Denzel Washington, Flight and ‘New Negro Exceptionalism’
His motivation might be very well linked to a generational trait in which he has found himself; As his forefathers policed and categorized black images with brush strokes via “good vs. bad” or “positive vs. negative” binaries, Whip, a stone cold alcoholic, works really hard to project a positive image against fanning the fire of popularized and mediated black pathology.
Whip is the son of a Tuskegee airman who, after the Second World War, continued flying planes for his crop dusting business in Georgia. As Whip’s dad was a Tuskegee airman, it is highly probable his father and grandfather both would have been imbued by the ideology of the New Negro spearheaded by Booker T. Washingtonamong others.
This movement was about laying the enslaved “old negro image” to death and reviving a “new negro image” predominantly by projecting and underscoring a highly positive imagery signified by “education, refinement, and money.” In his 1900 anthology, A New Negro for a New Century, Booker T. Washington states:
“The negro of today is in every phase of life far advanced over the negro of thirty years ago. In the following pages the progressive life of the Afro-American people has been written in the light of achievements that will be surprising to people who are ignorant of the enlarging life of these remarkable people.”
Military success by Black Soldiers on the battlefields—in the civil war, WW1 and others—was a key component of the New Negro image. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains, “of this anthology’s eighteen chapters, no less than seven are histories of black involvement in American wars…” Living up to the New Negro image and exemplifying a masculine military might, Whip’s father would have ultimately added to the project of creating a purely positive representation.