NPR’s Juana Summers talks to critics Angelica Jade Bastién and Vinson Cunningham about 2016’s music, literature, politics, and on-screen representation as the nation celebrates Black History Month.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This Black History Month, we are looking back at some relatively recent Black history. You probably remember this major album drop…
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “FREEDOM”)
BEYONCE: (Singing) Freedom, freedom, I can’t move. Freedom, cut me loose. Hey, hey.
SUMMERS: …Or maybe the premiere of this hit show.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “ATLANTA”)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You Paper Boi. You rich, right?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You Paper Boi?
BRIAN TYREE HENRY: (As Alfred Paper Boi Miles) You know it.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Boy, you so good.
SUMMERS: And what about this Oscar winner for best picture?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MOONLIGHT”)
MAHERSHALA ALI: (As Juan) At some point, you got to decide for yourself who you going to be – can’t let nobody make that decision to you.
SUMMERS: That’s right. The movie “Moonlight,” Donald Glover’s TV series, “Atlanta,” and Beyonce’s “Lemonade” all came out in 2016. And that same year, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling at games to protest racial inequality, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened here in D.C., and Barack Obama’s presidency came to an end. So this month, we’re taking a look back a decade to examine the legacies of these moments in Black American culture. Here to help are two critics. Vinson Cunningham is a critic for The New Yorker, and Angelica Jade Bastien is a critic for Vulture. Welcome to both of you.
ANGELICA JADE BASTIEN: Hello.
VINSON CUNNINGHAM: Hi. Thank you so much.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. OK. So I kind of want to start with a disclaimer that our team here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED had been thinking about all of this before social media seemed to explode with this kind of surprising wave of 2016 nostalgia. But that said, the list I just mentioned wasn’t even exhaustive. So I want to ask you both what other individual releases and – I don’t know – just, like, moments in Black culture stand out to you when you think back to 2016.
CUNNINGHAM: Well, I mean, it’s hard to get too far into 2016 lore – maybe we should call it – without talking about Beyonce’s album, “Lemonade,” Colson Whitehead’s novel, “The Underground Railroad.” And speaking of albums, Solange’s album, “A Seat At The Table.”
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “CRANES IN THE SKY”)
SOLANGE KNOWLES: (Singing) Well, it’s like the cranes in the sky. Sometimes I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds.
BASTIEN: A lot of big things.
CUNNINGHAM: A lot of big things.
BASTIEN: Rihanna – right? – “Anti” came out in 2016, and that was her last album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “DESPERADO”)
RIHANNA: (Singing) If you want, we could be runaways, runnin’ from any sight of love. Yeah, yeah. There ain’t nothin’. There ain’t nothin’…
CUNNINGHAM: And it’s so good.
SUMMERS: It’s so good.
CUNNINGHAM: It’s so good.
SUMMERS: One of the things that I’ve had in my mind a lot are the on-screen moments that were sort of the hallmarks of 2016. If you remember, “Insecure” also premiered that year and fed a whole lot of my personal group chat conversations, a whole lot of fun watch parties.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “INSECURE”)
ISSA RAE: (As Issa Dee) Do you want your man or not? Do you know your plans or not? You gonna (ph) go back home or not? You gonna claim your throne or not?
SUMMERS: There was also the big-screen adaptation of “Fences.” And there were also big nonfiction moments, documentaries like the “13th” and “I Am Not Your Negro.” Angelica, you’re a film critic. So I know that I’m sort of barely scratching the surface here with those mentions, but what did that amount of Black representation mean for where we were back in 2016?
BASTIEN: I felt like, you know, 2016, in terms of the images that we were being fed and arguing over and celebrating, I think that is one of the years that really crystallizes the Black excellence idea. I mean that for better and usually for worse because I think Black excellence sometimes gets really tied up not in curiosity and knowledge, but in the excellence that wealth confers.
SUMMERS: Vinson, I want to let you chime in here if you’d like to.
CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I mean, it’s, to me, all of the artifacts that you mentioned – and it’s strange to call them artifacts, only 10 years old but they do feel that way – correspond to the fact that, of course, that 2016 is the end of the – at least sort of electorally – the Obama era, and the beginning – the sort of rumbling of a beginning – of what we have now with Donald Trump. So you see in these – across a lot of these works, this kind of – I don’t know – like, wary positivity. This, like, OK, we’ve had this time of the highest level of, quote-unquote, “representation” that you could have – that is the figure of a Black person living in the White House. Maybe that can start to, you know, in the language of Reaganomics, trickle down into culture and the arts. And so I do think – I share Angelica’s sort of, like, sickly sweet feeling about that time.
SUMMERS: Yeah. I wonder if I could ask you to share with us one moment that comes to mind that kind of encapsulates where we were with Black culture in 2016.
BASTIEN: I mean, for me, the first thing that usually comes up is the image and styling of Beyonce at the Super Bowl halftime show.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BEYONCE: (Singing) Baby heir with baby hair and afros. I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.
BASTIEN: She looks great performing “Formation.” But then there’s also the layer of having a Black Panther-inspired outfit at the Super Bowl. And I also – just to add a note that I’m kind of seeing, like, a lot of work pop up that we’re discussing that really talks about the Black South. And I think the Black South has been a theme that a lot of artists have returned to again and again, then and through into now.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BEYONCE: (Singing) My daddy Alabama, mama Louisiana. You mix that Negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama.
BASTIEN: There’s everything, including “Moonlight.” Yes, that’s right. I am arguing that Miami is the South. If you have a problem with that…
CUNNINGHAM: (Laughter).
BASTIEN: …We can have a conversation. But I grew up in a very Black part of Miami. So, for me, Miami is the South.
CUNNINGHAM: I’m with you.
BASTIEN: Look at “Sinners.” We’re, like, now arguing for the importance, the diversity and the richness of the Black South in a way we haven’t gotten before. And I think there’s, like – for lack of a better way of putting it – wounds we’re sort of returning to thematically.
SUMMERS: I’ll open this one up to both of you. I wonder how you each see the legacy of these 2016 moments in Black history and culture playing out today. Are there through lines that you think we can trace to the current moment? And Angelica, I’ll start with you.
BASTIEN: It’s funny, you know, without the success of certain films in 2016, we don’t get “Get Out,” which means we don’t get that huge Black horror boom, for example, right? But yeah, without 2016, a lot of these conversations about, like, beauty, like, they don’t exist without the success of a lot of things that were happening in 2016. And I definitely think we’re in a period where the successes of 2016 are more complicated today because of Hollywood’s return to whiteness in a number of respects. So it’s a very interesting ground we find ourselves in thanks to the success of 2016 Black artistry.
SUMMERS: Vinson, what about you?
CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I think, you know, one, Angelica mentioned “Sinners,” and I think a look at that movie can – you know, has its correspondence with, as you mentioned, the establishment in 2016 of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is to say that the historical dimension of Black life – which has always been with us, you know, the sort of continued investigation and probing of the past – but I do think that there has been continued permission to fiddle with and tweak with that past. And I think that has been a strong emphasis of the – what we consider Black art of the past decade.
SUMMERS: We have been speaking with Vinson Cunningham, a critic with The New Yorker, and Angelica Jade Bastien, a critic for Vulture. Thanks to both of you.
BASTIEN: Thank you.
CUNNINGHAM: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEYONCE SONG, “ALL NIGHT”)
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