On black success and a complicated world: Harriet Tubman on the $20
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It took me maybe 30 minutes to give up on the “good/bad” binary that immediately developed online in response to the news that Harriet Tubman’s portrait would be on the front of the $20 bill. I went through a brief series of weirdly conflicting emotions before settling on: "I wish I could just be happy about this"—and then thinking on that for a while, too. I revisited Feminista Jones’ decisive opinion essay in the Washington Post from last year, “Keep Harriet Tumban—and all women—off the $20 bill,” and tweeted my favorite quotes from the piece. I also favorited tweets that reveled in the sheer badassery of Harriet Tubman’s work and legacy and celebrated the fact that “the first black person on money [will be] a dark skinned female war vet who worked hard to tank the slave economy,” as BlackAmazon tweeted that day. I enjoyed the memes and gifs and watched plenty of black girls and black women across the internet celebrate. I also allowed my body to settle into the discomfort and frustration I was feeling, rather than be angry at myself for reacting that way.
I don’t want to use this space to get into my own personal politics or ever-evolving praxis. Given the amount of material and available perspective already online, I don’t think it would benefit anyone. And anyway, the act of writing the “thinkpiece” and the act of watching the general public dismiss the “thinkpiece” before they even exist are both exhausting things. But after letting myself consider the tension that emerged instead of rushing to eradicate it, I fell into a slightly different strain of thought.
On Black Success:
It irritates me beyond reason that accomplishment and recognition for black folks is, so often, full of tension. Our successes in the academy are crowded by tokenism, exceptionalism and a perpetual sense of un-belonging. Our successes in the arts are rife with exoticism, the ever-malignant white gaze, and again, a perpetual sense of un-belonging. It’s similar for successes in other areas as well; those are just the two spheres I’m in relative proximity to. But regardless of the field, after the accomplishment and the recognition that is so often past-due, one begins to question the institution itself that did the recognizing—what archaic values does this particular gatekeeper use to define excellence? What does it mean to have my success measured by it? If a historically racist craft seriously in need of decolonizing deems your black work valuable—how does one begin to celebrate that? If a foundationally racist institution positions your black body somewhere near the top of a hierarchy—are the festivities not a complicated kind of joy?
I don’t mean to comment on whether or not black people should be allowed to celebrate their moments of recognition. I’m just saying that lately, almost all of my celebrations have been sung and danced beneath a shadow. Any recognition I’ve received in recent years has been, at least initially, colored by a happiness that felt unnaturally contained. Profoundly muted. And that angers me, especially now. Imaging Harriet Tubman’s face on tender that was previously used to mark her as subhuman, as merely operational in purpose, and then trying to see it all as a kind of retroactive honor—the joy I want very desperately to feel is somehow distorted.
Because that’s the kind of recognition this country offers us. The tensions we live with and navigate become normalized. The duality becomes unremarkable, except when we voice our discomfort. Many of our accomplishments appear materialistic. Our successes and even the celebrations of them are deemed contentious. Hell, marinating in our own joy is seen as divisive. This is the world in which “recognition” exists for black people. Put simply, it’s complicated.
And A Complicated World:
And by now, we’ve all heard the updated news—not just that Harriet Tubman will be on the $20-dollar bill, but that Andrew Jackson will share it with her as well, with his profile on the back of the currency. And here the tension is illuminated again. Our country’s constant dissonance in regards to its own history is made so plain it almost appears to be a bad joke. But then, isn’t that a condition we’re so familiar with? Haven’t we so often, in some way, even at our brightest and most brilliant, been made into a tasteless punchline?
Maybe it comes down to creating settings in which black people and other people of color can recognize and love on their peers in some temporarily fixed context. One that resists the white gaze, the capitalist gaze (can I call it that?), the patriarchal gaze (am I just making up terms here?), the imperialist gaze (yall know what I mean though, right?) as much as possible. Or maybe that’s not what we need. Or maybe we need it in limited amounts. I don’t know. Either way, shifting power is a painfully slow process, except in rare and explicitly deliberate circumstances. Ahem. Explicitly deliberate circumstances.
But creating alternative spaces does offer a conditional solace, at least.
That said—given the context, the history, the legacy of violence—is there even any way a country like ours could rightly honor a black woman as courageous and legendary and subversive as Harriet Tubman? Is it possible for a state that built so much of its wealth on black bodies and black blood—specifically the commodification and debasing of both—to honor her? What kind of recognition can a country that still benefits off those things offer a black woman who was born during, raised in and who fought against that terror?
And yet, there’s a desperate need for recognition and the celebration of our successes and our brilliance in spite of this—not a joy that ignores a violent framework, but maybe a joy that knows and understands the context, and so deliberately positions our joy in opposition to, in resistance of, and as a direct assault on that very violent framework that seeks to distort us. Though I’ve certainly witnessed that joy in limited capacities with dear friends and brilliant peers, I have no idea what that looks like on a massive scale. I mean, maybe Black History Month 2016 is the closest we’ve come to it. Cuz February was lit basically all the way through. But either way, it’s on us to keep imagining new ways to recognize and celebrate, new ways to honor each other’s present brilliance and our richly triumphant history.
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