scholarly journals Prairie Politics: Black Life in the Midwest, 1890-1940

1985 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Marjorie Murphy ◽  
Michael W. Homel ◽  
Dominic C. Capeci ◽  
James E. DeVries
Keyword(s):  
Black Life

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 Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

scholarly journals Birthing #blackboyjoy: Black Midwives Caring for Black Mothers of Black Boys During Pregnancy and Childbirth

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisha L. Goode ◽  
Arielle Bernardin
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Black Boys ◽  
Reproductive Justice ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Snowball Sampling ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Psychosocial Experiences ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Black Life

Abstract Background Structural racism mediates all aspects of Black life. The medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, and its detrimental impacts on Black birth, is well documented. The Black Lives Matter movement has elevated the national consciousness on all aspects of Black life, but significant attention has been directed toward the murder and dehumanization of Black men and boys. Black midwives, caring for Black people, using the Midwives Model of Care© which consistently demonstrates its efficacy and better outcomes for Black people, are uniquely positioned to witness the physical and psychosocial experiences of birthing Black boys in America. Methods Between 2011 and 2013, the first author conducted interviews with 22 Black midwives to understand their perceptions of, and experiences in, predominantly white midwifery education programs and professional organizations. Convenience and snowball sampling were used. This paper investigates previously unreported and unexamined data from the original study by focusing on the witness and insight of nine midwives who provided care for Black mothers of boys during pregnancy and childbirth. Findings The data presented three themes: It’s a Boy: On Restlessness and Complicated Uneasiness; Desensitization of Black Death; and, Physiological Impacts of Toxic Stress. Conclusions The findings demonstrate that caring for Black people must be simultaneously theorized and executed within an anti-racist, relationship-centered, reproductive justice framework. Black midwives are uniquely positioned to do this work. Greater attention, in practice and in research, is needed to investigate the birth experiences of Black mothers of boys.

The Black Lives Matter movement: A call to action: Acts 10:11–16, 25–28, 34–35

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Alfred Smith
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Black Christians ◽  
American Society ◽  
Justice Movements

The Black Lives Matter movement is one of the most dynamic social justice movements currently emerging in the USA. This movement led by young Blacks unapologetically calls out the shameful, historical legacy of American racism and White supremacy while asserting the humanity and sacredness of Black lives, particularly those of unarmed persons senselessly murdered by police officers. While Black Lives Matter is a new movement, it is also an extension of the 400-year struggle of Black people in America to affirm Black dignity, equality, and human rights, even while the major institutions of American society have propagated doctrines and enforced unjust rules/laws to denigrate Black life. Black Christians have found hope and inspiration from the Gospel to claim their humanity and to struggle to gain justice for Black lives and for the lives of all oppressed people. In addition, the Black Lives Matter movement provides a helpful critique of many Black churches, challenging them to confront their biases, which label young Black males as “thugs” (the new N-word) and which cruelly demonize the LGBTQ community. The story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 provides a scriptural basis for Christian introspection and responses to God’s vision for beloved community, and for the call to action from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110595
Author(s):  
Amaka Okechukwu
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Record

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

Black Mothering Legacies: Theorizing Lament as a Form of Justice Research

2021 ◽  
pp. 194084472110495
Author(s):  
Nichole A. Guillory
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Black Child ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Black Mothering

I feel compelled by the moment to take up these questions: What does it mean to mother a Black child within/against this historical moment within/against the (carceral) United States? What does it mean to mother a Black child when the legacy of enslavement in the United States is still the basis for assessing the “worth” of you and your children? How do I determine justice for my/a/the Black child in this historical moment? How does this justice come to matter? My approach to critical qualitative research is best understood through Cynthia Dillard’s (2006) notion of “endarkened feminist epistemology” (p. 3). Here I trace a lineage of Black mothering praxis that has been enacted in response to injustice across different historical moments and geographical locations in the United States. This lineage focuses on Black mothers who have lost their children to state violence, when that violence is perpetrated by the state or when the state fails to mete out justice for the taking of Black life.

Introduction1

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Njoroge Njoroge
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Black Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Rich History

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. —Ralph Ellison Black music has always been a tremendous source of information and inspiration for musicians, dancers, and music lovers. Listening to the music opens new worlds and windows onto the rich history of black music, society, and struggle in the circum-Caribbean, and provides a rich archive of the creative musical genius of the African diaspora. Music always expresses the interrelationships of movement, memory, and history, but this is preeminently true of the music of the African diaspora. This book uses music as both optic and focus, to examine and rethink both the modes of black cultural production and social formations in the African diaspora. The music has always been both an expression of “black” life and part of the philosophy that developed and emerged with that life, “as history and as art” (...

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