A Quote by Toyin Odutola
Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness and your black presence.
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Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.
Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.
If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.
What I say about myself, black footballers or black pop stars is that we have been 'elevated out of blackness.' Because when people see us, they don't see us as being black. These are the issues that we should address.
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.
When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon.
Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
I'm not talking about my children's father'he's a wonderful black man, the hero of my life, and he's never disrespected or betrayed me. But I'm talking about what I see in the streets and in the media, this naked hatred that black men have towards the authentic black woman'which is really an indication of black men's hatred for blackness itself.
No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.
I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
Blackness is a state of mind and I identify with the black community. Mainly, because I realized, early on, when I walk into a room, people see a black woman, they don't see a white women. So out of that reason alone, I identify more with the black community.
There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.
Through my school years, I learned more about slavery, anti-black racism, and oppression in the U.S., and my blackness could no longer be an afterthought. I started wearing it proudly, and as my consciousness deepened, so did my love for black folks.
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