A Momentum Of Perception

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ine art didn't treat blacks much better. For many years, paintings depicted Africans and African Americans as socially insignificant—slaves or servants, performers, people on the periphery. Rarely were blacks shown on their own terms. "We seldom see them in family situations, for example," Harris says.

Women took the worst of it. The tradition of the female nude in Western art, Harris says, suggests an assumption that the person consuming the art is male, probably white, and holds a certain status or power. Women in general were on display, to be consumed.

But black women were associated with uncontrolled passion and promiscuity and were to be appropriated as though they were a natural resource of a colonialized land, Harris says. They became a signifier of sexuality merely by appearing in a painting. Consider Manet's Olympia. The subject is a white prostitute reclining on a bed. An African servant girl kneels to give the prostitute flowers brought by the viewer, assumed to be an upper-class Parisian. The African girl heightens the sexual suggestion of the scene, Harris says. "Here within the privileged space of the white male gaze is a layered black subject who is at once socially inferior to a naked prostitute for whom she is a servant and simultaneously is a sexual signifier linked to the white woman within the bounds of male power."

This history of misrepresentation and appropriation has had a profound psychological impact on the African American community, Harris says. "These images, being some of the only representations of blacks, began to filter throughout the American consciousness and helped create a momentum of perception."

Harris relates this perception to the notion of double consciousness conceived by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903. Double consciousness is an awareness of self in addition to an awareness of how one is perceived by others. These perceptions, Harris says, had many African Americans determined to avoid behaving in any way that would invoke a stereotype.

Worse, many African Americans developed a self-hatred and wanted to join white society on its terms. "Passing," or being taken for white, became desirable among some lighter-skinned blacks. Still, Harris reminds us, there was resistance. The 1893 Chicago Congress on Africa gave rise to the Pan-Africanist movement, which urged Africans and African Americans to consider their origins and unite as a common people.

lack artists were listening. It was around this time that Henry Ossawa Tanner, who had spoken at the Chicago Congress on Africa, painted two well-known works—The Banjo Lesson in 1893 and The Thankful Poor a year later. Tanner was depicting black people with pride and dignity in their everyday lives. He expatriated to Paris—Harris says racial issues and characterizations violently upset Tanner, and perhaps he enjoyed greater freedom from prejudice in Europe—but much of his work remained influential in America.

In the mid-1920s, Archibald Motley addressed color consciousness by painting portraits of octoroons—people of one-eighth black ancestry. The subject of Motley's The Octoroon Girl is light skinned and well dressed. She's placed in an elegant setting; there's a painting on the wall behind her. The dark-skinned subject of Motley's Mammy, by contrast, is wearing a head rag. Her features are masculinized, her clothes are plain, and she stands in front of a bare wall.

"Status was thought to have increased as black blood decreased," Harris says. People of multiracial heritage were concerned with what one Motley scholar called a "fear of contamination by association" with darker-skinned blacks. Motley, himself of multiracial heritage, visually codified those concerns, Harris says. Motley would become best known for his vibrant scenes of African American nightlife. "These works depicted blacks of many hues and shades interacting in the same social space," Harris says.

Next: undermining misperceptions

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