anti-Black Violence Research Articles

Against the White Racial Imaginary: Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) makes legible what neoliberalism has obscured – the ongoing, even the intensification of, white supremacy’s organization of social space. This essay shows how Rankine illuminates an American landscape forged in history, steeped in memory and invested with symbolic meaning to argue that it is, fundamentally, constructed by and entangled with white supremacy. Rankine reworks pastoral lyric imagery and documentary photography to situate contemporary anti-black violence within a longer history of white terror. She defamiliarizes the language of reportage to critique documentary strategies of visual evidence that reinscribe racial hierarchies through reliance upon an unmarked white gaze. In place of individual testimony, documentary evidence and bounded lyric subjectivity, Rankine gathers an assembly of voices, employing rhetorical strategies that resist the violence of neoliberal individuation.

For Crying Out Loud: Racial Battle Fatigue and Black America: Implications for the Counseling Professions

ABSTRACT Trauma is a far too common familiarity in the lived experiences of Black Americans that can be traced back to the historical and contemporary vestiges of white supremacy and racism in the United States. However, little is known about how persistent trauma from racialized events (e.g. microaggressions, discrimination, anti-Black violence) erodes the mental and physical health of Black Americans, contributing to distress and cumulative exhaustion. In this paper, the authors discuss Racial Battle Fatigue in relation to the experiences of Black Americans as a result of living in a racialized society. Using two case examples, the authors examine and explain how Racial Battle Fatigue takes a toll on Black people, and conclude with implications for counseling professionals.

Shared equity leadership: Working collaboratively to achieve DEI fundraising priorities

In 2023, the article ‘Shifting the donor landscape paradigm: Strategies for increasing philanthropy among donors of color’ described the steps Brown University took to work collaboratively, nurture engagement and philanthropy among donors of colour and promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to the broader donor community during the dual national crises of the pandemic and anti-Black violence.1 At that time, more Brown constituents became aware of the University's DEI initiatives, and the Division of Advancement discovered that donors from all backgrounds were interested in learning more and supporting diversity priorities. This led to a shift in the donor landscape paradigm and enabled the division to collectively raise over US$30m for DEI priorities in one fiscal year. This paper will focus on the Shared Equity Leadership (SEL) study by the American Council on Education in collaboration with the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.2 The study describes how broadly inclusive and collaborative approaches to leadership are necessary to achieve equitable outcomes in which equity becomes everyone's responsibility. Through this paper, readers will learn how Brown's Advancement Division, in hindsight, practised SEL to achieve its DEI goals.

Sexual violence against liberian school girls: White benevolence, anti-black racism, and colonial continuities in post conflict recovery

This article addresses the practices of white benevolence as it (re)produces anti-Black racism in the post-conflict country of Liberia. This is undertaken through an analysis of the ProPublica documentary “Unprotected” which chronicles sexual violence against Liberian girls at the More Than Me Academy, linked to the broader practices of gendered colonialism and racism. More than Me was founded in 2008 by Katie Meyler, a young, white American woman, to save Liberian school girls from sexual exploitation by providing them with educational opportunities; but the school became a hunting ground for sexual gender-based violence for which those in charge claimed ignorance. Katie Meyler and More than Me can be placed in the longer, iterative history of colonialism that unfold(ed) in discourses and practices of white benevolence such that structural forms of anti-Black violence are both obscured and tolerated. Furthermore, the article addresses the social reproductive work undertaken by Liberian women, especially those who were at the forefront of mass protests to end the civil war (1989-2003), and who continue to prioritize education and gender equality, viewed as central to sustainable peace and transitional justice.

Fighting for Justice Amid Anti-Black Violence

This study draws on conceptualizations of BlackCrit and motherwork, and critical counterstorytelling methodological approaches, to present and analyze Ms. Irene Robinson's drawings and poetry that illustrate her experiences as a Black mother organizing for educational justice in Chicago Public Schools. The artistic narratives and supplemental analyses shared illuminate the authors’ liberatory dreams for education while also illuminating the structural violence Black students and families face in and out of urban schools. The authors conclude the article by offering implications for educators in K-12 urban schools that support more symbiotic and justice-centered educational praxes amongst teachers and Black mothers.

"To Suggest the Sound": Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt's Long Fiction

Abstract: Charles W. Chesnutt constructs the sound of whiteness in The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition by situating character language within emerging frameworks of racial "impressibility." House explores the lives of two siblings, John and Rena, whose racial passing Chesnutt registers, in part, through the siblings' language practices. Marrow , on the other hand, introduces a different type of "passing" character, the cruel Colonel McBane, whose speech patterns Chesnutt associates with, and uses to critique, anti-black violence perpetrated by the "po' white" class. Both novels critique the color line by participating in the popular nineteenth-century racial discourse of sentimental biopower and impressibility, as identified by Kyla Schuller. In the biopower regime Schuller describes, racial hierarchies rest on differing capacities of bodies to absorb sensations and stimuli and adapt. In Marrow and House , these capacities are underscored through language metaphor and linguistic characterization, part of Chesnutt's complex, longstanding inquiry into the relationship between language and race.

Summer (Somewhere) in the City

This (found) poem in three acts creates a conversation between Stuart Hall and Danez Smith, situated in the larger context of the long struggle for Black livingness. First comes the warning, descriptions of the violent now; HERE. Act II is a re-reading or re-writing of the secret codes of slavery and anti-Black violence, a play and exchange between realities and imaginaries, the tensions in Black social life; WHERE. The closing act insists that we dream of something different, a nod to a life Stuart Hall tried to write into existence, a life that his work is still writing; SOMEWHERE. By putting Stuart Hall in posthumous conversation with Danez Smith, I perform the kind of imaginary geographic maneuvering that characterizes Hall’s study, expanding the transatlantic and cross-generational capacity of cultural studies. Such a study, in a world where the African diaspora has been made commodity, is critical to the making of a world where Black(s) live(s) (matter).

Anti-Black Political Violence and the Historical Legacy of the Great Replacement Conspiracy

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year. We ultimately find that simply priming attitudes about racial demographic change through a single open-ended question consistently leads to increased support for political violence, increasing racial resentment, and expressed anti-Black views. Our approach allows us to test this question through variant methodological means, all of which confirm strong associations Americans have between racial demographic change, anti-Blackness, and violence. Our findings demonstrate that Black threat is an important driver of democratic backsliding in the realm of political violence that requires further attention.

Nope

Abstract Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) features a shape-shifting and Cthulhu-esque alien that feeds off settlers and other arrivants in the California desert. Focusing in particular on the Haywoods, a family of Hollywood horse wranglers descended from the otherwise anonymous Black rider on the horse of Eadweard Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion Plate 626, Nope can be read as suggesting the ubiquitous nature of anti-Black violence. Furthermore, this essay will suggest that the informe nature of the alien, referred to in the film as Jean Jacket, and which eventually reveals itself to be something like a giant jellyfish, also mirrors the way in which Blackness has historically been—and continues to be—treated likewise as informe, or what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson refers to as “plastic.” In other words, Nope suggests that Blackness is linked in the white Western imagination to plasticity and animality, as made clear by the restaging in Peele's film of the Muybridge sequence, but now featuring Jean Jacket and OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya). Finally, by exploring Blackness as effectively “alien” to white hegemony, Nope suggests a Black cinema that appropriates that “alienness” and one that becomes a vernacular/informal countercinema that resists white supremacy.

Antiracism and Black Self-Defense in the Face of (Juridical) Catastrophe

In this paper we analyze the relationship between antiracism and black self-defense. We draw a distinction between liberal and political black self-defense and argue that antiracism can at most sanction a juridical and individualistic notion of self-defense rather than a communal one. We argue that any and all theoretical conceptions of contestation, resistance, or revolution need to seriously grapple with the necessity of theorizing black self-defense. In doing so, we thematize antiblack violence through accounts of self-defense given by black radicals. Together, these arguments outline a perpetual conditional threat of violence against any and all black freedom projects, which in turn justifies enunciative black counterviolence.

The Future Is Now: Keith S. Wilson’s Affrilachian-Afrofuturist Politico-Aesthetic

Abstract: This essay argues that Affrilachian poet Keith S. Wilson’s poem “Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue,” from his debut collection Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (2019), extends the African American poetic tradition and the concerns of Black poets associated with the Appalachian region by addressing ongoing issues concerning anti-Black surveillance and anti-Black violence in relationship to Afro-futurity.

Community-oriented copaganda: Anti-Black violence in a visual archive of policing

Like legitimacy crises of the past, recent high-profile murders of Black individuals by the police have led to renewed crises of police legitimacy. As a response to both the racialized violence and the subsequent legitimacy crisis, community-oriented policing is once again being heralded as a bi-partisan solution to the problem. In this article, I situate such a solution as in alignment with, rather than a departure from, racist police violence. I do this by conducting a visual analysis of a federal archive of photographs said to represent community-oriented policing asking what the images reveal about the actual nature of this model of policing and one of its practices—copaganda. At the same time, I analyze the work of the archivists and the ways they seek to rebuild legitimacy through affective manipulation—or what I term community-oriented copaganda—and the photographic capture and marketing of racialized bodies. I ultimately theorize the archive as an expression of racist police power and anti-Black counterinsurgency that uses police power to reproduce race. In doing this, I show how copaganda can be read against itself to reveal its contradictions, exploitations, erasures, and violences.

Being Essential and Feeling Expendable: Black Female Clinicians’ Narratives About Working in the U.S. During Dual Pandemics

<i>Historically and in the present day, Black women’s positionality in the U.S. has paradoxically situated them in a society where they are both intrinsically essential and treated as expendable. This positionality, known as gendered racism, manifests commonly in professional environments and results in myriad harms. In response, Black women have developed, honed, and practiced a range of coping styles to mitigate the insidious effects of gendered racism. While often effective in the short-term, these techniques frequently complicate Black women’s well-being. For Black female clinicians who experience gendered racism and work on the frontlines of community mental health, myriad bio-psycho-social-spiritual harms compound. This project provided an opportunity for Black female clinicians from across the U.S. to share their experiences during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and anti-Black violence. I conducted in-depth interviews with clinicians (n=14) between the ages of 30 and 58. Using the Listening Guide voice-centered approach to data generation and analysis, I identified four voices to help answer this project’s central question: How do you experience being a Black female clinician in the U.S.? The voices of self, pride, vigilance, and mediating narrated the complex ways participants experienced their workplaces. This complexity seemed to be context-specific, depending on whether the clinicians worked in predominantly White workplaces (PWW), a mix of PWW and private practice, or private practice exclusively. Participants who worked only in PWW experienced the greatest stress, oppression, and burnout risk, while participants who worked exclusively in private practice reported more joy, more authenticity, and more job satisfaction. These findings have implications for mentoring, supporting, and retaining Black female clinicians.</i>

“Unimaginable from this distance”: Get Out , Black Speculative Horror, and Captive Embodiment

Abstract: In this essay, which attends to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Black horror masterpiece, Get Out , I consider how Peele’s visual narrative employs not only horror’s genre cues, but speculative tropes more broadly, to animate instances of embodied Black trauma and white gratification that can be linked directly to submerged American histories of enslavement. Hortense Spillers has memorably catalogued slavery’s “theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire”; my analysis in this essay zeroes in on her almost casual parenthetical recognition that this violence is “unimaginable” from our present vantage and interrogates the ways that Peele’s complex brand of Black horror brings such bodily trespass close. Throughout my discussion here, I consider both the bodily vulnerability of the film’s Black characters to racialized incursion and subjection, and their positioning as literal vehicles for the enactment of white agency, suggesting that the surface critique of liberal racism offered by Get Out is complicated and deepened by the film’s speculative horror elements. By animating and bringing near, via speculative horror tropes, some of the most “unimaginable” elements of anti-Black violence, Peele’s film advances an understanding of Black captive embodiment that uncannily echoes Afro-Pessimism’s sense of the perpetual and proximate nature of Black enslavement in our contemporary moment.

Temporal Tampering and “The Case for Reparations”

Abstract This essay examines Ta-Nehisi Coates's article “The Case for Reparations” to illuminate how he uses inventive temporal strategies to transform the grounds of the reparations debate. I argue, Coates engages in a process of temporal tampering that involves meddling with dominant temporal structures (conceptions of time that serve white supremacy) to accommodate the excessiveness of anti-Black violence. Through tactics of timeline jumping and a rhetoric of repair, Coates draws on articulations of time as a resource to sabotage anti-reparations temporalities. Instead of approaching the reparations debate through stale discursive entry points, such as financial logistics, I reveal how Coates draws upon conceptions of time to reposition reparations as a mode of worldbuilding and social transformation.

Anti-Black violence, discrimination, and sleep difficulties amongst racially diverse Americans: The aftermath of the murder of George Floyd

RationaleFollowing the murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans during the summer of 2020, there was unprecedented exposure to media-disseminated depictions of anti-Black violence. Little is known about the impact of this widespread form of vicarious racism that was pervasive during that historic time. ObjectiveThe present study applies the concept of vicarious racism to study this secondary exposure to anti-Black violence. We investigated negative impacts of anti-Black violence (NIAV) and personal experiences with discrimination in association with sleep difficulties, a critical intermediary health process. MethodsRacially diverse Americans (N = 487) were recruited to participate in a cross-sectional study using an online survey given between December 11, 2020 and February 11, 2021. ResultsBlack participants endorsed greater NIAV than Asian, Latinx, and White participants. Moreover, Black, Asian, and Latinx participants reported greater direct discrimination than White participants. NIAV and direct discrimination were each associated with more sleep difficulties. Although associations between NIAV and sleep difficulties did not vary by race, race moderated the association between direct discrimination and sleep difficulties. In addition, direct discrimination moderated the association between NIAV and sleep difficulties in an unanticipated direction: the link between NIAV and sleep difficulties was weaker for those experiencing more direct discrimination. ConclusionFindings suggest that anti-Black violence and police brutality not only impact direct victims but have widespread vicarious impacts on racially diverse Americans, and highlight that vicarious anti-Black racism and discrimination are important issues of public health.

Black life beyond injury: Relational repair and the reparative conjuncture

In our political present, shaped by the insurgent recognition of the consequences of antiblackness following the murder of George Floyd, but whose influence is quickly expiring, this article examines what the possibilities are for African American reparations. Thinking from this reparative conjuncture, the article examines the societal and ethical limitations of what kind of reparations this moment can produce. Identifying that the harms against African Americans and Black life in the Americas more generally are harms against Black relations, the article engages with the possibility of the relational discipline of Black ecologies to offer a framework for conceptualizing a full sense of reparation. However, in recognizing that Blackness as conceived within Black studies, and thus Black ecologies, is still largely limited to a commitment to the study of antiblack violence and its related practices of resistance, the article advances novel pathways for pursuing a formula for repair outside the terms of Black injury, which might produce relational repair.

Concealing Martial Violence

In this essay, I turn to the example of the 1919 Elaine Massacre—the deadliest incident of anti-Black violence in U.S. history—in order to better understand how its economically motivated, state-sanctioned, and brutally indiscriminate violence were nearly erased from history. I find that white journalists, military officials, as well as the Governor of Arkansas himself, drew upon long-standing race-based fears in their characterizations of what took place in Elaine. In so doing, they were able to simultaneously glorify and obfuscate the anti-Black violence, as well as further protect the property and economic interests of the white residents who had putatively been “under threat.” The scale of the violence in Elaine and the near totality of its erasure from the official record make the Elaine Massacre a chilling example of what Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has described as “martial capitalism”: the use of concealed military violence to wrest economic resources away from marginalized communities and toward their white counterparts.

Doing The Work to Do the Work: Black Teacher Educators Learning to Heal and Healing to Teach

ABSTRACT In this study, we, both co-authors and Black teacher educators, explored our experiences imagining and practicing Black liberatory pedagogical praxes through the contours of anti-Black violence. Framed through engaged and healing-centered pedagogical conceptualizations, we use Black storytelling to present narratives of our storied experiences doing the work to do the work. In doing the work to do the work, we encourage other Black liberatory educators to both create and sustain individual and collective space(s) to build their sociopolitical analyses of oppression in their worlds, to remember Black movements and moments of the past that have transformed oppression, and to imagine more justice-centered pedagogical praxes that liberate themselves and their students. Doing the work to do the work is both theory and practice; we hope that Black educators and those supporting the liberation of Black peoples can contextualize our storied lives shared here in their own dreams and practices.

3.3 When Viral Images of Anti-Black Violence Keep “Trending”: The Impact of Media-Induced Vicarious Trauma on Black Youth

3.3 When Viral Images of Anti-Black Violence Keep “Trending”: The Impact of Media-Induced Vicarious Trauma on Black Youth