scholarly journals Racism and Social Segregation in Maya Angelo’s “Caged Bird”

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
Khalil Bakheet Khalil Ismail
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Class Discrimination ◽  
Social Segregation

The main thrust of this paper is to examine the issue of racial segregation in Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” via exploring the poem in relation to the circumstances that typify life and existence in the African American context. An attempt is made to situate this poem within the heat of racism, oppression, and class discrimination as well as the search for black identity. The paper relies on New Historicism as the scope of exploration owing to the chunk of influence that history and society bears on African American writing. Then literary critical analysis is made to verify the different aspects of racism and social segregation as represented in the poem.

scholarly journals Blackfishing on Instagram: Influencing and the Commodification of Black Urban Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512110382
Author(s):  
Wesley E. Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Black Markets ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
The Media ◽  
Urban Aesthetics

This article examines blackfishing, a practice in which cultural and economic agents appropriate Black culture and urban aesthetics in an effort to capitalize on Black markets. Specifically, this study analyzes the Instagram accounts of four influencers (Instagram models) who were accused of blackfishing in late 2018 and is supplemented with a critical analysis of 27 news and popular press articles which comprise the media discourse surrounding the controversy. Situated within the literature on cultural appropriation and urban redevelopment policies, this study explores how Black identity is mined for its cultural and economic value in the context of digital labor. I assert that Instagram’s unique platform affordances (including its racial affordances) and the neoliberal logics which undergird cultural notions of labor facilitate the mechanisms by which Black identity is rendered a lucrative commodity vis-à-vis influencing.

Race Doesn’t Matter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey D. Fields
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Abstract Notion

This chapter focuses on African American Republicans who can be labeled as “color-blind” because their strategy for linking black identity to Republican politics involves de-emphasizing the role of race in black people's lives. These African American Republicans see themselves as linked to a broader black community, but they reject identity politics as the pathway to racial uplift. They endorse Republican social policy as part of a commitment to an abstract notion of conservative politics, not because the policies are good for black people. Indeed, for race-blind African American Republicans, the best thing for blacks is to abandon race-based identity politics.

“An Example for the Rest of the Nation”

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-246
Author(s):  
Martin Summers
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Hospital Staff ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Changing Demographics

This chapter covers the various challenges to Saint Elizabeths’ segregationist culture made by both black Washingtonians and the federal government over the first half of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring the staff’s inability to effect an absolute racial segregation in the wards, which was the result of the hospital’s constantly being in a state of overcapacity. The chapter also looks at the changing demographics of the patient population following World War II, when the army and navy stopped sending its mentally ill service members to Saint Elizabeths. It then turns to an examination of local community members’ and the federal government’s challenges to discrimination against black medical students, mistreatment of African American patients in the 1920s and 1930s, and exclusionary and segregationist employment policies. This chapter covers the desegregation of the hospital staff, from attendants and nurses in the 1930s and 1940s to physicians in the 1950s.

Harlem Nightclubs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Templeton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Lindy Hop ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
Social Dances

In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem became a major hub of New York City nightlife and a prolific space for African American artistic creation. It was in Harlem’s nightclubs (also known as cabarets) that big band jazz became a sensation and where theatrical dance forms like tap dance, and social dances like the lindy hop and the Charleston, gained widespread popularity. These artistic developments contributed to an emerging modern black identity among the intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. While the artists in these nightclubs tended to be African American, the more elaborate and expensive clubs catered almost exclusively to white patrons; black artists were often faced with the challenge of catering to white expectations while creatively developing their own art. The music and dance that emerged in these nightclubs also became the inspiration of many black modernist authors.

New Perspectives on New Deal Housing Policy: Explicating and Mapping HOLC Loans to African Americans

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney ◽  
LaDale Winling
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Working Capital ◽  
Class Bias ◽  
Loan Corporation ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Scholarship on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) has typically focused on this New Deal housing agency’s invention of redlining, with dire effects from this legacy of racial, ethnic, and class bias for the trajectories of urban, and especially African American neighborhoods. However, HOLC did not embark on its now infamous mapping project until after it had issued all its emergency refinancing loans to the nation’s struggling homeowners. We examine the racial logic of HOLC’s local operations and its lending record to black applicants during the agency’s initial 1933-1935 “rescue” phase, finding black access to its loans to have been far more extensive than anyone has assumed. Yet, even though HOLC did loan to African Americans, it did so in ways that reinforced racial segregation—and with the objective of replenishing the working capital of the overwhelmingly white-owned building and loans that held the mortgages on most black-owned homes.

Mapping Diaspora

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia de Santana Pinho
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Roots Tourism

Brazil, like some countries in Africa, has become a major destination for African American tourists seeking the cultural roots of the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research as well as textual, visual, and archival sources, Patricia de Santana Pinho investigates African American roots tourism, a complex, poignant kind of travel that provides profound personal and collective meaning for those searching for black identity and heritage. It also provides, as Pinho’s interviews with Brazilian tour guides, state officials, and Afro-Brazilian activists reveal, economic and political rewards that support a structured industry. Pinho traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn especially to Bahia, the state that in previous centuries had absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the "map of Africanness" that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, Pinho finds, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.

African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis

1995 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Joni L. Jones ◽  
Samuel A. Hay ◽  
Rena Fraden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
American Theatre
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