Born in the race conscious 1950s, raised with the radical nature of the 1960s, educated with the opportunities in the 1970s, started my professional artistic career in the post-modernism of the 1980s, developed my mastery in the global, technological and revisionist boom of the 1990s, by the time I hit 2010 I was simultaneously irreverent, idiosyncratic, enigmatic, inclusive, self-estranged, integrating, Theosophist, Buddhist, accommodating, tri-cultural, bourgeoisie, scholarly, phat sassy and slice you in a heart-beat vernacular. I am the New Black, and there are a lot of us.
We flit through the various aspects of our heritage as we code-switch leaving those not in “the club” baffled, faces furled in confusion. I can hear them thinking, “She sounded so white just a minute ago!”
I now bask in my enigmatic and unfathomable nature but I did not come to my mystery easily.
(This is an excerpt from a future blog on African-American Aesthetics. This mini-blog is in response the the Writer’s challenge–Worlds Colliding The Daily Post. I will post the fuller blog, Creative Synthesis, in the coming weeks.)
What Makes That Black? 