RACIAL CHANGE AND BLACK MOVEMENT EMERGENCE: A CASE FROM THE BLACK LIVES MOVEMENT

This article contributes to sociological understandings of race and social movements by reassessing the phenomenon of social movement emergence for Black social movements. Broadly, it addresses the possibility of organizational support for Black social movements. More narrowly, it seeks to understand the emergence of Black movements and racial change as outcomes of organizational transformation, specifically using the case of how the mixed-race prison reform organization Action for Police Reform (APR) joined the Black Lives movement. By providing a case of racial transformation and the spanning of tactical boundaries, I present two central arguments. First, it is necessary to look within organizational forms and at organizational dynamics to see how activists modify their organizations to support Black movements. Second, tailored more directly to the case of APR, sustained support for Black movements depends on organizational transformation, such as when activists repurpose an organization’s form and resources to maintain racially delimited tactics.

Democratizing memory and the question of Black difference in Brazil (ca. 1980–1988): The transformation of the Serra da Barriga (Alagoas), from haunted “Black territory” to national memorial in the transition between dictatorship and democracy

By voiding the previous social pact, including the predominant conception of racial integration, the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) created the conditions for a radical understanding of Black difference, which found its leading motif in the memory of the Quilombo of Palmares, a historical community of rebel slaves. A new Black movement understood its cultural and historical experience as containing a utopian legacy, an alternative for a Brazil marked by racism and inequality. To overcome its problems of legitimation, the regime set into motion a process of gradual democratization. The need to symbolically and culturally accomplish this transition created an institutional breach for the memory politics of the Black movement. In this context, the inclusion of the Serra da Barriga, a site of the war against Palmares, into national cultural heritage became the testing grounds for novel politics of culture that changed both the understanding of Brazilian nationhood and Black difference, as represented in the memory of Palmares.

Black Protests in the US, 1994-2010

We use a novel dataset to provide the first panoramic view of US Black movement protest events as reported in US newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialog with qualitative accounts of the period. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014-2016 and 2020. We find that protests were building in frequency in the 1990s after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and the widely discussed 1995 Million Man March into 2001, but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks, with mobilization building again at the end of the 2000s. Protests in response to police violence and other criminal legal issues were major arenas of struggle and news coverage. Also common were issues of national identity including celebrations of Black history and Black solidarity, protests against Confederate symbols, and protests about White hate groups and hate crimes. While Black people protested about a wide variety of issues, mainstream national media attention focused disproportionately on incidents of police violence and perceived threats of Black violence. We find substantial continuity in issues, organizations, and activism between this period and the Black Lives Movement of 2014-2020. Content warning: parts of this article describe incidents of police violence.

VAGINA DA ARTISTA - PERFORMANCE FEMINISTA EM POÉTICAS DE DUAS ARTISTAS MULHERES

Resumo: O artigo tem como objetivo problematizar a performance enquanto prática artística que promove a resistência, a pluralidade e a diferença, discutindo como ela pode favorecer aspectos educativos. Apresenta o conceito de performance em seus aspectos históricos, antropológicos e artísticos, bem como a performance autobiográfica, que possibilita o resgate de experiências pessoais, memórias coletivas e, no recorte apontado aqui, o exercício do ativismo feminista. Aborda aspectos do movimento feminista e analisa performances de duas artistas mulheres e feministas: a artista norte-americana Carolee Schneemann e a artista brasileira Panmela Castro. Por fim, avalia o caminho evocado pela performance como viável ao estabelecimento de estratégias de resistência e sensibilização por meio da experiência artística compartilhada entre performer e espectadoras. Ademais, aponta a performance como alternativa para instigar o pensamento crítico, a liberdade e a criação de possibilidades de transformações no âmbito pessoal e coletivo, por meio de ações que abordam temáticas identitárias que refletem as lutas de movimentos sociais, como o movimento feminista, movimento negro e movimento LGBTQI+.Palavras-chave: Arte contemporânea. Performance. Performance autobiográfica. Feminismo. Mulheres artistas. Abstract: The article aims to problematize performance as an artistic practice that promotes resistance, plurality and difference, discussing how it (the performance) can favor educational aspects. This paper presents the concept of performance in its historical, anthropological and artistic aspects, as well as the autobiographical performance, which enables the recovery of personal experiences, collective memories, and, in the clipping pointed here, the exercise of feminist activism. The article also addresses aspects of the feminist movement and analyzes the performances of two women and feminist artists: US artist Carolee Schneemann and Brazilian artist Pammela Castro. Finally, it evaluates the path evoked by the performance as feasible for the establishment of resistance and sensitization strategies through the shared artistic experience between performer and spectators. In addition, the article points to performance as an alternative to instigate critical thinking, freedom, and the creation of possibilities for transformations at both the personal and collective levels, through actions that address identity themes which reflect the struggles of social movements, such as the feminist movement, the black movement, and the “LGBTQI+” movement.Keywords: Contemporary art. Performance. Autobiographical Performance. Feminism. Women Artists.

A BIBLIOTECA ESCOLAR NA PERSPECTIVA DA PROMOÇÃO DA IGUALDADE RACIAL = THE SCHOOL LIBRARY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PROMOTING RACIAL EQUALITY

A História africana foi silenciada ao longo de séculos de escravidão e colonialismo e a Lei 10.639/2003 é fruto da emergência de políticas antirracistas conquistadas pelo Movimento Negro no Brasil, em especial na área de construção de políticas públicas para a educação escolar incluindo nos currículos o estudo da disciplina de História e Cultura Afro-Brasileira e Africana. Desta forma, a biblioteca inserida na realidade dos sistemas escolares de ensino do país, deve promover a igualdade racial, desenvolvendo coleções que explorem a temática referida por meio da ação cultural e a partir das manifestações de informação que compõem uma biblioteca escolar. Sendo fundamental na formação de leitores, a biblioteca escolar deve desenvolver acervos antirracistas que incluam livros, revistas, filmes, mapas considerando o público ao qual se destinam essas obras. A tradição da oralidade em sua complexidade e sua representação em sistemas de informação como as bibliotecas escolares é apontada como um desafio ao qual se pode considerar novas possibilidades.ABSTRACTAfrican History was silenced over centuries of slavery and colonialism and Law 10.639/2003 is the result of the emergence of anti-racist policies conquered by the Black Movement in Brazil, especially in the area of construction of public policies for school education, including in curricula o study of the discipline of Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture. In this way, the library inserted in the reality of the country's school systems must promote racial equality, developing collections that explore the aforementioned theme through cultural action and from the information manifestations that make up a school library. Being fundamental in the formation of readers, the school library must develop anti-racist collections that include books, magazines, films, maps, considering the audience to which these works are intended. The tradition of orality in its complexity and its representation in information systems such as school libraries is pointed out as a challenge to which new possibilities can be considered.Keywords: school library; ethnic-rational relations; Law 10639/2003; selection of information materials.

Conclusion

This chapter traces thirty years of engagement and organizing in Black Rochester. It emphasizes that no facet of life shaped Rochester in the period more than the emergence of a sizable Black population that is able to organize and command the attention of city hall and of the major corporations. It also mentions a telling diffusion of power that occurred by the end of the era, wherein corporations are no longer alone in charting the city's course. The chapter elaborates how the story of Rochester, New York makes clear that even among a relatively small Black population in a medium-sized city, there was no single Black movement nor one distinct path to freedom. It recounts Black activists that had continuously fought for equality and for their freedom rights throughout the history of the United States.

Build the Army

This chapter talks about a group of white ministers who aided Black Rochesterians in their struggle to create a police review board and expanded their commitment to the struggle for racial justice. It details how the white ministers acted through the local council of churches and joined forces with Rochester's Black ministers to found and fund an organizational structure capable of building a Black movement. It also traces the abortive engagement with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Chicago's Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. The chapter refers to FIGHT, Action for a Better Community (ABC), and the Urban League as the three groups that were competing for the hearts and minds of Black Rochester within a year of the uprising. It argues that in order for FIGHT to attract and retain the loyalty of the masses, it adopted an “oppositional identity.”

"Project 1619" as an alternative to "American project"

This article is the second in a series on the birth of a new elite in the United States, called ‘the minority elite’. The previous article hypothesized that what is happening is not so much the replenishment or evolution of the old elite, but the emergence of a new one, grown on the basis of the Affirmative Action Program, the culture of ‘woke capitalism’ and decades of the minority protest. The process of elite change intensified on the wave of protest activity of black minority, primarily ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, in the summer of 2020, which coincided with elections to all branches of government. The new elite need to create their own version of American history and their liberation mission. The ideological paradigm of the black movement includes several social doctrines: ‘The 1619 Project’, critical race theory, Black liberation, theories of white privilege, white supremacy and anti-racism. ‘The 1619 Project’ clearly demonstrates how the new elite understand the past, present and future of the United States and their place in the social structure. This article analyzes the theses of ‘1619’, and also contains the main conclusions of the professional criticism of this project. The goal of the project, according to its authors, is to reframe American history. It places slavery and systematic racism at the very center of US history and thereby denies the foundations on which the ‘American project’ is based. ‘1619’ is considered in the article as a socio-engineering project that includes various programs: curricula for colleges and schools, podcasts for radio, TV shows and films, interviews and speeches in universities, exhibitions, press publications, ideological themes for elections and trainings for organizations and social movements. The unprecedented speed of implementation and the scale of financing of the new version of American history in all spheres of society without its professional assessment indicate that this large-scale action was prepared in advance. The article deals with the fundamental factual errors in the presentation of history, analysis and interpretation of economic data in ‘1619’, including those that were uncritically borrowed from the school ‘New History of Capitalism’. It also addresses the doctrine of anti-racism. The analysis of the project showed a low level of evidence of the revision of history conceived in it. The author shows by the example of ‘1619’ that scientific research is not combined with ideological tasks, since the latter inevitably lead to adjustment to the given answer, a decrease in the level of the applied scientific apparatus and simplification of the conclusions drawn. Criticism of the project was heard only in the academic sphere, but did not get into the media. One of the most serious consequences of the project is the creation of a new mythology, supplanting from the public consciousness a version of American history based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and proven historical facts. The black movement, albeit temporarily, managed to impose its own narrative on public opinion and create a rationale for moving into power and receiving new privileges.

Antiracism in Times of Uncertainty: The Brazilian Black Movement and Emancipatory Knowledges

This Working Paper is a revised manuscript of the keynote lecture delivered on March 5, 2020, at the conference Living on the Edge: Studying Conviviality-Inequality in Uncertain Times (Mecila, São Paulo).

Race, Science, and Social Thought in 20th-Century Brazil

Race is a fundamental theme in the sciences and social thought of 20th-century Brazil. The republican regime, inaugurated in the country in 1889, was already born troubled by questions concerning the viability of the nation, which, from the viewpoint of European scientific theories on race, was doomed to fail due to the high contingent of black and indigenous people, and its racial mixture. The solution proposed by the country’s scientific and political elites was characteristically the theory of whitening, which, without breaking completely from scientific racism, established its own path for nation building. The 1910s were marked by the growth of the sanitarist movement led by the medical elite, the country’s leading scientific community at the time, which shifted the explanation for the country’s ills from its racial constitution to parasitic diseases. The eugenics movement emerged in Brazil closely connected to the sanitarist movement and was dominated in the 1920s by a Lamarckian conception of heredity, seeking to improve the “Brazilian race” through social medicine. This eugenics framework did not signify the absence of more racial interventionist proposals, however, such as the sterilization of the “unfit” and immigration restrictions. The latter proposition acquired the force of law under the 1934 Constitution and was maintained under the 1937 Constitution, which lasted throughout the Estado Novo. Nevertheless, the first Vargas government (1930–1945) invested in strengthening the image of a country with harmonious race relations and the identity of the Brazilian as miscegenated, an idea sustained by the social thought and intellectual production of the period. Following the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship and the Second World War, Brazil became a field for research on race relations promoted by UNESCO. The project’s starting point was the notion that the country could provide an example of harmonious race relations for a world traumatized by war and the Holocaust. The research findings, though, pointed to the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination. From the 1950s, research in the social sciences and the black movement deepened the investigation and the denunciation of racial inequalities in Brazil. Concurrently, research in the genetics of human populations insisted that the Brazilian population was characterized by racial mixture and biological diversity. After the 1970s, during the military dictatorship still, the black movement emphasized negritude as an identity and denounced racial democracy as a myth that concealed inequality. In this context, the sociology of race relations began to affirm race as one of the determinant variables of class structure in Brazil. In the 1990s, some sectors of the black movement and the social sciences asserted that antiracism should strengthen race as an identity and the black/white polarization. At the same time, in dialogue with the tradition of social thought and with modern research on the human genome, other intellectuals highlighted miscegenation as characteristic of the Brazilian population and advanced the need to combat prejudice and discrimination. The clashes of the 20th century eventually resulted in affirmative actions and quota policies being implemented by the Brazilian government from the 2000s.