Esperanza Spalding's "Black Gold": Jazz's Investment in Black Historical Representation

ESPERANZA SPALDING 

The other day I bumped into an elderly woman at the bus stop I frequent who had identified me as part of her clan. She was an older Ghanaian woman who called me to sit next to her. She must have realized that I was tired from walking in my heels.

She was excited to mention that her people were Ga and that she could tell I was a Ga also. It must have been my nose. It was one of those moments that leave you both thrilled and weirded out.

As we began to talk, I realized that while she had spent most of her life in Ghana and I had spent little of my life in this country of my parents' upbringing, what we had in common was an understanding that the fast-paced life here in the US was quite different than the lives we had lived in Ghana. That conversation has stayed with me. We kept it real. But there was another conversation that was happening alongside ours.

As we spoke, another woman quipped underneath her breath, "Go back to Africa, that's where you belong anyway." Stunned to hear, in my adult life, the same words I had heard spoken in elementary school, I glanced at her briefly and said, "That's the same thing Marcus Garvey said." Aware of what I had just said, I looked away, unsure of whether the older Ghanaian woman had gotten the message I had intended.

I realized the conversation we were all having, whether we wanted to have it or not, was about the push and pull of acculturation and the acceptance and the rejection of "other" cultural values. Just as quickly as I had come to the realization, the older woman looked straight at the other woman and asked, with more calm than I could have managed, "What at all do you know about Africa?" and chucked her teeth.  I fought back the desire to laugh, excited by the vindictiveness of the comment. But secretly I knew the question was also for me.

For people of the African Diaspora, many with transnational identities, so much of what we have all come to know about the continent, whether we were born on the African continent or not, has been shaped not only by our own questions of where we are from and how we got to where we are, but also by the history we read, the history that is passed on to us in school, through our parents and grandparents, and in the media. It isn't so much that the historical representations we are familiar with are entirely wrong; it is that there is so very little of it that it has become a singular narrative.

Similarly, the history of the continent is sometimes just that, history. We hear about survival and struggle, but how often do we hear about permanent legacy, flourishing community, ingenuity when speaking not just of post-colonial, contemporary Africa, but also of precolonial and colonial Africa?  And beyond ancient Egypt?  So much of the identity that people of African descent, particularly those outside of the continent, are asked to consume is that we are the descendents of slaves- a critical and important history. But that is neither where people of African descent begin nor where they end.

Esperanza Spalding, in her new song "Black Gold" (on Radio Music Society) turns another page in the history of jazz music and asks us to be active participants in owning the representation of the history Africa. If our schools won't do it, we owe it to our children to provide a balanced version of where they and/or their ancestors came from. While the video tends towards a romanticized version of the continent's accomplishments, is there any "ancient civilization" that the history books have not offered some romanticized version of?

The songs says "They'll be folks hell-bent on putting you down/Don't get burned/'Cause not necessarily everyone will know your worth." Spalding reminds us that although mainstream education will fail to illustrate the full spectrum of this history, it will continually be our responsibility to pronounce, write, and affirm the contributions that African society has made to world civilizations and world history from time immemorial and to celebrate this legacy OUT LOUD.

Check out the music video for "Black Gold" featuring neo-soul vocalist Algebra Blesset:

with love,