Black Politics Research Articles

Work that: Kamala Harris, resistance, and the black dancing body

Work that: Kamala Harris, resistance, and the black dancing body

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara This issue opens with Shana L. Redmond's presidential address delivered at the 2022 ASA annual meeting held November 3–6, 2022, in New Orleans, the first in-person conference in three years. The devastating deaths, violence, pain, mourning, policing, and confinement that filled the world during the intervening years only highlighted what Blacks have lived through for centuries. Redmond's powerful, beautiful, and heart-wrenching address, "The Dark Prelude," frees from capture the Black lives that were arrested, suspended, or terminated with a "routine" traffic stop by the police—Sundiata Acoli, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Assata Shakur on May 2, 1973; and Sandra Bland on July 10, 2015—by listening, accompanying, amplifying, and conversing with the sonic everyday of Black living. By turning our ears, eyes, hearts, and brains to the life before terror, Redmond urges us to imagine otherwise and be better. Kimberly Juanita Brown re-creates and joins the Black chorus Redmond called forth by pointing to the inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose of Black study and tracing Blackness that upends temporality. Erica R. Edwards responds to Redmond's invocation of "thick emotion" and "thick camaraderie" of Black study by beholding and listening to the Black anterior that lies in advance of and surrounds Black death and taking the reader through Redmond's act of indictment, not of the state of the field but of the world and our hearts. "Abolitionist Worldmaking" is a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's muchanticipated collection of essays, Abolition Geography, published in 2022. In his introduction, convener Alyosha Goldstein situates Gilmore's decades-long contributions to the prison abolition movement in the history of abolitionism and elucidates the mode of critique that abolition requires. Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis each reflect on the significance of the collection from a variety of perspectives, ranging from everyday movement building to the historical conditions of possibility for worldmaking as well as Gilmore's theoretical and methodological contributions. The first two essays examine settler cosmology, knowledge, and relationship to Indigenous lands and the environment. Nadia Chana's "On Eating, Critical Distance, and Qallunaat Cosmology" critically reads filmic texts that are purportedly about the Inuit and the hunting and eating of seals, showing that the tensions between eating and critical distance indeed illustrate Qallunaat (non-Inuit) cosmology. In "A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community," [End Page v] the study of the impact of settler colonialism on Menominee land and their understanding of "energy," Gregory Hitch and Marcus Grignon show that the Menominee consistently adapted and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while also appropriating dominant science and technology for their goals. The next two essays bring contrasting approaches to the racial meanings of iconography. Sharron Conrad's "More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination" uses a public opinion poll conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center that illuminated African Americans' deep veneration and mourning for the slain President John F. Kennedy. Through the analysis of the poll and Black families' practice of hanging his portrait alongside images of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr., Conrad challenges scholarly assessments of Kennedy's civil rights accomplishments. In "Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent," Najwa Mayer traces the production and mass circulation of a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman clad in hijab in the style of the United States flag and argues that the aesthetics of racial and secular liberalism converge on gendered Muslim American iconographies while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion. Finally, in "Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy," Naomi Greyser offers an innovative look at the American academy. Focusing on the felt impacts of institutional oppression on writing and learning, Greyser reframes writer's block less as a psychological syndrome than as a symptom of nationalist investment in academic writing as a means of managing knowledge, labor, and subject formation. In Book Reviews, Kristin...

“SUBJECT’s Wife”: The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance

This essay examines how gender shaped Black communist and communist-affiliated women’s experiences with political repression in early Cold War Chicago. While recent scholarship on Black women leftists in the mid-twentieth century has emphasized early Cold War anticommunism as a moment of rupture, I find that the experiences of Black women organizers in Chicago complicates such conclusions. Using police archives, personal papers, oral histories, and more, I contend that sexist-racist cultural discourses rendered Black women activists’ leadership and agency less visible to the state and that anticommunist state officials, as a result, tended to treat Chicago’s Black communist and communist-affiliated women as peripheral rather than central threats. Thus, Black communist and communist-affiliated women were more capable than their male counterparts of surviving early Cold War anticommunism and sustaining the class-conscious radical Black politics they had developed in Chicago. This essay not only identifies how raced gender discourses affected Chicago activists’ experiences with political repression, it also adds to recent scholarship by exploring the measure of opportunity Black communist and communist-affiliated women accessed in this early Cold War context, despite the straitened circumstances.

Diasporic Consciousness in African Immigrants’ Support for #BlackLivesMatter

AbstractThe goal of this research is to provide a diaspora-centered analysis of Black identity politics by illustrating how African populations navigate their diasporic identities and imposed racial boundaries when engaging with social movements like #BlackLivesMatter. Extending scholarship on Black immigration and Black politics, the present study highlights the processes by which racial histories, U.S. racial hierarchies, and gender hegemony guide African immigrants’ and children of African immigrants’ individual conceptions of Blackness as well as their political engagements. Using a qualitative design (N = 28 semi-structured interviews), I examine first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Africans’ connections to #BlackLivesMatter, a racial justice social movement mobilized in response to the police killings of African American men and women. Findings illustrate that while all participants express an implicit connection to #BlackLivesMatter by drawing attention to the visual aspects of their superordinate Black racial identity, there are certain sources ofdiasporic fragmentationthat lead to racial distancing, intraracial group contention, and subsequent disconnections from the movement. Deconstructing the notion of Black political behavior as homogeneous, findings also suggest that political solidarity does not require uniformity in interests: when engaging in collective action, it is possible to express racial linked fate while also expressing substantial differences in culture and knowledge systems.

The Legacy of Dr. Mae C. King

At the 2023 National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), Andrene Wright, Claire Crawford, and India Lenear were invited to speak about the legacy of Dr. Mae C. King at the 13th Annual NCOBPS Founder’s Symposium. Our remarks received overwhelming support from NCOBPS members, colleagues, and friends who knew Dr. King. We were invited to memorialize the moment with a piece in the National Review for Black Politics (NRBP). It’s not lost on us that the forum where we made these remarks would not exist if it weren’t for Dr. King, a founding member. To that, we say we are profoundly honored and humbled by these invitations. Below is a compilation of what we expressed at the Founders Symposium in Atlanta on March 10, 2023. We hope these reflections can provide a small fraction of the value Dr. King has gifted to the discipline, Black political scientists, and those whose lives were made better by her brilliance.

42nd Presidential Address, National Conference of Black Political Scientists

42nd Presidential Address, National Conference of Black Political Scientists

Black Political Economy, Solidarity Economics, and Liberation: Toward an Economy of Caring and Abundance

Combining Black political economy and solidarity economy theories and practices provides alternative models for group development based on recognizing and developing internal (to the individual and to the community) capacities and creating mechanisms that equitably produce, distribute, recycle, and multiply local expertise and capital within communities of color, especially Black, communities—creating a solidarity economy of caring community for survival (successful social reproduction), sustainability, and liberation. The history of mutual aid, cooperative ownership, and economic democracy among African Americans demonstrates how economic cooperation and solidarity economics have enabled Blacks to address human needs, generate income, and at the same time be family and community friendly, in reaction to anti-Blackness and racial economic inequality. Cooperatives enable low-income residents, women, immigrants, and people of color (who often are without any avenue to gain income or assets) to provide affordable, quality goods and services in ecologically sustainable ways and generate jobs, stabilize their communities, and accumulate some assets. The history of African American cooperative ownership demonstrates that Black Americans have been successful in creating and maintaining collective and cooperatively owned enterprises that often provided not only economic stability for members and their communities but also developed many types of human and social capital and developed community-wide well-being. I discuss how this helps us to define an economics of abundance and explore possibilities for achieving economic liberation in the twenty-first century. JEL Classification: J15, B54, P13

Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy.

Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson

Reviewed by: Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson H. Paul Thompson Jr. (bio) Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932. By Mark A. Johnson. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 235. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In Rough Tactics, Mark A. Johnson brilliantly and painstakingly uncovers and interprets the nonintuitive intersections of popular music, popular politics, and Black-white relations during the rise and height of the Jim Crow South. His argument focuses on political spectacles—such events as conventions, political rallies, and parades for various causes—and the presence and function of Black musicians at these events. Johnson's time frame covers both pre- and postdisfranchisement, but his argument is that, regardless of African Americans' voting rights, they were active participants in political spaces in ways that we might not expect. African Americans' behavior in those spaces, while at times genuinely supportive of the white agenda, often was meant to challenge or undermine the racism of that space through what is called "rough music." The story weaves through a multitude of state and local political campaigns and takes a deep dive into the southern prohibition movement, the 1903 United Confederate Veterans (UCV) reunion in New Orleans, and the 1909 Memphis mayoral election. Johnson's narrative is contextualized within the national campaign against political spectacles in general and the rise of Jim Crow. The first chapter focuses on African American bands in political spectacles through 1899, which Johnson uses as the approximate beginning of Black voter disfranchisement. Black bands were such a draw that both [End Page 139] Republicans and Democrats frequently employed them, whether for local contests or for functions, such as the celebration of the nomination of James Garfield. They were also found in local prohibition campaigns, labor movement events, and Virginia's Readjuster movement, usually to attract Black support to their cause. Chapter 2 reviews the role of musicians in Atlanta's local-option prohibition campaigns of 1885 and 1887 and Macon's in 1898. The "bridge" chapter focuses on the failed effort of New Orleans's American Federation of Musicians to require the UCV to include Black bands in its 1903 reunion. This dispute highlighted changing southern race relations, because, Johnson points out, the UCV had employed Black bands for earlier reunions and Black bands even participated in Lost Cause celebrations, such as the dedication of Richmond's Robert E. Lee statue. By 1903, however, southern racism was shifting to an exclusionary approach, as the argument of the UCV reunion committee that Black bands had no place in a "strictly social" event trumped the past practices of their own organization. As Johnson explains, "Although white southerners romanticized the enslaved Black musician, who made music willingly for the master, they balked at the new generation of professional talent, who insisted on setting terms of employment and compensation" (126). The next chapter examines Black band participation in southern prohibition contests in the early 1900s, when the prohibition movement had shifted from courting Black voters to advocating for their disfranchisement. Despite being disfranchised, like women, Black men were active participants in these contests, and, on some occasions, Black anti-prohibition bands amazingly confronted white female prohibitionists publicly without negative repercussions. Johnson's book climaxes with a look at the 1909 Memphis mayoral campaign, in which Black band leader W. C. Handy created the hit song "Mister Crump" as part of the get-out-the-vote effort for victorious candidate E. H. Crump, who went on to become Memphis's political boss until the 1940s. That song also launched Handy to the zenith of his career. Rough Tactics is based on extensive and intensive reading of ninety-two newspapers from this era, Handy's autobiography, and a few manuscript collections. The concise yet detailed and nuanced overview of several local prohibition campaigns is clearly one of the strengths of this work. But the most notable achievement of Rough Tactics is how it expands and complicates our understanding of Black politics under Jim Crow. While some Black bands' activities might have appeared to have been reinforcing racist stereotypes or advancing political agendas deleterious to Black people, in reality the bands...

Voting in the Reconstruction Novel: Black Suffrage, Election-Day Violence, and the Regulation of the Vote

AbstractHow did fiction respond to the expansions of democracy during the Reconstruction period? This article provides a survey of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction novels that include scenes of Black electoral participation. Such scenes of voting are also scenes of violence, either threatened or realized, and represent a range of political views. The article explores how novels use such scenes to advocate radical protections of Black voting rights, white supremacist restrictions on Black suffrage, and liberal policies of nonintervention in elections. A set of post-Reconstruction writers asserted a position as expressly moderate between the latter two: that Black political participation must be regulated. These novels pair the threat of Black voting with the civic emergencies of floods and other natural disasters in order to make the regulation of voting rights as necessary for survival as the management of a rising river. This view, positioned as a compromise between the rights provided by the Fifteenth Amendment and the fears of white reactionaries, was shared, alongside similar water metaphors, in the consequential decisions on voting rights by the period’s Supreme Court. This article shows the range of novelistic responses in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment and the shaping of a self-consciously moderate stance that ultimately supported the national policy of Black disenfranchisement.Liberals [could] square voting regulations with their belief in laissez-faire government . . . by treating electoral reform like the management of natural phenomena, a science of managing threats as in the linked rising tides of river and Black politics in [the period’s novels].

Countering anti-Blackness with migrant solidarity: Black and Caribbean linkages through racial struggle

ABSTRACT Black Caribbean migrants are uniquely positioned between multiple forms of negative racialization – that of their experiences with both anti-Black racism and xenophobia due to their immigrant status. Such positioning means that they may be subject to increased anti-Black and anti-migrant policing. In this paper, I argue that Black Caribbean migrants’ experiences with race in the United States can and should be interwoven with research and advocacy focused on the increasing criminalization of migrants or, Crimmigration research. I use archived newspapers, fliers, and pamphlets produced by Caribbean activists to show how they not only recognized these two-fold processes and but also reframed Black identity and politics to include anti-Black and anti-migrant discrimination as linked causes. I contend that their advocacy and concern for Afro-descent migrants, African Americans, and migrants more broadly reveal the expansiveness of Black politics through the bringing together of both Black and migrant concerns.

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

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

Black liberation politics and quagmires in trans-Atlantic black operas

Legacies of colonialism, slavery, and neo-liberalism, as well as the afterlives of black liberatory politics, are laying bare shortcomings of the regionalization of black politics and the limits of the freedoms fought for. In their attempts to grapple with these realities, diasporan African communities inadvertently fractured black solidarity espoused in the ethos of transnational black unity and pan-Africanism. I argue that neoliberal capitalism and contradictions of black liberatory discourses have given rise to black identities whose outlook disavo ws values that once bound the black race around common goals of social and economic justice. Drawing from Phyllis Taoua’s notion of “unfreed freedoms,” this article uses three black operas about slavery, migration, and human trafficking to explore contradictions of the afterlives of black liberatory discourses. I show that slavery and human trafficking in Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner (premiered in the United States in 2005), Shirley Thompson’s The Woman Who Refused to Dance (premiered in the United Kingdom in 2007), and Mandla Langa and Hugh Masekela’s Milestones (premiered in South Africa in 1999) point to renewed ways of theorizing black solidarity by acknowledging the singularities of our black situatedness and the peculiarities of the black condition in different black contexts.

The Intersectionality of Twitter Responses to Black Canadian Politicians

Research has shown that Black politicians in the Global North contend with higher instances of abusive language on social media platforms. The study investigates how public interactions engage with the intersectional positionalities of nine Black Canadian politicians. We collected all the replies to tweets posted by the politicians from 2006 to 2021. Results from the manual analysis showed that 56% of the tweets had a neutral tone, meaning that even if they contained abusive language, they did not directly address the politician. They were also not complimentary. There were more negative tweets than positive ones; 23% versus 21%. The themes of the tweets with negative tones centered on opposition to the politicians’ discussion of racial inequalities or racism, or their party affiliations, especially affiliation to the Liberal Party or relationship with Prime Minister Trudeau. The manual analysis showed women politicians received higher rates of abuses, while in the sentiment analysis stage that covered the entire data set, men were more trolled with 66.6% of words directed at them being negative, compared to 55.7% for the women.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

On a Concept of Black Politics

Abstract How do we define Black politics conceptually? What is the conceptual jurisdiction from which it is framed as distinct from other political concepts? The concept of Black politics, I argue, operates as a force of refusal of the inevitability of liberalism as the ‘end of history.’ It repudiates what liberal politics routinely represents as pacific, universal, rational and inclusive to the field of politics. The concept of Black politics, then, is an anamorphic signifier that destabilises dominant conceptions of liberal politics as inevitable. I make two arguments in this article: first, that liberalism is an anaemic singularity that excludes the imperial and racial assemblages in which it is implicated, and second, that the concept of Black politics is anamorphic in so far as it creates the possibility for emancipation that transcends this liberal obligation in its imperial and racial assemblages.

An American Paradox: Progress or Regress? BLM, Race, and Black Politics

An American Paradox: Progress or Regress? BLM, Race, and Black Politics

Violence Against Black Women in Politics: Experiences and Testimonials from Brazil

In this article the authors aim to understand the specificity of violence against Black women in Brazilian politics through the analysis of testimonies of Black politicians in different administrative positions and various regions of Brazil. Adopting the “Violence Against Women in Politics” (VAWIP) analytical model developed by Mona Lena Krook, the goal of this approach is to highlight the forms that this violence takes in the Brazilian context when gender and race intersect. In doing so, the article pursues two objectives. First, it offers an overview of violence against Black women in Brazilian politics, demonstrating how this phenomenon manifests itself in the analysis of these cases. Second, it observes how the testimonies of Black women politicians go beyond the analytical model proposed by Mona Lena Krook (2020), thus accounting for the intersectional specificities of political violence.

The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity

ABSTRACT Placing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy’s uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls ‘the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,’ I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy’s work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy’s assumption, ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’ do not ‘exceed racial discourse,’ but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power.

Invisible privilege in Asia: Introduction to special section

This introduction to the special section ‘Invisible Privilege in Asia’ suggests a framework within which studies of privilege in Asia can be situated. Animated by a global politics of Blackness and social movements that have renewed the focus on racialised inequality and hierarchy, we use this moment to urge an interrogation of the conceptual productivity of the notion of privilege. This project is particularly significant within a region that is often seen only as empirical site and not as a space for theory-building in the social sciences.