Black Liberation Research Articles

Black Meta Mode

This paper explores metamodernism traced via the Black Diaspora, providing theoretical foundations, historical context, and visions for its application in contemporary society. Serving as an abridged introduction to the concept of Black Metamodernism, and contextualizing it within the broader metamodern project, I begin with the “Black Metamodernist Manifesto,” outlining core principles and underlining its role as a socio-political movement fostering the integration of cognitive dissonance through diunital, both-and cognition. I posit that Black metamodernism utilizes diunital vision-logic to integrate cognitive differences, offering a pathway to Black Liberation and beyond. I contextualize metamodernism as Black beyond Race, positioning it as a tool for embodiment amidst contemporary societal contradictions. The paper culminates in a call for a Black Metamodern Aesthetic, a culturally functional artistic expression rooted in survival with socio-economic, and geo-political awareness.

Young Black American’s Use of Afrocentric and Black Liberation Spiritual-Based Practices to Thrive Amid Racism: A Meta-Synthesis

Researchers have proposed Afrocentrism and Black Liberation Theology as two culture-specific frameworks that may explain why spirituality contributes to Black American’s capacity to thrive, despite ongoing encounters with racism that can lead to diminished mental health. Still, scholars have not examined the connection between spirituality, racism, and mental health among young Black Americans (adolescents and emerging adults) through an integrative lens of Afrocentrism and Black Liberation Theology. A meta-synthesis permits researchers to synthesize and draw new meaning to existing qualitative studies. As such, we synthesized qualitative data from 16 studies that included the voices of approximately 288 Black adolescents and emerging adults to understand processes involved in their use of Afrocentric and Black Liberation spiritual-based practices to thrive and navigate mental health-related challenges sparked by racism and other intersecting forms of social oppression. Findings revealed four interconnected components: (a) Commitment to a Spiritual Identity, (b) Critical Consciousness, (c) Connecting to the Transcendent, and (d) Collectivism and Communal Support. This study shows how a meta-synthesis was employed to provide an in-depth understanding of Black youths’ use of spiritual resources to thrive amid racism and intersectional oppression.

Expressions of whiteness? A Black ecclesiological reflection on Fresh Expressions of Church

The article presents a critical literary analysis of the Fresh Expressions of Church movement, which started in the United Kingdom (UK) and was subsequently adopted by some mainline churches in South Africa. The authors review the genesis of the movement and its models, development and approaches in order to understand its relevance for the post-apartheid South African context. The authors then critically compare, through a literary analysis, the theological praxis of the Fresh Expressions movement and bring it into critical dialogue with some Black Liberation Theologians and Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement who, when apartheid was at its height in South Africa, argued for a ‘Black expression’ of church. In the article, the authors reach a dramatic point by asking whether a ‘fresh expression’ is indeed needed, in the light of an existing ‘Black expression’ of faith and lived religion in South Africa that has historically been ignored and stifled. The article concludes with a call to embrace Black Ecclesiology in the post-apartheid context.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article concludes with a call to embrace Black Ecclesiology in the post-apartheid context.

Dear Mr Sobukwe: examining Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s pan-African vision and how it has influenced youth movements in South Africa today

Pan-Africanism is experiencing a resurgence amongst young people in post-1994 South Africa. In this article, I explore how people across different generations interpret the legacy of a critical figure in South African history, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. The participants in this research and I represent a sliver in the changing interpretations of Sobukwe’s legacy in South Africa after 1994. I have chosen an epistolary form as the key organising framework to share my ethnographic research, mirroring Sobukwe’s own prolific letter writing practice throughout his life. The article presents letters written by two participants in my research to Sobukwe, followed by a response letter from me. This forms a dialogical conversation between me, the researcher, the participants in my research and Robert Sobukwe. The research essay contains elements of auto-ethnography, allowing me to engage closely with how Sobukwe has impacted my own thinking about justice in South Africa. I focus on education, a key tenet in Sobukwe’s pan-Africanist vision. The article shows the ongoing erasure of Black liberation fighters from contemporary South Africa and the impact of coloniality in education.

Hotep anti-Blackness: Misogynoir and queer exclusion in online conspiracy theorizing

Research suggests African Americans are more likely than Whites to support conspiracy theories, especially those related to the U.S. government. Locating the pedagogical practices of Black activists in the online hotep subculture, I use the concept of public pedagogy to understand how these activist influencers use social media to spread political messages in the public sphere. This essay situates hotep subculture as a conspiritualist project that uses Pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity, Black spirituality, and hip-hop culture to advance conspiracy theories among Black communities for consciousness-raising and economic independence. While hoteps have promulgated a pro-Black politic, their reliance on ethnonationalist homophobia and misogynoir promotes a form of erasure that is not only exclusionary and anti-Black but also reflects racial fears rooted in anxiety. This essay contributes to the growing literature on conspiritualism’s investment in white supremacy and the need for conspiritualist critiques to investigate how anti-Blackness shows up in discourses at the intersection of faith, spirituality, and global regimes of power. Drawing on the concepts of misogynoir and anti-Black heterotopias, Black gender and sexual minorities are framed within hotep discourse as subservient, deviant, and perilous to Black liberation.

Reclaiming My Womb

In Children of Blood and Bone and The Hunted, Tomi Adeyemi and L.A. Banks reclaim the isolated Black womb and reattach it to the human to which it belongs, thus humanizing Black women. This humanization of Black women combats the dominant narrative that seeks to reduce Black female identities to what their bodies can produce for the Western patriarchy world founded on capitalist exploitation. Their wombs are a counternarrative to the tired trope of the almighty phallus that disfigures phallic power into a deadly weapon, only suitable for destruction. Banks’ and Adeyemi’s placement of symbolic wombs highlights the power of wombs as a space where spirit and body meet to upend oppressive world orders rooted in spiritual darkness. Here, even the phallus achieves greater power. The womb exposes the phallus’s ability to invest life and further incubates that life to create revolution. Together the phallus and womb work to display the necessary fetation of rebellion, resistance, and liberation. Banks and Adeyemi join the scores of Black feminist writers who insist on the unity of Black masculinities and Black feminism to ensure the futurity of Black liberation.

“The War at Home”: Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Black Community; Race and Policing in New York City, 1970 to 1973

This article argues that in 1971 a war between the radical Black Liberation Army and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) erupted, and within this war, the NYPD tried to influence Black politics in the city’s Black community. However, the Black community in New York City was not monolithic politically. This community was diverse in its political makeup, and there was a political ambivalence by Black people about policing in their communities. It further demonstrates that the law-and-order turn was not fully embedded in white liberals’ virtuous attempts to pacify Black radicals or that the rise of law and order was not solely a product of federal projects such as the War on Poverty. Instead, this article argues that political debates within New York City’s Black community and efforts by the NYPD to influence Black politics largely drove the city toward greater law and order policing.

Black Mountain Songs

The article uses sound—specifically Black music, traces of Mvskoke Creek ceremonial music, and sound waves generated millions of years ago during the orogeny that produced the mountains in the region—to reorient the author to her mountain climb up the infamous Stone Mountain (Georgia, USA). The author takes up the listening practices informed by Dylan Robinson’s and Katherine McKittrick’s refusal in Hungry Listening (2020) and Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) to capture, know, or make Black and Indigenous sound immediately legible, knowable, and recognizable. Meditating on sound produced by (and on/in) mountains—with wonder—I offer a critical listening and imagining practice that accesses different temporalities, rethinks embodiment, and examines investments in walking as knowing. Moving with sound in this article, Black liberation and Indigenous resurgence (including Land Back) are experienced through geologic time, vibration, and soundwaves.

Africana Political Theory as Decolonial Critique

ABSTRACT This article illuminates a fundamental problem at the core of canonical political theory: the racialization of knowledge. It contends that the history of canonical thought as being necessarily Western and, therefore, European American, means the emergence of epistemic racism produces enormous consequences for the practice of philosophical thought—namely, Africana political theory (APT). Thus, this article raises important questions such as the colonization of reason, as well as the ongoing relationship between political theory and race, such that the specter of anti-black racism manifests and becomes intertwined with the foundations of the canon. Ultimately, the article proffers APT as decolonial critique to complicate and expand the parameters of philosophical practice. The overall consequences for the discipline, its students, and its practitioners actualize an ongoing movement for black liberation.

Close to Home: Suburbanization, Residential Segregation, and Jewish-Black Relations in St. Louis Park and North Minneapolis, MN

This study examines the suburbanization of Minneapolis’ Jewish community during the postwar period, focusing on the ethnic enclave of North Minneapolis and the Jewish ethnoburb of St. Louis Park. It argues that as part of this process, Jewish leaders adopted a strategy of self-discipline, in which they would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that instances of Jewish racism and other actions that threatened the community’s White, middle-class, and liberal image did not become public knowledge. Minneapolis Jews’ liberal ideology and self-disciplinary practices clashed with the increasingly public and confrontational tactics of the city’s Black liberation movement, facilitating a series of conflicts between Blacks and Jews in the neighborhood during the late 1960s. Jews, conditioned by postwar liberalism not to see how institutional racism affected their Black neighbors, interpreted these conflicts through the same lens they had applied to their experiences with prewar anti-semitism.

Cooking Up the Black Arts

This article reviews Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s classic text Vibration Cooking beyond its initial use as a culinary handbook, reading deeply into its many references to improvisation and liberation. Through countless allusions to friends and colleagues in free jazz, Black Arts, and other crucial 1960s Black artistic and political circles, Smart-Grosvenor’s text uses recipes to both cover and convey the work of everyday liberationist praxis in the Black Arts Movement circles of which she was a crucial member. In this article, I review Smart-Grosvenor’s longstanding relationships with key musicians, activists, writers, and performers for whom improvisation across many modes engendered processes of Black liberation. For Smart-Grosvenor, the liberatory capacities of improvisation also existed in cooking, where ritual, inherited food cultures, ad hoc executions, and commensality worked together to create space for and feed a movement for Black freedom.

Four theories to empower black men's existence: Meaning making in dehumanizing contexts

AbstractMost theories used to explore existential realities of clients were developed and informed by White Eurocentric philosophers, who overlooked the impact of race and racism on identity. At a time when Black men continue to experience threats to their survival, such as through the epidemics of racial violence and health disparities of COVID‐19, it is critical for professional counselors to appropriately incorporate racial and gendered perspectives into existential conceptualizations of client experience. In this paper, we identify four theoretical frameworks for clinicians to adopt in working with Black men's existential realities: Black existentialism, Black liberation narrative therapy, critical race theory, and radical healing psychotherapy. We locate these theories within the context of impacts from the dual pandemics of racial trauma and COVID‐19, applying mini‐vignettes to demonstrate how each theory can be responsive to the existential needs of Black men.

T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.: Tupac Shakur as a Symbol of Black Rebellion for the “Pac Babies” of Black Lives Matter! 1

The late Bay Area Hip Hop legend Shock G stated that Tupac Shakur “rhymed from this pit of his stomach,” asserting that Tupac’s greatness was in the potency and relevance of his message more than the technical skill of his lyricism. Tattooed across the stomach that Tupac rhymed from was the acronym “T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.” Tupac proclaimed that it stood for “The Hate You Gave Little Infants, Fucks Everyone,” a statement that reflected his worldview and echoed sentiments of those like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Huey P. Newton who viewed youth as the centerpiece of the struggle for Black Liberation. Though Tupac was murdered in 1996, his lyrics and interviews resurfaced in the aftermath of the police killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 and introduced a generation born after his death to his thug persona and T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. ideology as relavent, and accessible symbols of Black Rebellion. This article explores how Pac Babies, Black youth born after Tupac’s death, have adopted his Persona and Ideology to inform their entry into the Post Racial, social media era of the Black Freedom Struggle. I offer that, by providing T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. as an alternative to the politics of respectability of the Civil Rights Movement and being resurrected as mythical super hero battling police violence, Tupac influenced both the street protests and social media engagement during the protest phase of "Black Lives Matter!".

Edgework and Excess: Jimi Hendrix, the Phenomenology of Fuzz, and the Rehearsal of Black Liberation

Edgework and Excess: Jimi Hendrix, the Phenomenology of Fuzz, and the Rehearsal of Black Liberation

Peaceful Strategy to Black National Question in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth

This article analyzes the theme of Black national liberation as it appears in Ralph Ellison's novel Juneteenth. The study has relevance to probe into the remedies of Black liberation movement in America. The article addresses on the research problems concerning to the black protagonist's inability to identify and deal with an appropriate path that leads the freedom of blacks in American society. The study analyzes the issues through the research approach (methodology) of the Marxist concept of dialectics. According to this theory, the conflict between society's opposing forces is permanent, while any resolution to it is conditional and only temporary. This idea maintains that the key to the liberation of the oppressed nationality and class is the battle against the oppressor nationality and class. One of the novel's two main protagonists, Reverend Hickman, belongs to the oppressed black nationality and class. Hickman seeks to free the downtrodden Blacks from its constraints, but he chooses the incorrect road by making peace with the country's ruling white class. Hickman believes that the battles of Afro-Americans alone cannot end black national oppression; instead, he looks to some heavenly figure from the white race, such as Abraham Lincoln, to grant Afro-Americans their independence, justice, and equality. Bliss was nurtured by Hickman in the hopes that he would become the American equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, but Bliss betrayed Hickman by becoming into the racial baiting white senator Adam Sunraider. Despite Bliss's betrayal, Hickman continues to have faith in Sunraider. The study reveals that this Hickman's message of peaceful approach while dealing with ruling whites keeps the Afro-Americans weak, far from liberating the oppressed black nationality.

Intersectionality approach to mental health for Black men in student affairs

AbstractNavigating higher education can be a challenging experience for Black men. Among these, Black men often face unique mental health challenges stemming from systemic racism, cultural expectations, and societal pressures. Addressing their specific needs requires a comprehensive approach. However, supporting Black men's mental health in higher education involves a multi‐faceted approach. By actively recognizing their challenges and ensuring resources cater to their specific needs, we can create an environment where all Black men can thrive in student affairs services. In this article, we used Chapman‐Hilliard and Adams‐Bass's theoretical framework of Black Liberation Psychology to guide our analysis of the mental health challenges that Black men face in student affairs.

What if Black Studies studied fat for real for real?

ABSTRACT Only four years after Black Studies departments began to form in the US, Johnnie Tillmon, then Chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization, proclaimed in her 1972 article in Ms. magazine that her marginalized intersectional identities – woman, Black, poor, fat, middle-aged, and on welfare – gave her little to no value in the American imaginary. How, in the midst of establishing departments for the study of Black life, could Tillmon’s Black fat life not be studied as well? Cathy Cohen (1999) asserts that welfare reform, like women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, are “cross-cutting issues” that complicate “respectable,” singularized notions of group identity. Black Studies departments have long aligned with this “secondary marginalization,” and Black feminists have stepped in and fought to obtain epistemological space for Black women and femmes. However, there was a missed opportunity to connect Tillmon’s embodiment with the social justice work being done to establish Black Studies. Fat Black women, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, had been on the front lines, but their embodied experiences had no seats in the front of the Black liberation bus. Because of this disconnect, I posit that Black Studies’ secondary marginalization of fat Black women leaves a noticeable gap in its disciplinary project. I argue that Black Studies as a field must 1) engage with Fat Studies via a social justice commitment to disrupt Black fat women from being rendered hyper-visible as service-workers and hyper-invisible as decision-makers, and 2) utilize body size as an analytical category to gain more nuanced and deeper understandings of Black life.

Ambivalence and the unsettling aftershocks: Postcolonial perspectives on Vellem’s spirituality

Addressing a myriad of complex social, economic and political issues in the South African context requires that we draw from a variety of voices. This postcolonial reflection draws on the work of Vuyani Vellem’s African spirituality to highlight how it can help Africans conceptualise race epistemologically. The contribution emerged out of an article presented at a conference themed ‘unthinking West. The article employed the concepts of liminality and threshold to discuss the ambivalence encountered by Vuyani Vellem and highlights how his theological convictions still present unsettling ideological aftershocks within the unjust structures of society.Contribution: This contribution is a black liberation theological reflection, which laments how Vellem did not live to witness the full realisation of his dreams regarding the liberation of the black masses. The article identifies racial discrimination and misconceptions on African spirituality as some examples of the ‘unsettling aftershocks’ regarding challenges, which Vellem confronted within the unjust structures of South African society.

“I’ll Wait No Longer”: Emigration, Speculation, and Utopia in Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859)

Abstract: I argue that Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859) endorses a radical, speculative, and utopian political project whereby the possibility of Black liberation in the Americas is dependent on a revolutionary dismantling and restructuring of the institutions and apparatuses that uphold systemic white supremacy. Expressed formally in the fugitive movements of its protagonist, the novel oscillates between critiques of slavery and the animating, trace images of the society to come. Ultimately in utopian fashion, each instance of changing places becomes in the novel a speculative occasion for considering the ways in which a place may be changed .

Black Liberation Theology and the “Black Manifesto”

Black Liberation Theology and the “Black Manifesto”