Minimal Brain Dysfunction, Ritalin, and Racial Politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-78
Author(s):  
Michael E. Staub
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Brain Dysfunction ◽  
Minimal Brain Dysfunction ◽  
Children Of Color ◽  
Attention Disorder ◽  
Class Child ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
American Children ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Poor Children

This chapter examines psychologists’ involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in inventing a diagnosis known as “minimal brain dysfunction” (MBD) – a precursor to attention deficit attention disorder (ADHD). Although asserted to be a physiological matter, one best treated with stimulant drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin), MBD was not based on a clear medical symptom. Quite soon, the modal individual for whom Ritalin became considered the most appropriate treatment was a white and middle-class child. As desegregation was often followed by the new phenomenon of tracking within schools, and as more African American children were labeled as suffering from “mild mental retardation,” the contrasting diagnosis of MBD represented a new disease entity to address the cognitive challenges sometimes faced by privileged children of the predominantly white suburbs. Simultaneously, a growing number of commentators, both African American and anti-racist white, came fiercely to protest what they perceived to be a disturbing tendency to overprescribe stimulant medications to poor children of color.

African and African American Religions in the Early Americas

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Young
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Religion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.

“Deplorable Exegesis”: Dick Gregory's Irreverent Scriptural Authority in the 1960s and 1970s

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-236
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Religious Writings ◽  
Religious Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Teachings

ABSTRACTThis article examines comedian Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory's comical articulation of religious belief and belonging through his speeches and religious writings during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, during his most visible public presence as an activist and comedic entertainer, Gregory bore an irreverent scriptural authority for his readers and comedy audiences who sought a prominent, public affirmation of their suspicion and criticism of religious authorities and conventional religious teachings. This suspicion would allow them to grapple with the oppressive presence of religion in the long history of Western colonialism, in the U.S. context of slavery, and in the violence and segregation of Jim Crow America. Following this religious suspicion, however, Gregory's consistent goal was to implement just social teachings stemming from socially and theologically progressive readings of the Hebrew Bible and of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Gregory's irreverence modeled, and reflected, the maintenance of belief in both the divine and in the justness of remaking an oppressive, violent, unequal world through nonviolent activism in accordance with his understanding of the teachings of the King James scriptures that he read throughout his life. This study of comedy uses one African American male's production of irreverent, authoritative religious rhetoric to display a noteworthy mode of mid-century African American religious liberalism. It is also a case study highlighting the complexity of religious belief and affiliation. Despite acknowledged ambivalences about his commitments to religion, Gregory also modeled ways for audiences to reframe religious commitments to produce social change.

scholarly journals “An Authentic Record of My Race”: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Vaughn Booker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

Staging Public Blackness in Mid-Twentieth-Century Peru: The Repertoires of Pancho Fierro and Cumanana

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-230
Author(s):  
Heidi Carolyn Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Katherine Dunham ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Performance

In 1951, Victoria (1922–2014) and Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–92) attended a performance at Lima's Teatro Municipal (Municipal Theatre) by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Dunham (1909–2006), an African American choreographer and anthropologist, pioneered a “research-to-performance” method to study African-derived dances in the Caribbean and stage them in stylized choreographies. Elite Lima patrons walked out of the theatre during the danced African fertility rite in Dunham's “Rites de Passage,” but the performance left a lasting impression on the Santa Cruzes. Nicomedes Santa Cruz later described the event as the first positive staged demonstration of blackness in Peru—and Victoria Santa Cruz stated that, when they saw Katherine Dunham's production, they knew they had to do something similar. The Santa Cruzes went on to lead a revival of Afro-Peruvian arts in the 1960s and 1970s.

Beauty and the Black Student Revolt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirletta Kinchen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Student ◽  
African American Students ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
American Students ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Student Protest Movement

At the height of the Black Power movement, African American students, especially those attending predominantly white colleges and universities, demanded access to and inclusion in their institutions’ resources. Their demands included Black Studies and Black History programs, the end of racist practices by faculty and administrators, and more culturally sensitive programs that reflected their lived experiences. This essay examines how the Black Power movement sought to redefine the beauty aesthetic by exploring how African American students at Memphis State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s politicized the campus positions traditionally reserved for white students. In 1970 Maybelline Forbes was elected the first black homecoming queen at Memphis State. As athletic teams began to integrate during the 1960s and 1970s, black women struggled to penetrate the membership ranks of cheerleading squads, serve as homecoming queens, and join other spaces that excluded them. This essay demonstrates how these positions became contested spaces for the larger black student protest movement, thus offering a different perspective on how black activists engaged in protest on college campuses in the Black Power era.

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