Epilogue

This epilogue, written after the 2020 elections and the inauguration of President Joe Biden, first looks at the refusal of former president Donald Trump to accept his electoral defeat and his incitement of his hard-core supporters to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the Senate chamber of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Their violent storming of the Capitol, resulting in five deaths, prompted the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to impeach Trump for “incitement to insurrection.” However, only seven of fifty GOP senators joined all fifty Democrats to convict Trump, short of the required two-thirds majority of sixty-seven. One major consequence of Biden’s victory was his pledge, in a document entitled “Lift Every Voice: The Biden Plan for Black America,” to focus on “rooting out systemic racism” in American institutions. The epilogue then looks at the impact of Trump’s (and his followers) racism on two major social and political issues: the greater infection, hospitalization, and death rates of Blacks from the coronavirus pandemic, and racial justice and police reform after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. Attempting to arrest Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, Police Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes while he was handcuffed and prone on the street. The jury verdict in Chauvin’s murder trial, unknown at this writing, will play a significant role in determining how Americans will support, or oppose, programs and policies to “root out systemic racism,” as President Biden has pledged to combat. The reign of White Men’s Law must end.

Vodun Continuum in Black America: Communication with the Dead and the Invisible World in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing

The spread of Western rationalism through armed conquest, with the global dominance of Judeo-Christian and Islamic creeds, has almost obliterated the existence of the alternative ontological perceptions rooted in the dominated people’s cultures. This essay studies how Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing reaches back to African ancestral beliefs, vodun practices and rituals, and brings to life characters who strive to counteract exclusion with the conception of the world as a Whole, a continuum whose survival is premised on the respect of, and fusional union with, each element of that Whole. This conception partakes in the search for meaning to existence in a society that has erected individualism and the exclusion of black people into creed. The paper uses the theoretical approach of vodun ontology and, in an Afrocentric perspective, reads through Ward’s novel this cultural trait thriving centuries after the enslaved people’s departure from Africa. It purports to voice African traditional values and to celebrate cultural difference.

Black Media Reporting on Theater, Dance, and Jazz Clubs in Canada: From Shuffle along to Rockhead’s Paradise

Canada has a history of de facto Jim Crow (1911–1954). It also has a historical Black press that is intimately connected to Black America through transnational conversations, and diasporic migration. This article argues that Canada’s Black newspapers played a pivotal role in promoting Black performance during a time when they were scarcely covered in the dominant media. Drawing on news coverage from the 1920s through 1950s of black dance, musicals, and jazz clubs this article examines three case studies: Shuffle Along (1921–1924), the first all- Black Broadway musical to appear at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater, Alberta-born dancer Len Gibson (1926–2008), who revolutionized modern dance in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Montreal jazz club Rockhead’s Paradise (1928–1980), a pivotal site in the city’s Little Burgundy, a Black neighborhood that thrived in the 1930s through 1950s. The authors argue that when Black people were excluded from and/or derogatorily portrayed in the dominant media, Canada’s Black press celebrated collective achievement by authenticating Black performance. By incorporating Canada’s Black Press into conversations about Jim Crow and performance, we gain a deeper understanding of Black creative output and resistance during the period.

How Do You Play When You’re Prey?

Creativity is woven into the culture of Black America. Our histories and struggles as members of the minoritized African Diaspora are recorded and passed on in song and story, in movement and design. We are – and have been – the creators of an evolving culture that is simultaneously underestimated and desired by dominant culture. This othering poses real and pressing threats to our lives and livelihoods, as we are consumed and exploited to the point of erasure; and yet we keep creating. But why? What is creativity to the Black American living in such a predatory society? And how do I, as a Black creative minoritized in a Healing profession, engage with it? How do you play when you’re prey? These questions form the basis for an heuristic exploration into a video blog project entitled “Black Creative Healing,” where Black creatives are recorded engaging in conversation and collaboration over concepts relating to Blackness, Creativity, and the Healing process. Through arts-based analysis of past collaborations, available publicly on Youtube, I will investigate my own motivations, inspirations and roadblocks to the creative process as a Black healer. I will interrogate the directions and intentions laid bare by my creative endeavors and seek to define a central ethos by which other Black creatives may find themselves seen and encouraged, in the interest of finding balance between the “me” that is – and has been – prey, and the “me” that has only ever known – and been known by – play.

“They Made us into a Race. We Made Ourselves into a People”: A Corpus Study of Contemporary Black American Group Identity in the Non-Fictional Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates

This article examines representations of contemporary Black American identity in the non-fictional writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The dataset is a self-compiled specialized corpus of Coates’s non-fictional writings from 1996 until 2018 (350 texts; 468,899 words). The study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach combining corpus linguistics and corpus pragmatics. Frequencies of five identity-related terms in the corpus (African(–)Americans, blacks, black people, black America/Americans and black community/communities) are compared diachronically; then the pragmatic prosody of the terms is analyzed via the notion of control. The findings suggest that Coates’s representation of Black American group identity has shifted over time. Specifically, the terms African Americans and black America are replaced by the terms blacks and black people. The study’s empirical findings, considered through the theoretical framework on Black solidarity, suggest a shift in representation of group identity in Coates’s writings from an identity based on cultural and ethnic commonalities to an identity based on the shared experiences of anti-Black racism.

After Obama

This book engages the reader in a wide-ranging assessment of the legacy of Barack Obama—the “first Black president”—relative to Black politics. It uses its vantage point of being written during Donald Trump’s presidency to understand what Black politics has and has not inherited from the Obama administration. It is comprehensive in the number of constituencies and policy topics it covers. Its co-editors frame its chapters by explaining how both “inverted linked fate” and an “inclusionary dilemma” shaped the Obama presidency and legacy for Black politics. Nearly twenty prominent or emerging political scientists provide this book’s interior chapters, using quantitative and qualitative methods to draw conclusions. The first group of scholars examines the Obama administration’s impact upon the attitudes and perceived group interests of various Black constituencies, including voters, partisans, civil rights leaders, lobbyists, women, church leaders and members, and LGBTQ persons. The second group examines Obama’s impact upon Black policy interests, including civil rights, criminal justice reform, antipoverty, women’s welfare, healthcare reform, housing, immigration, and foreign affairs. In the conclusion, the co-editors consider what may confront the “next Black president” and the “next Black America.”