Nathaniel Wells: The Making of a Black Country Gentleman

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Anne Rainsbury
Keyword(s):  
White Woman ◽  
Black People ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Social Barriers ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Large Estate ◽  
Sugar Plantations ◽  
Black Life

In this chapter, Anne Rainsbury examines the surprising life of Nathaniel Wells whose story defies many of the assumed narratives of black life in 18th century England. Born enslaved in St Kitts, he was freed by his father, Williams Wells, a wealthy merchant who owned three sugar plantations. He was educated in London and inherited the bulk of his father’s estate at the age of twenty-one which included three plantations and the hundreds of slaves who worked them. He married Harriet Este, a white woman (after her death he would marry Esther Owen, also white), and bought a large estate, Piercefield, in Monmouthshire. Rainsbury explains that unlike the limited political rights and social barriers Wells would have faced in St Kitts, he was able to play a prominent role in local public life including becoming a magistrate and deputy lieutenant of the county of Monmouth. His social and political status contradicted the racism blacks faced in Britain, yet the irony that his wealth and standing were built on the profits of slavery and suffering of black people, Rainsbury says, cannot be overlooked.

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.

scholarly journals Turning the Tide on Violence against Women in Politics: How Are We Measuring Up?

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 695-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Ballington
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Women In Politics ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Psychological Harm ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
The Right ◽  
Human Rights Violation

Violence against women in politics (VAWP) is a human rights violation, as it prevents the realization of political rights. Violence against women in political and public life can be understood as “any act or threat of gender-based violence, resulting in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering to women, that prevents them from exercising and realizing their political rights, whether in public or private spaces, including the right to vote and hold public office, to vote in secret and to freely campaign, to associate and assemble, and to enjoy freedom of opinion and expression” (UN Women/UNDP 2017, 20).

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.

Refugees: The politically oppressed

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372093192
Author(s):  
Felix Bender
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Classical Approach ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Normative Foundation ◽  
The Right ◽  
What Matters

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically distinct approaches grounding the right to refugee status and argues that all three are normatively inadequate. Refugee status should neither be grounded in individual persecution for specific reasons (classical approach) nor in individual persecution for any discriminatory reasons (human rights approach). It should also not be based solely on harm (humanitarian approach). Rather, this article argues, it should be based on political oppression – on persons lacking public autonomy, formally expressed as a lack of legal–political status. The normative foundation for a claim to refugee status lies in the inability of a person to control, amend and seek recourse to the specific situation she faces. It lies in the lack of public autonomy expressed as a lack of legal–political rights. What matters for a claim to refugee status is thus the legal–political disenfranchisement of a person, ultimately leaving her with no recourse to the particular situation she faces other than flight. Refugees, then, are not only those who fear harm or persecution, but those who are politically oppressed.

scholarly journals Hungarian Feminist Periodicals as Alternative Public Spaces, 1907–18: Values, Networks, and Dissemination Strategies

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judit Acsády
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
National Federation ◽  
Mainstream Press

Women have been active as writers, translators, journalists, and editors in Hungarian public life since the mid-nineteenth century. They both participated in the mainstream press and created their own public spaces by establishing periodicals advocating women’s education, employment, and political rights. This article focuses on the Budapest-based journals A Nő és a társadalom [Woman and Society] (1907‒13), founded by Rózsa Schwimmer (1877–1948), and its successor A Nő [Woman] (1914‒27), the official organs of the Hungarian Feminist Association and the National Federation of Female Clerks. Drawing on the archives of the Feminist Association, including readers’ letters, it explores the networks connected to the journals. More particularly, it demonstrates how the editors, who also played key roles in the Association, established local offices and affiliate groups outside the capital to expand their readership and to propagate feminist ideas in the most effective way.

Black Life, Trans Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-171
Author(s):  
SA Smythe
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The West ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Vulnerable People ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Black Life

Abstract This essay thinks through some possibilities and implications for a trans studies formation in Europe and across the West that takes as some of its core concerns and ethical commitments black people, black life, and black capacities for insurgency, experimentation, and trans nonbinary method. Writing against the logics of displacement, disciplinarity, and depletion, what follows is a brief meditation on both the institutionalization of trans studies in Western academia and the material disregard of black people, trans people, migrants, and other oppressed and vulnerable people under the extractive regimes of cisheteropatriarchial white supremacy.

Antiblackness and the Adultification of Black Children in a U.S. Prison Nation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir A. Gilmore ◽  
Pamela J. Bettis
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Black Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
White American ◽  
Gender And Education ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Life

Discourses in the early 21st century surrounding the presumption of childhood innocence were undergirded by antiblackness. The theorization of antiblackness within the context of race, gender, and education has been beneficial to understanding how the mistreatment of Black children and the illegitimacy of Black childhoods within the white American racial imaginary is seemingly justified. Foundational to the United States, antiblackness is a race-based paradigm of racial othering and subjugation through a litany of organized structural violence against Black people. Structured outside the realms of humanity and civil society, Black life, through this paradigm, is regarded as other than human. Arguably, antiblackness shapes all racialized, gendered, sexualized conditions and experiences of all Black people, including the age compression of Black children. Antiblackness scholarship posits that there is an institutional unwillingness to see Black youth as children. Discourses on what it means to be a child, who can occupy that position, and when a particular stage of a child’s development is reached, are all structured against Black youth. Pathologized as deviant, adult-like problems, Black children occupy life in a liminal space, where they are denied childhood status but carry adult-like culpability. As adultified Black youth, they lack autonomy and are not granted leniency to learn from their mistakes like their white peers. With their actions and intentions perceived as deviant, ill-willed, or hypersexual, Black children are susceptible a wide range of violence from school punishment, the criminal justice system, sexual abuse and exploitation, and excessive police force.

How Brenda’s Baby Got California Love

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Black Life ◽  
And Gender

Centering the lives, music, and experiences of Tupac Shakur and his mother, Afeni Shakur, this chapter explores the migration stories of black people across the Black Map through the lens of hip hop music, the Black Panther Party, the Up South, Out South, and West South. Emphasizing the importance of cultural production and black music, the authors highlight the role of race, place, police brutality, and gender in black life and politics. Focused on the connections across space and time, this chapter demonstrates the key role black power politics, police brutality, and hip hop in the politics and migrations of black people throughout the chocolate cities.

The Two Ms. Johnsons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Black People ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Black Life

Centering the lives, experiences, and murders of transwomen activists Marsha P. Johnson and Duanna Johnson, this chapter explores the migration stories of black women across the Black Map. Emphasizing the importance of intersectionality, the authors highlight the role of race, gender violence, and homophobia in black life and politics. Focused on the connections across space and time, this chapter demonstrates the key role transwomen and women of color play in the politics and migrations of black people throughout the chocolate cities.

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