Hoodoo, Kentucky, Workers Adminstration Project, Poetry, Black Folklore, Ancestors and Memory

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-117
Author(s):  
Jasmine Wigginton
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Women Poor ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Internal Bias ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Do So

A poem about realizing freedom through transformation. The poem “ ‘Hoodoo’ Inspired by Mamie Hansberry from Christian Country Kentucky” is based on the voice of Mamie Hansberry, a formerly enslaved woman from Kentucky. Hansberry’s words were recorded by historians and archivists who worked for the Workers Project Administration (WPA). The WPA was a Depression-era program where historians and writers went around the South to collect the stories of the former enslaved. This program provided an opportunity for Black voices to be added and centralized in the archives. Despite positive intentions, the archivists were clouded by their own internal bias. Most of the collectors were white Southern males who held strong biases that influenced the topics they chose to explore. For example, Black folklore is featured heavily in the WPA narratives. To the recorder, these beliefs might have been viewed as eccentric and uncivilized. When interacting with Mamie Hansberry, they more than likely prompted her into explaining “Hoodism”. Instead of a simple introduction, however, Hansberry spun an oral rhyming poem, “A snake head an’ er lizard tail, Hoo-doo; Not close den a mile of jail, Hoo-doo.” Through her rhythmic re-telling, she showcases the beauty and power that resides in “Hoodisms”, that was probably lost by the white male listeners. The archives often offer us silence on Black voices that are women, poor, and rural. If they were recorded, they are often tainted by the bias of our racist and sexist systems, such as in the WPA narratives. Instead of looking to the archives to better tell the stories of my ancestors, I choose to do so through poetry allowing me to reimagine and explore where the archives offer me no assistance. Removing the white male gaze, I give my version of “Hoodism” based on the long line of Kentucky Black women who came before me, like Mamie Hansberry. This is my homage to their voices and stories. Their stories are not lost or forgotten.

Theorizing Charismatic Authority in Early Islamic Law*

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-158
Author(s):  
Jonathan E. Brockopp
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Model ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Do So

In Islamic Studies, charisma has usually been reserved for the study of marginalized individuals. I argue here that charisma may also be applied to leadership among legal scholars. To do so, I join a long line of scholars who have modified Max Weber’s initial insights, and put forth a new, dynamic model of charismatic authority. The purpose of my model is to account for the fact that religious histories emphasize the uniqueness of the originating charismatic event, be that Prophet Muhammad’s revelations, Jesus’ theophany or the Buddha’s enlightenment, while at the same time recognizing that the charismatic cycle never quite ends. In contrast with Weber, I argue that charismatic authority in religious traditions is best understood as a network of influence and interaction through which the routinization of charisma reinterprets and redefines the meaning of the originating charismatic event.

scholarly journals Staging Intersectionality

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
John-Paul Zaccarini
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
White Gaze ◽  
Brown Bodies ◽  
Performance Of Race

This essay follows the making of a queer of colour aesthetic space in the form of a music video entitled Brother, within a largely homogenous white University. The video places white heteronormativity on the periphery whilst intersectional brown bodies take the centre. It inverts racist and fetishistic tropes in music video culture and reverses the white male gaze. The making of the video created a small brown island in a sea of white as a vision of a future brown space protected from the ubiquitous, ambivalently festishizing white gaze; a gaze that projects its own narrative onto bodies of colour. It puts forward a thesis of racial agency, whereby the performance of “race” is scripted by the person of colour and not provoked by the construct of whiteness.

Rape as Racial Injustice

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-74
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Victims ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
Legal Defense ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Local Campaigns

This chapter examines activists in the black freedom movement who politicized the connection between rape and racism in their fight for justice. These activists argued that rape law and the entire legal system served to uphold white supremacy. Black men almost exclusively faced the death penalty for interracial rape, and black women victims saw little to no justice in the aftermath of white male sexual violence against them. In response, activists launched local campaigns nationwide in defense of black women victims, demanding justice. Likewise, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund pursued the abolition of the death penalty in their defense of convicted black rapists. In calling attention to the injustices faced by black men, some lawyers and activists also engaged the trope of the lying white woman. This was one of the strategies employed in Maryland’s infamous Giles v. Johnson case. In defending both black victims and accused black assailants, lawyers and activists exposed the racial injustices embedded in rape laws and their application. However, activists’ formulation of rape as racist oppression failed to engage a politics of rape that included black female victims of intraracial rape. This ultimately limited the scope of the movement.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

Different Worlds and Divergent Paths: Academic Careers Defined by Race and Gender

2008 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUANITA JOHNSON-BAILEY ◽  
RONALD CERVERO
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Research University ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Faculty Interactions ◽  
Disparate Treatment ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Academic Lives

In this article, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, a Black female professor, and Ronald M. Cervero, a White male professor, examine and contrast their academic lives by exploring how race and gender have influenced their journeys and their experiences. Using journal excerpts, personal examples, and a comparative list of privileges, the authors present a picture of their different realities at a research university. The depiction of their collective forty years in academia reveals that White men and Black women are regarded and treated differently by colleagues and students. Manifestations of this disparate treatment are evident primarily in classroom and faculty interactions. An examination of the professors' relationships with people and with their institution illustrates that, overall, the Black woman is often relegated to a second-class existence characterized by hostility, isolation, and lack of respect, while the White man lives an ideal academic life as a respected scholar who disseminates knowledge, understands complexity, and embodies objectivity.

Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Greene
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the names that come to mind for most Americans if asked about the civil rights or Black Power movements. Others may point to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom backed pathbreaking civil rights legislation. However, recent scholarship suggests that neither black male leaders nor white male presidents were always the most important figures in the modern struggle for black freedom. Presidents took their cues not simply from male luminaries in civil rights organizations. Rather, their legislative initiatives were largely in response to grassroots protests in which women, especially black women, were key participants. African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.

“Look! A Black Ethnographer!”: Fanon, Performance, and Critical Ethnography

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 322-335
Author(s):  
Bryce Henson
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Critical Ethnography ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Subjects ◽  
Do So

This article engages the possibility of a critical Black ethnography and a performative fugitivity. Drawing on the author’s ethnographic research, it examines the tension between being a racialized and gendered person and becoming an ethnographic self. This tension rises when critical Black ethnographers are visually rendered outside the domain of the ethnographer, a category forged against the template of Western White male subjects. Instead, they are interchangeable with the populations they perform research with and suspect to performances of racialized and gendered violence. This opens up an emergent politics for the possibility of a critical Black ethnographer who alters how ethnographic practice is undertaken to grapple with the realities of race and gender by the critical Black ethnographer in the field. That said, the critical Black ethnographer must reconcile being Black, becoming an ethnographer, and what it would mean to be a critical Black ethnographer. To do so, this article draws on Frantz Fanon and situates him as both a performer and a critical ethnographer to analyze how does a critical Black ethnographer engage with performance, performativity, and the performative.

Go ’Head Girl, Way to Represent!

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-74
Author(s):  
Maretta McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
White Male ◽  
Prime Time ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Television Show ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Cultural Images ◽  
Television Content ◽  
And Gender

Negative cultural images of Black people, shaped by predominantly white male television content creators, have prompted calls for more racial inclusion behind the scenes. Even though representation is the topic of scholarly conversations, little is known about what representation in television content leadership looks like or how people from diverse backgrounds influence the ways Black characters are portrayed on-screen. This chapter fills this gap by examining a prime-time television show created, written, and executive produced by a Black woman, Shonda Rhimes. Using qualitative content analysis, this chapter analyzes Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy to explore how intergroup interactions and depictions of race and gender on a prime-time television show may reflect the social location of its creator. The findings presented in this chapter suggest that the way Rhimes redefines culturally negative stereotypes of Black women reflects her “outsider within” social location, one she used to push back against external definitions of Black womanhood.

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