scholarly journals State Racism, State Violence, and Vulnerable Solidarity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myisha Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Law

What makes #BlackLivesMatter unique is the implication that it isn’t only some black lives that matter, that is, not only the mostly commonly referenced male lives. Rather, the hashtag suggests that all black lives matter, including queer, trans, disabled, and female. This movement includes all those black lives who have been marginalized within the black liberation tradition, as well as in greater society. The movement highlights the ways in which black people have been traditionally deprived of dignity and human rights. State racism and state violence are sustained together. The law creates a “subrace” out of those whom white society fears and holds in contempt. This leaves not only black Americans, but all citizens vulnerable. A way to fight this form of racism is not only to create a solidarity among the oppressed members of the subrace but to create a solidarity with all members, in “vulnerable solidarity.”

William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Law ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Case Basis

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

Black Lives Matter and the Struggle for Freedom

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Brian P. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Incremental Change ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black President ◽  
Black Movement ◽  
New Phase

In late April 2016, at a town hall-style event in London, President Obama complained about the rising movement against the state-sanctioned murder of black people often referred to as Black Lives Matter. Activists, he admonished, should "stop yelling" and instead push for incremental change through the official "process."… The spectacle of the first black president scolding black activists in the context of a rising rate of police murder (as of this writing, the police have killed 630 individuals, at least 155 of them black, nationwide in 2016) speaks volumes about the state of black politics today.… For those trying to understand the emergence of a new black movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a new phase of a longer, older movement—on the watch of the first black president, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential starting point.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

A House Divided Now on Fire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caron E. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Law

The violence against black people in the United States, as witnessed particularly in the shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of John Crawford III in Ohio, indicates the anxiety over the changing social order from white patriarchal to a more diversified locus of power. Therefore, it conducts a discourse analysis of texts, such as the Blue Lives Matter website, that reactively and defensively support the law enforcement community and refute the Black Lives Matter narrative. The discourse analysis reveals a level of anxiety that allows those within the police community to scapegoat the Black Lives Matter movement, further revealing the need of this particular community to maintain hegemonic race relations: thereby failing to recognize the vulnerability of black people in the United States.

scholarly journals Closing Remarks

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Hoag
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The Law

On November 20–21, 2020, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law hosted a virtual two-day symposium entitled How the Law Underdeveloped Racial Minorities in the United States. Broadly, the theory of underdevelopment looks at the standard of life in a nation as a measure of that country’s economic conditions. The application of this theory in the context of the law and as a measure of the quality of life of racial minorities stems from Professor Manning Marable’s work on capitalism and the economic and social conditions of Black Americans. In her Closing Remarks, Professor Alexis Hoag provided context for the contemporary application of Professor Marable’s theory in light of current events, exploring the Coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the 2020 Presidential Election. She then introduced carceral abolition as a theoretical and practical framework to understand the law’s underdevelopment of Black people and to help address the criminal legal system’s disparate impact on racial minorities.

scholarly journals Black Lives Matter! Nigerian Lives Matter!: Language and Why Black Performance Matters

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Adelakun
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Production

This essay explores performance as a language by looking at its appropriation by other cultures, and the associated history of the crafted phrases that are borrowed along. I start by noting that to create awareness of the massacres that have recently occurred in some parts of Nigeria, commentators, both in and out of the country, and activist-cum-protesters created the term “Nigerian Lives Matter.” They appropriated from “Black Lives Matter,” the American-originated advocacy movement that campaigns against violence and brutality against black people. I show that these forms of lexical interchange are possible because of non-Americans’ familiarity with America’s racial history, and black performance liberation expressivity, which they have been acculturated into as a result of their long exposure to American culture. Beyond phrases however, I argue that black performance itself is a language that has a global resonance among minorities. To illustrate this further, I do a close reading of This is Nigeria, a recent music video released by Nigerian lawyer turned artist, Folarin Falana (Falz), alongside a version of the original production, This is America, also recently released by Donald Glover (Childish Gambino). Both songs continue in the older tradition of African and African American transatlantic political relations through music, the shared understanding of the similarities of anti-black oppression, and the formation of aesthetics that mediate the advocacy of black liberation. The songs are also a pointer to how black advocacy might continue to unfold in contemporary era.

scholarly journals Do Black Lives Matter in Post-Brexit Britain?

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G. Reddie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Liberation Theologian

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’.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

CIVIL AND LEGAL LIABILITY OF JUDGES

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaroslav Skoromnyy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Pension System ◽  
Legal Liability ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Model Code ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

The article presents the conceptual foundations of bringing judges to civil and legal liability. It was found that the civil and legal liability of judges is one of the types of legal liability of judges. It is determined that the legislation of Ukraine provides for a clearly delineated list of the main cases (grounds) for which the state is liable for damages for damage caused to a legal entity and an individual by illegal actions of a judge as a result of the administration of justice. It has been proved that bringing judges to civil and legal liability, in particular on the basis of the right of recourse, provides for the payment of just compensation in accordance with the decision of the European Court of Human Rights. It was established that the bringing of judges to civil and legal liability in Ukraine is regulated by such legislative documents as the Constitution of Ukraine, the Civil Code of Ukraine, the Explanatory Note to the European Charter on the Status of Judges (Model Code), the Law of Ukraine «On the Judicial System and the Status of Judges», the Law of Ukraine «On the procedure for compensation for harm caused to a citizen by illegal actions of bodies carrying out operational-search activities, pre-trial investigation bodies, prosecutors and courts», Decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine in the case on the constitutional submission of the Supreme Court of Ukraine regarding the compliance of the Constitution of Ukraine (constitutionality) of certain provisions of Article 2, paragraph two of clause II «Final and transitional provisions» of the Law of Ukraine «On measures to legislatively ensure the reform of the pension system», Article 138 of the Law of Ukraine «On the judicial system and the status of judges» (the case on changes in the conditions for the payment of pensions and monthly living known salaries of judges lagging behind in these), the Law of Ukraine «On the implementation of decisions and the application of the practice of the European Court of Human Rights».

Human Rights Activities as a Function of the Prosecutor’s Office

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
K.N. Golikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Law

The subject of this article is the problems of the nature, essence and purpose of prosecutorial activity. The purpose of the article is to study and justify the role of the human rights function in prosecutorial activities in the concept of a modern legal state. At the heart of prosecutorial activity is the implementation of the main function of the Prosecutor’s office – its rights and freedoms, their protection. This means that any type (branch) of Prosecutor's supervision is permeated with human rights content in relation to a citizen, society, or the state. This is confirmed by the fact that the Federal law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation” establishes an independent type of Prosecutor's supervision-supervision over the observance of human and civil rights and freedoms. It is argued that the legislation enshrines the human rights activities of the Prosecutor's office as its most important function. It is proposed to add this to the Law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation”.

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