The Negro-Art Hokum

Schuyler, George S. "The Negro-Art Hokum." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 96-99. Print.

Well, this reading sure was harsh. Despite the pretentious tone and somewhat radical opinions, however, I can’t help but conclude that this Mr. Schuyler is on to something. Firstly, I do agree with him that the focus of African heritage on African Americans is misplaced and outdated. Keeping in mind that not all blacks find their roots in Africa, Schuyler is right to say that Americanization (or at least the detachment from Africa through several generations) has lead to a race that is more American and less African. He is also right to point out that African American art more closely resembles American art than it does African. And, although Schuyler is advocating blind equality for the wrong reasons, he is right to say that society needs to drop the pretense that race is a dividing issue.

Schuyler is very wrong, however, to say that the works of blacks might as well be the works of whites. Despite the disconnect with African ideology and art, the works produced by blacks in America represent a subculture that very much has its own significance. Perhaps the insistence on calling them “African American” puts the focus on the African, when a more correct term would be “black American”. Because it is so that black Americans have their own subculture, as I pointed out, from which to create art. The same can be said of any repressed minority – the fact that they were black hardly matters (in this line of argument). Ignoring the racial divide (despite its superficiality) as Schuyler has done is deliberate ignorance. Just because he doesn’t think it should exist does not mean it will simply cease to be and the problems of racial divide will sublimate immediately. It’s a shame that this isn’t the case, but it is the reality and, further, it is a defining feature of the black American minority that the perceived (rightly or not) racial differences fuel whatever it is that causes them to create art that is so very distinctly black.