Crossing Bar Lines

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams ◽  
Robin D. G. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Eminent Scholar ◽  
Musical Practices

This book provides an interpretive framework for understanding how African American creative improvisers think of musical space. Featuring a Foreword by eminent scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, this is the first critical improvisation studies book that uses Black Geographies theory to examine the spatial values of musical expression in the improvisational and compositional practices of trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill. Bar lines in this book serve as a notational and spatial metaphor for social constraints connected to systemic and structural white supremacy. Crossing them therefore applies not only to conceptions of Black spatiality in musical practices but also to how African American musicians address structural barriers to fight the social injustices that obstruct freedom and full citizenship for African Americans and other marginalized groups. Defined by both liminal and quotidian reality, Black musical space, like Black feminist thought, is about theorizing through the lived experiences of Black people which reflect different genders, sexual identities, political stances, across improvisational eras. Using this theory of Black musical space, the book explains how these dynamic musicians explicitly and implicitly articulate humanity through compositional and improvisational practices, some of which interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter. Consequently, Crossing Bar Lines not only fills a significant gap in the literature on African American, activist musical improvisation and contemporary social movements, but it gives the reader an understanding of the complexity of African American musical practices relative to fluid political identities and sensibilities.

scholarly journals Structural Violence of Schooling: A Genealogy of a Critical Family History of Three Generations of African American Women in a Rural Community in Florida

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelyn Newman Phillips ◽  
Wangari Gichiru
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Children

Through the lens of structural violence, Black feminism and critical family history, this paper explores how societal structures informed by white supremacy shaped the lives of three generations of rural African American women in a family in Florida during the middle to the late twentieth century. Specifically, this study investigates how disparate funding, segregation, desegregation, poverty and post-desegregation policies shaped and limited the achievement trajectories among these women. Further, an oral historical examination of their lives reveals the strategies they employed despite their under-resourced and sometimes alienating schooling. The paper highlights the experiences of the Newman family, descendants of captive Africans in the United States that produced three college-educated daughters and a granddaughter despite structural barriers that threatened their progress. Using oral history interviews, archival resources and first-person accounts, this family’s story reveals a genealogy of educational achievement, barriers and agency despite racial and gendered limitations in a Southern town. The findings imply that their schooling mirrors many of the barriers that other Blacks face. However, this study shows that community investment in African American children, plus teachers that affirm students, and programs such as Upward Bound, help to advance Black students in marginalized communities. Further, these women’s lives suggest that school curriculums need to be anti-racist and public policies that affirm each person regardless of the color of their skin. A simple solution that requires the structural violence of whiteness be eliminated from the schooling spheres.

Terence Blanchard and the Politics of Breathing

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Staten Island ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Systemic Violence

This chapter discusses trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s composition “Breathless” (2015). “Breathless” was Blanchard’s response to the 2014 killing of Eric Garner by members of the police on Staten Island and his musical connection to the Black Lives Matter social movement. Blanchard sonically represents breathlessness harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically within the values of Black musical space. It is argued that Blanchard’s orchestration of reverbed male and female sounds of exhalation with the spoken-word lyrics of JRei Oliver is a social critique of systemic violence. This chapter explains how Blanchard’s music is in conversation not only with the Black Lives Matter movement but with the archives and community repositories of improvised social justice music by past African American musicians who have historically created a Black sense of place through musical practices.

scholarly journals Defining a People

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tisa Wenger
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
Mission Movement

This chapter examines the varieties of religious freedom talk in African American history. It argues that the racial assemblages of the dominant white society severely limited the utility of religious freedom as a way to (re)define African American identity. It begins by showing how often religious freedom worked in support of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy; and how black church leaders rearticulated this freedom as one way to assert the full humanity of black people and to reposition themselves as fully modern, rational and moral modern subjects. The chapter goes on to argue that many of the new religious movements of black urban life—including Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam—used religious freedom talk in their efforts to redefine their communal identity away from the negative valences of blackness, either replacing race with religion or infusing their blackness with a new cosmic significance. But however they defined themselves, the dominant society denied their claims and overwhelmingly dismissed them as fraudulent and overly political rather than legitimately religious. For the vast majority of African Americans, religious freedom provided little escape from the confines of a racialized oppression.

The Sonic Archive of Black Spatiality

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

The epilogue expands on the purpose of the book and the author’s approach to it. Although the book does not abandon positivism, the author never privileges traditional research musicological methods over his own lived experience—as an African American improviser, composer, and theorist—or the lived experiences of the improvisers discussed in the book. The chapter expresses a hope that the book will provide further insight into the relationship between African American improvised music and cultural notions of spatiality in relation to improvisation. The chapter further elaborates on Black musical space: it is not defined by a defiance of whiteness or white supremacy. It is defined by joy, struggle ad infinitum, and reliance on community. Black musical space expressed through humanity ultimately escapes attempts to codify it. The chapter continues with a final summary of the author’s findings about each musician discussed in the book. While Blanchard, Higgins, Carrington, Akinmusire, and Hill express their ideas differently in the language of Black musical space, they are all connected by how they cross bar lines to emphasize the social context connection between their lived experiences and their improvisational and compositional practices.

Entering a Theory of Black Musical Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Musical Practices

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of Black musical space for the five case studies on African American improvisers. This chapter defines what is meant by crossing bar lines relative to Black sociality represented in the musical practices.

scholarly journals The Obligation of White Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 1006-1019
Author(s):  
Sara Plummer ◽  
Jandel Crutchfield ◽  
Desiree Stepteau-Watson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Bird Watching ◽  
Black Bodies

On Memorial Day 2020, a white woman, Amy Cooper, was walking her unleashed dog in New York City. After being apprised of the leash law in that state by a man bird watching, Ms. Cooper proceeded to call the police stating an “African American man” was “threatening her life and that of her dog” (Ransom, 2020). While this event may seem unconnected to the field of social work, it is a modern example of the way white women, including those in social work, use emotionality, bureaucracy, and the law to control Black bodies. Social work has been and continues to be, responsible for policies and practices that maintain white supremacy culture and criminalize Black people.

Getting Tough

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
African American ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Penal System ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The U.S

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

The Legal System and Its African American Constituents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Legal Legitimacy ◽  
Black Public Opinion ◽  
Representative Samples

Despite popular reports that the legal system is in a state of crisis with respect to its African American constituents, research on black public opinion in general is limited owing to the difficulty and expense of assembling representative samples of minorities. We suspect that the story of lagging legal legitimacy among African Americans is in fact quite a bit more nuanced than is often portrayed. In particular, black public opinion is unlikely to be uniform and homogeneous; black people most likely vary in their attitudes toward law and legal institutions. Especially significant is variability in the experiences—personal and vicarious—black people have had with legal authorities (e.g., “stop-and-frisk”), and the nature of individuals’ attachment to blacks as a group (e.g., “linked fate”). We posit that both experiences and in-group identities are commanding because they influence the ways in which black people process information, and in particular, the ways in which blacks react to the symbols of legal authority (e.g., judges’ robes).

“I LEAVE YOU LOVE”: African American Women as Collectors in, of, and through, the Arts

Collections ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 113-166
Author(s):  
Lisa Pertillar Brevard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Government Service ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
American Women ◽  
World Citizenship ◽  
Direct Descendant ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Just Society

In her last will and testament, educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) declared, “I LEAVE YOU LOVE. Love builds.” A direct descendant of former chattel slaves, Bethune believed in building from the bottom up: beginning with love, or positive thoughts, and manifesting those thoughts. By accretion of goods and goodwill, she built not only a physical school which fostered the arts as a bridge toward world citizenship for disenfranchised black people but also a school of thought, extending to encompass purposeful government service at local and federal levels, toward achieving a just society. Bethune’s determined example of building by accretion informs and helps us to better understand and articulate a wide variety of African American women’s collecting in, of, and through, the arts. This article explores and defines—according to philosophy, purpose, practice, type, scope, and audience—various examples of collecting and collections among selected African American women in the arts, many of whom became contributors to, and subjects of, various collections.

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