It’s graduation season for the nation’s colleges and universities, including the little more than 100 institutions that bear the federal designation as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
And we feel good. I mean, we are Black excellence and Black joy unparalleled—for ourselves, our institutions, and for our people.
We shout some—well, a lot—when the name of any graduate we know is called. We make signs. We coordinate elaborate outfits ranging from print-up or air-brushed t-shirts to matching Sunday’s best ensembles. We blow the whistles. Occasionally, we set off blow horns. We, like the spirit of schoolmasters long ago, have been known to ring bells of some sort. We make a joyful noise for our beloved.
Yes, we are Black and we are proud.
We were proud enough to stand and sing once upon a time, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” from memory, long before Beyoncé so epically belted out the timeless refrain at last year’s Coachella.
Now, though? Not so much. And I’m wondering whether or not in an attempt at performative Blackness have we shirked the scope of actual Blackness which opted for solemnity as celebration—the two are not, I believe, mutually exclusive.
HBCU schoolmasters once prided themselves on offering Black people the dignity we long deserved. In ceremonies, whether religious or secular, tradition was scared. For them, dignity was freedom, even when hampered by the politics of Black respectability and weighted by a preoccupation with White gaze.
