletes as ‘superhuman’ and ‘physical behemoths’. It is no secret that black athletes have overwhelmingly dominated American sports on sheer physical prowess since racial desegregation, particularly the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA), effectively two of America’s most popular and most profitable sports leagues. In both leagues, African Americans comprise over 70% of the racial makeup. These athletes, as Professor LaMay once mentioned, are celebrated more like gods than simply talent in American society. Recent events over the past few years, however, has demonstrated that respect for black bodies in American society quickly stops at their performance and profitability as the “same body [that] is admired and commodified in the music and sports”[xxiv] continues to “invoke feelings of fear and danger”[xxv] in wider society. We see this in the viral videos of racist 911 calls, “shopping while black” marketplace discrimination, and other racially-motivated criminalizations of blacks, especially black men. In the wake of this increasingly growing racial profiling and police brutality, several black athletes used their platforms to take a stand, or in the case of black NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick – a kneel; but as we saw in Kaepernick’s case, cultural supremacy does not equate to power equality. After beginning to kneel during the national anthem in protest of institutionalized racial injustice rather than stand as is customary, Kaepernick was effectively blackballed within the league. Despite Kaepernick’s act inspiring a widely supported movement both within and outside of sports (including by white athletes), the NFL later issued a policy requiring all players to stand during the national anthem, essentially dismissing the feelings of marginalization that informs a majority of their players’ racial identity. Ultimately, while 70% of the players may be black, 93% of the NFL’s principle owners are white, once again shackling black talent within the structures of the White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

This disconnect between the mainstream’s obsession with black culture and their understanding, or rather respect, of the brutal realities of the African-American experience only deepens with cultural appropriation. In the Beyond the Culture conference I attended at Georgia State University, a recurring theme in one of the sessions – “Pop Culture and Expressions of Trauma” – was black womanhood, particularly how the increasingly publicized appropriation of such has reinforced historical feelings of inferiority about black women’s racial identity rather than serve to combat them. Black womanhood, especially in terms of beauty and physicality, has historically been devalued and rejected by mainstream culture, which instead celebrated the European aesthetic (except, of course, when exoticizing certain ethnicities).[xxvi] With black culture’s mainstream ascendancy also came a newfound acceptance of many of these once devalued features – just not on women of color: Kim Kardashian was deemed a ‘trendsetter’ for wearing historically black hairstyles, such as cornrows and Fulani braids, while black women themselves continue to face workplace discrimination for these styles; Kylie Jenner inspired a viral trend and launched a billion-dollar company for her big lips in the same year African-American actress Viola Davis was described as “less classically beautiful” by the New York Times for this very feature[xxvii]; Vogue magazine celebrated white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea in 2015 for “pioneering a big booty trend,” while black women have historically been hypersexualized for their commonly curvaceous figures[xxviii]; and acrylic nails and wigs, previously associated heavily with black women, were ghettoized and demeaned (to quote Jesse Williams), that is until celebrities such as Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and the Kardashians proudly bore them.

This marginalizing appropriation hardly stops at fashion and beauty. In 2019, singer Ariana Grande came under fire for her heavily trap-inspired yet widely successful single “7 Rings.” In his article for The Atlantic, culture writer Spencer Kornhaber effectively underlines not only the problematic nature of Grande’s single but its deeper implications:

[Her] “blaccent” and even her spray tan seemed part of an old story about white people profiting off of black aesthetics to project a sense of edge without feeling any of the associated struggle … Grande’s hair lyrics, by contrast, are about her famous ponytail and the extensions she buys to create it. That’s certainly a reference that’s authentic to her, but also one that draws a shaky connection to former drug dealers having escaped poverty and to women of color showing pride in the face of marginalization. Of course, drawing shaky connections is how all pop music works: Singers’ specific stories offer metaphors that are scalable for all sorts of lifestyles. You can be white and still feel a sense of empowerment by listening to trap. But most listeners at home don’t then project their fantastical appropriation of someone else’s struggle to the masses in a hit song about their mega wealth … [The] fact remains that a sound and an attitude that black artists used to articulate specific things about their lives in a racist society is being pushed further into the realm of catchall cliché. The average, non-black listener, after being exposed to “7 Rings,” may be less able to discern the particular meanings—and social circumstances—of the original documents. In a very real way, Grande has taken other people’s shine.[xxix]

Kornhaber also puts this in pressing economic terms, posing the question, “Are marginalized creators being materially harmed and erased?”[xxx] Interestingly enough, this was one of the central research questions posed in our research project for Internet & Society (MIT 388). While the course touched upon the various ways everyone from black artists to black activists have been able to etch out a more prominent voice within society from the digital space, we chose to address one group that has been notably excluded from this – urban black youth. The historic marginalization of urban black youth has translated into the digital space as a result of their lack of ownership over their creative productions, due once more to cultural appropriation. The most important takeaway from the conference, however, is that appropriation does not breed marginalization – representation, or rather the lack thereof, does. Representation, described at the conference as our culture’s new critical watchword, means recognizing one’s lived reality on mass culture’s largest stages – a power very hardly transmitted.

The Great Awokening

This power, however, has increasingly been reclaimed by those marginalized by its theft. As Yousman summated, “the dialectical relationship between Black resistance to systemic oppression and the continued maintenance of White privilege have resulted in a crisis within the Western world and White identity.”[xxxi] For example, singer Katy Perry, who has been criticized for years for her blatant appropriation of black culture, recently acknowledged the problematic nature of her actions as she had come to understand the importance of black women’s hair, stating, “I can educate myself.”[xxxii] She further commented on the tonal shift that has occurred in popular culture, specifically as it relates to mainstream’s engagement with minority cultures: “Don’t you feel like we’re in a race to become the most woke? Can someone tell me where the starting line and the finish line of all the wokeness is?”[xxxiii]

This marks the most recent seismic shift in black America, one that finds American race relations on two divergent yet concurrent paths. On one hand, institutionalized racism continues to wield tremendous influence over American culture and society. On the other, we see increasing mainstream acknowledgment and celebration of black pride. This highlights the most important difference between Negrophilia in 1920s France and that of contemporary America – black mainstream cultural producers are finally able to assert their identity whilst challenging the powers that be in their cultural productions to a much wider and more receptive audience. It is precisely this context that has pushed the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to the forefront of popular culture and has allowed for Beyoncé’s widely-acclaimed 2018 performance at Coachella (inspired by the traditions at historical black colleges and universities), Kendrick Lamar becoming the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize, the genre-defining success of Marvel’s 2018 film Black Panther, and the cultural juggernaut that was Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out. In the not too far past, these works might have been met with marginalization or neglect, but instead they were met with widespread critical and commercial acclaim. This new era in American popular culture has seemingly began closing what Peele initially sought out to prove in Get Out – the “gap between the aspirational post-racial discourse and the brutal realities of poverty, police profiling, anti-immigration vitriol, and mind-boggling incarceration rates for blacks and Latinos/as [was] wide.”[xxxiv]

Conclusion

Despite nearly a century and an ocean apart, William’s words offered insight not only to contemporary American popular culture but 1920s Parisian society. With the resources and tools availed to me throughout my CMAP journey, I have been able to use this parallel to interrogate mainstream’s fascination with African-American culture. Despite black culture’s hypervisibility within American popular culture, it has found itself shackled within the same “interlocking systems of domination” that has informed the historic marginalization of African Americans. Rather than increased representation, mainstream consumption of black culture has instead resulted in widespread appropriation, both minimizing the experiences of marginalization that largely informs African-American culture and proliferating the racial power imbalance that defines it. While black cultural producers are slowly reclaiming their cultural sovereignty, Negrophilia within contemporary popular culture has nonetheless been an alarming reality in American society that has reimagined one of its darkest faces – racism. Too often overlooked and too rarely interrogated, CMAP has allowed me to fill this gap within media scholarship.

Endnotes

[i] Katie Rogers, “How Jesse Williams Stole BET Awards With Speech on Racism,” New York Times, June 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/arts/television/bet-awards-jesse-williams.html.

[ii] Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, back cover.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Archer-Straw, “A double edged infatuation,” The Guardian, September 23, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/23/features.weekend.

[vii] Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia,” n.a.

[viii] Cornel West, Race Matters, 47.

[ix] Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia,” 371.

[x] ChallengingMedia, “bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation.”

[xi] hooks, Black Looks, 2.

[xii] Archer-Straw, “A double edged infatuation,” The Guardian.

[xiii] Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia,” 369.

[xiv] Archer-Straw, “A double edged infatuation,” The Guardian.

[xv] Lilleker, Key Concepts in Political Communication, 117.

[xvi] Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique, 4.

[xvii] Matthew Yglesias, “The Great Awokening,” Vox, April 1, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020.

[xviii] Njee, “Share Cropping Blackness,” 126.

[xix] Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia,” 376.

[xx] Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia,” 367.

[xxi] Jay-Z, “Niggas in Paris,” track 3 on Watch the Throne, Def Jam, 2011.

[xxii] Rose, “A Style Nobody Can Deal With,” 72.

[xxiii] ChallengingMedia, “bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation.”

[xxiv] Njee, “Share Cropping Blackness,” 126.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Awad et al., “Beauty and Body Image Concerns Among African American College Women,” n.a.

[xxvii] Derrick Clifton, “The Big Problem With Our Fascination With Kylie Jenner's Lips That Nobody Is Talking About,” Mic, April 22, 2015, https://www.mic.com/articles/116222/what-the-fascination-with-kylie-jenner-s-lips-says-about-beauty-and-race.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] Spencer Kornhaber, “How Ariana Grande Fell Off the Cultural-Appropriation Tightrope,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/ariana-grandes-7-rings-really-cultural-appropriation/580978/.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Njee, “Share Cropping Blackness,” 120.

[xxxii] Molly Fischer, “The Great Awokening: What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?” The Cut, January 8, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/pop-cultures-great-awokening.html.

[xxxiii] Ibid.

[xxxiv] Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique, 4.