Black Resistance Research Articles

O sentido constitucional do tombamento quilombola: reflexões a partir do diálogo entre Direito e história

The article addresses the contributions of history to the understanding of the constitutional meaning of the listing of quilombola heritage, in art. 216, § 5 of the Federal Constitution, taking the controversies between Anthropology and History, concerning the redefinition of quilombos, as a starting point. The listing of all sites with historical reminiscences of the old quilombos constitutes a legal and constitutional command that still lacks enforcement, considering that the historic definition of quilombo is the subject of many criticisms, which understand that the concept, in fact, tries to refrigerate the quilombo. Disagreeing with this premise, the article intends to demonstrate that such controversy must be mediated by the Law, based on the reconciliation of the contributions of Anthropology and History to the quilombola cause. In this sense, the contributions of history to the problem of quilombos present them as symbols of black resistance, which was recognized by the Federal Constitution, which made possible, through patrimonial protection, the adding of new elements to the myth of the Nation-State. The methodology used was a critical review of previous research.

Mujeres negras y feminismo afrodiasporico en la agenda Brasil-Colombia

No presente documento busca-se evidenciar as formas de opressão, dominação e exploração a que são submetidas as mulheres negras no Brasil e na Colômbia e o feminismo afrodiasporico como alternativa dos movimentos de mulheres negras para a criação de uma agenda comum de resistência. Apresentam-se alguns elementos de análise interseccional de forma a perceber que entre ditas categorias existem relações cruzadas que fazem impossível assumir a primazia de alguma delas sobre outra. Algumas caraterísticas da população negra nesses territórios são demarcadas evidenciando as analogias presentes na diáspora africana na reinvenção da vida em diversas geografias. Procura-se destacar as principais semelhanças nas estratégias de resistência das mulheres negras grifando as caraterísticas comuns na luta contra o capitalismo patriarcal de supremacia branca.

Phyllis Ntantala Revisited: The Politics of Mothering Black Resistance Movements through Writing

Phyllis Ntantala was born in South Africa in the 1920s and moved to the USA in the 1960s. She used her writings as a weapon to confront injustices meted out to African people the world over. Her struggle made a significant contribution to Pan-Africanism, as she identified not only with the struggles of black South Africans, but also with the struggles of African Americans. This Pan-African approach comes out strongly in her autobiography, A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (1992). The text captures not only the struggles of the African people in South Africa as they resisted and challenged discriminatory practices by a white settler minority community, but also that of the African-American community, as it depicts the dramatic struggles of the civil rights movement, led by figures such as Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To those who assumed that Ntantala would be grateful for the privileges she enjoyed in the USA, and which she lacked in her native South Africa, she responded that in her country she “lived as a black person”, and that in the USA she “was also a black person”; consequently, she “looked at things from a black person’s perspective” (1992, 198). This article is an academic and intellectual celebration of Phyllis Ntantala’s contribution to Pan- African struggles as an intellectual, woman, and mother. It is written from an Afrocentric and Pan-Africanist perspective by an African-American woman.

Institutional Racism and Black Resistance as Portrayed through Images and Narratives in American Graphic Novels

For centuries, racial discrimination and injustice have resulted in the struggle of African Americans to resist racial inequality. Nevertheless, their struggle has never been easy since racism against African Americans has long been institutionalized. In other words, any kinds of white oppression that marginalized, discriminated, and alienated African Americans have embedded in formal institutions, such as legal, educational, as well as social and political institutions. Accordingly, this study dealt with institutional racism and black resistance in the United States as portrayed through images and narratives in two American graphic novels, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and John Lewis’ March: Book Three, which depicted different ways African Americans were oppressed by and resisted against institutionalized racism. This study applied African American criticism to reveal the racism and black resistance portrayed in both graphic novels based on Feagin’s and Better’s theories of systemic racism and institutional racism. As this study focused on graphic novels, the analysis combined both narrative and non-narrative elements in making meaning through cues provided in the graphic novels, including stressed words and facial expressions. This study reveals that the whites have successfully oppressed African Americans for so long due to the white racial frame and its embedded racist ideology that enforced segregation system. Furthermore, the findings suggest that only by empowering themselves, African Americans are able to resist institutionalized racism in order to gain their freedom and equality of rights.

#DiminishingDiscrimination: The symbolic annihilation of race and racism in news hashtags of ‘calling 911 on Black people’

This critical textual analysis examines the symbolic annihilation of race and racisms by the use of hashtags, such as #BBQBecky and #CornerstoreCaroline, in news coverage of White people in the United States who called or threatened to call 911 to report everyday behavior of Black individuals in 2018. This study argues that the use of humorous and virtual hashtags to represent the callers contributed to overall coverage of racially charged incidents in ways that reduced the events’ seriousness in terms of social policing of Black individuals. Collectively, this coverage formed a type of symbolic annihilation of racist interpretations of callers’ acts and Black resistance and meanings embedded within the hashtags themselves.

Locating black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories

ABSTRACTMigrating to the US is transformative in the short stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! and Chimamanda Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The currents of Blackness, gender and class alter their characters' experiences of the world, shaped by the global flows of migration taking place under neoliberal capitalism. This essay explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist resistance in Danticat's ‘Caroline's Wedding' and Adichie's ‘Imitation'. I offer a Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatised. My reading of Danticat's and Adichie’s short stories leads to a progressive reconsideration of diaspora.

Surviving (Black) Together

How do Black feminism and womanism foster interconnectedness to one another and the sacred? What knowledges manifest through collective practices of wondering and wandering together? This essay provides reflections on our own engagements with creative-relational inquiry, manifested through our collective practice, Hill L. Waters, a scholar–artist collective rooted in love, Black queer resistance, and art as activism. Organized around and through three corresponding moments, this poetic essay embodies creative-relational inquiry and narrates our process of collectivity. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how collectivity as a writing practice, political commitment, and identity translates Black feminist and womanist theory into praxis.

Review: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, by Damien M. Sojoyner

Review: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, by Damien M. Sojoyner

The White Response to Black Lives Matter and Mike Brown

Using the year 2015 to frame and contextualize the discussion, this article asks why white backlash is an expected reaction to black resistance. In short, white backlash is built into the liberal construction of race. Utilizing Joel Olson’s conception of Herrenvolk democracy, this article analyzes how the color-blind norm of race moves race into a sphere of discourse where it is omnipresent but also disempowered for any legal remedy. Policing becomes an institution by which race is made apparent, as the inequitable treatment by the police dictates who is protected by the color line. Drawn from polling surveys and government reports, data is provided with regard to the unchanging perceptions of racial attitudes. Black Lives Matter takes up the Black radical tradition in order to reassert Black humanity in the face of a system that normalizes racial violence, racial terror, and its own racial ignorance. In this way BLM displays the counternarrative to white hegemony. This counternarrative forces us to realize the depth of the race problem by mobilizing a language of abolition. Circling back to Olson’s abolition democracy, this article concludes by looking at how far we must go in terms of applying abolition to our discourse, language, conception of humanity, and democracy.

Protesting “a Bigger and Better Birth of a Nation”: Lost Causism and Black Resistance to David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, 1936–1940

This article traces the history of concerted black resistance to the film Gone with the Wind, whose popularity I argue was contingent on its expression of white nationalist pro-Confederate, pro-slaveholder Lost Cause mythology. By centering the voices of the resistance, this article offers a corrective to previous scholarship that fails to grasp the resistance’s significance or frames it as merely provoked by the offensive nature of the film’s racist imagery and language. Instead, at the heart of the protest was the danger that the film’s mythology posed to black communities if it became entrenched in white national historical consciousness. Activists were correct about the film’s ideological impact, and their protests wielded real influence, altering the film’s final product to be less overtly racist. However, failing to stop Gone with the Wind, while muting its most racist components, contributed to the film’s incredible popularity and its longevity.

Terreiros e quilombos no Brasil, um louvor às resistências

O artigo se propõe a tensionar o campo do patrimônio cultural pelo modo de pensar rizomático. O objetivo geral é questionar as políticas ancoradas na questão identitária e, atreladas a elas, políticas de direito territorial no Brasil. Nesse questionamento, colocamo-nos em uma posição de contra-saber/poder dominante e fazemos um louvor às resistências... Às existências que sobrevivem. São objetos de estudo que trazem acontecimentos que causaram rupturas e conexões. Possuem marcos temporais específicos em suas emergências, porém constituem sobrevivências importantes a serem destacadas sobrevivências a processos territoriais hegemônicos, guiados pelo capital. Sobrevivências que fazem uso do conceito identidade para a garantia de seus direitos. Os dois estudos apresentados, o Terreiro da Casa Branca (Salvador/BA) e o Quilombo Caçandoca (Ubatuba/SP), ressaltam os terreiros e quilombos enquanto “Territórios Negros”, a resistência negra espacializada.

Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas*

Abstract The lash and shackles remain two primary symbols of material degradation fixed in the historical memory of slavery in the Americas. Yet as recounted by states, abolitionists, travellers, and most importantly slaves themselves, perhaps the most terrifying and effective tool for disciplining black bodies and dominating their space was the dog. This article draws upon archival research and the published materials of former slaves, novelists, slave owners, abolitionists, Atlantic travelers, and police reports to link the systems of slave hunting in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the US South throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slave hounds were skillfully honed biopower predicated upon scenting, hearing, sighting, outrunning, outlasting, signaling, attacking, and sometimes terminating, black runaways. These animals permeated slave societies throughout the Americas and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion, indigenous extirpation, economic extraction, and social domination in slave societies. as dogs were bred to track and hunt enslaved runaways, slave communities utilized resources from the natural environment to obfuscate the animal's heightened senses, which produced successful escapes on multiple occasions. This insistence of slaves' humanity, and the intensity of dog attacks against black resistance in the Caribbean and US South, both served as proof of slavery's inhumanity to abolitionists. Examining racialized canine attacks also contextualizes representations of anti-blackness and interspecies ideas of race. An Atlantic network of breeding, training and sales facilitated the use of slave hounds in each major American slave society to subdue human property, actualize legal categories of subjugation, and build efficient economic and state regimes. This integral process is often overlooked in histories of slavery, the African Diaspora, and colonialism. By violently enforcing slavery’s regimes of racism and profit, exposing the humanity of the enslaved and depravity of enslavers, and enraging transnational abolitionists, hounds were central to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas.

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Getting Under the Skin: Antiblackness, Proximity, and Resistance in the SLĀV Affair

SLĀV is a musical stage play directed by Robert Lepage, and based on recordings by singer Béatrice “Betty” Bonifassi. The recordings are Bonifassi’s reinterpretations of music composed by enslaved and incarcerated African Americans—that is Black people labouring under, and resisting, the conditions of slavery and its afterlife. Though Lepage and Bonifassi promoted the show as an homage to Black people, SLĀV opened at the 2018 Montreal International Jazz Festival to protests by the SLĀV Resistance Collective, accusing it of cultural appropriation. SLĀV was eventually cancelled as Black artists began pulling out of the festival. Unsurprisingly, Lepage, Bonifassi and much of the Quebec public accused the protestors of censorship, and of misunderstanding Quebec’s unique context. Situating its analysis within the field of Black Canadian Studies, in this article Howard examines the discourse around SLĀV as manifested through the words of Bonifassi, Lepage, journalists, and commenters. Howard argues that SLĀV instantiates the broader context of antiblackness in Quebec, and pays particular attention to gestures of inclusion and proximity consistent with modes of slavery and its afterlife in New France/Quebec. These gestures attempt to contain Blackness within national, linguistic, and other boundaries, disciplining the ways it is allowed to assert itself. Black resistance must therefore defy these boundaries and claim solidarity between and across variously located Black people.

A Speculative Reading of Black Feminist Resistance in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

A Speculative Reading of Black Feminist Resistance in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans

Reviewed by: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans Selena Sanderfer (bio) A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 313. $29.95 cloth) One of the most difficult tasks for historians is to uncover the voices of peoples who have faced erasure or left little evidence that has survived in the historical record. In A Mind to Stay: White Plantations, Black Homeland, Sydney Nathans unearthed the lives of Paul Hargis, a family patriarch who experienced the transition from slavery to freedom, and the peoples of Cassimore, the all Black community that he and other formerly enslaved people helped to establish in Hale County, Alabama, after the Civil War. Hargis left few clues about his life: a Freedmen's Bureau contract signed with an 'X' in 1865, his place of residence in census records, and a deed documenting that he purchased land in the 1880s. In order to elucidate Hargis's story, the author oftentimes had to investigate him indirectly and comb the thousands of papers left by his former owner, Paul Cameron, for greater insight. Nathans has completed an immense undertaking in reconstructing Cassimore by collecting oral histories, reconstructing family trees, and perusing the masses of public records referencing the community's longtime residents. The backdrop to these experiences is the land itself. Culminating with the modern civil rights movement, the story of the land spans the one hundred seventy-year history of the residents' enslavement in the antebellum period, their attempts to become economically self-sufficient in the postwar era, community development during the age of Jim Crow, and the challenges of commercialized farming and outward migration in the twentieth century. Nathan contends that Black residents, who chose to stay, connected landownership to true freedom. His work is "an account of the meaning of land to those who lived on it, and how the land's role and meaning changed over time" (p. 14). A Mind to Stay covers the economic, political, and social history of Cassimore, including people such as Tom Ruffin, a formerly enslaved person, who by 1900 was the largest Black landowner in the county, and Ned Forrest Hargress, a landowner, church elder, and [End Page 363] rumored son of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Also included are residents who challenged racial and economic injustices such as James Lyles, a preacher and civil rights leader, who along with his wife, Mildred, began a local Black credit union and the Alabama Farmer's Cooperative in the 1960s, and Alice Sledge Hargress, who in 1964 at the age of fifty mobilized during the civil rights movement and, like thousands of other Blacks in Hale County, registered to vote for the first time. Some contention might be made at the author's attempts at emotional conjecture, applied at times to Cameron and to Hargis. Nathans portrays Paul Cameron as a paternalistic slaveowner, one who cares for his enslaved workers more than profits. The author contends, "Indeed, within bondage, as Paul Hargis and his siblings could testify, the fair measure of 'humanity' was comparative, and by comparison, the Camerons and Bennehans of the early nineteenth century stood high among their peers" (p. 98). Yet, there are also accounts in which Cameron exhibits the demoralizing characteristics of southern slave owners. In 1865 one of his former bondsman called him a "hard Master—yielding short supplies of all sort & granting no indulgences" (p. 98). An absentee owner to many of his slaves, it can also be said that he was driven by profit, condoned contemporary tortures, and always displayed bias toward the word of his white employees. Although possibly contrived, most of the assertions about Cameron's motivations, Hargis's concerns, and the rationale of both enslaved people and owners, are reasonably surmised. Within this microhistory of one Black community in Alabama, readers will gain insight into and recognize themes of westward migration, Black resistance to economic and political subjugation, and southern genealogy. A Mind to Stay will also begin to allow readers to understand how for Black Americans living on family land provided a sense of pride, self-determination, and sanctuary from Jim Crow that cannot...

Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson

Reviewed by: Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson Richard S. Newman (bio) Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. By Kellie Carter Jackson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 224. Cloth, $34.95.) What role does violence play in the struggle for social change? That is the challenging question Kellie Carter Jackson asks in her stimulating and thought-provoking book on black abolitionists and the politics of violence [End Page 263] before the Civil War. More than an examination of violent means in the classic abolitionist struggle, Jackson’s book offers a deeper meditation on the way that force has framed black freedom struggles. As she notes, “The trajectory of change in black America has almost always depended upon the local, state, and federal government’s willingness to accept (or be forced to accept) black humanity” (162). And that struggle has always entailed forceful confrontations with white politicians and citizens—sometimes physical, sometimes rhetorical, but always ramifying. From slave rebellions to self-defense measures to explosive oratory that galvanized blacks and scared white audiences, Jackson notes that force was never far from the black freedom movement. Yet, she asserts, too many abolitionist scholars still “privilege the performance of nonviolence” (3). Only when we see “violence as the great accelerator in American emancipation” will scholars have a more accurate understanding of black abolitionism’s power and importance (3). Though Jackson perhaps underrates the way that other scholars have examined violence in abolitionism, this book is an essential read. Indeed, it is a book meant not only for scholars of abolitionism and the Civil War but for anyone interested in the way that activist struggles often straddle the line between prophetic words and forceful (even violent) action. Jackson’s book is forcefully argued. While she ranges beyond the nineteenth century in introductory and concluding sections, Jackson focuses tightly on black abolitionists’ understanding of violence as both tactic and strategy during the antebellum era. In five main chapters, she examines several key themes in the black radical tradition: the creation of a usable iconography of black rebellion, debates over the limits of moral suasion and the importance of physical self-defense tactics in northern black communities, and the wider meaning of black resistance on the eve of sectional war. Jackson flips the traditional script in abolitionist historiography by making nonviolent activists and antislavery political organizers the outliers to a black-centered struggle held together literally by the concept of force. As she notes, white reformers consistently contained black activists’ call for physical responses to proslavery violence. In the wake of Elijah Lovejoy’s killing in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, white abolitionists counseled local blacks against arming themselves. Little wonder that African Americans revered John Brown, who, far from containing black uprising, sought to join it. That search for truly forceful friends became a key component of black liberation. Jackson joins a host of other scholars in noting that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 served as a tipping point for the entire abolitionist movement. Yet while many white activists now supported black self-defense tactics, many others still saw nonviolence (in the form of political mobilization or [End Page 264] moral suasion) as the best strategy for undercutting slavery as a national institution. Blacks dissented, espousing proactive forms of rebellion. They valorized slave uprising and made enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law “a dangerous endeavor” (53). In this way, blacks helped make the 1850s “one of the most violent eras in US history” (53). The Civil War didn’t just come; it was beckoned by black activists who literally wanted to fight for freedom. Though Jackson’s book takes on abolitionist historiography, it also flows from broader scholarly attempts to place violence at the center of American history. From Joanne Freeman’s The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (2018), on violence in American politics, to Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013), which focuses on state-sponsored violence against Native Americans during the Civil War, a range of scholars has sought to link violence, reform, and nation...

Theorize for What? Reading Black Queer Film and Popular Culture

Theorize for What? Reading Black Queer Film and Popular Culture Jennifer DeClue (bio) Still and moving images of black queer sexuality abound in our contemporary moment and bountifully elicit black queer theories of embodiment, temporality, and desire.1 The condition of non-heteronormativity that coheres to national black belonging is a conduit for the imminent, pervasive, and insidious vulnerability to state violence that imperils all black people. The vector of blackness bends, shapes, and refracts violences that circulate through the brutality of gender production, the myriad traumas of sexuality, the virulence of class stratification, and the occlusion of black needs around ability and care. The cultural consumption of blackness makes inescapable the history of black valuation and commodification and makes unmistakable the ties between black worthiness, black pain, and black fascination. These conditions produce a queer blackness of being made evident in films and works of popular culture that conjure scenes of black resistance, black queer desire, and black love and tenderness.2 Black queer cultural production allows for luster, sensuality, and pleasure to not simply rest in our imaginations but be made material, felt and seen. The way that images of black corporeality are made delectable and voraciously consumed is beyond the control of the makers, but all is not lost, this is where black queer theory can issue a measure of redress. In the most capacious and insightful ways, black queer theory names and meticulously analyzes targeted, covert, and free floating anti-black heteronormative impositions that mean to limit our recourse, mistake our glamor for digestibility, and threaten our lives with impunity.3 As Cathy Cohen explicates in her foundational article, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” “queer” lives into its radical potential when it refers not simply to sexuality and gender, but describes a political commitment full of coalitional possibilities [End Page 43] and strategies that join together to dismantle mechanisms of systemic oppression and upend limiting conceptions of freedom.4 My understanding of the urgency of black queer theory is informed by the ways that it carries with it that unabashed defiance of dominant power that has given “queer” its radical charge. In considering the stakes of black queer theory and its relationship to black queer film and popular culture, attention to black trans theory and representation is essential. It must be stated, unequivocally, that the vulnerability of trans visibility is lethal. The murders of black trans women and men continue, with no end in sight. To theorize visual culture and black queerness is to theorize visibility and black transness and contend with the bind of representation that puts black trans and queer people’s lives in jeopardy. This analysis of black queer theory, film, and popular culture is meant to work in concert with black trans theory. The anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett, (Tourmaline), Eric Stanley, and Johanna Burton, brilliantly and incisively theorizes the trap of trans visibility.5 C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity brings black trans history into contact with a black trans present through a theoretical treatment that produces a rigorous and imaginative intervention into black studies and trans studies.6 Both Trap Door and Black on Both Sides balance their examinations of the racialized gender terror of the past and the racialized gender terror of the present with a world-making impetus that shapes trans futures. The radical world-making possibilities that emerge in black trans and queer theory call to me, and I reel with a desire that lurches toward the future as I reach back toward a beckoning past. The fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, celebrated in the summer of 2019, is a stirring reminder of the indelible truth that trans women of color inaugurated our contemporary queer movement with their acts of resistance. The trans coalitional movement building work of S.T.A.R, founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in 1970, imagined a future that included gender self-determination, the end of police violence, the end of exploitation by the medical industry, and food, shelter, and education for all; we...

Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest by Brent M. S. Campney

Reviewed by: Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest by Brent M. S. Campney Amy Louise Wood Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest. By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. x, 240. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08430-0; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04249-2.) Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest is a welcome follow-up to Brent M. S. Campney's earlier book, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana, 2015), which challenges the popular illusion that Kansas was a bastion of pastoral virtue, free of the racial conflict that consumed the South or urban locales in the North. Instead, Campney argues that racist violence was as important to maintaining racial hierarchy in this midwestern state as it was in the South. Hostile Heartland expands this same argument to the larger region, with chapters that cover histories of racist violence in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri, as well as Kansas. He also extends his time frame, reaching back to the antebellum era and spanning through the 1930s. Campney makes a number of important contributions. First, he is one of just a handful of scholars who have examined lynching as part of a continuum of violence that includes threatened lynchings, homicides, rapes, whippings, and expulsions. Hostile Heartland makes clear that all these various forms of racist violence terrorized African Americans and supported white efforts to institute segregation, by law or custom, in public life. Second, Campney's chapter on [End Page 733] antebellum violence in the Old Northwest upsets the common presumption that Jim Crow–era lynchings represented a new phenomenon. Third, Campney shows how African Americans resisted white attacks, often through armed selfdefense. Black resistance happened organically and locally, rather than through official civil rights activism, and that resistance could engender further attacks and retribution. Fourth, his chapter on the role of law enforcement in aiding and—over time, as the police became more professionalized—stopping lynchings is a careful analysis of the topic that should plant the seed for more scholarship on the relationship between policing and mob violence. Finally, Hostile Heartland contributes to a historiographical trend that seeks to challenge the notion that racism and racist violence were distinctive features of the South. In Campney's reading, what distinguished the South was not white supremacy but demographics; if there were fewer lynchings and other forms of attacks in the Midwest, it was only because there were fewer African Americans in the region. On the whole, white midwesterners targeted African Americans as fiercely as their southern counterparts did. Neither was racist violence merely a product of white southern migrants to the Midwest, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, Campney shows that white migrants from the Northeast were just as protective of white supremacy as those from southern states. The modes of violence that northern and southern migrants used, however, often differed, a point Campney could have elaborated upon. Campney also does not spend much time discussing what motivated this violence beyond white supremacy. He provides thorough context on the racial climate in each state he covers. Readers do not learn much, however, about the political, social, or economic contexts that might have precipitated acts of racist violence. He does note that African Americans were at times targeted because they posed an economic threat to local whites. Were there local circumstances that made those attacks more likely? What other factors might have prompted white attacks? If white supremacy was a persistent fact, why did violence break out only at certain times in certain places—and take the forms that it did? Still, despite these questions, Hostile Heartland is a thickly researched survey that draws a striking picture of just how precarious life was for African American migrants to the Midwest. Amy Louise Wood Illinois State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Anti-Black Violence, Police Brutality, White Supremacy

256 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Statement of the Feminist Studies Editorial Collective June 3, 2020 Anti-Black Violence, Police Brutality, White Supremacy We collectively represent the oldest journal of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in the United States. We write this statement in the midst of events that magnify a long history of unceasing anti-Black violence in the United States, and we do so to express our pain, rage, and vigilance. Along with this statement, we make available for open access our most recent articles about Black protest. The mass protests in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, among many, many other African Americans, remind us of the words of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: revolt occurred “because it became impossible for [them] to breathe.”1 The current uprisings are part of a long history of Black resistance and liberation movements—the Haitian revolution, Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Apartheid movement —that have inspired other freedom movements around the world. But they are also distinct because of their roots in the Movement for Black Lives, which was founded and organized by queer Black women to create a world that values Black life and centers Black joy. This movement affirms the work and intellectual labor of Black women and queer, 1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, new ed., trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; London: Pluto, 2008), 176.  257 trans, and disabled people who use feminist and queer pedagogies to critique hierarchical organizations and charismatic leaders. The uprisings take place in the third month of a COVID-19 pandemic that has devastated Black lives. The healthcare system has long failed Black people, but especially so under an administration determined to gut the Affordable Care Act. Low-paid healthcare workers, janitors, domestic workers, transportation workers, and those working in the gig economy have been forced to work without proper personal protective equipment, belying the notion that they are “essential” workers. Racial capitalism has rendered vast numbers of people disposable through staggering layoffs . The US state’s failure in the domains of health and economic protection stands in especially stark contrast to its spectacularly militarist crackdowns on protesters using tear gas, rubber bullets, and low-flying army helicopters. The Trump administration’s necropolitics are on full display: it has determined who will live and who will die by enacting violence in the name of preserving law and order and by pursuing neglect and austerity measures that have so far contributed to the deaths of approximately 200,000 people and a deadly economic collapse. As uprisings continue and cities burn across the country and popular media and conservative portrayals decry violence toward property, we reiterate our commitment to challenge violence against people— structural and physical—and the environments they inhabit. We recognize that racialized narratives shape the violence and note how, when white bodies instigate violence, it is often overlooked. We acknowledge and condemn the hardships that property damage causes to those who are economically struggling. But we refuse to be distracted from the key principle: the non-negotiable value of Black lives, minds, and bodies. As we collectively grieve specific lives lost, we also know there are countless others whose names we will never hear. The unrest we see is the culmination of years of terror visited upon Black people of all kinds. The death of Black men at the hands of the police has now provoked a series of protests, but until the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, we had never seen such large-scale protests over the death of a Black woman. And we see over and over again that queer and trans people such as Tony McDade who die at the hands of the police are not grieved publicly, their humanity not seen. We salute projects such as #SayHerName and #BlackTransLivesMatter that have raised awareness of the depth of state violence against all Black people. 258 We recognize the bravery of those who protest white supremacy and stand in solidarity with them—amid a deadly pandemic, people are putting their lives at risk for this principle. Their demands for change...