Black Radical Research Articles

Radical Black behaviorism to address racial microaggressions among African American clients: The case of Aniyah

AbstractThis article describes radical Black behaviorism and how it may be utilized during counseling to address the effects of racial microaggressions among African American clients. A case illustration is provided, and implications for broader societal change are discussed.

Prison Rebellions, Black Radical Consciousness, and Counterinsurgency

Prison Rebellions, Black Radical Consciousness, and Counterinsurgency

Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation By Theo Williams

Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation By Theo Williams

Two Racial Capitalisms: Marxism, Domination, and Resistance in Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall

AbstractThe popularity of the concept of “racial capitalism” has exploded over the past decade, penetrating both academic and activist circles. Two thinkers have been foundational to this revival: Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to merge these two thinkers into a single framework, we argue that they develop divergent, and potentially irreconcilable, theories of racial capitalism. Robinson and Hall both challenge an orthodox Marxism that crudely reads politics from class position, and both point to the constitutive roles of culture and racism in mass mobilisation. Yet they diverge in two key ways. First, they root their theories in incongruous systemic logics: Robinson emphasises racial differentiation and domination, whereas Hall emphasises the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. And second, Robinson's theories of domination and resistance are rooted in spatial connections, most importantly via Western racialism and what he calls the Black radical tradition, both of which envelop the globe. By contrast, Hall insists on the spatial fragmentation of domination and resistance, which emerge as conjunctural articulations in specific contexts. Challenging the idea that there is a singular racial capitalism lens or frame, we urge scholars and activists alike to rigorously interrogate the specific mechanisms linking racism and capitalism.

What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There: Critical History in Radical Black Re-imaginations of Canadian Nursing Histories.

As a "foursome" of nursing history students and scholars, upcoming, junior, and seasoned, we presented a panel on new work and possibilities related to histories of Blackness and Black nurses in Canadian nursing history. Our presentation was the 2023 keynote Hannah Panel Presentation for the joint Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (CSHM-SCHM) and the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (CAHN-ACHN) conference. Reflecting and expanding our perspectives, we share the relevance and significance of engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness and (in)visibility of Blackness in nursing history. This paper considers the overarching question of how does engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness serve as an anti-racist strategy when examining, analyzing and understanding the history of nursing and health care? A core tenant of this work aims at acknowledging how institutional relationships of power are reproduced within scholarship unless there is space for radical re-imaginations. The disruption to power is achieved by exploring the connections between nursing and history from the perspective of Black nurses' history or Black feminist thought. We also disrupt power by our form, in challenging expectations of scientific inquiry as the only format of valid knowledge production within the discipline. Possibilities of arts-based methodology as a site for democratization in nursing knowledge are evoked through the metaphoric language (water, fire, air and earth) interwoven within the text. We highlight how each of us engages with nursing history, further complicating previous narratives of our collective Canadian past. In publishing our thoughts on historical inquiry in a nursing journal, we hope to provoke more curiosity and interest in history within our discipline as a site for liberation!

Racial Capitalism, Cedric Robinson, and a Method for Architectural History

Elaborating on the techniques that the Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson uses to write the histories of racial capitalism, this essay outlines a way to approach longue durée architectural histories. Robinson analyses racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) through the practices of what he calls the Black radical tradition, and these techniques provide a way to conceptualise a history of architecture in the modern Atlantic World that focuses on denaturalising the racial regimes that have shaped it. Using a series of examples—a lecture by a carpenter-architect in upstate New York, Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello, an advertisement for marble-quarrying labour in Tennessee, and the commodity chains of lumber—this essay outlines the questions and methods that Robinson’s approach, which he describes both as a “counterfeiting” of received discourse and as a non-dialectical negation of that discourse, suggests for architectural histories that attends to vast geographies and timescales.

‘The Real Data Set’: A Case of Challenging Power Dynamics and Questioning the Boundaries of Research Production

While the co-production of knowledge through community-engaged research is intended to be a reciprocally beneficial process, academic institutions have often devalued community expertise by treating community organizations as subjects rather than co-creators of knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic work with a community-based organization (CBO), Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), this paper shows how one CBO is challenging and critiquing these long-standing power dynamics between community and their university partners. LA CAN centered community expertise and formed long-term mutual relationships based on shared values, primarily an abolitionist framework and connection to Black Radical Thought. Drawing from LA CAN’s partnerships and their definition of power, we discuss how shifting power dynamics and centering community expertise leads to a different form of knowledge production, resulting in “the real data set”. This case shows how CBOs are movement researchers who are central to creating and interpreting theory.

Cracks within capitalism: Alternative rental practices and a politics of care among small-building owners in Chicago

ABSTRACT The United States is currently in the fourth decade of an ongoing, and worsening, affordable housing crisis, due in part to neoliberal financialization and the retrenchment of social safety net programs. Research has illuminated the role that landlords play in maintaining, and profiting, from this neoliberal turn in the housing market. Meanwhile, low-income renters and other marginalized people have engaged in strategic resistance and activism, drawing on a politics of community care and collectivism that runs counter to neoliberal market ideology. It is within this wider context—a housing market where neoliberal and collective care politics clash—that I analyze the viewpoints and rental practices of a unique group of housing market actors: resident landlords, or people who live in the same buildings as their tenants. Among a wider sample of 52 owner-occupants, I interviewed 22 owners who held anti-oppression viewpoints, and who attempted to put their politics into practice by adopting atypical rental practices. Drawing on Black radical and feminist traditions in urban political economy, I theorize these activities as political decisions that created sites of opportunity, where building owners and residents attempted to reconfigure their relationships under capitalism, providing a window into possibilities for more caring housing arrangements.

Research: “I’ve always had the abolitionist spirit in me”: Preservice Teachers of Color and Pedagogies of Abolitionist Praxis

This year-long ethnographic study explores how two ELA preservice teachers of color enacted pedagogies of abolitionist praxis—centering teaching and learning to and through an abolitionist praxis of identifying and dismantling surveillance, criminalization, and punishment—via the areas of curriculum and instruction, relational work, and organizing and activism. When enacting pedagogies of abolitionist praxis, with specific attention to curriculum and instruction, three findings were identified. First, both teachers purposely and strategically designed their curriculum and instruction to explicitly teach an abolitionist praxis, yet they did so via distinct approaches. Next, the teachers rooted their curriculum and instruction in a radical Black, Indigenous, and feminist imaginary to teach about but, more importantly, teach against carceral practices, policies, and ideologies. Last, both teachers facilitated youth-led action research projects that centered present and future world-building actions. This study provides implications for the education and support of preservice teachers and for K–12 teacher practice.

Tip of the spear: Black radicalism, prison repression, and the long Attica revolt By OrisanmiBurton, Oakland: University of California Press. 2023. 328 pp.

Tip of the spear: Black radicalism, prison repression, and the long Attica revolt By OrisanmiBurton, Oakland: University of California Press. 2023. 328 pp.

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

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

Sexual Violence and Racial Capitalism: James Baldwin's Prisons, 1969–74

AbstractThis essay engages with James Baldwin's work on prison rape in the early 1970s: his directing of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes while in Turkey (1969–70), his nonfiction book No Name in the Street (1972), and his penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Over the course of these works, Baldwin theorized that sexual violence constitutes racial capitalism by mediating between the two state-organized institutions tasked with securing the primitive accumulation and surplus value on which racial capitalism relies: the family (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) and the prison (and, more broadly, policing). In turn, Baldwin helps converge two intellectual traditions that developed after him, the black radical and Marxist feminist traditions, in order to explain how sexual violence expropriates both forced productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor through its production of racialized gender and kinlessness.

Bridging Psychological and Political Liberation: Black Buddhism and Black Radicalism

Bridging Psychological and Political Liberation: Black Buddhism and Black Radicalism

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)

Seeking Sanctuary in Loving Fat: A Path to Transformation and Acceptance

Disclaimer: Before you begin, we must warn you… We ain’t your traditional academics. We visionaries are birthing a new mindset where fat folx are unapologetically loved. We are Radical Black Love advocates, and we are transformational agents. We move with a moral imperative to create sanctuary spaces (Smith 2022) where fat folx can restore.

‘A great many of them die’: Sugar, race and cheapness in colonial Queensland

AbstractThe frontier of colonial Queensland was pushed northward through the second half of the 19th century by proliferating sugar plantations. The cultivation of sugar cane for these plantations rested predominantly on the shoulders of unfree, racialized Pacific Islander workers. This history reveals dialectics of cheap lives and land, as nature was produced for exchange at the commodity frontier, unfolding in crises of disease, death and exhaustion. In exploring the story of this frontier, an opportunity emerges to begin a conversation between a recent return to materialism within Australian historiography and the traditions of eco‐Marxism and Black radicalism. The contention here is that this engagement represents both ‘urgent history’ and ‘truth‐telling’, as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene.

“We Know It's a Library”: Black Space, Black Women's Labor, and Radical Black Joy

The Junior Scholars Program (JSP) is a tuition-free youth learning program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. At JSP, Damaris, a former JSP instructor, was introduced to Kadiatou, the Schomburg Center's former education and outreach programs manager. They write collaboratively to (re)member the dialectical relationship between Black women's labor, Black Space, and Radical Black Joy.

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

As political theorists explore work beyond traditional workplaces, how should we understand the vast class of insecure, informal, and unsalaried workers whose existence defies traditional categories of employment? In asking this question, I revisit the political theory of the Marxist feminist and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework movement, Selma James, to explore her “internationalism of the unwaged” and her writings on wagelessness. An example of political theory in service of struggle, James’s internationalism was widely circulated in anticolonial, Black radical, and autonomous Marxist circles in the 1970s. In this article, I argue that it was grounded in three intertwined and mutually reinforcing arguments: an account of how capitalist life is spatially divided into distinct workplaces; an anticapitalist theory of identity that explains social difference as maintained by the international division of labor and labor market hierarchies; and a diagnosis of work organization viewed from the perspective of the wageless worker. I trace how James developed these arguments about the spatial division of labor, hierarchies of identity, and internationalist political struggle and how her view of the common exploitation and division of workers formed the basis of a class-struggle identity politics. Her political theory was an important contribution to women’s international thought and transnational feminist critiques of global forms of domination and exploitation. It also offers a critique of capitalism’s organization of the displacement of work and workers and an account of wagelessness as a work situation, both of which illuminate capitalist organization of work and wageless life today.

White Atmospheres: Choreographing Racial Materialities in Academic Space

This essay offers a critical introduction to the circulation of racial materialities, and especially whiteness, in North American and European academic contexts. It proposes that we can escape from the dominant epistemology of identity as a fixed attribute of individuals without losing the urgent and much-needed analytics of identity as social and material force. In the gap between “identity politics” and a richer critical politics of identity lies the difference between a discursive public sphere of agonistic conflict and one of potentially transformative relationality. Drawing on critical race theory and especially black radical thought, my analysis rejects the reduction of identity to discrete census categories and attempts to situate contemporary scholarly practices in the context of a planetary decolonial movement. If “identity” today is all too frequently dismissed by a methodological whiteness that strictly separates it from materiality, politics, and knowledge, then a dramaturgical or choreographic analytics of race might better address how racial materialities operate both above and below the level of individual bodies, subjects, and citizens. Synthesizing practical insights from artistic research and performing arts with critical theories of race and identity, this essay refers to some of the author’s recent personal experiences at academic events in order to describe and analyze whiteness as a form of social choreography.

Black teachers in white spaces: Rupturing reproductions of Anti-Blackness in preservice social studies education

ABSTRACT While states, educational agencies, and colleges of education across the United States seek to recruit more Black social studies teachers, the authors of this study—two former social studies teachers turned social studies preservice educators—raise caution to how limited these efforts are in transforming the anti-Black conditions that often contextualize teacher education programs. Using duethonographic methods, the authors reflect and analyze their experiences as undergraduate preservice social studies educators in predominately white institutions. In doing so, they construct letters to influential educators in their lives. As the letters and related analyses reveal, they had influential Black radical educators in and out of the academy that supported their justice-centered pedagogical and curricular development, as well as their survival in anti-Black preservice contexts. The authors conclude by putting forth a conceptualization of BlackCrit in preservice social studies education that they hope will aid educators and students alike in locating and utilizing support systems rooted in Black love and unapologetic praxes to both interrogate and dismantle the structures of anti-Blackness present in their preservice social studies programs.