Blues music’s full-portrait Black femininity was antiracist art rejected by assimilationists

Evidence

For decades, diverse sketches of Black feminine behavior had swayed heads and hips, minds and hearts, in buoyant juke joints. Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 827

Categorization

• XREF: Complements the ‘veil shifted from passive tradition into active revolutionary instrument’ thread — blues as a mass cultural anti-racist art form alongside intellectual antiracism.
• SEED: Article angle: the blues as the first mass antiracist genre, and the assimilationist critique of ‘respectability’ in art — how ‘Wild Women’ subverted the Talented Tenth’s respectability politics.