Black art—or, art about blackness—is in crisis. So we’ve been told, anyways. The cause of this state of emergency has been named, with the unmistakable rustle of clutched pearls, “black trauma porn.”
This is the story. Black art has been trapped—perhaps since Sidney Poitier’s Christlike angst in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), perhaps even since Gus squirmed under a neo-Confederate microscope in Birth of a Nation (1915)—within a stultifying mandate: to depict, for the sake of entertainment and edification, black suffering. This is the art that is funded, circulated and honored. Central works of art about blackness, works as incongruous as Beloved and The Blind Side, are united by their commitment to depicting that suffering. And not merely depicting it: black trauma porn titillates, triggering animalistic, sadistic pleasure principles in white viewers while retraumatizing black viewers. This titillation becomes the sole purpose of black art.
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