Subversive Creativity Has Always Been a Way for Black Folx to Practice Freedom

The celebration of Black Music Month, Pride and Juneteenth, Provides a Platform for Examining How Black Creative Practices Can Continue to Advance Social Justice

By Britton Williams

Janelle Monae and Jidenna; Photo Credit: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

Black people have used subversive creativity to claim freedom in unfreedom from the moment we were extracted from our homelands. Along the middle passage, enslaved Africans out of necessity stitched together new ways of knowing, communicating, and being. During enslavement, music served as a vehicle for Black people to plan and facilitate escapes. Across time, it has encouraged and sustained freedom movements such as Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter; challenged racist stereotypes; birthed impactful genres like spirituals, the blues, jazz, and hip hop; and connected diverse, often marginalized, Black communities through mechanisms like ballroom culture and the Black church.

Black art has been a multi-contextual power source to Black communities and the larger American society, but America’s dominant culture has a long track record of simultaneously appropriating Black art while ignoring the contributions of Black artists. Investment in Black art as an educational tool, for example, has been largely lacking despite — and perhaps because of — its proven ability to be an agent of social change and healing.

June now presents a tri-fold occasion for celebration within and across Black communities. It brings Juneteenth events that commemorate the end of slavery; Pride parades and festivals that venerate the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and LGBTQIA+ activism; and festivals that lift the history and trajectory of Black music and recognize the richness of the Black artistic canon. The moment presents a prime opportunity for examining and heeding the ways Black folx persistently use creative practices to advance freedom, healing, and justice.

Today, leaders across every level of government are installing policies that encourage violence and oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality. Artists such as Toni Morrison, Angie Thomas, and George M. Johnson are currently under attack and being removed from school libraries precisely because of their power to disrupt oppressive narratives and unsettle dominant expectations. Laws targeting and stigmatizing LGBTQIA+ folx are blatant practices of subjugation meant to uphold the status quo. During this current moment of swelled social unrest and societal fracture, Black art practices past and present offer us a roadmap in fugitive healing, freedom, and creative resistance.

An intentional turn to the arts is needed to challenge the social-societal, political, individual, and collective rupture that has long been present and is currently acutely evident. As a creative-arts therapist, I’ve seen firsthand the impact of the arts across contexts and its power to facilitate change. Funding arts programming in schools and as a part of mental health treatment is one of the best investments political leaders, philanthropists and society can make in this moment. Exposure to the arts promotes emotional expression, builds empathy, and expands perspectives. Furthermore, the arts are an incredible tool to teach history and expose young people to a wide range of cultures and experiences.

Accessible mental health treatment programs that integrate Black aesthetics and artistic practices are urgently needed to attend to the historical and cultural traumas that are very much present. Creative practices can help people work through trauma when words and cognitive processes aren’t enough to help address deep emotional injuries. Art can create spaces where we can imagine new and expanded potentials — a necessary component of individual and collective healing.

Black artists and their creative practices are urgently needed in this moment of our country’s evolution to serve as holders and sharers of the histories that oppressors seek to erase, the communicators of subversive messages that carve out spaces of freedom and healing, and the storytellers that can move hearts and minds. Black art has moved this nation through struggle at every turn, and the journey is not yet done. So, as we celebrate this month through song, dance, performance, and image, we should also commit ourselves to creating pathways to realizing the full power of Black creative practices.

Britton Williams is a drama therapist and doctoral candidate in the Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center.