On New Braunfels Avenue, San Antonio.
Category: history
San Antonio African American Community Archive & Museum (SAAACAM)
SAAACAM opened its new exhibit space at La Villita, with exhibits Their Contribution Our Legacy and SNAP (on Eugene Coleman and his civic works). San Antonio Magazine. San Antonio Heron. SA Express-News (2019).
Radical revolution of values
…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.
Haiti
[Radio] The Opera Show
Hannah Catherine Jones‘s PhD research cum radio show on nts.live
The Opera Show – The Oweds Special – Part I: Owed to Survivance, London, 07.07.20
Kara Walker – ‘I’m an Unreliable Narrator’
via Art Resources Transfer, a nonprofit organization committed to documenting and disseminating artists’ voices and work to the broadest possible public.
- Zadie Smith: “What Do We Want History to Do to Us?” (The New York Review of Books)
- Hamza Walker: “Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage…” (The Renaissance Society)
- Kara Walker on the Post-Lockdown World (Frieze)
Ibram X. Kendi
Let’s revisit a 2018 post, in which Dr. Ibram X. Kendi appeared in a segment of On the Media.
Here are choice excerpts from the show’s transcript.
… the assumption about where racism thrives, namely among the uneducated, the hateful, the poor. […] this prevailing narrative is centuries old and completely wrong.
Those who were producing racist ideas were doing so to justify existing policies that typically benefitted them. So, in other words, instead of ignorance and hate leading to racist ideas and racist ideas leading to racist policies, racist policies have been leading to racist ideas and racist ideas have been leading to ignorance and hate.
In Western European slave markets at the time, sub-Sahara Africans were typically more valuable, primarily because their skin color made it more difficult for them to run away, in contrast to the more plentiful slaves in the slave market of Eastern European Slavs. And so, then they had to create a justification that defended why they were exclusively slave trading in African people.
When you make it [the argument that racism being fundamentally] about ignorance, you’re not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America’s institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.
It also allows people to believe that I as an activist can go out and educate people. I know the path in which that can be done. It’s a lot harder though as an activist to say, okay, you know what, the fundamental problem is power and policy. So it allows for some people to go the easier route as it relates to anti-racist reform.
There’s actually more violence occurring in impoverished black neighborhoods than there are richer black neighborhoods. It’s the same among all the other racial groups. [LAUGHS] In other words, there’s an actual correlation between violence and unemployment rates. The problem is not people, the problem is actually unemployment. And then it changes the calculus of how we, of course, fight violent crime.
His books, Stamped from the Beginning, 2016, How to Be an Antiracist, 2019, and Antiracist Baby, 2020.
Further readings : Antiracist reading list, The Atlantic, Center for Antiracist Research.
Voyage à Haïti, via ina.fr
25 février 1961, 12min 49s.
RADIODIFFUSION TELEVISION FRANCAISE, Solange Peter, Générique réalisateur, Irène Chagneau, producteur.
Another voyage, Les Turkana, 1958.