“Sometimes Blackness is threatened,” says Kehinde Wiley, the visual artist, “by a desire to go outside of a collective sense of deprivation and to engage education and opportunity. It feels good to all be down with one another. This notion of being authentically Black is comforting. To be down is to be with it, to be with your people, to be part of the collective. But I think it’s time to grow out of that.
