scholarly journals Countering the "Phenomenology of Whiteness": The Nation of Islam's Phenomenology of Blackness

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
E. Anthony Muhammad ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hermeneutic Phenomenology ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Critical Hermeneutic ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Black Man ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Devil

The Nation of Islam (NOI) has intrigued American society since its inception in 1930. Historically, the religio-nationalist organization has been the object of admiration for its uncanny ability to reform the lives of downtrodden blacks. At the same time, the NOI has garnered condemnation for the controversial, racialized and divisive doctrine that it espouses. This condemnation has led to a dismissal of the NOI’s doctrine as reactionary, bigoted, and fanciful myth-making. In recent decades however, scholars have begun interrogating the doctrine of the NOI. Rather than dismissing it, scholars in various fields have recognized the critical and phenomenological nature of its doctrine as it goes about the “mental, physical, and spiritual resurrection” of black Americans. In this article, I interrogate three of the most controversial claims of the NOI: The White man is the devil, the Black man is God, and its endorsement of the separation of Blacks into their own territory. Viewed through the lens of phenomenology, I submit that the NOI’s doctrine and actions should be viewed as the establishment of an emancipative and recuperative “Phenomenology of Blackness” that counters a lifeworld built upon the disembodiment and dehumanization of Black bodies. Reframing the NOI’s doctrine in this way positions it as a linguistic, religiously stylized, praxis-oriented critical hermeneutic phenomenology.

scholarly journals Color Crit: Critical Race Theory and the History and Future of Colorism in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Reece
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
American Society

Critical race theory teaches that racism and racial inequality are constants in American society that stand outside of the prejudices of individuals. It argues that structures and institutions are primarily responsible for the maintenance of racial inequality. However, critical race theorists have neglected to formally examine and theorize colorism, a primary offshoot of racial domination. Although studies of colorism have become increasingly common, they lack a unifying theoretical framework, opting to lean on ideas about prejudice and preference to explain the advantages lighter skinned, Black Americans are afforded relative to darker skinned Black Americans. In this study, I deploy a critical race framework to push back against preference as the only, or primary, mechanism facilitating skin tone stratification. Instead, I use historical Census data and regression analysis to explore the historical role of color-based marriage selection on concentrating economic advantage among lighter skinned Black Americans. I then discuss the policy and legal implications of developing a structural view of colorism and skin tone stratification in the United States and the broader implications for how we conceptualize race in this country.

Blackface Minstrelsy

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
To Come ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Minstrel Shows ◽  
American Society

According to most scholars whose primary focus is on this topic, minstrel shows were one of the most disgraceful yet complex chapters in the history of American musicals. Popularized during the early to mid-19th century, minstrelsy incorporated and emphasized the prevailing racism, racial stereotypes, and white supremacy mentality that had permeated almost every aspect of American society since the mid-1600s. More specifically, minstrel shows transferred and translated concepts of race and racism into a form of leisure activity in which ridiculous and obscene Black American images, such as “Sambo” or “Zip Coon,” who were slow witted “plantation darky” and ignorant free Black Americans, were used to justify racial segregation, political oppression, and at times, uncontrolled racial violence. Despite the ongoing debate within the academy, most scholars contend that the first series of minstrel shows emerged during the 1820s, reached their zenith soon after the Civil War ended, and remained relatively popular well into the early 1900s. As America’s first form of popular entertainment, during its origins minstrel shows were performed by white men, mostly of Irish descent, who blackened their faces with burnt cork, cooled ashes, or dirt and began to ridicule and depict a distorted view of African American life on southern plantations through both songs and dances. Additionally, Black Americans were normally shown as naive buffoons or uncontrollable children who danced their way through and expressed a fondness for the system of slavery. At the same, this musical genre also helped to launch the careers of many well-known entertainers of the era, both African Americans and non-African Americans, such as James Bland, Stephen Foster, Al Jolson, and Bert Williams. In the end, the culture that embraced this type of “popular entertainment” was either wholly enchanted by such racially charged images or took these images as the truth about the history and experience of all African Americans. Additional scholars such as Eric Lott and Robert Toll contend that the origins, development, and legacy of minstrelsy, especially after the mid-1840s, in some ways, was a response to the economic depression of the 1830s and early 1840s, as an attempt to reassure the dominate white society that their societal status and political dominance would continue for decades to come. In some ways, these notions are still alive today. Finally, many studies on the topic of minstrelsy can be divided into historical periods such as: (1) early writings (1930s–1950s); (2) the revisionist era (1960s and 1970s); and the contemporary era (1980s to the present).

I’m Going to Marry the Devil’s Daughter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Lyric Tradition ◽  
Jim Crow South ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the way in which the blues lyric tradition uses the devil as a figure for the southern white man and hell as a figure for the miseries of the Jim Crow South. The white slave master and slave patroller show up, in coded form, in the antebellum spirituals; this tradition was reconfigured after Emancipation to reflect the new realities of the sharecropper's and bluesman's world, one presided over by the white bossman, sheriff, and prison farm warden. Bluesmen acted the devil, one might say, in order to evade and supplant the (white) devil and live more freely in the Jim Crow South over which he presided. Big Bill Broonzy, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lightnin' Hopkins, Champion Jack Dupree, and others recorded songs in which they signified on this mean white devil; Wheatstraw and Broonzy imaged themselves as his son-in-law: the black man making love to the white devil's daughter.

Race, Interdependence and Healing in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320
Author(s):  
Mar Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Community Building ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Resistance Strategies ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
American Society ◽  
Early Trauma

Abstract In Toni Morrison’s works, traumatized characters are victimized by the damaging, racist dominant ideology that still codifies black bodies as the non-human “Other” due to the long-lasting effects of slavery and diasporic dispersal. These individual and collective traumas seemingly hinder their articulation of healthy forms of subject formation and community-building efforts. My contention is that in God Help the Child (2015) Morrison explores the ramifications of early trauma in her characters’ lives but also, more importantly, an array of resistance strategies, which facilitate healing, within an ethics of interdependence. Hence, Morrison critiques fundamental inequities in American society and around the world, by paying attention to the intersections of race, gender, and age discourses.

William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Law ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Case Basis

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

“The Future Golden Day of the Race”: Millennialism and Black Americans in the Nadir, 1877–1901

1991 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy E. Fulop
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sunday Afternoon ◽  
The Future ◽  
Black Man

At the turn of the century, Edward W. Blyden, resident of Liberia and former Presbyterian missionary from America, read to some African natives the following description from the New YorkIndependentof the burning of a black man in Georgia:Sam Hose was burned on Sunday afternoon in the presence of thousands of people. Before the fire had been kindled the mob amused themselves by cutting off the ears, fingers, toes, etc. to carry away as mementos. After the burning, and before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the heart and liver being especially cut up and sold. Small pieces of bone brought 25 cents, and “a bit of liver, crisply cooked, sold for 10 cents.” So eager were the crowd to obtain souvenirs that a rush for the stake was made, and those near the body were forced against and had to fight for their escape.

The Assault on Class

Worldview ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 15 (7) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Peter L. Berger ◽  
Brigitte Berger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
American Society ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Ideal

Of all evils in American society, racial oppression is the most intolerable. Of all priorities for American society, the attainment of racial justice is the most urgent. This is so because the issue of race touches on the very heart of the moral values by which the society lives. Martin Luther King understood this, and the same understanding illuminates his idea of an integrated American society.The ideal is not only the integration of black Americans in terms of all the rights and privileges promised by the society's political creed; and it is not at all integration that deprives blacks of their cultural identity, as King's detractors (including the posthumous ones) have falsely claimed.

scholarly journals MASCULINIDADES NEGRAS EM MOVIMENTO – O CINEMA NEGRO COMO PRÁTICA DECOLONIAL NA EDUCAÇÃO BLACK MASCULINITY IN MOVEMENT –THE BLACK CINEMA AS A DECOLONIAL PRACTICE IN EDUCATION

RevistAleph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Aurélio Da Conceição Correa
Keyword(s):  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Cinema ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Relations Of Power

Este ensaio tem a proposta de dar continuidade na crescente discussão sobre as masculinidades negras, reconhecendo que estas são subjugadas como inferiores, devido as raízes coloniais racistas que criam relações assimétricas de poder, cria-se uma masculinidade hegemônica patriarcal do homem branco, hétero e cristão. Esta violência colonial aprisiona até os dias de hoje as subjetividades e as representações do homem negro. O cinema como artefato reprodutor da realidade acaba a dar sequência a estes históricos estereótipos. Porém, existe na atualidade uma emergente criação cinematográfica que busca outras representações estéticas para os corpos e mentes negras. A partir destes filmes pensamos em possibilidades pedagógicas que descolonizem as mentes e ressignifiquem as masculinidades negras. This text has the proposal to continue the growing discussion about black masculinities, recognizing that those are subjugated as inferior because of the racist colonial roots that create asymmetrical relations of power creating the patriarchal hegemonic masculinity of the white, straight and Christian man. This colonial violence imprisons until the present day the subjectivities and representations of the black man. Cinema as a reproductive artifact of reality ends up following these historical stereotypes. However, nowadays there is an emerging cinematic creation that seeks other aesthetic representations for black bodies and minds. From these films we think of pedagogical possibilities that decolonize the minds and resignify the black masculinities.

scholarly journals The Creation of the Devil and the End of the White Man’s Rule: The Theological Influence of the Nation of Islam on Early Black Theology

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Marjorie Corbman
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Complete Identification ◽  
The Devil

This article examines the emergence of the Black Theology movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the religiously diverse milieu of Black political movements during the same period. In particular, the theology of the Nation of Islam was widely understood by contemporary commentators as a major source of the confrontational rhetoric and tactics of the Black Power movement. Drawing upon the writings of the radical Black nationalist minister Albert B. Cleage, Jr., this article examines the importance of what Cleage termed the Nation of Islam’s “Black cultural mythology” in providing the possibility of a break in identification with white Christianity. In particular, it traces the influence of the Nation of Islam’s proclamation of God’s imminent apocalyptic destruction of white America on the theology of James H. Cone and Cleage. In doing so, this article argues for the importance of examining questions of racial and religious difference in American history alongside one another. It was precisely through creative appropriation of a non-Christian framework of biblical interpretation, rooted in faith in God’s complete identification with Black humanity and the consequent imminent judgment of white America, that early (Christian) Black Theologians were able to retain their Christian identity and sever its entanglement with white supremacy.

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