Black Political and Philosophical Thinkers
This thinker pronounced "Race is real. Racism is not."
Who is Richard Perry?
race seeks to discipline, manage, contain
race is a social construct NOT a biological truth
unequal relationship b/w aggregates, characterized by dominant and subordinate forms of social interactions and reinforced by public discourses of power, ownership, privilege within economical, social and political institutions of society.
Race becomes real as a social force when individuals or groups behave towards each other in ways that either reflect or perpetuates the hegemonic ideology of subordination and the patterns of inequality in daily life.
Martin Luther King was a notable advocate of this tradition
What is Integrationist
Initiated in the antebellum political activism of the free Negro community in the North, as articulated by Frederick Douglass.
Anchored in a firm belief of American democracy- outlaw illegal barriers which restrict equal access and opportunities to racial minorities
Building coalition with whites + achieving reform within the contexts of the system
Objective: deracialization of the hierarchies of power within the society and the economic system
Political representation
Critique: Symbolic representation
Huey Newton and Bobby Seal Co- Founded this resistance group
What is The Black Panther Party (1966-1982)
Developed the Ten Point Plan- education, exempt from military service, end police brutality, access decent housing, employment opportunities, healthcare service, fair judicial procedures
The Breakfast Feeding program- politicized hunger and nutrition
Socialism: class oppression was the root of people’s suffering. Created unlikely coalitions across races + focused on community building (ie. free health clinics + consciousness raising- drew the line between their conditions and their broader contexts of soc. inequalities)
Viewed in the popular media as militant to criminalize/discredit and vilify their political work
new gender narratives: militant women vs. men serving pancakes. Black feminism + activism was celebrated; an increasing interest in gender equality and foregrounding roles of women
This form of cultural production is closely tied to political civil rights movements
What is Anthems
political performances- Those involved in the performance were actively engaging in a quest for alternatives to their political present and were assist[ing] in imagining and enacting that change by the songs on their lips and in their ears: the anthems” (Redmond 8)
These anthems are intended to conjure alternative affiliations that meet people where they are, in their communities, churches, schools, and organizations while also allowing them to grow through the mobilizations within those “translocal” spaces.
They are not meta-texts in the same way as national anthems; they derive their power not from a rigid and controlled nationalism […] but from identification with communities excluded from the promises of the nation. These anthems are connected to one another through histories of struggle and political techniques more so than through sonic methods or composition; they are sounded and performed differently but all fall along a continuum of Black political practiced theorized by Cedric Robinson as the Black Radical Tradition. Their tie to a history of dissent makes their articulations all the more dangerous within the hostile societies of their birth and employment
[…]This sound, while detectable and traceable, cannot be contained or wholly stopped, making its dissemination more fluid and its impact that much more powerful than the written word. While the written compositions and organizations, and, later, their performers and performances often were banned and outlawed, the sounds and utterances produced in their name would not be silenced. As harry Belafonte famously argued, “You can cage the singer but not the song” (13)
Bridge and formal leadership is most strongly represented in this novel.
What is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Grassroots, local activities that provide the local communities day-to day lessons on self empowerment
Public positions and roles primarily accessible to men. Typically top-down
This thinker created the U.N.I.A.
Who is Marcus Garvey
Prompted philosophy of Black pride + self worth + self reliance.
Fought for the decolonization of Africa- "Africa for Africans"
Encouraged global operations among Africans
Black Nationalist- Favored a separatist path toward empowerment
Critique= viewed race as a permanent social category + racial purity. The logistics of returning to Africa= not possible/ mythical Africa
This stereotype is a throwback to the the Antebellum South and presented Black women as the ultimate nurturer and faithful servant
What is The Mammy
Justification for "the pathological nature of the Black family" (instability) and for Black women putting others' lives + health and happiness above their own.
-gender neutral, desexualixed= made tolerable to white women
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Jezebel: legitimized white men's access to Black women's bodies, and diverted anger from white men to black women, an emotional strategy for white women to deal with the infidelity
Delia Douglas argues that _____ is “concurrently a site of of subjugation, creativity, and resistance” for Black peoples (333).
What is Sports
Black peoples bodies relegated outside the realm of human + racial otherness
Anti-black racism/ misogynoir/ homophobia= sports are political. They do not operate in a vacuum.
Double Bind- Ben Carrington
The exceptionality of black athleticism thus moves through a double bind. It is on the one hand at once typical; an ideal type that attempts to define the boundaries of blackness itself and therefore, by extension, the identities of all black people, or rather, to be very specific, those racialized into the category of blackness. And yet, this very typicality serves to render black people, as bodies, outside the category of the truly human as exceptional
Typology of Sports Activism
1. Symbolic activism
2. Scholarly activism
3. Grassroots activism
4. Sport-based activism
5. Economic activism (Cooper et al. 151).
This documentary produced an "oppositional gaze" on low income neighbourhoods
What is Unarmed Verses
Film as a medium to reveal/ resist/to gaze
Agency- the choice to document and direct how the story is captured.
Ethical + responsible= giving back to the community, celebrating the community, nurturing relationships within the community.
Community Centers: Safety; Socialization; Creative expression
Gentrification: Disrupting communities, cultural traditions-sound and food (festivals, shops etc.); Contributing to displacement, erasure, disposability of Black life/ Black persons.
The limits and shortcomings of multiculturalism and masculinity is challenged most explicitly in this novel.
What is Brother
multicultural discourse does not respond to police brutality + the precarious living conditions of immigrants + the educational system
Masculinity revisited:
-School to prison pipeline
-Black Queer Diaspora
(“The spaces for black masculine performance in contemporary North American popular culture are actually few…. The spaces for the performance of black masculinity are largely characterized by musical cultures, fashion—or more accurately, style—and an urban bad-boy aesthetic that tends to limit black men to performing a small number of roles concerning their manhood” (p. 233).
Talented Tenth was coined by this philosopher.
Who is W.E. DuBois
values voting, political representation, higher education= manhood
intellectual community should help to free the rest.
critique--> does not account for class stratification among Blacks. Elitist.
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Double Consciousness
“One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Souls of Black Folk 215).
“The history of the American Negro is the history of…this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (Souls of Black Folk 215).
Hooks redefined this term
What are Stereotypes
Stories that are not true/ stand in for what is real- they are fantasies/ projections
They invite pretence
They are fictions narrated to make sense of difference
They abound when there is distance
This genre engaged in resistance against chattel slavery.
Document the conditions of/ or ”truth” about slavery
Encourage the abolition of slavery
Provide religious inspiration
Assert the narrator’s personhood
Challenge stereotypes about Black people
Bell hooks stated we must critique Rap as operating within this domain.
What is "White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy"
“The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (1994)
Helps us call attention to the dominate white mass media and their responsibility for reproducing these images.
“When young black males labor in the plantations of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, their right to speak this violence and be materially rewarded is extended to them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (1994)
This text encourages us to critically challenge the "Strong Black Woman" trope
What is The Other Side of the Game?
eg. Scene 13/Scene 16/ Scene 9- Personal sacrifice
“Seldom have we stopped to think, however, that this thing called strength, this thing we applaud so much in black women, could also be a disease. . . . The superficial attractions of strength have dominated portraits of black women to the detriment of other possibilities and potentially stymied future directions for the representation of black women. This tradition of portrayal, therefore, has created as well as become its own form of illness” (Harris, 109).
This activist started his teachings in the NOI.
Who is Malcom X
PROGRAM
Black Nationalism
Leave religion at the door
A self help philosophy
Militant advocacy
TACTICS
Re-education/develop a political consciousness
Own to operate and control the economy /create employment
Earlier in his career
Nation of Islam (NOI)
Combines the Black Messianic and Afrocentric doctrine of Garvey
Rereading(s) of the Qur'an and Bible
Teaches that God is a Black man, Black civilization is the source of science + wisdom, and that Black people should separate from the whites.
Relies on essentialist notions of race
Reclaims and Recenters the Black Body
Promotes a strong, economic network for Black people
Later in his career:
desired/demanded radical restructuring of wealth/capitalist system + power
rejected rigid Black separatism (moves away from essentialist notions of race--> moves towards greater collaborations
sought to balance religion and politics
greek verb--> to disperse , sow/ scatter.
What is Diaspora
migration of a community in large numbers over a sustained period of time, and the settlement or resettlement into a new community.
efforts to maintain, revive, invent a sense of home or the last homeland or cultural identity in the new geographic location.
metaphor + symbol= displaced people live in relationship to the past/present and future.
1) exile
2) promise of return- deferred/delayed belonging with the belief that one day day they will be restored/redeemed.
constant displacement + seeking renewal/ restoration (diaspora consciousness- exile and belonging, cyclical relationship)
political and cultural unease that fames one's being in the diaspora. A struggle to belong.
The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference (Hall 235)
Maroon communities represented this type of resistance.
What is Overt Resistance
enslaved people escaped and formed independent autonomous black communities that were socially and politically independent of plantation slavery
i.e. protests, escapes, talking back, rebellion
A form of cultural production that is a method/creates alternative knowledge systems.
What is Music (RAP)
Music is a method. Beyond its many pleasures, music allows us to do and imagine things that may otherwise be unimaginable or seem impossible. It is more than sound; it is a complex system of mean(ing)s and ends that mediate our relationship to one another, to space, to our histories and historical moment (1)
revolutionary demand of happiness
the root of black resistance practices
mediates our relationship to one another/ space/ histories.
creative alternatives to political presents
Hip hop manages the painful contradictions of social alienation and prophetic imagination
This short story grapples with the pressures of Black immigrants and refugees living in the Americas.
What is Little Copper Bullets
Grief:losing family, neighbours, their homelands in multiple ways (through violence, through departure, some senses of betrayal, a return that is never fully a return)
Displacement: how Aisha and Adam negotiate space/ being in Canada/ their differences/ etc. (i.e. Adam trying to master the English language- which makes him move further away from his roots)
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How does the Diaspora impact intergenerational relationships, impact one's relationship to the land and their identity.
This thinker coined Prison Industrial Complex.
Who is Angela Davis
Black people were used as raw material for the rapid expansion of the US penal system
Racism is deeply tied to global capitalism
slave owners and patrons of the convict lease system- disregard the humanity of Black people
the judicial system and the penal system become key weapons in the state's fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination/ racism/ poverty and war
“The contemporary prison appears to reincarnate the organizational logic of the Middle Passage, and similarly confines bodies that are conditionally degraded and in limbo between labour, value, civic death and biological death” (2003: p. 73)
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associations between blackness + criminality
we must redefine what we categorize as criminal
transform laws and society into an order harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and interests of the vast majority of its members.
America was considered this after Obama was elected.
What is Post-racial
loses a language to discuss racism
diffuses the terrorization of whiteness
allows assimilation and forgetfulness
whiteness is neutral
leads to color blind politics-->
racial arrangements are hidden
people are accused of over sensitivity
Robin D.G. Kelley proposed these two things as "powerful political forces"
What is love and imagination
social movements- produce a knowledge that stems from an imagination inspired by the possibility of a new order, a new world, freedom (57)
To put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art, but works that take us to another place allowing us to envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling (59)
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•The idea of Political Education
•Idea of Knowledge Work/ Knowledge Workers: Academics/ Intellectuals, Activists/ On the Ground Folk and Cultural Producers.
•Importance of Transformative Thinking
•Function of the Imagination + Love
The antonym of "respectability politics."
What is Disrespectability Politics
Disrespectability Politics- Places where black women live—between disses and respect – Where Black women are challenging heteronormativity, sexual repression , and elitist social structure while negotiating their role as consumers, purveyors, and adaptors of respectability. (Brown and Young 2016)
Also useful for a "Black ratchet imagination lens"= Black queer youth use this lens in hiphop to create their own resistance + reclaim their autonomy + heal from their exclusion and the violence they are subjected to = form their own knowledge systems + agency
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Respectability Politics- police the behaviors of Black people, namely Black women, so that they are compatible with hegemonic standards of decorum (Higginbotham, 1993)
This text proposes "viable patterns of life and thought" for Black communities living in the Americas.
What is Black Life: Post BLM and the Struggle for Freedom
The Black Test simply suggests that any policy that does not meet the requirement of ameliorating the dire conditions of Black people’s lives is not a policy worth having (91)
This proposal is a challenge to rethink the very grounds of a desired national and global transformative change—where it begins and where it ends. The black test is the proposal and a provocation to those committed to modernity’s ideals to notice and to urgently act on how encounters with BlackLife always seem to reveal the limits of their policy imaginations. The Black Test requires us to think another and different world now (92)