On the Search for a Tripartite Identity: Paule Marshall’s Upward Mobility Narrative in Praisesong for the Widow

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

On the Novel and Civic Myth

Old Settlers, New Negroes, and the Birth of Modernity in Black Chicago Beryl Satter (bio) Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. By Davarian Baldwin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 363 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955. By Adam Green. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 306 pages. $35.00 (cloth). $20.00 (paper). For better or worse, there is a long scholarly tradition of studying black Chicago. Starting with University of Chicago sociologists' distorted early twentieth century investigations that cast the city's African American community as "naturally" vice ridden, it has since expanded to encompass an interdisciplinary array of themes and approaches, from St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's pathbreaking 1948 study Black Metropolis to more recent works by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, literary scholars, and historians analyzing everything from black Chicago's vibrant 1930s-era literary "renaissance" to its changing place within the city's machine politics.1 Now two historians have moved beyond the sociological angles more typical of black Chicago scholarship to look instead at the community's striking cultural innovations, which transformed not just Chicago's culture but that of the nation as a whole. Davarian Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life focuses on the 1910s through the 1930s, while Adam Green's Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago covers the years 1940 to 1955, but both challenge previous accounts of black creativity and, indeed, historians' understandings of cultural renaissances in general, by highlighting the ways that entrepreneurial and market forces fostered exciting new forms of black cultural expression. Both also contest the ideas of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, particularly his 1957 study Black Bourgeoisie, which attacked the black middle class for abandoning older virtues of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice in favor of an embrace of a "world [End Page 383] of make-believe" based upon conspicuous consumption. Baldwin challenges Frazier's underlying assumptions about middle-class respectability, the black consumer culture marketplace, and racial advancement, while Green counters Frazier's dismissive attitude toward the black middle class through a reading of Ebony, the celebrity-besotted black magazine that Frazier saw as the epitome of black middle-class self-delusion. Yet the two books could hardly be more different. Although both celebrate black creativity, they offer radically opposing visions of the relevance of class divisions, political debate, and racial conflict for understanding black (and by extension, U.S.) life. While Baldwin stresses that black cultural innovation was forged in a context of class conflict and often included expressions of resistance to white racism, Green explicitly brackets discussion of racism, intraracial class conflict, and intraracial political battles because, he insists, black life is about far more than these difficult subjects. But if we've learned anything from the past few decades of cultural studies, it is that culture does not exist in a vacuum and cannot be studied as if it floats untouched by the political battles around it. Green claims to be breaking new ground by telling a story of agency rather than declension, but his approach actually hearkens back to an older, inherently conservative tendency to marginalize politics from the reading of culture. The stronger of the two books, Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes uses innovative readings of black urban popular culture to uncover the values and intellectual vision of ordinary people. In some ways, Baldwin's entire study is an attack on two ideas that were implicit in Frazier's famous attack on the black bourgeoisie: first, that values of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice supposedly abandoned by the black middle class were in fact the most important values for black people to embrace; and second, that the places that fascinated many black Americans, middle class or otherwise—such as sports, movies, music, and self-adornment—could be dismissed as mindless escapism that lacked political content. Baldwin challenges these two assumptions in order to recast our understanding not of the black middle class, but rather of class, culture, and creativity within a black urban context and, more particularly, of...

Review: <i>American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship</i>, by Niambi M. Carter

Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space

Black British Culture and Society brings together in one indispensable volume key writings on the Black community in Britain, from the 'Windrush' immigrations of the late 1940s and 1950s to contemporary multicultural Britain. Combining classic writings on Black British life with new, specially commissioned articles, Black British Culture and Society records the history of the post-war African and Caribbean diaspora, tracing the transformations of Black culture in British society. Black British Culture and Society explores key facets of the Black experience, charting Black Britons' struggles to carve out their own identity and place in an often hostile society. The articles reflect the rich diversity of the Black British experience, addressing economic and social issues such as health, religion, education, feminism, old age, community and race relations, as well as Black culture and the arts, with discussions of performance, carnival, sport, style, literature, theatre, art and film-making. The contributors examine the often tense relationship between successful Black public figures and the media, and address the role of the Black intellectual in public life. Featuring interviews with noted Black artists and writers such as Aubrey Williams, Mustapha Matura and Caryl Phillips, and including articles from key contemporary thinkers, such as Stuart Hall, A. Sivanandan, Paul Gilroy and Henry Louis Gates, Black British Culture and Society provides a rich resource of analysis, critique and comment on the Black community's distinctive contribution to cultural life in Britain today.

This article discusses voluntary membership among black Americans in the post-civil rights era. Previous empirical studies comparing black to white social participation are critically assessed. A model composed of social class and intragroup regionality variables is offered to explain membership patterns as a manifestation of vertical and horizontal differentiation in the black American social structure. The analysis of empirical data collected by telephone interviews (N = 321) in a southwest Chicago community revealed that education most accurately predicts membership across associations but that occupation and regionality are also important variables. The analysis showed that members of church groups and civil rights groups are likely to be women from the rural South with at least 12 years of education. These findings suggest that explanations of black American life in the post-civil rights era may wish to consider vertical as well as horizontal differentiation. membership is an important aspect of black American life. Traditionally, organizations such as church groups, civil rights groups, sororities, fraternities, youth groups, and community service groups have been a source of strength and leadership development in the black community. In this light it is somewhat surprising to find that much of the research on voluntary activity among blacks suffers from a lack of theoretical perspective. Empirical studies have tended to compare the participation rates of whites to blacks in various social and political activities. As a result, only a glimpse of the voluntary patterns of black Americans is provided, and blacks tend to be portrayed as belonging to too many expressive associations and/or to too few instrumental associations. This portrayal has had the unfortunate effect of creating a stereotypical image of black associational life as deviant, if not frivolous. This article will attempt to correct this problem by analyzing voluntary membership among blacks in the post-civil rights era. Voluntary association refers to formal organizations, regardless of size, in which membership is usually voluntary.

The texts in this article offer perspectives on queer practices in African American culture that cut across empirical and speculative forms of scholarship, alongside primary sources. These lists combine works of scholarship with primary documents, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, to the extent that both broad genres participate in the documenting of Black queer lives as Black queer lives. Along these lines, the texts collected across these lists deploy a variety of methodological and disciplinary strategies for representing practices that resist in necessary ways being reduced to scholarly discourses. Black historiography is, itself, a practice of recovery from the archives of an antiblack world. A tradition of Black feminist practitioners in history and cultural studies have demonstrated the manifold ways Black life is distorted by archives of Black subjugation. Recovering Black histories has meant reading across distortions and absences within these archives. Representing contemporary Black life practices has, likewise, meant working through and against ongoing forms of structural violence that pathologize Black life. Scholarship on queer practices in Black cultures, whether historical or contemporary in focus, requires working through distortions and gaps in already-fraught archives, and requires working against multiple, simultaneous forms of pathologization. For the purposes of this article, both “queer practices” and “African American culture” will be defined broadly. On the latter concept, notwithstanding the challenge of delineating something called “culture” within a social field that has, historically, maligned the inventiveness of Black people, “African American culture” here encompasses the array of Black inventive practices from the everyday to the extraordinary. In the context of this article, queerness shall encompass nonnormative sexualities and genders. This preliminary definition is immediately complicated by the sexual politics of structural racism. Namely: What, for Black Americans, might be the parameters of a normative gender or sexuality? From the perspective of an antiblack world, is there such a thing as an intersection between Blackness and the normative? In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson puts it this way, “as figures of nonheteronormative perversions, straight African Americans were reproductive rather than productive, heterosexual but never heteronormative” (p. 87). To be sure, really existing African American communities have their own standards of normative and nonnormative behaviors around and performances of gender and sexuality. The challenge for scholarship is to attend to the specificities of Black queer lives without ignoring the queerness internal to Blackness itself, which is also to say the queerness and the Blackness of life itself.

Still Here

<i>Special Report:</i> Racism and Inequities in Health Care for Black Americans

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

Considering Meme-Based Non-Fungible Tokens’ Racial Implications

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Patricia Stuelke Tillet, Salamishah . 2012 . Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC : Duke University Press . $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. 248 pp. In a second-season flashback, viewers of Shonda Rhimes’s delicious soap opera Scandal finally become privy to African-American political fixer Olivia Pope’s reasons for (temporarily) abandoning her job and her affair with married white president Fitzgerald Grant, despite having helped steal the election for him. “I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson about all this,” she tells Fitz in a stolen hallway conversation. How does this rare historical invocation fit into Scandal’s optimistically postracial yet manifestly corrupt world? Salamishah Tillet’s penetrating study of the uses of slavery in African-American post–civil rights culture offers a means of approaching this question, suggesting that we might understand Rhimes’s show and other texts like it as complicated articulations of African Americans’ ambivalent dreams for American democracy in the post–civil rights era. Tillet’s elegantly constructed book analyzes representations of slavery in the post–civil rights period by African-American authors, artists, and intellectuals as responses to the experience of “civil estrangement”: the paradox in which African Americans possess equality under the law but remain barred from American economic prosperity and the nation’s official myths, monuments, and histories. African-American post–civil rights representations of slavery respond to this paradox by advancing what Tillet terms “a democratic aesthetic,” a “mode of poetics and politics” (12) that critiques myths of American equality while simultaneously writing African Americans back into those narratives and revising them for a radically democratic future. In defining this aesthetic, Tillet explains that these representations neither idolize the past nor revere the state but rather advance a “critical patriotism,” one that incorporates elements of postmodern skepticism and Post-Soul aesthetics in order to advance a utopian dream of democracy while “remaining skeptical of its materialization” (12). In her book’s first two chapters, Tillet investigates the deployment of this “democratic aesthetic” by interrogating post–civil rights revisions of antebellum icons. The first chapter traces how novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, playwright Robert McCauley, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed reimagine Sally Hemings not as a victim or an empty symbol, but rather as a “radical black female subject” (23). These authors’ restagings of the interracial intimacy between Hemings and Jefferson, Tillet argues, revise sanitized myths of slavery and register post–civil rights civic disenfranchisement while casting Hemings as an agent of history and an ideal model for post–civil rights citizenship. In the second chapter, Tillet [End Page 146] considers post–civil rights renditions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Topsy, tracing how works by Ishmael Reed, Robert Alexander, Bill T. Jones, and Kara Walker use satire to puncture the hegemony of Stowe’s sentimentality while reimagining more complex Uncle Toms and Topsys. Both of these chapters would make for excellent reading in undergraduate literature or composition classrooms, as Tillet organizes them in clearly framed sections that would offer undergraduates useful models for comparative analytical essays. The second chapter, however, is ultimately more compelling than the first, due to Tillet’s careful exploration of how the texts she discusses “are remembering slavery at different points in time” (85). She is beautifully attentive, for example, to how Reed’s 1976 Tom registers a cynical critique of the Black Power movement, while Alexander’s later reappropriation of Tom registers the frustration of the civic estrangement that arose after Rodney King’s beating. In contrast, such attention to shifting historical context is noticeably absent from Tillet’s first chapter. Further consideration of her authors’ revisions of Sally Hemings in relation to the different historical moments of their production (ranging from 1979 to 2008), particularly the evolving context of US feminisms, might have helped Tillet more fully account for the texts’ variegated presentations of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. The second half of Tillet’s book takes up more collective forms of remembering and representing slavery, considering post–civil rights African-American heritage tourism and African-American...