At the same time, Black creators are being financially remunerated for the loss of Floyd’s life via the granting of opportunities to work within popular culture’s most prominent and lucrative spaces. If stripped bare, at base, we are hoping that imbibing pop cultural content like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will improve America’s regard for the humanity of George Floyd, instilling in the audience a compassion capable of deterring racial violence in the future.
Rather, engagement is motivated by the belief that popular culture can connect white Americans to Black ones-and to the Black poor in particular-while, simultaneously, providing an arena for redressing the violence that white Americans have done to the Black poor. This pop cultural experience is optional, and, in my experience, white folks usually do not pursue it to satisfy a broad and general curiosity about Black people. This demographic constraint makes popular culture the primary medium through which white Americans engage with Black ones. For every white American to have even one Black friend, every single Black American, including newborns, would need to have six white friends.
Of all the industries in desperate need of change, why has popular culture been prioritized? There is at least one generally statable reason, and it has to do with the fact that despite a falling share of the population, white Americans still outnumber Black Americans six-to-one. Today, popular culture is the terrain most visibly altered by the pursuit of social justice: in the decade since Trayvon Martin was killed, movies have changed in positive ways for all people of color, much more so than public education, zoning, or the prison-industrial complex.
Into the Spiderverse, Black Panther, Soul, and the overall push by Disney to place Black characters in Star Wars and the MCU can be traced to 2014. At that time, HBO, BAFTA, and other institutions of popular culture enacted diversity guidelines and launched in-house programs for creators of color. The same paroxysm and transactional response also happened seven years ago, in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder.
As a result, a series of excellent Black films received better promotion than they might have otherwise, such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, and Judas and the Black Messiah. The streaming services-Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and the like-assembled watchlists of Black movies and television. In the months following George Floyd’s murder, magazines and journals put forth dozens of “Black editions” and special issues to promote the work of their Black contributors. So that means you got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities so that it’s all about ‘representation’ rather than substantive transformation… ‘you gotta black president, all y’all must be free.’” – Cornel West interviewed by Joe Rogan, July 24, 2019 I was just a ragged, funky black shoeshine boy and was afraid of the people on the Hill, who, for their part, didn’t want to have anything to do with me.” – James Baldwin interviewed by Julius Lester, the New York Times Book Review, “You got 1 percent of the population in America who owns 41 percent of the wealth… but within the black community, the top 1 percent of black folk have over 70 percent of the wealth. There was a great divide between the black people on the Hill and us. There were those who lived in Sugar Hill and there was the Hollow, where we lived.