Black Activists Research Articles

Black Women’s Activism in Brazil: Black Genocide, Anti-Blackness and Racial Apartheid

Este artigo enfoca as mudanças na militância das mulheres negras, particularmente em Salvador, Bahia, Brasil, de 1995-2015, comparando duas marchas nacionais. Organizações negras em todo o país se uniram para organizar uma marcha nacional em Brasília, capital do país, em Novembro de 1995. Vinte anos depois, em Novembro de 2015, as mulheres negras organizaram uma marcha nacional para abordar a interseção do racismo e do sexismo. Durante esses vinte anos, militantes negras trabalharam incansavelmente contra o genocídio negro, o anti-negritude e o apartheid racial no Brasil, e as mulheres negras estiveram na linha de frente dessas lutas. A interseccionalidade de raça, classe e gênero foi e permanece crítica para a militância das mulheres negras e a produção do conhecimento e da pesquisa. O artigo examina as mudanças na militância no movimento negro ao longo de vinte anos que marcaram o crescimento das organizações e redes de mulheres negras.

Queering reproductive justice: Memories, mistakes, and motivations to transform kinship

AbstractWhy does a queer feminist approach to reproductive justice matter? Why might it matter for youth who build their families while navigating the surveillance of a large urban U.S. child welfare system? Why might it matter for queer transracial families like my own and for other “disruptive families”? This autoethnographic account shadows my ethnography with Black adolescent mothers and their children living under surveillance. The works stems from an obligation to shift my gaze to myself, as I follow a long reflexive tradition in feminist anthropology around exploring my vulnerabilities and changing point of view. I argue that queering reproductive justice reveals diverse forms of kinship and care networks to motivate coalition building across families. Queer Black activists and feminists have consistently offered critical insights into how to make the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter more inclusive of Black trans and cis girls and women, as well as for gender‐expansive Black people and families. As a multi‐city and global coalition erupts and demands the liberation of Black lives, the time is ripe for a queer coalition for reproductive justice.

The Metamorphoses of 'Orfeu da Conceição' by Vinicius de Moraes

This text is a hermeneutic exercise about one of the paradigmatic works of Vinicius de Moraes, Orfeu da Conceição. This plays opens a partnership between the poet and the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, which was fruitful and unique for Brazilian arts. Orfeu da Conceição is also paradigmatic because it is the first work to bring black actors to the stages of the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro. Orfeu da Conceição led to one of the films that most contributed, positively or negatively, to the international image of Brazil in the second half of the 20th century, the award-winning Orpheus Negro, by Marcel Camus. The text will notice how many of the ideas and representations of the favela were already visible in the Brazilian popular repertoire prior to the composition of the play. The idea, in general, is to observe how, in addition to its poetic-musical quality, Orfeu da Conceição can also serve as a reflection on how we represent and see favelas in the urban context, both in 1956 and today.

LÉLIA GONZALEZ

Lélia Gonzalez was a memorable black activist and intellectual. He studied and fought racism and sexism, studies that today are called intersectionality, but were already treated by Lélia before the word appeared. Lélia graduated in History and Geography, was a Master in Communication and a PhD in Political Anthropology. She was also one of the founders of the Unified Black Movement against Discrimination and Racism (MNUCDR) in 1978, which today is known as the Unified Black Movement (MNU). In addition, Lélia published numerous works that contributed and contribute to the discussions on the racial issue and black women in Brazil.

A fragmentação do mito da democracia racial e a dimensão pedagógica do cinema negro

Este artigo trata a fragmentação do mito da democracia racial, cuja sociedade brasileira monocultural foi vista como um paraíso de laboratório racial, para os países multirraciais. O Movimento Negro Unificado - MNU lutou contra o racismo, a violência policial e a ditadura militar, fragmentando o mito da democracia racial brasileira. Os ativistas negros se identificaram com o cinema novo, de Glauber Rocha, que adotou o negro como referencial estético. Glauber criou também o cinema negro, sendo o cinema das minorias vulneráveis, no qual a imagem do ibero-ásio-afro-amerindio fez uma luta ontológica contra a hegemonia imagética do euro-hétero-macho-autoritário sua euroheteronormatividade, que foi o sentido da eurocolonização. Na dimensão pedagógica do cinema negro as minorias desenvolveram a construção da imagem de afirmação positiva, ensinando ao anacronismo excludente como ela é, e deve ser tratada, na sociedade de contemporaneidade inclusiva.

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

In the State’s Shadow of Fair Housing: D.C. (White) Business Leaders and their Revanchist Desires

This article traces D.C. White business leaders’ advocacy of (low-income) Black suburban relocation and White upper-class resettlement in D.C.’s central neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. By examining the organizational papers and memos of meetings and policy documents from the Federal City Council, a D.C. nonprofit advocacy organization for the city’s leading business and real estate leaders, I document how predominantly White business leaders appropriated fair housing and regional fair share political stances to articulate revanchist desires. These leaders’ revanchist rhetoric depicted the Black poor—especially the single Black mother with children—as the primary figure of neighborhood blight and domestic deviance. In the wake of these revanchist politics, low-income Black mothers remained principal victims of pro-mobility policies and gentrification agendas that forced them to continually move to support demolition or redevelopment. This article affirms low-income Black mother activists’ political support for placemaking and low-cost, family-friendly, and well-maintained communities.

We Need to Talk Nondefensively About Race and Admit Shortcomings

Back to table of contents Previous article ViewpointsFull AccessWe Need to Talk Nondefensively About Race and Admit ShortcomingsTerry A. Kupers, M.D., M.S.P.Terry A. KupersSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.S.P.Published Online:14 Jul 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.7b19AbstractEveryone I know is participating in demonstrations proclaiming Black Lives Matter or donating money to the cause. But whites who join the movement must eventually look within at previously unexamined remnants of society’s structural racism embedded deep within our consciousness. A Black person raises a criticism about insensitive racial bias in what a white person has just said. In far too many cases, white people feel unfairly criticized and turn away from the struggle. That is very unfortunate. We have to evolve new ways to hear the concerns raised by people of color about assumptions we make because of our socialization as whites.I went to the South to participate in the 60s civil rights movement. Leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) shouted “Honky, go home!” I was crushed. My first response was, “I’m not a racist—I am trying to help. Why are they treating me like this?” I talked to a Black friend, a leader of SNCC in Los Angeles, and he told me, “Terry, you are a honky. Why do you think that Black activists would welcome you into the leadership of a movement when the movement is all about developing Black leadership; that’s self-determination.” Hard to take in, but true.There was discussion of the “Moses Syndrome,” the white civil rights activists’ unexamined and unconscious belief that whites are the natural leaders of all social movements, even movements to free people of color. That belief was acted out in all sorts of strange ways—for example, in white participants’ dominating discussions at SNCC meetings in Mississippi with Black and white attendees. That’s what made Black leaders say “Honky, go home.” They wanted us to organize our white peers to end racism while they organized the Black community. I learned a very valuable lesson. It wasn’t that I was a racist in some kind of all-or-nothing categorization. It ran deeper than that, and it was more pervasive. James Baldwin said it: The mouse is always more aware of what the cat is up to than the other way around.When I traveled by car from Echo Park in Los Angeles to my first job as a psychiatrist at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital and Charles Drew Medical School in Watts and got off the freeway, I would feel safer seeing a police car. I would think to myself, “Now I don’t need to lock my doors as I drive on the streets to the hospital.” My mentor, Dr. George Mallory, a distinguished Black psychiatrist, drove the same route to the hospital every day. He wore three-piece suits and drove a late-model Cadillac, whereas I wore casual clothes, had long hair, and drove a beat-up VW bug. He was pulled over repeatedly by the police and roughly frisked while the police would simply wave me on as I passed.Very many whites are committed to ending racism and fostering social justice, but we are products of our socialization in a structurally racist society. I do not have to give much thought to the possibility that the police will shoot and kill one of my sons as they walk in our neighborhood, but Black parents have such thoughts every minute. When a Black colleague points out that something I said or did was insensitive to the pain in her situation and could be better formulated to take racial inequities into account, I thank her and grow as a person. I can only hope that she will think of me not as a racist, but as a white person who wants to do the right thing and is relatively unschooled in the harsh realities of racism because of having grown up as a privileged white. I hope she can trust me a little more now on account of my demonstrated willingness to confront the biases I had inevitably accrued in a society where Black lives are valued less than white ones. We can only end racism together. The real test of our shared commitment is how long we stay focused on the murder of George Floyd (and many others), and how much energy we put into ending racism on an ongoing basis. ■Terry A. Kupers, M.D., M.S.P., is a professor in the Graduate School of Psychology at the Wright Institute. His latest book is Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It (University of California Press, 2017). He is the 2020 recipient of NAMI’s Gloria Huntley Award. ISSUES NewArchived

A insustentável invisibilidade do nuclear: os processos de publicização dos problemas sociais e ambientais decorrentes da exploração do urânio em Caetité, BA

O artigo discute os processos de publicização dos problemas do nuclear em Caetité, Bahia. Desde o início da operação da mina de urânio na região, no ano de 1999, uma série de atores locais e não locais tem produzido evidências dos problemas decorrentes da extração do mineral para combustível das usinas nucleares brasileiras. Neste artigo argumenta-se que esse processo, ao mesmo tempo que constitui o nuclear e o urânio como uma situação problemática, também transforma os atores a ela concernidos, construindo os processos através dos quais questões do nuclear se tornam visíveis. Para isso, baseia-se em documentos, relatórios técnicos, materiais publicados em jornais e observação de campo de parte dos atores envolvidos nas questões do nuclear. Concluímos que as exigências dos atores passam a ser construídas a partir de evidências que seguem constrangimentos metodológicos próximos daqueles produzidos pela operação da mina, baseado em monitoramento e avaliação de dados técnicos. Mas, diferente da manutenção do nuclear como uma caixa preta, os atores publicizam o urânio e o nuclear como um problema público.

Choreographing exclusion: protest, race, and place in São Paulo

ABSTRACT This essay considers how street protest, a nearly ubiquitous presence in the past decade during Brazil’s political turmoil, deconstructs twentieth century mythologies of racial mixing while potentially generating new myths. I analyze protests that dramatize racist and elitist attitudes over public space in São Paulo, Brazil. Demanding access to public transportation and luxury shopping, protestors use sites of exclusion as a dramatic element essential to their messages. From white hipsters to black university activists, to adolescents on the urban periphery, these urban actors perform various choreographies of exclusion, using their bodies to dramatize class and racial differences that they are protesting. While protests exposes and sometimes disrupt the entrenched arrangements of interracial and cross-class encounter within spaces of mobility and consumerism, protest choreographies recruit protestors and spectators alike into contradictory relationships.

Reading the Light Right: The Exposure of Asian Skin Tones in Cinematography

This article discusses how contemporary cinematographers make technical and aesthetic decisions about exposure when working with actors of different skin colours – specifically those of Asian ethnicities. Having worked internationally as a cinematographer and lighting co-ordinator, with casts belonging to different ethnicity groups, I am able to offer practical insight into the interaction between colour, the quality of light, and Asian skin in digital film production. As I will explore below, it is encouraging to see that cinematographers have begun exploring ways to better illuminate Black actors, and arguably, the same level of care and creativity can be applied when filming Asian talent. The article will examine firstly, how exposure tools for the camera are used, and secondly, the different approaches of industry practitioners seeking to develop more careful and varied ways of lighting Asian skin.

Three Black Women’s Reflections on COVID-19 and Creative Arts Therapies

COVID-19 has revealed underlying social inequities that disproportionately impact Black communities. This commentary offers three different reflections by creative arts therapists on this critical moment of widespread protest, organizing and demands for justice led by Black activists worldwide.

‘The people’ exposed: spatio-racial-affective alterity in Haitian popular protest

ABSTRACT Beginning in 2013, urban Haitians staged several antigovernment protests that eventually led, in 2016, to the removal of President Michel Martelly without an elected successor. This protest movement used racial, spatial, and affective markers to expose an image of pèp la (the people) and to rework old and new race-class divisions in the Haitian population. Conducting ceremonial bonfires, donning black and red masks, and chanting Vodou songs to summon cho (hot) spirits, the protesters sought to embody revolutionary soldiers who defeated colonial troops in 1804. They framed the conflict as one between black militants of the downtown geto (ghettos) and the lighter-skinned, uptown, ruling elites. This article traces how a culturalization of ‘the people’ as black, ‘hot,’ and of the geto emerged through the rituals of protest, and how this movement ultimately identified a new, militant persona – the nèg geto (ghetto black) – as the popular subject of Haiti. This article goes on to elaborate the potential consequences of this configuration of the people: on one hand, it can be viewed as an effective tool of empowerment; on the other hand, it may propagate racist tropes that have long been used to marginalize poorer and darker people in Haiti.

To be Black, Queer and Radical: Centring the epistemology of Marielle Franco

AbstractThe aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.

Racial Valuation: Cultural Gatekeepers, Race, Risk, and Institutional Expectations of Success and Failure

Abstract Racial inequality persists in culture industries, despite increases in representation. Focusing on the Hollywood film industry, this research analyzes written correspondence to understand how, in their discourses, cultural workers as intermediaries or gatekeepers construct ideas about race to make predictions about economic value, success, and failure of cultural products. Findings demonstrate that cultural workers make racial valuations, or race-based judgments about the economic worth of cultural products—in this case by associating white actors with low economic risk, increased chances of profitability, and the expectation of success and linking black actors to high economic risk, decreased chances of profitability, and the expectation of failure. This practice of racial valuation disrupts conventional logics that emphasize the financial ambiguity of cultural markets to advance white institutional logics that invoke raced-based projections about a cultural product’s expected performance. Ultimately, these racially biased assessments affect people, products, and processes along the film production, distribution, and consumption spectrum, especially privileging white workers and limiting Black workers in foreign markets, thereby creating and reinforcing unequal racial outcomes within culture industries.

Review: Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, by Racquel J. Gates

Review: Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, by Racquel J. Gates

Food and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: re-reading the 1962-1963 Greenwood Food Blockade

ABSTRACTThe relationship between food and the American civil rights movement is often storied within the context of lunch counter sit-ins. Yet, food not only functioned as a backdrop to protests and demonstrations, it also took center stage. In the Mississippi Delta, for instance, an event known by activists as the 1962–1963 Greenwood Food Blockade illuminated the centrality of food to movement politics. Rarely remarked upon or discussed in detail, scholars read the blockade as an isolated disruption to the Mississippi Civil Rights movement, overlooking the significance of this event. In this paper, I attempt to recover the Greenwood Food Blockade from narratives of the civil rights movement and offer an alternative reading of the event. This reading is instructive and extends what we know about the civil rights movement in important ways. First, it enlarges our understanding of food as a weapon, tool, tactic, and everyday preoccupation in the civil rights era. Second, it amplifies the role of poor rural black communities, local activists, and women in dictating the civil rights agenda in tandem with national activists. Third, it shows how these actors engaged in everyday food politics central to our understandings of food justice and food sovereignty today.

Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.

The Enemy Within: The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Enemy Pictures

Photography has played an obvious role in black liberation movements. In the fight for civil rights, both the supporters of segregation and its opponents forged a stereotyped picture of their enemy. Our hypothesis is that the photographs from the mainstream media played an ambiguous role. They participated in the creation of two types of enemy shown as a threat to democracy: the hateful and violent white supporter of segregation, on the one hand, and the hateful and violent black nationalists, on the other. Their images testified against racism, but also circumscribed the movement to narrow legal objectives. The northern media created a two-sided picture of the black activists. First, to exonerate the northern liberals, they offered a reassuring view of racism in which the enemy was the violently racist white-trash barbarians from the Old South. In these pictures the southern activists are helpless victims, as was the case with Rosa Parks in the most widely distributed pictures of her. Second, the black nationalists were later portrayed as hateful and violent and disrespectful of American values. In doing so, the Northern media forged a dichotomy between a supposed peaceful and nonviolent movement before 1964, and a violent and useless black power era after 1965. But history is more complex than suggested by these well-known pictures.

Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970, by Stanley Keith Arnold

<i>Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970</i>, by Stanley Keith Arnold