Afro-American Research Articles

Increased Mortality Trends in Patients With Chronic Non-communicable Diseases and Comorbid Hypertension in the United States, 2000-2019.

BackgroundAccording to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), countries are required to reduce the mortality rates of four main non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), diabetes mellitus (DM), chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs), and cancer (CA), by one-third in 2030 from the 2015 level. However, progress fell short of expectations, partly attributed to the high rates of hypertension-related NCD mortality. This study aimed to investigate the mortality trends of SDG-targeted NCDs with comorbid hypertension. In addition, the disparities in mortality rates among different demographic subgroups were further explored.MethodsMortality data from 2000 to 2019 were acquired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. SDG-targeted NCDs were considered the underlying causes of death, and hypertension was considered a multiple cause of death. Permutation tests were performed to determine the time points of Joinpoints for mortality trends. The annual percent changes and average annual percent changes (AAPCs), as well as 95% confidence intervals (CIs), were calculated to demonstrate the temporary trend of mortality rates overall and by age, sex, ethnicity, and region.ResultsThe hypertension-related DM, CRD, and CA mortality rates increased over the 20 years, of which the AAPCs were 2.0% (95% CI: 1.4%, 2.6%), 3.2% (95% CI: 2.8%, 3.6%), and 2.1% (95% CI: 1.6%, 2.6%), respectively. Moreover, despite decreasing between 2005 and 2015, the hypertension-related CVD mortality rate increased from 2015 to 2019 [APC: 1.3% (95% CI: 0.7%, 1.9%)]. The increased trends were consistent across most age groups. Mortality rates among men were higher and increased faster than those among women. The hypertension-related CVD, DM, and CA mortality rates among African American people were higher than those among White people. The increased mortality rates in rural areas, especially in rural south, were higher than those in urban areas.ConclusionIn the United States, the hypertension-related DM, CRD, and CA mortality rates increased between 2000 and 2019, as well as hypertension-related CVD mortality between 2015 and 2019. Disparities existed among different sexes, ethnicities, and areas. Actions to prevent and manage hypertension among patients with NCDs are required to reduce the high mortality rates and minimize disparities.

A Journey to Justice: Transnational Civil Rights and Ramnath Biswas, an Indian Globetrotter from Bengal, 1938–40

Ramnath Biswas (1894–1955) independently travelled around the world on a bicycle between 1931 and 1940. His travelogues about Africa and the US reveal Biswas to be an active supporter of the nascent transnational civil rights movement. This article connects his endeavours to achieve social justice for African, African American and Asian people with the phenomenon of ‘coloured cosmopolitanism’. Biswas’ observations—in particular, his portrayal of racial dynamics between Indians and Africans—are striking. Exploring Biswas’ narratives from a micro-historical perspective allows us to envision an alternative history of solidarity between non-white (‘oshwet’) people and to place his journey at the intersection of Indian Ocean Studies and studies of transnational civil rights activities during the inter-War period.

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

Recasting the Global South

Recasting the Global South

Black Self

When asked to convene a colloquium about something that, for me, defines the art world during this on-going pandemic, I thought of the obvious – revisionism in the West, and the stratospheric obsession/fetishization of the black body. Why, I wondered, is black portraiture ‘a thing’? And why, of all people, was Amoako Boafo the most sought-after black portraitist in 2020? Why, at this historicalmoment, should the art world reclassify its driving concerns, rethink curation, staffing, education, and access? Because black art is the new frontier? Because of a seismic ethical shift, generated by theslaughter of blacks in America? Because the spectreof imperialism persists?

“Getting on the Negro History Bandwagon”: Selling Black History from World War II to the Dawn of Black Power

Drawing on a diverse range of archival material, oral histories, market research literature, and Black periodicals, this article sheds new light on the development of Black history–themed advertising and public outreach campaigns by White-owned corporations from World War II to the dawn of Black Power. While not universally celebrated, corporate Black history campaigns often received tremendous public support and played an important role in promoting better relations between White-owned businesses and Black America. Indeed, when measured against the continued neglect of Black history within the nation’s educational, political, and popular culture, such projects can be argued to have played an intriguing, if largely understudied, role in efforts to relocate Black history from the margins to the mainstream of American society. Nevertheless, through “celebrating” Black history, white businesses also helped to curate it in ways that reinforced gender disparities in historical representation and reified the perceived connections between racial progress and consumer capitalism. Most significantly, these early Black history advertising campaigns set the groundwork for widespread corporate engagement with, and commercialization of, the African American past.

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

REEXAMINING AND REFRAMING AMERICAN HISTORY: THE 1619 PROJECT

The paper examines and analyzes the 1619 Project published in 2019 by The New York Times Magazine. The publication of the 1619 Project is a clear indication of an ongoing debate around American history and politics in which the center stage is given to the dominant white Americans who are considered the builders of the state and nation, whereas the role and contribution of people of color in American history is either overlooked or denied. The intent of the 1619 Project is to reframe and reassess American history by placing African Americans at the center of American history, acknowledging their contribution as well as debunking the dominant Eurocentric myths and discourses. The 1619 Project challenges the mainstream historical narrative that the US history started in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, instead offering 1619 as the date of the beginning of American history with the arrival of the first enslaved people to the British colony of Virginia. By analyzing the 1619 Project it is revealed that the narrative based on the centrality of African American people in the US history in fact exposes the deep-seated institutional systemic racism in American society and deconstructs the myth of American exceptionalism. Although the 1619 Project is a forceful and dynamic endeavor in challenging the mainstream Anglo-American national discourse of American history, the dominant Anglo-American historical narratives remain deeply entrenched and prevalent in the consciousness of American public and education system. Key words: 1619 Project, American history, slavery, whites, blacks, African Americans, racism, American exceptionalism.

Hiding in plain sight: The magnitude of unused disease modifying therapies in multiple sclerosis and strategies for reducing the economic burden of care

BackgroundThe rising costs associated with multiple sclerosis (MS) disease modifying therapies (DMTs) creates challenges for patients and the healthcare system in the United States (U.S.). Within a specialty medicine waste project, we quantified the magnitude of unused medications and corresponding value, the primary factors driving treatment switches, and explored reasons for discontinuations by race and ethnicity. MethodsOver one calendar year, MS DMTs were recovered from new and existing patients from a single neuroimmunologist within a tertiary MS care center. Baseline demographic and clinical information, including reasons for medication discontinuation or transitions were captured. Patients were stratified into three treatment transition categories: (i) non-medical, (ii) medical, or (iii) tolerability reasons. Cause-specific Cox proportional hazard functions were fit for possible causes for treatment changes. ResultsA total of 422 patients (female: 73.2%, median age at diagnosis: 32.9 years (y)) comprised of 86.3% Whites, 11.6% Black or African Americans, 1.4% Asians, and 0.7% Native Americans were included, representing 23% of patients evaluated within 2018, with a mean disease duration of 12.8 years (y) (standard deviation (SD): 8.2) and treatment duration of 2.9y (3.4). Women were more likely to switch due to injection fatigue or desire for an oral DMT when compared to men (95% CI [0.26, 0.78], p = 0.01). Being Black or African American people with MS increased the hazard of switching treatment due to injection fatigue and desire for an oral medication relative to White patients with MS by 91% (95% CI [1.07, 3.42], p = 0.03) and switching to a new DMT based on the subjective report of a perceived lack of efficacy was 221% greater (95% CI [1.04, 4.70], p = 0.04), but not in relation to side effects, being 50% less likely to switch (95% CI [0.28, 0.90], p = 0.02). In the passive recruitment phase over a single calendar year, DMTs with a retail value of $5.2 million (Average Wholesale Price (AWP)) were recovered. In the 1-month active recruitment phase within the same year involving 49 people with MS, unused MS DMTs of $1.1 million (AWP) were acquired. Of the 471 patients studied, 56.2% reported transitions in DMTs for reasons other than adequate disease control and tolerability at one point in their treatment history, underscoring the need for individualized therapy selections that enhance persistence and increase the likelihood of reducing further neurological disability. ConclusionThe magnitude of unused and wasted MS DMTs is staggering and these findings allude to a larger, more pervasive problem within the healthcare system with financial resources being applied to therapies that go unused.

Dismantling Ethnic Notions Through Bildungsromane: An Examination of The Bluest Eye

The Bildungsroman, or “coming-of-age” narrative, has long been a staple of Western literature; however, as a genre whose protagonists are usually young white men or privileged white women, authors who want to tackle a protagonist that does not fit this narrow description are faced with a challenge: how do they navigate the arc of growing up in a genre that is built for white men, and therefore excludes them and their characters by definition? My paper explores one such author’s efforts to reclaim the genre, not by forcing her characters to follow the traditional arc, but by exploring the reasons they are unable to conform to it.
 In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison reinvents the genre by turning the individual arc of the Bildungsroman into the story of an African American community, interweaving multiple Bildungsromane to subvert dominant stereotypes of African-American people. In this paper, I juxtapose her novel with Marlon Riggs’ documentary, Ethnic Notions (1987) to reveal Morrison’s combative reinvention of the stereotypes Riggs investigates such as the “Black Mammy,” the “violent brute,” and the “pickaninny.” In doing so, she restores humanity and complexity to the one-dimensional caricatures of Blackness that have dominated Western thought and harmed Black people. By exploring Morrison’s novel, this paper hopes to reach beyond stereotypical depictions of Blackness and encourage the continued interrogation of its portrayals in our everyday lives as a mode of rehumanization and resistance to dominant racist ideologies.

White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform

White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform Nikki Skillman (bio) In the opening pages of her book Hollywood Forever (2017), harmony holiday reproduces a handbill the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans distributed in the mid-1960s, when her father’s career as an R&B artist was at its peak. “NOTICE! STOP Help Save The Youth of America DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS,” the flyer proclaims, warning that “the screaming, idiotic words, and savage music of these records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America.” holiday’s choice to present a color facsimile of the document without commentary invites readers to examine it closely, while its reappearance in magnified excerpts interspersed among her poems requires us to keep looking at it throughout the book. It is as if, in the transparency of the text’s open hatred, holiday senses that there is more to see, or perhaps an end of seeing—a final inscrutability that is made all the more disturbing by the blandness of the handbill’s visual form. Embodying the ideals of clarity, order, proportion, and functionality that exploded into popular design at midcentury, the New Orleans flyer is set mostly in Futura, the iconically modern, neutral bearing of which credentialed it to appear on the plaque left on the moon to commemorate a mission “for all mankind.” The typeface courses [End Page 359] through Hollywood Forever in the reproductions of the flyer and in the titles of the poems, haunting the book’s interwoven pronouncements on Black celebrity culture at midcentury, white artistic appropriation, racial violence, and subversive Black art. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Back cover of Harmony Holiday, Hollywood Forever (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2017). On the back cover of the book, Holiday transforms the New Orleans handbill into a substrate for her own inscription, mimicking its layout and typographic style in a superimposed text that dispels the flyer’s auratic power while maintaining its spectral presence. Issued by “HOLLYWOOD AFRIKANS & THE CITIZENS’ COUNCIL FOR REPARATIONS™ HOLLYWOOD, KALIFAS, CALIFORNIA” (Fig. 1), Holiday’s mock handbill urges “BIBLE BLACK” readers to “Help revive Black America from the artless stupor of celebrity culture” and to “BOYCOTT corporate imitations of black music on the radio.” “The screaming mediocre noise on those records,” she writes, “is packaging the suffering of American Africans to sell around the globe in the service of the false doctrine of white supremacy.” Like so many of the poems in Hollywood Forever that incorporate typography borrowed from archival ephemera, Holiday’s parodic graphic maneuver on the back cover of the book suggests that any act of writing involves inhabiting the page as a palimpsest of historical “misuse” (71), as she puts it, where public discourse meets private significance.1 “Call your father and tell him you love him,” she writes onto the document that so menacingly targeted her father and artists like him; “Séance if you have to.” Hollywood Forever demonstrates [End Page 360] that approaching inscription as a cultural practice implicated in histories of oppression and exclusion begets daunting expressive impasses, but letterforms also emerge in the book as formal proxies for repressive orders that the poet can in turn subject to symbolic reconstitution and counterfactual improvisation. Holiday’s allusive uses of marked typography to evoke archival traces of racist history suggest the tendency of letterforms to become racialized through patterns of use. The capacity of typography to accrue such cultural freight lends social and political significance to its manipulation as an element of literary form. Breaking with the prevailing literary “ethic of typographic invisibility” that persisted throughout the twentieth century and into the present, Holiday is one of a number of contemporary poets who deploy “visible” or “marked” letterforms to explore the racial valences of inscription as a cultural institution while also diverging from the experimental typographic practices of the white avant-garde tradition.2 Through visual allusions to the aesthetics of historical pages, these poets sound the depths we perceive, consciously or unconsciously, in typographic surfaces. They deploy conspicuous letterforms to reveal how racial meanings are woven into the “endless tapestry” of what Michel de Certeau calls...

Politics that Matter in Nas’s "Illmatic"

This essay focusses on a single, seminal piece of American hip-hop music: Nas’s Illmatic. Taking prompts from ANT and new materialism, and from Bruno Latour more specifically, I argue that Illmatic can and should be read as an exploration of the specific urban ecology from which it originated. This ecology is one of the urban landscape of New York’s housing projects as much as of the social practices of their inhabitants. At the same time, it is a concrete articulation, to borrow Latour’s famous phrase, of the racist policies that those who planned and oversaw its construction aimed to enforce. Though Nas’s music is often thought of as not as explicitly political as that of Public Enemy or KRS-One, a reading of it in this context reveals that it has no less political potential. Throughout the album, there is a detailed and complex engagement with the housing projects and how they contain and modify the possible mental landscapes of those who inhabit them. Incarceration, a central question for both Nas and Black America, must then be thought of as something that is not limited to the milieu of the prison. Instead, it is the prevailing condition in the urban ecologies of the housing projects. This imprisonment Nas understands in two ways: materially and mentally, working on bodies and working on minds. The very possibilities of thought are limited and formed by the ecologies of concrete that they take place in. Ultimately, through a close and careful reading of Illmatic, it becomes clear that the oppression of African Americans is not simply a social one: it is material. The housing projects themselves are an attempt to construct an urban environment that constrains thought, to make impossible the imagination of an alternative.

The Promises and Perils of Black Capitalism

McDonald’s is a rite of passage, It is the little-girl me darting through an ocean of moldy paneling and washed-out burgundies to the Playland out back, who imagined taking flight sitting atop a plastic hamburger-faced spring rider. It is the teen-aged me hanging out with that one special guy, who spent hours stretching a large drink and fries. It is the young-mother me, too, who took my three kids to fill up on burgers and fries as a treat while saving me and my husband a night in the kitchen and stealing some all-too-rare us time. Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America peers deeply into that nostalgia like a mirror, both gilt edged and carnival. McDonald’s reflects our values back to us but also stretches them, revealing both the possibilities that undergird US capitalism and society as well as the limits. Franchise holds up to the light...

ATA2022 Annual Conference & Expo May 1–3, 2022Boston, Massachusetts

ATA2022 Annual Conference & Expo May 1–3, 2022Boston, Massachusetts

Sowing The Seeds of Chinese Exclusion As the Reconstruction Congress Debates Civil Rights Inclusion

During Reconstruction, Congress amended the Constitution to fundamentally reorder the legal and social status of African Americans. Congress faced the challenge of determining how Chinese people would fit in to the emerging constitutional structure. This article draws on a method of digitizing the Congressional Globe to more broadly explore the arguments about Chinese rights and privileges during Reconstruction. Unlike African Americans, Chinese were part of an international system of trade and diplomacy; treatment of other people of color was understood as a purely domestic question. In addition, while a core feature of Reconstruction was ending the enslavement of African Americans and overruling Dred Scott by making Africans Americans born in the U.S. citizens and granting them eligibility for naturalization, for Chinese, Congress chose to leave in place racial restrictions on naturalization, which had existed since 1790. This rendered them perpetual foreigners in America. With regard to labor rights, by abolishing slavery, Congress intended to raise up the freed men, giving African Americans a chance to work on equal terms with other citizens. In the main, Congress continued to treat the Chinese people as constitutive of the so-called “Chinese question,” a nominalization that ascribed to them features of caste, from which there was little possibility of upward mobility. Congress recognized that some Chinese workers in the U.S. who were building railroads or working in mines might be subject to labor exploitation from bosses and from jobbers, sometimes white and sometimes Chinese. However, rather than intervene to liberate Chinese laborers through laws that would free them from involuntary servitude, and give them fair terms on which to compete, Congress eventually moved in another direction: excluding the Chinese altogether in 1882.

Sowing The Seeds of Chinese Exclusion As the Reconstruction Congress Debates Civil Rights Inclusion

During Reconstruction, Congress amended the Constitution to fundamentally reorder the legal and social status of African Americans. Congress faced the challenge of determining how Chinese people would fit in to the emerging constitutional structure. This article draws on a method of digitizing the Congressional Globe to more broadly explore the arguments about Chinese rights and privileges during Reconstruction. Unlike African Americans, Chinese were part of an international system of trade and diplomacy; treatment of other people of color was understood as a purely domestic question. In addition, while a core feature of Reconstruction was ending the enslavement of African Americans and overruling Dred Scott by making Africans Americans born in the U.S. citizens and granting them eligibility for naturalization, for Chinese, Congress chose to leave in place racial restrictions on naturalization, which had existed since 1790. This rendered them perpetual foreigners in America. With regard to labor rights, by abolishing slavery, Congress intended to raise up the freed men, giving African Americans a chance to work on equal terms with other citizens. In the main, Congress continued to treat the Chinese people as constitutive of the so-called “Chinese question,” a nominalization that ascribed to them features of caste, from which there was little possibility of upward mobility. Congress recognized that some Chinese workers in the U.S. who were building railroads or working in mines might be subject to labor exploitation from bosses and from jobbers, sometimes white and sometimes Chinese. However, rather than intervene to liberate Chinese laborers through laws that would free them from involuntary servitude, and give them fair terms on which to compete, Congress eventually moved in another direction: excluding the Chinese altogether in 1882.

The effects of the Great Migration on urban renewal

The Great Migration significantly increased the number of African American people moving to northern and western cities beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that their arrival shaped “slum clearance” and urban redevelopment efforts in receiving cities. To estimate the effect of migrants, we instrument for Black population changes using a shift-share instrument that interacts historical migration patterns with local economic shocks that predict Black out-migration from the South. We find that local governments responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects that aimed to redevelop and rehabilitate “blighted” areas. More Black migrants also led to an increase in family displacement. This underscores the contribution of spatial policies such as urban renewal towards understanding the long-term consequences of the Great Migration on central cities, and Black neighborhoods and individuals.

Erased by Respectability: The Intersections of AIDS, Race, and Gender in Black America

Abstract This article explores gender's relationship with white supremacy and respectability politics and the intersectional impact of the three on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Black community from the 1980s to 2000. The demonization of gay white men and erasure of white women from the HIV/AIDS epidemic evidenced that white supremacy does not distribute its privilege equally. Through a juxtaposition of my interview with HIV/AIDS advocate Ruselle Miller-Hill, a formerly incarcerated Black woman living with AIDS, and well-known AIDS activist and survivor Rae Lewis-Thornton, I examine the impact of internal gendered respectability politics in the Black community. The article also examines how these respectability politics painted Black women as the victims of duplicitous bisexual Black men to protect the former's respectability at the expense of their sexual autonomy.

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John H. McWhorter

Reviewed by: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John H. McWhorter Joe Bartzel John H. McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021) Linguist and commentator John McWhorter contends that contemporary US antiracism is a religion—not just “like” one, but “actually … a religion” (23). As Woke Racism’s subtitle suggests, this religion—Electism, he calls it—harms black Americans. McWhorter has equated antiracism with religion before—first in a 2015 article at The Daily Beast—and many critics of the US American left have also since noted its purported parallels with religion.1 As one of McWhorter’s [End Page 155] fellow heterodox liberals, I opened Woke Racism wondering what insights his book-length treatment of the provocative antiracism-as-religion thesis would yield. McWhorter and I agree on much: Contemporary antiracism too often emphasizes performative gestures that do not substantively improve black Americans’ lives. Many of the radical leftist views that infuse antiracism are more dubious, and less widespread among black Americans, than antiracist discourse suggests. In their zeal to show solidarity with black suffering, antiracists often conflate that suffering—to the near-exclusion of other human experiences—with authentic blackness. Too many antiracists discount black America’s diversity, construing blackness in monolithic terms—ideologically and otherwise—that many black Americans find constricting. And there are practical measures to improve black Americans’ lives that a broad coalition of US Americans could support even while rejecting antiracism’s more radical tenets. This review, though, highlights two shortcomings of Woke Racism: McWhorter’s account of religion remains underdeveloped, and he misreads the moment to which his book speaks. Woke Racism invokes multiple theories of religion. In the chapter “The New Religion,” McWhorter describes features that, on his view, qualify Electism as a religion—e.g., superstition (25), clergy (28), and a concept of original sin (30). (Notably, the features he highlights characterize Christianity rather than religion[s] generally.) A family resemblance approach seems operative here: Electism shares many (though not all) characteristics with other social phenomena categorized as religions (60); on the basis of those shared characteristics, Electism should count as a religion too. Elsewhere, though, McWhorter writes in essentialist terms evocative of New Atheist interpretations of religion, as the acceptance of “suspensions of disbelief … inherent to a religion” (25), or placing a “bar on matters of logic” (56). Religion, “true to [its] nature,” cannot be reasoned with (60). It consists of “widespread beliefs founded in transparently irrational assumptions” (175). McWhorter also suggests some functionalist definitions of religion, invoking Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence (69) and Sigmund Freud’s theory of religion as psychological inhibition (70). McWhorter offers no argument that these disparate theories of religion cohere, yet his haphazardness is not my primary concern. Beneath McWhorter’s slapdash account(s) of religion lies a concern not with religion per se but with bad [End Page 156] religion. In this regard, McWhorter’s aims seem little different from the inscription of boundaries between good and bad religion that, Robert Orsi argues, lies at the foundation of religious studies in the US academy.2 In his 2015 Daily Beast article, McWhorter labels antiracism a “flawed” religion; in Woke Racism he continues to construe it in such terms, unwittingly recreating just the sort of rigid insider-outsider boundaries that he associates with the antiracism he criticizes (35). Throughout Woke Racism, McWhorter specifies what variety of bad religion he takes Electism to be: fundamentalism (22, 34). Like fundamentalists, he contends, Elects resist reason, demanding that others adopt their worldview. McWhorter commits a common colloquial mistake when he describes these features of Electism as “medieval,” though (19–20, 59). Fundamentalism is neither a monolith nor a medieval (or, for that matter, ancient) phenomenon. Despite fundamentalist Christians’ insistence that biblical inerrancy, for instance, only preserves beliefs received from the Bible’s ancient authors, fundamentalism is distinctly modern. It arose as a response to various challenges of modernity— especially the emergence of Darwinism and historical biblical criticism. Categorizing antiracism as a variety of fundamentalism is potentially fruitful, but only if McWhorter sees the argument through. The comparison would benefit from a...

One Night in Miami (2020)Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (2021)Muhammad Ali

<i>One Night in Miami</i> (2020)<i>Blood Brothers: Malcolm X &amp; Muhammad Ali</i> (2021)<i>Muhammad Ali</i>