‘DO you see yourself as a man first, or as black first?” asks the African American man.
Another next to him offers an answer: “The first thing I see in the morning is a black man.” To his right, a third man, also African American, nods slightly as he listens.
In a darkened room in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the three men were engaged in a frank question-and-answer conversation about what it’s like to be a black male in America today. It is part of a video display, “Question Bridge: Black Males” that is on view through May 1.
The dialogue spans the gamut of how the men feel about common stereotypes leveled at black people, what it means to have a black president in Barack Obama — even how they feel about having romantic relationships with white women.
Other black men, both young and old, rich and poor, joined in as the discussion about which identity each considers most prominent progressed.
“It’s hard, coming up in America, to divide black from anything, my manhood … for me to define myself entirely as a man, sure I could do that, but that’s not really the reality of it,” said Danny Simmons, a 62-year-old from New York City.
“I identify first as a man, and then as a black man. As an American man. My family is from the Caribbean,” said another New Yorker, 47-year-old Michael Liburd. “So I define myself as a man first, then define my ethnicity from that.”
Then, another question: “If all the whites were gone, who would you be?”
“You would be a human being,” answered Johnnie Muhammad, a 54-year-old Chicago man, who noted the concept of being black only exists because of white people’s historic position of supremacy in the world. “Our blackness has been defined as something inferior, as something less than white.”
He said the better question in that context would be “If white world supremacy was gone, would we have to mention black?”
Others disagreed.
“I think we unfortunately would still find ways to divide ourself along all kinds of lines,” said Jabari Mahiri, 67, of Oakland, California. “We’ve seen it occurring in a variety of countries in Africa, where white people aren’t present. What I hope I would be is a human working toward a less divisive set of ways of being in the world with other people.”
Observing their conversation for a while, the fluidity with which it took place — questions posed, honestly answered, call and response — belies the fact that none of these men were actually in the room. In fact, most of them had never even met.
The discussion took place virtually, across five video panels running simultaneously on a projector screen. The interviews with the men — more than 160 of them — were conducted over the course of years in nine cities by four artists, Chris Johnson of Oakland, Hank Willis Thomas and Bayete Ross Smith of New York, and Kamal Sinclair of Los Angeles.
Over the course of the roughly three-hour long documentary, which was edited to give the illusion that the men were actually listening and responding directly to each other, even though they were apart in both time and distance, they mulled over topics including how to stop the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and what to do if police are stopping, obstructing or harassing them. Other questions covered cultural specifics — why black women treat them differently than women of other races, whether they’re afraid to eat chicken and watermelon in front of white people.
Many of the questions were pointedly blunt, and one of the artists, Johnson, a professor of photography at the California College of the Arts, said that was exactly the intention.
Johnson developed an earlier version of the documentary based on interviews with African Americans of different economic classes: upper-class black men from New York asking questions of and answering those of black men living in the ghettos of San Diego, for instance, he said.
The goal was to showcase their divisions and the variety of opinions, beliefs and views among the black community, to shatter the notion that they could all be defined in one monolithic way.
“I wanted to get members of each of those demographics and get them to ask questions of each other,” Johnson said. “I went to doctors and lawyers who were black and said, ‘I know you have some questions you want to ask (lower-class black people). Because it was just me and a camera, I got some really probing questions, like do you know where welfare comes from, and do you even care?”
Johnson said those interviews produced a powerful hour-long documentary, which Thomas, a former graduate student of his, happened upon years later and proposed collaborating on a new version.
“He injected two very powerful ideas,” Johnson said. “One was that we do it only with black men, instead of the black community, and the second was that we do not predict what the divisions between black men are. I was working on the premise that economic division was it, but he said, ‘Just let them define themselves.’ ”
He said he hopes viewers of the exhibit will walk away with a vastly different notion of what a black man is.
“I want them to walk out with a different understanding of the black male conscience, to change perceptions of black men,” he said.
Eva Fierst, the museum’s education curator, said the “Question Bridge” exhibit can be defined as a piece of social justice art.
“Social justice is something that’s increasingly being practiced in art,” Fierst said. “There was a time when it was … not so much. But in the last five to 10 years, it’s become really prominent.”
Fierst said the exhibit builds upon another exhibit that the museum hosted in 2013, “DuBois in Our Time,” which focused on the life, legacy and modern relevance of W.E.B. DuBois, a prominent African American scholar and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, and the university’s library is named after him.
“When we saw this, we thought it was the perfect continuation of the subject matter of that exhibit,” she said.
As relevant as the “Question Bridge” exhibit is to current events around the country — the shooting death of Michael Brown and the protests and riots in Ferguson, Mississippi, and Baltimore that followed over publicized police shootings involving mostly young black men, the emergence and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and an explosion of debate about race relations in America — Fierst said the exhibit had actually been planned in advance of most of those developments.
“We didn’t know that would happen when we planned it, but we’re very happy it has come to us, because we find that it is really relevant,” she said.
Johnson, the artist, said his team also did not expect the exhibit to hold as much relevance to the current national climate as it does in the wake of those developments, and he laments the fact that it does.
“I hoped it would not,” he said. “We do these projects so we don’t have to do them again down the road. When we began creating it in 2007, we had no idea that innocent black men being killed by police [would become] the kind of news that it has, so it’s a really timely and untimely coincidence that it has such resonance in these times.”
Johnson said besides the dialogue and method of fostering understanding that the exhibit represents, he hopes it will spawn a second positive outcome.
“I hope to see this methodology applied to many other social problems,” he said. “There can be a ‘Question Bridge,’ colon black women, or colon Native Americans. But those groups have got to do it themselves, I can’t do that because making a safe space for people to ask questions is what it’s all about.”
To facilitate that, the museum has set up two lounges separate from the main exhibit for visitors to sit and discuss what they’ve seen or to participate in the project themselves. The former is a small room filled with couches and chairs where discussion can be had in a comfortable setting, Fierst said.
“We knew because of how this exhibit is that people would want to have discussion,” she said. “It opens up a lot of eyes for people when they’re done.”
The latter includes a stool in front of a mounted iPad tablet where black men can sit, ask their own questions and answer others. Those clips are sent to the artists to be incorporated into an interactive website.
A computer station has been set up in the same room to allow visitors to surf that website.
“Question Bridge: Black Males” will be on view at the University of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art through May 1. Museum hours are Tuesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 :30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m. The museum is closed for spring break, through March 20.