People and Places
San Francisco State University
Def: The San Fran State Uni strike established one of the first African American studies departments in the country.
Sig: experience at SFSU represents the challenges faced by students who wanted African American studies and the centrality of students to the history of Afam
Chattel Slavery
Def: practice of inherited racialized slavery
Sig: The inherited and race based nature of enslaved people’s status in early America distinguishes chattel slavery from other systems of slavery throughout human history.
Double Consciousness
-Black americans seeing themselves through the eyes of the white world (media, institutions, etc.)
-does harm to black people through not being able to understand themselves on their own terms
-two-ness between Blackness and Americannes that Jim Crow makes incompatible
Sig: Shaped scholarship in Afam Studies and has broad explanatory power
Pan Africanism
Def: the political movement for political rights for all of the African diaspora, esp. on the continent
Sig: a key political current in african american politics and studies
Sara Baartman
Def: African woman put on display by Europeans to reinforce the ideology of race. Even in death, her body was used to advance race science.
Sig: example of how ideology of race is reproduced
Reconstruction
Def: the reconciliation of south and north after the civil war. (extra credit :Should distinguish between reconstruction and radical reconstruction) and talk about black people being able to participate in public life
Sig: was an experiment in true interracial democracy where formly enslaved people were a driving force that was ended by white supremacist violence
Culture of Dissemblance
Def: giving the appearance of openness while hiding your inner self. A strategy developed by black women navigating racial stereotypes and sexual violence during the great migration
Sig: one of the most important strategies of black women around sexuality, but leaves silence around their sexuality where stereotypes fill in
The erotic
Def: a deep, life affirming force that serves as a source of creativity, passion, and fulfilment. It is more than just sexual pleasure, as it emphasizes the pursuit of experiencing the full extent of satisfaction and fulfillment in every aspect of one’s life developed by Audre Lorde
Sig: our deepest desires are a resource for political power
Invisible Institution
def: practice of black religion out of the surveillance of enslavers during the antebellum period
sig: developed the foundation of Black religion: an anti slavery gospel, and imagining a world beyond slavery
Politics of Respectability
Def: The theory and practice that believed if black people comported themselves with modesty, piety, and thrift (i.e. with Victorian values) that this would combat racism and racist sterotypes. Developed by black women in the Baptist church in the 1880s and 1890s
Sig: Remains one of the central themes and practices in black sexuality history and present.
Metalanguage of Race
Def: race does not just shape its own meaning or how we understand what race is, it also colors the meaning of terms that on the surface have nothing to do with race.
Sig: Understanding race is a metalanguage allows us to demystify U.S. history
Abolition
Black studies understands abolition as an ongoing process of organizing against the afterlives of slavery that has not yet been achieved that builds on the history of abolition as the ending of slavery. The legal definition of abolition is the end of chattel slavery.
Significance: not just a tearing down of one specific system, abolition as a politics has expanded to organizing against the afterlives of slavery and for the development of more just systems
“Prison-industrial complex abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy.”
Henry Blanton Parks
Def: AME minister who argued that Black Americans should colonize Africa in his 1899 book Africa: The Problem of the New Century
Sig: An example of how some black americans felt imperialism could bolster their claim to masculinity
Group Centered Organizing Tradition
Def: Baker felt that the most powerful and sustainable social movements came about when there were many leaders, or what we call, “group centered leadership” rather than charismatic leadership. Her vision of group-centered leadership extended beyond the traditional leadership of elite males to include women, those with less education, young people etc. She believed group-centered leaders would be less likely to put personal advancement above the needs of the group.
Strategy: Long term organizing
Tactic: non violent direct action as tactic, not way of life
General Strike
Def: Dubois insisted that enslaved people ought to understood as workers. As Wake Forest historian Guy Emerson Mount writes, “As workers, slaves constantly struggled with their masters not only over their working conditions but over their legal and social status as well. The end game for any slave insurgency was not just to own the means of production but to own one’s very self. Enslaved people freed themselves by running away aka going on strike.
Sig: the general strike forced the hand of President Lincoln while turning a war to save the Union into a war to end slavery. Turned a war about the interests of white people into one about ending slavery.
Diaspora
-the voluntary and involuntary movement of African people around the globe
-imagined community
-performance
-political project
-sig: allows us to study the total global black population comparatively AND/OR include all black people in black studies
Ida B Wells
Def: an American journalist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s.
Sig: Wells didn’t just develop a proto Black feminist critique of lynching (that it obscured the violence of white men against black women and undoing the myth of interracial rape), she was also a part of the movement to end lynchings in the United States
Black Capitalism
Def: Black capitalism was a movement between 1965 and 1974, which argued for the use of federal funds to encourage the development of Black businesses. Black capitalists argued that increasing Black businesses would solve urban rebellions in U.S. cities and was essential to addressing racism
Sig: Part of why the movement for Black Capitalism is significant, is because it is one of the few moments when Black Americans received backing (albeit small, piecemeal, and paternalistic) to support the development of black businesses
Racial Capitalism
Def: Racial capitalism is the phrase Cedric Robinson used to describe how race and capitalism are co-constituted – early forms of racial thinking are a fundamental part of the development of capitalism
Sig: understanding the true origins of capitalism through racial capitalism opens up a new avenue of critique – the Black Radical Tradition
African American Studies
three stages and the correct time periods: intellectual history, movement history, academic discipline
-need to mention San Francisco State