“What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?”

Amandla Stenberg in Love is the Message, The Message is Death

In Love is the Message, The Message is Death Jafa draws primarily from found video footage, to create a dazzling, deeply emotional sequence of images that trace African American identity from the Jim Crow era (1870’s) to the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri (2014). The film’s many protagonists exist along a spectrum of fame, status, and notoriety: some are well-known, others anonymous, with a few belonging to Arthur Jafa’s immediate family as well as his wider personal, creative, and intellectual community.  

Set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired hip-hop anthem Ultralight Beam (2016), in the work Jafa juxtaposes images that are plucked out of their regular context to endow them with new meaning through their careful composition and sequencing. From President Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace after nine Black Americans were killed by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina (2015) to an anonymous couple holding each other amid Hurricane Katrina floodwaters (2005), Jafa’s video plays scenes of Black joy and suffering not as parallels, but intersections. Glorious moments in history, victories in sport, the freedom of improvised jazz and the expressiveness of hip-hop, are interlaced with police violence and racism on the streets, presenting great cultural achievements together with the extreme pain, bliss, hope, tragedy, and injustice of the Black American experience. 

For the sequencing of these images, “things” from disparate contexts, time frames and histories are put in proximity to one another. With this editing gambit, Jafa creates a renewed tension and energy by placing images in what artist and filmmaker, John Akomfrah calls “affective proximity”. This concept proposes that there is a kind of friction generated by the proximity of images with the same subject, but with different contexts. Their meaning is derived from their juxtaposition and the viewer is affected by the emotional charge associated with it. Working in affective proximity allows Jafa to disrupt expectations around objectivity and continuity.  

The pacing of the video’s visual and sonic material is based on a strategy derived from African American music, what Jafa calls “Black Visual Intonation.” This technique of manipulating frames—through subtle slow motion or acceleration— is used to emphasize certain parts of movements. Through experimental editing practices, Jafa emulates the way that jazz musicians play around the beat and outside of the diatonic scale in order to disrupt the viewer’s experience of time.

Jafa’s film speaks to a dualistic tension flagged, most obviously, in the title. But it’s not just the conflict between Love and Hate or Life and Death: it’s between the enormous, in some ways unrivalled prestige accorded to so many aspects of Black culture (particularly in music and sports, but also in protest and activism) and the persistent facts of racism, injustice and inequality. One of the fundamental questions the video raises is articulated by actress Amandla Stenberg: “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?”