Black Talk Research Articles

The Crucible

The Crucible

Composite counterstorytelling as a technique for challenging ambivalence about race and racism in the labour market in Ireland

In this study, the statement ‘race is no longer an issue’ is used to examine how 32 migrants of Spanish, Polish and Nigerian descent understand the significance of race in labour market mobility in Ireland. Their responses showed that Black and White workers talk about race differently. It also revealed an ambivalence about race among the White workers. This article employs counterstorytelling technique to analyse and present these differences through stories which humanise the lived experiences of migrants navigating the Irish labour market. The article commences with a discussion of how whiteness provides unacknowledged privilege. This is followed by a discussion of critical race theory’s counterstorytelling as an analytical tool for examining social relations. The participants’ narratives and current realities are then synthesised and woven into dialogues to construct composite portraits that invite readers into the world of migrant workers. The two stories constructed in this article portray how stories can open conversation about race and racism. Story A contains stereotypes that are used to explain the lack of racial diversity in the workplace, while story B challenges the complacency about how race and racism impact on the disparity in outcome among different groups. Finally, the article highlights the importance of counterstories in labour market research.

Black LGBTQ/SGL Elders: A Black Transwoman, an African-American Same-Gender Loving Woman, and a Black Lesbian Talking About Sex with a Cisgender White Lesbian Sex Researcher

Black LGBTQ/SGL Elders: A Black Transwoman, an African-American Same-Gender Loving Woman, and a Black Lesbian Talking About Sex with a Cisgender White Lesbian Sex Researcher

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

Black women talk about stereotypical transference enactments in cross-cultural supervision

ABSTRACTLittle is known about cross-cultural supervision dynamics between Black, female supervisors who provide clinical supervision of White supervisees. This study examined transference enactments which occurred between Black, female clinical supervisors (N = 57) and White supervisees. The results show that White supervisees’ racist and sexist behaviors towards the Black, female supervisors demonstrated remnants of stereotypical images historically attributed to Black women (i.e., Mammy, Jezebel, and/or Sapphire). Moreover, the findings highlight the need to initiate multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills to enhance clinical skills. The paper concludes with recommendations for cross-cultural supervisory dyads and implications for future research.

Reading Góngora's habla de negros in a Literary Attack Poem

Abstract This article interprets and contextualizes Góngora's 1609 burlesque, black-talk sonnet “A la Jerusalén conquistada que compuso Lope de Vega.” A translation into English illuminates the poem's sense: a black reader critiques Lope's epic and alludes to an African epic superior to the Jerusalén. After clarifying Góngora's words, I argue that his implied reader recognizes black talk as an invitation to laughter at and derision of black Africans. The study then focuses specifically on black oppression related to literary composition and shows how Góngora's sonnet affirms exclusivity for white male authors. To this end, I establish parallels between Góngora's sonnet and writing by and about Juan Latino, the sixteenth-century black author of epic poetry in Latin who challenged white authorial exclusivity and became a frequently invoked exception to the rule as well as a target for racist stereotyping.

Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics

Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics. By Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2013), pp.viii + 437, AU$40.00 (pb).

“A boy cannot marry another boy”: adolescent boys' talk about ‘gay’ boys at school

This study explored how black South African adolescent boys talk about ‘gay’1 in schools. Thirty two boys (age ranged from 13–18 years old) attending two high schools in a historically black South African township took part. Data on their understanding of being gay were gathered using individual interviews and focus group discussions. The data were analysed using Edley and Wetherell's (2001) discursive interpretive framework. Findings suggest negative bias in the boys' attitudes towards ‘gay’ boys. The boys considered being ‘gay’ as ‘deviant’, ‘abnormal’, ‘un-Christian’ and ‘un-African’. Furthermore, ‘straight’2 boys reported isolating themselves from ‘gay’ boys and avoiding practices stereotypically associated with being ‘gay’, such as wearing colorful pink clothes. Social constructions of hegemonic masculinity and homophobia appear present within an ordinary South African school setting.

The Urge to Adorn: Generational Wit and the Birth of The Signifying Monkey

The Urge to AdornGenerational Wit and the Birth of The Signifying Monkey Houston A. Baker Jr. (bio) What ever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes. His religious service is for the greater part excellent prose poetry. Both prayers and sermons are true works of art. The supplication is forgotten in the frenzy of creation. The prayer of the white man is considered humorous in its bleakness. The beauty of the Old Testament does not exceed that of a Negro prayer. —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) It was, however, in a folklore molded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth, the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, the confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son, the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular, work songs sung under blazing suns, all these formed the channel through which the racial wisdom flowed. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Literature” (1937) If Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston had not existed, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his magnum opus, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, would not exist.1 Wright and Hurston are signally brilliant elders who made Gates possible. In her canonical essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston offers an anecdote to illustrate an African American “urge to adorn.”2 She describes a room in a black residence of Mobile, Alabama, as follows: “an over-stuffed mohair living-room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and chifferobe, a console victrola. The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements of [End Page 831] the Mobile Register. There were seven calendars and three wall pockets” (1022). Hurston observes that to the jaundiced eye the scene may appear grotesque. But to the practiced eye of the African American cultural initiate, the room is the quintessence of beauty. Hurston sums the matter as follows: “We each have our standards of art, and thus we are all interested parties and so unfit to pass judgment upon the art concepts of others” (1022). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers personal testimony to his instruction in the linguistic adornment and grace of the black vernacular as follows: My fascination with black language stems from my father’s enjoyment of absolute control over its manipulation. My father has mastered black language rituals, certainly; he also has the ability to analyze them, to tell you what he is doing, why, and how. … It is amazing how much black people, in ritual settings such as barbershops and pool halls, street corners and family reunions, talk about talking. Why do they do this? I think they do it to pass these rituals along from one generation to the next. They do it to preserve the traditions of “the race.” (xxi) Vernacular adornment and adorned black talk, as Hurston notes, transcend summary judgments. In their deployment and effects both enhancement and verbal exchange are vehicles for the transmission of what Richard Wright calls “racial wisdom” (“Blueprint”).3 Such wisdom is spoken, inscribed, and performed in a genealogy of preservation and passage. Wright would refer to the adornment noted by Hurston and black verbal mastery recalled by Gates as “forms of things unknown.” For Wright, “unknown” signifies not absence, but a subtly ubiquitous presence of black initiation rites. The ever-morphing protocols of vernacular “forms” are all citations of African American tradition. They are anagrammatic whispers, street-corner boasts, and kitchen table corrections. Hurston’s astute characterization of the vernacular and Wright’s emphatic championing of the “forms of things unknown” secure their legacies as critical instruction. Their critiques mark a double-gendered and engendered wisdom of vernacular mother and father wit. Who has not been captivated by Hurston’s catalog of double descriptors such as “high-tall,” “kill-dead,” and “hot-boiling”? Who has not been drawn into the fictive world of Wright by his bald and skillful representation of vernacular speech? In wisdom and style, Wright and Hurston provide indispensable conditions of possibility for the [End Page...

Nikki Giovanni: Literary Survivor Across Centuries

Nikki Giovanni: Literary Survivor Across Centuries Trudier Harris (bio) Followers of Nikki Giovanni recognize her easily in a variety of roles: poet, essayist, reader extraordinaire, proto-feminist, editor, cultural cheerleader, memoirist, conversationalist, scholar/critic, and professor/teacher. What cements all these roles together is the fact that Giovanni is a literary survivor. For more than forty years (noteworthy in the life of any artist, but especially in the context of Giovanni’s having first earned a reputation during the volatile 1960s), Giovanni has maintained a loyal following among readers and listeners as well as among a few faithful evaluators of her work.1 She has unquestionably managed to adjust with the times, to grow, and to retain a wide popularity among readers and listeners of her own generation as well as those much older and much younger than she is. From the distinctive—yet collective—voice she put forth early in her career in such works as Black Feeling Black Talk Black Judgement (1970) through her latest declarations of traveling to Mars with the assistance of nasa, Giovanni has remained impressively herself, a self that her audiences appreciate. From echoing the strands of militancy that guided the young artists of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to exhibiting a divergent strand of individualism that was at times in tune with that militancy and at times not, Giovanni has managed to earn accolades as a writer who could be sympathetic to a movement but who did not let that movement diminish her uniqueness. Giovanni’s career might be divided into a before and after—before her arrival as Commonwealth Visiting Professor of English at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 1987 and her career since that monumental change. Before was defined by identification with militancy, especially manifested in the poetry, of the 1960s and its aftermath. From the beginning of her career, Giovanni was concerned with power and politics, which she interpreted in many ways, and which was informed by the lessons she learned from her family and friends. Throughout her career, she has focused on the emotional and political health of African Americans, which means that she has also, at times perhaps inadvertently, made [End Page 34] the health of the United States her focus as well. Communities in which she has lived and communities of which she is a part demographically have also influenced her writing, both creatively and in creative non-fiction. At times, she has served voluntarily as a spokesperson for sections of the African American community, and at other times she has been drafted into that role. She has always had integral emotional ties to social movements within African American communities, and that is perhaps one of the reasons she has managed to remain so engaged with members of the generations that were contemporary with her and that have followed her ascendency to national and international prominence. Controversy continues about whether or not Giovanni was truly a militant in the 1960s. Evidence from her poetry and essays can be used to suggest that she was quite militant. In turn, other of her poems can be used to suggest that she was more interested in friendship, love, and the relationships that accompanied both. Perusal of Black Feeling Black Talk Black Judgement will yield “Poem for Black Boys,” in which she declares that young black males should take to the streets in violent revolution instead of following Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violence tactics; “For Saundra,” in which she avows “maybe I shouldn’t write / at all / but clean my gun / and check my kerosene supply / perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all” (BFBTBJ, 89); and “The True Import of the Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro,” in which she advocates a militancy that leads to fatalities. And of course there is “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which Giovanni declares that, in retaliation for King’s assassination, most white people should have “at least two fingers” removed from both hands (bfbtbj, 54) and should be blinded or have their eyes removed. When she asserts that King’s blood should choke “ten hundred million whites” (bfbtbj, 55), the case for militancy seems to be...

A Contemporary Look at Social Linguistics in the Classroom: A Book Review of Talkin’ Black Talk: Language, Education and Social Change

Alim, H. S., & Baugh, J. (Eds.) (2007). Talkin' Black Talk: Language, Education and Social Change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0807747469 (paperback). Talkin' Black Talk: Languag...

Considering the political roles of Black talk radio and the Afrosphere in response to the Jena 6

Purpose – This paper seeks to present the Black blogosphere’s discussion of the Jena 6 case to uncover how ethnic identity is performed discursively to promote social activism. Design/methodology/approach – Through an analysis of Black blog postings reporting on the Jena 6 case, this case study chronicles the way in which Black audiences responded to this news story. The research chronicles the ways in which Black audiences responded to the Jena 6 news story and how Black blogs expanded participation in the discussion of events related to Black interests. Findings – The findings point to critiques of dominant cultural meanings about race relations and racial injustice. In addition, the findings suggest that social media has become an additional medium that is effectively used by African Americans’ in their historical struggle for civil rights. By chronicling the ways in which Black audiences responded to this news story, the paper demonstrates that Black blogs provide a useful space for discussing perceived racial injustice from a diverse African American cultural perspective. Moreover, Black bloggers are able to raise awareness of racial injustice within both the Black community and the broader US society and mobilize collective action. Practical implications – New divides may be emerging because of limitations on what you can do on a mobile device. This increase in mobile internet access and the accompanying differences in internet experience heightens the need for studies that examine culturally salient behavioral aspects of use and interpersonal relationships characterized by social support, communication, and resource sharing. Originality/value – Through an analysis of Black blog postings reporting on the Jena 6 case, this study chronicles the way in which Black audiences responded to this news story. The findings point to critiques of dominant cultural meanings about race relations and racial injustice. In addition, our findings suggest that the momentum of this social movement was based in the political and economic dynamics of a community; however, social media is enabling critical global, yet vigorous conversion of activism

From Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Ture

The young black boy—maybe sixteen years old if his smooth young face is a measure— stands handcuffed in a corner of the store while two policemen—one white and one black— take down particulars; the black policeman talking to him while scribbling into a small notebook. “I told these boys,” the woman behind the counter—a black woman—tells the white policeman who is entering notes into his pad too, “that if they keep coming in here trying to steal I was going to call the cops.” She was scooping up cigarettes, gum, candy, and other counter items, handing them to a helper who was putting them beneath the counter. The store wasn’t closing; it’s just that the neighborhood wasn’t changing either. Black power in Greenwood, Mississippi, helped make possible the black-owned gas station and convenience store where this arrest took place. In the 1950s, Amzie Moore, head of the NAACP in neighboring Bolivar County, had the only black-owned gas station in the Mississippi Delta. He refused to put up “white” and “colored” signs and seated in his home’s bay window with a rifle, floodlights pouring over the backyard, at least when we were there, he kept watch to protect himself, us, and his house from the attack he was certain would be coming from outraged whites one night. Black power has desegregated Greenwood’s police force, elected blacks to the city’s Board of Aldermen, and made it possible for a black man like me to enter the Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood and have a white clerk politely ask, “May I help you, sir?” The questions surrounding young boys like the one I saw being arrested at the convenience store remain unanswered. Black Power. Although Richard Wright wrote a book with that title, history will always associate the words with Stokely Carmichael, who on June 16, 1966, while continuing a protest march begun by James Meredith, spoke them in a Greenwood park not far from the gas station where years later I was witnessing that young boy’s arrest. Earlier that June day in 1966, Stokely too had been arrested. “This is the 27th time . . .” he told the crowd of 1,000. “I ain’t going to jail no more. . . . We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” he roared to amens, clapping, and stomping feet. He stood, eyes blazing, fist clenched with one finger pointing, like a wrathful prophet stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament as Willie Ricks, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer, leapt to the platform. “BLACK POWER!” Ricks shouted out, “BLACK POWER! What do you want?” “BLACK POWER!” the crowd responded with a force that startled a press corps expecting to hear the tones of we shall overcome. And Stokely Carmichael exploded onto the national stage and into the national consciousness as yet another unexpected black leader whose anger and dissatisfaction seemed to come out of nowhere.

Race Relations Stories: How Southeast Asian Refugees Interpret The Ancestral Narration Of Black And White Peers

The contact hypothesis (Allport 1954) predicts that cross-racial interaction can produce social bonding under certain status, relational, and institutional conditions. We extend this classic theory on ingroups and outgroups using qualitative data on Cambodian and Hmong refugees' recollections of casual conversations about ancestry with black and white peers. To cope with affective trauma, these refugees have created personal narratives about forced emigration. They believe that white peers shared stories about immigrant ancestors from Europe to affirm or elicit their emigration narrative. The refugees rarely believe that black peers' talk about slavery and discrimination was a story-sharing gesture and felt uncomfortable discussing these issues. Yet the refugees also feel disappointed when recalling interactions with assimilated white peers who “don't have a story to tell” about ancestry. From these inductive findings, this article proposes the corollary discourse hypothesis to explain how sentiments about intergroup narration, and not just frequency of contact, amplify or diminish empathy and association in a heterogeneous society.

Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power. Edited by Dwight N. Hopkins. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007. 262 pp. $24.95 paper

Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power. Edited by Dwight N. Hopkins. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007. 262 pp. $24.95 paper

Why I Hate Abercrombie &amp; Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (review)

McBride, Dwight A. 2005. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on and Sexuality. New York: New York University Press. $60.00 hc. $19.00 sc. xvi + 251 pp.In Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, Dwight A. McBride synthesizes black, feminist, and queer to interrogate black male in political, popular, and academic arenas. The collection, comprised of ten essays, marks another entry in slowly growing corpus of scholarship dedicated to integrating sexuality and into black and queer studies, respectively. This is a pressing and timely cause to be sure-one that cannot be achieved through glancing gestures to quartet of race, gender, sexuality, and (8). Instead, McBride argues that risks must be taken, disciplines transcended, and personal experiences revealed for, in phrasing of Essex Hemphill, the ass-splitting truth to be told (qtd. in McBride 37).Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch does indeed transcend disciplinary genres, with rhetorical styles ranging from scholarly to confessional. Written in three sections, essays are organized around Queer Black Thought, Race and Sexuality on Occasion, and Straight Black Talk. The essays in Queer Black Thought, including provocative title essay, demonstrate ways of reading cultural texts within black queer theoretical framework McBride lays out in preface and introduction. The four brief commentaries in Race and Sexuality on Occasion focus on political issues where race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect. Finally, Straight Black Talk examines how academic rhetorics of obscure black gays and lesbians.Inspired by Robert Reid-Pharr's Black Gay Man (2001) and Gary Fisher's Gary in Your Pocket (edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1996), McBride discloses his own personal experiences of and sexuality throughout most of these essays. In most revealing essay of collection, It's a White Man's World, McBride theorizes his sexual encounters with white men to measure currency of black men's bodies in marketplace of (104). Connecting these experiences to gay pornographic films and personal ads, McBride argues persuasively that black men's bodies are objectified and that black men are valued when they fulfill white fantasies of stereotypical black sexuality and masculinity.The essay works so well because, in politicizing desire, McBride redresses one of his major disagreements with queer theory-that the realm of desire for queer theorists seems to represent possibility for a kind of idealized freedom and liberality (101). This is an important point for queer scholars interested in theorizing how sexual subjectivities are structured by and privilege. But while McBride's offers insight for queer theory, he unequivocally frames himself as a race man, personally and politically invested in transforming African American studies (2). As current chair of African American at Northwestern University, McBride's perspectives as an administrator and faculty member reveal persistent institutional and ideological obstacles to black in academia.The ideological qualms McBride raises with old paradigms for work stem from its blindness towards black gays and lesbians (3). For example, McBride argues in Straight Black Studies that scholarship on James Baldwin has tended to reduce him to one identity, rather than understand his racial, sexual, and other identities in concert with one another. McBride's reading of Baldwin scholarship advances his claim that a black queer critical sensibility is urgendy needed to challenge monolithic representations within African American that often collapse differences of gender, class and sexuality into a homogenous, hegemonic black subjectivity (39, 57). While this monolithic representation may have, been politically expedient to institutionalization of African American within white academia, it now restricts a diverse representation of black in academy. …

Black talk about AIDS

Social psychological research on educating African Americans about AIDS has linked cultural relevance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of such educational materials. Twenty-eight gender-segregated focus groups were conducted, each consisting of between four and ten African American participants with an African American focus group leader. A content analysis of 14 of the focus groups held with men revealed a pattern whereby their was a noticeable difference in the men’s reported beliefs and practices as compared to their reports on questionnaires. Participants switched between two frameworks in a manner analogous to code switching. Furthermore, these data reveal that not only was linguistic competency (defined as the ability to effectively express and communicate) framework dependent, but the content of the discourse was framework-dependent. Specifically, the content of the discourse was inconsistent and at times contradictory between frameworks.

Race and Cultural Identity: Playing the Race Game Inside Football

The first part of this paper explores the biographical and academic attention white writers have given to the black athlete. There is an examination of the links between how sport and race have been interpreted in relation to the black body, and how this has led to ambiguous assumptions about the capacity of black families to enable black players to adjust to English society. The paper shows how Fanon's (1967) approach to identity and race, combined with ideas about performance and dramaturgy (Goffman 1956), form a theoretical framework called ‘racialized performance’ that focuses on the pressure to perform to white masculine standards and values. Through a series of case studies, there is an interpretation of the ways that black players talk about their arrival into English soccer and the types of privileges and routines that have been developed by white men in their absence. The discourse of black players reveals the types of inclusion and exclusion that operate through the processes of class, race, masculinity and sexuality, through a number of relationships with white men, be that in the crowd, in the playing field, or in the changing room.

Appropriating a Slur

Appropriating a Slur

Book Review: Black Faith and Public Talk

Book Review: Black Faith and Public Talk