Category: history

Ibram X. Kendi

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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.

Attachment with feeling and imagination

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… romantics believed in a transcendental nature that moves through affects and inspires the visionary and autonomous individual. an individual who then creates their own imaginative and personal perspective on Humanity and the world. In short, they emphasized the power of the human imagination to contribute to the future,which stories we tell each other and how we tell them matters…

feelings, emotions, and the imagination …

Lewis Waller offers on the nexus of Romanticism and historiography. via aeon.

Also,

art thus becomes as Schelling famously argued the organon and criterion of truth itself

at 16:32.

Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

Achebe

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Memory is necessary if surviving is going to be more than just a technical thing.

… Ibo proverb — “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.”

via brainpickings

Related : Conversations with James Baldwin. Book.

“[Photo] of Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin in Florida, 1980. Where they met for the first time at a conversation between them organised as part of a conference hosted by the African Literature Association, in Gainesville, Florida.” via duroolowu.

Walter Rodney’s ‘Groundings’

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Via Verso, On Walter Rodney‘s concept and practice of ‘Grounding’ as Critical Pedagogy by Kevin Okoth.

“A collection of public lectures held by Rodney in Jamaica and at the Congress of Black Writers in Montréal, Groundings provides a pedagogical framework for intellectuals fighting to undo the epistemological distortions of imperialism.”

“To truly ‘ground’, Rodney believed that the revolutionary intellectual must go anywhere to reason with their people. […] ‘I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down and listen’, he writes. ‘It might be in a sports club, it might be in a school-room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully […] – ‘dark dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them.’ […] For Rodney, the revolutionary Black intellectual cannot hide in the university and challenge the status-quo within the boundaries of academic respectability. These intellectuals, he argued, do not pose a threat to the neo-colonial elites; only when these same intellectuals break out of academic isolation and engage in the mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground, do they begin to challenge oppressive and exploitative systems of power.”

Morant Bay, Jamaica

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“The events at Morant Bay in 1865 followed on the heels a period of public meetings known as the Underhill Meetings, and peaceful expression of grievances through petitions. Complaints included a series of economic issues related to wages, land tenure, access to markets, and labor rights; political issues related to unfair taxation, no justice in the courts, and elite-biased government policies; and civil issues that included voting rights, and access to healthcare, education, and land. In that sense it was not a riot so much as a social movement, which was rejected by the Governor and finally turned to violence against the representatives of the local government.”

via Graphic Arts, Princeton University Library. Research for future works.