How do we use our gifts of creativity to communicate the call for justice? This question is becoming more relevant and brought to the forefront of many conversations giving the state of unrest in these United States of America. Lamentably, many who either do not want to face the truth of the biases and inequalities facing black and brown people or who want to continue to perpetrate and support the violent treatment of minorities, would “turn their tvs off” to escape accountability.
However in the short span of seven days in Black History Month, the conversation became louder. With the choreographed symbolic message through visuals, beats, dancing, staging, clothing, and lyrics, the artistic yet revolutionary protest of American rapper Kendrick Lamar rode the tempest.
Lamar’s call for justice, clothed in art came like a tsunami into the living rooms of millions of Americans. It began when 15.4 million viewers of the 67th Grammy awards saw him win five Grammy’s on the vote of more than 13,000 Academy members for “Not Like Us.”
This song’s power was in its protest with these lyrics:
They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
Once upon a time, all of us was in chains
Homie still doubled down calling us some slaves
Atlanta was the Mecca, building railroads and trains
Bear with me for a second, let me put y’all on game
The settlers was using town folk to make ’em richer
Fast-forward, 2024, you got the same agenda
During Super Bowl 59’s halftime show, called out the “game of the experiment of America” and his messge flooded into the midst of 133.5 million viewers who, regardless of their reaction and reception, didn’t “turn the TV off.”
African-American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin penned this about an artist.
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”
Pseudologia Fantastica
Black History is not surprisingly missing in the classroom because these books, written in protest by revolutionary artists were burned, packed away and banned so that the bloody violence of the American story is not told. After all, America could never be “great” back then if the light of the truth of its “greatness” showed the potency of its weakness in the violence and wickedness to Native Americans and Blacks. Hugh Trevor-Roper, History Professor penned;
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”
The pages which were left in the history books and taught were pseudologues. The lies, that those of African descent do not have the honor and value in their DNA, or are illiterate, or that the diverse and creative languages are not civilized.
“Les dialectes Africains ne sont pas des langues de civilisation.” (“African dialects are not civilization languages.”) –Alain Davesne.
Hence, it is imperative that all people, including blacks, urban, the youth, the spiritual, and the Christian understand, respect and leave spaces for artists. Art holds a holds a key to understanding our history, present status, and our future.
Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Historians
Baldwin’s quote is a reminder that God has given many an anointing for creativity. We are “emotional or spiritual historians,” communicating both revolution and freedom. God’s gift of art is to be used to communicate, preserve, record, and evolve with knowledge and technology.
We see artistry first demonstrated before humanity in the Creation story in Genesis 1 and 2. We also witness adaptation, in the covering of Adam and Eve with animal skin imagery. God taught us in that moment that we do not need words to understand how He saves us.
The Real Concern of the Artist
Transformative art to create order in disorder in the concern of the artist. Exemplified in the blood over the door posts in the Exodus Story, to Harriet Tubman’s guidance through the Underground Railroad, mimicking the call of the barred owl, sermons, dances, to the Creole language in the islands, the Gullah language spoken in North Carolina to Jacksonville, the Sea Islands of the United States, the Kromanti language in Jamaica, to the beat of drums, to music and Negro Spirituals, to maps in hairstyles, to
Poems like
● W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Song of the Smoke”
● Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”
Songs of freedom and protest like
● McKinley Dixon’s “Run, Run, Run”
● The Stop the Violence Movement’s “Self-Destruction”
Gospel songs like
● Alice McClarty and the Traveling Echoes’ “We Shall Overcome”
● The Ward Singers “The Little Light of Mine”
Visual art like
● Edinah
● Tahj “Queen Tahj” Williams (Black Masking Indian and 2025 Super Bowl LIX logo and theme art creator).
Today, taking the baton is the new beginning in the history of evolving communicative artistry. We have a God-given mandate to tell the unadulterated truth through our artistic gifts.
We must appreciate the art depicting our heritage, peaceful days, violent days, resistance days, days of loss, days of victory, days of tears, days of joy. I pray as a people we etch the following words into our hearts knowing that our voices through our artistry matter.
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” James Baldwin
