Black art or American art? The differing approaches to universality in George Schuyler and Coleson Whitehead’s writings

True, from dark-skinned sources have come those slave songs based on Protestant hymns and Biblical texts known as the spirituals, work songs and secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues, that outgrowth of rag-time known as jazz (in the development of which whites have assisted), and the Charleston, an eccentric dance invented by the gamins around the public market-place in Charleston, S.C. No one can or does deny this. But these are contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country. They are foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes. They are no more expressive or characteristic of the Negro race than the music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race.
(Schuyler, George S., “The Negro-Art Hokum,” p. 1)

And the disparate literature of the colored tribes. Accounts of African empires and the miracles of the Egyptian slaves who had erected pyramids. The farm’s carpenters were true artisans—they had to be to keep all those books from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain. Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. There was a man named Benjamin Banneker who composed almanacs—almanacs! she devoured them all— and served as a confidant to Thomas Jefferson, who composed the Declaration. Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.
(Whitehead, Coleson, The Underground Railroad, pp. 224-225)

Coleson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and George S. Schuyler’s "The Negro-Art Hokum" present fundamentally different views on the relevance of Black American art to a broad Black population in the United States, based on differing views on the existence of a shared identity and community among that population. Schuyler argues that Black American art is indistinguishable from art created by any other American ethnic group, and that art created by individuals from that group cannot represent the whole; Whitehead, on the other hand, highlights how Black American art is relevant to all Black Americans, regardless of their background otherwise, since the shared experience of racialized existence creates a common cultural reference.

Both passages recognize that the Black population is not a homogeneous entity; Schuyler points out that Black people from the American South are different from Black people from the American North and outside of the United States, and Whitehead lists different locations and achievements of the "colored tribes," recognizing that the Black population comes from different origins within the African continent. Schuyler identifies a number of different art forms created by Black Americans, but argues that because they are localized creations by particular cultural segments, and are thus unknown to other communities from a different cultural background who happen to share genetic and physical attributes (their racial background), they cannot be considered representative of or universally relevant to all people from that racial background. The fundamental divergence is that Whitehead represents a diverse range of works, either by or about Black people from all kinds of different cultural backgrounds and different historical periods, as being explicitly universally relevant; the framing of “all the colored people she had ever known” and “the stories of black people yet to be born” makes the universality of the works to everyone from a Black racial background the explicit point of the depiction of the library.

The diversity that Schuyler identifies as an impediment to Black art being representative of an entire racial background is taken by Whitehead and turned into an argument in favor of universality instead. Schuyler points out Northern, West Indian, and African communities as being distinct from Southern communities, each with differing cultural backgrounds “foreign” to the others; Whitehead describes the “disparate literature of the colored tribes” as all part of one collection, first noting the same diversity that Schuyler points out, but then depicting all of the works as a single body, with the final line of the passage then affirming the collection’s universality as a whole. The collection contains stories of African empires, slavery in ancient times, major Black historical figures, and slave narratives; the line “she recognized their stories as their own” comes immediately after the description of slave narratives, but does not explicitly name what “their stories” refers to, allowing us to apply that description to all of the texts listed beforehand.

When looking at the next line, reading “their stories” as referring to all of the different texts in the library makes more sense in context. First, the line identifies the stories as the stories of “all the colored people she had ever known”; both the words “all” and “colored” imply a broad framing. “All,” through the simple meaning of the word, ascribes universality to the description; “colored” takes on a broader meaning through its proximity to the word “black,” used in the next clause - since the two different words are used to describe groups of people in the same sentence, rather than using the same word twice, we can infer that the words refer to different groups of people. This same technique is used immediately beforehand; when describing people born into slavery, the text uses the word “slave,” while when describing people kidnapped into slavery from Africa, the text uses “Africans,” the difference in word choice implying a difference in background. In this instance, “colored” can be applied to everyone from a non-white racial background, while “black” specifically refers to people of African descent. Secondly, describing specifically slave narratives as “the stories of black people yet to be born” would be a coherent, albeit pessimistic, reading, but describing slave narratives in particular as “the foundations of their triumphs” would be a reductive reading of the text; the texts by Black authors or that describe historical achievements by Black people provide examples of past “triumphs,” and thus provide more of a broad foundation for future triumphs than the limited context of slave narratives.

The act of presenting all of the different works mentioned in The Underground Railroad’s library together also itself creates an equivalency between the works, assigning each work a broader importance as a part of the collection than mentioning any individual author or work would. It is the collection of specifically works by and about Black people that creates the main impact of the scene; by placing all of these texts in the same context, in which the fact that the works were created by Black authors creates their primary significance for the scene, Whitehead implicitly rejects Schuyler’s claim that art created by Black authors is only relevant to that author’s specific context. The works are significant not only in their own right, but, in this scene, also because they were written by Black authors and tell stories of Black people; the line “She recognized their stories as her own” sits in opposition to Schuyler’s claim that such works are “...no more expressive [...] of the Negro race” by positioning works that have no other relation to Cora than on racial grounds, such as the “African empires,” as being part of this library of stories that are “[Cora’s] own.”

It is worth noting that depicting specifically a library of writings by Black authors relates to the controversial history of relating literacy to Black personhood and the trope of using literacy as a shorthand for intelligence (and thus personhood). The phrase “the foundations of their triumphs” claims that the stories and texts found in the library play an essential role in allowing for Black people to excel - in both the past, as indicated by the wording of “..all the colored people she had ever known,” and in the future, as indicated by the line “...black people yet to be born”; the texts, and by extension writing and literacy, are thus represented as being foundational for the “triumphs” of Black people both in the past and in the future.

While Schuyler equates both white and Black artists under the title of "American," Whitehead further draws a distinction between Black authors and white American authors through the mention of the single white author named in the passage, Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Banneker is mentioned as a confidant of Jefferson, who is then contextualized as the man who "composed the Declaration." The words omitted are notable; instead of fully spelling out "Declaration of Independence," the mention of independence is stripped, since the final version of the American Declaration of Independence did not grant freedom to the Black slaves of America. As the Black residents of America did not gain independence through Jefferson’s Declaration, the mention of independence is omitted, and the mention of Jefferson as the single white author brought up in the passage thus serves as a subtle reminder of the difference in historical context between white and Black authors – Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was not a Declaration of Independence for Benjamin Banneker, the main subject of the sentence.

Schuyler’s phrase “expressive or characteristic” uses two different terms as part of the claim against the universality of Black art to an entire racial background; Whitehead’s description leans more towards conflicting with “expressive” than “characteristic.” While there is nothing in the cultural creations that rely on specific inherent racial characteristics, the cultural creations do express specific attributes of cultural racialized experiences. While the “music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders” are not an inherent aspect of “the Caucasian race,” their existence is due in part to the cultural history of those people, which includes racialized experiences; cultural outputs are expressive of the collective experiences of the culture. The African empires described in Whitehead’s library are impactful to Cora not only because of their historical role, but because they are evidence of a broader racial history, which is ascribed significance as a contrast to the heavily negatively racialized roles and experiences of the later authors and the characters in the novel. The works in the library express a cultural history that has been heavily shaped by racialized experiences in a particularly visible manner, given the history of race-based slavery; the racial aspects of the cultural history of the “Appalachian highlanders” or “Dalmatian peasantry” are not as visible, due to the lack of overtly visible racially-based oppression, but that very lack of racial oppression is itself a form of racialized experience, meaning that the cultural creations by those groups of people can be seen as expressive of a particular racial history.

Both The Underground Railroad and “The Negro-Art Hokum” address the question of whether art created in a particular racial context can be universally relevant to everyone from that racial background, especially when it comes to Black art in the United States, and come to very different conclusions. The two texts diverge in their interpretations of racialized experiences as being cultural, as well as what constitutes a racialized experience of the world; Schuyler maintains that the immediate context in which a person is found is much more relevant than racial history, while Whitehead’s depiction of racially-relevant texts display the importance of racial history to an individual’s experience of the world. Both texts acknowledge that Black Americans have created important types and works of art; the difference in worldview is whether those works are fundamentally Black, or fundamentally American - and whether or not one of those identities outweighs the other.

Works Cited

Schuyler, George S. “The Negro-Art Hokum.” Nation, 16 June 1926, pp. 662-663. Class handout.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Doubleday, 2016.

Artificial Intelligence statement

No form of generative-AI was used in writing this paper.