We are our own monuments, and we can be theirs, too

174 CLA JOURNAL We are our own monuments, and we can be theirs, too Beauty Bragg “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” ~Langston Hughes,“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,    all the faces, all the Adams and Eves and their countless generations; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. ~Margaret Walker,“For My People” These two quotations sprang to mind for me as I contemplated the implications of COVID-19 racial unrest and transformation because the quotes speak to some of my own varying responses to the events of spring and early summer 2020. Hughes and Walker implicitly address issues of Black selfconception , Black imagination, and the historical function of Black music, each of which is a thread in my consideration of the immediate future. The conclusions I draw reflect a synthesis of many aspects of my experience. I have engaged in much therapeutic talk with friends, most of whom are black academics. I have responded to queries from former students about what I make of all of this. I have listened to the points of view of my young neighbors ranging from fifteen to twenty-seven, who are mostly processing the legacy of race in this nation in a serious way for the first time. I have tried to provide counsel and guidance to my own two young adult children, who are trying to figure out what their role in these events and society in general should be. Like Hughes and Walker, I think that at the heart of any strategy for transformation must be a recognition of our own cultural authority. Just briefly, I want to turn to an instructive example, embodied in Nas’s commemorative performance of his 1994 debut album, Illmatic, with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in 2014. The possibility of such a performance reflects the work that went into shifting a national discourse away from attacks on rap and other aspects of hip-hop culture in the late twentieth century to opening the possibility for its public celebration as a national art form in CLA JOURNAL 175 We Are Our Own Monuments, and We Can Be Theirs, Too the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is the result of the collective work of black artists and intellectuals, which insisted on the right to define the political and aesthetic value of the form. As an encapsulation of the question of whether symbols matter—a question also addressed in the present call for the removal of racist monuments—such a moment should remind and assure us that our work matters and invite even more generations to join the tradition of collaborative black inquiry that has surely, if more desultorily than we would like, brought us to this moment of reckoning. Our efforts have not been in vain. The impact of our deconstructions of systemic racism can be measured both in the number of people of all races and ethnicities who took to the streets, globally, in the summer of 2020, and in the efforts of some to discredit public conversations meant to help us consider the complexity of what we face as a society trying to move away from the framework that has recently defined national efforts to resolve the race problem. Here, I am thinking, for example, of the rancor with which the “1619 project” has been met. For many, the “controversy” of this project is almost unfathomable since the evidence that every sphere of American public life has consciously excluded black people in their natal periods is abundant and multi-dimensional. However, the project’s detractors’ objections make perfect sense when viewed from the perspective of Karen Ferguson’s Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and theReinventionof RacialLiberalism(2013),whereinshearguesthattheliberalvision shaping late-twentieth-century racial resolutions was rooted in a development model that paralleled U.S. approaches to foreign policy in the recently decolonized third world. The approaches emerging from...