So here’s the thing. white people don’t believe that Black people can create art without it having something to do with them. Our films must teach them lessons, our books and songs and outworks must inform them, in no uncertain terms, that slavery bad, drugs bad, racism bad, and if not then it’s a Bad Movie, and Not Effective and Disappointing. If our art doesn’t include a Sesame Street style lesson on the Horrors of Being Black, then it’s bad screen-writing and lazy and a bunch of other buzzwords. If we don’t gently coddle them and hold their hands and give them easy to swallow theory, or give some sort of strong message on violence, drugs, police brutality, etc., then it’s bad.
I just think it’s so annoying that everything I do as an artist has to mean something to white people. I don’t write to teach white people lessons. I’m sure most Black filmmakers don’t make their movies to teach white people lessons. Black artists have the right to make art for the sake of making art. We’re allowed to tell stories that are entirely divorced from politics. We’re allowed to write horror and romance, to talk about what it’s like to be Black and gay, and to fall in love, and how it is to live in a haunted house, or how it is to have doppelgängers that want to kill us.
I don’t even know how to put it into words, but I’m tired of white people thinking that Black people are put on this earth to entertain and teach them. It’s frustrating and tiring and I wish that Black creators were allowed to just be,
And what’s even more frustrating is that if it’s not to teach a lesson, our art must be suffering and horror, we must be raped, enslaved, downtrodden, poor, to involved with reality it’s pessimistic
And I’m tired of that. I’m tired of hearing about anything white people want. I’m tired of being under the scope of white people as if they are so much more powerful than us as people that even when we make it our mission to create art for art that it’s in the thought of white people. I don’t want defy white people. I don’t want to shuck and jive for white people. I’m not gonna act like white people have this intrinsic power that I need to think of them. I’m gonna be me and do work as I desire. Period.
I’m gonna do work how I desire. Because I can.
Period.
