The EJI, the Legacy Museum, and “Postgenocide” America

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-202
Author(s):  
Marouf A. Hasian ◽  
Nicholas S. Paliewicz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Peace And Justice

This chapter studies the counterpart to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Legacy Museum. Attending to the affective and cerebral displays of racial pasts and presents, the authors show how the museum presents a timeline of racial terrorism from slavery to the present era of mass incarceration of persons of color. The hauntologies of the Legacy Museum not only radically critique the colorblind discourses of civil rights remembrances, but they also raise questions about the possibilities of the need to remember an African American Holocaust.

Attica South

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-248
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
The Moment

This chapter narrates the moment when mass incarceration cast more and more African Americans into prison during the decade of the 1970s. As such, the chapter illustrates how the onset of mass incarceration swept onto southern prison plantations a younger generation who not only had witnessed 1960s era civil rights protest, but several of whom were active veterans of the Vietnam War, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and local Black Power groups. This chapter offers a reconceptualization of Black masculinity as African American men in both Texas and Louisiana’s Angola responded to the prison’s sexual violence with a communitarian-grounded defense of one another and the sanctity of their bodies. Chapter 6 offers the simultaneous narrative of African American politicians elected in the wake of the civil rights movement who sought prison reform, alongside radical black political organizing against the prison plantation. In response to growing fears that “Attica” might come South, Texas prison administrators doubled down on the southern trusty system and looked to “get tough” on civil rights agitation by bringing in new leadership with experience in quelling Black radicalism and civil rights suits.

Transcending the Veil

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-228
Author(s):  
Natasha V. Christie ◽  
Shannon B. O’brien
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Rights Issues ◽  
Selection Of

This work examines how Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks used various rhetorical techniques to strategically maneuver his rhetoric to address racial issues and represent African American concerns. The results of a content analysis of a selection of Obama’s speeches and remarks confirm that Obama and his speechwriters favored the use of statements of color-blind universalism. However, when making certain remarks regarding civil rights issues or perceived racial issues, the pattern shifted, presenting a rare glimpse of the unbalanced representation of African American concerns. These findings suggest that Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks performed double-consciousness; they used universal, balanced, and targeted universalism rhetorical techniques as a genuine, congruent political style for representing African American concerns as a “raced” politician.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

SHIFTING POWER

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 417-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Remster ◽  
Rory Kramer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Rural Districts ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Legislative Districts

AbstractWhile prisoners cannot vote, they are counted as residents of the often rural legislative districts where they are incarcerated rather than their home districts. We examine the extent to which incarceration shifts the balance of a representative democracy by considering its impact on legislative apportionment. Drawing on data from the Census, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission, we develop a counterfactual framework to examine whether removing and returning prisoners to their home districts affects equal representation. Because prisoners are disproportionately African American, we also employ this counterfactual to assess racial differences in the impact of prison gerrymandering. Findings indicate that incarceration shifts political power from urban districts to suburban and rural districts through legislative apportionment. Moreover, non-White communities suffer the most. We conclude by considering how our findings fit a growing literature on the role of mass incarceration in [re]producing racial inequalities in the contemporary United States.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Abugo Ongiri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Black Cinema ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
Political Organizing

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Black Soldiers in World War II America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Military Training ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Military ◽  
American Racism

The history of the African American military experience in World War II tends to revolve around two central questions: How did World War II and American racism shape the black experience in the American military? And how did black GIs reshape the parameters of their wartime experiences? From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression years of the 1930s, military planners evaluated the performance of black soldiers in World War I while trying to ascertain their presence in future wars. However, quite often their discussions about African American servicemen in the military establishment were deeply moored in the traditions, customs, and practices of American racism, racist stereotypes, and innuendo. Simultaneously, African American leaders and their allies waged a relentless battle to secure the future presence of the uniformed men and women who would serve in the nation’s military. Through their exercise of voting rights, threats of protest demonstration, litigation, and White House lobbying from 1939 through 1942, civil rights advocates and their affiliates managed to obtain some minor concessions from the military establishment. But the military’s stubborn adherence to a policy barring black and white soldiers from serving in the same units continued through the rest of the war. Between 1943 and 1945, black GIs faced white officer hostility, civilian antagonism, and military police brutality while undergoing military training throughout the country. Similarly, African American servicewomen faced systemic racism and sexism in the military during the period. Throughout various stages of the American war effort, black civil rights groups, the press, and their allies mounted the opening salvoes in the battle to protect and defend the wellbeing of black soldiers in uniform. While serving on the battlefields of World War II, fighting African American GIs became foot soldiers in the wider struggles against tyranny abroad. After returning home in 1945, black World War II-era activists such as Daisy Lampkin and Ruby Hurley, and ex-servicemen and women, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

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