It features a peculiarly African-American twist on Marx’s and Engels’s observations about capitalism’s commodity-fetish effect—the transformation of a marketable object into a magical thing of desire. It is my belief that capitalism’s original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time.

It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased—an operation that explains not only the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proferred and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes, and bucks, in Donald Bogle’s coinage), but the American music industry’s never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, Pink, Eminem—all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure.

It is with this history in mind that African-American performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith once posed the question: Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?