Black History Testifies to the Impossible Creative Power of Black Resistance

There is a powerful traditional saying within Black cultural spaces, one that speaks of “making a way out of no way.” This saying captures the resilience, agency and creativity that Black people have embodied within the context of mightily resisting the pervasive and systemic anti-Blackness in the United States. The saying conveys how Black people have developed the approaches necessary to create space for impossible passage through impassable barriers, despite the obstacles designed to keep us “in our place.”

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin reminds us that Black history “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.” And Cornel West builds on this idea when he points out that Black people have been terrorized, traumatized and brutalized for 400 years and yet are still able to create so much beauty. Even as our Black bodies didn’t belong to us legally, we danced; even though our family relationships were violated, we found togetherness; even though our voices were repressed, we sang; even though we were deemed intellectually “inferior,” we articulated prose and poetry that was nothing less than sheer genius. Collectively, we are a protean people who refuse to be silenced, oppressed and dictated to by the machinations of white supremacy, which includes its current iteration in the narcissistic, neofascist tendencies of Donald Trump.

After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, a Black philosophy graduate student sent me a text asking what they should do. They felt the dystopic moment. I immediately communicated the history of Black suffering under the maliciousness of white power in the United Sates. My point was clear: “Don’t be surprised. We’ve been here before!” We’ve seen this before in the White Citizens’ Councils, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Eugene “Bull” Connor — you name it. I then very quickly reminded the student of the indefatigable spirit of Ida B. Wells-Barnett who, in the face of racist threats, fought against the gratuitously violent spectacle of white mobs lynching Black people. My point was to emphasize that we are a people who refuse to accept white tyranny, that we are prepared to resist in the name of freedom, and that we are a proud and audacious people who will continue to make a way out of no way.

Our capacity to be otherwise than what whiteness dictates is what drew me to interview Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. Griffin’s most recent book is entitled, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. Griffin beautifully speaks to the power of Black yearning, showing how Black people continue to transcend to greater heights of creative expression, despite the obstacles that have been used to deny Black humanity. Griffin’s scholarship communicates with such clarity how Black people embody a profound and indomitable spirit of self-determination, self-worth and self-inventiveness in various forms (aesthetic, somatic, literary) amid pernicious and ongoing threats to our very being.

Black History Month continues to be an important moment to shine a spotlight on the achievements of Black people. That spotlight should teach the world, as Griffin argues, about what it means for a people to continue to fight for “perpetual achievement of the impossible.” That is an indispensable Black History Month message to the United States and to the world.

George Yancy: In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, you state, “Following the path opened by [Toni] Morrison, many contemporary Black writers posit death as the central marker, the major experience of Blackness.” This is an important place to begin when theorizing Black existence. Black people in the U.S. understand death and dying as constitutive of what it means to live precariously within a country founded upon anti-Blackness. However, you also discuss in your book In Search of a Beautiful Freedom how as a child you discovered Billie Holiday. You write about how her voice communicated a certain longing and yearning that you couldn’t find the words to express. You write, “To long for something you will never have, to aspire for a destination you will never reach—that is what I heard in Billie Holiday’s voice.” Black death and Black yearning are two important existential motifs that constitute Black life. Say more about the power of Black yearning. What is it that sustains Black yearning under conditions of continued Black oppression?

Farah Jasmine Griffin: What a fascinating question. The two are related, I think. They both speak to the prevalence of Black death in our tradition of writing, our death at the hands of racist violence, our foreshortened life chances, the lack of possibility and the power of Black yearning, which constitute our persistent ability to imagine freedom, and to project ourselves into an imagined future where such freedom might exist. It involves our capacity to imagine that place other than the one we presently occupy and to keep reaching for it. It’s a yearning that fuels our constant creativity and innovation whether it be in music, dance, language or style. What is, is never enough. How do we make it better, make it not just more bearable, but more desirable, more beautiful, worth getting through another day — worth reaching for and creating something viable for those who will follow? It’s in the longing for a home that we never knew, and the yearning for a future where we are safe from violence and want. It’s as if we know the process of transformation is in the very act of longing itself.

What I find fascinating is that Black people in fact create under haunting conditions of social death. Despite the reality of social death, Black people experience embodied joy and deep ecstasy. In Read Until You Understand, you quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, where he writes, “We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.” Baldwin, of course, isn’t describing “Black stereotypes,” but Black social life. When I think of Black music, I think of the active sense of Black musicking, Black joy expressed at those cultural sites called juke or jook joints, the power of Black bodies in motion and modes of Black agency. In her powerful text, To ’Joy Our Freedom, historian Tera W. Hunter writes, “In slavery, blacks were denied ownership of their bodies.” Talk about how Black resistance, claiming of Black embodiment, is embedded within Black musicking.

James Baldwin reminds us that Black history “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”

What a powerful Baldwin quotation! He also says, “We sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.” Within the limits, within the conditions of oppression we find each other, and we have “no need to pretend to be what we are not,” and we find a freedom close to love. I love that Baldwin quote. It encapsulates so much of what has driven my work. I am always seeking those moments, identifying, explicating and trying to theorize them. They are often found in moments of Black sociality. That love and joy is deeply embodied. Music is central to those moments and so is love and laughter. So much of how we experience music is in our bodies. It isn’t only cerebral, though it is that as well. It is in the tap of our feet, the sway of our hips, the nod of our heads, a feeling deep in our hearts, the very beat of our hearts; it’s an embodied knowledge carried at the cellular level. It is a sonic and movement vocabulary that informs gesture and speech. I was watching a clip of a young Aretha Franklin singing on a television show and Darlene Love was one of her backup singers. They were singing a pop tune, “It’s in His Kiss.” One of those girl group pop tunes that Aretha transformed into something soulful and transcendent. The person who posted the clip, the writer Brandon Ousley, pointed out a moment when Darlene, in the middle of background singing and choreography is so blown away by what Aretha does vocally that her body does a small back bend without losing a beat and she turns and smiles in Aretha’s direction before waving her hand like one might do in church — all in time. A soulful, sisterly gesture of love, appreciation and recognition in the midst of a broader performance. It is a moment of embodied musicking with and against the grain of mainstream American popular music, which is what Aretha and her generation of soul artists did. They brought the body in, refused to separate it from the brilliance, the genius.

Farah, it is not lost on me that the root meaning of the name Aretha comes from the Greek word, Arete, which means excellence. It is Aretha’s genius that generates creative excellence and that produces that which is both soulful and transcendent. Part of the historical process of anti-Black racism was not only to deny Black people the capacity for creativity, but to legally and politically repress their desire for intellectual flourishing. In fact, in North Carolina (in 1831), there was a slave code that read: “Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to . . . produce insurrection and rebellion . . . any free person who shall hereafter teach or attempt to teach any slave within this state to read or write . . . shall be liable to indictment.” As you know, for Frederick Douglass, reading and writing were forms of freedom, self-worth and yet anguish. Speak to the importance of encouraging robust reading and writing among young Black people in the U.S. As I ask this question, I am aware of the cowardly and despicable anti-democratic reality that right-wing conservatives are banning books, which is an attack on critical thinking and knowledge production, and which speaks to a form of toxic anti-intellectualism.

Right-wing conservatives are banning books at the same time that American children across the board have lost ground in reading ability. The children of elites will be fine, but non-elite children of all races will continue to suffer. We are increasingly an illiterate society, which is why we are increasingly an anti-democratic one. For generations, Black people knew that literacy was an integral part of our quest for freedom. And while African Americans insisted that schools teach children to read, they did not solely rely on these institutions. I think that in the current moment one of the greatest things we can do is to instill a love of reading in our young people. Reading expands their sense of the world, their sense of what is possible and their sense of themselves and the universe to which they belong. Reading stretches them back into a rich past and forward into a dynamic future that they can help to build. Reading fuels their imaginations and their critical thinking abilities. For young people, we can ask them, “You love Kendrick?” Now suppose we also encouraged them to read everything that Kendrick read for a particular album?

Reading together also helps to create intergenerational, loving bonds of community. We need to create reading communities. We are in a very dangerous period. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jamelle Bouie have brilliantly pointed out, the current administration is hell-bent on destroying the entire civil rights infrastructure of the last 60 years. It is what Bouie calls the “segregationist intent” of the administration’s policy. Banning books is only the start. We will have to address this on multiple fronts. But as our forebears knew, literacy will be central. That’s why they created Sabbath Schools and Freedom Schools for children and for adults. Over the past 50 years, Black people have produced an extraordinary body of literary and scholarly work. It’s time to create or utilize existing spaces for sharing and teaching that material. There is also an important move to translate some of that work into beautiful, lovely children’s books. I’d like to see more of this. Books for Black children have always been part of our tradition. Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and other literary greats wrote for children. However, the genre of children’s books also produced wonderful writers who wrote only for young readers, like Muriel Feelings, Virginia Hamilton, and others. Recall that it was W. E. B. Du Bois who edited the monthly children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book and later, in 1973, the Johnson Publishing Company produced, Ebony, Jr! (Recently Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer published the exquisite New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families.) The point here is to say that as a community we historically centered our children’s literacy and took it on as a community responsibility to teach them to learn and love to read. It’s time to do so again. We can utilize new technologies to assist us in introducing children to reading and to lead them into long-form works beyond the quick satisfaction of scrolling on a screen.

You have mentioned that your father would write notes in books he gave you. In one of those books, he wrote, “Baby, read it until you understand.” Being only in the third grade, what did you make of that powerful message? It is diametrically opposed to anti-intellectualism.

I adored my father, and reading was one of the things we did together. We went to bookstores and libraries, and for me that was daddy/daughter time. It could have been anything — fishing, sports, cars, whatever… I just enjoyed the time with him. So, I would read and then he’d ask me about what I read, what I remembered and what I thought. It wasn’t like a test, it was like a game, playful and fun. It was also the way I learned to listen to and love Black music. He taught me the alphabet, he taught me to read, he taught me scales, he taught me to read music. He bought me small instruments and he bought me books. Time spent with my father was precious time spent learning about our people and their genius and it was an adventure. But then shortly after writing that note, my father died, so the note took on a sense of urgency and became a lifelong project. I’m not sure that would have been the case had he not passed away at that time. In fact, had he lived, I might have rebelled at some point. But in his absence, it became a way of keeping him close. It kind of takes us back to where we started this interview. It became a way of trying to fulfill my yearning for him. My intellectual pursuit was an effort to fulfill a yearning for something I would never achieve — connection with my father. But my, what a rich life I received along the way. Yes, one that is diametrically opposed to anti-intellectualism. And one that is committed to seeking justice as well.

It is Black History Month. Please share a few book titles by Black authors that you think are necessary to read during this time and why those titles?

Toni Morrison’s Paradise because it is a challenging take on the attempt to create a Black utopia.

Edwidge Danticat’s most recent collection of essays, We’re Alone, which is a series of meditations on history, politics, immigration and environmental/climate disaster.

Joshua Myers’s Of Black Study, which is a brilliant take on the thought of five Black intellectuals and their critique of Western knowledge. It is a compelling work for anyone wanting a deeper engagement with Black thought.

Since we spoke about Black children’s books, two of my favorites:

• indigo dreaming, by Dinah Johnson is a gorgeous book about a young girl on the coast of South Carolina dreaming about a possible relative, also a girl, on the shore of West Africa. It encourages a wide-ranging diasporic imagination in young readers.
• Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. This book will inspire dreams, storytelling, vocabulary and new art. It is joyful.