I made sure after reading your “Check It Out” on the Henry Taylor exhibit in New York to get there before it closed. I’m glad I did—for two reasons. First, because there definitely are many very good paintings and installations addressing important and different dimensions of Black life and struggle in America. Many works highlight both persistence and resistance in the face of oppression, in powerful ways. Henry Taylor’s installation on the Black Panther Party has real power and is overall positive, even though in my opinion it did not emphasize what was truly revolutionary about the Panthers—and why the authorities were driven to try to wipe it out.

But the second reason I am glad is not so positive. And that is because I think that there is something so wrong in this exhibit, that I am glad to have the chance to call it out. 

Here’s what I’m talking about. Given the character of your review, I was surprised when I came upon a whole section of the exhibit toward the end that did nothing but laud some truly reactionary trends amongst Black people. Here I am talking about what struck me as very respectful portraits of not only bootlickers like Jay-Z, not only of utter lackeys of U.S. imperialism like the former emperor (!) of Ethiopia Haile Selassie (who ran a bloody U.S.-backed police state for decades), but to top it all off a joint portrait of Barack and Michele Obama! Sorry, Barack Obama is not part of the “Black radical tradition,” (as Angela Davis once said)—he’s part of the murderous U.S. imperialist tradition, playing a special role as the “first Black president” in fostering what were and are truly poisonous illusions here and around the world. I mean, just look at this exhibit—we go through really powerful pieces on the everyday humanity of Black people in a system that is set against them, we go through a powerful section on mass incarceration and police/Klan terror, we go through an important exhibit on the Black Panther Party and then—almost as the logical conclusion—there are the Obamas, put forward as if they are part of the resistance to all the horror in the exhibits. In fact Obama spent his whole presidency scolding the very youth whom this system has in its sight and even made a point of calling those who rose up against police murder in Baltimore “thugs.” And that doesn’t even touch on his international role—including that all during his term he carried out murderous assassinations around the Middle East and Central Asia, he fully backed Israel in two earlier aggressions against Gaza and he escalated the bloody U.S. war in Afghanistan. The only way a portrait of Obama should be in that exhibit is if it showed the blood from the many murders he is responsible for running down his jaws. Let me put it bluntly: Obama is in no way, shape or form somehow “better than” George W. Bush (and the fact that the Obamas and Bushes make a show of being quite friendly and have even participated jointly in efforts to chill things out is not at all accidental).

I understand that “Check It Out” pieces are not meant as full-scale reviews and evaluations, but are more used to encourage people to check out different art works of value, and that’s important. However, when a “check-it-out” piece is so uncritical, it feeds confusion. Now there’s nothing wrong with saying that something is contradictory but worth checking out because of its contradictions (in this case, between the powerful exposure of Black national oppression coupled with a “striving to come under the wing” of the bourgeoisie). In this case, the painting of and then the prominent inclusion of the Obama and Selassie portraits shows that even among otherwise progressive people who are driven to sincerely oppose the oppression of Black people, it is extremely important to grasp the need to draw a firm line against U.S. imperialism and to struggle sharply with what is bourgeois nationalism, (that is, ideology which ultimately represents the strivings and interests of the capitalist or petty capitalist classes among the oppressed).