Dark Times: What The Fight For Weeksville And Reparations Says About Blackness In America

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates, left, and Actor Danny Glover, right, testify about reparation for the descendants of slaves during a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, at the Capitol in Washington.

Recently I went to see a new exhibit by the major black artist Lorna Simpson, whose work I have long followed and loved. “Darkening,” currently on view at the Chelsea gallery Hauser & Wirth, features an array of large-scale paintings cast in blues and blacks. “Dark times, to me, mean dark paintings,” she recently told the New York Times about the pieces in the show.

While she spoke of grief and personal loss, she said the paintings were also inspired by the current state of affairs. “It feels very much like living in the moment of fascism in the United States, that spreads and gives permission all over the world,” she explained. “That permission it’s giving is very scary. In our safety, on an individual level, I feel it.”

One work called "Source Notes" is an image made with ink and screenprint, gessoed on fiberglass. In it, a black woman, a photograph that may have been taken from Ebony magazine (one of Simpsons favorite sources), wears a dotted capelet with a dark collar. She is grounded in a cinematic canvas of dark blue, her face turned to us over her left shoulder, and her dark lashes curled up over knowing eyes — ones that have seen all too many things, including any kind of violence or disparity or cruelty that the world might try to pull. It’s as if she’s saying, “You can’t touch me now, because I have chosen to preserve my blackness, myself.”

That image of black resilience has stuck with me because at every turn we see how the preservation of blackness in America remains an uphill battle. Earlier this month, Weeksville Heritage Center became the first black city-funded institution in Brooklyn, and the first new member to be added to the city’s Cultural Institutions Group in 20 years. Weeksville, which is also the oldest African American settlement in Brooklyn, was facing closure in July if it didn’t raise $200,000 through a CrowdRise donations campaign. That Weeksville was initially relegated to an online social fundraising platform in order to preserve such an essential part of black history is not even a lightly veiled statement on how little black history matters to New York, purportedly one of the most progressive cities in the nation. But the campaign surpassed its goal, mostly because of donations both large and small made by black folks — full disclosure, I donated — some of whom, like New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, offered matching funds.

But why did it take so long? Why did an institution of such historical importance have to come to the brink of bankruptcy in order to win city funding and recognition? Along those lines, on Juneteenth, a House Judiciary subcommittee convened to debate the H.R. 40 bill, which would consider how the federal government might implement reparations to black Americans for the institution of slavery. Among the witnesses who testified was the writer Ta-Nehesi Coates, who authored the seminal 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” At the hearings, Coates said that the matter of reparations is about citizenship.

“A nation is both its credits and its debts," he said. "If Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings."

Hemings was, of course, Jefferson’s slave, who also bore several of his children. Indeed, if a white man matters, then so does a black woman. This should not be a novel concept, and yet, it is.

It’s all of a piece. Simpson’s bold paintings, the salvation of an historical black cultural institution, the argument for reparations — all of these subjects essentially come down to that under-girding of tenacity and resilience that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about in his classic book, "The Souls of Black Folk," which introduced the concept of "double-consciousness" and what he thought of as the eternal black struggle — "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

But as Simpson, Weeksville’s supporters, and Coates demonstrate, over a century after Du Bois wrote that passage, we are no longer warring over two ideals. We are now simply that one dark body whose dogged strength has kept us from being destroyed.

Erasure can come in subtle forms. This past Christmas, I sent my white adoptive mother a book of collages by Simpson. My mother is herself an artist who, like Simpson, works with collage, as well as other mediums using watercolor and oils. While she lives year-round in rural New Hampshire, she makes frequent trips to see me and my family in New York City, which always includes one or more visits to a museum or gallery. She is also wildly well-read, having had subscriptions to the New York Times, New Yorker and Vogue for decades.

“How nice,” she said to me on the phone after she received the book. “I’d never heard of Lorna Simpson.”

It didn’t surprise me. Despite having adopted a black daughter, my mother has never understood the intricacies that come with raising one. Still, her ignorance about a renowned artist who has had a retrospective exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art, but maybe more importantly, who is so beloved to me, her daughter, felt like a dagger to my black self. But it’s a self that only exists, I’ve come to understand, because of my own will to preserve it. That is what we black folks do, because no one else will.

Rebecca Carroll is a cultural critic and Editor of Special Projects at WNYC, where she develops, produces and hosts a broad array of multi-platform content, including podcasts, live events and on-air broadcasts. Rebecca is also the author of several interview-based books about race and blackness in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw, and her personal essays, cultural commentary and opinion pieces have been published widely. Her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, is due out from Simon & Schuster in 2020.