scholarly journals Black Protests in the US, 1994-2010

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Elaine Oliver ◽  
Chaeyoon Lim ◽  
Morgan Matthews ◽  
Alex Hanna

We use a novel dataset to provide the first panoramic view of US Black movement protest events as reported in US newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialog with qualitative accounts of the period. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014-2016 and 2020. We find that protests were building in frequency in the 1990s after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and the widely discussed 1995 Million Man March into 2001, but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks, with mobilization building again at the end of the 2000s. Protests in response to police violence and other criminal legal issues were major arenas of struggle and news coverage. Also common were issues of national identity including celebrations of Black history and Black solidarity, protests against Confederate symbols, and protests about White hate groups and hate crimes. While Black people protested about a wide variety of issues, mainstream national media attention focused disproportionately on incidents of police violence and perceived threats of Black violence. We find substantial continuity in issues, organizations, and activism between this period and the Black Lives Movement of 2014-2020. Content warning: parts of this article describe incidents of police violence.

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-177
Author(s):  
Meghan Quinlan

Ate9 Dance Company’s Kelev Lavan raised questions about the politics of individualism and the neutrality of whiteness in art, during a period of acute social tension surrounding police violence against people of color in the US. Issues of technique, aesthetics, and the invisibilization of identity politics are explored in the context of this site-specific performance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-168
Author(s):  
Desmond Ang

Abstract Nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This article documents the large, racially disparate effects of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance, and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment. These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals.


1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-51
Author(s):  
Carule Fabricant

I would like to begin by juxtaposing two very different pictures of global travel taken from recent articles in the popular media and considering their implications both for contemporary postcolonial theory and for our readings of “third world” fictional texts. In one article from the summer of 1997 (Newton 6-7), the Los Angeles New Times displayed on its cover a slender man in his thirties staring hopelessly out from behind a barred window. The caption read: “No Way Out: Romanian Gavrila Moldovan Risked His Life to Come to America. The INS Promptly Locked Him Up on Terminal Island. Three and a Half Years Later, He’s Still in Jail.” The accompanying story described Moldovan’s desperate flight out of Romania after being declared a “noncitizen” for writing an anti-government news article, which rendered him vulnerable to immediate arrest, and after his parents died in a suspicious car “accident.” Having slipped aboard a container ship bound for the United States together with some fellow countrymen (three of whom died en route), he was discovered and unceremoniously dumped ashore in Panama, only to stow away shortly thereafter on another container ship headed for the Port of Los Angeles. After finally reaching his destination, a “euphoric” Moldovan explained to the US authorities awaiting him at the port: “I come here to be in freedom.... ’” His “welcome” consisted of being arrested and locked up in the INS Processing Center on Terminal Island, in which, though never charged with any crime, he remained for several years before being transferred to Kern County Jail in Bakersfield, where he is currently languishing amongst a population of men awaiting trial for serious crimes (6-7)—one of thousands of refugees and immigrants who have been, and continue to be, incarcerated in prisons that have contracts with the INS, for lack of proper documents, for minor infringements of the law, or because they are denied political asylum despite compelling evidence of their vulnerability to government reprisal at home.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-290
Author(s):  
Siduri J Haslerig ◽  
Rican Vue ◽  
Sara E Grummert

As the most watched college sport broadcast of all time, the US Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)’s College GameDay (CGD) is one source of socialization that primes US audiences to make certain associations. Through disaggregated analysis of regular- and post-season CGD pre-game and game-of-the-week broadcasts during the 2016 football season, the authors examine the coverage of players’ physicality and injuries, contrasting the portrayals of Black and white American football players. The paper documents prominent narratives that promoted Black players as relatively invulnerable, while making the case that these narratives serve to prime audiences to ascribe inhuman abilities to Black people and thereby reinforce white supremacist ideology.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisy Massey ◽  
Jeremy Faust ◽  
Karen Dorsey ◽  
Yuan Lu ◽  
Harlan Krumholz

Background: Excess death for Black people compared with White people is a measure of health equity. We sought to determine the excess deaths under the age of 65 (<65) for Black people in the United States (US) over the most recent 20-year period. We also compared the excess deaths for Black people with a cause of death that is traditionally reported. Methods: We used the Multiple Cause of Death 1999-2019 dataset from the Center of Disease Control (CDC) WONDER to report age-adjusted mortality rates among non-Hispanic Black (Black) and non-Hispanic White (White) people and to calculate annual age-adjusted <65 excess deaths for Black people from 1999-2019. We measured the difference in mortality rates between Black and White people and the 20-year and 5-year trends using linear regression. We compared age-adjusted <65 excess deaths for Black people to the primary causes of death among <65 Black people in the US. Results: From 1999 to 2019, the age-adjusted mortality rate for Black men was 1,186 per 100,000 and for White men was 921 per 100,000, for a difference of 265 per 100,000. The age-adjusted mortality rate for Black women was 802 per 100,000 and for White women was 664 per 100,000, for a difference of 138 per 100,000. While the gap for men and women is less than it was in 1999, it has been increasing among men since 2014. These differences have led to many Black people dying before age 65. In 1999, there were 22,945 age-adjusted excess deaths among Black women <65 and in 2019 there were 14,444, deaths that would not have occurred had their risks been the same as those of White women. Among Black men, 38,882 age-adjusted excess <65 deaths occurred in 1999 and 25,850 in 2019. When compared to the top 5 causes of deaths among <65 Black people, death related to disparities would be the highest mortality rate among both <65 Black men and women. Comment: In the US, over the recent 20-year period, disparities in mortality rates resulted in between 61,827 excess deaths in 1999 and 40,294 excess deaths in 2019 among <65 Black people. The race-based disparity in the US was the leading cause of death among <65 Black people. Societal commitment and investment in eliminating disparities should be on par with those focused on other leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.


2021 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Bunting ◽  
J. Michael Homan

Gloria Werner, successor to Louise M. Darling at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, university librarian emerita, and eighteenth editor of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, died on March 5, 2021, in Los Angeles. Before assuming responsibility in 1990 for one of the largest academic research libraries in the US, she began her library career as a health sciences librarian and spent twenty years at the UCLA Biomedical Library, first as an intern in the NIH/NLM-funded Graduate Training Program in Medical Librarianship in 1962–1963, followed by successive posts in public services and administration, eventually succeeding Darling as biomedical librarian and associate university librarian from 1979 to 1983. Werner’s forty-year career at UCLA, honored with the UCLA University Service Award in 2013, also included appointments as associate university librarian for Technical Services. She was president of the Association of Research Libraries in 1997, served on the boards of many organizations including the Association of Academic Health Sciences Library Directors, and consulted extensively. She retired as university librarian in 2002.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 138-143
Author(s):  
Michael J. DeValve

Witnessing current events in Ferguson, and now in Milwaukee, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, of course Portland, and now Kenosha, Wisconsin, where protests against police violence are met with yet more police violence, the question naturally arises: Why are police so seemingly insistent on actively working counter to their own organizational best interest? This essay poses this troubling question and derives part of an answer for it from institutional theory.


Author(s):  
Opoku Onyinah

A new set of Pentecostal renewal started in the early twentieth century leading to the proliferation of Pentecostal denominations, and renewal movements within the then existing denominations. The beginning of this Pentecostal renewal has often been linked with the Bethel Bible School, which was started by Charles Fox Parham, and amplified by William Joseph Seymour at Azusa Street, Los Angeles, in the US. This article brings another dimension of the renewal by demonstrating that, for the Catholic Charismatics the outbreak of the Holy Spirit in the early twentieth century was partly an answer to the prayer of Pope Leo XIII. In addition, the Catholic Charismatic advocates consider the Pentecostal experience, dubbed Duquesne Weekend, which led to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movements as the answer to the prayer of Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican. The considerations of the Catholic Charismatics are presented apparently as an affirmation of the sovereignty of God over his Church and the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 181-195
Author(s):  
Igor Mandel

Recent renaming of the R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship without official discussion among members of American Statistical Association (ASA), along with other events of similar type, was an important step in creating a new atmosphere in science in general. On the one hand, this is tightly related to such critical issues as freedom of speech, research and opinion, while on the other hand, it is related to conformity, yielding to irrelevant demand, and to denial of evidence as a first basic principle in science. The paper shows that a) all accusations against R. Fisher are factually groundless; b) the decision was motivated not by the facts, but by political and moral pressure, connected with allegedly “institutional racism” of the American society and the US police specifically; c) the decision was a natural consequence of the victimhood culture, which penetrates more and more into academia; d) this culture, in turn, is counter-scientific in a sense that it does not need any evidence; e) particularly, the most popular current thesis about “police bias against black people” – which seems a direct real trigger of the lecture renaming – cannot be confirmed by available data. Showing all that, the paper could be considered a warning against dangerous social tendencies in modern science in general and statistics in particular.


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