It's a Black Thing

 This is in response to a foreign student's response to the article

"COSMOGRAMIC DESIGN: A CULTURAL MODEL OF THE AESTHETIC RESPONSE"

Nettrice R. Gaskins

Downloaded from https://direct.mit.edu/books/chapter-pdf/260518/9780262351454_cbq.pdf

Reply from Nya Patrinos:

There’s a saying: “It’s a Black thing (thang).”  We often use it when we can't explain ourselves to non whites because there's too much insider knowledge needed to continue the conservation. I think some of the ideas in the article that you may not relate to aren’t necessarily Western, they come from the lived experience of the African Diaspora. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American woman writing about things that are very African American. She explains, “Afrofuturism… according to scholar Alondra Nelson, offers ways of looking at the subject position of Black people that cover themes of alienation and aspirations for a better future.”

So the “subject position of Black people” might lead to a sense of unfamiliarity if you aren’t Black. And since you didn’t grow up in America, you don’t have the experience, however distorted, that white faked experience of being a Black person because one has consumed media depicting black characters/caricatures. Maybe you never saw In Living Color, watched (now abhored) The Cosby Show or A Different World, suffered through a billion Tyler Perry movies, or followed the Black comedians of the year on Saturday Night Live. If you never went to a Black church (or saw it depicted in almost every other movie), perhaps Call and Response feels confusing.

And if you don’t have enslaved ancestors, this passage might not strike you as deeply as it struck me:

“In a basement floor at the First African Baptist Church, which is well into its third century and one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, there is space that is four feet tall and held hundreds of enslaved Africans following the Savannah River to freedom. Builders punctured holes in the floor in the cross-and-diamond shape of an African prayer symbol, the Kongo cosmogram, and publicly worshipped its ancient meaning.”

Because you wouldn’t relate to what it means to have ancestors who were captured in Africa enslaved in the Americas. You can’t see your granny there. You can't see yourself there.  And if your whole culture hadn’t been erased, if 20 million African ancestors hadn't died in middle passage,  it would be hard to understand the urgency of reconnecting to Africa and to the Kongo cosmograms.  

So I absolutely understand why it doesn't fit your breath.  But I don't think it is unfamiliar because of Western Aesthetics. In my opinion, this article is  just a black thing (thang).