Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights ed. by Robert J. Patterson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights ed. by Robert J. Patterson Katherine Karlin (bio) Patterson, Robert J., Ed. Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 282 pp. ISBN: 9780252084607. $26.00 Paperback. It would be difficult to think of a moment in which Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights, edited by Robert J. Patterson, would land with greater resonance. The volume arrives during a season of widespread protests against police violence, a significant shift in public opinion on the connection between law enforcement and implicit bias, and a substantive debate on reform versus defunding. What began as a grass-roots effort to dismantle racist iconography—particularly statues of Confederate soldiers—has been taken up by municipal governments, which have ordered the removal of these Jim Crow-era relics by city workers, sometimes under cover of night. In the wake of these sustained protests, cultural organizations have been issuing apologies for blind spots in their diversity efforts, and a period of soul-searching—at least some of which seems to be in good faith—has begun in the fields of literature, entertainment, and the arts. On June 19, 2020, the commemoration of Juneteenth, an astonishing array of Black writers, performers, and artists gathered under the banner of Black Artists for Freedom issued a statement calling for commitments from the institutions they work with, not only to sever ties with the police, but to advance opportunities and representation. "No more stereotypes," the statement reads. "No more tokenism. No more superficial diversity. We will no longer watch Black culture be contorted into a vehicle for self-congratulation, complacency, guilt relief, experiential tourism, fetishism, appropriation, and theft" (Black Artists for Freedom). The moment of reckoning for the culture echoes the decade of the 1970s that Black Culture examines, an explosion of artistic and political activity following the conclusion of the Civil Rights era, and its eradication of Jim Crow laws. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts left huge areas of institutionally embedded racism untouched, in housing, employment, education, and healthcare. "The post-civil rights era retrenchment of a de facto segregations revealed how white supremacy and antiblack racism were interconnected, intertwined, interrelated, and deeply embedded in America's values and institutions. Neither legislative acts nor a naïve belief in the general goodness of the American people could undo their historical and emotional sentience" (Patterson, 2). The political fight shifted from Civil Rights to Black Power; demands for institutional measures like affirmative action found their footing; and the culture, in all its manifestations, reflected the push to continue the struggle against racism on a new stage. Although the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement were finite and fulfilled, the [End Page 324] struggle had also instilled a momentum that continued into the cultural sphere long after its legislative battles had concluded. The cover of Black Cultural Production features a photo of actress Cicely Tyson, brandishing the two Emmys she won in 1974 for her lead performance in the television miniseries The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Tyson was awarded the best actress award and a special citation as "Actress of the Year"). The gleam of Tyson's smile and the shiny awards suggest a promise of a new period in the arts, one in which Black stories could be told without the use of caricature or of white interpreters. Three years after Jane Pittman established the receptivity of white audiences, as well as Black, for stories of Black lives, the miniseries Roots was a cultural juggernaut, with 100 million viewers, a record that remains, as Lisa Woolfork in her essay on "Generations" states, unbroken (59). Mainstream television comedies like "Sanford and Son," "Good Times," and "The Jeffersons" portrayed Black families in a range of socioeconomic circumstances. The theater and poetry of the Black Arts Movement was shaking up the intellectual world. In the movies, Blaxploitation, which began as a low-budget response to the erasure of Black lives from action films, grew into a multimillion-dollar industry. Women novelists like Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Octavia Butler began to publish highly personal and experimental fiction, and the editor who nurtured many of these...