Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
American South ◽  
White People ◽  
Personal Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
And Storage ◽  
Natchez District ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
The Ideal

In the antebellum Natchez district, in the heart of slave country, black people sued white people in all-white courtrooms. They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society. To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used—the language of property, in particular—to make their claims recognizable and persuasive to others and to link their status as owner to the ideal of a free, autonomous citizen. In telling their stories, Welch reveals a previously unknown world of black legal activity, one that is consequential for understanding the long history of race, rights, and civic inclusion in America.

scholarly journals Racism Reflected in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
Nikita Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Congo River ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper deals with the concept of racism, which is considered as a dark topic in the history of the world .Throughout history, racist ideology widespread throughout the world especially between black people and white people. In addition, many European countries started to expand their empire and to get more territories in other countries. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which is his experience in the Congo River during the 19th century dealt with the concept of racism, which was clear in this novel because of the conflicts that were between black and white people and it explained the real aims of colonialism in Africa, which were for wealth and power.

Planes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandra D. Bhimull
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Air Travel ◽  
White Flight ◽  
White People ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Air Passage ◽  
Affective Dimensions

Chapter 4 concentrates on how people learned to be in and live with ordinary flight through the everyday sky. Focused on air passage itself, it explores how a flying culture took hold and examines the affective dimensions of airline travel. Analyzing air travel stories, it chronicles what first-generation fliers did and felt inside early airline cabins. The vertical distance between the airplane and the ground profoundly altered the ways air passengers related to colonial landscapes and lives beneath them. The second part of the chapter illuminates how black people on the ground reacted to white people in the sky, and vice versa. It connects the emergence of everyday air travel practices to the upward expansion of empire. The last part of the chapter brings the history of white flight and racial segregation to present-day discussions of aerial mobility and the varying experiences of frequent and infrequent fliers.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known aspect of the legal history of the slave South. African Americans were not only observers of trials, informal participants, defendants, or objects of regulation: trial court records reveal them to be prolific litigators as well. They were parties to civil suits in their own interests and directly active in legal proceedings. They sued other black people, certainly, but they also sued white people. What is more, they often won. This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians. But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways we understand the operation of power, of law, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South. The black legal experience in America cannot be reduced to white regulation and black criminality. Examining African Americans’ involvement in private law reveals a different picture. Black people appealed to the courts to protect their interests. They exploited the language of rights and property, thus including themselves within an American narrative of citizenship and privilege in advance of formal emancipation. When black litigants made such claims at law, they expected the courts to validate and execute those claims. Indeed, they sought accountability. Thus, seemingly mundane civil actions like debt recovery suits complicate our notions about the sources of rights and their relationship to civic inclusion.

scholarly journals Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 111-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahim Kurwa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
White People ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Residential Space

The neighborhood is a historic and contemporary site of the assertion of white racial and economic domination, particularly over Black people. Although there is strong evidence that whites continue to prefer racially segregated neighborhoods, fifty years of fair housing jurisprudence has made it more difficult to openly bar non-white residents. Among the many strategies used to protect white domination of residential space is the coordinated surveillance and policing of non-white people. In this paper, I show how Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, has become an important platform for the surveillance and policing of race in residential space, enabling the creation of what I call digitally gated communities. First, I describe the history of the platform and the forms of segregation and surveillance it has supplemented or replaced. Second, I situate the platform in a broader analysis of carcerality as a mode and logic of regulating race in the United States. Third, using examples drawn from public reports about the site, I illustrate how race is surveilled and policed in the context of gentrification and integration. Finally, I discuss implications, questions, and future issues that might arise on the platform.

Community Versus Hospital Opioid-Related Overdose Deaths in Illinois

2021 ◽  
pp. 003335492199490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Feinglass ◽  
Garth Walker ◽  
Rushmin Khazanchi ◽  
Kelsey Rydland ◽  
Robert Andrew Tessier ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Census Tract ◽  
Black People ◽  
Cook County ◽  
Opioid Use ◽  
White People ◽  
Overdose Death ◽  
Level Data ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hospital Deaths ◽  
Overdose Deaths

Objective To better understand approaches to reducing mortality from the opioid epidemic, we analyzed in-hospital versus community opioid-related overdose deaths in Illinois. Methods We used data from the Statewide Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (July 2017 through December 2018) to identify deaths that occurred in hospitals and communities (ie, homes or public spaces). We used census tract–level data for 34 Illinois counties to create bivariate mapping by overdose death rates. We used logistic regression to analyze the association of demographic and overdose characteristics with the likelihood of death in a hospital versus a community. Results During the study period, 2833 opioid-related overdose deaths occurred in 24 Illinois counties, 655 (23.1%) of which occurred in the hospital; of 2178 community deaths, 1888 (86.7%) occurred in the same census tract as the decedent’s recorded residence and 1285 (59.0%) occurred in the decedent’s home. Non-Hispanic Black people were 1.63 (95% CI, 1.27-2.10) times more likely than non-Hispanic White people to die in a hospital. Decedents from suburban Cook County and other Chicago suburban counties were significantly more likely to die in the hospital than decedents from Chicago or other Illinois counties. Documentation of a previous overdose, history of opioid use, and having bystanders present were significantly associated with hospital deaths. Evidence of a rapid overdose, fentanyl present, or prescription opioids were significantly associated with deaths in a community. Conclusions The high number of opioid-related overdose deaths in the community illustrates the need to decriminalize illicit drug use and facilitate treatment seeking. Establishing supervised safe consumption sites may have the biggest effect in reducing the number of opioid-related overdose deaths.

Scared Sheetless

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Newton ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The U.S

The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in the U.S. This paper argues that those attempting to understand how white supremacy works should delve into recent justifications of anti-black violence rather than simply waiting to spot the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Doing so requires scholars to disabuse themselves of taking for granted the descriptions of what may be characterized as a U.S. Christian-White imaginary and to observe the dynamic, discursive shifts that Jean-Franc̜ois Bayart calls “operational acts of identification.” Drawing on incidents from antebellum slavery to the Black Lives Matter era and beyond, it is argued that white people have long been able to justify anti-black violence by appealing to a biblicist “Negrophobia,” wherein black people are rendered as frightening, even demonic creatures that must be stopped for the good of God’s kingdom. This paper presents a critical history of violence in America that is representative of a devastatingly effective strategy that continues to fortify the functional primacy of whiteness despite popular rejections of racism.

scholarly journals Woman in the Mirror: Reflections

2015 ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Laura Fish
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Black British ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Political Views ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joan Riley

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf asserts: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. (34) The use of the mirror is key to Woolf’s arguments about the position of women in general and in particular that of women writers. Complicating Woolf’s view less than a century later, I examine how black women function as looking-glasses in a dual way: as blacks, we shared the past (and now share the current) fate of black people reflecting the “darker” side of white people, as many whites projected onto blacks the unacknowledgeable traits of their own nature. The mirror is also key then to the way in which racial oppression has been analysed in literature. My paper offers an account, by way of selected examples from the history of our literature, of indicating how the mirror has been essential to how black British women are viewed and reflected back. I suggest that the misshapen image in the looking glass created by white people and also black men, allows them to see an inflated reflection of themselves, to assume false feelings of superiority, and to perpetuate oppression against us. I focus on Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Una Marson, Joan Riley and Helen Oeyemi–authors whose work either anticipates or relates to Woolf’s notion of mirroring, by seeking ways to addressor overcome the situation in which we are placed. The texts explored not only trace the development of the tradition of our writing - the shift from being represented to representing ourselves– but also present a range of cultural and political views and identify three recurring themes: firstly, the denigration in our portrayal; secondly, the assumed superiority white people and black men adopt over us; and thirdly our resistance in remonstrating against such treatment and exposure.

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