In The Case for Multiple Narratives Part 1: Performing Blackness I explained how a packaged and commodified Blackness masquerading as a myriad Black stories is performed by Blacks and non-Blacks in the United States and abroad.
This part offers up a couple of solutions I see to transform this trend towards eradicated narratives. I see it happening in two ways simultaneously.
First thing we must do is to create and teach others to create the stories we need. This is where Afrolicious, Mambu Badu and a number of other individuals, organizations and institutions who are already doing this come in. Not only should these stories have the diverse Black audience as its target, but also they must be dynamic, innovative, relevant and engaging. Most importantly, they must be everywhere.
There’s no question about the power images have over the way we perceive ourselves. I can tell you “Brown is beautiful!” until the sun comes down and rises again, but if you only see White narratives being told and Brown narratives merely hinted at, my words will fall flat. The combination of Brown images and great design and PR must be deliberate and subversive. The more Brown images there are, the more diverse this narrative of Blackness becomes.
We already have the talents and skills we need to set things in motion. We have the filmmakers, the illustrators, the designers, the teachers, the scientists, the essayists, the writers, the coders, the ad agencies, the critics, etc. We just need to connect them to each other on and offline. We need local, regional and national organizations that will provide the support and networks needed by smaller Black owned outlets to get their content to the people that need to get it.
This brings me to the next part. The internet has been a great way to gain and share knowledge and it continues to be a great piece of infrastructure. I personally could not live without it. But we need to leverage it to distribute these stories to American Blacks. This is where innovation comes in. With the right funding and business models, we can create the systems that will feed content right into the hands of our young people.
As the Internet is becoming increasingly mobile, we need innovation in the devices that are able to carry the Internet and in ensuring the Internet is available and accessible to American Blacks. It’s not okay to have corporations feeding off our mobile activity only to distort our stories and misrepresent us to ourselves. If we want to compete with them, we’ve got to be innovative.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Pretty soon I’ll launch my contribution to this effort in the form of a wiki for American Black media on Afrolicious. But what do you think? Am I completely off base? Are there any other ways we can turn this trend around? I would love to hear your thoughts!
~aod