Minkah MakalaniThe duet of art and social change is not new. Today’s blend of art and activism, in part, has its roots in the 20th Century’s Harlem Renaissance. That foundation and evolution is part of Minkah Makalani’s expertise. He is an associate professor and Director of the Center for Af ricana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.Makalani spoke with Race Unwrapped Host and Producer Michelle Tyrene Johnson about that historical foundation and its modern progeny as part of this season’s focus on art and protest.This excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Michelle Tyrene Johnson: Tell me a little bit about your area of expertise as it relates to the Harlem Renaissance.Minkah Makalani: I'm an intellectual historian who works on social movements, artists and activists, and their involvement and ideas about politics, progress, racial oppression, liberation.MTJ: What you have studied and what you're currently working on links arts and politics.MM: I think we tend to view politics as this pure area that gets into the nuts and bolts of how we live, how government functions, how decisions are made, how policies are implemented, and so forth. There's obviously legitimacy to that view, but I think when we think of politics as kind of simply that, and disengage from it, divorced from art and culture, we get a very diminished view of what politics can be. So the tendency then is to focus on politicians, and then we also get a diminished view of what art is.MTJ: How do you think that the Harlem Renaissance has influenced where we are today from an artistic and racial and cultural lens?MM: We think about those people in the current era that we know of who are great orators who have a command of language and a charisma and ability to captivate an audience. Then think the most prominent examples of those - preachers and hip-hop artists, and maybe we can extend that more generally to someone like Beyoncé. They are doing kind of what we want or what we think politicians should do, and that is to communicate with us. That is to capture and distill ideas and emotions and desires and aspirations into this form that we can then get behind them and vote. I think it still offers us a very limited understanding of what politics is, and that's why the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement is such a robust and underappreciated era. What are Black people gravitating towards? They're reading, and they're talking about these things, but they're also listening to the Blues, spirituals. They're reading poetry. They're developing less regarded poetic forms. All these ways that people talk in barber shops and beauty salons, over a drink or in a bar, all of these things are kind of that cultural matrix that I think makes up that new Negro movement. And when we think about that period, I think the other thing to really grapple with is that this is the first generation where people haven't been born in or connected to slavery in an experiential way. Their parents may have been, or their grandparents may have been enslaved. This is the first generation that is born after the enslavement of Black people in the United States.MTJ: And then the stereotype is, of course, y'all Black people are good at arts. That's about passion. That's not about intellectual prowess, right?MM: We see this today with all these machinations and claims about DEI. That people are only in these positions in the military or in universities or in other fields because of DEI. I just refuse to believe, and no one has provided the evidence to support, that they are just so intellectually superior that this is the reason why they're in these positions, and women, Black people, other people of color are excluded from them. That's because we have a long tradition of questioning the logic of that and it comes out in the arts too. And I think when we get into the Blues, when we get into the spirituals, what Toni Morrison captures so well in her novels, what Zora Neale Hurston is really capturing in her work, we see a whole host of people during the Harlem Renaissance period who reject that logic as a basis for our humanity and our freedom. I think that's the part that doesn't get talked about enough when we think about the Harlem Renaissance. ...read more read less