Leaving on a Jet Plane

Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson

The last of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey) and W. E. B. Du Bois. Exploring their lives, legal setbacks, and push against global imperialism and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora and into and throughout Africa, this chapter illustrates the how place, race, peace politics, and power collide in the lives of black people here, there, and everywhere around the globe.

Open Theology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Michael D. Barber

Abstract In 2020, two crises emerged into prominence in the United States and other parts of the world: (1) the flourishing of the COVID-19 virus, in which the polarization and relativization of knowledge have hobbled efforts to prevent pandemic spread, and (2) the killing of George Floyd which has stirred worldwide protests against centuries of racial oppression and unbared an underlying racist ideology about the seemingly lesser value of Black people. It might seem that both these crises are unrelated, but this article argues that both crises are rooted in a common phenomenon, the surge of the pursuit of everyday pragmatic mastery beyond its legitimate boundary. This pursuit of mastery has instrumentalized structures of discourse, thereby undermining Alfred Schutz’s paradigm of the well-informed citizen seeking to understand dispassionately imposed relevances and the non-pragmatic provinces of meaning that might have restrained the pursuit of such mastery, such as the provinces of theoretical science and religious experience. As regards racism, the pursuance of such mastery results in transgressing and eliminating through violence the ethical boundaries the Levinasian other prescribes. These twin crises are not disparate happenings occurring now to remedy the tedium of the pandemic, but are bound together at the hip.


Author(s):  
Lewis R. Gordon

Lewis R. Gordon’s essay focuses on Du Bois’s shift from New England liberalism to international radicalism and his global influence in Africana thought, despite his focus on African American politics. Though Du Bois’s expectation of equality for black people in the United States was a supremely radical idea on its own, it was his association with the black tradition of addressing social contradictions and imagining a future of grappling with them that led to the development of his radical philosophical anthropology. Du Bois, like many other Africana scholars, used his theories to express why black people could no longer wait to challenge the status quo. Therefore, Africana political theorists must assert the humanity of people of African descent, which necessitates an explanation of why they are human and how they have historically been excluded from definitions of humanity.


Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson

The second of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of three black women professionals, entertainers, and community activists: Mary Hill Sanders, Dionne Warwick, and Alma Burrell. Exploring their lives, health setbacks, and push against the glass ceiling and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora, this chapter illustrates the how gender, place, race, and power collided in the lives of black people before and after the civil rights movement.


2020 ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.


2020 ◽  
pp. 216747952095077
Author(s):  
Evan L. Frederick ◽  
Ann Pegoraro ◽  
Samuel Schmidt

When asked if she would go to the White House if invited, Megan Rapinoe stated, “I’m not going to the fucking White House.” The next morning, President Donald Trump posted a series of tweets in which he criticized Rapinoe’s statements. In his tweets, Trump introduced issues around race in the United States and brought forth his own notion of nationalism. The purpose of this study was to conduct an analysis of users’ tweets to determine how individuals employed Twitter to craft a narrative and discuss the ongoing Rapinoe and Trump feud within and outside the bounds of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and nationalism. An inductive analysis of 16,137 users’ tweets revealed three primary themes: a) Refuse, Refute, & Redirect Racist Rhetoric b) Stand Up vs. Know your Rights, and c) #ShutUpAndBeALeader. Based on the findings of this study, it appears that the dialogue regarding racism in the United States is quickly evolving. Instead of reciting the same refrain (i.e., racism no longer exists and systematic racism is constructed by Black people) seen in previous works, individuals in the current dataset refuted those talking points and clearly labeled the President as a racist. Additionally, though discussions of nationalism were evident in this dataset, the Stand Up vs. Know Your Rights theme was on the periphery in comparison to discussions of race. Perhaps, this indicates that some have grown tired of Trump utilizing nationalism as a means to stoke racism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (52) ◽  
pp. e2110347118
Author(s):  
Ray Block ◽  
Charles Crabtree ◽  
John B. Holbein ◽  
J. Quin Monson

In this article, we present the results from a large-scale field experiment designed to measure racial discrimination among the American public. We conducted an audit study on the general public—sending correspondence to 250,000 citizens randomly drawn from public voter registration lists. Our within-subjects experimental design tested the public’s responsiveness to electronically delivered requests to volunteer their time to help with completing a simple task—taking a survey. We randomized whether the request came from either an ostensibly Black or an ostensibly White sender. We provide evidence that in electronic interactions, on average, the public is less likely to respond to emails from people they believe to be Black (rather than White). Our results give us a snapshot of a subtle form of racial bias that is systemic in the United States. What we term everyday or “paper cut” discrimination is exhibited by all racial/ethnic subgroups—outside of Black people themselves—and is present in all geographic regions in the United States. We benchmark paper cut discrimination among the public to estimates of discrimination among various groups of social elites. We show that discrimination among the public occurs more frequently than discrimination observed among elected officials and discrimination in higher education and the medical sector but simultaneously, less frequently than discrimination in housing and employment contexts. Our results provide a window into the discrimination that Black people in the United States face in day-to-day interactions with their fellow citizens.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itumeleng D. Mothoagae

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.


2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lamont Hill

In this article, I examine the role of Black Twitter as a “digital counterpublic” that enables critical pedagogy, political organizing, and both symbolic and material forms of resistance to anti-Black state violence within the United States. Focusing primarily on post-Ferguson events, I spotlight the ways that Black people have used Black Twitter and other digital counterpublics to engage in forms of pedagogy that reorganize relations of surveillance, reject rigid respectability politics, and contest the erasure of marginalized groups within the Black community.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.


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