Black men live and dream. Have emotions, feelings, hopes and fears. At a time when black men, especially younger ones are being vilified, de-humanized, incarcerated in massive numbers, and yes-shot dead in the streets, with an outcry and nationwide demonstrations as a result and reaction, I hope people will share the following film by a young black artist.
#Blackmendream from Shikeith on Vimeo.
About Shikeith (SHī/KEETH )
Shikeith born Jan. 3, 1989 makes photos, media art and films. He lives, and works in Philadelphia, PA. His first solo exhibition ‘Ode to Black’ was held at the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at The Pennsylvania State University, where he studied art and received several awards including The Leslie P. Greenhill scholarship for Photography. He has also shown his work at Crane Art’s Ice Box in Philadelphia, PA. In 2014, Shikeith received a Heinz Endowment grant , through the Pittsburgh Advancing Black Arts initiative.
Photo of Shikeith, “Working in Pittsburgh, on my solo exhibition “Somewhere Over The __” –October 2014 , at Bunker Projects
Sheikeith describes the project and the questions asked of the men whose faces you will not see.
This work expresses my, and our apprehension to be. #Blackmendream (2014) is a social practice art film that utilizes social media to provide contemporary black men an outlet for open emotional expression often denied through racial, and black masculinity taboos.To contribute viewers are encouraged to respond to the set of questions below that investigate the individual black male experience with emotionality.
Watch the film here.
1.When did you become a black man? When did you become a man?
2.How would you describe your interaction with other black males in your youth? Adulthood?
3.What makes you angry? sad? happy?
4.Have you ever dealt with emotional stress directly related to being a black man?
5.Have you ever been depressed? What caused it?
6.Were you able to express your depression to the people around you? If yes, how did they respond–if no, what stopped you?
7.What has stopped you from expressing yourself emotionally?
8.How were you raised to deal with your emotions?
9.How do you feel you’re perceived by other black men?
10.Do you cry? When was the last time you cried and why?
11.What has your mother/father told you about expressing your emotions,and when?
12. What’s the hardest thing about being a male? a black male?
13. Whats a repetitive happy dream/day dream you can remember?
15. What’s a repetitive nightmare you can remember?
The film opens with a black screen and we hear the voice and words of James Baldwin being interviewed by conservative white reporter R.H.Darden, in Los Angeles (Pacifica Archives, KPFK, 1968) after his piece, James Baldwin on Stokely: From Dreams of Love to Dreams of Terror, was published in the Los Angeles Free Press. In this powerful piece-not often cited, Baldwin had written:
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of the black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s sleep. So it was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokely — as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing — coined the phrase, Black Power. He didn’t coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it’s been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank. I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with Black Power.
Those representatives of White Power who are not too hopelessly brain-washed or eviscerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to be obsessed with the problem of how to control his destiny and protect his house, his women and his children, is for that black man to become in his own mind the something less than a man which this Republic, alas, has always considered him to be. And when a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given him by others, he is talking revolution. In point of sober fact, he cannot possibly be talking anything else, and nothing is more revelatory of the American hypocrisy than their swift perception of this fact. The “white backlash” is meaningless 20th-century jargon designed at once to hide and to justify the fact that most white Americans are still unable to believe that the black man is a man — in the same way that we speak of a “credibility gap” because we are too cowardly to face the fact that our leaders have been lying to us for years. Perhaps we suspect that we deserve the contempt with which we allow ourselves to be treated.
The government would like to be able to indict Stokely, and many others like him, of incitement to riot; but I accuse the government of this crime. It is, briefly, an insult to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of any black person, to ask me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is unable to do anything to make the lives of its black citizens less appalling.
Darden, of course, had a strong, negative response to Baldwin’s vision of what it means to be black, and a black man in America.
We hear him ask Baldwin “in a nutshell..what is happening?
Baldwin responds “Rage is happening, that’s what’s happening, it’s been happening for a very long time…Ralph Ellison told you a long time ago, long before I did, what it is like to be an invisible man…”
You can see more of Shikeith’s work on his instagram page.
Cross posted from Black Kos
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