Black Politics Research Articles

The Emigrant Ambassadors: a foundation for present-day Black Liberation

In this polemical commentary on Canada, the author argues for the recognition of the crucial role played by West Indian, particularly Barbadian, women – Emigrant Ambassadors − of the 1950s and ’60s who fought in Canada against their supposed subordination in the West Indian Domestic Scheme so as to establish Black women at the forefront of a liberatory struggle and create the conditions on which the present Black Lives Matter Millennials can now build. Using the examples of Jean Augustine (first Black member of Parliament) and Mia Mottley (Barbados’ prime minister), who fought the ordained de-skilling and downward mobility of the neocolonial economic arrangements, he asks that we view them not as individual achievers justifying a neoliberal meritocracy but rather as part and parcel of Black liberatory politics, stretching from slave rebellions to the Black Power movements and fights against racism of the mid-twentieth century.

Review: Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box, by Terry Smith

Book Review| April 01 2022 Review: Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box, by Terry Smith Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box, by Terry Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 300 pp. $24.99 (paper). ISBN: 9781108445467. Gbemende Johnson Gbemende Johnson Hamilton College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2022) 3 (1-2): 51–54. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.51 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gbemende Johnson; Review: Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box, by Terry Smith. National Review of Black Politics 1 April 2022; 3 (1-2): 51–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.51 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search After the 2020 presidential election, multiple states passed laws placing additional requirements and restrictions on access to the ballot, including increased voter identification requirements and absentee ballot restrictions. While these laws appeared race-neutral, observers argued that the goal of these laws was to reduce turnout among voters of color, who are more likely to cast their ballot for Democratic candidates. Optimally, laws that intentionally discriminate against populations based on race would fall in face of legal challenges. However, what if members of the public cast votes with racial animus against certain groups? Should there be a remedy to address such behavior and, if so, what should that remedy be? Also, should elected officials who use appeals that denigrate racial groups be held to similar standards as employers who engage in discriminatory behavior toward their employees? These are a few of the central questions that motivate Terry Smith’s discussion in Whitelash:... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics, by Davin Phoenix

Book Review| April 01 2022 Review: The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics, by Davin Phoenix The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics, by Davin Phoenix. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 282 pages. $29.99 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-108-72533-0. J. Benjamin Taylor J. Benjamin Taylor Kennesaw State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2022) 3 (1-2): 54–57. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.54 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation J. Benjamin Taylor; Review: The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics, by Davin Phoenix. National Review of Black Politics 1 April 2022; 3 (1-2): 54–57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.54 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search Davin Phoenix’s The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics contributes to the literatures on behavior, affect, and race in American politics. His aims are made clear in chapter 1, where he says, “[T]he main endeavor of this book is…to offer a framework for assessing how racial differences in emotion translate into racial disparities in political participation” (5). Phoenix claims there is an “anger gap” between Black and white Americans that explains differences in campaign tactics, political mobilization, and political attitudes in the Black community. Chapter 1 lays out an elegant framework describing the divergent emotional experiences facing Black and white Americans. Phoenix’s main point, beyond laying out the plan for the book, is that the risks for being “angry while Black” in American culture are significant and ever-present. Given this widespread understanding, particularly among African Americans, it is clear anger may not be the emotional path to political... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts

Book Review| April 01 2022 Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021. 430 pages. $25.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780198870685. Dorian Brown Crosby Dorian Brown Crosby Spelman College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2022) 3 (1-2): 57–60. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.57 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dorian Brown Crosby; Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts. National Review of Black Politics 1 April 2022; 3 (1-2): 57–60. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.57 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search Alexander Betts’s The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies elucidates displaced peoples’ often overlooked economic contributions and agency. Betts accurately notes that the number of globally displaced persons steadily increases. At the same time, policies of resource-rich States continue to reject them. The book’s central argument is “that within this age of displacement, the key to sustainability lies in unlocking the potential contributions of refugees themselves” (viii). Betts’s refugee inclusivity strikes a musical note in the choir of positive refugee narratives. The purpose of the book is to provide practical solutions for refugees as they carve out dignified lives amid challenges such as the economic fallout from the pandemic, rising populism and nationalism, and the decreasing willingness of Western countries to admit displaced persons. To that end, Betts asks, “How can we create sustainable refugee policies that can enable displaced people to live in safety and dignity... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett

Reviewed by: Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett Sara Rutkowski Kate Dossett.Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2020. 358 pp. $34.95. In a scene from the play Liberty Deferred, written in 1937 by Abram Hill and John Silvera, ghostly victims of lynching are admitted into the afterworld Lynchtopia, where they vie for a prize for having the most horrific murder. The winner, Claude Neal, who in real life was tortured and mutilated publicly in Alabama in 1934, then leads a march of lynch victims to the US Senate as a version of the song from Disney’s Snow White—which had been released in theaters that same year—plays “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, off to Washington we go.” There, the ghosts raucously heckle Southern senators who are in the process of trying to filibuster an antilynching bill. In the context of 1930s racial realities and politics, this is a courageous, provocative, and indeed radical theatrical script. And it is among a select group of manuscripts from the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) that Kate Dossett explores in her engaging study Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. These works, written and revised collaboratively between 1936 and 1939, served to radically challenge, satirize, and symbolically dismantle white supremacy. In Liberty Deferred, the Hartford Negro Unit drew from popular culture and the grotesque to powerfully parody “the carnivalesque atmosphere that accompanied the increasingly ritualistic nature of southern lynching in the early twentieth century” (112). That the FTP’s Negro Units—set up in twenty-three cities throughout the US as part of the WPA—generated new theater that confronted racial prejudice is not new information. These units are roundly considered by scholars to be among the FTP’s greatest accomplishments for the themes they engaged and the boost they provided to Black theater and talent. Although, oddly, no single book-length study has previously been dedicated to the history of the units alone. But Dossett’s is not a sweeping account or survey of this extraordinary undertaking; instead, assuming a degree of familiarity among her readers, she offers a close, rigorously researched examination of several “black performance communities” that coalesced around the Negro Units and produced what she deems radical theater. Beginning with “the premise that African Americans could be architects of a radical future in the middle decades of the twentieth century,” Dossett tells us, that radicalism should be seen “as a site of contest rather than a destination” (31). [End Page 99] Indeed, Dossett quickly establishes—and frequently reiterates—that her lens is focused as much on process as it is on product: the conversations and debates “about the representation of black life in the arts and the direction of radical black politics” out of which these dramas emerged (23). If these scripts succeeded in toppling traditional portrayals and narratives of blackness that audiences were used to seeing on stage, they did so because groups of Black writers, actors, and directors mobilized to write—and rewrite—their own stories and histories, often in conflict with white theater communities, and more broadly, with the New Deal machine. The script for Stevedore, for example, a play about dock workers in New Orleans written by two white playwrights and first staged in New York in 1934, underwent multiple revisions by Seattle’s Negro Unit before it returned to the stage in 1936. Most notably transformed was the final scene, which originally depicted white laborers “saving” the Black workers from a lynch mob who had accused the hero, though framed, of raping a white woman. When it was staged, the Black stevedores performed their resistance alone. As Dossett writes, “Envisioned by its authors and production company as a labor drama that foregrounded interracial unionism, African Americans exploited the self-making possibilities of the production process and became agents of their own liberation” (41). The same is true for the play Haiti, originally written by white journalist William Dubois. The Harlem’s Negro Unit scrubbed it of Dubois’s racist portrayal of the Haitian Revolution and created instead an homage to Toussaint Louverture that stunned and thrilled...

Las Vidas Negras Importan: Centering Blackness and Racial Politics in Latin American Research

Racial disparities in Latin America exist in poverty levels, income, education, infant mortality, political representation, access to social services, and other key indicators. However, researchers in comparative politics face an uphill challenge to prioritize racial politics in studies of democratization, democratic consolidation, representation, and even social movements and inequality, despite racial hierarchies being quite harmful to democracy in Latin America. This article argues for the centering of Black politics and racial hierarchies in Latin American politics and highlights recent literature to map just how that can be done. More than adding race as a variable or a control, we must understand racial identification and anti-Black racism in Latin America: how they operate, and how they influence, complicate, motivate, affirm, and inspire politics. In this article, I address ( a) why we should center racial politics in Latin American politics, ( b) how comparative racial scholars have centered Black politics, ( c) the methodologies necessary to accurately measure racial identification, and ( d) recent research that examines the interplay between racial self-identification, Black group consciousness, and voting behavior.

Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic

Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic Tamika Nunley Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. America in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 254 pages. Cloth, ebook. Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 328 pages. Cloth, ebook. Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 182 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. By Brandon Mills. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 259 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 352 pages. Cloth, ebook. In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. By Christopher Tomlins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. 372 pages. Cloth, ebook. During the past decade, a resurgence of scholarship examining nineteenth-century politics and abolition has broadened to emphasize the actions of the enslaved and the articulations of Black political strategies. Though this literature lies beyond the conventional chronological boundaries of early American and Atlantic history, its robust ideas concerning political resistance and the afterlives of revolutions, as well as its assessments of commercial and cultural currents crossing the Atlantic, should be of considerable interest to scholars of early American history. In particular, recent work on the early nineteenth century using various modes of analysis—including speculation, literary history, and Black radical intellectual traditions—shows the myriad ways that slavery, resistance, and moral reform [End Page 135] shaped early American politics. Both the methods deployed and the historical trajectories uncovered by these scholars should prove generative for early Americanists and Atlanticists in future framings of their inquiries. Above all, recent scholarship has shown the vitality of Black political engagement. In In the Matter of Nat Turner, Christopher Tomlins uses a “speculative” approach, deploying a skillful reading and imagining of the sources, to offer a compelling retelling of Nat Turner’s life, beliefs, and intellect as well as the political significance of his rebellion. Tomlins begins with a treatment of how Turner appears in public memory, literature, and history. This approach allows the reader to think through the origins of the assumptions that shape how historians interpret Turner and the rebellion. For instance, as Tomlins shows, historians C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese were influenced by novelist William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in that they acknowledged the significance of the rebellion but remained largely dismissive of Turner as a credible historical figure and depicted him as a “hate-driven madman” (22).1 Tomlins reads the mediated testimony of Turner’s court deposition as a window into his biblical hermeneutics. He depicts Turner as not a fanatic but as an evangelical Christian who experienced sanctification and daily edification in preparation for holy war and makes the essential intervention of taking the theological interpretations of the enslaved seriously. More specifically, he shifts the focus from the conventional emphasis on Exodus and the Old Testament to the book of Luke in the New Testament. This move—away from drawing parallels between the enslaved and Old Testament Israelites and toward recognizing the self-image of Nat Turner, enslaved rebel, as sacrificial Christ figure—invites a level of analysis and complexity that the field desperately needs to understand the spiritual dimensions of resistance. According to Tomlins, “Turner is living entirely in sacred space and time, beyond Armageddon, his calling—at last clarified—to fight the final battle against Satan” (61). For Tomlins, the profoundly spiritual dimensions of Turner’s vision expose the problems with how scholars usually conceptualize resistance, which typically refers to the range of responses enacted by the enslaved to challenge enslavers and slavery itself, rather than to the epistemological foundations of resistance and their implications for broader debates. As Tomlins shows, responses to Turner even among white Virginians were far...

Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

“Save Auburn Avenue for Our Black Heritage”: Debating Development in Post–Civil Rights Atlanta

This article investigates debates concerning the redevelopment of Atlanta’s historic Black business district, “Sweet” Auburn Avenue, in the 1980s. It argues that the revitalization debates suggest two ways of conceptualizing the post–civil rights era; first, as an era of limits in which shifts in the global economy and the national political landscape narrowed the scope of what liberal Black politicians and civic activists believed what politically possible, and second, as an era of anxiety in which political and economic crises fostered nostalgia about the Black past and uncertainty about the future of Black Americans. Focusing on the divisions that emerged among Black Atlantans over the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Site and the construction of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the article analyzes how the political-economic constraints and anxieties of the period informed various visions of redevelopment. In doing so, it reveals how the conditions of the post–civil rights era, and the affect produced by them, structured urban Black politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

“From Congo in a Slave Ship”: The Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade and Antebellum Free Black Political Engagement with Congo

“From Congo in a Slave Ship”: The Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade and Antebellum Free Black Political Engagement with Congo

Moore, The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972

Moore, The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972

About the Contributors

Joshua J. Branciforte is an independent scholar. He has previously coedited the “Queer Bonds” special issue of GLQ (17:2–3), and his work has also appeared in Modern Language Quarterly. He is currently working on the edited volume On the Subject of Ethnonationalism, forthcoming with Fordham University Press.Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an assistant professor of African American studies and religious studies at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Gods of the Flesh: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans,” which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series. His work has also appeared in The Black Scholar, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and The Journal of African American History.Eben Kirksey is associate professor of anthropology at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Kirksey is best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that mixes ethnographic, historical, ethological, and genetic methods to study spaces where humans and other species meet. Duke University Press published his first two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as The Multispecies Salon (2014), a curated collection of artwork and essays. His latest book, The Mutant Project (2020), embeds queer and crip theory within a readable tale about some of the world's first genetically modified people.Holly Randell-Moon is a senior lecturer in the School of Indigenous Australian Studies, Charles Sturt University, Australia. She has published on infrastructure, biopower, and settler colonialism in the journals Celebrity Studies and Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication and the edited book Colonialism, Tourism and Place: Global Transformations in Tourist Destinations (2020). Along with Ryan Tippet, she is coeditor of Security, Race, Biopower: Essays on Technology and Corporeality (2016). She is also coeditor of the journal Somatechnics.Danielle M. Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Racial Formation in the Americas.” Roper is the curator of “Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive.” Her work on blackface performance and feminist activism in Latin America and the Caribbean has also appeared in Latin American Research Review and Small Axe.

John Lewis and the Durability of Transcendent Race Politics

AbstractJohn Lewis's civil rights activism in the 1960s often obscures the fact that he won elective office as a racially moderate politician. Scholars have long noted the efficacy of using deracialized, or racially transcendent, campaign strategies to get elected, despite normative concerns. These strategies were critical to electing Black governors, senators, and even President Obama. However, in the age of Black Lives Matter, some have questioned the continued usefulness of the strategy. Using Rep. Lewis's life as a guide, I examine the ways that some Black politicians continue to use deracialization, even in this racially charged social and political moment, and I explain how younger cohorts of Black politicians challenge this approach. Ultimately, I argue that while deracialization is a contested strategy, its efficacy has not diminished. Rather, Black politicians have expanded the boundaries of what constitutes racially transcendent politics to include consensus issues like voting rights, which while highly racialized, are not likely to induce an erosion of support among non-Black Democratic voters.

Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

AbstractWhat effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Moral Faith and the Legacy of John Lewis's Political Vision of “Good Trouble”

AbstractThe late congressman John Lewis spent most of his political life engaging Black Power's commitment to economic and political freedom through a political vocabulary that aligned with his deeply held beliefs in nonviolence, human rights activism, and moral faith. The tension between the Black radical left and establishment Black politics dates back to Lewis's clash with elite Black leaders over the content of his prepared address for the 1963 March on Washington. The address provides a glimpse into Lewis's complicated political legacy. The youngest speaker at the March, Lewis faced the daunting task of both representing the political philosophy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and meeting the expectations of established civil rights leaders. Negotiating the political interests of the organizers of the March alongside the demands of SNCC foreshadowed the congressman's political vocation: a lifetime of civil rights advocacy through a politics of respectability and Black Power's political philosophy of freedom and economic transformation. Lewis's political legacy is complicated; and yet, it was fueled by an unabashed commitment to Black freedom struggles, human rights activism, and racial reconciliation.

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

The public and private life of Sol Plaatje

There has been an upswing in attention to South African biography in the past few decades, with a welcome trend towards remaking or revising the canon of important figures from the South African past. This has included edited collections of the works of prominent individuals, and notable among these have been early-twentieth century black African politicians and writers. Historical Publications Southern Africa (renamed from its previous moniker, the Van Riebeeck Society) has published four edited collections of the writings of such individuals since 2008, including Isaac Williams Wauchope, Richard Victor Solope Thema, and A.B. Xuma. A Life in Letters, a collection of Solomon T. Plaatje's correspondence, is the fourth such volume in just over a decade. There are 260 letters, written from 1896 to 1932, included in the book. Most are in English, but some are in Setswana, Dutch/Afrikaans, and a few are in German. Although a number of the letters are from the collections of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, the reviewer counted twenty-seven different collections across three continents. The book is thus an excellent resource not only for historians, but also for students and the general public who now have access to a wide range of Plaatje's thoughts, opinions, and emotions that are evident in his letters.

Elizabeth Todd-Breland. A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 344 pp.

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