Race Archives - Page 18 of 29

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Life Sentences

Opening remarks from the Conference on Incarceration and the Humanities

November 30, 2017 • by N. D. B. Connolly

Now, you could imagine the horrors of a colonial prison in a black, economically depressed country like 1930s Jamaica, just as you can imagine the nightmare that the sound of wailing men might conjure in the mind of a nine-year old child like my grandfather. Even the most benign administrative ...

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An Unreasonable Standard

Reconsidering law, race and police violence

November 13, 2017 • by Jennifer M. Page

Wilcox escaped the Coburns, but 30 minutes later, was confronted by another police officer, Jesse Kidder. Wilcox left his vehicle and ran at Kidder. “Shoot me, shoot me,” Wilcox said again and again, still running forward. “I don’t want to shoot you, man,” yelled Kidder as he backed up. Wilcox ...

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What We Really Learned in Charlottesville

Finding a Way Forward

November 9, 2017 • by Andrew Boyer

By the standards of today’s whiplash news cycles, the coverage was in-depth and lasting. The media did not move on from the issue so much as it overexerted itself and wearily stumbled on to the Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Trump’s DACA repeal. When the dust settled, nearly everyone agreed ...

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#BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

What active citizenship can look like and what it can accomplish

November 8, 2017 • by Deva Woodly

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison 1787 “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.” – Ella Baker 1964[1] Social movements are often regarded as potentially hazardous disruptions, uprisings that interfere with the normal mechanisms of politics -- insurgencies that must be either repressed or swiftly re-incorporated into the regular legislative process. In ...

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Towards Our Fugitive Striving

A Note from the Editors

November 6, 2017 • by Deva Woodly and Christopher Paul Harris

The Context We understand that race is made through the brutal craft of white supremacy: a political, social, economic, and interpersonal formation that both requires and produces anti-blackness to sustain itself. Equally clear to us is that racial “knowledge,” in all its forms, continues to structure our collective experience, both in ...

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The Case for Curiosity in the Fight Against Anti-Blackness

Why We Need a Beginner’s Mind

October 26, 2017 • by Shanelle Matthews

In part, the dearth of curiosity about Black people is a direct result of the ways in which anti-Blackness and white supremacy obscure Black people’s inherent value and worth. In the face of this reality, we have to find a way to build and broaden people’s curiosity about Blackness anyway. ...

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The Virality of Patriotic Antiracism

Combat Veterans and Geopolitical Racism

October 25, 2017 • by Amir Sadeghi

Today, however, the struggle to destabilize the institutional fabric of disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and wealth inequality risks being buried by viral images of combat veterans “taking a knee,” or the children of service members killed in combat signaling their support for the “cause.” Generally speaking, it has become patriotic to stand ...

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Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Fate

A response to Keval Bhatt

October 22, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

In a stirring, passionate, and bracingly clear recent contribution to the ongoing Charlottesville thread in our “Power and Crisis” vertical, University of Virginia student Keval Bhatt accounts for his decision to join others in shrouding the famous, indeed iconic, statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University. I ...

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Before Charlottesville

An interview with Carolyn McAllaster on the Greensboro Massacre of 1979

October 21, 2017 • by Carolyn McAllaster

Carolyn McAllaster, the Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor of Law and director of the HIV/AIDS Policy Clinic, said the events in Charlottesville and the president’s response to them sparked memories of the Greensboro Massacre in which five protestors died and 11 were injured even before news of the apology broke. ...

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Why Do You Call Us Ladies?

History, gender, and manners in public life

October 18, 2017 • by Jessica Halem and Jen Manion

Consider the story of Abigail Adams and her most famous quote. When Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” as he drafted the Declaration of Independence, she was not advocating for the rights of American women who were predominantly poor, indentured, and enslaved. Rather, she called specifically ...

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Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?

Remolding our Political Aesthetics

October 17, 2017 • by Gordon Mantler

The contrast between the two is striking and one reason why I take students there. The Emancipation Memorial, designed by Thomas Ball, portrays a stern Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling, newly freed black man. In one of Lincoln’s hands is the Emancipation Proclamation; the other floats above the prone ...

Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?

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Triangulation is the Not-So-New Black

Party Coalitions, Racial Scapegoating and the Carceral State

October 10, 2017 • by Daniel Kato

Bill Clinton vilified African-Americans with his draconian crime bill while pushing for economic deregulation policies that he hoped would woo Republicans while also not upsetting the labor base of the Democratic Party too much. By the time Obama came around, African-Americans went from being vilified by the Democratic Party to ...