Creativity is an integral part of Black American identity. Our histories and struggles as members of the African Diaspora have been recorded and passed on in song and story, in movement and design, generationally for millennia. The paths we have traveled, and the communities that have birthed us – and continue to birth us – are hardly limited to the African continent, let alone Western-dominant, Eurocentric, male, cis-gendered, heteronormative history (Tarik, 2018). As a result, our impact is expansive and innovative. We are – and have been – both the products and creators of evolving and global culture that is simultaneously underestimated and desired by the dominant (Western, White, etc.) majority. It could even be said that “Black innovation fuels the popular” (Elam, 2005, p. 347), regardless of whether that is our intention as a people. As an example, music was utilized as a vehicle for coded communications and acts of resistance dating back to the times of slavery (Pyatak & Muccitelli, 2011; Towns, 2015). But even further back than that, the ritualized use of creativity in movement, music and beyond have served as a means of connecting to ancestors and unifying heritage that is connected to wholistic ¹ views of land and health (Linklater, 2010; Herard-Marshall & Rivera, 2019).

With this in mind, when the dominant audience – who does not fully understand the thing they are seeing and envying – tries and fails to duplicate what it perceives of Blackness, the oft resulting hyper-racialized stereotypes masqueraded as ‘authentic’ become especially horrific (Elam, 2005). As Jamila Woods emotes in her 2019 song “Baldwin” (a tribute to the late and esteemed African American writer James Baldwin), “You don’t know a thing about our story, tell it wrong all the time.” This repackaging of Black creativity causes harm in ways that are more than just symbolic – it detaches our innovations from the communities who birth them, which can have far-reaching impacts on our literal lives.

I am reminded of Solomon Linda, the original composer of the song Mbube, which would come to be known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Originally composed in 1939 and recorded in South Africa by a White-run studio that hired Black engineers to try and push a particular type of ‘authentic’ but ‘sellable’ music, Linda’s family would not be compensated for the exploitation of his work until it was used in the popular Disney’s Lion King movie decades later (Milan, 2000). This meager compensation of course came decades after Linda’s death in poverty, and generations of trauma were lived by his family in the aftermath of their ancestor’s abuse.

This kind of exploitative drain on the resources of Black communities has parallels in many aspects of life across the African Diaspora, both in and beyond the arts. The racialization of Black Americans in particular has implications in socioeconomic status such as poverty (driven by the limitation of resources while profiting off our labor), exposure to violence, and hyper-criminalization, all of which are interrelated (Burch, 2014; Elsaesser et al., 2016). To put all this another way: America loves what its Black people produce but doesn’t have any particular love for Black people themselves.

So, it would seem we (Black people) must love and care for ourselves. We innovate means of supporting each other in aims of liberation from the kind of intersectional oppression described by the Combahee River Collective (1978), and promote healthy interdependence, with an emphasis on access to resources, and leadership of those most impacted by this oppression (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). In this sense, creativity becomes currency, a means of uplifting and sustaining our communities for ourselves, by ourselves. Our diasporic experiences are deeply interconnected, but not owned by any one singular facet of Blackness; they might instead be regarded as being in constant traffic across and between cultural lines and divides. It is from this point that we step into our current work.

In late 2019, after yet another in a series of tremendous – but informal – conversations with Black colleagues on the role of the arts and creativity in Black health and wellness, it occurred to me that perhaps other Black creatives within and beyond my social circle were having similar conversations. I began to think to myself that perhaps these discussions of innovation and affirmation could be shared on a broader scale. The result of this seedling thought was ‘Black Creative Healing,’ or BCH, a YouTube videoblog featuring conversations and collaborations between myself and other Black creatives regarding Blackness, creativity and the healing process.

Collaborators have been drawn from a variety of lived experiences in and outside of the creative arts, from the fields of social work and music performance, to literature, non-profit leadership and beyond. Between the initial public release of BCH’s first episode and the time of this publication, there have been five video collaborations, and the series has since been converted to an audio podcast hosted by the Black Music Therapy Network, cohosted by Adenike Webb. The current homepage of that podcast can be found at http://www.blackmtnetwork.org/black-creative-healing. This paper is an exploration into the first three BCH video collaborations, all of which are publicly available via https://tiny.cc/BlackCreativeHealing and were released as two-part episodes (subsequent to these, collaborations began being released as single stand-alone episodes).

Heuristic research involves self-inquiry of experiential phenomena (Moustakas, 1990). As conceptualized by Moustakas, who was a prominent originator of the American Humanist Psychology movement, the insights yielded from systematic personal exploration have the potential to serve as foundational building blocks for future phenomenological research (Mihalache, 2019). The key term here is systematic. Moustakas outlined six steps for ensuring the rigor of heuristic inquiry, including 1) initiatial engagement with the primary research question, 2) immersion with the intensity of the research topic, followed by 3) incubation and time away from said topic, then 4) spontaneous and natural illumination from the incubation process, 5) explicitation (explanation) of the resulting illuminations, and 6) creative synthesis, most often in the form of storytelling, as a means of relating findings (Moustakas, 1990). These steps, particularly the processes involving explanation and creative synthesis, lend themselves well to arts-based research, which frequently uses response art as a means of conveying or elevating data (Gerge et al., 2017). In fact, Gerge and colleagues lay out six steps of their own for encouraging vigor in arts-based research, which they call “Rx6”:

As I set out on my journey of self-inquiry towards investigating my own motivations, inspirations, roadblocks and desires in relation to the creative process as a Black healer, engaging in this arts-based methodology seemed the most natural way to interrogate my intentions and directional choices within a cultural context, as autoethnography seeks to do (Creswell, 2013). Essentially, I was (and am) seeking to define for myself a central ethos by which I could ultimately parse out an answer to the prompt initially posed by Zelda Lockhart, BCH Episode 3 collaborator, who asked, “How do you play when you’re prey?” My specific research questions were as follows:

For this project I chose to undertake the process of heuristic and autoethnographic investigation into the above questions in the following way:

Initial engagement and coding of each BCH episode was intentionally focused on any quotes or moments in each episode where my motivations, inspirations, intentions, or roadblocks to the creative process were discussed or otherwise illuminated, in order to essentially jumpstart my creative investigation into my research questions. The following results are thus organized in relation to these themes (motivation/ethos/inspiration, roadblocks/challenges, and intentions), with a final section before the discussion where I acknowledge these results in their totality with further creative synthesis relating to the sense of feeling ‘held’ in this work.

In considering how best to synthesize the above results together, it seemed natural to do so in a lyric video format, integrating all of the previous elements of distillation. That video can be found at https://youtu.be/w-DXD6a0Pug. The music from the song I had written in response to my collaboration with Zelda from Episode 3 provided the score, with lyrics displayed on the screen throughout the video. Lyrics are alternately presented against still photos from my syntheses of Episodes 1 and 2, or a background featuring various shades of an almost ocean-like blue-green color, animated to move in a wavelike pattern, intermixed with fresh video of me sitting and/or moving in response to the music. In the final minutes of the video I sit still in a meditative pose, with palms open on my lap, eyes closed initially, then opening to look directly into the camera. It is arguably the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done, to simply sit in presence with my camera, knowing that on the other side of that lens endless miniscule moments are being captured and will be viewed by who knows how many people, including people who may say “I don’t get this?” or “What is she doing?” or “This is ridiculous/terrible/I hate this person and everything about them.” I realize that last perspective might seem far-fetched to some readers, but when you are a Black woman on the internet, it is sadly not uncommon – and an experience I’ve had more than once – to become the target of unusually personalized vitriol from white supremacists (or advocates of white supremacy) online. And yet, I am also mindful in those vulnerable final minutes of my lyric video that that moment means something to me and may mean something to someone else. In fact, I am mindful in that moment that I am undoubtedly part of a lineage of people who have embarked on similar explorations. And so – as I gaze into the camera – I am really looking for, and at, them: the people who I know will understand, and sitting in certain presence with those who already do, and have understood this process, long before I thought to undertake this journey myself. Perhaps that, too – that vulnerability and sense of resolve amidst a sea of uncertain certainty – perhaps that is Blackness too. Perhaps that is how we play when we are prey.

What began as a YouTube videoblog featuring conversations and collaborations between myself and other Black creatives has yielded some much-needed affirmations for myself, and perhaps others too, through the creative heuristic and autoethnographic process I underwent to re-visit and interrogate my role as a Black creative.

In seeking to answer the broader query of “How do you play when you’re prey,” I’ve touched on three key areas from my more detailed research questions. Those areas included: motivation (why do I create), roadblocks, and placing my creative engagement in an intentional context. Reflected in discussions by Tarik (2018) and Rivera and Herard-Marshall (2019) on the origins of Black creativity are my motivations to embrace the historical and present complexity inherent in being a Black person. I feel myself as part of a lineage of creatives that have operated long before and well beyond the colonization of Africa’s land and peoples, with an ongoing commitment to lifelong studenthood that honors that lineage. I am forever honing the process of defining myself for myself, in hopes that my engagement and sharing of this process will help someone else to do it too. I am motivated to do this even through roadblocks similar to those threats of cooptation and exploitation described by Elam (2005) and Milan (2000), as I fear for the harm that is so often enacted on Black folks who speak or act in opposition to dominant narratives. I am constantly on guard against my creativity being weaponized against me, a scenario that sustains itself in an ongoing battle against self-sabotage amidst systemic threats.

Through all of this, I set very intentional boundaries around myself as a Black creative. I contextualize my work as an accessible protected space in which I—and any others who share that space with me—can be a whole person, in fluidity and vulnerability. Much like the care practices laid out by the Combahee River Collective (1978) and Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), I craft my work and the spaces in which it occurs with mindfulness towards ancestral wisdom and a view of a brighter future that can be co-constructed in community.

I feel this work also yields exciting possibilities for the future of creative exploration into the various communicational codes, acts of resistance, and innovation contained in, and perpetuated by, members of the African Diaspora since before – and beyond! – slavery and systemic oppression (Pyatak & Muccitelli, 2011; Towns, 2015). Dominant culture may never fully understand what it perceives of my – or other – embodied interpretations of Blackness (Elam, 2005). But I am held by the creative practices of my ancestors before me, and there is opportunity here – by engaging in further conversations and collaborations between Black creatives – to further enrich our understanding of creativity within the Diaspora and build stronger networks for more meaningful community connections. These connections can then serve to sustain the vital flow of our life-affirming innovations to – and for – the peoples who birth them.

This has implications well beyond the arts. Deeper and more firmly established connections within Black American communities in particular could impact individual and communal socioeconomic status through the visibility and interconnectedness of resources created by and for the community. It may also serve to disrupt the exposure to violence (or providing healthy opportunities for processing that exposure), that can so often lead to our hyper-criminalization and related harm (Burch, 2014; Elsaesser et al., 2016). In this way, our love for ourselves as members of the African Diaspora becomes a tangible form of community care (Combahee River Collective, 1978; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). On one level, a Black creative somewhere engaging with my work may find themselves feeling more seen and encouraged by an exploration of the Black self that is – and has been – prey yet is also known and held in ancestral love and community, by play. They may see in my vulnerability an invitation to hold their own, to look inward to their own fears and roadblocks with gentleness and find their own fire: their own lineage to tap into. Ultimately, on a deeper level, it is my hope to connect Black creatives to each other in our sense of being held – by each other, by our communities, and our ancestors, in ways that deepen our communal and ancestral bonds, and sustain the flow of creativity that affirms our path towards collective liberation. We deserve all of that, and more.

Natasha Thomas, PhD is a Board Certified Music Therapist (MT-BC) and Assistant Professor at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). She serves on the steering committee of the Black Music Therapists Network (BMTN) and co-facilitates the BMTN sponsored podcast “Black Creative Healing” with Adenike Webb. Natasha is also serving with Marisol Norris as co-editor of an upcoming special issue from the Journal of Music Therapy on equity & justice. Natasha is a committed advocate for creative & culturally sustaining support for marginalized communities. Her current research focus involves Black creativity, particularly identity construction and community care. Natasha’s research and clinical work are inclusive of emerging technology, as well as the perspectives of disability and queer identities, and the unique ways those perspectives and resources can intersect to impact quality of life, identity construction and meaning making.