Amazing Grace - Empowerment or Cultural Artifact?

Wintley Phipp’s video at first glance is emotionally charged and dramatic. However, his performance which includes a discussion of Negro spirituals and John Newton’s Amazing Grace demonstrates the de-politicization of a marginal cultural practice. Modern social scientists and folklorists “borrow” a political marginal practice from the original producer, and classify and tame it into an authentic sensibility that crosses cultural spheres. The cultural practice becomes a cultural artifact that can be marketed to the dominant culture. The taming begins with the assumption that the noise made by slaves was “spiritual” (and by this I mean Christian spiritual not indigenous spiritual) rather than political or social or a mixture of any of the three. This erases any meaning that the producers themselves had ascribed to the music. It also erases the cultural practices that might have shaped the meaning, for example slave owners forcing their slaves to sing an upbeat tune while working. While the religious and abolitionist causes spiritualizing black noise helps to politically challenge society’s then existing mores on the issue of whether slaves have souls, the move is one that brings the dialogue into the modern sphere. The consequence is that the modern propensity for scientific classification makes the political challenge vulnerable to social scientific classification and its propensity to ascribe what is the acceptable aesthetic. This classification and aestheticism robs cultural practices of their political efficacy and reifies them into cultural artifacts. The negro spiritual, no longer occupies the margins where it once had political power, but has been centralized into an ideal westernized black expression that can be produced separate from the realities of the black community itself. This move robs the black community of politically determining what it means to have a black soul in a modern westernized context because any cultural production is measured against the culturally acceptable artifact, which is now produced under the watchful eyes of the dominant white culture. Phipps demonstrates the taming or confining of the political meaning of the cultural practice of black noise when he points out that all Negro spirituals could be played on the black keys. Phipps wants to ascribe a hidden significance to this. Perhaps as abolitionists began to assemble Negro spirituals for their own grievances, it was important to take the noises they heard and order them to the black keys as symbolic. Given that slaves did not have access to piano, by ordering the noise to the black keys of the piano, a whole range of black noise was ignored. Phipps by humming the noises to the tune of Amazing Grace ignores the production of the Negro Spiritual into a formal and westernized musical construct. In doing so, it is aesthetically pleasing as well as understandable to his predominately white crowd. Here we have again the notion that the authentic black soul is one that produces a westernized aesthetic sound recognizable and acceptable to whites. The video shows the consequence. The idealized negro spiritual, robbed of its political power to challenge and speak to current racial issues, becomes a romanticized performance that leaves the audience in tears. Tears and pathos however are dangerous because now this white audience has a firm picture in their mind of the ideal black man, rooted in a sentimentalized version of a black slave, noble and deeply spiritual, quietly enduring the violence of slavery. This idealized black soul becomes for the audience the power that transformed John Newton and abolished slavery. But in reality this ideal black soul has only limited political agency, because his or her expression is kept centralized so as not to be too disruptive of the status quo. Removed from the margins, what does this ideal black man have to do with our current racial issues? How might this depiction reify the white audience’s reaction to other productions of black political agency? Amazingly the ideal black soul seems to become a border that demarcates centralized acceptability and marginalizes radicalism.