Howard Thurman and the Religion of Jesus

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-291
Author(s):  
Mitzi J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
First Century ◽  
Class I ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
Howard Thurman

This essay examines Howard Thurman’s interpretation of the historical Jesus and the religion of Jesus in his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited (jatd). Thurman interprets Jesus within his first century CE socio-historical context and from the perspective of disinherited African Americans. He articulates the significance of the religion of Jesus, versus religion about Jesus, for the disinherited and how it can ensure their survival. Since jatd addresses race/racism and class/classism but not the intersection of race, gender, and class, I place jatd in conversation with black feminist Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, womanist theologian Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness, and Angela Sim’s Lynched, who focus on the survival of black women (Lorde and Williams) and the resilience of black people living in a culture of fear.

scholarly journals Black feminist intersectionality is vital to group analysis: Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in?

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199776
Author(s):  
Suryia Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Analytical Structure ◽  
The Relationship

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called ‘Zoom’. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: ‘Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis’ Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there ‘cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can’ (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the ‘problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in?

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
American Life ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Twenty First Century

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

RAPE AND RACIAL APPRAISALS

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Shawn McGuffey
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Women Survivors ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Conceptual Models ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Caribbean Immigrants

AbstractUsing Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, I demonstrate how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. Specifically, I extend the concept of racial appraisal by shifting the focus from how indirect victims (e.g., family and friends) use race to appraise a traumatic event to how survivors themselves deploy race in the aftermath of rape. Relying on 111 interviews with Black women survivors in four cities, I analyze how race, gender, and class intersect and contour interpretations of sexual assault. I argue that African Americans in this study use racially inscribed cultural signifiers to root their understandings of rape within a racist social structure (i.e., a racial appraisal)—which they also perceive as sexist and, for some, classist—that encourages their silence about same-race sexual assault. African and Caribbean immigrants, however, often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for Black feminist/intersectional theory.

The Ekwe Collective

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joëlle M. Cruz ◽  
Oghenetoja Okoh ◽  
Amoaba Gooden ◽  
Kamesha Spates ◽  
Chinasa A. Elue ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
First Century ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Twenty First Century

While making clear that black femininity exists and is located in multiple spaces, this essay brings out the intellectual and cultural presence and voices of black women in both national and international feminist communities. We engage black feminist thought (BFT) by offering the example of our community—the Ekwe Collective—a sisterhood of six feminist scholar–activists and their daughters. This essay offers insights on how BFT translates to the lived experience of communities of color in the twenty-first century. In particular, we draw upon and extend three dimensions of the theory: experience, generation, and space.

scholarly journals From Venus to “Black Venus”: Beyoncé’s I Have Three Hearts, Fashion, and the Limits of Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
West African ◽  
First Century ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Western Art

In 2016, Lemonade was lauded as “Black girl magic” for the ways the hour-long HBO special (and subsequent album) celebrated Black women and the Southern gothic tradition. It also was the first hint of Beyoncé paying homage to West African Yoruba traditions. At the 2017 Grammys, her performance was both an invocation of the sacred in Western art history and further homage to Yoruba. The performance opened with poetry by Warsan Shire, and snapshots of her daughter, Blue Ivy, but the highlight was Beyoncé’s gold gown, and crown, and gold accessories, all of which symbolized the African goddess Osun. Released just before her Grammys performance, the I Have Three Hearts photo-series circulated as pregnancy images (she was pregnant with twins), but it also functioned as a repository of Beyoncé’s invocation of the sacred in Western culture, as embodied in Venus, and the African goddess, often labelled as “Black Venus.” This article is an examination of three images in the I Have Three Hearts series, taken by Awol Erizku, and the series’ accompanying poetry by Shire. I argue that it raises important questions about the role of visual culture in fashion and popular culture. Is Beyoncé the Venus of the twenty-first century? Does this photographic series remap Western visual culture to reimagine Black womanhood in the discourse on sexuality? Or, it is an example of pastiche in postmodern culture wherein truncated information is authorized, making everyone an expert without the demand for historical context?

“A New Spelling of My Name”: Becoming a (Black, Feminist, Immigrant) Autoethnographer Through Zami

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-133
Author(s):  
Tanja Burkhard
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Marginalized Communities

In this article, I provide the historical context for the reception of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami’s by Black women across the African diaspora as a backdrop for my own autoethnographic engagement of the book. I narrate my journey to claiming space within the field of autoethnography by anchoring my discussion in Zami and its themes. The goal of this work is to illustrate the crucial nature of autoethnographic work to transnational Black feminism, and its ongoing importance to women from and in marginalized communities.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittney C. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper

Despite the fact that Black feminism, as a critical locus of Black women’s twentieth century knowledge production, has become a fully institutionalized field of academic specialization since the late 1970s, the contention of this book has been that there is still a requisite and tacit failure to take Black women’s work, as thinkers and theorists on broader questions affecting Black people, seriously. Yes, Black feminist women’s arguments about the centrality of gender to racial concerns have gained major academic currency, as evidenced by the broad use of intersectional discourse in numerous fields and disciplines. And yes, the new Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly as conceived by Garza, Tometi, and Cullors has made Black feminist politics the currency of Black radical thought. But the fact that Alicia Garza’s comments written in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sound eerily similar to commentary from Anna Julia Cooper writing in the nineteenth century, and Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks writing in the twentieth suggests that not enough has changed.

scholarly journals Racism and Representation of Racialized Beauty in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 164-174
Author(s):  
Dr. Nirjharini Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
The Impact

The American novelist Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye portrays black society and deals with the themes of black victimization and racial oppression. It presents a prolonged representation of the means in which the standards of internalized white beauty contort the life and existence of black women. This paper explores and elucidates the impact of race, racial oppression and representation in The Bluest Eye. And how racism also edifices the hatredness between Blackand White communities. This paper will discuss various issues and concepts such as Race, Race in the Colonial Period, Racializing the Other and Stereotyping. The paper also deals with understanding Representation through the ideas of Saussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Geertz, and Said. Racism is primarily a belief in the supremacy and dominance of one race upon another that consequences in the differences, discrimination and prejudice of people towards one another rooted and established on their race or ethnicity. Racism has deeply affected the African-American coloured people making them feel inferior. The Bluest Eye reflects the appalling effect on blacks individualising the values of a white culture that rejects them both immediately and incidentally. Even after abolition of slavery legally still the African-Americans faces the cruelty of racial discrimination and never considered equal to the whites. The Black people struggles to ascertain themselves with the white and their ethnic ways. Toni Morrison propounds on black cultural heritage and seeks the African-Americans to be gratified and proud of their black colour as well black identity. This paper conveys the essence of the coloured people’s fight for their race, and  also its continuance and forbearance in a principally multicultural White dominated  America.  

“Do Not Run Away from Your Blackness”

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-194
Author(s):  
Ralina L. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
First Century ◽  
Legal Counsel ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Production Economies ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Entertainment Products

Chapter 6 focuses on television production economies and relies upon interview data in order to illustrate how Black female television writers, studios’ in-house legal counsel, and producers skirt and tease notions of postrace in constructing their own brands of resistance. This chapter investigates how a coded, more polite, and postracial form of racialized sexism affects those who work in the industry as much as infiltrates the entertainment products that make their way to audiences. This chapter draws upon interview data with prolific Black women television professionals in Hollywood in order to understand the ways in which twenty-first century representations of African Americans on television are shaped by segregated spaces.

Sickness in slavery and freedom

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley A. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
American Medical Association ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Medical Association ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
Poor Treatment ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Health Deficit

The health deficit of African Americans is explored in a historical context, starting with the abuse, poor treatment, and sub-standard medical care Blacks received during and after slavery. Segregation was the law of the land until the 1960s, and African Americans not only received marginal health care but faced significant barriers in access to medical schools. This chapter looks at the battle to end segregated medicine and the gradual acceptance of black people in medical schools and as members of the American Medical Association.

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