The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

Now Available: 51.3, Antidoting

 

 

Cover art by Abu Qadim Haqq

From the introduction, “Vaccines, Antidotes, Cures”

“By now you must have grown tired of the easy poetics articulating racism and Covid-19 as “twin diseases” or dual pandemics; or perhaps as “mutual infections” or symbiotic viruses. Such talk has been rampant over the last year, suggesting a desire to link concurrent phenomena in the language of mutuality, of ongoing social illness or catalytic metastasis. It is also the case that in times when mundane reality faces the pressure of social contradiction as well as the hot breath of literal violence, metaphor becomes a way of containing the incommensurable and of expressing the inexpressible and the incomplete.

Understandably this particular set of metaphors works in more direct ways. For example, they operate to delink these phenomena of racism and the pandemic from a state-sponsored narrative of pure happenstance or randomness, which renders them as opportunistic infections instead of chronic illnesses. Historians, however, are likely to flinch at this casual blending of phenomena given their awareness of a history in which race and cultural differences are ever framed in terms of infections, disease and contagion.” [more]

Issue 51.3 also includes the following:

  • Antidoting, by Jared Sexton
  • Howard University & the Challenge of the Black University: A Conversation with Andrew Billingsley & Greg E. Carr, by Amy Yeboah
  • What Was African Fiction? A Roundtable on Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership (University of Michigan Press, 2018), featuring Madhu Krishnan, Christopher Ouma, Laura Chrisman and Mukoma Wa Ngugi
  • A Conversation with Cover Artist Abu Qadim Haqq, by Louis Chude-Sokei
  • Review Essay: Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women; Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance; Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora / by Paul J. Edwards
  • Book reviews: 1919 by Eve L. Ewing / by Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu; A Black Women’s History of the United States
    by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross / by Channon S. Miller

 

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, and our upcoming final issue of the year.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice (two issues), and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

Now Available: 51.2 Caribbean Global Movements


Artwork by Philippe Dodard

 

The Caribbean has always been a site of global and local interactions and transactions. These movements have played an important role in the dissemination of ideas and sharing of cultural practices from the indigenous people’s pre-Columbian experience to the contemporary Caribbean migrations and internationalization of Caribbean culture.  Caribbean Global Movements, as a subject of intellectual inquiry, remains a timely engagement and maintains relevance as a critical component of Black Studies in general.

Caribbean theoretical and political movements have ignited the Africana world and continue to be generative research areas and inspirations for social movements—from the Haitian Revolution to Pan Africanism and Negritude, to the Cuban and Grenadian Revolutions and anti-colonial struggles and independence movements. Caribbean left theorists, such as C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, Franz Fanon, Fernando Ortiz, Nancy Morejon, and Sylvia Wynter are but a few of the Caribbean thinkers who have sustained what we know as Black Studies. Further, the mobility of Caribbean popular cultural forms, from Reggae and Rastafari to Hip Hop and Carnival cultures, continue to transform understandings of the Africana Diaspora.

This issue includes essays and reflections which poignantly offer understanding and critical engagement with the movements of people and ideas, the circuits and mobilities of Caribbean culture, literature and art, and the need for economic sustainability in times of climate crisis and other disasters. Led by “Reflections on Haiti” by Angela Y. Davis, we set the stage for an Africana world still reckoning with the Haitian Revolution and the place of Haiti in our consciousness and knowledge production. Davis signals to us the need for a re-centering of Haiti. This is also visually rendered through the cover art, which represents a site installation of the world-renowned Haitian artist Philippe Dodard titled The Rising Soul.

Critical articles and essays included in the special issue by Patrick D. M. Taylor, Myriam Moïse, and Attillah Springer reveal in different ways what it means to locate and theorise “Caribbean Global Movements” through the centering of Haiti and revolutionary movements. Taylor re-reads resistance and the spiritual practice of Obeah in Barbados, migrating outwards from the Haitian Revolution. Moïse challenges the masculine narrative of Negritude by asserting a feminine genealogy that affirms a revisioning of political movements. Springer connects Caribbean peoples, ideas, and culture through resistance and a demand for revolution as praxis. Other contributions reveal that the Caribbean region has much to teach the world. Ever so relevant during the COVID-19 global pandemic, Evelyn Erickson offers a personal and professional assessment of the Cuban healthcare system as one that is sustainable and offers a model for the Caribbean and the world. Marsha Jean-Charles posits an important critique of how Caribbean migrants become criminalised in the United States. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert powerfully examines the realities of the climate crisis and injustice across the Caribbean and centers the experiences and lessons from our everyday realities. Attillah Springer closes the issue with a creative usage of the culture of marronage to create a visible ideological and cultural stance of refusal and resistance. Caribbean Global Movements emerges as a defiant and complex component of the Africana world and Black Studies.

As some of the most vulnerable regions to climate crisis, island nations and their people have much to share/teach about the impossible double binds of tourism-dependency capitalism and unsustainable development. These exacerbate environmental degradation, food and economic insecurity and exploitation, which then further drives migration and migratory circuits across the region. This special issue engages these pressing concerns and challenges us to think differently about the Caribbean region and its knowledge production.

– Carole Boyce Davies and Angelique V. Nixon

 

For a limited time, access the intro and “Antillean Women and Black Internationalism: The Feminine Genealogy of Negritude,” by Myriam Moïse for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus Black Privacy and more.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice, Black Religions in the Digital Age, and more. CFP for Black Archival Practice listed here.

Now Available: 51.1 Black Privacy

 

Cover Art: Rayelle Gardner

Black Privacy collects reflections on, provocations around, demands for, acute analyses of, and uncertain futures for Black privacy in the face of anti-Black violence, surveillance, and hypervisibility. This special issue interrogates the history of Black privacy in its impossible antebellum and Jim Crow forms, its present urgency in the face of spectacular visibility, and the possibilities for futures of Black privacy that still allow for political expression.

From the stunning cover of the issue by Rayelle Gardner, Black Privacy announces its subject as the rearrangement of methods and representations of Black life. This disordering insists on revealing the mechanisms of white supremacist capture but not limiting Black study to those technologies of violence. In the powerhouse opening roundtable, four scholars of Black feminist study engage Angela Davis’s 1971 TBS essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” articulating new “fictititous cliches” that append to the study of Black women under enslavement, particularly around their sexuality. Sarah Haley, Shoniqua Roach, Emily Owens, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor write from the current explosion of work around Black women’s history even as they push the field on its continued reliance on masculinized resistance. Instead, the forum is a forceful articulation of Black femme, feminine, and feminist study of the history of Black privacy.

The questions of the issue continue on the (im)possibility of Black privacy, historically, politically, aesthetically. Christen Smith’s timely reflection on anthropological practices and global state violence against Black women focuses particularly in and near the domestic space/home (linking back to Roach’s piece in the forum). After that, Petal Samuel’s article takes us to an analysis of privacy as a (white) commodity and as a material experience in the contemporary world that relies on Black labor and the denial of Black life for its possibility.

The next two pieces are in deep conversation with each other– Roger Reeves’s provocative call against Black Twitter talk as politics, and Kevin Quashie’s unplanned for “response,” an in-depth detailing of how Black poetry can aesthetically reveal experiences of anti-Blackness while maintaining a critical privacy for emotional survival at the same time. Deirdre Cooper Owens then returns to the genealogical questions of the opening forum with a reflective essay on the enduring uncertainties of Black history and Black privacy, arcing toward the possibilities of claiming elemental, cellular life for blackness and its future articulations.

Finally, we end on an urgent, post-Covid conversation between aliyyah abdur-rahman and Simone Browne, each contemporary luminaries in the fields of Black privacy. Speaking across the humanities and social sciences, abdur-rahman and Browne question the material global reach of technology studies, of the justice brought and undone by the technological capture of Black death, and of the means of refusal– through art, faith, and sartorial practices– offered by Black women against the spectacular era of 2020. Altogether, this spread of work mines history, anthropology, Black feminist studies, sonic studies, diaspora studies, social media studies, and literary theory to ground us in crucial questions about the past and futures of Black privacy.

– Shoniqua Roach and Samantha Pinto

 

 

For a limited time, access the intro and “Confinement, Interiority, Black Feminist Study: A Forum on Davis’s “Reflections” at 50,” by Sarah Haley, Shoniqua Roach, Emily Owens, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for free.

Subscribe to our 51st volume here. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus Caribbean Global Movements, and more.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice, Black Religions in the Digital Age, and more. CFPs for the first three 2022 issues listed here while open.

 

Social Justice Handbook Series: Imagining A Global Resistance

 

This is part two of a three part series. Read the introduction to the series and the first post here. All articles linked to in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).

 

The Black Lives Matter movement has seen renewed global visibility in response to a boiling point of racial injustice in the United States: the increased visibility of police violence against Black people, the disproportionate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color, and the recent blatant paramilitary attacks against U.S. citizens from their own executive branch — a violence that immigrants of color in the U.S. have also undergone for decades. Concurrently, this transnational “awakening” to demand racial justice has demonstrated a worrying trajectory towards corporatization: the viral spread of radical ideals on social media have given way to superficial “digital activism” where hefty marketing campaigns instrumentalize the cause without commitment to structural change, and celebrities and politicians virtue-signal without tangible action. The time for a multiethnic and multinational coalition against white supremacy is long overdue, and the articles included in “Imagining A Global Resistance” have sought to envisage the contours of such a coalition at different historical moments.[1] Proving W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion that the color line circles the globe, the authors here illustrate that the color line not only divides the global population in terms of race, but further creates a system of material inequity that reproduces their oppression.[2] Together, the articles included in this bundle expose not only the shared experience of capitalist exploitation through temporal and spatial divides, but also the power of a common resistance.

In pursuit of a global coalition against racial injustice, we must be prepared to sacrifice the illusion of progress in favor of structural change. Robert L. Allen’s article “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory” (2005) reconceptualizes Black peoples in the U.S. as neocolonial subjects via the illusory inducements of Black capitalism and Black politics.[3] This system instrumentalizes a portion of the Black upper middle class as a buffer against insurgency and as an appeasing spectacle of Black progress. In this way, Allen identifies false consciousness as an ideology that dovetails with author Nawal El Saadawi’s observations in the second article in this bundle. Buttressing the myth of American individualism, Black capitalism allows for selective assimilation into capitalist structures of profit and exploitation; meanwhile, it obscures the enforced poverty of Black communities as a whole. This internal neocolonial system, bolstered by Black capitalism, works in tandem with the illusion of Black politics, in which representational gains are prized while Black communities remain politically and economically circumscribed by existing racist political structures. While the theory of internal colonialism Allen outlines is specific to the experiences of Black Americans, it finds commonality with the decolonial approaches of authors such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano and their articulations of “coloniality of power” to envision “the prospect of developing a global paradigm of the colonial relationship that will also provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the powerful resistance that continues to emerge in subaltern communities and nations around the world.” Yet, Allen points to a major problem in this multinational coalition building, one which remains an equally insidious threat in 2020 as in this article’s publication year, 2005: disenfranchisement strategies render these alliances weak, unorganized, and easily undermined.

El Saadawi’s “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind” (2004) offers striking examples of the power of corporate interest in disenfranchising oppressed communities, specifically Arab women in Egypt and abroad. She indicts the collaboration between Islamic fundamentalism and American Neo-imperial capitalism, a collaboration that she boldly claims renders Arab women “bodies without a mind.”[4] El Saadawi condemns global capitalism and its support of misogynistic social, political, and religious formations. She charges “native intermediaries”—members of an oppressed group who, pursuing the promise of assimilation into power, continue to perpetuate the structures that oppress and disenfranchise them and their communities—with possession of a “false consciousness.” This critique of false consciousness extends across many of the pieces offered here, from the neocolonial structures of Black capitalism in the U.S. that Allen discusses to the tokenization of Black police officers described by Edward Palmer in the third bundle of this collection. Her focus on the specific status and experiences of Arab women serve as an important reminder of the intersectional nature of systemic oppression and compel us to consider the disproportionate effects of global capitalism on women around the world. El Saadawi is keenly aware of these effects and the dangers of unchecked power, as she was imprisoned under former President of Egypt Anwar Sadat for two months in 1981 in response to her feminist publications. Sadat positioned her as an enemy of the state for precisely the global feminist consciousness she offers in this noteable piece.

In the final article of this bundle, we turn to epidemics of police violence in the United States as another iteration of the coalition between white supremacy, capitalism, and state power. Carl Dix begins “Police Violence: Rising Epidemic/Raising Resistance” (1997) by invoking October 1996: a moment he characterizes as a “unified national movement of resistance” against the epidemic of police brutality. His descriptions of this “new” and “diverse” resistance feel equally applicable to the present conjuncture: from Ferguson in 2014, to Minneapolis this year, to the numerous global protests against police violence, many of which have not entered into the American consciousness with the same intensity. Police are good at their job—they relentlessly protect the property and profits of the state and the rich elite at the expense of a racialized labor source kept in desperate conditions. Within the United States, the policing of Black Americans maintains the internally colonized proletariat of racial capitalism. The imperial U.S. further consolidates its capital power by reproducing this colonized proletariat within the Global South through the related technologies of militarism and the unchecked economic expansion of U.S. multinational corporations. Racial capitalism may take us to the boiling point but, through the redirection of corporate and governmental organizations, we are prevented from spilling over into complete revolution. While Dix’s hope in witnessing the multiethnic coalition of 1996 has not yet come to fruition, it articulates the potential for global resistance that is both anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Justice begins by cultivating a consciousness of the global majority tied to the liberation of working people everywhere.

Allen, El Saadawi, and Dix call for resistance that traverses boundaries—whether national, racial, ethnic, or gendered—to build collectivity beyond the instruments of colonialism and capitalism. With coalition comes the power to reimagine our relations in favor of justice, community, and care.

 

Jamiee Cook, Maria Sintura, and Maile Young

Graduate students, University of California, Santa Barbara, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative

 

[1] In his monograph Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson redefines racialism as a material force which would “inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.” He coins the term “racial capitalism” to refer to “the subsequent structure as a historical agency” of this reconceptualization of Marxist relations (2). Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

[2] Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 1902, 2.

[3] Internal neocolonialism resignifies the formulation of African America as a “nation within a nation” subjected to a form of “domestic colonial rule” (4). This idea has been articulated by theorists and activists at different points in history: from Martin Delany as early as 1852, to W.E.B DuBois in 1945, and Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm X in the 1960’s. Robert Allen, “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, 2005.

[4]Nawal El Saadawi, “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind,” The Black Scholar, 2008.

Now Available: Black Code

Cover art by John Jennings

The Black Scholar is proud to announce the release of “Black Code,” by guest editors Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Johnson and Neal have assembled a collective of digital soothsayers working on the margins of Black Studies, Afrofuturism, radical media, and the digital humanities. Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as praxis and methodology, it waxes insurgent when the need arises. And in this moment, we are in need of Black digital insurgency, one attuned to racial scripts of the past even as it looks to future modes of Black thought and cultural production for inspiration. Barely scratching the surface, this issue welcomes new work and celebrates a Black digital fugitivity that has been present since the beginning of the internet. Our contributors include Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lauren Cramer, Alessandra Raengo, Tara L. Conley, Ashleigh Wade, Aleia Brown, Joshua Crutchfield, Megan Driscoll, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, and Joy James, with an introduction from Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, and cover art from John Jennings celebrating Octavia Butler’s iconic novel, Wild Seed.

For a limited time, download and read the introduction, “Wild Seed in the Machine,” and “Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community” by Aleia M. Brown & Joshua Crutchfield for free.

To receive both print and digital versions of this issue, subscribe to Volume 47. When you subscribe to Volume 47, you will also receive “After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa,” “Black Experimental Poetics,” and our final issue of 2017.

From the Archives! Rebellion Reflections: Urban Revolt in Memory, Strategy, and Practice By Ashley M. Howard

*Each virtual issue collates some of the best writing from our archives, updated with new introductions written by prestigious scholars of black studies, and will be free to read and download for a limited time.*

While violence as protest has been a long-standing tradition of the disenfranchised, the 1960s urban rebellions firmly fixed these actions in the African American tactical toolbox. While an incident of police violence most frequently sparked these violent reactions, activists also registered their discontent with chronic unemployment, discrimination, and second-class citizenship.

Looking back, 1965 Watts, 1980 Miami, 1992 South Central, 2015 Baltimore and countless other cities share much in common: police violence as catalyst; in property violence by rebels who are socially aware but politically ineffective; and a pervasive discourse of equal opportunity coexisting with gross social and economic disparities. Scholars, activists, and the concerned public cannot be complacent, however. The response and utility of uprisings are markedly different in the twenty-first century. The militarization of the police, widespread use of social media, and a quasi-sympathetic and digitally connected public strain our capacity to employ and frame these events in productive ways.

The included articles represent a multitude of African American reflections on urban rebellions. Beginning with the second issue of The Black Scholar, contributors like Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) founder Max Stanford struggled with the meaning and future of armed militancy via the uprisings. Politicians such as Representative Ron Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and the first black mayor of a major city, Richard Hatcher, detail the impact of these events on their constituencies. Poet-activist Aaron Ammons and scholar Hortense Spillers contemplate the personal impact of the uprisings through creative writing while other scholars historicize the events, uncover the rise in police brutality and document urban inequities. Finally, scholar-activist Sundiata Cha-Jua details one community’s efforts to combat police brutality in the wake of fifteen-year-old Kiwane Carrington’s murder by local officers in Champaign, Illinois. Collectively and in the wake of current and imminent street struggles, these articles encourage us to revisit the uprisings in order to frame our past and inform our future.

Ashley M. Howard
Loyola University New Orleans

Articles are free to access until 30 April, 2017 and can be accessed here.

Muhammad Ali: The King of the Inauthentic by Gerald Early

When I wrote in my introduction to The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998) that, as a society, we were on the verge of “over esteeming” Muhammad Ali and thus of grossly misunderstanding his significance and deeply diminishing him as a person, I did not see myself as a revisionist but rather a seeker of a new level of nuance, an explorer.[1] Doubtless, my observation that Ali did not sacrifice any more as an athlete when he was suspended from boxing for three and a half years for his stance against the nation’s conscription laws and the Vietnam War than those athletes who were drafted during World War II was pushback against the leftist version of Ali. Those who served during World War II lost significant chunks of their athletic life spans and were, in many cases, in danger on the battlefield to boot. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis, the great crossover African American athlete of the Depression, did not fight competitively from March 28, 1942 to June 18, 1946, over four years, because of Louis’s army service during World War II. This was a longer layoff than Ali’s. What price patriotism? What price dissent? (Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn had a layoff from baseball as long as Louis’ from competitive boxing during World War II. He did not seem to think it hurt his career; rather he thought he might have been aided by it. It is an open question whether the layoff helped or hurt Ali.)

In thinking about Ali’s layoff in this context, I simply wanted readers to think about it more athletically in order to reveal something ironical about it politically. What did it mean compared to other young men who lost years in their prime because of military service as he had opposing such service? But such framing was not meant to suggest that Ali was insincere or, worse, inauthentic as a dissenter, which was precisely the point of  a recent piece in the rightwing online journal, Breitbart News, that compared Ali unfavorably to Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame outfielder Ted Williams, who served as pilot in both World War II and the Korean War, the upshot of which was accusing Ali of being a draft dodger. (The only other American fighter who was publicly accused of draft dodging was heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who avoided conscription during World War I, accused by his first wife, Maxine Cates, during their bitter divorce in 1919. Dempsey was brought up on charges in federal court of draft evasion in 1920 but was acquitted.[2])

The Breitbart article wanted to claim, in essence, that Williams made the greater sacrifice, losing time as an athlete during his prime and risking his life for his country while in combat. But the article misses the point: Ali did not dodge the draft; rather he challenged its legitimacy and was willing to pay the price for the challenge by going to prison if he lost. If he were a true draft dodger, Ali would have tried avoiding both the draft and prison by any means he could. Whether his religious grounds for opposing the draft were ethically acceptable or reasonable (he was not claiming to be a conscientious objector in a traditional sense by claiming not to believe in the morality of violence but a Muslim duty-bound to the dictates of his religion’s call to arms) is not in any way a reflection on whether they were sincere or authentic.

In the case of Ali in this instance the right wants to have it both ways with Islam: it is wrong and it is insincere as a set of religious beliefs (although with Muslim terrorists, the right underscores that the beliefs are wrong but that they are sincere which makes them all the more dangerous.) But the Breitbart article is part of a revisionist interpretation of Ali, to claim he was inauthentic, fake, a fraud, a hypocrite, a shallow man. Ali as symbol and man is thus part of the Culture Wars; the revisionism was not all generated by the right, by the all means, but also by some liberals who became weary and wary of Ali hero-worship in the fighter’s declining years and who wanted to challenge the liberal and leftist view of Ali as the grand American dragon-slayer.

In recent years, the core of revisionist criticism of Ali particularly centered on his treatment of his arch rival Joe Frazier, whom he beat twice in three fights, much of it about how unfairly and cruelly Ali castigated and belittled Frazier in the pre-fight promotions as an Uncle Tom and a gorilla, and as ignorant. Frazier was always bitter about this, about how, even when he was champion after beating Ali in 1971, he was never given his due because he existed solely as Ali’s foil. “Always able to feel the lancing invective with which Ali assaulted him, wrote Mark Kram in Ghosts of Manila, “Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community.”[3]

Ghosts of Manila is the ultimate Ali revisionist book, taking Ali down a few pegs for his sexual excesses (while he preached abstinence and sex sanctified by marriage), for allowing the Nation of Islam to control his money (much to Ali’s financial detriment), for allowing himself to be bullied by the Nation about opposing the draft, almost forcing him to be a martyr, for misusing his own money in ways that were not unusual for a professional athlete but shockingly irresponsible nonetheless, and for denigrating his black opponents, largely for the amusement of his large white audience, despite his proclamations of being a loyal race man.

There is nothing that Kram describes that is untrue; indeed, bits and pieces of some of Kram’s assertions can be found in other Ali books. But the overall impression is that Ali, like the Nation of Islam, is something of a fake, a bit of a post-modernist confidence game. Nothing underscores this as much as Kram’s description of Joe Frazier as being of Gullah ancestry, where Frazier sees himself (and Kram frames him) as a pureblood (He once called Ali “a half breed”), a black from the fields, unassimilated.

To be sure, Ali politically denigrated his black opponents (who were far more competitive threats to him than the relatively few white fighters he fought) because, first, there were few other options he had to interest the general public in a bout between two black men other than politicizing his fights. Nearly all of Joe Louis’s major fights were against whites. The political dynamic of racial and ethnic difference was built into the bouts (something which boxing has always emphasized to get fannies in the seats) and Louis really had to do nothing to stimulate the public’s fantasies about what the public imagined was at stake. In the age of the black dominance of the sports, Ali had to resort to something else and in the age of civil rights and Black Power he found a winning formula: cast himself as a race hero fighting the white man’s lackey, a feat that reshaped black disunity as the race’s own sort of culture war.

Second, Ali found this to be a way to celebrate and defend his new consciousness as a politically aware black man as a result of publicly joining the Nation of Islam in 1964. (He had actually been a fellow traveler since 1961.) Being a Muslim athlete made him a new kind of being, a reinvention, something fresh and different on the scene. In this sense, Ali was an original, even as he copied the trash talking of professional wrestling, boxers like John L. Sullivan (“I can lick any son of a bitch in the house”), and the exaggerated claims of modern advertisers and Hollywood trailers, the exaggerations of popular culture. He was both P. T. Barnum and the acts that Barnum was trying to sell. In the age of mass culture, what could possibly be authentic beyond what you asserted rhetorically was authentic? For Ali and his generation, authenticity was a belief, not a fact, a manipulation of the truth, not a quest for it. And everyone in the modern world knows authenticity to be a manipulation.

Third, as a champion athlete he was a fierce competitor who defined his greatness by his rivalries. How could he truly be great unless he could convince the public he was fighting for more than just money or even fame? Was his rivalry with Frazier really very different or worse than that between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis or between Tesla and Edison or between soul singers Joe Tex and James Brown? Would anyone, outside of professional boxing, remember Joe Frazier now if Ali had not treated him the way he did?

Notes

[1] Gerald Early (ed.), The Muhammad Ali Reader, (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1998), vii

[2] Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1980), 77-87.  Also see Jack Dempsey with Barbara Piattelli Dempsey, Dempsey, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 126-131; Jack Dempsey as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Demspey by the Man Himself, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 118-125;   Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ‘20s, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 121-166.

[3] Mark Kram, Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 55

 

8.29.12--Gerald Early, PhD, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, is an essayist and American culture critic who joined the Washington University faculty in 1982. Writing on topics as divergent as boxing, baseball, jazz, literature, and the Miss America pageant, he is the author and editor of more than a dozen books and the winner of numerous prestigious literary prizes. But what he finds among his most important tasks is being a mentor for his students. “I see myself as an optimistic enabler,” says Early, “certainly as a kind of coach.” Photo by Mark Katzman

Photo by Mark Katzman

Gerald Early is Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.  He currently serves as the editor of the university’s online journal, The Common Reader.

 

Editor’s Choice: Top 5 Articles of 2015

Here are our editors’ top five articles from T​BS​ volume 45 (2015). Given the abundance of great material from this year, narrowing it down to only five was near impossible. We truly appreciate all the hard work our contributors put into their articles. We couldn’t have done it without ALL of you!

Alphabetical by author:

  • Translating Blackness: Dominicans Negotiating Race and Belonging, by Lorgia García-Peña (45.2)
  • Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure, by Joan Morgan (45.4)
  • Looking Back, Facing Forward: (Re)-Imagining A Global Africa, by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (45.1)
  • New Orleans Revisited: Notes of a Native Daughter, by Lynnell L. Thomas (45.3)
  • If Loving Olitz is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right: ABC’s Scandal and the Affect of Black Female Desire, by Kristin J. Warner (45.1) [Free to access for limited time!]

For access to our upcoming 2016 content, subscribe now! For more information on subscriptions and accessing the above articles, see here.

 

Haiti: The Second Occupation by Jemima Pierre

[Reposted from The Public Archive]

July 28, 2015 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the landing of US Marines in Haiti and the beginning of a military occupation of the Black Republic that lasted until 1934 — nineteen years in total. With its massacres of Haitian peasants, its control of Haiti’s finances, its suppression of the Haitian press, and its dissolution of the Haitian legislature – all backed by a combination of Jim Crow ideology and Monroe Doctrine exceptionalism – the US occupation represents a searing annotation in the history of Haitian sovereignty. Yet the memory of the US occupation sits awkwardly in the context of the Haitian present where a new, second occupation of Haiti is currently in its eleventh year. It begs the question posed by @public_archive, “How do you memorialize occupation in the middle of occupation?”

The second occupation began June 2004 and was established under the pretext of “stabilizing” Haiti after the U.S.-sponsored ouster of the country’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. During the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” France, Canada, and the US hatched a plot to overthrow Aristide. The following February their plan was implemented. Aristide was kidnapped by US marines and sent to a military base in the Central African Republic. US President George W. Bush announced afterwards that he was sending US forces to Haiti to “help stabilize the country.” As Peter Hallward documents, the invading “Franco-American” force targeted and killed Aristide supporters, installed a puppet Prime Minister, and enabled the formation of a paramilitary force that organized anti-Aristide death squads. The United Nations, then led by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then cleaned up. According to Hallward, UN Security Council voted unanimously on April 29, 2003 to send, “an 8,300-strong UN Stabilization Force from 1 June, under the leadership of Lula’s Brazil.”

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is a multi-billion dollar military occupation that has had in any given year between 6000 and 9000 military troops and police in addition to thousands of civilian personnel. While there is no civil war in Haiti, and while crime rates are higher in other nations in the Western hemisphere – including Jamaica and the U.S. – MINUSTAH has had its illegal mandate renewed and extended every year. During this second occupation, the US and its allies, France and Canada, have been able to install another puppet government, the neo-Duvalierist Michel Martelly. Martelly, who has been ruling by decree since January 2015, has opened up Haiti to radical economic fleecing, including the giveaway of land and the Republic’s gold and mineral resources. He has also diligently worked to reinstate the Haitian military. And in a horrific parallel to first US occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH has committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people – including rape and assassination. MINUSTAH is also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that has killed more than 9000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands. Despite the deaths, and despite the evidence proving their culpability, the United Nations has enjoyed immunity from prosecution.

While the current occupation was initiated and continues to be largely funded by the U.S. and the United Nations, Haiti’s sovereignty has been extinguished by a multiracial coalition of Caribbean, Latin American and African countries. This may be the most sinister and least talked about aspect of the occupation, but it is perhaps the one that most requires our attention and contempt. In the first instance, there is Brazil. Brazil has been in charge of the military wing of the occupation since its inception. It has spent upwards of $750 million on maintaining military control. For Brazil, the country in Latin America with the largest Black population and a supposedly leftist government, Haiti is its “imperial ground zero.” Brazil has used its contribution to the occupation of the Black Republic to demonstrate its credentials as a regional power and to show the Americans and Europeans that it is ready for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. For Brazil, Haiti is also a training ground for domestic security and enforcements; its Haitian forces return to the country and deploy the tactics of military terror on its own poor Black and Brown favela dwellers.

The second occupation’s new Black leadership is, however, as egregious as Brazil’s involvement. The head of the MINUSTAH mission in Haiti is Sandra Honoré, of Trinidad and Tobago. A career diplomat and former ambassador to Costa Rica, Honoré takes up the post previously held by Mariano Fernández Amunátegui of Chile. Her deputy is Carl Alexandre, an African-American attorney who previously worked as the “Resident Legal Advisor” for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti. This Black leadership is accompanied by a multinational military force made up of a number of South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Jamaica, Grenada, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Guinea, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

One hundred years after US Marines landed in Haiti, it seems as if the entire world is colluding to undermine the sovereignty of the world’s first Black nation. Under these circumstances, we cannot memorialize Haiti’s first occupation without rebuking those responsible for the second.

 

Jemima Pierre (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: race, racial formation theory, and political economy; culture and the history of anthropological theory; and transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology) and is currently working on a project on the racialized political economy of multinational resource extraction in West Africa. Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, Haiti, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in a number of academic journals. She has also served as editor and columnist for the online news magazine Black Agenda Report.

She can be reached at pierrej[at]ucla.edu.

For Anthony Dansberry, another holiday to hope by Christopher Benson

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter  with permission from the author.]

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison. “Nothing special,” he would say in response to questions I had sent along with family members who made the trip down from Chicago to Danville Correctional Center to surprise him.  Two-hour drive. Four-hour visit. Two days later.  “Just the same old stuff,” Anthony told me through his cousin, Rick Dear.  “Just another day cleaning outside the prison; picking up trash and taking out the garbage.”

A plum job, to be sure.  With a title.  Lawn and Grounds Specialist.  Status for a model inmate.  “I get to be outside and look at the cars as they drive by.”  A breath of fresh air.  A flirtation with freedom.  Or, perhaps, a cruel tease.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Same old stuff,” he said.  “I ate turkey bologna, mashed potatoes, green peas and apple pie. The only thing that was special or different was the apple pie.  They don’t give us that around here.  Only on holidays.”

In Chicago, Anthony’s family gathered around the table for Christmas dinner to celebrate the moment.  His Aunt Bernice, who has been hospitalized, suffering with bone cancer, was able to come home for the day.  The family blessing offered by Anthony’s Aunt Ollie expressed hope that Anthony, too, would come home one day soon.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Nothing special,” he said.  Not just this Christmas.  But every Christmas for the past 22 years on a 75-year sentence, paying for a crime he did not commit.  The death of 77-year-old Edna Abel resulting from a 1991 mugging.  There was a questionable confession — with limited reading skills, Anthony believed he was signing a form for his release from interrogation.  There were forensics that didn’t add up, dots that didn’t connect.  (A palm print proved not to be Anthony’s.)  And there was conflicted eyewitness testimony: Of the six eyewitnesses, only one was able to make a positive ID. Two of them said he wasn’t the one. The only witness called to testify appeared to have changed elements of her story by the time of trial.

Lawyers from Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions argued all this before the Illinois Prison Review Board in 2010 and in the court of public opinion since then.  Hoping to persuade public officials that Anthony’s murder conviction was tragically flawed.  Hoping to add the public voice of support for their clemency petition awaiting decision by Gov. Pat Quinn — the only person now who might free the 50-year-old Anthony.  The last appeal.  The last hope for a man who has become something of a poster child for a broken criminal justice system.  One that can go terribly wrong even while trying to right a wrong.  One that blindly allows innocent people to languish in prison, while the guilty go free.

Anthony has been riding a roller-coaster-of-a-hope for the 14 years his case has been represented by CWC, led by co-director Jane Raley, attorney of record on the 2010 Prison Review Board brief; Margaret Soffrin, of counsel; investigator Susan Swanson, who brought the case to CWC in 2000; and former Northwestern law students Rami Fakhouri and Rachel Freyman, who worked on the brief.

Even this Christmas season was marked by the ups and the downs.

The upside.  Anthony, along with other DCC inmates, heard the local television report of Quinn’s Christmas Eve decision granting 179 clemency petitions.   Hope.   Even though names were not included in the TV report, it seemed to Anthony that the CWC work on his behalf finally had paid off.  Surely he was on the Christmas list.

The downside.  This past Saturday, Anthony heard from his Aunt Ollie, and cousin, Rick, that his name was not included.  But that was not the worst of it.  His attorney of record, his advocate, his champion, Jane Raley, had died.  On Christmas Day.  She had succumbed to cancer.

“His whole demeanor changed,” recalls Rick, 51, a film set builder and Studio Mechanics Union member. “He didn’t cry or shed a tear,” because, well, you don’t do that in prison.  But the impact was palpable.  “He looked as though he’d just been hit by a truck.”

True to form, though, according to those who know him best, Anthony put aside his own concern about clemency, about how his appeal would proceed. “It’s not about the release right now.”  He only expressed concern about Raley’s family.  “It’s not about me anymore because she sacrificed so much, she sacrificed being with her family to take time out for me and to be with me.”  Of all the lawyers on his case before CWC took it on, Raley had been “the only one I could trust, who didn’t lie or do anything for their own benefit,” he said.

“When some of the things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, she always kept trying and looking for something else.  She told me not to worry.  ‘We’re gonna do this’ or ‘I need to talk to this person,’” he recalled.  Or “‘I need to look into this thing.’”  Like Edna Abel’s purse that mysteriously had disappeared from evidence for awhile.  “‘I will get you an answer,’” Raley would tell Anthony.  “And she always answered my calls.”

In his Saturday conversation with family, Anthony wanted to know about funeral arrangements.  (Jan. 3.)  He wanted to reach out to Raley’s family.  Somehow.  To let members know how much he appreciated their sacrifice.  All the hours Raley had put into his case.  An innocent man racked with a sense of guilt over what proving his innocence had cost others.  All the quality time Raley had lost with her family.  Not just in working on legal representation.  But also the time she spent in guiding him through it all.  Giving him hope.  Encouragement.  No guarantees, she had advised.  But at least “a fighting chance” that one day he might be released.

On Sunday, the day after his family visit, Anthony told his cousin Rick by phone that he had not been able to sleep after they left.  He had begun to write a letter to Raley’s family.  He had sought help from a fellow inmate.  He needed that help.  The writing part.  That literacy problem again.  The one that had led him to sign a confession believing it was a release form.  Half his lifetime ago.

In the draft letter shared with me by Rick, Anthony expresses his deepest sympathy along with his appreciation for Raley’s “caring and loving spirit.”  He acknowledges that she went beyond “what other attorneys in situations would have done for their clients,” showing “patience” in going over his case with him repeatedly when he didn’t understand.  In the letter, which he writes was “as difficult for me to close as it was to open,” he expresses gratitude to Raley’s “loving family” who “shared her with me for as many years” as they did.

Somewhere between the words, though, is something even deeper than all of the very moving emotions.  There is the sense that Jane Raley still is counseling Anthony.  Assuring him.  Encouraging him not to give up.

Anthony has learned the power of the possibility.  Of hope.  Of believing in the unseen.  With little more than the inspiration of people he has come to trust.

He has not given up any of that.  Hope that the work and the sacrifices of people like Jane Raley still will pay off.  Hope that his appeal finally will be considered.  Hope that more petitions for clemency will be granted by Gov. Quinn before he leaves office on Jan. 12.

Hope that Anthony Dansberry has spent his last Christmas in prison.

 

Christopher Benson is a blogger for The Chicago Reporter.
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