“This Is the Black Renaissance,” the headline above Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s byline for Time magazine proclaims, at once a manifesto and mantra encapsulating what he (and others) recognize as “the third great cultural revival of Black Americans.” Like the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement before it, Black creativity is undeniably thriving, asking no permission to exist, nor validation from the white gaze that would prefer us to remain “other.” In this moment, and in spite of everything—or more likely, because of it—Kendi, a 2020 The Root 100 honoree, maintains that we are once again centering ourselves.
In this first Black History Month after the racial reckoning of 2020, I feel impelled to do what historians rarely do: mark history while the story is still being written. We are living in a time when the white gaze remains ever present in American life, but is hardly dominant among today’s assemblage of courageous Black creators. We are living in the time of a new renaissance—what we are calling the Black Renaissance—the third great cultural revival of Black Americans, after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, after the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Black creators today were nurtured by these past cultural revivals—and all those brilliant creators who sustained Black Arts during the 1980s and 1990s. But if the Harlem Renaissance stirred Black people to see themselves, if the Black Arts Movement stirred Black people to love themselves, then the Black Renaissance is stirring Black people to be themselves. Totally. Unapologetically. Freely.
The article and attendant issue, published in tandem with the start of Black History Month, is a new special project created in partnership with the award-winning historian and author.
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“When historian, Time 100 honoree and How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi approached Time with the idea to partner on a project about marking this moment as a Black cultural renaissance, the most challenging question we faced was how to choose which of the innumerable artists and works—across poetry, film, television, music, theater and more—to highlight,” Time Editor-in-Chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal writes in his letter to readers. “This renaissance features works that directly explore the quest for racial justice, as well as art that mines the everyday realities of moving through the world as a Black person—finding the comedy and drama in work, relationships and family.”
Time’s core demographic may not be Black, but Kendi does not shy away from taking his audience to task in its marginalization of Black lives and cultural identity. Pointing to the last six years or so as pivotal in once again demonstrating the power and immense breadth of Black creativity, he writes:
Black novelists, poets, filmmakers, producers, musicians, playwrights, artists and writers got the white judge off our heads. We are no longer focused on making white people comfortable or uncomfortable. We also got the Black judge out of our heads. We refuse to carry the race on our shoulders. We are tired of being race representatives. We’ve escaped the shaming politics of respectability. We are showing that our Black lives have meaning and depth beyond white people.
