Every year, the MacArthur Fellows Program awards its recipients a $625,000 “no strings attached” grant, an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential so they may continue to “exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.”
In 2021, 12 of the 25 “geniuses” that have been selected and were announced this week identify as Black.
Among them are historian Ibram X. Kendi, who founded and directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University as well as wrote the best-selling books How to Be an Anti-Racist (2019) and Stamped From The Beginning (2016), and civil rights activist Desmond Meade who helped strike down restrictive voting laws for formerly incarcerated citizens in Florida.
Artist Jordan Casteel, internet studies and digital media scholar Safiya Noble, biological physicist Ibrahim Cissé, art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood, film scholar, archivist and curator Jacqueline Stewart, and choreographer and dance entrepreneur Jawole Willa Jo Zollar are among the other 2021 MacArthur Fellows.
A full list (in alphabetical order) of the Black fellows and summaries of their work follow below:
Hanif Abdurraqib is a music critic, essayist, and poet using the lens of popular music to examine the broader culture that produces and consumes it. Many of the essays in Abdurraqib’s first collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), grew out of reviews and articles he wrote while a journalist; taken together, they form a deeply personal consideration of self-identity and the continued suffering inflicted on Black bodies at the hands of police and others. For example, he writes about attending a Bruce Springsteen concert days after visiting a memorial for Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and struggling to reconcile his technical appreciation of the music with the racialized and gendered stories told by the lyrics.
In his book Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019), Abdurraqib traces the three-decade history of the pioneering hip-hop group and its impact within the larger hip-hop movement. He writes with clear affection for the group, and his assessment of the social and political atmosphere in which it operated includes reflections on how those same forces shaped his childhood and his experience of the music.
Abdurraqib delves more deeply into historical research for his most recent book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021). His thought-provoking observations on key artists and cultural moments in music, film, dance, and comedy—ranging from William Henry Lane, a nineteenth-century minstrel dancer who performed for White audiences in blackface, to Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl appearance and the dance and music television show Soul Train—form a focused analysis of Blackness and a celebration of Black identity.
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