‘These past 500 years have not been without cost to our humanity but can the survivors of the African Diaspora lay claim only to the judgment of Ham? Is our colour a curse from a malevolent God? Or is it inscribed with death by the wish and the will of the dominant culture?’ Lubaina Himid’s hard-hitting rhetorical questions cut to the heart of her protest aesthetic by coming to grips with the omnipresent realities of white supremacy as a body-and-soul-destroying force that bleeds through every aspect of an African diasporic social, political and cultural imaginary. ‘After all, it was they who inscribed Africans with their notion of negritudinal darkness to offset their self-attributed whiteness’, she insists. Himid holds the racist hate of a white-dominant culture to account for perpetuating acts of discrimination and persecution against the ‘survivors of the African diaspora’. As she unequivocally demonstrates, white western society alone is responsible for inventing the racist ‘notion of negritudinal darkness’ as an entirely fabricated construction that was created solely to define an illusory and mythic imagining of a ‘self-attributed whiteness’. Faced with these traumatising realities, she is categorical in her conviction that ‘Black was an act of Self-naming’. For Himid, a determination to bear witness to acts and arts of Black self-naming interrogates the stranglehold exerted by a white racist mainstream imaginary which shows no sign of abating, especially on the enduring battleground that is white western art history.

Staging her own radical and revolutionary acts of ‘Black self-naming’ as well as self-imaging and self-representing, Himid takes the white racist biases of a dominant art world to task. Writing of her repeated reimaginings of the Black male figure gesticulating for aid after a shipwreck in the French painter Théodore Géricault's epic work, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), she confirms:

By way of providing further context for her decision to paint this ‘invisible’ figure, she explains that ‘[t]he accident of discovering the signalling negro came when I was 40 in 1994 having been painting seriously for 12 years’.