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In April 2016 the US Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman will be the new face of that country's twenty-dollar bill.1 An impassioned open letter from then Secretary Jacob Lew happily reported the decision to put Tubman on the note was the result of inspiring popular input the Treasury had received from the American people. This ideological fantasizing of bureaucratic processes as democratic ones is particularly glaring in a time when neoliberal politico-economics continues to erode actual democratic practices and potential, but that Harriet Tubman is slated to be the new face of the twenty-dollar bill is more striking still. It is without irony that Lew declared Tubman "represented our most cherished values" (Lew 2016). As a slave Tubman circulated as capital—indeed as the stabilizing commodity, or "gold standard" amidst a volatile emerging capitalist market in the founding of the United States (Lott 2017, 23)—and will now circulate as capital once more, but as its face. Tubman on the twenty emblematizes a larger contradiction in contemporary Anglo-American culture: that of the popularity and consumability of certain representations of black life within an econo-cultural system founded in, and (still) grounded in black (social) death. Given the common framing of racism and anti-racism as functions of love and hate, loving black culture or hating it seems to serve as an increasingly salient litmus test to discern who is anti-black or not. This cultural politics of wokeness suggests we are in a historical moment in which black lives mattering is being conflated with black lives mattering on the face of things. This essay uses Sylvia Wynter's approach to aesthetics as a "deciphering practice" to challenge the notion that racism and anti-racism can be apprehended as functions of love and hate, and points instead to an analytic of taste and consumption as a way of understanding racial "structures of feeling" (Williams 1977).
The Mainstream Celebration of Blackness
Black Panther will offer proof that a depiction of a reality of something other than whiteness can make a ton of money.
—Jamil Smith, "The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther"
Blackness—used here in reference to black culture(s) and representations of black people without any claim to a notion of authenticity—is imagined in contemporary popular culture through a conflation of aesthetic...