“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Dr. Martin Luther King
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. via DemocracyNow.
Radio Alhara (‘the neighbourhood’). Learning Palestine – Until Liberation, 12 hours of lectures, interviews, book presentation, talks, storytelling, music, songs, poetry and chants. Compiled by Learning Palestine Group.
Palestine, BLM & Boycott In The Arts: Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, Jasbir K. Puar, Amin Husain, Marz Saffore, Friday, November 4, 2016 at Artists Space.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
Robin D.G. Kelley defends Black studies;a version of this essay appears in Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, available now from Haymarket Books as a free ebook.
Most state laws prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write were introduced after 1829, in response first to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World—an unrelenting attack on slavery and US hypocrisy for maintaining it
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Who’s afraid of Black Studies? White supremacists, fascists, the ruling class, and even some liberals. As well they should be. Not everything done in the name of Black Studies challenges the social order. Like any field, it has its own sharp divisions and disagreements. But unlike mainstream academic disciplines, Black Studies was born out of a struggle for freedom and a genuine quest to understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge. The objects of study have been Black life, the structures that produce premature death, the ideologies that render Black people less than human, the material consequences of those ideologies, and the foundational place of colonialism and slavery in the emergence of modernity. Black Studies grew out of, and interrogates, the long struggle to secure our future as a people and for humanity by remaking and reenvisioning the world through ideas, art, and social movements. It emerged as both an intellectual and political project, without national boundaries and borders. The late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson described it as “a critique of Western Civilization.”
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No serious scholar believes that someone is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” solely “by virtue of his or her race or sex.” We teach the opposite: that race is neither fixed nor biological but socially constructed. Modern categories of racial classification were Enlightenment-era European creations that relied on a false science to claim that discrete “racial” groups share inherent traits or characteristics. We reject such claims as essentialist and recognize that behaviors and ideas attributed to race, gender, class, and sexuality are not inherent but ideological, and therefore dynamic and subject to change. We use evidence-based research to show that policies that further racial, class, and gender inequality need not be intentional, and that anyone can be antiracist, regardless of their race.
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The point of these attacks is to turn antiracists into enemies and the people identified as “white” into victims. Marginalized white working people, who are victims of stagnant wages, privatized health care, big pharma, and tax policies that redistribute wealth upward, are taught instead that they live in what was once the perfect country until woke forces took over and gave their hard-earned income to the Negroes and immigrants who are now trying to take their guns. It would be a mistake to think of such rhetoric as a “culture war.” This is a political battle. It is part and parcel of the right-wing war on democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities.
Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University Torkwase Dyson, Artist & Scholar Marisa Fuentes, Rutgers University Sarah Haley, Columbia University Cameron Rowland, Artist & Scholar Alex Weheliye, NorthWestern University
In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.
The Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves, today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA, Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents’ own reactions to bondage.
While African Americans were virtually excluded from Writers’ Projects in several Southern states, the pattern was not universal. In several states–notably Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida–ambitious black units flourished; in several others the number of black workers fluctuated in response to work quotas. And the energies of the black writers were directed almost exclusively to the collection of materials pertaining to African-American culture.
The relative paucity of black personnel on the Writers’ Project makes their accomplishments all the more impressive. In addition to the collection and preparation of materials for the state guides, African-American workers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia engaged in research studies on black history and culture. The Washington office of the FWP also contemplated publishing a history of the antislavery struggle “from the Negro point of view”; development of a comprehensive bibliography of writings on African-American culture; and the compilation of a documentary record of events in the history of the Underground Railroad. Sterling A. Brown, whose unstinting support and encouragement sustained each of those efforts, had personally formulated plans for the publication of a volume that would draw substantially upon Writers’ Project materials obtained by black researchers. These studies were curtailed and publication plans based upon them thwarted, however, by the abrupt termination of the Writers’ Project in 1939. Only The Negro in Virginia, a product of that state’s black unit directed by Roscoe E. Lewis and one of the outstanding achievements of the Writers’ Project, attained publication.
Limitations of these narratives–
…At best with the awareness that a totalizing of history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concerns. With all these provisos issued, these narratives nonetheless remain an important source for understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath….
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 11.
Martin Jackson, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615314/.James Green, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615295/.Albert Todd, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. July 9. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615382/.
William Branch, 322 Utah St. San Antonio, TX (Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams-Duhon. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. p.149)
