Racially Motivated Spying Pretext

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

Revolutionary Suicide

Editorial| July 01 2021 Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities Paula J. Massood, Paula J. Massood Paula J. Massood is a professor of screen studies and chair of the Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and on the doctoral faculty in the Theatre and Performance program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Temple University Press, 2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (Rutgers University Press, 2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (Temple University Press, 2007), and coeditor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021). She is currently president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pamela Robertson Wojcik Pamela Robertson Wojcik Pamela Robertson Wojcik is a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2020), Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2016), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke University Press, 2010), and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke University Press, 1996). With Paula J. Massood and Angel Daniel Matos, she coedited the collection Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2021) 7 (3): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paula J. Massood, Pamela Robertson Wojcik; Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2021; 7 (3): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search When we proposed this special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Precarious Mobilities,” we were thinking about all the forms of precarity that engender mobility or make movement, in all forms, arduous or impossible. We were thinking about how certain forms of mobility could be precarious, risky, even dangerous. We were thinking about the long arc of precarious mobility, such as the forced enslavement of millions of Africans in the Americas. But we were especially attuned to contemporary dynamics of this state of being as it relates to what has come to be called the precariat, an intersectional class of people who lack labor security and thus have unstable sources of income, people who have “no ladders of mobility to climb,” for instance those from the traditional working or lower middle class, migrants and ethnic minorities, and youth.1 We were thinking about precarious labor in the academy and the... You do not currently have access to this content.

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

<i>Virginia Museum of History &amp; Culture. Jamie O. Bosket</i>

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Only in the last decade or so has racism undergone serious inquiry by scholars of Russia. Western academics had long taken at face value the words of Russian ethnographers and anthropologists that Russians themselves, as a people on the margins, had an innate understanding of the non-White societies they encountered and, in many cases, conquered. The Soviet Union, of course, portrayed itself as a bastion of anti-racism. Eugene Avrutin's slim volume attempts to synthesize new scholarship that finds race in important places in Russian politics and culture from the tsarist period to the present. Racial thinking, and racialization, developed in uneven ways in the multiethnic tsarist empire and Soviet Union. Even at the height of racist attacks in the Russian Federation a decade ago, the state, as well as its predecessors, never openly embraced racist rhetoric, unlike so many governments in the West. But racism lurked behind encounters that ended in mass violence as well as those that produced feelings of isolation among non-Slavic subjects or citizens. The book's opening chapter is its strongest, as Avrutin offers a nuanced and concise discussion of the appearance and development of racial theories in Russia, and how the color line in the region was “inherently messy” (p. 6). Racialization—the process of turning peoples into fixed others, culturally or biologically—underwent continual shifts within modern Russia, depending on the nature of encounters, the ideology of the regime and many other factors. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the author's previous publications and expertise, much of the focus of this volume is on anti-Semitism. Racial theories and practices had a particular resonance for Jewish peoples of the tsarist empire. Racial theorists worked to attribute them with all types of unfavorable attributes. Whereas racial categorizations appeared more complicated given long interactions between peoples who mixed, for example, on Slavic and Turkic frontiers, Jews were seen as a people apart. As part of Bloomsbury's “Russian Shorts” series, this volume has to be extremely selective in its examples. It was unfortunate, however, that the largest minorities in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation are barely mentioned. We do not hear anything of substance on the Turkic peoples, from Tatars to those of Central Asia, or peoples of the Caucasus or Siberia. In addition to his focus on Jewish populations, the author spends a significant amount of space on the tiny number of African-Americans in the USSR. Black activist W.E.B. Dubois's observations are highlighted, even if it could be argued his thoughts on Russia are mainly used to underscore his views on racial relations in the United States. African-Americans had a particular status in the Soviet Union, due to their place in Cold War maneuvers. Avrutin does discuss the more central issue of substantial numbers of African students who passed through Soviet universities and faced significant racial prejudice even as the USSR was working to portray racism as a phenomenon linked to capitalism and the United States. The last chapter, which focuses on the Russian Federation, details the sharp rise in violent racism in the 2000s. Extremist groups felt a degree of impunity in attacking non-Whites. Putin's regime proved complicit in foregrounding Slavic superiority even as it made no overtly racist appeals. Avrutin sees Russianness and Whiteness as mutually reinforcing each other over this period, though it is hard to talk about a single “white power movement” in Russia (p. 92). What is missing in this chapter is a discussion of the sharp decrease in racially motivated attacks since the mid-2010s. The book does briefly mention that most ethnic Russians were neither active nor complicit in racist behavior, but the question of broader attitudes and context still lingers, and how and why things change over time. This volume offers a succinct portrayal of how racialization worked at different times and places from the late tsarist period to the mid-2010s. Its selective nature and focus on Jewish and African-Americans as on, supposedly, opposing poles of racist treatment means that we miss much about how racism worked in the vast majority of interethnic encounters in modern Russia.

Journal Article "We Want to Set the World on Fire": Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the New Negro World, 1940–1944 Get access Keisha N. Blain Keisha N. Blain Address correspondence to Keisha N. Blain, Department of History, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. Email: keisha-blain@uiowa.edu. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 1, Fall 2015, Pages 194–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv032 Published: 11 September 2015

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In the aftermath of public outcry of multiple high-profile killings of Black teens at the hands of police or under the auspices of stand-your-ground laws, several bereaved mothers became symbols of resistance to white supremacist policing and surveillance. Known as the “Mothers of the Movement,” this paper traces three of these women (Sybrina Fulton, Lucy McBath, and Lezley McSpadden) from the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 to the transition to candidates themselves. Their engagement in maternal politics is part of a long lineage of Black maternal activists that have sought justice for their fallen children through public advocacy. While McSpadden, Fulton, and McBath all lobby against white supremacist violence, they are most politically successful when they make their case from a rhetoric that affirms a respectability politics that measures the value of Black citizens in their ability to comport themselves within middle-class cultural standards.

This paper contends that systemic violence is fundamentally a classification problem. The interrogation of the production of racialized library subjects in relation to one another and in relation to political and social conditions may shed light on the intensely complex problems of racism in the United States today. I discuss the ways that sections of library classifications were constructed based on ideas about African Americans in relation to American social and political agendas. My claim is that the structures that were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are deeply embedded in our libraries and have participated in the naturalization of certain racialized assumptions and associations. In the 21st century we continue to maintain, apply, and refine a flawed structure. My aim is to provide a window into how epistemic violence affects American consciousness about race by revealing some of the ways that our library classifications have been woven together by a group of men who cited and informed one another and ultimately, organized and universalized American history. These classifications are structured around assertions about timeless and fixed national values constructed out of progressive conceptualizations of the nation and its citizenry. A reliance on racial exclusion was necessary for this grand narrative, and scientific theories and classifications provided legitimacy and fuel for racist programs. One of key ways that exclusion was legitimated and supported was through the application of evolutionary theory and principles. Social engineering, white supremacy, and conquest were justified and propelled by beliefs in the evolutionary superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not by accident that these ideas became foundational to classificatory practice in libraries. In fact, Thomas Dousa has drawn attention to the intellectual climate in which late 19th century library classificationists worked - particularly, the theories and classifications of the sciences and nature as devised by Auguste Compte, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin - and argues that these ideas and systems inspired the introduction of evolutionary principles into bibliographic classifications.[i] The present paper is in agreement with Dousa's claim and argues that such a conclusion carries critical implications for understanding libraries' classifications of race and ethnicity. Emphasis is placed is on the legacy of the classification of books about people of African descent as variously named and conceptualized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The last section of the paper examines the classifications as performatives to examine some of the processes by which racism has become systemic on library shelves. [i] Thomas M. Dousa, "Evolutionary Order in the Classification Theories of CA Cutter and EC Richardson: Its Nature and Limits." NASKO 2, no. 1 (2011): 76.

Reviewed by: A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now by Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis Britt Halvorson Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis, A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now. Columbus: Trillium/The Ohio State University Press, 2021. 243 pp. $24.95 (paper). A central problem in critical whiteness studies has been what historian Kathleen Belew has identified as a perceived bifurcation between violent White nationalist groups and mainstream American life. A History of Hate in Ohio joins a variety of other recent works in challenging that division. Although it focuses mainly on White power groups, the book examines White supremacy broadly and gives attention to its many forms, from segregated [End Page 199] public schools to settler violence toward Native Americans. Collectively, these different manifestations paint a portrait of racism across different periods of Ohio history in legislative and everyday forms as well as among White mobs and White hate groups. While readers should be warned that the content is disturbing, the book's unflinching, detailed account of White racial violence in Ohio can serve as a valuable reference for not only experts but also anti-racist organizations and perhaps even movements toward reparations. One of the book's contentions is that, due to Ohio's well-documented abolitionist history, the state's longstanding White racial violence has been hidden behind a "mythology of Ohio as a racial utopia somehow free from the racism of the South" (65). The authors point repeatedly to Ohioans' ties with White hate groups and discriminatory legislation elsewhere in the U.S., questioning the state's exceptionalism in this regard. For instance, the author of the book's first half, historian Michael E. Brooks, describes how nineteenth-century Black Laws in Ohio restricted the movement of free Black individuals and were based directly on similar laws in Virginia and Kentucky that supported plantation owners' interests. The state required that, beginning in 1804, Black individuals carry a certificate of freedom. Employers could not hire people without this certificate and were subject to fines if they did so. Through a sleight of hand, the Ohio legislature even passed laws beginning in 1829 that ensured that public taxes went to the education of White but not Black children, because persons of color were not levied property taxes in support of schools. Combined with an 1861–1887 ban on interracial marriage, these laws created a far-reaching system of racial inequality, even though racial discrimination was officially banned in public spaces by a little-enforced 1884 civil rights act. Through its historical reach, the book also assembles a view of both White mob violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its relationship to the later terror campaigns of the Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and other neo-Nazi groups. In one case, a White mob formed in 1862 when Black dock workers in Toledo began receiving the same wages as White laborers. In another, a White crowd of fifteen hundred gathered in Akron in 1900 when a Black man, Louis Peck, was accused and convicted of assaulting a White girl, even though Peck was later pardoned by the governor in 1916. Such mob violence eventually morphed, following the cultural rise of sympathetic portraits of White nationalism in Birth of a Nation and elsewhere, into public Klan rallies in the 1920s. These were major [End Page 200] spectacles, with one at the Wood County Fairgrounds numbering fifteen thousand people. Over the next century, White power organizations went through numerous re-groupings in Ohio, as leaders were sometimes tried for crimes or had ideological disagreements. Against this backdrop of the continued reorganization of White hate groups, the book shows that civil rights had to be legally and socially fought for by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Black activists at each step, from Black customers being refused service at a Yellow Springs barber shop to Black patrons being denied entry to Cincinnati's Coney Island theme park (which did not admit Black patrons until 1955). By offering a meticulous analysis of Ohio's White hate groups through the present, the book also gives scholars and activists...

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

Recent scholarship on the civil rights movement of the 1960s has begun to explore a whole host of issues behind the famous names of movement leaders and civil rights organizations that have dominated the discourse for some time. Some of the most critical issues include gender, class, and deference patterns. Steven D. Classen's book fits comfortably into this new scholarship by providing a detailed and provocative look at the role of the media in the Mississippi phase of the civil rights movement. In particular, this study examines the critical role of two television stations in Jackson, Mississippi, in events surrounding the local movement in the 1960s. For some time, scholars have acknowledged the importance of the mediA&Mdash;particularly the relatively new medium of television—in the civil rights struggle. For the most part, however, the focus has been on the positive function of the media in publicizing civil rights campaigns in the South. For example, much has been made of the connection between the dramatic televised images of marchers being beaten and tear-gassed in Selma, Alabama, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, many are now convinced that some of the activists in the movement became particularly adept at using the media to advance their cause. For example, S. Jonathan Bass's Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (2001) assesses the impact of King's letter as a media event. Classen, however, examines the powerful negative impact on the Mississippi movement of television stations in Jackson, Mississippi, that were controlled by arch segregationists. According to the author, “a supremacist ventriloquism in and around Jackson spoke of African American contentment with the status quo” (p. 75). Even though white supremacists managed to maintain control of the airwaves in Jackson throughout the 1960s, they were unable to extend their influence in the media beyond their community. Classen's study details the frustration with this reality that motivated white supremacist activism aimed at influencing local and national programming content. Classen's analysis also reveals that the state of Mississippi supported this white supremacist activism with tax dollars. This meant that black activists during the civil rights movement were obliged to confront this formidable power.

You ought ... make some other arrangement, or presently you, too, will be ... under shadow of Ethiopian. --The Grandissimes When Lee surrendered Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 8, 1865, what has since been labeled first modern had come a sobering conclusion. At a cost much higher than expected by either of warring parties, some old and tenacious issues were finally resolved. As historian David Potter puts it, was dead, secession was dead, and six hundred thousand men were dead. (1) Yet, despite Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, ratification of Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and Supreme Court's subsequent affirmation of indestructible Union, what would prove be most volatile issue gripping postwar America had been left unresolved. (2) Observed Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in 1866: It seems our fate never get rid of question. No sooner have we abolished slavery than a party, which seems [to] be growing in power, proposes suffrage, so that problem--What shall we do with Negro--seems as far from being settled as ever. (3) While Lincoln's inaugural admonition to do all which may achieve and cherish a and lasting among ourselves seemed have been embraced almost universally, profound disagreement prevailed as precise nature of this just peace and practical means by which nationalization could or should be accomplished. Where white supremacists such as Thomas Nelson Page contended that disfranchisement of Negro was permanent good of both radical black activists such as Frederick Douglass demanded inclusion of the in body politic, warning that if black men have no rights in eyes of white men, of course whites cannot have any in eyes of blacks. The result is a war of races, and annihilation of all proper human relations. (4) Amidst this polarized debate between old-school white supremacists and newly energized black activists, white authors writing in Anglo-American humanist tradition, with its deep roots in abolitionist movement, found themselves in an uneasy double bind. On one hand, they clearly recognized legitimacy of demands for unrestricted racial equality and a truly egalitarian society. On other hand, however, they also perceived necessity of asserting undiminished moral and political leadership of their own liberal white middle class. Tarnished by dehumanizing experience of slavery, humanism, apply Georg Lukacs' analysis, had reaffirm itself as both source and standard bearer of social progress. (5) Prior Civil War, bourgeois liberals had habitually professed social progressiveness through their embrace of more or less radical abolitionist tenets and a firm commitment free market economy, which was said reveal a fundamental harmony of interests across class and race lines. Of course, in light of growing labor unrest in industrialized North, such outspoken agitation against chattel slavery and ringing endorsements of free market were hardly void of self-interest. As David Brion Davis has shown within British context, liberal denunciations of slavery opened new sources of moral prestige for dominant social class, helped define a participatory role for middle class activism, and looked forward universal goal of compliant, loyal, and self-disciplined workers. (6) Still, white abolitionists' rejection of racialist thinking and allegiance democratic universalism certainly boded well for four million blacks who escaped bondage after war. In fall of 1865, George William Curtis, former abolitionist circuit speaker and since 1863 editor-in-chief of Harper's Weekly, augured that America's Good Fight would soon result in the total overthrow of spirit of caste by reminding his readers that Government of United States was made by men of all races and all colors, not for white men, but for refuge and defense of men. …