Frederick Douglass (1817?–1875) is a monumental American figure. As a runaway slave and leading black thinker, speaker, and writer in the abolitionist movement and during Reconstruction and its tragic collapse, his legacy in American history is singular. His ideals and scorching criticisms have marked American political thought about democracy, religion, race, racism, liberty, and equality. American political parties claim him, especially the Republican Party, with which he has an early connection and which has used his figure (...) as cover for their less than egalitarian projects, as do different ideological camps. One can find accounts of Douglass as an existentialist, revolutionary, proto-libertarian, liberal, civic republican thinker. His North Star continues to guide those who welcome its light, although it may lead them down different political-ideological paths.In all of this, one can imagine that those not familiar with the details of Douglass’s narratives and deeds might, in the context of all of that national hagiography, lose track of the fact that he was a black man. Frederick Douglass was a black man born into slavery, survived that brutal regime for twenty-one years, and then escaped and became a principal leader of the American abolition movement and leading black political thinker. Shortly after escaping slavery, he wrote his first famous autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and subsequently two more, in addition to volumes of speeches, articles, and a novel. It is as if his monumentality, like marble, alabaster, or bronze—the stuff of civic memorials—would obscure that irreducible fact in its grand monotones.Nick Brommell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass reminds readers that that irreducible fact is a nontrivial, essential element of Douglass’s life and work. Bromell argues that this includes the political theory, a product of Douglass’s black political philosophy that runs through it all. He contends that Douglass argued for an inclusive conception of personhood and active citizenship, which America’s founding public philosophy, distorted by white supremacy, purposefully did not. Its elements include a defense of the moral personhood of blacks and their full and equal citizenship and a view of political community enlivened by group solidarities and active citizenship in defense of justice.In the course of his analysis, Bromell, a literary theorist, draws on an assortment of contemporary philosophical, rhetorical, and political theories, all of which have a critical theoretical bent, to explicate Douglass’s ideas. This method bears fruit in an instructive analysis of the rhetorical structure of Douglass’ his arguments. Brommell’s analysis of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom usefully explains how it stands out, not only in terms of updated autobiographical details, but also style and analytical and argumentative intent. This is a reading that other scholars have pioneered, but his rhetorical analysis fleshes out, for example, the role of moral sentiments, care, and intimate and social relations in Douglass’s narrative.A central feature of Bromell’s analysis is that Douglass employs what he and others call a “fugitive rhetoric” that comprises an emphasis on the perspective of his and other black Americans’ standpoints, the holding of opposite ideas in tension, and the use of the rhetorical technique “chiasmus,” where a statement is repeated in reverse order in successive phrases or clauses. It is an illuminating analysis, but Bromell goes further by claiming that Douglass was committed to the tenets of contemporary standpoint epistemology. Douglass certainly referenced and employed his experience and viewpoint as a black man and former slave in his work, just as he directly addressed the viewpoints and interests of black Americans. However, whether this means that Douglass was committed to the set of ideas that we now call standpoint epistemology is another matter. This concern applies to Bromell’s reading of Douglass’s method of holding seemingly contrasting ideas in tension and his use of chiasmus. Contemporary philosophical theories of chiasmus carry particular metaphysical and epistemological implications, and those theories might shed light on Douglass’s political projects. However, their incidental utility does not mean they definitively describe Douglass’s intent or public philosophy. This is a specifically important point because those theories lead to subjective conceptions of truth, especially relating to ethics and politics, while Douglass, as Bromell recognizes, repeatedly and emphatically endorsed what he took to be universal normative truths.In the same vein, Bromell makes several additional claims regarding the conceptual distinctiveness of Douglass’s view of power, dignity, rights, and citizenship. Douglass employed conceptions of each and other important ideas specific to his style, approach, and ends. As other black political thinkers did before him, he used these concepts to condemn slavery, racism, and the hypocrisy of American Republicanism and Christianity to assert the equal moral personhood and dignity of blacks and demand equal rights and citizenship. Bromell rightly emphasizes the role of “power,“ as an individual capability, in Douglass’s view of natural rights, moral dignity, and citizenship. It is an emphasis that is in keeping with both Douglass’s personal narrative and his national political projects. Douglass did not think that Americans—that Black Americans or abolitionists—should passively wait for deliverance from either God or national political leadership. Likewise, Bromell is correct to push back on reductions of Douglass’s views to Lockean, Rousseauian, or Kantian interpretations. Douglass is more than an incarnation of standard deontological, liberal, or civic republican philosophy. As a nineteenth-century black radical thinker, he stood in relation and contributed to those moral and political philosophical traditions. However, Bromell’s claim that Douglass’s conceptions of power, natural rights, and citizenship are conceptually distinct from the large host of major philosophical, theological, and political theoretical accounts that preceded him and influenced those ideas in his time is suggestive but not decisive.Like other writers and theorists before him, Bromell offers us another Douglass—as a black critical political theorist. This is a testament to the fecundity of Douglass’s black political-philosophical legacy. It is a legacy that leads to competing interpretations of him; all the same and for all their differences, his scorching prophetic vision of liberty, equality, citizenship, and progress unites them all. (shrink)

Buddhism-influenced essays, stories, and reviews by National Book Award winner Charles R. Johnson. This wide and varied collection of essays, reviews, and short stories by the renowned author Charles Johnson offers incisive views on politics, race, and Buddhism. Johnson notes that in his life the two activities that have anchored him and reinforce each other are creative production and spiritual practice. This book is a crystallization of what he has learned during his passage through American literature, the visual arts, (...) and the Buddha dharma. Essays include: "And if Peace Is Their Goal" on the principles of enlightened politics, "The King We Need" on the deep and sophisticated moral philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and why King's teachings and example are important to all Americans, "Why Buddhists Should Vote"--Johnson posits that voting can be seen as a way to reduce suffering, "The Meaning of Barack Obama"--an appreciation of the man who became one of the most historic US presidents, even before his first 100 days were through, "Why Buddhism for Black America Now?"--what Buddhism can offer the African-American community in the post-MLK era. (shrink)

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. -/- By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing (...) so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. -/- Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film. (shrink)

The most remarkable aspect of Einstein’s 1946 address at Lincoln University is that it has vanished from Einstein’s recorded history. Its disappearance into a historical black hole symbolizes what seems to happen in the creation of a cultural icon. It is but one of many political statements by Einstein to have met such a fate, though his civil rights activism is most glaringly missing. One explanation for this historical amnesia is that those who shape our official memories felt (...) that Einstein’s “controversial” friends like Paul Robeson and activities like co‐chairing the anti‐lynching crusade might tarnish Einstein as an icon. That icon, sanctified by Time magazine when it dubbed Einstein “Person of the Century” at the end of 1999, is a myth, albeit a marvelous one. Yet it is not so much the motive for the omission but the consequence of it that should concern us. Americans and the millions of Einstein fans around the world are left unaware that he was an outspoken, passionate, committed antiracist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent (...) —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Sociological accounts usually emphasise the primacy of phenotype (cor, colour) over ancestry for orienting concepts of ‘race’ in Brazil. In this paper, I present an alternative account of the cultural and political significance of ancestry in contemporary Brazil, drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with 50 Brazilians who had recently taken personalised DNA ancestry tests. The interviewees’ attitudes towards their ancestry are interpreted in relation to Brazil’s longstanding national myth of mestiçagem and the history of eugenic Whitening ideologies (ideologias (...) do branqueamento) that have sought to erase traces of Brazil’s African origins. However, they are also interpreted also against the backdrop of contemporary Black Movement activism that aims to actively recovering Afro-Brazilian histories and memories from these processes of erasure. (shrink)

Previous research using immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown that after a short period of embodiment of White people in a Black virtual body their implicit racial bias against Black people diminishes. Here we tested the effects of some socio-cognitive variables that could contribute to enhancing or reducing the implicit racial bias. The first aim of the study was to assess the beneficial effects of cooperation within a VR scenario, the second aim was to provide preliminary testing of (...) the hypothesis that empathy and political attitudes could contribute to implicit bias about race, while the third aim was to explore the relationship between political attitudes and empathy. We had (Caucasian) participants embodied in a Black virtual body and engaged either in a cooperative (Coop group) or in a non-cooperative (Neutral group) activity with a confederate experimenter embodying another Black avatar. Before and after VR, we measured participants’ implicit racial bias by means of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and their perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter. Before VR we also assessed participants’ political attitudes and empathy traits. Results revealed that, as compared to the Neutral group, the Coop group showed lower IAT scores after the social interaction. Interestingly, in the Neutral but not the Coop group the perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter was associated with the initial racial bias: the more the participants reduced their distance, the more they reduced their IAT score. Moreover, reported traits of empathy and political attitudes significantly explained the variance observed in the initial implicit bias, with perspective-taking, empathic concern, and personal distress being significant predictors of the IAT scores. Finally, there was a relationship between political attitudes and empathy: the more participants considered themselves as left-wing voters, the higher their perspective-taking and empathic concern scores. We discuss these findings within the neuroscientific and social cognition field and encourage scholars from different domains to further explore whether and under which conditions a given manipulation for reducing racial bias could be efficiently transposed in VR. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's (...) pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) (...) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles. (shrink)

This essay treats the final version of Hume's Essays, Volume 1, as an artfully shaped whole. Framed by essays on taste that address the interaction of personal and social dynamics, the volume is organized into loose clusters of political and moral essays that share a common pattern of offering multiple approaches to the issues they examine and pursuing a given idea until it reaches a point of excess that generates a salutary correction. This activity circumscribes an inexact range (...) of balance, which is left for the reader to resolve or, better, to continue. In this, Hume's Essays invite readers to participate in the interaction between self-formation and cultural forms that is motor of Hume's post-skeptical philosophy and the genre of the essay alike. (shrink)

This book considers the ability of individuals and communities to maintain healthy relationships with their surroundings—before, during and after catastrophic events—through physical activity and sporting practices. -/- Broad and ambitious in scope, this book uses sport and physical activity as a lens through which to examine our catastrophic societies and spaces. Acknowledging that catastrophes are complex, overlapping phenomena in need of sophisticated, interdisciplinary solutions, this book explores the social, economic, ecological and moral injustices that determine the personal and (...) emotional impact of catastrophe. Drawing from international case studies, this book uniquely explores the different landscapes and contexts of catastrophe as well as the affective qualities of sporting practices. This includes topics such as DIY skateparks in Jamaica; former child soldiers in Africa; the funding of sport, recreation and cultural activities by extractive industries in northern Canada; mountain biking in the UK; and urban exploration in New Zealand. Featuring the work of ex-professional athletes, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, political ecologists, community development workers and philosophers, this book offers new perspectives on capitalism, nature, sociality, morality and identity. -/- This is essential reading for academics and practitioners in sociology, disaster studies, sport-for-development and political ecology. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, nationalistic approaches to the obstacles of racism in the United States have increasingly come to be seen as the more revolutionary of the various forms of anti-racist struggle. This paper explores several historical instances of Black Nationalism and seeks to demonstrate that, despite the many points on which they might diverge, they share in common a tendency to naturalize and embrace the category of race as a basis for political struggle, (...) and that they therefore constitute an ideologically accommodating and hence essentially regressive approach to the questions of race and racism. It is suggested that a critique of the modern category of race and a political practice aimed at its denaturalization will be a necessary aspect of any attempt to overcome racial oppression and inequality. (shrink)

And how are the answers to these questions affected by the Black and Latino experience in the United States"-From the Preface This collection of new essays explores the relation between race and ethnicity and its social and political ...

Traditional notions of civic education often introduce privilege and reproduce Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Proponents of cultural citizenship champion Black cultural knowledge, and critical race pedagogies to help marginalized individuals, including students of color, actualize their agentic selves. This manuscript presents three vignettes to demonstrate how teachers implemented the Black Lives Matter at School’s 13 Guiding Principles to develop Black cultural citizenship with students. Three salient aspects emerged: (1) the need for students to be active contributors (...) in the current movement for Black liberation; (2) a call to support students unlearning and relearning Black history; and (3) instruction that provides opportunities for students to recognize and challenge systems of oppression. (shrink)

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism (...) in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed. (shrink)

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition. While challenging conventional interpretations of key Marxist concepts and claims, the author contends that Marxism has been 'white' insofar as it has failed to recognize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world.

ABSTRACT Frederick Douglass developed an aesthetic theory during the Civil War in four lectures entitled “Life Pictures,” “Lecture on Pictures,” “Age of Pictures,” and “Pictures and Progress.” But his aesthetic theory is underestimated by Douglass scholars and others, often in favor of his various types of aesthetic practice, such as photography, autobiography, and speeches. There are several reasons to give Douglass's aesthetic theory its due. First, we can recognize that Douglass self-consciously engaged in theory to combat the racist belief that, (...) being black, he was incapable of expounding any philosophy. Second, we can understand why he was convinced that art was able to contribute to abolition and racial equality. Third, we can better appreciate the aesthetics of Douglass's picture making, speeches, political activities, and lived experiences if we know more about his theoretical account of them. Prospectively, many key elements of contemporary critical aesthetic theory are present in Douglass's aesthetic theory. (shrink)

Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, “Black Health” dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science that has been used to abuse Black people since our African ancestors were brought to America on slave ships. A genuine investigation into the status of Black people’s health requires us to acknowledge that race (...) has always been a powerful social category. Race largely predetermines individuals’ social and political power and access to resources needed for health and wellbeing. And as a group, Black people have been intentionally denied this power and access. Systemic racism, oppression, and White supremacy in American institutions have largely been the perpetrators of differing social power and access to resources for Black people. It is these systemic inequities that create the social conditions needed for poor health outcomes for Black people to persist. An examination of social inequities reveals that it is no accident that Black people have poorer health than White people, instead in America, almost every institution has been designed to withhold what Black people need for proper health and wellbeing. Black Health provides a succinct discussion of Black people’s health, including the social, political, and at times cultural determinants of their health. This book examines the ways that Black people’s multiple identities—social, cultural, and political—intersect with anti-Black institutions, such as housing and health care to determine their poor outcomes in pregnancy, pain management, sleep, and cardiovascular disease. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reflect on how, from a philosophical point of view, race and politics are codependent categories. Based on reflections inspired by Michel Foucault, the article shows how this philosopher helps us to understand this interrelationship. As an example and an exercise in connecting thought with reality, it reflects on the difficulties historically undertaken by whiteness to prevent the black population from occupying spaces in the political arena. However, the reflections show that (...) the strategies to make the political agency of black people invisible have something to tell us. In dialogue with historiography, this reflection presents evidence of a black political philosophy and points to the need for Brazilian political philosophy to investigate its characteristics in order to contribute to eradicating the epistemicide that philosophy itself and other sciences have fed by not being predisposed to investigate, codify and present Afro-Brazilian philosophies in order to comply with the provisions of Laws 10.639/03 and 11/645/08. (shrink)

During a period in which institutions have been refashioned to meet the demands of a complex social and political economy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to alter the public educational system. As scholars and researchers examine the material effects of NCLB, efforts to improve the educational system and its effects must also explore the relationship between policy and racial ideologies including discursive fantasies. This article examines the relationship between NCLB and racial fantasies of Black (...) youth as problematic others in order to help education reform scholarship and advocacy examine the violence of NCLB. (shrink)

Solidarity-the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation between citizens that are essential for a thriving polity-is a basic goal of all political communities. Yet it is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in multiracial societies. In an era of increasing global migration and democratization, that issue is more pressing than perhaps ever before. In the past few decades, racial diversity and the problems of justice that often accompany it have risen dramatically throughout the world. It features prominently nearly everywhere: from (...) the United States, where it has been a perennial social and political problem, to Europe, which has experienced an unprecedented influx of Muslim and African immigrants, to Latin America, where the rise of vocal black and indigenous movements has brought the question to the fore. Political theorists have long wrestled with the topic of political solidarity, but they have not had much to say about the impact of race on such solidarity, except to claim that what is necessary is to move beyond race. The prevailing approach has been: How can a multicultural and multiracial polity, with all of the different allegiances inherent in it, be transformed into a unified, liberal one? Juliet Hooker flips this question around. In multiracial and multicultural societies, she argues, the practice of political solidarity has been indelibly shaped by the social fact of race. The starting point should thus be the existence of racialized solidarity itself: How can we create political solidarity when racial and cultural diversity are more or less permanent? Unlike the tendency to claim that the best way to deal with the problem of racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, Hooker stresses the importance of coming to terms with racial injustice, and explores the role that it plays in both the United States and Latin America. Coming to terms with the lasting power of racial identity, she contends, is the starting point for any political project attempting to achieve solidarity. (shrink)

In this book, Richard A. Jones highlights the importance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work for contemporary African American and Africana philosophy. The Black Book investigates the epistemic, linguistic, and political grounds from which inspiration might be drawn.

Based on a case study of the South African food and canning industry at the Cape from 1940 to 1960, this article examines the conditions that fostered women's high level of involvement both in the trade union and in local and national political organizations concerned with gender and racial issues. Particularly important were women's prevalence in seasonal labor, which gave them few individual options for improving their situation at work; a progressive, nonracial trade union that encouraged close ties between (...) family, work, and community and that kept women involved during the off-season; and an active political movement concerned to mobilize women against the threats to their work and family lives from the apartheid state. In addition, unlike women in many areas of Asia and Latin America, these women had a long tradition of productive labor and were not expected to refrain from visible public activity. (shrink)

The existing research on the role of intellectuals in alleviating suffering has overlooked contributions by prominent Black intellectuals from the United States in the early 1990s. Two roundtable debates co-organised under the auspices of the Boston Review at Harvard and MIT in 1992 and 1993 in response to Eugene Rivers’ essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack” were central to these contributions, counting a star-studded line-up of Black intellectuals including bell hooks, Cornel West, and (...) Glenn Loury. Participants explore the role of Black intellectuals in the US, debating what they can and should do to combat oppression and domination. In this article, I recover the context of the debates, reconstruct their arguments, and make a case for their major historical and political significance. I comparatively interpret the two roundtables, identifying three major points of convergence. First, participants begin from a Gramscian conception of organic intellectuals, developing this further to defend the need for collective intellectual praxis. Second, the race-class-gender nexus plays a central role in structuring the very possibility of intellectuals affecting social change. Third, these intellectuals subscribe to a significantly pessimistic action paralysis, indicative of the relative powerlessness of intellectual debate in addressing structural oppression. (shrink)

The death of Frantz Fanon at the age of thirty-six robbed the African revolution of its leading intellectual and moral force. His death also cut short one of the most extraordinary intellectual careers in contemporary political thought. Fanon was a political psychologist whose approach to revolutionary theory was grounded in his psychiatric practice. During his years in Algeria he published clinical studies on the behaviour of violent patients, the role of culture in the development of illness and the (...) function of the psychiatric hospital as a social milieu. These papers illuminate Fanon's political theory, expose weaknesses in his concept of political consciousness and liberation, and contain a 'secret history' explaining the tide of revolutionary movements in the Third World. (shrink)

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies (...) how race exploits bodily and enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

DIVA consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity./div.

On the winter morning of 16 June 1976, fifteen thousand black children marched on Orlando Stadium in Soweto, carrying slogans dashed on the backs of exercise books. The children were stopped by armed police who opened fire, and thirteen-year-old Hector Peterson became the first of hundreds of schoolchildren to be shot down by police in the months that followed. If, a decade later, the meaning of Soweto’s “year of fire” is still contested,1 it began in this way with a (...) symbolic display of contempt for the unpalatable values of Bantu education, a public rejection of the “culture of malnutrition” with which blacks had been fed.2 The local provocation for the Orlando march was a ruling that black children be taught arithmetic and social studies in Afrikaans—the language of the white cabinet minister, soldier, and pass official, prison guard, and policeman. But the Soweto march sprang from deeper grievances than instruction in Afrikaans, and the calamitous year that passed not only gave rise to a rekindling of black political resistance but visibly illuminated the cultural aspects of coercion and revolt.The children’s defacement of exercise books and the breaking of school ranks presaged a nationwide rebellion of uncommon proportion. The revolt spread across the country from community to community, in strikes, boycotts, and street barricades. It represented in part the climax of a long struggle between the British and Afrikaans interlopers for control over an unwilling black populace and was at the same time a flagrant sign of the contestation of culture, an open declaration by blacks that cultural value, far from shimmering out of reach in the transcendent beyond, would now be fought for with barricades of tires, empty classrooms, and precocious organization. 1. At least three general analyses of the Soweto uprising have emerged: deeper African National Congress involvement in the community; strains on the educational system, unemployment and recession, with greater industrial militancy stemming from the strikes in the early seventies; and the emergence of Black Consciousness ideology. See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 , pp. 321-62.2. See M. K. Malefane, “ ‘The Sun Will Rise’: Review of the Allahpoets at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg,” Staffrider ; reprinted in Soweto Poetry, ed. Michael Chapman, South African Literature Studies, no. 2 , p. 91. Soweto Poetry will hereafter be cited as SP. Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is the author of a monograph on Simone de Beauvoir and is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry , “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida’s ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,’ ” appeared in the Autumn 1986 issue. (shrink)

This article looks at the contribution made by Ambalavaner Sivanandan to black politics and organising in Britain. It reviews some of his most important writings and analyses their significance and influence on black activism and race studies. Specifically, the article looks at the ways in which class and race intersected in his work and his critical stance towards political elites and advocacy for radical politics.

Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies and won the 2018 American Book Award. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore, is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic (...) research across disciplines. -/- Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males. (shrink)

"Get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it takes to change the world in this comprehensive biography that tells the complete life story of internationally renowned peacemaker Nelson Mandela. Civil rights activist. World leader. Writer. Throughout his life, Nelson Mandela took on many roles, all in the pursuit of peace. Born in 1918 in South Africa, he grew up in a culture of government-enforced racism and became involved in the anti-apartheid movement at a young age. Deeply committed to nonviolent activism, Mandela (...) directed a peaceful campaign against the racist policies of his South African government, and spent twenty-seven years in prison as a result. In the years following his emergence as a free man, he continued his efforts to dismantle the country's apartheid system and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside South African President F.W. de Klerk. In 1994 he was inaugurated as South Africa's first black president and served until his retirement from active politics in 1999 at the age of eighty-one. He continued to promote global peace until his death in 2013, and his legacy lives on. From Nelson Mandela's childhood to his monumental impact on race relations and nonviolent activism, this comprehensive biography shares the truth about the man behind the iconic smile: his struggles, his triumphs, and the sacrifices along the way"--. (shrink)

This essay aims to demonstrate how attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory, and in modern politics more generally. Black political thought can be viewed as the attempt to develop a set of critical tools to help explain the political distinctiveness of black life-worlds and how this distinctiveness is structured by a series of relations between (...) individual and community, self and other, state and society, citizen and non-citizen, and national and multinational (or global) circumstances. Too often, black politics is exclusively considered as a form of minority group politics and phenomena reducible to empirical investigation and observation, rather than a set of practices with underlying conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological premises. If we understand race as a fundamentally relational concept, namely, an assumption of dynamic interaction between two or more putatively distinct groups, and racism as a political phenomena that is conditioned and articulated through politics, then taken together they provide the opportunity for reflection and consideration of how black peoples and subjects have conceptualized, created and engaged in politics, political communities, and their articulation. Race and racism, the modalities of political participation and, conversely, the modalities of political exclusion have been recurrent themes in black political thought. The distinctiveness of black political thought is symptomatic of the distinctive trajectories of black politics, which first emerged from spaces of exclusion in Western polities and colonies. The histories of black political and social movements provide evidence of the ways in which black subordination in Western societies and polities required the reconfiguration of the actual boundaries between the public and private, the political and the social. Race and racism, the distinction between identity and identification, black solidarities, and the relationship between history, context, and politics and the political are themes central to black political thought. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 956-976, September 2022. This article explores the role of practical political theory in the Black Lives Matter movement. I argue that BLM represents a multifaceted engagement with the complicated politics of redemption that lies at the heart of American democracy. In one sense, BLM stands for the integration of black life into the framework of political value, and thus for a redemption of the promise of ‘justice for (...) all’. In another, it is a challenge to the principles themselves, viewing justice as a threat to be managed, rather than as a principle to be redeemed. Exploring the praxis of this movement, organized both against and within the possibility of redemption, will enable us to more effectively characterize the limitations of a politics grounded in the theorization of justice and generate a richer understanding of the possibility for practical political theory to simultaneously employ and critique the politics of redemption. (shrink)

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper, an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti-racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some (...) of her contributions to a Black feminist love-politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care-work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered-raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love-force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The reception of the work of Charles Mills has mostly been restricted to responses to Rawls, social epistemology, and Black feminist critique. All overlook the sustained analysis of space, race, and waste, which this article argues is its most valuable contribution for critical philosophy of race today. This article claims that that in addition to “cognitive resistance,” an analysis of Black trash suggests intimate ecological resistance as a fundamental aspect of the political self-assertion of (...) racialized “subpersons,” and argues that this challenges any qualified fidelity to the basic tenets of liberal political philosophy. Focusing on waste from the pig industry in North Carolina, the article returns to Mills’s essay “Black Trash” to demonstrate the importance of ecology to the racial contract and its renewed relevance. Building on Shatema Threadcraft’s critical engagement with Mills in Intimate Justice, the article concludes that a Black trash feminist approach that foregrounds intimate matters is necessary for ecological resistance. (shrink)

This article shows that themethodologyof Mills’ ‘Black Radical Kantianism’ (BRK) represents a major plot twist for Kant studies as well as contemporary political philosophy utilizing Kantian ideas. BRK is no mere upgrade of Kant’s or Kantian ideal theory for racial justice. Mills’ methodology requires us to positboththat the real Kant and establishment Kantianism have been racist, sexist and Eurocentric;andthat only by first admitting and reckoning with the compatibility of white supremacy and liberal egalitarianism can we hope to radicalize (...) Kant or Kantianism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of (...) “maternal theory” as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

An update of one of the indispensable political and social histories of African Americans since World War II.

Critics take issue with Arendt’s writings on the question of race in the United States, especially in On Violence [1970] and her controversial essays on school desegregation and education “Reflections on Little Rock” [1959] and “The Crisis in Education” [1958]. Recent works, such as that of Kathryn Sophia Belle, Patricia Owens, and Chad Kautzer, call to reevaluate Arendt’s canonical status through the lens of her anti-Black racism and warns that her thought sanctions state violence against racial groups. Anne (...) Norton and Robert Bernasconi argued before against Arendt’s failure to acknowledge Black agency and thought and how anti-Black racism structures the political realm in American society. While I agree with these critiques about Arendt’s shortsighted and questionable judgments, I find in her writings on guilt and political responsibility a resource to think resistance to anti-Black racism. This is not an obvious claim as the literature on Arendt’s notion of political responsibility focuses mainly on her writings about post-war Germany and the controversy following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963] rather than her controversial writings on race and racism in the US. Yet we can find this connection in Arendt’s writing when she questions “white guilt” as an instance of collective guilt in On Violence (64-65) or when she criticizes in “Reflections” the abandonment of responsibility in its two senses: the responsibility to protect the children and the responsibility for the world (50). In the following I explain the relevance of political responsibility to confronting structural and historical racial injustices. I address critiques about the asymmetrical burden of responsibility and white ignorance and show support for the constructive, actional, backward- and forward-looking dimensions of political responsibility in the visions and platforms of the Movement for Black Lives. (shrink)

This article examines the responses of two communities to hate crimes in their cities. In particular it explores how community understandings of responsibility shape collective responses to hate crimes. I use the case of Bridesberg, Pennsylvania to explore how anti-racist work is restricted by backward-looking conceptions of moral responsibility (e.g. being responsible). Using recent writings in feminist ethics.(1) I argue for a forward-looking notion that advocates an active view: taking responsibility for attitudes and behaviors that foster climates in which hate (...) crimes are more likely to occur, even when a person's individual actions do not contribute directly to harms. Using the case of Billings, Montana, I explain how recent Not In Our Town campaigns take responsibility for hate crimes in the ways feminist literature suggests. -/- I take as my point of departure hate crimes committed against the family of Bridget Ward, an African American woman, who moved into the suburb of Bridesburg in 1996. When issues of responsibility for racism arose in the local press, most Bridesbergers insisted that their community was not racist; they blamed only the individual vandals. This narrow blame-assigning focus is in keeping with most Anglo-American definitions of responsibility as belonging essentially to individuals and not to communities. Traditionally, moral and legal theory construct responsibility from a perspective that looks downward and back. These perspectives are preoccupied with punishment and reward, praise and blame; they assume justice is done when guilty parties are found and tried. -/- This focus masks deeper community problems. As Elizabeth Spelman remarks, "tolerance is easy if those who are asked to express it need not change a whit." (2) Focus on praise and blame is, in part, a function of race privilege. Bridesberg is 98% white, and part of "the arrogance whitely behavior" is positioning one's self as a judge, expert, and problem solver. (3) The view from this particular subject position limits attention to individuals and their actions, rather than to communities and their practices; it shifts attention away from the fact that Bridesberger's collective practice of distrusting outsiders has lead to hate crimes in the past. Pointing to vandals and claiming "they are racist" does not free one's community of racism. It reinscribes a community spirit that is resistant to change. -/- The second part of this essay explores what communities like Bridesberg might have done to prevent violence. Often there is little individuals alone can do to stop racial violence, but that there is a sense in which community members are obligated to organize themselves. Strategies that focus community responsibility on retribution rather than long-term change, are short lived and ineffective. Anti-racist activism requires a forward-looking view of responsibility: one that aims at inoculating the community against increased risk of violence. This requires taking responsibility for the fact that one's town might foster climates in which hate crimes are more likely to occur. It requires that we begin inquiry in the lives of those harmed. -/- Collective citizen efforts to prevent Aryan groups from gaining a foothold in Billings, Montana offers a clear illustration of how to take responsibility for hate crimes using strategies designed consciously to prevent further hate crimes (e.g., when Black Churches were threatens, all community members attended services there; when a rock was thrown through a window with a menorah, many homes displayed menorahs). The community responses in Billings are a stark contrast to those of Bridesburg, and serve as a powerful example of how forward-looking notions of responsibility can translate into effective political strategy. Although, these strategies are not in and of themselves feminist, they are powerful illustrations of what feminists mean by forward-looking views. The success of resident's collective action and coalition building gave rise to a national Not In Our Town campaign used in about a dozen cities today. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis, race, and racism -- From psychoanalysis to political theory -- Reparative group leadership -- Conflict and authenticity -- Bonding and solidarity -- Coalitions and reparative politics.