Police Brutality and the Black Arts Movement

Abstract

Black Arts activists, particularly visual artists, often took Black Arts and Black Power militants themselves as the iconic subject of representations of police brutality and repression. The general Black understanding that police violence was not fundamentally an encounter between individual African Americans and individual "bad cops" but a key instrument of systematic oppression gave Black Arts inversions of the power relations between Black subjects and white police a particular power, at once humorous, thrilling, cathartic, and ultimately liberatory. The depiction of police brutality as part of a system found its way into the broader Black popular culture, especially the Blaxploitation film genre. In many respects, Blaxploitation is hard to categorize because, like R&B in music, it can be seen as more of a marketing strategy rather than a coherent genre. The community, again a working-class Black community, is shown defiantly and resolutely waiting, prepared to resist both culturally and directly. They already know that Black lives matter, their lives matter.