Race Archives - Page 19 of 30

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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 ...

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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

Sept. 30, 2017 DC

October 4, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

Black Women First! Black Women First! Shouted several thousand people as they marched up Pennsylvania Ave. from the Capitol on September 30. They were leading two marches, which started at two different points on Capital Hill before joining to march to the Department of Justice on 10th St. There they planned to turn south to go to ...

March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

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‘Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race’ by Clay Cane

A book review

September 23, 2017 • by Kevin Ewing

In 1991, filmmaker, educator, and gay rights activist Marlon Riggs told Outlook magazine: “When the existing history and culture do not acknowledge and address you -- do not see or talk to you -- you must write a new history, shape a new culture that will.” He called for Black lesbian and ...

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Empire, Epidemics and Visions of Racial Apocalypse

The Precursors of Contemporary Xenophobia

September 21, 2017 • by Alexandre White

In the numerous violent clashes the book depicts, like the one in which Belgian soldiers stationed in consular offices in India massacre thousands of advancing migrants, murder is depicted in orgiastic fashion while officers recite the victories of great conquerors past to raise morale -- tales of crusading knights slaying ...