The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter

2021 ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Dana Francisco Miranda

Since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the United States has seen the coalescing of black protestors and activists along with their multiracial collaborators under the banner of Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This struggle against racialized violence, police brutality, and white supremacy has been witnessed in myriad ways, with two of its most prominent “reactions” occurring in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Within this struggle, the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) has chosen to follow a “leader-full” model that replaces traditional hierarchical forms of leadership for that of collaboration and decentralization. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the competing notions of centralized and decentralized leadership within black liberation movements to better understand this model. Using the works of Barbara Ransby, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Frantz Fanon, this work will explore forms of black leadership that articulate alternative modes of accountability, service, and well-being within the struggle for black livability.

Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew V. Kiang ◽  
Alexander C. Tsai

AbstractBackgroundThe horrific nature of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis Police Department officer on May 25, 2020 has sparked more than a month of nationwide protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. At critical junctures of the nation’s public health such as these, academic medical institutions may exert leadership by issuing public statements to communicate institutional values.MethodsWe obtained statements issued by 56 leading U.S. medical schools relevant to George Floyd’s killing and subsequent protests. We tokenized statements into words, n-grams of sizes 2 and 3, and sentences; removed non-informative stop words and words that would compromise de-identification; and stemmed the remaining words using the Porter algorithm. We followed a predefined set of rules for identifying important elements of these statements related to leadership in antiracism and public health.ResultsNearly all named George Floyd (50 [89%]), a majority noted the role of racism (43 [77%]) and acknowledged the Black community specifically (41 [73%]). Fewer ╌ slightly more than half ╌ referenced the act resulting in Floyd’s death (31 [55%]) or made explicit reference to the police (29 [52%]). Only 7 (13%) explicitly used terms denoting active support, like “antiracism” or “Black Lives Matter.” Most (45 [80%]) included references to negative sequelae resulting from racism like “disparities” or “inequality”. All included hopeful language.ConclusionOnly a minority of institutions made reference to the killing of George Floyd by the police, and most failed to address this country’s targeted, historically engrained, and sustained oppression of Black people through white supremacy. Thus, our study identifies significant opportunities for U.S. medical schools to exert meaningful leadership in health.


2016 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon R. Byrd

The emergence of Black Lives Matter has introduced a language of black liberation to a new generation of students. In doing so, it has provided an opportunity for historical study. Teacher-scholars can and should take advantage of the renewed interest in systemic threats to black life in the United States when teaching about past victims of state-sanctioned violence including Celia, an enslaved teenager executed for killing her master after years of sexual abuse. In doing so, they can not only draw useful connections between the past and present but also lay the foundations for a more meaningful study of black radicalism and black resistance in the United States.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 645
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Mayer

In the reinscribing of white supremacy in the United States, the contemporary university as a place of exclusion presents a problem of religion. Approaching religion as “the search for depth” and addressing the “techno-myths” of betterment, longevity, and the rituals of enacting these myths that capture today’s social imaginaries, this paper proposes an alternative to religious faith in “rising” and the rhetoric of the contemporary American technocratic-meritrocratic paradigm. Adopting the posthumanist methodologies of reflexivity and diffraction, the author argues for an embodied catholicity of the university as a community, an open system rather than a pre-formed locus to which racially minoritized students are “added” or “included”. In advancing the co-creativity of a Catholic-pluriversal university via an ethic of love and care, the author presents a Christian spirituality that is itself a technology that offers the hope of enacting a more life-giving congruence between the sacred and the secular than the myth of Manifest Destiny and the racialized violence that is the continued manifestation of that mythos. Embodied in the posthuman mystic’s practices of “re-memory,” the author presents Christianity as a performative-pluralistic religion of evolution, one of common action with the potential to draw into something new the energies of creativity in today’s university.


Author(s):  
Walda Katz-Fishman ◽  
Jerome Scott

We analyze class, race, and revolution in the United States through Marxist theory and philosophy, and the experience and lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League) in the auto and related plants and community in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The League brought the black liberation movement to the point of production. They grasped the dialectics and interpenetration of class exploitation and racial oppression within capitalism, and the strategic centrality of white supremacy for ruling-class profit and control. Their struggle embodied the unity and interrelation of theory and practice and the necessity of becoming proletarian intellectuals. The League came to Marxism-Leninism as the theory most closely related to their practice as workers at the point of production. Armed with the weapon of Marxism, former League members stayed the course through the stages of capitalist development—from Detroit as the epicenter of global capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the technological shift from labor-enhancing to labor-replacing automation and robotization in the plants, to the deepening capitalist crisis, economic, ecological, and social destruction, and intensifying militarism and fascism in the twenty-first century. For over fifty years, they were part of the leadership of the multiracial, multinational, and multigendered working class in the 1960s, and they remain active within the twenty-first century’s rising movement. Former League members consistently lift up the strategic direction and class unity necessary for revolutionary transformation in the interests of the working class, and for the survival of humanity and the planet.


2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-94
Author(s):  
James F. Keenan

The Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to awaken the rest of the United States to its failure to recognize systemic racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. With a keen awareness of racism as structural, this article first considers the pervasiveness of systemic racism in the church and then investigates how in the United States anti-blackness was first documented as the color line, then as racism, and now as caste. Recognizing these social structures, it concludes by considering virtues and practices that could help in decentering the dominant caste in its expression of white supremacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G. Reddie

This article speaks to existential challenges facing Black people, predominantly of Caribbean descent, to live in what continues to be a White dominated and White entitled society. Working against the backdrop of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that originated in the United States, this article analyses the socio-political and cultural frameworks that affirm Whiteness whilst concomitantly, denigrating Blackness. The author, a well-known Black liberation theologian, who is a child of the Windrush Generation, argues that Western Mission Christianity has always exemplified a deep-seated form of anti-Blackness that has helped to shape the agency of Black bodies, essentially marking them as ‘less than’. This theological base has created the frameworks that have dictated the sematic belief that Black bodies do not really matter and if they do, then they are invariably second-class ones when compared to White bodies. In the final part of the article, the author outlines the ways in which Black theology in Britain, drawing on postcolonial theological and biblical optics, has sought to critique the ethnocentrism of White Christianity in Britain in order to assert that ‘Black Lives Do Matter’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aya Esther Hayashi

We in the United States are living in the midst of two pandemics: Covid-19, which is affecting communities of color at an absurdly disproportionate rate, and a renewed spate of murders of Black people at the hands of police. They reveal the depths of racial inequity and injustice in our country. This is a crisis—a turning point where many of us are wondering what we can do better and how we can be better. For us in fan studies, will we finally face the white supremacy embedded in our discipline and take steps to become an antiracist discipline?


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassidy Bibo ◽  
Julie Spencer-Rodgers ◽  
Benaissa Zarhbouch ◽  
Mostafa Bouanini ◽  
Kaiping Peng

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
Kristine Brown ◽  
James Sturges

With the continued influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States, especially to Southern California, health concerns and needs have increased among this population over the last several years. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) obtained a federal grant that provided resources to establish the Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC). COPC consists of comprehensive efforts to improve the overall well-being of the Angela Chanslor area within the City of Pomona in East Los Angeles. Focus areas of the project include 1) Education and Integrated Services, 2) Community Planning and Capacity Building for Neighborhood Revitalization and Safety, and 3) Job Development and Training. The focus of this paper is health promotion activities within Education and Integrated Services. The primary objective of this portion of the program was to provide residents with physical examinations and health screenings, health education, and medical and social service referrals. Topics discussed are the target community, general overview of COPC, Family Services Information and Referral Program (i.e. health promotion program within Education and Integrated Services), program impact and results, and suggestions for continued implementation and future efforts. / Con la influencia continua de inmigrantes Mexicanos a los Estados Unidos, especialmente al sur de California, ciertas necesidades con respecto a la salud han incrementado en esta poblacion en los ultimos anos. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). Obtuvo ayuda Federal para establecer El Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC). El centro COPC consiste de esfuerzos conprensivos para mejorar el bienestar del area Angela Chanslor que esta ubicado en la Ciudad de Pomona en la parte Este de Los Angeles. Las partes enfocadas del proyecto incluyen, 1) Educacion y servicios Integrados, 2) Plan para la Comunidad y un Edificio de Capacitacion para la comunidad que dara revitalizacion y seguridad, 3) Y habrira trabajos y entrenamientos. El enfoque de este proyecto es de actividades en Promocion de Salud aliadas con educacion y Servicios Integrados. El objetivo principal de esta porcion del programa era de proveer a los residentes con examinaciones fisicas, educacion para la salud, y eran referidas a servicios medicos y sociales. Los topicos que son tratados son: La comunidad que sera ayudada, El enfoque general de COPC, informacion del programa para referir a servicios familiares, el impacto del programa y resultados, y sugerencias para implementar futuros esfuerzos.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document