The Long War on Black Studies, in The New York Review

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

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

Tina Campt on AAS Podcast

Episode 8: A Black Gaze.

A Black Gaze is, it’s a framework. Well, I talk about it as a looking practice, and it is a looking practice that is not about how black people see. It is not a black perspective or black vantage point. It is not subjected in that particular way, and it is not collective in that particular way. Instead, it is a, a, practice of looking practice that positions you in relationship to blackness regardless of whether or not you are black or not.

Change everything

We Organize to Change Everything : Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice edited by Natalie Adler, Marian Jones, Jessie Kindig, Elizabeth Navarro, and Anne Rumberger.

A free ebook, via Verso and Lux–a socialist feminist magazine, examines the fight for abortion from the 1970s to the present, bringing together the voices of clinic defenders, health care providers, and the networks of feminist activists helping pregnant people obtain care from Mississippi to Mexico.

With contributions from: Jenny Brown, Naomi Braine, Verónica Cruz Sanchez of Las Libres, the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, Derenda Hancock and Kim Gibson of We Engage, Amelia Bonow of Shout Your Abortion, Barbara Winslow, Marian Jones, Jen Deerinwater, Raquel Reichard, Amy Littlefield and ReproJobs, Erin Matson and Shireen Rose Shakouri from Reproaction, Cheryl Rivera, Victoria Law, Marie Solis, Dr. Mary K. Bowman, Movimento di Lotta Femminile di Padova, Lizzie Presser, Arielle Swernoff, Mattie Lubchansky, and an introduction from Jessie Kindig.

graphics via shout your abortion.

Earth

A plan to save the earth and bring the good life to all.

This book covers:

• Rewilding half the earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity

• A rapid transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption by the world’s wealthiest

• Global veganism to cut down on energy and land use

• Worldwide socialist planning to efficiently and equitably manage production

• The involvement of everyone—even you!

Verso

Property Will Cost Us the Earth Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement by Verso Books, edited by Jessie Kindig.

[NAME] opens

via mailchimp

[NAME] is opening up a storefront at 6572 SW 40th Street. We’re having a little party to celebrate this milestone this Saturday, February 12th, from 2-5pm.  Though we’ll officially start celebrating at 2pm, the shop will be open from 11am on, showcasing the books and editions that [NAME] has produced since 2009, with artists such as Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Beatriz Monteavaro, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Nathan Carter, Brian Kennon, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez, among so many others. We will also have some of the scholarly publications that we have worked on, including Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System; Practice Space; Dark Nights of the Universe, and more.

If you’re unable to join us on Saturday, visit us soon. Starting February 16th, we’ll be open from 11–5pm.


The appearance of black lives matter, 2017.

National Coalition Against Censorship on censorship of 2022 edition of Illuminate Coral Gables

In July 2021, […], Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago urged the city’s commissioners to condition city funding for Illuminate Coral Gables, a public art show, on the exclusion of two of the participating artists because of their purported political views. In order to protect the integrity of the work and reject such a blatant act of censorship, the chief curator resigned. As a result, the whole 2022 edition of the show was cancelled, depriving Coral Gables residents and visitors of a much-celebrated art event.

https://ncac.org/news/mayor-coral-gables-florida-art-censorship

Open Letter: Release Otero Alcántara [NYR]

The Cuban government is detaining the artist solely for expressing his ideas through his art and for his nonviolent defense of human rights.

To President Miguel Díaz-Canel:

We the undersigned condemn the detention of the Black artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a leader of the San Isidro Movement, a group of Cuban artists, journalists, and academics that campaigns for freedom of expression.

[…]The New York Review

Radical revolution of values

AP Photo/Horace Cort via PR

…the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

[…]

His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality.

Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the “affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic policies from foreign policies.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
January 15, 2018

Fifty Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon Terry. Excerpt at The Paris Review. via Haymarket.