Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice

Time​ Magazine

01-05-2025

Larcenia Floyd died in 2018, two years before George. But when her son was being asphyxiated to death by Derek Chauvin, he screamed for her. It was the 'Mama!' heard around the world, an anguished incantation that called millions into the streets to protest.
That wail of loss—the sound of a ripped-apart parent and child—to the cold hands of premature death has been a commonplace of Black American life throughout history. Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described it this way: 'Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.' Poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks put the same thought in these terms: 'we jazz June/we die soon,' she wrote in her seminal poem 'We Real Cool.'
In 2010, fine artist Titus Kaphar completed the painting Father and Son. It depicts scholar W.E.B. DuBois—arguably the greatest thinker of the 20th century—with a cutout where his son might have been, lying across his lap. Kaphar's piece is a contemporary pieta, one not based in the story of Mary cradling the body of Jesus after his descent from the cross, but instead, one from Black history. In DuBois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, he included the autobiographical essay 'Of the Passing of the First Born' about the death of his toddler son Burghardt, a death that might have been avoided had the diphtheria vaccine been made available to Black people in Atlanta where DuBois was working as a professor at Atlanta University. DuBois carried that grief with him as he wrote essays, fiction, and pageants, as he edited The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, as he rose and fell as a leader when the nation and many of his peers grew to consider him too strident, too far left, too unflinching. Kaphar's stirring portrait was completed 107 years after Souls and 47 years after DuBois' death. It followed, but it also foretold. Father and Son preceded what we think of as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter era by three years, which we tend to date to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in 2013. Kaphar continued to paint portraits of parents without children in the second decade of this century as we saw the parade of sonless mothers who came to be known as 'Mothers of the Movement,' a chilling redux of images of the 1960s.
These repetitions reveal a harrowing truth. Such a portrait is timeless as long as racial inequality far too frequently sinks life and chances of life in this country. And despite the shrill denials heard in anti-DEI and anti-'woke' platforms, the evidence is clear: Racial inequality is as it ever was in the United States.
Art is a particularly powerful tool in this moment because it can offer more than just points for debate. Art can engage not just the intellect, but the soul, hence the aptly titled DuBois classic. It resonates with our greatest hopes and deepest frustrations. Above all, it buoys the spirit, enabling us to continue to press for a better future, but also to imagine what that future might be by refusing the idea that our bodies are fated for abuse and destruction.
I have often attested to the beauty of raising Black children because I believe we deserve to feel something more than the fear of raising children in a dangerous and unequal world. I want to affirm that joy keeps us going when terror feels overwhelming using my art—writing—and my intellect as the vehicle for truth.
But, having lived through the mass death of COVID-19 and now living in the age of backlash against everything that made my life possible as a Black woman professor, it is undeniable that notwithstanding the multimillion-strong season of protest in honor of George Floyd's life, we aren't on more solid ground. In fact, we have been pushed off land and find ourselves treading water. Ours is a living inside a cascade of crises that have compounded over the past 15, 10, five years, despite the moments of respite and promises of transformation. We have marched and sung. We have voted, protested, and pleaded. And yet, suffering persists, the water deepens. It makes you wanna holler a 'mama' of your own. (And perhaps you heard the echo of Marvin Gaye's 1971 track 'Inner City Blues.')
It is no wonder, then, that in African American culture, art has flourished in the worst of times. In 1900, for instance, three years before DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, civil rights leader and poet James Weldon Johnson and musician J. Rosamund Johnson composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'—the song we now know as the Black National Anthem. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, 500 Black schoolchildren in Florida first sang it to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The song became incredibly popular with Black Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. It resonated because it told the story of Black Americans' struggle in epic terms, detailing endurance and fostering hope and collective responsibility. In 1926, when Carter G. Woodson formally declared 'Negro History Week' in February (a ritual that would grow to become Black History Month in the 1970s), the song became an integral part of that annual ritual celebrated in school, religious, and civic life. The effect of singing that anthem together deepened the faith of students and their communities in the possibility of justice and strengthened the conviction that each one had a hand in transformation. A noble inheritance demanded as much.
1926 was also the year in which DuBois published the article 'Criteria of Negro Art' in which he famously said 'all Art is propaganda' speaking directly to Black American artists. The message was that artists had a hand in the struggle for human and civil rights, and therefore, should put their gifts in service to that duty. Though I would not be as heavy-handed as DuBois—I don't believe all art must be propaganda—it is certainly clear to me that art (visual art, music, literature, and dance) is essential for freedom dreaming. This is no less true in 2025 than it was in 2020, 1926, or 1903.
Still, like many I suspect, I wonder if my words work—if my art matters in these moments of struggle. I need only look to others to be reminded.
Mario Moore's painting Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd hangs on my wall. In it, a Black woman in a purple embroidered robe faces the water. The title is powerful. Mary Ann Shadd was an abolitionist, a suffrage activist, the first Black woman publisher in North America and the second Black American woman to graduate from law school. Henry Bibb was born into slavery, escaped, and made his way to freedom through Detroit (Moore's hometown) to reach Canada. After emancipation, he would write an important abolitionist narrative. The woman in Moore's painting gazes at the Detroit River. In the antebellum era, crossing that watery border was a near-certain passage to freedom. The painting is for me, and I think for many who see it when it circulates in museums or on computer screens, a reminder of the once treacherous and even deadly pathways to freedom. Even more, it begs us to seek inspiration from those who traveled them as we face treachery today.
I learned this implicitly in my own life course, too. I frequently say that as a writer I haunt the past. By that I mean I gaze into it to find the content through which we might craft our moral imaginations today. So many of the neglected and abused of generations past have a great deal to teach us. And if we can recognize the full ugliness in our past, we might be better at creating beauty in its stead for the future.
It wasn't only in my studies that I learned this, but also in my encounters with art. Like so much of Generation X, I grew up on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life double album. His song 'Love's in Need of Love Today' was a particularly potent teacher. It gave credence to the ever-present terror that existed in a world filled to the brim with disasters. And yet, it also issued a belief that a disposition toward love—a discipline of hope, to borrow words from abolitionist Mariame Kaba—makes the difference.
Recently, I have spent a lot of time listening to Milton + Esperanza, an album pairing octogenarian Brazilian jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist Milton Nascimiento and American bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding. Nascimiento has influenced generations of musicians across the globe. spalding is a contemporary phenom. Watching their NPR Tiny Desk Concert, I was as moved by the lush, exhilarating music as I was by their obvious deep friendship and love across generations. From Nascimiento to spalding there is inheritance, from spalding to Nascimiento there is homage. They are, like me, both descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and generations turned from centuries of racial violence and injustice. And through the current hysteria-inducing political chaos that engulfs us, I reach for the space they create, one where love and care are apparent. It is a salve and also a reminder of who we are and what we come from.
It is hard to avoid cynicism, especially now. Especially with so much behind us and possibly even more before us. To bolster ourselves, many of us who do creative and intellectual work have been holding fast to a quote from Toni Morrison. It seems to be in constant circulation on social media platforms: '…This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!'
What too often is left out in the meme-ing, however, is that Morrison attributed those words to a friend of hers. This friend was responding to Morrison's depression about national politics in 2004. That friend's words reminded Morrison of the dangerous conditions in which so much great art has been made. Morrison concluded the essay she wrote for the Nation that described this interaction by saying, 'I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.' Indeed, she kept creating until her final days, like DuBois, through war and injustice and even after the passing of her second-born son, Slade.
Morrison's remarkable courage is a reminder that the value of art in these times is much greater than how it might inspire people to action alone. It exists in art's power to allow us to find meaning notwithstanding mourning, to imagine our way out of the morass of our present moment or personal challenges, and to keep us living rather than frozen in fear and anguish. Take, for example, the Blues—that foundational American music born on plantations and in penitentiaries—and how it insisted upon the full humanity of Black people in the harshest of conditions. Indeed, the Blues tradition might explain why George Floyd himself turned to one of Blues' musical descendants, hip-hop, when he was trying to turn his life around, an effort that ultimately brought him to Minneapolis, where he was killed.
Art does not forestall injustice. It does not shape policy or create law. It is not the same work as political organizing or protest. But it is indispensable. One need only to look at the joy of line dancing on social media and the majesty of Mardi Gras krewes in New Orleans for current examples. Each season we find new iterations of old habits, ones that refresh culture but also keep tradition alive. That combination allows us to more deeply contemplate our condition— to meditate on that which would be right and good. Most of all, it helps us find and nourish love. Love is indeed in need of love today. For our children. For all of us.
Over 20 years ago, when I first embarked on parenthood, I thought of all the music, all the dancing, all the literature, all the museum exhibitions, all of the folk wisdom, the seeds of folklore, and the creative language that I had to offer my children from my tradition. My heart was full with gifts. Despite the inevitability of racism, they were born to an abundant inheritance that I insisted upon affirming at every turn. That is what I was given, that is what I gave, that is what we must continue to give, even as our hearts are broken. Again.
There are and will be more empty-armed parents and children. In my own family, we've embraced the empty-armed and felt empty-armed in the past two years with the deaths of two of my cousins who are survived by parents and children. I believe that, albeit indirectly, losing them, both men under age 60, is a legacy of the persistent seeping force of racial injustice, snaking like smoke through our lives.
The question is not whether we will grieve (we are, mightily) but whether we will find the means to survive the grief and live to fight the injustice. Art is a way.