Black Lives Matter in Brother: A Postcolonial Perspective

This study aims to examine how the lives of blacks are reduced and eliminated in Brother (2017) by David Chariandy. Black Lives Matter is a hash tag that appears after the killing of Trayvon Martin (17 years old African American) in 2012 by the savage hands of George Zimmerman (white person). This hash-tag has become a social movement that calls for equality in order to stop the violence against black people because their live is as valuable as white’s. The movement comes into being to highlight the “hypocritical democracy in service to the white males whose freedom are openly depended upon the oppression of blacks” (Lebron, 2017, P. 1). Those who have started this movement try to redeem a state and its arbitrary actions against black who are exterminated since the slavery. Alicia Graza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have established this movement to reveal the suffering of the blacks who have no rights to live their life. Chariandy is a Canadian writer who specialized in Caribbean literature, black diaspora, and postcolonial studies. The novel is analyzed through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept (intersectionality) to show how the race, gender, and class are intersecting together to emphasize how the human beings will be treated accordingly.

Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.

Echopoetics and unbelonging: Making sense of reconciliation in academia

This article is a narrative and conceptual exploration of the journey towards practicing Indigenous allyship in an academic context. I begin by tracing a trajectory of coming to work with Indigenous peoples as a non-Indigenous, multiple migrant, and queer person of color situated as a therapist and educator in a Canadian academic institution’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Anti-racist and de/postcolonial theories and concepts abound to label my experiences of tokenization, yet they invariably fall short of the nuanced and complex ways that both reconciliation and oppression unfold in the everyday. Beyond critical theories that speak with certainty of structural violence, I trace my trajectory of coming to understand my work with Indigenous peoples within and for healthcare curricula and community development. I describe an intertextual practice of echopoetics that is trying to make sense of a world where both historical trauma and daily aggressions continually reproduce inequities, in order to reveal spaces of possible hope and healing. Yet, what seems to be happening in this echopoetics is a process of unbelonging from the multiple cultural and institutional narratives in my surround—at times including those that intend to liberate. Focusing on the negation—“ non”—as a non-Indigenous/non-White person, I provide a reflection on how this practice cultivates an unbelonging that becomes both a political stance at the point of invisibility, as well as a lonely yet definite healing.

“I Want to Speak to a White Person”: Daily Microaggressions and Resilient Leadership

This case study blends the accounts of 10 Black women who engaged in a research study on their experiences of microaggressions when serving as school leaders, to tell the story of one Black female principal in a mostly White suburban district. We describe the ways the environment enabled and perpetuated gendered racist incidents at multiple levels and detail some of the microaggressions affecting her career path, leadership, and community interactions, as well as the ways she overcomes these obstacles and persists. We contextualize this narrative in the literature around gender, race, and school leadership, in studies of gendered racism, and finally in White allyship scholarship. We conclude by posing questions around whose responsibility it is to address these issues, and the structural changes necessary to do so.

The Relationship Between System Justification and Perspective-Taking and Empathy

Four studies tested the hypotheses that system-justifying beliefs will be negatively associated with perspective-taking (PT) and empathic concern (EC) and this negative relationship will be exacerbated when system-justifying people encounter information that challenges system-justifying stereotypes. System justification and PT and EC were negatively associated at the dispositional level (Study 1). Experimentally increased PT decreased system justification through increased EC (Study 2) whereas experimentally increased system justification decreased PT and EC (Study 3). Moderation analyses indicated that when exposed to status-quo-inconsistent information (e.g., a Black vs. White person and/or a woman vs. man of high socioeconomic status), system-endorsing people were less likely to engage in PT (Study 4). There was no effect of system justification on actual helping behavior.

Conclusion

There are some forms of cruelty, injustice, or simple unkindness that we can’t help but notice. That they are cruel, unjust, or unkind is clear to everyone: to their sometimes gleeful perpetrators, to those wounded by them, and to everyone else in the vicinity. But there are forms of cruelty and injustice that are not like this. Some forms of racialized harassment, and some forms of sexual violence, are easy to conceal—in the sense that anyone not directly targeted by them can find a way not to notice them. Sometimes, that not-noticing is active and culpable. Sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the shock and dismay of a White person coming to grips with the power and depth of racism in her community, or the shock and dismay of a man coming to grips with the extent of sexual violence in his community, can be off-putting. The news isn’t shocking to the people who’d been struggling all along. Someone who has long been aware of the contours of the problem may look on in bemused frustration as the newly shocked manage to secure attention—from peers, the press, perhaps policymakers—that had somehow been in short supply before....