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      The Politics of Rihanna’s Pregnancy Style

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      When the right to control your own body and the right to dress how you like intersect.Ever since she announced her pregnancy in late January via Instagram and an artfully staged paparazzi shot of her and her partner ASAP Rocky strolling beneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, Rihanna’s maternity style has been marked more by what she has not worn than what she has.She has not worn tent dresses. She has not worn maternity jeans. In fact, she has barely worn much clothing at all.Instead she has bared her naked belly at seemingly every turn: in green draped fringe and ombré pants at a Fenty beauty event; in a bra, sheer blue top unbuttoned over her bump and low-slung gray jeans at the Super Bowl; in dragon-bedecked black pants, a vinyl bandeau and a crystal headdress at a Gucci show; in a sheer baby-doll dress over a lacy bra and panties at Dior; and, most recently, in a sheer organza Valentino turtleneck over a sequin skirt and bandeau at Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party.In the annals of public pregnancy, there has never been a display quite like it.Not surprisingly, the general reaction among celebrity watch sites has been a breathless swoon. “Rihanna Keeps Wearing the Hottest Maternity Looks Ever,” HighSnobiety crowed. “Rihanna Is Single-handedly Giving ‘Maternity Style’ a Rebrand,” Glamour U.K. sang.Rihanna at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in February.Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesAt a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in March.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by RihannaThey’re right, of course. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “the celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right?The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names; (2) what Ms. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines”; and (3) modern politics.All of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)After all, said Renée Ann Cramer, the deputy provost of Drake University and author of “Pregnant With the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump,” this is a time when “many people on the far right and even the mainstream right are promoting policies that challenge the continuing autonomy of women-identifying people over their bodies, lives and decision-making capacity.”At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week in March.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesBy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. Cramer said. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights.It’s a pretty radical move.The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries.In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane.It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness.It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.” Or so wrote Helen Charman in a review of the show in the international art magazine Apollo.ASAP Rocky and Rihanna at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week in February.Victor Boyko/Getty Images For GucciAfter the Rams Super Bowl victory in February.Ab/BackgridIt revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state.That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.”That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.And that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W; Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006; and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna.As the pregnant body became valorized for its life-giving potential, it increasingly became “a place of safe transgression,” Ms. Cramer said. And that meant that “it’s one of the few times women-identifying people can safely disrupt some norms.”At Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party in Hollywood.Ngre/BackgridProgressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.”Not so Rihanna. She has made confronting her pregnancy part of her every day. Or maybe more pertinently, our every day. “I was expecting the announcement,” Ms. Cramer said — perhaps even a few other, carefully calculated appearances. “But there has been no return to covering up.”Though it’s possible that this is a totally unconscious choice — maybe her skin is so sensitive that it’s uncomfortable to have anything on her belly — Rihanna herself has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty. Most obviously in her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, currently valued at around $3 billion.Indeed, her current approach may have been foreshadowed by her choice to have Slick Woods, at nine months pregnant, model in her first Savage X Fenty show in 2018 wearing only pasties and lacy lingerie. Famously, Ms. Woods went into labor on the runway, later posting “I’m here to say I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WHENEVER I WANT AND SO CAN YOU.” (There were some additional words in there to emphasize her point, but they cannot be printed in this newspaper.)Change the date and those lines could easily be the motto of Rihanna’s maternity wear. She did characterize her own pregnancy style as “rebellious.”Now the question, said Ms. Cramer, is whether “an overt celebration of embodied power through pregnancy can make a difference.” Can the “performance of a powerful pregnancy by a wealthy woman at the top of her game filter down” to change how all pregnancies are perceived?If so, Rihanna will have done a lot more than influence how pregnant women dress. She’ll have influenced how we think about the rights of women. Pregnant or not. More

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      An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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      The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More

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      One Last Takeaway From ‘The Slap’: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone

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      Lost in the Oscars fray is the hurt inflicted when a group is denigrated for a laugh. Chris Rock, who has examined this issue in a documentary, should have known better.While the Slap Heard Round the World has been vigorously debated and dissected since Will Smith confronted Chris Rock at the Oscars, there was more to the incident than its abrupt physicality.Rock’s joke, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s resulting eyeroll, echoed even more thunderously for Black women. Her glare encapsulated the fatigue and frustration that so many of us deal with in the complex daily feat of simply wearing our hair as we like. That Chris Rock would point to a Black woman’s hair for a joke left me breathless, and I wasn’t alone.“When Black women’s hair is mocked by comedians like Rock, he ushers in the everyday forms of microaggressive hatred against Black women that normalized blatant discrimination,” Ralina Joseph, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, said in an email interview.Black women’s hair has been the object of scrutiny, derision and ridicule in American society since it’s been growing out of our heads. Thanks to standards of beauty that for too long excluded us, we are arguably the largest demographic in the country whose hair is continually policed. Court cases document fights against school districts and corporations trying to govern how we can wear our hair. A segment of people who don’t live with it, in all its iterations of textures and lengths, somehow wants to dictate how and when it’s pretty, professional or unkempt.Distaste for Black hair seeps into our everyday lives: Just last month, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hair in hiring, public housing placement and public access accommodations. Let that sink in: Exclusionary actions stemming from disdain toward our hairstyles are so pervasive, they require legislation.Nowadays, visibility and a touch of glamorization in mainstream media (I’m lookin’ at you, Beyoncé), have fostered a growing fascination with our manes — a double-edged sword. Bosses scrutinize or give it a shout-out, strangers try to paw or photograph it, friends and frenemies praise or judge it — even Tinder prospects weigh in on it.Academic studies have outlined how strongly the identity of many Black women is tied to their hair. Not having the type of hair that’s affirmed and considered “womanly” in the culture at large can dent one’s sense of self. And feeling that what’s considered a key part of womanhood needs altering to be accepted, especially from childhood, makes it hard to see one’s image as positive.The Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith, who the academy said refused to leave following the incident, apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the academy denounced his actions.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.Since it’s hard to separate our image from our hair, poking fun at a Black hair style is an easy way to get a laugh while devaluing Black women. Witness Jamie Foxx lampooning us as Wanda on “In Living Color” and Martin Lawrence as Sheneneh. It’s incomprehensible that a Black comic would reach for it in such a high-profile setting as the Oscars — especially a man so closely associated with a film about Black women’s hair struggles.Not only did Rock produce and narrate the 2009 documentary “Good Hair,” which brought Black hair culture to the big screen, but he created it with his own daughters in mind. In the opening, he recounts how one of his girls asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Onscreen, he speaks to a range of women, including celebrities like Raven-Symoné, who explain that when they relaxed their hair, the goal was also about making society comfortable with them.Chris Rock in “Good Hair,” a documentary he narrated and produced.Roadside AttractionsWhile the film could have delved further into how Black women have thrived in a beauty culture (including a hair-care industry) that has rarely included them, it illuminated our struggle to audiences that may not have known one existed. It’s hard to understand how he could help bring that gem of a film to life and yet take a swipe at a Black woman’s hair. Did he so quickly forget the lessons of that film, which seemed to recognize how American society “otherizes” us and our tresses?Or, worse still, did the lessons never matter? Rock has a history of dogging not just Black women, but the entire Black community, or as Joseph calls it, “in-group punching down.”“Despite a brief ‘Good Hair’ moment. where he celebrated (and mocked) Black women, his punching down has also been broadly anti-Black woman,” she noted.Through his career, Rock has demonstrated a penchant for belittling and mischaracterizing Black women, from his ex-wife to female romantic partners in general. In a 1997 episode of “The Chris Rock Show,” he skewered Black women’s need to join the Million Woman March to his guest — Jada Pinkett Smith, a march participant.There’s another sensitive aspect to Rock’s dig at Pinkett Smith. In interviews and on her Facebook series “Red Table Talk,” she has chronicled her painful ordeal with alopecia, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. She initially concealed her hair loss under wigs. That she decided to shave her head and reveal the reason was to be commended, not jabbed at. To be clear: Whether Rock knew of her condition or not, the joke wasn’t hurtful only because Pinkett Smith deals with alopecia (an affliction to which “Good Hair” even devotes special attention). The insult added an extra layer of hurt, especially because Black women can be harsh on ourselves about hair, amid social pressures and Eurocentric beauty standards that we’ve internalized, often to an extreme degree.Generations of Black American women recall weekend afternoons spent watching an iron comb glow like molten lava on the stove burner. We waited for our mothers to wield the hot comb like a weapon, ready to press our thicket of coils into submission to make us more culturally palatable. Even at a young age, I wondered who I was supposed to be impressing.When I was deemed old enough, I “leveled up” to chemical straighteners that would frequently blister my scalp — all for a flouncy bob I detested. “Beauty is pain,” my hairdresser would chirp as she kneaded the chemical cream into my roots and I winced. In my mid-20s, I decided beauty wasn’t worth that pain, so I chopped off most of my hair and have since maintained a very short, natural style.“When Black women’s hair features as the butt of jokes, the very real and myriad forms of multiple marginalization against Black women is erased and even justified,” Joseph noted. “It hurts.”Even though the jokes at the expense of us and our hair predate Rock, we don’t need him to lead the way in turning up the savagery of the practice, let alone on Hollywood’s biggest evening.Like the director Jane Campion’s misstep a couple weeks ago at another awards show (which, sadly, also involved the Williams sisters, one of the focuses of the Will Smith film “King Richard”), this takedown of a Black woman stings even more for having been unleashed by someone who should know better — in Rock’s case, as a Black father of daughters; in Campion’s, as a woman who’s also probably dealt with sexist professional slights. But the result each time was the same: Black women were expected to smile and take the stab.In one sense, the entire Oscars to-do, and its flurry of embarrassment and apologies, could have been avoided by choosing not to drag a Black woman down by her hair. Yet for too many and for too long, it has felt irresistible not to mess with it, mess with us.So to anyone who ever feels the urge to mock, I’ll reframe Will Smith’s warning at the show: Keep the mention of Black women’s hair out of your mouth. More

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      The Psychic Contortions of the Black Billionaire

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The story is so good it hurts to hear. In an era of stupefying inequality, one of the most famous members of the upper class is a former drug dealer from a notorious public-housing project. He switched the product and rode CD sales to a new ZIP code. He went from nobody to somebody to a fixture in public consciousness who hangs out with a former president. If you’ve been rapping along with Jay-Z since “Reasonable Doubt,” or maybe even his feature on the early Jaz-O single “Hawaiian Sophie,” you’d be forgiven for seeing that star scream across the sky and thinking his song was right: There’s nothing you can’t do.But when the force of his flow isn’t in your ears, what he did seems impossible once again. He is not just rich; he is, according to Forbes, a billionaire. Rappers aren’t supposed to make that much money. For starters, part of the job is knowing how to spend it, and Jay-Z has done plenty of that. But also, rappers, like athletes, tend to have short careers — the genre reinvents itself too quickly for elder statesmen to hang on. And it is a cutthroat business. Get rich or die trying is the injunction for this heady mix of the mostly male, mostly Black, cocksure young musicians rehearsing punch lines in the nation’s ghettos, where making it very well might be a matter of survival. It is a dreamer’s music, by necessity. But more than four decades into the genre’s reign, there are levels now. Some artists get paid. Others acquire capital.This is an uncomfortable situation. According to a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve, the median family wealth for Black households is $24,100. (The median white household has nearly eight times that.) Somewhere in that data set are eight Black American billionaires, at least according to the Forbes list. Whether your politics lead you to believe that these eight are inspirations or a problem, the last several centuries of history might lead you to ask how it is even possible they exist. Four of them — Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Tyler Perry and Kanye West — made their names as entertainers. (There’s also Rihanna, who is a resident of the U.S. but not a citizen.) Rapper, as an occupation, appears more frequently on this short list than an Ivy League education does.Photo illustration by Ryan HaskinsIt is a strange fact of this country’s economic system that the most common way for Black people to become obscenely wealthy is to first become obscenely famous. Among other things, this means that much of their net worth is tied to the value of their public personas in ways that do not hold true for other billionaires. Whatever you think of Stephen A. Schwarzman, Miriam Adelson or even Bill Gates, their wealth is untethered to their Q Scores. Of course there are outliers. Elon Musk does relish playing to the crowd as the enfant terrible of auto manufacturing, generating an insulating admiration from his fans, but Kanye and Jay-Z are truly in a bind.For as long as it has existed, rap was, or was supposed to be, the crafted but splenetic outpouring of the dispossessed. At the same time, it has been about a life that most of its listeners cannot lead, but it held on, however tenuously, to its lower-class roots. Jay-Z always rapped as if he had the planet in his palm, even when it was really just a few blocks in Brooklyn. Over the years, he really did gain the whole world. And now a globally popular form of working-class youth music has, as its most powerful representatives, a pair of billionaires in their 40s and 50s. It has not been an easy balance to strike.Entertainers occupy a curious position where the lines between worker and owner sometimes blur. Rappers are signed to labels and then often open their own. Some of these labels collapse, often in a wave of recriminations about shady business practices. The contracts can control artists’ entire output, leaving them almost entirely dependent on the label to actually make something of their labor. Maximize revenue, cut labor costs. That, more than all the drug dealing said to take place, is the business world that produces many of these rappers. And they have, as often as not, leaned into this ethos. When they promise you that they’re reciting what they know, it is not really a reference to some social truth ripped from the depths of poor, Black neighborhoods. What they know is capital: What it is to have none, what it is to get a taste, what it takes to try to make peace with winding up on the other side of that divide.From the beginning, Jay-Z was a businessman. His debut album was released on the auspiciously named Roc-A-Fella Records, which he founded with two friends, Kareem Burke and Damon Dash. It made sense to have a piece of the action, because he helped popularize Mafioso rap, which took the bleak air of street-corner hustling and gave it the baroque mystique of gangster films. If there had not been a Black James Cagney or Francis Ford Coppola, there was at least a Shawn Carter. But the business world is brutal, inside and outside the law.At its peak in the ’00s, Roc-A-Fella featured a stacked cast: Just Blaze on production; the Philadelphia icons Beanie Sigel, Peedi Crakk and Freeway; the sprawling Dipset crew in Harlem; a young producer from Chicago named Kanye West. When Cam’ron appeared on the show “Rap City” in an oversize pink T-shirt, counting off a large pile of bills while freestyling that he’d “seen all islands, Cayman to Rikers,” it seemed unfathomable that the Roc era would ever end. But in a few years, Def Jam bought out the label’s founding partners and appointed Jay as the umbrella corporation’s president. Fights over shelved albums, loyalty, blocked promotions and due credit broke up what had looked like a street family.This led to a peculiar situation in which boardroom drama spilled out in the form of diss tracks by Def Jam artists aimed at their employer’s lead executive. Roc-A-Fella eventually folded. But still, to this day, Jay-Z owes much of his image as a business magnate to the dynastic sheen his labelmates gave “the Roc,” not to mention the marketers, graphic designers and interns that made them icons of New York street swagger.Jay diversified his portfolio in the years after that. He has a stake in Oatly, two separate highly valued liquor companies — Armand de Brignac Champagne and D’Ussé Cognac — several homes, the streaming platform Tidal, a club near Madison Square and an expansive art collection. If on his debut he spoke a little beyond his means when he said he was “well connected,” he has made it true. It is hard to think of a door he cannot open. Even as he has outgrown what made him Jay-Z, that project remains central to his business. He is the best rapper alive, the entrepreneur who made it out of the projects, the kingpin. The albums remind you why the Cognac is worth so much money.‘What’s better than one billionaire? Two. Especially if they from the same hue as you.’This situation is not unique. In the entertainment world, people must become corporations if they want to become truly wealthy. High-profile singers, athletes, actors and so on often make their real money from endorsement deals rather than their day jobs. What separates the billionaires from their peers is that they turned endorsements into equity. Michael Jordan gets a percentage of Nike’s Jordan brand revenue. Kanye, who owns the Yeezy brand outright, has major deals with Adidas and Gap. Winfrey and Perry have sprawling media concerns. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is a subsidiary of the LVMH luxury conglomerate.Many of these businesses could keep running without their famed figureheads, but the sheen would dissipate somewhat. Dell does not sell its computers by trading on the fact that it and its founder share a name. But without Kanye’s imprimatur, it’s hard to imagine Yeezy’s moon-boot look becoming a default sneaker silhouette. Fenty, by contrast, seems to have capitalized on a real gap in the market by broadening the available shades for foundation and concealer. Still, the entertainer-billionaire is as much the product as the shoe or concealer up for sale. From the outside looking in, this seems like a shaky foundation for a fortune so vast. Stars lose their luster all the time. It’s part of their appeal.On “The Story of O.J.,” from his latest album, “4:44,” Jay-Z raps about the psychic drama of successful Black Americans. In the animated video, his character tells his therapist that he failed to invest in Dumbo real estate early and missed out on a 1,250 percent return. Later he explains that art he bought for $1 million appreciated in value and is now worth 8. The song weaves back and forth between an examination of racial stereotypes and a guidebook to gaining freedom through asset ownership.You could hear Jay-Z, over time, growing more comfortable with his newfound status. On “The Black Album,” he rapped, “I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them, so I got rich and gave back, to me that’s the win-win.” It’s a defensive sentiment. The poor do help one another; there is often no other choice. That song is called “Moment of Clarity” — but nothing seems very clear at all. All the old signifiers, the ones linking public prominence and political progress, are slipping. They have to be reasserted from the top down. “What’s better than one billionaire? Two. Especially if they from the same hue as you,” Jay-Z rhymed on “4:44.” The ghetto’s music is starting to sound like prosperity gospel. Rap is relatable because the fan embodies the rapper. The “you” is rarely the listener, rather an invitation to adopt a new “I.” That “I” might get high, duck, dive, sling, get shot at and shoot back. But who is this “I” who accumulates such an immense sum of money, he starts to see things from the other side while insisting we’re still the same? The hue tells me nothing about what you’ve become.For once, through drive and circumstance, a few Black artists actually stand to be the main beneficiaries of the popularity of Black culture. On paper that might be progress. But two things remain clear: Black art sells, and wealth collects. Money pools in rooms that remain hard to get into. Years ago, Forbes magazine organized a meeting between Jay-Z and Warren Buffett, treating the rapper like the heir apparent. They both spoke about the role of chance. Buffett talked at length about being white, male and born in the U.S. at the right time. It was the discourse of what we would now call “privilege,” which feels like an understatement when talking about one of the wealthiest men alive. When Jay-Z spoke, he told a story about a nearly inseparable friend of his who was arrested during a sting operation. Jay-Z happened to be out of the country for an early recording date. His friend was incarcerated for over a decade. That’s luck, the vicious kind that fortunes are made of.Blair McClendon is a writer, an editor and a filmmaker in New York. His writing has appeared in n+1, The New Republic and The New Yorker. More

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      Michelle Materre, Champion of Black Independent Film, Dies at 67

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      Through her distribution company and an educational series, Ms. Materre was for decades a tireless advocate for underrepresented filmmakers.Michelle Materre, a distributor and educator who promoted Black women’s voices in film and released influential independent movies by Black creators, died on March 11 in White Plains, N.Y. She was 67.A friend, Kathryn Bowser, said the cause was oral cancer.Ms. Materre was an early proponent of independently released works by Black female directors, beginning at a time when diversity in independent film was far from the forefront of the cultural conversation.Her company, KJM3 Entertainment Group, worked on distribution for major films; one of its first projects was the marketing of Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Widely viewed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and said to have been the first feature film by a Black woman to have a wide release, “Daughters of the Dust” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2004.The New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in 2020 that “Daughters of the Dust,” which tells the story of Gullah women off the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia in the early 20th century, “has sent ripples of influence through the culture,” inspiring the imagery in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” and the director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic. Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” also regularly cites the film as an influence.Ms. Dash, in a remembrance for the International Documentary Association, wrote, “We remain forever grateful for Michelle and team KJM3 for the initial run of ‘Daughters of the Dust’ in 1992; it would not have been a success without them.”From left, Barbara-O Jones, Trula Hoosier and Alva Rogers in Julie Dash’s ‘“Daughters of the Dust,” one of the first films handled by Ms. Materre’s distribution company, KJM3 Entertainment Group.Cohen Media Group/Everett CollectionKJM3 Entertainment was formed in 1992 and released 23 films before it ceased operation in 2001. Another of the company’s most influential distribution efforts was “L’Homme Sur Les Quais” (“The Man by the Shore”) (1993), a drama by Raoul Peck, the Haitian auteur who went on to direct “I Am Not Your Negro,” the 2016 documentary about race in America based on the writings of James Baldwin.Ms. Materre’s passion for bringing unsung masterworks to wider audiences animated her career. In 1999, she started Creatively Speaking, an effort to package short films from underrepresented filmmakers into full-length programs organized thematically. It has grown into a major cultural player, holding regular screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and educational panels about diversity in filmmaking at the New School and elsewhere.“One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema, 1970-1991,” which compiled short films into a longer project, was one acclaimed Creatively Speaking project. In 2017, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it the most important repertory series of the year.In a 2019 interview for the New School, Ms. Materre said she started Creatively Speaking because she saw a lack of opportunity — a theme throughout her career.“I found that there weren’t very many outlets for filmmakers of color and women filmmakers who hadn’t reached the possibility of making feature films yet,” she said. “They were making short films — all these amazing short films, but nobody was ever seeing them.”Once she began producing these films, she added, “people gravitated towards them like crazy.”In the International Documentary Association tribute, Leslie Fields-Cruz, the executive director of Black Public Media, wrote that Ms. Materre “understood why Black films need special attention when it comes to distribution and engagement.”“There are multiple generations of filmmakers, curators, distributors and media arts administrators,” she wrote, “whose lives and careers have been impacted simply because Michelle took the time to listen and to care.”Ms. Materre, right, with Kathryn Bowser of KJM3 Entertainment, left, and Kay Shaw of the National Black Programming Consortium at the premiere of the film “Follow Me Home” in New York in 1997. Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMichelle Angelina Materre was born on May 12, 1954, in Chicago. Her father, Oscar Materre, was a Chicago firefighter and owned a paint business. Her mother, Eloise (Michael) Materre, was a real estate agent.She grew up in Chicago and attended the Chicago Latin School. She then earned a B.S. in education from Boston State College and a master’s in educational media from Boston College.In 1975, she married Jose Masso, a Boston public-school teacher. They divorced in 1977. She married Dennis Burroughs, a production technician, in 1990; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She is survived by her sisters, Paula and Judi Materre. Ms. Materre’s work at Creatively Speaking was centered in New York City; in addition to distributing films, she often organized panels and screenings of little-seen works like “Charcoal” (2017), the Haitian director Francesca Andre’s short film on colorism and skin lightening practices in the Black community.Ms. Materre consulted on the production and distribution of numerous films and served on the boards of the Black Documentary Collective, New York Women in Film and Television, and other groups promoting underrepresented filmmakers.In 2000 she began teaching at the New School in New York City, where her courses focused on diversity and inclusion in media.In a remembrance for The New School Free Press, Ms. Materre’s colleague Terri Bowles, with whom she taught a course at the New School, wrote, “She radiated a love of media and cinema, immersing her students, colleagues and friends in the vernaculars of the image, its myriad presentations and its critical importance.” More

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      Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race

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      With “Who We Are,” the lecturer Jeffery Robinson and the directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler follow in the tradition of documentaries that excavate our past.For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the country’s legacy since its founding. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,’” Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.”Reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick and wrote, “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.“Who We Are” partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, ‘Jeff, that’s really extreme.’” But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didn’t want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we don’t actually say what it is that we’re doing.ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama — until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.Robinson with Josephine Bolling McCall, the author of a book about her father’s lynching in Alabama in 1947.Jesse Wakeman/Sony Pictures ClassicsThe film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract don’t mean anything if you can’t connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, “There was a pile of bodies.” There was just a chill that went up and down my spine — this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your family’s, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we were all leaving. And he wasn’t going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that that gentleman could be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” There’s value in making the effort, there’s value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We can’t be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. There’s a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, “What is that, a breakfast cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information that’s in this film.This goes to the concept of “the minds of the rising generation.” All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we can’t teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the minds of the rising generation.”SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there’s an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nation’s history. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You don’t need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself. More

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      Will Smith’s Full Oscars Speech for Best Actor 

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      Will Smith, who started his acting career in 1990 in an after-school special on ABC and became one of Hollywood’s most bankable and prolific action stars and producers, finally achieved the one thing that had always eluded him: He won an Oscar.Moments earlier, Smith had brought the ceremony to an awkward standstill by striding onstage from his seat and — in what at first seemed like a preplanned bit — hitting Chris Rock, who had just cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. (“Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait,” Rock had said, an apparent reference to her short-cropped hair.)Smith then returned to his seat and angrily shouted twice at Rock to not utter his wife’s name, using an expletive that was bleeped by ABC. A rattled Rock tried to regain his composure, and a stunned audience, both in the theater and at home, tried to figure out what happened. “Right now, we’re moving on with love,” Sean Combs said, arriving onstage soon afterward to introduce a celebratory montage from “The Godfather.”Smith was celebrated for his performance in “King Richard” as the fiery, flawed coach and father of the tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams — mirroring best actor wins at major film awards ceremonies this year, including the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.“Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” an emotional Smith said in his acceptance speech. “In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world.”He went on to apologize to the academy and to his fellow nominees, but not to Rock. “This is a beautiful moment,” Smith said. “And I’m not crying for winning an award. It’s not about winning an award for me, it’s about being able to shine a light on all of the people.”Smith was previously nominated for best actor in 2007 for “The Pursuit of Happyness” and in 2002 for “Ali.” Rather incredibly, given the lack of diversity in the movie business, he lost to a Black actor in both instances: first to Denzel Washington and then to Forest Whitaker.In 2016, however, Smith became part of the #OscarsSoWhite movement. After nominating only white actors and actresses for its awards in 2015, drawing widespread criticism, the academy did it again the next year — overlooking performances like the one Smith gave in “Concussion.” Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, was outspoken about what many people saw as an urgent need for the academy to become more inclusive. Smith was less pointed in his criticism, but joined her in a boycott of the ceremony. In the years since, the academy has dramatically expanded its voting membership.Also nominated for best actor on Sunday were Washington (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”), Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”) and a hard-campaigning Andrew Garfield (“Tick, Tick … Boom!”).Here is Smith’s entire acceptance speech:Oh, man. Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world. Making this film, I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I’ve ever met. I got to protect Saniyya [Sidney] and Demi [Singleton], the two actresses that played Venus and Serena.I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. I know to do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse, you got to be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business you got to be able to have people disrespecting you, and you got to smile and pretend like that’s OK. But Richard Williams, and what I loved — thank you, D. — Denzel [Washington] said to me a few minutes ago, he said, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”It’s like, I want to be a vessel for love. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena — I just spit, I hope they didn’t see that on TV — I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That’s what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador for that kind of love and care and concern.I want to apologize to the Academy. I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. This is a beautiful moment, and I’m not crying for winning an award. It’s not about winning an award for me. It’s about being able to shine light on all of the people: Tim [White] and Trevor [White] and Zach [Baylin] and Saniyya and Demi and Aunjanue and the entire cast and crew of “King Richard” and Venus and Serena, the entire Williams family. Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father, just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things.To my mother, a lot of this moment is really complicated for me, but to my mother — she didn’t want to come out; she has her knitting friends, she has a knitting crew that she’s in Philly watching with. Being able to love and care for my mother and my family and my wife. I’m taking up too much time. Thank you for this honor. Thank you for this moment. And thank you on behalf of Richard and Oracene [Price] and the entire Williams family. Thank you. I hope the Academy invites me back. Thank you.Nancy Coleman More

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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More