“Backlash Blues”: A Tale of Devils, Moral Panic, and Deviance

In 1967, Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul released “Backlash Blues,” a sonic adaptation of Langston Hughes’s 1966 poem of the same name, “Backlash Blues.” Langston’s words, encased in Nina’s use of Black cultural artifacts such as a Delta blues, serve as testimony and defiance against the persistence of racial backlash. Racial backlash wreaks havoc on historically racialized communities and devastates access points of opportunity in ways that are imperceptibly cunning and violent. I assert that these acts of aggression are directly linked to White supremacy. Preservationists of White supremacy work tirelessly to preserve its function and potency by incriminating and projecting those who dare oppose it as “the problem,” “the devil,” or “folk devil”—a manufactured scapegoat portrayed as deviant in nature, diabolical in deed, and the source of social problems in times of improbability and moral panic. I situate Nina’s rendition of “Backlash Blues” as a framework of storytelling, consciousness, and oppositional voice to trace the contours of racial backlash in America from its earliest forms to contemporary times. To push out and against its enduring practice of selective amnesia, I employ call and response, an Afro-Diasporic tradition and feature of the blues to situate America’s twisted history of White supremacy alongside bold efforts that have repeatedly contested it on the battlefield for justice. I illuminate how those who wrestle daily with White supremacy strategize to eradicate its presence. In the spirit of Langston and Nina, “I’m gonna leave [White supremacy and its preservationists] with the backlash blues!”