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Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and drawn by various artists, is a self-contained story featuring T’Challa, King of Wakanda battling threats to his kingdom. Though his primary problem is a strange force, manifesting as a huge monster, which causes earthquakes and drains vibranium of its power, he must first face a reborn White Gorilla cult, led by a resurrected M’Baku, and a bitter friend from his youth who has designed a trap for him.

Okorafor completes her run with an alternate universe story about Ngozi, the young Nigerian woman who protects Wakanda as both Venom and Black Panther. Fun adventures to accompany Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful look at governance, power and responsibility in The Black Panther.
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In Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, his 1997 collection of essays focussing on aspects of Black culture in Canada, Rinaldo Wincott, African-Canadian writer and academic, suggests that his readers “read the essays as an attempt to articulate some grammars for thinking Canadian blackness.”

He goes on to expand on what he means by “writing blackness”:

“Writing blackness after the civil-rights era, second wave feminism, black cultural nationalism, gay and lesbian liberation, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill spectacle, the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots, the Yonge Street Riots, and the O.J. Simpson trials, is difficult work.Yet, writing blackness remains important work. Black postmodernity insists upon being chronicled as it makes fun of and spoofs the very notion of writing blackness. A certain kind of upheaval of blacknesses exists which makes apparent the senselessness of writing blackness even as we are compelled and forced to write it.

“In a Canadian context, writing blackness is a scary scenario: we are an absented presence always under erasure. Located between the U.S. and the Caribbean, Canadian blackness is a bubbling brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile— even for those who have resided here for many generations. The project of articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always pre-occupied with elsewhere and seldom with here. It seems then that a tempered arrogance might be a necessary element of any grammar that is used to construct a language for writing blackness in Canada. A shift in gaze can be an important moment.

“The writing of blackness in Canada, then, might begin with a belief that something important happens here. If we accept this, finally, then critics can move beyond mere celebration into the sustaining work that critique is. A belief that something important happens here would mean that celebration could become the site for investigating ourselves in critical ways. We can begin to refuse the seductions of firstness and engage in critique, dialogue and debate, which are always much more sustaining than celebrations of originality.”

Thus, the act of discussing and critiquing black literature, music, film, art, becomes a declarative and profoundly political act - it announces that Black Canadian culture and art exist, that they are situated here, in and among other Canadian cultures, and that they are important, worth not just noting, but debating, being taken seriously. In writing these essays which deal with themes, aspects and artefacts of Black Canadian culture and history, Wincott asserts their value and importance and announces the necessity of acknowledging that these subjects are every bit as central to the Canadian cultural identity as the subjects written about by white critics. It is a revolutionary declaration.

The essays that follow cover a diverse range of subjects, from the complexity of Black Canadian culture in relation to African-American culture within the context of the Black diaspora, to the poetry of M. Nourbese Philips and Dione Brand to the films of Clement Virgo and Stephen Williams. With his essays, Wincott asserts the centrality of exploring blackness in the works of black Canadians, and the importance of this to Canadian culture as a whole. Black art is a part of Canadian art, and discussions of messages about blackness must be recognised as a legitimate topic in Canadian cultural criticism.
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Reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells the story of her life to the age of 17. It is a deep look into, not just the circumstances that shaped a woman who would become a gifted and beloved poet, but also into the conditions of life for black Americans in the south.

In her autobiography, Angelou opens up her young life fearlessly, sharing personal details not only of her family and their lives, but her pain, shame and sorrow. At the same time, she paints vivid portraits of Black culture as she experienced it, both negative and positive. We see the grinding poverty and constant threat of white insult and violence in the rural areas, but also the strength of family and community ties. We see ourselves within the rich urban black culture of St. Louis, with its connections to the underworld, and its influence on the life of the city.

Angelou - born Marguerite Johnson - and her brother Bailey were sent to live in Stamps, Arkansas when they were three and four, respectively. Their parents, then living in California, had ended their marriage and neither was in a position to care for the children, so they were put alone on a train with address tags on their wrists and tickets pinned to their clothes and sent home to their paternal grandmother. After several years living in Stamps, they were taken by their father to St Louis, where they lived first with their maternal grandmother, and then with their mother, a woman well connected to the underground gambling scene, and her lover. While there, Angelou was raped by her mother’s lover. The man was convicted, but avoided serving time. When he was found dead not long afterward, Angelou believed he had died because she had lied in court about how often he had touched her, and decided never to speak again to anyone except Bailey lest she kill someone else with her words. Not long afterwards, she and Bailey were sent back to Stamps, Angelou wondering if they had been sent away because of her family’s frustration with her silence.

After several years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother relocated again, this time to San Francisco, where their mother was now living, not that far from their father, still in Los Angeles. It is here that she takes the first steps toward womanhood and independence. School, her first job - as the first black female tram conductress - coming to terms with a father who was too self-absorbed to love her, the growing between her and her brother, her developing sexuality, and, in the final sequence recounted in the book, the birth of her son after a casual sexual interlude undertaken just to see what sex was all about.

Angelou offers loving portraits of those who helped to shape her life, from family to members of the community who introduced her to literature and the power of well-crafted words, to others further outside her circle who, kindly or otherwise, taught her about life beyond her grandmother’s general store (which served both blacks and poor whites) and her mother’s gambling connections. And she connects the events of her life to the condition of blacks in America, showing in a hundred ways, large and small, the strength and resilience of a people oppressed.

Angelou wrote several other autobiographical volumes, something I had not known before, as this volume is the one the everybody talks about. I think I’ll have to find and read the others.
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How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is a collection of work memorialising and expanding upon the significant contributions to social justice theory made by the women of the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Taylor’s stated intent in this volume is “an effort to reconnect the radical roots of Black feminist analysis and practice to contemporary organizing efforts” and “to show how these politics remain historically vibrant and relevant to the struggles of today.”

The Combahee River Collective, “a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974 and named after Harriet Tubman’s 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people” formed in reaction to both the white feminist movement, and the civil rights movement. The women of the CRC - including Barbara Smith, her sister Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier - were painfully aware that white feminists were not paying attention to racism and the particular conditions experienced by the black woman in America; at the same time, they felt that a focus on racism alone was not a sufficient basis for critical analysis and action planning relevant to black women’s liberation.

While it would be some years yet before Kimberlé Crenshaw named and defined intersectionality, the CRC “...described oppressions as “interlocking” or happening “simultaneously,” thus creating new measures of oppression and inequality. In other words, Black women could not quantify their oppression only in terms of sexism or racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. They were not ever a single category, but it was the merging or enmeshment of those identities that compounded how Black women experienced oppression.”

The CRC also introduced the concept of identity politics into radical social analysis, arguing that “...oppression on the basis of identity—whether it was racial, gender, class, or sexual orientation identity—was a source of political radicalization.” Furthermore, identity politics meant that “experiences of oppression, humiliations, and the indignities created by poverty, racism, and sexism opened Black women up to the possibility of radical and revolutionary politics” - it provided a point of entry for an oppressed group to work towards their own liberation. For the CRC, identity politics was connected to coalition building. They believed that different oppressed groups, in working together on the issues affecting the liberation of those oppressed groups, could effect real change. Identity politics allowed people to radicalise around their own oppression, identify the specific issues affecting their own conditions - and then join with other groups to address multiple issues together.

The CRC was a truly radical political movement, operating from a socialist base that acknowledged the importance of class in an understanding of the oppression of black women, and within a spirit of internationalism that declared solidarity with the “global movement of Black and Brown people united in struggle against the colonial, imperialist, and capitalist domination of the West, led by the United States.”

The first chapter of the book is, inevitably, a reprinting of The Combahee River Collective Statement, a historic document that sets out the results of the Collective’s analysis. They begin by stating:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”

I remember reading, and being deeply affected by, the CRC Statement. I think it is an absolute necessity for any feminist or anti-racist activist to read it, and one of the things that delights me about Taylor’s book is that she has made the Statement readily available in print. If you are unfamiliar with it, there are also a few places where it can be found online, if you look for it. It is an important document, more so now than ever as we witness the failure of white feminism or socialist action or civil rights movements alone to radically transform our world to one in which true social justice is the rule, not the fervently hoped for, rare in practice exception.

The Statement is the heart of this book. What follows in the interviews conducted by Taylor with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier and Alice Garza, and the comments of Barbara Ransby is the background, contextualisation, extension, and evolution of these essential ideas, presented to a new generation that can build on them to bring about real change, true liberation for all.

These interviews are powerful, thoughtful, often raw, always real, explorations of what it means to be a politically and economically radical black feminist. They are steeped in intersectionality, in the importance of seeing the indivisibility of multiple marked statuses. They are fearless in calling out both white supremacy and late-stage capitalism as poisonous ideologies that limit social justice. They are historically and immediately important.

It has been 40 years since the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, and it remains an important document in the body of theory that informs the broad social justice movement, and the specific Black feminist movement. In bringing together the statement and the voices of those who created it, and who have incorporated its ideas into their own movement, Taylor reminds us of its power and truth.
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Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.


[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)
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Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by law professor Dorothy Roberts, was first published in 1997, but the topic it addresses, the relationship between race and concepts of reproductive freedom, are no less fraught today than they were 20 years ago - in fact, these issues, in the era of Black Lives Matter, may be even more crucial now.

White feminism has long framed reproductive freedom as the freedom not to bear children, and advocated for access to birth control and abortion. What this fails to recognise is the ways in which reproduction for black women is a story that begins with forced rape and abduction of children during slavery, and continues through eugenicist narratives to coerced administration of birth control and forced sterilisation.

“...we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression. While Black women’s stories are sometimes inserted as an aside in deliberations about reproductive issues, I place them at the center of this reconstructive project. How does Black women’s experience change the current interpretation of reproductive freedom? The dominant notion of reproductive liberty is flawed in several ways. It is limited by the liberal ideals of individual autonomy and freedom from government interference; it is primarily concerned with the interests of white, middle-class women; and it is focused on the right to abortion. The full extent of many Americans’ conception of reproductive freedom is the Constitution’s protection against laws that ban abortion. I suggest an expanded and less individualistic conception of reproductive liberty that recognizes control of reproduction as a critical means of racial oppression and liberation in America. I do not deny the importance of autonomy over one’s own reproductive life, but I also recognize that reproductive policy affects the status of entire groups. Reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.”

By tracing social responses to black women’s reproductive history, fertility and family choices, Roberts demonstrates the ways in which reproductive freedom has many different meanings for black women. Where white ablebodied women have in general been encouraged to have children, leading to a construction of reproductive freedom as the choice not to reproduce except on her own terms, the mass of historical and social meanings surrounding reproduction for black women leads to a far more complex formulation of what it means for them to have full autonomy over their reproduction.

Roberts begins where all narratives of black people in the Americas must begin, with the conditions of slavery. Black women were seen not only as labourers, but as the source of new slaves to add to the labour force. While systematic breeding of slaves was not common, most slaveowners were well aware of the economic benefits of black women’s fertility. Childbearing was encouraged, barrenness punished. Rape was common, both at the hands of white men, and black men chosen as mates for potentially fertile women. At the same time, black women had no rights to their children, who were legally the property of their owners. Their children might be taken from them, and sold away or rented out without any recourse. Even when their families remained intact, mothers often had little choice over the rearing of their children. As healthy slaves were required to work long hours, childrearing was often assigned to older or disabled slaves who could no longer work at hard labour.

Roberts goes on to discuss the shift in social pressures brought to bear on black women once slavery was abolished and their reproduction no longer benefits owners. The growing eugenics movement, based in a belief that a range of character traits from intelligence to moral behaviour were hereditary in nature, combined with racist constructions of black people as unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, morally lax, lazy, insubordinate, and otherwise undesirable, began to argue for limitations on reproduction among black people, as well as other “undesirable” groups. Sterilisation of both men and women in these groups, as well as limited access to prenatal and perinatal care for the poor were advocated as means of preventing the passing on of inferior genes.

“I turn to a discussion of eugenics because this way of thinking helped to shape our understanding of reproduction and permeates the promotion of contemporary policies that regulate Black women’s childbearing. Racist ideology, in turn, provided fertile soil for eugenic theories to take root and flourish. It bears remembering that in our parents’ lifetime states across the country forcibly sterilized thousands of citizens thought to be genetically inferior. America’s recent eugenic past should serve as a warning of the dangerous potential inherent in the notion that social problems are caused by reproduction and can be cured by population control.”

However, Roberts acknowledges the complexity of black attitudes toward birth control. Many black women used various forms of birth control, from abstinence to barrier methods to post-coital douching and abortion. Over the first half of the 20th century, the birth rate among black women fell to the same levels found among white women. The ambiguities result from the mixed messages for birth control. Many white birth control advocates - and some Black advocates as well - used the language of eugenics, while most black advocates talked in terms of spacing families, improving maternal health and decreasing infant mortality. At the same time, a significant number of black voices called for blacks to resist family planning as a firm of racial suicide, and indeed, to raise birth rates in order to outpace white population growth.

Roberts devotes considerable space to a discussion of the use of Norplant as a birth control method aimed at - and in some cases forced upon - poor and minority women, with particular emphasis on preventing pregnancy among unmarried teens and women on welfare. Issues ranging from unethical testing on Third World women to lack of long-term testing, to side effects, health risks and problems with implant removal, point to a ‘solution’ adopted without much thought fir the real concerns of women, as a measure to control the reproduction of the poor, and particularly women of colour. Part of the hidden coerciveness of Norplant comes from the fact that, unlike other forms of contraception, which a woman can simply decide not to use, Norplant can only be discontinued with the intervention of a medical practitioner.

“Being able to get Norplant removed quickly and easily is critical to a user’s control over reproductive decisionmaking. Yet poor and low-income women often find themselves in a predicament when they seek to have the capsules extracted. Their experience with Norplant is a telling example of how a woman’s social circumstances affect her reproductive “choices.” A woman whose insertion procedure was covered by Medicaid or private insurance may be uninsured at the time she decides to have the tubes removed. A woman who had the money to pay for implantation may be too broke to afford extraction. Some women have complained that they learned of the cost of removal—from $150 to $500—only after returning to a physician to have the implants taken out.”

Other key examples of the policing of Black women’s bodies and reproduction focused on in Roberts’ examination of race and reproductive freedom include the prosecution and incarceration of poor, and primarily black, pregnant and post-natal drug users on charges of child abuse, child neglect, and similar crimes. She shows clearly that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the goals here are not to protect black fetuses or to fight drug abuse, rather, that the factor driving such prosecutions is the desire to control black reproduction. She also dissects the American welfare system, showing how it is designed to penalise poor black women with children. A discussion of new reproductive technologies such as IVF observes the ways in which the costs if these technologies, and the fact that they are not covered by Medicaid or many insurance plans, make them inaccessible to Black women and families who are infertile or otherwise having difficulty in having a child.

Roberts concludes her examination of race and reproduction by examining the ways in which the liberal understanding of liberty as a defense of individual choice fails to provide true social justice and equality. Modern American law and society has focused on liberty as a protection from government intervention, and ignored the potential for equality that can come from government action. To ensure equality in the area of reproduction, as in many other areas, requires a balance between liberty and equality as guiding principles. This formulation of a positive, progressive idea of liberty:

“... includes not only the negative proscription against government coercion, but also the affirmative duty of government to protect the individual’s personhood from degradation and to facilitate the processes of choice and self-determination. This approach shifts the focus of liberty theory from state nonintervention to an affirmative guarantee of personhood and autonomy. Under this postliberal doctrine, the government is not only prohibited from penalizing welfare mothers or crack-dependent women for choosing to bear children; it is also required to provide subsistence benefits, drug treatment, and medical care. Ultimately, the state should facilitate, not block, citizens’ efforts to install more just and egalitarian economic, social, and political systems.”
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Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.
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Ijeoma Oluo is a writer and journalist who has focused on writing about misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice. Now she has written a book, So You Want To Talk about Race, which brings together her thinking on these topics in an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of the discourse, for the person who wants to enter the conversation on racism in a useful way.

She tackles the hard questions head-on, with clear examples and plenty of practical metaphors to get the important ideas across. In each chapter, she addresses a different, common area of discussion around race, and provides specific ideas about how to tackle the issues, what things to keep in mind, even, where relevant, key facts for engaging in argument. The topics she covers are wide.ranging, and important. The intersectionality of race and class that pushes back against the idea that policies aimed at reducing poverty are also going to resolve race-based poverty. The definition of racism as a structural phenomenon, not an individual one, and how that affects the discourse. The effect of micro-agressions. What privilege is, and why you need to check it. The depth of misogynoir (google it) in our society, and why it hurts black women so badly. The politics of cultural appropriation. Social issues such as affirmative action and the school-to-prison pipeline.

This is more than just an introduction to concepts. It is also a training manual, in a sense, that addresses the issue of how to have a productive conversation about race. It’s an important book for anyone, and particularly anyone white who genuinely wants to talk about issues of racism without harming the people of colour you’re talking to. And for those who want to engage with those who seem ignorant about racism, but teachable.
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Danielle L. McGuire’s book At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, looks at the role of black women’s resistance to sexual violence at the hands of white men in the history of the civil rights movement. As she notes in her Introduction:

“And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men—the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting intransigent white supremacists like “Bull” Connor. The real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence—has never before been written. The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

In her landmark book, McGuire focuses on the history of black women and sexual violence in Montgomery, Alabama - the home of icon and activist Rosa Parks and in some ways the birthplace of the civil rights movement in the South - where in 1944, Recy Taylor’s speaking out about her rape made headlines and brought Parks, then a NAACP worker, to nearby Abbeville to investigate the case. Using Montgomery as a case study for her thesis, McGuire follows the stories of sexual violence and the response of the black community, particularly black women - but she makes it clear that Montgomery is hardly an anomaly, that such race-based sexual violence was and is endemic in America.

“Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.”

While her focus in examining black activism in response to sexual violence is on the harassment and rape of black women, uncounted numbers of whom were victims of white men who were never punished, McGuire does not ignore the way that accusations of gendered violence were used against black men, thousands of whom were falsely accused of offenses against white women and, if they escaped lynching, found it nearly impossible to convince the courts of their innocence.

However, her central narrative is clear in connecting the growing outrage at the numerous incidents of black women abducted and raped by white men with the impetus to activism. Years before the assault on Recy Taylor, the cause of the Scottsboro nine - nine black youths convicted of raping two white women - brought together black civil rights activists and white progressives to fight for justice; Taylor’s case galvanised protest and resulted in the formation of organisations whose activities would expand and persist.

Despite their best efforts, it proved impossible to win convictions against Taylor’s rapists, who either denied their involvement, or alleged that she was a known prostitute whom they had paid. But the movement went on to take up the cases of other black women, and to broadcast information about these assaults across the country.

Aside from entrenched racism and the belief that the rape of black women was not really a crime, the progressives and activists involved in fighting for equal justice faced serious opposition from another direction: the cold war fear of Communist ‘infiltrtion’ and McCarthyism. Many of those, white and black, who took up the cause of equal justice for blacks were, or had t one time been, involved in groups that the government had identified as communist. In some cases, so many members of civil rights organisations were also linked to socialist or communist groups, that the FBI considered them as Communist fronts. This led to their civil rights positions and actions being discounted as Russian propaganda intended to destabilise and discredit the U.S.

Yet on the other hand, the post-war era had seen many black veterans returning from the theatres in Europe and the Pacific, changed by their participation in the war against fascism. These former soldiers “...returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality, and bodily integrity. In small towns and cities across the South, black veterans became the “shock troops” of an emerging civil rights movement.”

In the mythology of the civil rights movement, the spark is Rosa Park’s refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Parks is often portrayed as a woman who simply was too tired, and snapped one day. In reality, the organising had begun years before, around the far more complex issue of violence against blacks, and particularly sexual violence against black women. McGuire draws the connections between this focus and the bus protests. Most working black women could not afford cars; to get to their places of work - many were domestic workers who lived far from the homes of their employers - they had to ride the buses. But the indignities did not end at having to sit at the back of the bus. Black people were often subjected to verbal and physical assault for the slightest indication of disrespect. They could be required to pay at the front, then get off and board at the rear doors - unless the bus driver decided to drive off without them. Bus drivers sometimes beat black riders who sat in the wrong seats, or refused to get up and move further back, or get off if a seat was needed for a white person. The buses were a site of white violence toward blacks.

McGuire’s narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, and other actions undertaken during the civil rights era to bring public pressure to bear on the rampant discrimination and racism of the Southern US, restore to its place the forgotten role of black women. Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat or defend herself in court; she was just the first woman with a sufficiently impeccable reputation to risk a national news event on. Much of the organising and fundraising during the boycott was done by women. Women organised car pools and drove cars. And in the thousands, women walked, or shared rides, rather than break the boycott, in the face of daiky threats and abuse. Women were charged and arrested for their roles in the boycott, but the media narrative focused on the male ministers, and above all, on the charismatic young Martin Luther King Jr. in making him the hero of the movement, the work of black women was pushed into shadows.

Women were active, organising, marching, working on voter registration, desegregating lunch counters and schools, their work and courage the backbone of the civil rights movement. Women like Jo Ann Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer gave tirelessly of their energy and time in the movement. Like the men, they risked harassment, loss of employment, beatings, jail, destructions of property snd homes through vandalism and arson, and death. They also risked sexual intimidation, humiliation and rape.

McGuire spares the reader none of the details of the brutal acts that shored up white supremacy, the beatings, rapes, torturings, deliberate mutilations, and murders of black men, women and children for the slightest of imagined offences against the “proper order” of society, for being “uppity” or indeed for no reason at all other than the fear, insecurity and rage of white people. McGuire writes about the civil rights era, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but the reader cannot forget, as the horrifying images emerge from the page, that the violence continues.

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Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, is a companion volume to the Rose Fox edited Long Hidden, also published by Crossed Genres, the sadly defunct publishing house that, in its short life, nurtured some remarkable authors and released some important volumes of speculative fiction.

The focus of this anthology is marginalised youth - narratives of children and adolescents from many settings and time periods who share the experience of being outside, oppressed, ignored, othered, and sometimes worse. They represent those who exist in the margins of history and society.

Evocative as most of these stories are, not all reach the same heights of overall craft. Some deal in familiar times and places, others unveil pieces of history not often explored in fiction, or for that matter, in factual narratives. And as always in any collection, some touched me deeply, and others, even if technically admirable, were less engaging. Among my personal favourites are:

“A Name to Ashes,” by Jayme Goh, which tells a story I was not aware of, that of Asian workers pressed into slavery in Cuba under Spanish colonial rule.

“Trenches,” by Sioban Krzywicki, about a young trans person who magically comes into her own reality after leaving home to fight in the trenches during WWI.

“The Girl, The Devil and the Coal Mine,” by Warren Bull, in which a 12-year-old black coal miner’s daughter takes on the Devil in a battle of wits to save her brother.

“How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters,” by Erik Jensen, is a bawdy yet heroic tale of two child prostitutes in ancient Greece, a cityful of animated phallic statues, and Isis’ interest in a new penis for Osiris. Not recommended for folks with castration anxieties.

“North,” by Imani Josey is the story of a young black woman who moves north during the Great Migration, where she is given a choice between comfort, and love.

These and other stories collected here shine a light on times, places and people that history tends not to care about, letting us see into hidden lives. There is fantasy, and magic, and strange creatures, but there is also truth and history.


*There are 22 short stories in this anthology, 11 written by women, 10 written by men, and one written by a person who chose not to indicate their gender.

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I have been reading a fair bit lately about race and antiracist theory, but most of what I’ve been reading has been written in an American context, though of course much is broadly applicable to the situation in Canada, too. Much of the Canadian material I have been able to access has focused on indigenous issues. So I was particularly happy to learn of the publication of Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

Maynard is a Black feminist writer and grassroots community organiser who has been on the forefront of resistance to police violence for over a decade.

“Working with racialized youth in state care and in street-based economies, as well as with adult street-based sex workers, I have been constantly and painfully aware of the gross racial and economic injustices at the fault lines of Canadian society. Though I have not worked exclusively with Black communities, I’ve regularly witnessed enormous and disproportionate levels of what can only be called state-sanctioned violence and concerted neglect of Black people.”

Maynard writes that she began writing Policing Black Lives as a response to her experiences, and to the realisation that little literature on this issue in a Canadian context existed.

“In combing through the world of research for something that would describe the realities that I was seeing, I realized that there was still far too little literature addressing, in one place, the specificities of how criminal and immigration laws, inequitable access to work and housing and other state policies and institutions interact to shape the conditions of Black life in this country. It has become increasingly clear that none of these incidents are isolated; they are part of a larger pattern of the devaluation of Black life across Canada.

I felt compelled to write this book because anti-Blackness, particularly anti-Blackness at the hands of the state, is widely ignored by most Canadians.”

Maynard begins by interrogating the myth of Canada as a place of racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. She argues that anti-Black racism and state violence are endemic, but unregarded, in Canada, to the point that many white Canadians are unaware of the extent to while the various institutions of the state regulate, dehumanise and injure Black Canadians, and that, like institutional racism in the United States, has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade.

As the book’s full title suggests, Maynard starts her narrative of Black experience of systemic state oppression and violence with the often ignored history of slavery in the British and French colonies that would come to be identified as Canada. While not all Black people living in the colonies prior to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire were enslaved, many were. The ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade made stops at ports such as Halifax. During the American Revolution, Black Americans who fought for the English were given freedom and promised land in Nova Scotia - at the same time that white American Loyalists migrated north with their household slaves, who remained property.

One consequence of the existence of slavery and the ideologies that supported it in early Canadian culture is that free Black Canadians were devalued as citizens, denied many of the rights and privileges accorded to other colonial settlers, and subjected to race-based discrimination and sometimes violence. Racism was endemic. The freedom runners who followed the Underground Railway north to Canada may have escaped literal enslavement, but they did not arrive in the mythologised land of racial tolerance Canadians imagine our country to have been.

“The segregation of Black communities — which, like slavery, was a form of controlling Black movement and institutionalizing subordination — was based on the idea that Black people were both inferior and dangerous to whites. Formally and informally, segregation was one of Canada’s foremost strategies for maintaining white dominance across all aspects of society after slavery’s end. In the United States, Jim Crow referred to the de jure segregation of Black from white in the public facilities of the former Confederate states. Canada had its own iteration of practices that separated Black from white in what some historians call “Canada’s Jim Crow.” Canadians produced “their own distinct language and rationalizations” when “propping up white supremacist ideology and practices.” Segregation in the post-abolition period cut across all aspects of society. Public education, immigration, employment and housing were all subject to a veiled Jim Crow-style segregation that either formally or informally kept Black persons in social, economic and political subjugation.”

Maynard discusses the ways in which Black people have been associated with a presumption of criminality, beginning with the presentation of Black freedom runners as criminals who had escaped from their lawful owners. The presence of escaped slaves was used to justify scrutiny by both police and the general public. After abolition, vice laws were used to continue scrutiny of Blacks; assumption about the general immorality of Black people resulted in the frequent use of prostitution laws against Black women in public places, and of drug laws against Blacks, and particularly Black men. Black men were also at risk of accusations of rape committed against white women, while at the same time, it was almost impossible for a white legal system convinced of the sexual immorality of Black women to consider rape against them as a crime.

“After slavery, associations between race and crime, and particularly between Blackness and crime, took hold as an important means of legitimating the ongoing state surveillance and control over Black people’s lives. Beyond prostitution and drug laws, the creation and application of criminal laws in general were used by the Canadian government to manage deep-seated fears and anxieties about Blackness. Tracing the lineage of racism in Canada’s legal system from the 1700s to the present day, Black Canadian legal scholar Esmerelda Thornhill concludes that “the law has colluded — and continues to collude — with race in ways that accommodate and foster ongoing … anti-Black racism”. The data supports this claim. Examinations of court records between the years of 1890 to 1920 found open racism in the sentencing of Black offenders by many magistrates. From 1908 to 1960, Blacks convicted of violent offences would receive far more severe sentences. The result of these court decisions was a consistently disproportionate rate of incarceration for Black people. In 1911, Black males were incarcerated at a rate eighteen times higher than that of white males, while in 1931 they were incarcerated at a rate ten times higher than whites. Incarceration had replaced enslavement as a legal means to literally strip people of their freedom, as well as separate families and inhibit future employment opportunities. Black incarceration was thus highly effective in maintaining Black disenfranchisement and subjugation in post-abolition Canada. The association of Blackness with danger allowed for the policing of Black peoples’ lives by white settler society, law enforcement and immigration agencies — Black emancipation had not yet been actualized.”

The association of Black communities and crime has continued. Black protest is criminalised, with protestors and civil rights activists seen as thugs and hoodlums. Despite evidence that Black people are no more likely than white people to use illegal drugs, the War on Drugs focused on Black communities, with Blacks far more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted on drug offenses. Racial profiling ad carding disproportionately target Blacks, particularly Black youth.

“Though not only Black people were arrested for drug infractions, the increased police surveillance and repression of Black communities mandated by drug law enforcement had direct impacts on Black incarceration in the period immediately following Mulroney’s War on Drugs. In 1995, a large-scale investigation in Ontario documented a massive influx of Black prisoners during the period spanning 1986–1987 to 1992–1993. By the end of this period, Blacks were incarcerated at a rate five times higher than their white counterparts. Though the CSR Report found that Black and white communities engaged in crime at comparable rates in that same period, this period saw the rate of incarceration of Blacks increase by over 200 percent, compared to white persons, whose rates rose by just over 20 percent. Black women, though arrested in smaller numbers than Black men, were found to face even more disproportionate rates of incarceration than men. By the end of 1993, Black women were incarcerated at a rate of seven times that of white women. Admissions at Vanier Centre for Women increased the rate of admission of Black women by 630 percent, whereas white women’s admissions at the same prison went up by 59 percent.”

Maynard devotes several chapters to the examination of the ways in which Black women, and particularly Black trans women, are treated by the police ad other agents of the state. Presumptions of engagement in sex work are common for Black women in public spaces. Poor Black women receiving social assistance are often represented as likely to commit fraud, or other crimes, and live under heightened scrutiny in their private lives by agents of social welfare agencies. Verbal, physical and sexual abuse by state agents is common. Black Caribbean women who travel between Canada and their home countries are frequently profiled as drug couriers.

Maynard also examines other aspects of the ways in which Black Canadians are surveilled, regulated, policed and denied privacy and autonomy: the issues of migrant Blacks, including refugees, and the policing of borders and concepts of citizenship; the scrutiny and interference in Black families, pathologising of Black family life and removal of Black children from their families; and the institutionalised racism Black youth face within the educational system.

I don’t often say things like this. But in this case, I think it’s essential. Maynard’s book should be read, and seriously deliberated on, by every white person in Canada. We are far too find of congratulating ourselves for being better than the US on racism. The truth is, we aren’t. We are just further behind on having it out in the open for everyone to see.

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The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, is a collection of writings in response to the racism that is an integral part of North American, white supremacist society. The title is a reference to James Baldwin’s classic writing on the same issues, more than 50 years ago, a reference that Ward makes explicit in her introduction.

“I read Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” while I was in my mid-twenties, and it was a revelation. I’d never read creative nonfiction like Baldwin’s, never encountered this kind of work, work that seemed to see me, to know I needed it. I read it voraciously, desperate for the words on the page. I needed to know that someone else saw the myriad injustices of living while black in this country, that someone so sharp and gifted and human could acknowledge it all, and speak on it again and again. Baldwin was so brutally honest. His prose was frank and elegant in turn, and I returned to him annually after that first impression-forming read. Around a year after Trayvon Martin’s death, a year in which black person after black person died and no one was held accountable, I picked up The Fire Next Time, and I read: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.” It was as if I sat on my porch steps with a wise father, a kind, present uncle, who said this to me. Told me I was worthy of love. Told me I was worth something in the world. Told me I was a human being. I saw Trayvon’s face, and all the words blurred on the page.

It was then that I knew I wanted to call on some of the great thinkers and extraordinary voices of my generation to help me puzzle this out. I knew that a black boy who lives in the hilly deserts of California, who likes to get high with his friends on the weekend and who freezes in a prickly sweat whenever he sees blue lights in his rearview, would need a book like this. A book that would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce, protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America. A book that would gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form, and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to witness, to reckon. A book that a girl in rural Missouri could pick up at her local library and, while reading, encounter a voice that hushed her fears. In the pages she would find a wise aunt, a more present mother, who saw her terror and despair threading their fingers through her hair, and would comfort her. We want to tell her this: You matter. I love you. Please don’t forget it.”

Every piece in this collection is important in what it says, and what it asks the reader to contemplate. These are powerful pieces, poems, personal narratives, essays, examinations, exhortations, accusations, inspirations. They talk about growing up black. About walking while black. About the history of black people. About the deaths of Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and Rekia Boyd, and the Charleston church worshippers and Sandra Bland and too many others. About white rage and black mourning. About knowing your rights, and knowing how to behave when you’re stopped for breathing while black. About being a black parent, knowing what you must say to your black child, in the hopes of keeping them alive. About being black in America.

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In 2014, British blogger Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a post on her blog entitled “Why I’m No LongerTalking to White People about Race.” In it, she expressed her frustration and exhaustion at trying to explain even the basic facts of living as a person of colour in a white supremacist society, at dealing with white fragility and hostility. I remember reading the post, which circulated very widely in social justice circles, and thinking quite a bit about it.

Now Eddo-Lodge has written a book in which she talks a great deal, and with great passion and patience, about race, and called it, with some irony, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. One welcome aspect of the book for me is that so much of the current work on racism and white supremacy is coming from an American perspective, but this is s problem that crosses borders and has a long and bitter history in all white-majority countries and the countries that have been colonised and exploited by them.

Eddo-Lodge begins with a brief history of racism against people of colour in Britain, providing background I’d known little to nothing about. And much of which, she notes, she herself had known little about before beginning her research.

“Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.”

Eddo-Lodge goes on to discuss issues of systemic and institutional racism, white privilege, white feminism, and intersectionality within the context of the British experience. And she explains these issues with great clarity, making this an excellent introductory book for beginning anti-racist activists, and particularly white people struggling with understanding these concepts and explaining them to others. Her words could easily serve as a handbook for every white person who takes up the task of speaking to white people about race, and I’m grateful that she has done this work.

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I have a confession to make. As much as I adore Octavia Butler’s work, I have never read Kindred. I don’t think I could. It’s a thing I have, that goes along with being deeply emotionally drawn into the lives of the protagonists of the books I read, and the films I watch. I have a hard time handling any kind of slave narrative, or any narrative where people are unjustly accused an punished, especially if it is a true story, or a historically accurate fiction. (I had a hard time with parts of Les Miserables, too, but the fact that I read it in my struggling French as part of a course enabled me yo distance myself enough.)

But I’ve always wanted to read it, and so when Damien Duffy and John Jennings released their graphic novel adaptation of Kindred, I decided this was one way to come as close as I could without freaking out too much while reading it. I find the visual format just distancing enough.

I’m still overwhelmed by the narrative. Not just the realities of live in a society based on slavery, but the way that the characters from the modern era, Dana and Kevin, have to struggle against the mindset of what being a member of the slave class, and the owner class, can do. And the exploration of how relationships are twisted and distorted by the fact of slavery - not just those that cross racial lines, but those between black slaves, and white slave owners. The sexual exploitation. The destruction of families, the denial of kinships, white slave owners selling their own black lovers, siblings and children. The forced and stolen labour. The dehumanisation. The brutal punishments. All the things that one knows about, but can hardly bear to think about.

I’m still overwhelmed by the impossible situation that Dana is placed in. To have to facilitate rape in order to ensure one’s own existence, to act as the guardian angel toward a man who consistently commits or orders acts of violence against the humans he holds a power if life and death over, because he must survive to father the child you are descended from. But Butler has that habit, of putting her characters into situations that you don’t think they can bear, ad yet they do.

I’ve read enough about Kindred over the years to know that Duffy has done a fine job of incorporating the story and the themes that Butler addressed in her novel. And I’m grateful for the style the illustrator has chosen - just realistic enough, but not too realistic, another slight act of distancing that makes the subject matter easier to bear.

I will be seeing some parts of this in my mind fir some time to come, I think. And it’s good that I have finally had some experience of the novel, albeit at this distance. Maybe someday I will be able to read the novel for myself.

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Ibram X. Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, traces the history of thought about race in America, from the earliest days to the present, "... from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets." The book itself draws its title from a statement about race: "... from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. 'This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,' but 'by white men for white men,' Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The 'inequality of the white and black races' was 'stamped from the beginning.' "

Kendi structures his observations into five historical periods, characterising each period as, in a way, a conversation with the ideas on race of five American intellectuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. He carefully weaves the development of each individual's thoughts on race into the historical events of their times, comparing and contrasting their views with other intellectuals of their times, showing both the influences on their ideas, and their influence on events and the ideas of others. While his focus is on ideas about racism, he makes a consistent attempt to identify the ways in which gender and queerness intersect with race. This results in various critiques throughout the book of the ways in which racist and heterosexist ideas and practices differently affect Black men and Black women, the ways in which sexism and hetersexism have influenced Black anti-racist thought about women, gender, and Black queerness, and the ways in which feminist movements and thinkers have engaged in racist thought and action.

In exploring the range of ideas about race that have influenced and driven American culture, society and politics, Kendi identifies three general strands of thought - segregationalists, assimilationists, and antiracists:

"But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals."

Kendi takes aim at the generally accepted belief that ignorance and hatred are the basis for the development of racist ideas, which then are manifested in policies that end in racial discrimination. He argues instead that the self-interest - political, economic, and cultural - of the elite white classes leads to the adoption of policies that discriminate and oppress along racial lines, which supports the development of racist ideologues, which create ignorance of and hatred toward racialised groups.

The precursor to racist ideas, Kendi argues, can be found in Aristotle's justifications for the Greek practice of slavery, which holds that, while al non-Greeks are barbarians, peoples from extreme climates are in particular inferior to Greeks because of the environment they live in. Variations on these ideas - that people from other cultures are inferior, and people from distant places where the physical conditions are different are even more so - were later used to justify slavery in the Roman and Muslim spheres of influence. A second source of racist thought may be identified in the Biblical story story of Noah's son Ham, the progenitor of African peoples and other dark-skinned peoples, who 'looked on his father's nakedness.' As punishment, Ham, his son Canaan, and their descendants were cursed by God. The darker complexions of Africans and other non-Europeans were seen as a mark of the curse and of their inherited inferiority.

Initially, slavery in Christian Europe, like that in Muslim countries, involved both black Africans and
Eastern European Slavic peoples. However, in the 15th century, the pattern began to shift as the sea trade with coastal Africa increased significantly (and the Slavs embarked on fort building to discourage Turkish slave raids), black slaves became the norm and racist justifications for slavery derived from initial idea of the 'curse of Ham' dominated the discourse. With the 'discovery' and later colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, concurrent with the increasing colonisation and exploitation of African nations, the racist narrative of the inferiority and natural role as slaves of dark peoples - both African and indigenous American - became the established thinking on race among Europeans and American colonists.

As slavery became a necessary institution for the provision of cheap labour in the colonies, the previously existing racist idea of African peoples as barbaric and hypersexualised was extended, with stress on the sexual aggressiveness of black women. This served to excuse the rape of female slaves. Kendi notes that the law - which in British tradition had long held that a child takes on the social status of the father - was explicitly reversed, ensuring that children born of such rape were seen as slaves, and hence additions to the available cheap labour pool, like their mothers. At the same time, sexual contact between white women and black men of any status was prohibited.

European law at the beginning of the colonial period held that Christians might be indentured, but could not be enslaved. Thus at first there was little pressure to convert slaves to Christianity, and much resistance. Indeed, many slave-owners and segregationalists in general argued that for various reasons - barbarism, lower intellectual capacity, even the presumed lack of a fully developed soul, Africans could not by their natures become Christians. Christian assimilationists, wanting to save black souls without threatening the economic status quo, began to argue that Africans had been brought by historical necessity into slavery so that their masters might convert them - thus making them more docile slaves. Laws were passed that explicitly stated that converting someone already a slave would not change their legal status in any way; Virginia's 1667 statute declared that "the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.”

With the approach of the Enlightenment and he beginning of 'scientific' thinking about race, two opposing theories of human origins, monogenesis and polygenesis, emerged. Monogenesis - usually associated with assimilationist thinking on racism - held that all humans had the same origin. On the other hand, polygenesis - a clearly segregationalist narrative - put forward various theories concerning the origins of the different races; the one consistent element of these theories was the idea that Africans did not share an origin with white peoples - indeed, they often argued that Africans and great apes shared an origin.

Repeatedly, "altruistic" attitudes toward African slaves - the idea, for instance, that despite their presumed barbarism, their souls were capable of salvation - were advanced, only to be countered by either segregationalist narratives, or laws that ensured that no degree of altruism might interfere with the economic interests of land/slave holders. Slavery was cast as both legal and permissible under Biblical precedent - thus criminalising any black person who sought their own freedom. "No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers."

As the abolitionist movement grew, both in England and in what would become the United States, new ideas entered the public discourse on race. Abolitionists put forward the argument that while Africans were inferior - thus supporting racist perceptions - it was so because of the conditions of slavery. Pro-slavery voices expanded upon the concept of polygenesis, giving reason upon reason for their conviction that black people were of a different species altogether from white people. Kendi pays particular attention to Thomas Jefferson's writings on both the justification for the American revolution and his support for the continued enslavement of Africans in America. The notion of colonisation - creating a new nation in Africa for free American blacks (as Britain had done in Sierra Leone) added further nuances to ideas about the nature, capabilities and potentials of black people, and the possibility of a state in which free blacks co-existed with whites.

As the middle of the 19th century approached, with the Civil War still some decades away, the multitude of positions on black Americans included wholehearted advocates of slavery, 'gradual abolitionists' who wanted a slow end to slavery, those who wanted to immediately abolish slavery but limit the civil rights of blacks until they were 'ready' to exercise them, those who demanded immediate abolition and full enfranchisement, and those who supported abolition only if free blacks were deported to the new African colony of Liberia.

Kendi demonstrates how new developments in scientific understanding consistently came to be used against the possibility that blacks and whites could be equal. Darwin's Origin of Species may not have addressed human evolution, but even while it provided the means of dismantling the popular theory of polygenesis, it was used to argue that whites were superior to blacks due to natural selection. Sir Francis Galton's work in mathematics led to the understanding of statistics, but his strong pro-nature stance in the nature vs. nurture debate led to the creation of eugenics as a sociopolitical position, and Sir Herbert Spencer's championing of Darwin's theories resulted in the concept of 'social Darwinism' - two ideas that were easily used to counter any attempts to 'improve' the situation of slaves or free blacks in America. When Darwin at last turned to the subject of the evolution of the human species, his thinking on race was sufficiently ambiguous that "Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed Descent of Man. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction."

Kendi does not shy away from critiquing the positions of Black intellectuals or the Black elite - middle-class or wealthy, often Northern, educated professionals and entrepreneurs - on the issue of race. The 1890s were a time when Black public intellectuals began to have a greater voice in the national conversation on race in America. Sadly, many members of the Black elite were assimilationists who had internalised racist thinking about themselves, or about 'lower class' blacks who needed to be 'raised up' from the state to which they had descended during slavery.

The 'voice' chosen by Kendi to frame the conversation on race during the late 19th and early to mid 29th century is W. E. B. Du Bois, whose own understanding of race changed significantly during that time. In the 1890s, when Black intellectuals were gaining prominence, W. E. B. Du Bois was a young man whose anti-racist vision had not yet matured. Du Bois had studied in Germany and, on returning to the US, at Harvard, and, as Kendi explains,

"He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly low-class Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.

Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined 'to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.' Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that American racism could be persuaded and educated away. 'The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,' he theorized. 'The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.' "

The preeminent Black voice of the period was Booker T. Washington, "the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, [who] wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. ... In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the 'Atlanta Compromise.' He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers 'to dignify and glorify common labour.' So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, 'It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,' they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, 'the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.' "

It is interesting to note that anti-racist thought seemed to be most fully developed among Black women who had entered the realm of the public intellectual. Speaking about Booker T. Washington's assumption of the mantle of premier Black intellectual on the the death of Frederick Douglass, Kendi says: "Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans."

"Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. 'I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me,' wrote an anonymous 'southern White woman' in The Independent. Oberlin graduate and teacher Anna Julia Cooper took it upon herself to defend Black womanhood and encourage Black women’s education in A Voice from the South in 1892. Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. 'The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,' Cooper explained. 'She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.' And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the 'quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity' of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the 'semi-civilized religionism' of low-income Black southerners.

Southern white men were 'shielding' themselves 'behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]' through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. 'The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,' she declared, 'the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.' "

Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, the predominant thinking about race remained either segregationalist or assimilationist in nature. Du Bois, disenchanted by his efforts to raise the condition of Blacks through education and 'suasion,' slowly came to realise that racism had to be confronted directly, that nothing Blacks did to become 'more like Whites' was going to change the engrained white supremacist position. Other anti-racist thinkers - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin - joined him in rejecting assimilationism and the notion that Black people had to 'improve' themselves in order to earn equality with whites.

Post-war America found itself in the position of presenting itself internationally as the beacon of freedom while domestically still in an era of Jim Crow and deep racial inequities. It became a matter of national image to at least give the impression of moving towards racial equality and civil rights for all. Gestures such as school integration were attempted, provoking serious opposition in the South. Civil rights activists began staging demonstrations to draw attention to the need for action. In 1964, the US government went ahead with civil rights legislation, but in many ways the effects were superficial, and did not result in deep, systemic change. Kendi marshalls a powerful critique of civil rights 'gains' during this period: "... as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time."

In this post-war environment, new voices emerged to take up the national conversation on race: Elijah Mohammed and his protege, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and the black anti-racists who would become the leaders of the Black Power movement, including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Kendi follows these and other Black voices, and those who sought to diminish or silence them, through to the grassroots antiracist organising of BlackLivesMatter.

As his account of ideas about race moves forward through American history, Kendi examines each new stage in racial/racist thought with reference to the events which both contributed to and were bolstered or opposed by it. His research is detailed and exhaustive, making for a book that is immensely informative but best explored slowly and thoughtfully. Looking at American history through this lens of its ideas about race is a difficult but important experience for the white reader. Events we thought we understood, at least in general, take on different meanings and perspectives; backgrounded events take a new and more prominent place in the national narrative.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who truly seek to understand the roots of racism in America.

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Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (ed. Joaneath Spicer) is an evocative visual record, with accompanying explanatory text, of an exhibition curated by Joaneath Spicer, James A. Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Walters Art Museum.

The exhibition's intent, as stated in the foreword by Gary Vikan, Director of the Walters Art Museum, is "to explore the varied roles and societal contributions of Africans and their descendents in Renaissance Europe as revealed in compelling paintings, drawings, sculpture, and printed books of the period" and "to understand the period in terms of individuals of African ancestry, whom we encoun- ter in arresting portrayals from life, testifying to the Renaissance adage that portraiture magically makes the absent present."

The artefacts which comprise the exhibition reveal a range of representations of the African presence in Europe between 1480 and 1620, from slaves and freedmen at work to ambassadorial retinues and visiting rulers, from naturalistic portraiture to caricature and exoticism.

The volume is divided into sections, each of which references a different aspect of the African presence in renaissance Europe, each richly illustrated with images of Black people in varied situations. If nothing else, this collection of visual evidence of the presence of African people and their descendants in Europe should be more than enough to refute the common claim in some parts that Europe was white, white, white until the relatively recent influx of former colonial subjects and refugees. But the information contained in the text, which ranges from examinations of the work of slaves and free blacks to explorations of European ideas of "blackness" is important to the understanding of the position of black people in European history and how that affects race relations today.

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Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi's novel Homecoming is both compelling and difficult to read. Its scope is vast, encompassing two centuries of the African Diaspora and multiple elements of the transAtlantic slave trade and its consequences in both America and Africa, but its focus is always personal, each chapter forming a link in a double chain of protagonists telling uniquely personal stories. The novel follows the descendants of the two daughters of Maame, a West African Asante woman in the late 18th century. Maame, who is both a slave and a secondary wife of a Fante farmer, gives birth to her first daughter during a disastrous fire. Fearing that she will be blamed for the ill fortune, Maame runs away. Her first daughter, Effia, is raised by a malicious and abusive stepmother, but grows up to become the 'bush wife' of British officer James Collins. Effia's people, the Fante, are middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring captives of other tribes, sometimes by purchase, sometimes through raiding, from inland, and then selling them to the British slavers based in the fort where Effia comes to live as a new bride.

Meanwhile, Maame has made a new life for herself, marrying a 'big man' of the Asante. Her second daughter, Esi, is raised lovingly in the heart of her extended family, but is taken from her hime and people in early adolescence by raiders, traded by the people her sister is raised by, passing to a life of slavery in America through the very fort her sister lives in.

In one narrative line, Gyasi's characters deal with colonialism and its many effects on the culture and political landscape of West Africa, while in the other, they survive slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, segregation, and life as marginalised people left out of the American Dream.

The chapters that tell the story of Esi and her descendants are much harder to read than those featuring Effia's descendants, capturing as they do the soul-destroying experiences of slavery and racism in America. Unfortunately, if there is a weakness in the book, it lies in these very American-centred chapters. Somehow, Gyasi's American characters, particularly as the novel approaches modern times, seem to be more archetypes than living characters, representing categories of African-American experience rather than real people who live through circumstances reflective of the lives of Black Americans. Her African characters seem somehow freer to be themselves. But this is a small flaw in an ambitious, and largely successful narrative.

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An Internet acquaintance posted a link to an online course on Critical Race Theory offered by Adrienne Keene at Brown University, and while I'm not in a position to formally enroll in, or even audit, a course, I thought that it might be both interesting and useful to read as many of the assigned books and articles as I could access.

One of the core texts is Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (foreword by Angela Harris), which I was able to download via a link in the course syllabus.

In their introduction, Delgado and Stefancic say: "The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."

They go on to provide a brief history of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement and to identify the fore principles that most CRT scholars and activists would agree are the foundational ideas of CRT:

"First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascen- dancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. ...

A third theme of critical race theory, the “social construction” thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient."

Other crucial concepts in CRT are differential racialization - the recognition that different minority groups are defined, treated and represented in different ways at different times by the dominant culture in response to its changing needs and interests - and intersectionality - a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which holds that "No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity."

Finally, CRT argues that people of colour offer unique perspectives and knowledge on issues with a racial component: "... the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know."

The concepts outlined in the text are not new to anyone who has been at all engaged in anti-racism action or discourse in recent years, but I found that there was value in seeing these basic tenets organised in a logical fashion, and seeing how they flowed from and built upon each other to create a way of seeing race in North American society. As an activist who began thinking and reading about these matters in the late 60s, and who has tried to keep current with the many changes and refinements, advances and extensions of theory over the decades, a primer in modern race theory is also an excellent source for absorbing not just new theory, but new terminology, and a resource for scholarship in more specific areas of the field of study.

I'm very glad that I happened upon this text, and decided to read it. And I'm looking forward to further readings from the course syllabus (which can be found here: https://blogs.brown.edu/amst-2220j-s01-2017-fall/syllabus/).

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Michelle Alexander's book on the carceral state, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is rightfully on most lists of essential books to read for an understanding of race in America. It is a masterful indictment of the ways in which the American justice and penal systems continue the job of the former "Jim Crow" laws, of keeping black Americans in the role of second-class citizens, with limited rights and reduced access to everything from jobs to participation in the political system. As Alexander notes in her Introduction,

"The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race."

She goes on to say that " ...despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)."

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander demonstrates with overwhelming evidence that mass incarceration is indeed a racial justice issue, and one that should he at the forefront of the social justice agenda.

"This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system."

Alexander begins her argument with a discussion of past 'racial caste systems' - slavery and the Jim Crow - and how the same results are created again and again by changing social structures and institutions: "... there is a certain pattern to the births and deaths of racial caste in America. Time and again, the most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole. This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste system in the United States: mass incarceration."

The essence of Alexander's argument is demonstrated through detailed historical research. She shows clearly how, almost from the moment of emancipation following the civil war, unjust laws and prisons that are little more than enforced eork camps have been used to perform the same social functions that slavery did, to deny human rights, civil rights, and the rights of citizenship to black Americans, and to coerce their labour to support the economy to the benefit of white Americans. Of the Reconstruction Era, she writes that "... tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release. With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. Death rates were shockingly high, for the private contractors had no interest in the health and well-being of their laborers, unlike the earlier slave-owners who needed their slaves, at a minimum, to be healthy enough to survive hard labor."

The Jim Crow era - the name is most likely derived from a popular minstrel show character - stretched from the Reconstruction to the post-WWII period, when changes began to appear, sparked by the nascent civil rights movement, the growing presences in politics of blacks in the North, and a desire to actualise the American ideals of freedom and equality which were made much of during the war. Of the Jim Crow era itself, Alexander notes that "By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged."

But even as Jim Crow laws were challenged and civil rights were - at least formally - gained for American blacks, the development of a 'law and order' focus that would ultimately lead to today's carceral state had begun. In federal and state legislatures, the strongest supporters of law and order platforms were the same politicians who opposed civil rights legislation. Initially, race-based arguments were openly used by the 'law and order' proponents - they pointed to lower crime rates in the south where segregation remained the unwritten law of the land and referred to civil rights protestors as criminals.

Later, the racism in the law and order platform because implicit, with the concept of a 'culture of poverty' which led to crime standing in for a direct association between being black and being more prone to criminality. This 'colourblind' language became the norm among conservative politicians by the time that Reagan sought office:

"In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the “excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse” and thus built on the success of earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race. Condemning “welfare queens” and criminal “predators,” he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites—poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights agenda. As one political insider explained, Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.” To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964—he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights,” and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language."

With the introduction of the "war on drugs" the pieces were finally in place for a massive increase in law and order funding to provide more police and more prisons. Signalling its true goals with clarity, the federal budget for law enforcement grew in the wake of the war on drugs while spending on drug prevention, education and treatment programs was cut. At the same time, urban black men - most of whom had traditionally worked in blue collar jobs requiring minimal education - were facing an employment crisis due largely to globalisation and the shift from an industrial to a service based economy. Poverty, unemployment, the introduction of crack cocaine into urban centres, increased policing, welfare crackdowns and a 'tough on crime' policy among bith conservatives and liberals set the stage for mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of black Americans.

"The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives to the War on Drugs and “get tough” movement were being entertained in mainstream political discourse. Once again, in response to a major disruption in the prevailing racial order—this time the civil rights gains of the 1960s—a new system of racialized social control was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

Alexander examines in depth the ways in which the 'war on drugs' has been used as a justification for massive investment in policing and prisons, changes in the execution of laws which make arrest and conviction easier, and incentives from grants to military equipment to asset seizures which motivate police departments to focus their resources on drug-related crime. Starting with the legal processes of warrants, search and seizure of evidence, she follows the trail through to incarceration and disenfranchisement, and the denial of access to employment, housing, education, professional certification and other essentials of living to released felons, showing the coded racism of anti-drug and anti-crime propaganda, legislation and police action, and demonstrating the ways in which the system operates to disproportionately target black communities.

In the final section of the book, Alexander addresses the massive challenge posed by any attempt to end this prison-centred system of racial caste control. The end of the carceral state requires first the end of the War on Drugs and the ideas that black communities are the primary centre of drug activity, that black men are the primary actors in the drug trade. The first principle of change, then requires an "understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control." In order to achieve this understanding, Americans must be willing to give up the false ideal of 'colourblindness' and look at - and have a national conversation on - the realities of race.

In considering the factors that have worked against the development of a clear consciousness of racial inequity, Alexander makes an interesting argument for the end of affirmative action:

"Racial justice advocates should consider, with a degree of candor that has not yet been evident, whether affirmative action—as it has been framed and defended during the past thirty years—has functioned more like a racial bribe than a tool of racial justice. One might wonder, what does affirmative action have to do with mass incarceration? Well, perhaps the two are linked more than we realize. We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve “cosmetic” racial diversity—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness."

She goes on to itemise the specific reasons behind this proposition: "... (a) it has helped to render a new caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a “trickle down theory of racial justice”; (d) it has greatly facilitated the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now (wrongly) assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations." Alexander makes a strong argument that, by facilitating a small number of success stories that showcase 'black exceptionalism,' affirmative action actually supports the continuation of the carceral state by seeming to say that 'if these black individuals can succeed, that means the failure if most to do so is rooted in personal choices and decisions, not systemic racism.'

Her closing thoughts on the path to an end to the carceral state and the beginning of a society based on social justice for all look back to the shift that Martin Luther King Jr. was moving toward when his life and evolution as a leader for social change was brutally ended. As he said in introducing the idea of the Poor People's Campaign, "I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society."

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Keeanga-Yamahtta ​Taylor, African American scholar, socialist and academic - she is assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University - offers a profoundly incisive and extensively researched study of US politics American racism and Black resistance in recent decades in her book From ​#BlackLivesMatter ​to ​Black ​Liberation.

Taylor's viewpoint is grounded in both socialist and anti-racist theory - and her analysis looks at both economic and cultural forces. Taylor's focus here is on the era from the civil rights movement to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the similarities and differences between the two movements, and ultimately on "the potential for a much broader anticapitalist movement that looks to transform not only the police but the entire United States." However, she begins her analysis with an examination of America's history as a racist state, from the earliest foundation of a slave-based economy to the exclusion of Black Americans from the benefits of the New Deal. In particular, Taylor points to the effects that the cultural myth of "American exceptionalism" has had, particularly in the Cold War period, in suppressing any consideration of institutional and systemic injustice in American society, and the subsequent evolution of the idea of the "culture of poverty" as the reason for the existence of economic and social inequity in the supposedly freest and most economically mobile country in the world.

"The government and its proponents in the financial world were making a global claim that the United States was good to its Black population, and at the same time they were promoting capitalism and private enterprise as the highest expressions of freedom. American boosters sustained the fiction of the “culture of poverty” as the pretext for the persisting inequality between Blacks and the rest of the country. In some ways, this was even more important as the United States continued its quest to project itself as an economic and political empire. Cold War liberalism was a political framework that viewed American racial problems as existing outside of or unrelated to its political economy and, more importantly, as problems that could be fixed within the system itself by changing the laws and creating 'equal opportunity.' "

Taylor notes the beginnings of a wider understanding of racial inequity as a systemic issue - and one with material as well as cultural elements -during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, the extension of the welfare state under Johnson, and most significantly, in the multiple Black Liberation movements, and particularly The Black Panthers - that followed in the latter half of the 1960s.

"Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans drew even more radical conclusions about the nature of Black oppression in the United States as they were drawn directly into the radicalizing movement; hundreds of thousands more sympathized with the rebellions. The struggle broke through the isolation and confinement of life in segregated Black ghettos and upended the prevailing explanation that Blacks were responsible for the conditions in their neighborhoods. Mass struggle led to a political understanding of poverty in Black communities across the country. Black media captured stories of injustice as well as the various struggles to organize against it, feeding this process and knitting together a common Black view of Black oppression while simultaneously providing an alternative understanding for white people. A Harris poll taken in the summer of 1967, after major riots in Detroit and Newark, found 40 percent of whites believed that “the way Negroes have been treated in the slums and ghettos of big cities” and “the failure of white society to keep its promises to Negroes” were the leading causes of the rebellion. Many, including Martin Luther King Jr., began to connect Black oppression to a broader critique of capitalism."

Unfortunately, as Taylor demonstrates, this early materialist critique of the philosophies and methods of institutionalised racism faded in the 1970s as more conservative, 'personal responsibility' narratives take the central place in the debate on both racism and poverty, and the doctrine of 'colourblindness' emerged as a means of appearing non-racist while continuing to engage in administrative and economic practices that were inherently unjust to people of colour.

"Nixon’s turn to focusing on crime fit snugly with his broader use of colorblindness to champion his domestic policies. There was no need to invoke race in this campaign for law and order, but the consequences of the policies could not have been clearer. Crime was committed by bad people who made bad choices—it was not the product of an unequal social order that left Blacks and Puerto Ricans, in particular, isolated in urban enclaves with little access to good jobs, housing, or schools in a worsening economy. Instead, inequality left poor and working-class people of color to their own devices to advance in a society that had made next to no provisions for them to do so through legal or normative means. These kinds of constrained “choices” were made in white enclaves as well, but those were less surveilled and less likely to be criminalized by the police and the criminal justice system as a whole."

As the political climate in America became increasingly conservative in the years following Nixon - even among Democrats, but alarmingly so among Republicans - the twin narratives of colourblindness and the 'culture of poverty' became fixed as the foundations of public policy. Even among the middle class Blacks who increasingly gained access to positions of political and economic power, these narratives went unchallenged, while social and economic conditions worsened for poor blacks (and other people of colour). By the time that conditions were ripe for the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as Taylor notes in comparing the situation in 2014 immediately prior to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson to that preceding the emergence if the civil rights movement, "The main difference is that today, when poor or working-class Black people experience hardship, that hardship is likely being overseen by an African American in some position of authority. The development of the Black political establishment has not been a benign process. Many of these officials use their perches to articulate the worst stereotypes of Blacks in order to shift blame away from their own incompetence."

Taylor sees the betrayal of black communities by black politicians and elites as the inevitable outgrowth of a switch from grassroots resistance and critique of the political and economic power structure structures to a strategy based on electoral politics - one which, due to the nature of the political process in America left black politicians financially beholden to corporate money and conservative voting bloc brokers.

After examining political viewpoints surrounding the oppression of Black Americans, Taylor turns to an examination of racism and violence toward Blacks in criminal justice institutions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans began their long transition from living largely in rural areas to living predominantly in urban ones. In that time, there have been many changes in Black life, politics, and culture, but the threat and reality of police surveillance, scrutiny, violence, and even murder has remained remarkably consistent. The daily harm caused by the mere presence of police in Black communities has been a consistent feature of Black urban history and, increasingly, Black suburban history. Police brutality has been a consistent badge of inferiority and second-class citizenship. When the police enforce the law inconsistently and become the agents of lawlessness and disorder, it serves as a tangible reminder of the incompleteness of formal equality. You cannot truly be free when the police are able to set upon you at will, for no particular reason at all. It is a constant reminder of the space between freedom and “unfreedom,” where the contested citizenship of African Americans is held."

She opens with a discussion of laws restricting black movement, employment and home rental/ownership after the Civil War, laws whose violation was punished by enforced labour on municipal projects - thus beginning the carceral-based slavery system that has replaced the plantation-based slavery system.

"The desperate need for labor seemed insatiable; it turned all Black people into potential suspects and justified surveillance and scrutiny. Convict leasing was lucrative for employers compared to slavery, since it involved lower overhead expenses. As one observer put it, “Before the war we owned the Negroes. If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.” The police were the linchpin to this new arrangement."

Having set the scene, as it were, by delineating the history of the conditions - institutional racism and its consequences for the average black person, police brutality, the narrative of a 'culture of poverty' and the co-opting of the black elite - which could, given the necessary spark, bring about a new Black liberation movement, Taylor takes a close look at the Obama regime and its influence on perceptions of racism. She recalls the initial optimism of blacks and progressive whites at the election of a black man to the office of President:

"The excitement about Obama turned into postelection euphoria. That was certainly the feeling in Chicago on election night, when a cross-section of the city converged in Grant Park to hear the country’s first Black president-elect address the nation. It was a rare, almost strange scene to see a multiracial crowd gathered in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the United States. That was the power of Obama’s calls for hope and change. On the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, 69 percent of Black respondents told CNN pollsters that Martin Luther King’s vision had been 'fulfilled.' In early 2011, asked whether they expected their children’s standard of living to be better or worse than their own, 60 percent of Blacks chose “better,” compared with only 36 percent of whites. This was not just blind hope: it was the expectation that things would, in fact, be better. One researcher described the broader context: 'Certainly, the Obama presidency has fueled euphoria in black circles. But even before Obama came on the scene, optimism was building—most notably among a new generation of black achievers who refused to believe they would be stymied by the bigotry that bedeviled their parents. Obama’s election was, in effect, the final revelation—the long awaited sign that a new American age had arrived.' "Now we have a sense of future,' said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson. 'All of a sudden you have a stake. That stake is extremely important. If you have a stake, now there’s risk—you realize the consequences of compromising an unknowable future.' Almost 75 percent of African Americans in the South said that Obama would help America rid itself of racial prejudice. Forbes ran an enthusiastic editorial opinion in December 2008 titled 'Racism in America Is Over.' "

Disillusionment with Obama's reticence on racial issues and acceptance of the 'culture of poverty narrative among Blacks helped to build a loose coalition between social justice activists and the economic justice activists of the fledgling Occupy Wall Street movement.

"...Black Occupy activists organized “Occupy the Hood,” whose goal was to raise the profile of the Occupy movement in communities of color across the country and widen the range of people involved. Some “Occupy the Hood” organizers had also been involved in organizing against “stop-and-frisk.” Thus, not only did Occupy popularize economic and class inequality in the United States by demonstrating against corporate greed, fraud, and corruption throughout the finance industry, it also helped to make connections between those issues and racism. The public discussion over economic inequality rendered incoherent both Democratic and Republican politicians’ insistence on locating Black poverty in Black culture. While it obviously did not bury the arguments for culture and “personal responsibility,” Occupy helped to create the space for alternative explanations within mainstream politics, including seeing Black poverty and inequality as products of the system. The vicious attack and crackdown on the unarmed and peaceful Occupy encampments over the winter and into 2012 also provided a lesson about policing in the United States: the police were servants of the political establishment and the ruling elite. Not only were they racist, they were also shock troops for the status quo and bodyguards for the 1 percent."

Taylor pinpoints the killing of Trayvon Martin as the turning point that led to the coalescence of the BlackLivesMatter movement. Despite protests, demonstrations and attempts by Black and anti-racist activists to challenge the narrative, Martin was characterised as a dangerous criminal and his killer, George Zimmerman, as a victim.

"Out of despair over the verdict, community organizer Alicia Garza posted a simple hashtag on Facebook: “#blacklivesmatter.” It was a powerful rejoinder that spoke directly to the dehumanization and criminalization that made Martin seem suspicious in the first place and allowed the police to make no effort to find out to whom this boy belonged. It was a response to the oppression, inequality, and discrimination that devalue Black life every day. It was everything, in three simple words. Garza would go on, with fellow activists Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, to transform the slogan into an organization with the same name: #BlackLivesMatter. In a widely read essay on the meaning of the slogan and the hopes for their new organization, Garza described #BlackLivesMatter as 'an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.' "

While the death of Martin ad the acquittal of his killer marked the beginning of the BlackLivesMatter movement, Taylor identifies the crucial moment when that ignited mass resistance in the killing of Michael Brown:

"For reasons that may never be clear, Brown’s death was a breaking point for the African Americans of Ferguson—but also for hundreds of thousands of Black people across the United States. Perhaps it was the inhumanity of the police leaving Brown’s body to fester in the hot summer sun for four and a half hours after killing him, keeping his parents away at gunpoint and with dogs. “We was treated like we wasn’t parents, you know?” Mike Brown Sr., said. “That’s what I didn’t understand. They sicced dogs on us. They wouldn’t let us identify his body. They pulled guns on us.” Maybe it was the military hardware the police brandished when protests against Brown’s death arose. With tanks and machine guns and a never-ending supply of tear gas, rubber bullets, and swinging batons, the Ferguson police department declared war on Black residents and anyone who stood in solidarity with them."

As she recounts the growing response to the deaths of Brown and other black boys and men at the hands of police across the country, Taylor draws clear distinctions between the positions of the black 'older statesmen' such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who sought to defuse tensions and re-establish the legitimacy of the government in dealing with police violence and racism, and the younger generations of activists who sought immediate and direct action.

"The young people of Ferguson had great reverence and respect for the memory of the civil rights movement, but the reality is that its legacy meant little in their everyday lives. “I feel in my heart that they failed us,” Dontey Carter said of contemporary civil rights leaders. “They’re the reason things are like this now. They don’t represent us. That’s why we’re here for a new movement. And we have some warriors out here.” When Jesse Jackson Sr. arrived in Ferguson, he was confronted by a local activist, who said, “When you going to stop selling us out, Jesse? We don’t want you here in St. Louis!” Other activists did not go that far, but they did note that young Black people had been thrust into leadership on the ground in Ferguson because they were the ones under attack."

Taylor notes other differences between the BLM movement and the more established Black civil rights organisations - the prominence of women and LGBT people, its decentralised structure and use of social media, the flexibility of its tactics, its work in coalition building with labour and other movements, and the development of a "systemic analysis of policing.... that situated policing within a matrix of racism and inequality in the United States and beyond."

In the book's final chapter, Taylor discusses the ways in which radicalisation on political and economic issues - an analysis that links capitalism to the material conditions that Black and other marginalised people are faced - with is a necessary part of the struggle for Black liberation. She reminds us of the socialist perspectives adopted by 60s activists such as the Combahee River Collective and the Black Panthers, and traces the roots of black radicalism in the United States from the early days of the Communist Party in that country. Beginning with the words of Karl Marx on the relation between colonial exploitation, slavery, and capitalism, she outlines a radical understanding of the relation between the capitalist system and the oppression of black people, leading to the conclusion that only a restructuring of society which embraces economic as well as social justice can bring about the goal of black liberation.

"Racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doing so. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule, made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay. To that end, racism, capitalism, and class rule have always been tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other. Can there be Black liberation in the United States as the country is currently constituted? No. Capitalism is contingent on the absence of freedom and liberation for Black people and anyone else who does not directly benefit from its economic disorder. That, of course, does not mean there is nothing to do and no struggle worth waging. Building the struggles against racism, police violence, poverty, hunger, and all of the ways in which oppression and exploitation express themselves is critical to people’s basic survival in this society. But it is also within those struggles for the basic rights of existence that people learn how to struggle, how to strategize, and build movements and organizations. It is also how our confidence develops to counter the insistence that this society, as it is currently constructed, is the best that we can hope to achieve. People engaged in struggle learn to fight for more by fighting for and winning something. But the day-to-day struggles in which many people are engaged today must be connected to a much larger vision of what a different world could look like."

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