Family Homes, Inverted: Illicit Occupations and Black Intimacies in and beyond the Loophole of Retreat

Black persons with HIV are less likely than white persons to experience viral control even while in treatment. We sought to understand whether patient characteristics and site of care explain these differences using a cross-sectional analysis of medical records. Our cohort included 8779 black and 7836 white patients in the Veterans Administration (VA) health system with HIV who received antiretroviral medication during 2013. Our primary outcome, viral control, was defined as HIV serum RNA <200 copies/mL. We examined the degree to which racial differences in viral control are related to site of care, patient characteristics (demographics, HIV treatment history, comorbid conditions, time in care, and medication adherence), retention in care, and combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) adherence, using multi-variable logistic regression models. Compared to whites, blacks were younger and had lower CD4 counts, more comorbidities, lower retention in care, and poorer medication adherence. The odds of uncontrolled viral load were 2.02 (p < 0.001) for black relative to white patients without risk adjustment (15% vs. 8% uncontrolled viral load, respectively). The odds decreased to 1.83 (p < 0.001), 1.65 (p < 0.001), 1.62 (p < 0.001), and 1.24 (p = 0.01) in models that sequentially controlled for site of care, age and clinical characteristics, care retention, and cART adherence, respectively. Overall, 51% of the viral control difference between blacks and whites was accounted for by adherence; 26% by site of care. We conclude that differences in the site of HIV care and cART adherence account for most of the difference in viral control between black and white persons receiving HIV care, although the exact pathway by which this relationship occurs is unknown. Targeting poorer performing sites for quality improvement and focusing on improving antiretroviral adherence in black patients may help alleviate disparities in viral control.

Writing to "Virtuous" and "Gentle" Readers: The Problem of Pain in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents and Harriet Wilson's Sketches Sally Gomaa (bio) By the mid-nineteenth century, associating slavery with excessive pain provided enough grounds to call for the abolition of this peculiar institution. The American Anti-Slavery Society's Declaration of Sentiments in 1833 stated that slaves were "recognized by law, and treated by their fellow-beings, as brute beasts" against the "Divine prerogative" and "the highest obligations resting upon the people of the United States" (qtd. in MacDonald 354). While slavery was "brutification" (My Bondage 152), abolition was being "changed from a chattel to a human being" (Life and Adventures 439). The radical transformation from "thing" to "man" was enacted on the abolitionist platform by displaying slaves' bodies in pain. For example, Frederick Douglass writes that he was introduced to audiences at abolitionist events as a graduate from the peculiar institution "with my diploma written on my back" (My Bondage 219). When Douglass became no longer satisfied to merely "narrate" wrongs but tried to "denounce" them, he was told to "have a little of the plantation manner of speech" so that people would believe him (220). For Douglass, the transition into freedom required speaking "just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me" (221); for the abolitionists, it required exposing his scarred body and "assuring the audience that it could speak" (220). Thus, the slave's body was used in abolitionist discourse as the site/sight of pain. But the more slaves' bodies in pain turned into spectacle, the more assigned to physicality they became. To put it succinctly, Friend Collins instructs Douglass to "[g]ive us the facts . . . we will take care of the philosophy" (220). This observation is not new: abolitionists' use of the slave's scarred body was shaped by the cultural and historical factors that were beginning to sentimentalize pain. By sentimentalizing, I mean a whole range of ways in which pain was viewed as an affect. To begin with, according to Elizabeth Clark, evangelical revivalism provided abolitionists with "a religious model of sympathetic conversion" (479) that promoted the use of pulpit story-telling and vivid language. Because this language was often "unsuitable for polite society," abolitionists had to do the "cultural work" of providing "a set of interpretive conventions" (486) so that representations of slaves in pain would be sure to arouse sympathy. Should this caveat imply that such representations would arouse feelings other than sympathy? In "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain," Karen Halttunen argues that toward the end of the eighteenth century and through the beginning of the nineteenth, reform literature "did eroticize pain, constructing it as sexual in nature" (324). By directing pain toward "privatization," humanitarian reformers created "an imaginative cultural underground of the illicit and forbidden" (334). The meticulous attention with which they tried to embed representations of cruelty "in a tangle of apologies, explanations, indirections, and bowdleristic omissions" (332) points to their awareness that they were "participating in the introduction of a new cultural linkage of violence and sex, a linkage whose primary purpose was to establish the obscenity of pain" (330). Yet, despite its dubious nature, pain provided an epistemology, "a kind of transcendence," according to Marianne Noble (144). Noble argues that sentimental literature's use of masochism [End Page 371] "makes available to a woman who endorses 'true womanhood' a way of imagining her own embodiment and her own desire for physical pleasure" (23) because "in the sentimental ideal, a sufferer and an observer exceed their own bodily limits through the common bond of pain" (144). This "common bond" rests on "a conviction that non-slaves could know what the pain of slavery felt like" (129); for example, "bereavement and separation" are "universal" emotions. Harriet Beecher Stowe's literary method in Uncle Tom's Cabin exemplifies this approach by "thrust[ing] into readers' preexisting wounds, forcing them to 'feel for' the slave by re-experiencing their own painful separations and other forms of suffering" (129). Sentimentalizing pain could thus implicitly enlist the sufferer into validating the observer's preexisting ideas or ideals regarding pain. Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; or...

The Hardships of Slaves and Mill Workers By Stephanie Gamboa arriet Jacobs's (1813-1897) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl narrates the nonfic- tional firsthand account of a female slave during the early 1800s. Jacobs experience as a Southern African American slave puts many thoughts into perspective through- out her book. The fictional story of Life in the Iron Mills takes place in 1861 where the daily activities of a Northern mill worker is intricately examined. Both stories engage the topics of race, gender, class, and the different mentalities in the Southern and Northern regions. Incidents and Life in the Iron Mills illustrate the inequalities that citizens faced in the early years of the United States. Jacobs's reveals the gender and race problems present in America while Life in the Iron Mills touches bases on the class differences in America. These two firsthand accounts provide an insightful comprehension of the social and eco- nomic struggles faced in America. It also allows for a comparison to the different struggles presented to African Americans when compared to lower class whites in the 19 th century. These two pieces ultimately reveal that not all was perfect in American society and that much reform needed to be made to truly provide its citizens with equality. The predominant issue in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, are the many injustices masters inflicted upon African American females as in comparison to male African American slaves. The main character Jacobs mentions “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” 1 On top of the strenuous workload a slave was expected to perform, African American women were subjected to sexual harassment both physical and mental. From an early age, African American women experienced this har- assment because they were viewed as property and therefore could be used for whatever purpose the master deemed appropriate. The unlimited power and control over female Af- rican Americans made it acceptable for masters to do as they pleased which put women in a vulnerable position to be viewed as sexual objects. Jacobs describes her experience and those of other African American females concisely when she states, “She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse.” 2 Jacobs faced constant sexual harassment from her master because she was what one may consider beautiful having a lighter complexion derived from her Anglo-Saxon herit- age. 3 Dr. Flint demonstrated much interest in Jacobs, following her everywhere she went and constantly reminding her that she had to submit to his every will. To further worsen the matter the mistress was extremely jealous and hateful towards Jacobs. The mistress would use every opportunity at hand to make Jacobs’s life more difficult. 4 Instead of ex- pressing compassion towards the degradations women faced, the mistresses showed hatred towards African American females. Slaves were subjected to psychological abuse, being separated from their children and spouses as well. Jacobs’s master inflicted this form of manipulation upon her. Dr. Flint constantly threatened Jacobs with separating her from her children if she did not comply with his will. Jacobs declared that, “Dr. Flint loved money, but he loved power more.” 5 Dr. Flint did not physically beat Jacobs however he did deny her basic human rights. There were many instances where white friends of the family tried to purchase Jacobs; however, H

Racism imposes profound psychological, relational, and emotional burdens on Black individuals, fundamentally shaping their experiences of intimacy. This article explores the effects of systemic, institutional, and structural racism on Black relationships. By combining neurobiological insights on race-based traumatic stress with a sociocultural exploration of Black intimacy there is an emphasis on mental health, communication dynamics, sexual wellness, and family structures. Integrating existing literature and theoretical frameworks, this study highlights the barriers racism creates for Black intimacy and offers pathways for resilience and systemic reform. The findings underscore the importance of culturally responsive interventions and structural changes to foster relational well-being within Black communities.

Reviewed by: Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy Ed Chamberlain (bio) Jenkins, Candice M. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a bevy of women writers took to the genre of the novel, narrating the experience of black American life and community in the United States. The outcome of these moments was a literature that reflects the cultural politics of an era steeped in debate about private worlds of African-American families. In effect, these representations are legible as crystallizing United States political phenomena, such as the burgeoning civil rights movement and the efflorescence of dialogues about sexual politics. Relatedly, the literary critic Candice Jenkins recently published a response to the aforesaid period and texts, titled, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (2006). Her work is a compelling study of these novels, which include Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Paradise (1998), Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Jenkins’s work makes sense of these novels by examining how the books’ portrayals of race and desire conform to, or deviate from, the sociopolitical forces that Jenkins dubs as, “the salvific wish” (13). Since Jenkins finesses this notion of the “wish” rather extensively, it is useful to foreground that the salvific wish, or, as she abbreviates it, “the wish,” functions as an offshoot of uplift ideology; furthermore, she explains that, “the content of the salvific wish—a black, largely female, and generally middle-class desire—is a longing to protect or save black women, and black communities generally, from narratives of sexual and familial pathology” (14). Jenkins’s convincing critique of the wish shows that this social desire begins innocuously as an aspiration to moral conduct, but, in due course, it becomes an unattainable standard that polices “black intimate” (16) life in domesticity and circumstances of sexuality. Private Lives, Proper Relations expounds upon the wish through an intersectional approach of race and sexuality, illustrating how the aforesaid novels’ portrayals problematically oblige women to conform to dominant notions of black respectability. Jenkins contends that such forms of conformity require black women to adhere to “white cultural ideology—in particular, Victorian gender ideals” (29), which are predicated on heteronormativity, racism, and sexism. As Jenkins explains, this conformity is believed to insulate women against the “vulnerability of blackness” (5); that is to say, she shows how one’s catering to the wish is a means to compensate for the vulnerabilities that arise when black intimacies of family and sexuality are repeatedly stigmatized by dominant cultures, such as whites and elites. Jenkins’s analysis of these vulnerabilities, the wish and black intimacy, is cogent because she innovatively elaborates on several strands of scholarship in the larger academic fields of literary and cultural studies. Firstly, Jenkins’s intersectional method of analysis is significant because—like the research of critics Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Hortense Spillers—Private Lives, Proper Relations pays close attention to how black women have often remained ostracized in cultural representation because of their color and sex but are now beginning to gain more of a voice, particularly in terms of how intimacy affects them. To examine this mélange of relations, Jenkins builds upon the work of critics, such as Lauren Berlant, who have taken up the grammar of intimacy to reconfigure the hackneyed binary of the public/private paradigm. The logic behind this theoretical shift in Jenkins’s argument is the idea that any facile separation of “‘public’ and ‘private’ faces” (24) is effectively limiting due to the complex traffic between these environs. [End Page 687] Rather than embracing the overused model of private/public, Jenkins lucidly employs the notion of intimacy as an apparatus of analysis because it exceeds binaristic and myopic forms of thinking. Jenkins’s use of intimacy as a lens enables a more nuanced and versatile approach for examining the multiple contact points of affect, gender, nation, and race in African-American cultural expression. Intimacy, as Jenkins proposes, is a central component for understanding the sociopolitical construction of black subjectivity...

“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of <i>Moonlight</i>

Prince, 13, (left) is an 8th grader in Washington, D.C. He lives with his mother, stepdad, and younger sister. rap culture teaches young black males to live a life on street and not worry about education. Without an education, will be in street asking for Black males aren't successful of and stuff. Their parents aren't doing right. They see their parents and friends smoking and cursing. They do same thing. They want to be just like their friends. Prince also said a good family life and home environment are important for success in school, but a lot of young boys don't have that because their parents weren't there for them. you don't learn something when you're young, when you grow up, it might be hard to change. DAMON, 13, (left) is an 8th grader in Washington, D.C. He lives with his mother, grandfather, two sisters, and a brother. Boys drop out of school they're following what they and they do not see black males are traditionally successful. Black males also drop out of school because they want to be like what they see, what their surroundings are. All they think about is money--like selling drugs and getting money. They try and make money wrong way. The biggest factor in determining what will make black males successful academically is who they hang out with. people they hang out with are bad and do wrong things, I think they'll try to be like their friends, and they'll start being off task in They can still be good in school, but do bad stuff outside of school, and that makes them stop doing good in school. do young black males say about what stands in way of their academic success? Rather than rely on scholarly researchers to answer this question, we talked with a number of black males between ages 13 and 22 in Washington D.C., and Milwaukee, Wis., to learn what they had to say. We did not approach this as a rigorous academic study but as a series of conversations to learn more about perspective of this important group of learners. As you'll hear, these young men rarely talked about schools or teachers as cause of gap. Rather, they attributed it to cultural, family, and community factors. All of these young men want and understand importance of a good education. They also talk about importance of cohesive families, attentive parents, and positive male role models, as well as dangers of rap culture, poverty, and low expectations. These interviews didn't reveal anything that most people work with black males in urban areas don't already know. But they do reveal that young men interviewed are clear that challenge of educating black males is much bigger than schoolhouse. -- Tracey Sparrow and Abby Sparrow KHALIL, 13, (above) is an 8th grader in Washington, D.C. He lives with both parents and three brothers. your parents are not doing good at home, sometimes that person will drop out of school to help their parents and go to streets to make more money to have a roof on top of your head. If I don't get a good education, my future would be like working at McDonald's or working on streets. JOVANTE, 21, (not pictured) dropped out of high school at age 16 and is currently and chronically unemployed. He lives with his mother and one sister in Milwaukee. When he entered high school, he lost his focus. Jovante knew that in long run, his future would be better if he stayed in school, but the wait is hard. What you see is what you want, and shoes and clothes became more important to him than high He did not want to depend on his mom to get what he wanted he had watched her struggle and did not want to be cause of her struggle. If I could have been graded on my conversations and understanding, I would have been an excellent student. …

In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God the elderly ex-slave Nanny explains to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under slavery. She emphasizes the necessary, corrective force of sexual repression within nascent free-black communities. Nanny wants Janie to understand why the benefits of Janie's financially stable, virtually asexual marriage to a man three times her age outweigh the prospects of a romantic union and sexual gratification with a man Janie likes. Nanny tells Janie that us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways (16). What Nanny's pronouncement reveals is that slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic familial relationships. Not only did the institution deny slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds, insidiously it also assaulted their sexuality, robbing them of the basic rights of bodily autonomy and sexual choice. (1) Through Nanny, Hurston describes this violating, soul-shattering feature of slavery and its cumulative generational effects on black identity formation even after slavery's formal abolition is queer. This essay reads literary renderings of black enslavement as founding articulations of a plausible connection between the institutionalization of sexual violence and racial subordination in slavery and modern theories of sexual difference. Tracing certain modern epistemologies of sexuality to the era before the late nineteenth century--their acknowledged moment of formal entrance into the ideological order--I suggest that representations of sexual perversity under conditions of enslavement have contributed to notions of sexual alterity and to the ideologies by which aberrant sexual practices were named, domesticated, and policed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many scholars, including Lisa Duggan, Siobhan Somerville, and Sander Gilman, note that the development of discrete sexual categories in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discursive and legislative deployment of racial theories to support coercive regimes of race-based social stratification between black and white citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. (2) Discourses of racial and sexual pathology contributed significantly to juridical measures (like legal segregation) and acts of racial terrorism (like lynching) that prevented black Americans from accessing the full entitlements of citizenship after slavery's formal end. Here I show that the era, institution, and literary representation of slavery helped to shape emergent models of sexual difference. The entwinement of violent racial separatism, sexual regulation, and the discursive production of bodily difference that characterizes the late nineteenth century may be usefully traced back to the institutional patterns of slavery and to the theories of black inferiority promulgated by its proponents and practitioners. This paper reads Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to analyze the interrelation of sexuality, race, identity, and social order in the middle of the nineteenth century. As canonical exemplars of the slave narrative form, Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents not only evidence the material history of slavery but also manifest the power of literature to shape the cultural construction of identity, fantasy, and ideology. That the written testimonies of Douglass and Jacobs grapple at all with the relation of nonheteronormative sexual practices to (sexual and racial) identity formation suggests that we may productively extend modern theorizations of sexual identity to an earlier historical moment and locate them, at least partially, in the sexual deviance and sexual violence of the slave plantation. (3) This paper contends, then, that the brutal enslavement of black people, their legal definition as three-fifths human, and the social economic, and legislative practices of slavery helped to institute not only whiteness but the very notions of the person, the citizen, the normal and the heterosexual as well. …

This edited volume offers a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between love and care in the context of neoliberal practices of professionalization and work. Each of the book’s three sections interrogates a particular site of care, where the affective, political, legal, and economic dimensions of care intersect in challenging ways. These sites are located within a variety of institutionally managed contexts such as the contemporary university, the theatre hall, the prison complex, the family home, the urban landscape, and the care industry. The geographical spread of the case studies stretches across India, Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the US and provides broad coverage that crosses the divide between the Global North and the Global South. To address this transnational interdisciplinary field of study, the collection utilises insights from across the humanities and social sciences and includes contributions from literature, sociology, cultural and media studies, philosophy, feminist theory,

The Violence of the Underground Railroad Kellie Carter Jackson (bio) Robert H. Churchill, The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vii + 256 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.99. For many years, the story of the Underground Railroad has been wrapped in a romantic nostalgia of sorts. School children are told about the efforts of Harriet Tubman or other popular narratives of narrow escape such as those included in Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). These stories are recounted with moments of heroism and risk, but they never hinge on the absolute violence employed to retrieve fugitives. Robert Churchill's The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America is a welcome addition to abolitionist historiography. His thesis is simple, but potent: The Underground Railroad is a story of violence. Slave catchers trekked into northern and free Black communities to retrieve "stolen property." Their violent confrontations with Black and white residents enraged all those around them. In abolitionist history, violence could serve as the protagonist or, as Churchill argues, "violence is a current that runs through every fugitive account and every Underground activist reminiscence" (p. 3). Churchill contends that slave catchers who pursued fugitives into the North brought with them "a Southern culture of violence that sanctioned white brutality as a means of enforcing racial hierarchy and Black subordination and upholding masculine honor," but their presence compelled an array of responses in the four distinct regions he examines (p. 5). Divided into three parts, The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America begins with the origins of the Underground Railroad and ends with the start of the Civil War, examining cultures of violence in the slave-holding South, the Borderland, the Contested Region, and the Free Soil Region. In six chapters, Churchill traces the attempts to aid fugitive slaves beginning just before the Underground Railroad was established. He next examines fugitive rescues and responses in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, and New England. He explores Northerners open defiance and resistance to slave catchers and determination to defend Black enclaves [End Page 246] and communities. Churchill's concluding chapters address the evolution of the Underground Railroad as a result of the revamped Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. He offers examples of how resistance to slave catchers became so persistent that returning Black people to the plantation South became nearly impossible in certain regions that included abolitionist strongholds. I was impressed by Churchill's lengthy appendix, which covers nearly seventy years of fugitive slave rescues from 1794–1861, where the majority of the outcomes resulted in freedom. I have no doubt certain scholars and students will find both the book and its appendix useful and instructive. However, overall, I found Churchill's work fell short of his promising and sophisticated goals. He wants readers to understand the Underground Railroad in the context of "a geography of violence, a shifting landscape in which clashing norms of violence shaped the activities of slave catchers and the fugitives and abolitionists who defied them" (p. 3). I needed the author to flesh out his interesting and provocative ideas more. At times, his connections felt fragmented and unclear. For example, Churchill mentions notable fugitive cases such as Margaret Garner, The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, the Jerry Rescue or the taking of Anthony Burns in Boston. These are well known and consequential fugitive slave cases, but they are not granted sufficient context for the gravity or impact they have in the movement. He moves from incident to incident and altercations to confrontations, but he does not dwell long enough on any episode to give readers the depth of what resistance, violence, and rescue truly meant and what they accomplished for the movement and the eventual demise of slavery. In his text, Black people are acting and moving, but seldom given voice or the volume their contributions deserve. I anticipated his work would expand upon the brilliance of the late historian Stephanie Camp. Her work on a "geography of containment" in Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and...

Background: Breast cancer outcomes in the United States continue to improve, but sociodemographic disparities remain prevalent and impact care delivery and outcomes in vulnerable populations. Safety-net health systems are intended to address inequities by providing access to care for the uninsured/underinsured. Care delivery in a safety-net setting is often inherently complicated by limited resources at these institutions. Here, we present the overall survival (OS) data of breast cancer patients treated at a large safety-net system, compared to the national average. Methods: Parkland Health (PH) is the safety-net system for Dallas County and is affiliated with the University of Texas Southwestern Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center (NCI-CCC). Electronic medical records of patients diagnosed with invasive breast cancer between 2018 to 2020 at PH were reviewed and data on demographics, treatment, and outcomes were collected. Categorical data was summarized with counts and percentages and continuous data was summarized with median and interquartile range. Statistical comparisons used Chi-square test for categorical data and rank sum test for continuous data with a significance level of 0.05. Survival data was analyzed using Cox proportional hazard model. Data from the National Cancer Database (NCDB) for the same period was used for comparison. Results: Of the 657 patients included in the study, the majority (82.5%) belonged to racial and ethnic minorities (Hispanic 50.2%; Black 32.3%). Compared to the NCDB, PH patients were more often uninsured (67% vs 1.6%) or enrolled on Medicaid (14.5% vs 6.9%), and less often on Medicare (8.5% v. 43%) (p&amp;lt; 0.01). Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) phenotype and late-stage diagnosis (stage III/IV) rates were higher at PH compared to NCDB (TNBC 22.8% vs 10.7%, p&amp;lt; 0.01; late stage 30.6% vs 13.2%, p&amp;lt; 0.01). At a median follow up of 33 (range 24-43) months in PH and 28 (range 21-36) months in NCDB, the unadjusted OS for the PH population was 86.3% vs 92.6% for the NCDB population (p &amp;lt; 0.01). Within the PH population, Black race, higher stage, and TNBC were associated with decreased OS. There was a significant interaction between Black race and TNBC. When combining all patients (PH+NCDB), site of care (PH) was associated with a higher risk of death from breast cancer (HR 1.467, 95% CI 1.192-1.805, p&amp;lt; 0.0005), however, multivariate analysis did not show a significant difference based on site of care. Factors associated with a significantly increased risk of death in this multivariate analysis (corrected for interaction between Black race and TNBC phenotype) included age, late-stage diagnosis, TNBC, Black race, and uninsured status (Table 1). Conclusions: Breast cancer patients treated at PH were more likely to have adverse disease characteristics compared to the NCDB population. When accounting for these risk factors in multivariate analysis, patients treated at PH had similar outcomes compared to the national average. Our findings reinforce the critical role of safety-net systems in promoting health equity and eliminating disparities. Table 1 Citation Format: Sarah Kashanian, Shifa Kanjwal, L. Steven Brown, Andrea Semlow, Mary Hodges, Robyn Cobb, Brad Walsh, Umber Dickerson, Navid Sadeghi. Outcomes of breast cancer in a minority-enriched population treated at a large safety-net system: Is site of care a predictor of poor outcomes? [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2023 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(9 Suppl):Abstract nr PO5-09-06.

This article explores the socio-materiality of Black hair care practice as an affective surface through which we can understand Black women’s experiences of intimacy and belonging. Texture of hair has often been overlooked in the examination of racialized presentation, even as shade or skin colour has been over-determined. By paying attention to the centrality of touch in negotiating grooming practices in Black hair care, a multi-layered appreciation of the material entanglements in Black intimacies can be explored. Hair is more than part of the body, it is both highly visible, as well as intensely personal and political in terms of the ways it is worn and seen by the observer. Drawing on a sensory ethnography of Afro hair salons in the UK and biographical narrative analysis, this article explores Black women’s relationships with their hair in everyday life, alongside a parallel reading of the classic text “Cassie’s hair” by Susan Bordo. This layering of narratives allows for a new form of listening to emerge, an attunement that forefronts the habitual practices of hair dressing and hair making as ways of “becoming black”. In every twist, braid and weave, these biographies highlight the intimate entanglements by which the ambivalence of black belonging is negotiated. Touch in particular, both nurturing and hostile, represents an important socio-cultural ritual through which collective belonging is experienced: evoking memories of inter-generational and transnational intimacies with black communities in another time and another place. This paper offers a novel way of reimagining the role of affect in understanding collective intimacies and sustaining black identity in diasporic contexts.

Since the publication of Brad Gooch's City Poet: Lye and Times of O'Hara (1993), those who care know about the poet's personal life will know that O'Hara had interest in sexual encounters with seemingly heterosexual African-American men. Among the anecdotes of his adventures in the 1950s, Gooch relates that O'Hara invited the black postman into his apartment for sex, and he fellated a black token clerk in a change booth in Queens (195-96). O'Hara cast the black man in emphatically sexual role, and this was also a significant feature of the poetry. frequently wrote of the black man as a fundamentally--even a violently--sexual being. This is given a primitivist or rite of spring treatment in the early poem, Easter' which contains the invocation: Black bastard black prick black pirate whose cheek batters the heavenly heart and signs its purple in the ribs of nightly explosion (99) These lines and comparable lines in other poems have been taken as offensive racist cliches. It is easy see why Aldon Lynn Nielsen, among others, has written of an imagined aura of primal eroticism (222) in O'Hara's writing of black men. (1) O'Hara identifies a racial or ethnic group that, in its perceived backwardness, comes stand for identity that is bold, pure or unhybridized, and unselfconsciously sensual. expresses frustration with his own classed and acculturated white self, and he imagines that the visceral power of the black man will disrupt him and force him towards a new beginning. Without wishing remove the lines from the realms of the racist, a qualification might be ventured on the grounds that there is here, as so often in O'Hara's poems, ironic sense of quotation and assemblage. Even as he conjures with his primitive other, there is awareness that this figure too is a symptom of acculturation, a further set of received images and scenarios. adopts a primitivist mode familiar him from canonical modern art: the painting of Picasso; Stravinsky's music; the writing of Stein, Lawrence, and others. But O'Hara knew that engage with the primitive was also enter into a more popular and domestic cultural routine. In a poem of 1951, The Poet in the Attic, the boy Frank fantasizes a masturbatory panorama of Zanzibar, Nubian niggers, and French sailors (37). Crucially, this escape into the foreign does not actually take him beyond the family home. What he imagines as bracelets worn/by mahouts are in fact grandpa's teeth, and his association of sex with primitive others is traced directly back standard US family reading: He slides warmly o'er the world/on nationally geographic carpets. National Geographic began publication in 1888 as a specialist academic journal, but by the early twentieth century it had become a bestselling mainstream publication. With its photographs of unclothed natives, it was a byword for a legitimized white American sexual voyeurism. It was, according Rothenberg, America's source of wholesome exotica and erotica (3) . Although the sexual element of National Geographic is usually assumed be present in photographs showing the breasts of women of other races, it bears noting that the issues of the journal both for the period of O'Hara's boyhood and the period in which he wrote The Poet in the Attic have a great many more photographs of unclothed dark male bodies. Similarly in the cinema, as film historian Richard Dyer has shown, it was quite rare in this period to see a white man naked, while non-white male bodies were routinely on display in the western, the plantation drama, and the jungle adventure film (146). Across a range of media, inviting a heterosexual or a homoerotic gaze, primitivism was a widely-shared practice of projecting desires and fears. It was a cultural mechanism that elicited and contained that which was inherent the norm, but which could not be recognized as such. …

This study takes as its starting point an event that occurred on the morning of December 15 1998, in Hogsback. Hogsback is a small mountaintop community in the Amatola mountains in the Eastern Cape. Many of the black people who work for the white, land-owning members of the community (who comprise one-sixth of Hogsback's inhabitants) and the artists whose work I examine come from Hala, the village at the bottom of the Hogsback pass. Early every morning, they walk ten kilometers up the Hogsback pass, through the indigenous forest, and then return to the valley every evening. It is this relationship between mountains and valley, involving the juxtaposition of traditional African ways of seeing with aspects of white Western culture, that I wish to explore in this paper, by focussing on the the way in which they come together in objects created in the diverse, divided Hogsback community. On December 15, Hogsback was struck by a tornado. Several people were killed, and buildings were damaged, including Crab Bush Primary school, attented by children from Hogsback's black community and Hobbiton, an outdoor education camp for children. Two things are of note here: first the roofs, shiny unpainted zinc at Crab Bush and blue painted zinc at Hobbiton and secondly, the name Hobbiton (there are many similar place names from the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Hogsback). The storm system of which the Hogsback tornado formed part moved on to Umtata and Nelson Mandela, who happened to be in Umtata on that day, narrowly escaped the tornado. In the subsequently, the Eastern Cape was struck by a number of tornadoes. For example, there were been several tornadoes in the northern Transkei, while some months later, the town of Alice suffered tornado damage. Hintsa's missing head--which has been linked to a number of disturbances and upheavals in South Africa--is sometimes cited as one possible reason for the number of recent tornadoes in the Eastern Cape. Until Hintsa's head is restored to its proper resting place, the tornadoes will continue, many say. Some claim Nelson Mandela has also played a part. Because, it is asserted, he did not carry out all the necessary traditional rituals when he married Graca Machel in his home village the tornado went looking for him in Umtata pharmacy. Although they have recently begun appearing more frequently, tornadoes are not something new to the Eastern Cape. Reverend Wilson Mafika, one of the oldest inhabitants of Hogsback, describes tornadoes that took place on Hogsback in 1943 and 1977 and in his father's and grandfather's day. Records of Thabo Mbeki's early life are missing, as a result of a tornado which destroyed his family home in the Transkei and the adjoining grocery store. Reverend J.S. Lister gives an account of of a tornado at Coolin farm, below the Elandsberg, on the plateau above the Hogsback pass in the earlier part of this century: [I]t had swept across the farm, uprooting trees and even fencing posts, and [we] were shown a sliver of wood which had been driven into the front door with such force that it could not be pulled out by hand (Lister: 6). In Hogsback, there are a number of young men who sell unfired clay animals, most often horses and hogs, by the roadside. They also sell walking sticks, wooden snakes and large carved pieces of wood. There is a more or less stable grouping of several men in their late twenties and early thirties, which includes Zithobile Mona, Sandile Nqweniso, his younger brother Tam, Nash (Tembani) Xwembe, Wowo Mzinyati, Mbuyiseli Jonas and Lennox Dlala. The sale of their clay creations constitutes their major form of income, although they will do other jobs where they can. Most of them have had limited schooling--on average, not more than four years (Wood/Loubser). They are joined by others on an irregular basis. For instance, schoolboys will usually be present at weekends, and other men will occasionally sell clay animals or walking sticks as a way of making some money when they are semi-employed or unemployed. …

Unlike many cities farther north, Kansas City, Missouri - along with its sister city in Kansas - had a significant African American population by the midnineteenth century and also served as a way station for those migrating north or west. Take Up the Black Man's Burden focuses on the people and institutions that shaped the city's black communities from the end of the Civil War until the outbreak of World War II, blending rich historical research with first-person accounts that allow participants in this historical drama to tell their own stories of struggle and accomplishment. Charles E. Coulter opens up the world of the African American community in its formative years, making creative use of such sources as census data, black newspapers, and Urban League records. His account covers social interaction, employment, cultural institutions, housing, and everyday lives within the context of Kansas City's overall development, placing a special emphasis on the years 1919 to 1939 to probe the harsh reality of the Depression for Kansas City blacks - a time when many of the community's major players also rose to prominence. Take Up the Black Man's Burden is a rich testament not only of high-profile individuals like publisher Chester A. Franklin, activists Ida M. Becks and Josephine Silone Yates, and state legislator L. Amasa Knox but also of ordinary laborers in the stockyards, domestics in white homes, and railroad porters. It tells how various elements of the population worked together to build schools, churches, social clubs, hospitals, the Paseo YMCA/YWCA, and other institutions that made African American life richer. It also documents the place of jazz and baseball, for which the community was so well known, as well as movie houses, amusement parks, and other forms of leisure. While recognizing that segregation and discrimination shaped their reality, Coulter moves beyond race relations to emphasize the enabling aspects of African Americans' lives and show how people defined and created their world. As the first extensive treatment of black history in Kansas City, Take Up the Black Man's Burden is an exceptional account of minority achievement in America's crossroads. By showing how African Americans saw themselves in their own world, it gives readers a genuine feel for the richness of black life during the interwar years of the twentieth century.