“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.

“I Just Wanted a World That Looked Like the One I Know”

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Ralina L. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strategic Ambiguity ◽  
The Press ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One

Chapter 3 examines showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ twenty-first century Black respectability politics through the form of strategic ambiguity. Joseph traces Rhimes’ performance of strategic ambiguity first in the pre-Obama era when she stuck to a script of colorblindness, and a second in the #BlackLivesMatter moment when she called out racialized sexism and redefined Black female respectability. In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, this chapter asks: how did Rhimes’ careful negotiation of the press demonstrate that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman was to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women could and must engage in racialized self-expression, and redefine the bounds of respectability?

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.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

Dancing on the Edges of History, but Never Dancing Alone

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Barbara Ransby
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Gender

In this chapter the author reflects on what it means to be a black female historian in the twenty-first century. She challenges those who argue that it should simply mean being a good scholar and that notions of race and gender are anachronisms. She draws from her personal experiences in graduate school and in the academy as well as those of many other female historians of African descent to reflect on the slow and erratic progress but also persistent, intractable prejudice augmented by decades of institutional racism. She also elaborates on the significance of political activism, parenting, and mentors to her work and her life.

scholarly journals Black Mayors in Non-Majority Black (Medium Sized) Cities: Universalizing the Interests of Blacks

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi K. Perry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Politicians ◽  
Black Mayors ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Twenty First Century

The nature of political representation of Black constituents' interests from their elected Black representatives is changing in the twentyfirst century. Increasingly, African Americans are being elected to political offices where the majority of their constituents are not African American. Previous research on this question tended to characterize Black politicians' efforts to represent their Black constituents' interests in two frames: deracialized or racialized (McCormick and Jones 1993; Cruse 1990). However, the advent of the twenty-first century has exhausted the utility ofthat polarization. Black politicians no longer find explicit racial appeals appropriate for their electoral goals, given the changing demographic environment, and greater acceptance of African American politicians in highprofile positions of power. Black politicians also increasingly find that a lack of attention to racial disparities facing constituents within their political boundaries does not effectively address why certain groups like Blacks are disproportionately and negatively affected than others, across a range of issues. Rather than continue to make efforts to represent Black interests within those two frames, Black politicians have begun to universalize the interests of Blacks.

Creating a Typical America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanee Gupta-Carlson
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
American Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Typical American

This chapter describes how sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd conducted research in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s and how popular reception to their book Middletown: A Study in American Culture created Muncie’s reputation as typical America. It analyzes how exclusion of African Americans and foreign-born individuals from the Middletown study resulted in a distorted understanding of the typical American that continues to haunt the American mindset into the twenty-first century. It explores how scholars and other researchers have addressed the distortion and situates the author’s study within this context.

Conspiracy Theories in U.S. History

2018 ◽  
pp. 285-297
Author(s):  
Kathryn S. Olmstead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
First Century ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The U.S

Although many Americans believe that conspiratorial thinking is reaching new heights in the twenty-first century, conspiracy theories have been commonplace throughout U.S. history. In the colonial and early republic eras, Americans feared that Catholics, Jews, Masons, Indians, and African Americans were plotting against them. In the nineteenth century they added international bankers, rich businessmen, and Mormons to the list of potential conspirators. In the twentieth century, conspiracy theories continued to evolve, and many Americans began to suspect the U.S. government itself of plotting against them. These theories gained more credibility after the revelation of real government conspiracies, notably CIA assassination plots, the Watergate scandal, and the Iran–-Contra affair.

The Future of “Race-Conscious” Memorialization in Twenty-First-Century America

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-217
Author(s):  
Marouf A. Hasian ◽  
Nicholas S. Paliewicz
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Soil Samples ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

In this concluding chapter, the authors take up the question of how American communities are going to react to the EJI’s “race conscious” efforts. It is one thing to visit the memorial, dig up soil samples from lynching sites and send them to the Lynching Memorial but quite another to be arguing for massive overhauls in the ways we think about incarceration of African Americans or the need for reparations. Here, the authors argue that their critical genealogical analyses have shown why U.S. communities may be willing to acknowledge the problematics of antebellum, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, or even 1950s segregationist practices, but they are possibly unwilling to see the lingering influence, in the twenty-first century, of entrenched racial categorizations or carceral practices that can be traced back to post-Civil War years.

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