Race

Elizabeth Alexander’s work reflects the influence of the Black Arts Movement on Black creative expression since the 1960s. The Black Arts Movement has its roots in the Harlem Renaissance, when writers such as Langston Hughes engaged in critical and creative works that celebrated Black culture. The political and cultural context of that sharing was one in which the arts were a potential source of racial inclusion and racial harmony for diverse audiences.

Proponents of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s shifted those contexts by creating art directed at Black audiences. Whether white readers/observers of Black art liked Black art or treated Black people better because of their experiences with Black art was beside the point: Black art was for Black people. Art could be a source of liberation, resistance, connection to African ancestry, or even healing for a racial community and families scarred by centuries of racism. Works of the Black Arts Movement showed the influence of Black and African storytelling traditions, celebrated important Black historical figures and events, and centered art as a practice that could create the political conditions needed to throw off white oppression and internalized racism.

Black women writers and others shaped by that movement critiqued it because it sometimes represented Black identity as a monolith by ignoring intracommunity differences such as gender; others pointed out that devaluing Black art without explicit political messages impoverished Black artistic expression. “Race” is in conversation with that critical work. Alexander includes themes and details one would expect to find in a work informed by the Black Arts Movement. Her poem is about a Black “ancestor”(Line 14), one who engages in potentially “heroic moments” (Line 14) on “behalf of the race” (Line 15). The poem features a family story, one likely passed down orally among those “[m]any have told” (Line 12). Paul’s choice to return home initially restores a Black family to wholeness when Paul becomes once again a “brother” (Line 13).

The last stanza of this poem includes an implicit critique of the Black Arts. Rather than reinforce a settled notion of race and Black identity, Alexander represents race as a “strange thing” (Line 26) that sometimes defies commonsense representations. Paul’s story of passing so he can occupy a role prohibited to Black people sits uneasily beside stories of resistant Black ancestors such as Harriet Tubman, but it is indeed part of Black history, albeit one that is frequently “not told” (Line 21). In addition, the Black family in the poem is one that fractures in the contest over its racial identity. Alexander uses her art to represent Black identity, but her work unsettles assumptions about race.