Blackness in Britain


Book Description

Black Studies is a hugely important, and yet undervalued, academic field of enquiry that is marked by its disciplinary absence and omission from academic curricula in Britain. There is a long and rich history of research on Blackness and Black populations in Britain. However Blackness in Britain has too often been framed through the lens of racialised deficits, constructed as both marginal and pathological. Blackness in Britain attends to and grapples with the absence of Black Studies in Britain and the parallel crisis of Black marginality in British society. It begins to map the field of Black Studies scholarship from a British context, by collating new and established voices from scholars writing about Blackness in Britain. Split into five parts, it examines: Black studies and the challenge of the Black British intellectual; Revolution, resistance and state violence; Blackness and belonging; exclusion and inequality in education; experiences of Black women and the gendering of Blackness in Britain. This interdisciplinary collection represents a landmark in building Black Studies in British academia, presenting key debates about Black experiences in relation to Britain, Black Europe and the wider Black diaspora. With contributions from across various disciplines including sociology, human geography, medical sociology, cultural studies, education studies, post-colonial English literature, history, and criminology, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students of the multi- and inter-disciplinary area of Black Studies.





Book Description




The Making of a Black Scholar


Book Description

This captivating and illuminating book is a memoir of a young black man moving from rural Georgia to life as a student and teacher in the Ivy League as well as a history of the changes in American education that developed in response to the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and affirmative action. Born in 1950, Horace Porter starts out in rural Georgia in a house that has neither electricity nor running water. In 1968, he leaves his home in Columbus, Georgia—thanks to an academic scholarship to Amherst College—and lands in an upper-class, mainly white world. Focusing on such experiences in his American education, Porter's story is both unique and representative of his time. The Making of a Black Scholar is structured around schools. Porter attends Georgia's segregated black schools until he enters the privileged world of Amherst College. He graduates (spending one semester at Morehouse College) and moves on to graduate study at Yale. He starts his teaching career at Detroit's Wayne State University and spends the 1980s at Dartmouth College and the 1990s at Stanford University. Porter writes about working to establish the first black studies program at Amherst, the challenges of graduate study at Yale, the infamous Dartmouth Review, and his meetings with such writers and scholars as Ralph Ellison, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He ends by reflecting on an unforeseen move to the University of Iowa, which he ties into a return to the values of his childhood on a Georgia farm. In his success and the fulfillment of his academic aspirations, Porter represents an era, a generation, of possibility and achievement.




The Black Anglo-Saxons


Book Description

A penetrating exposition of the Black middle class individuals who do not accept their role and responsibilties as advocates for all African Americans.




Remaking Black Power


Book Description

In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.




Race & Excellence


Book Description

Griffith (psychiatry and African and African American studies, Yale U.) engages in dialogue with pioneering black psychiatrist Pierce. They meld his life and career, focusing on his theories about the predictable nature of racist behavior and the responses of oppressed groups, and how his own experience with racism has affected his work. In addition to his work on racism, Pierce is known for his substantive scholarship on coping with extreme environments such as the South Pole. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy


Book Description

The essays in Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy make visible the submerged stories of Black life in academia. They offer fresh historical, social, and cultural insights into what it means to teach, learn, research, and work while Black. In daring to shift from margin to centre, the book’s contributors confront two overlapping themes. First, they resist a singular construction of Blackness that masks the nuances and multiplicity of what it means to be and experience the academy as Black people. Second, they challenge the stubborn durability of anti-Black tropes, the dehumanization of Blackness, persistent deficit ideologies, and the tyranny of low expectations that permeate the dominant idea of Blackness in the white colonial imagination. Operating at the intersections of discourse and experience, contributors reflect on how Blackness shapes academic pathways, ignites complicated and often difficult conversations, and reimagines Black pasts, presents, and futures. This unique collection contributes to the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the ways in which Blackness is made, unmade, and remade in the academy and the implications for interrelated dynamics across and within post-secondary education, Black communities in Canada, and global Black diasporas.




Dear Science and Other Stories


Book Description

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.




A Political Education


Book Description

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.




Making Black Lives Matter


Book Description

Download your free digital copy of Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism! At the heart of racist attitudes and behaviors is anti-Black racism, which simply put, is the disregard and disdain of Black life. Anti-Black racism negatively impacts every aspect of the lives of Black people. Edited by renowned scholar and psychologist Kevin Cokley, Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism explores the history and contemporary circumstances of anti-Black racism, offers powerful personal anecdotes, and provides recommendations and solutions to challenging anti-Black racism in its various expressions. The book features chapters written by scholars, practitioners, activists, and students. The chapters reflect diverse perspectives from the Black community and writing styles that range from scholarly text supported by cited research to personal narratives that highlight the lived experiences of the contributors. The book focuses on the ways that anti-Black racism manifests and has been confronted across various domains of Black life using research, activism, social media, and therapy. In the words of Cokley: "It is my hope that the book will provide a blueprint for readers that will empower them to actively confront anti-Blackness wherever it exists, because this is the only way we will progress toward making Black lives matter." Making Black Lives Matter is a book that is meant to be shared! The goal for Cognella for publishing this book is to amplify the voices of those who need to be heard and to provide readers free access to critical scholarship on topics that affect our everyday lives. We''re proud to provide free digital copies of the book to anyone who wants to read it. So, we encourage you to spread the word and share the book with everyone you know. Learn more about Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism! If you post about the book on social media, please use the hashtags #MakingBlackLivesMatter and #Cognella to join the conversation! Chapters and contributors include: Introduction - Kevin Cokley, Ph.D. Part I - Activism Chapter 1: "Historical Overview of the Black Struggle: Factors Affecting African American Activism" - Benson G. Cooke, Edwin J. Nichols, Schuyler C. Webb, Steven J. Jones, and Nia N. Williams Chapter 2: "Facilitating Black Survival and Wellness through Scholar-Activism" - Della V. Mosley, Pearis Bellamy, Garrett Ross, Jeannette Mejia, LaNya Lee, Carla Prieto, and Sunshine Adam Chapter 3: "Confronting Anti-Black Racism and Promoting Social Justice: Applications through Social Media" - Erlanger A. Turner, Maryam Jernigan-Noesi, and Isha Metzger Chapter 4: "#Say Her Name: The Impact of Gendered Racism and Misogynoir on the Lives of Black Women" - Jioni A. Lewis Part II - Public Policy Chapter 5: "A Tale of Three Cities: Segregation and Anti-Black Education Policy in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin" - Annika Olson Chapter 6: "Policing the Black Diaspora: Colonial Histories and Global Inequities in Policing and Carceral Punishment" - Ricardo Henrique Lowe, Jr. Chapter 7: "Building Health Equity among Black Young People with Lived Experience of Homelessness" - Norweeta G. Milburn and Dawn T. Bounds Chapter 8: "Anti-Blackness and Housing Inequality in the United States: A History of Housing Discrimination in Major Metropolitan Cities" - Tracie A. Lowe Part III - Community Voices Chapter 9: "Values-Driven, Community-Led Justice in Austin: A Project" - Sukyi McMahon and Chas Moore Chapter 10: "Leveraging the Power of Education to Confront Anti-Black Racism" - David W. Nowlin, Robert Muhammad, and Llyas Salahud-din Chapter 11: "Let the Òrìṣà Speak: Traditional Healing for Contemporary Times" - Ifetayo I. Ojelade Chapter 12: "The Victorious Mind: Addressing the Black Male in a Time of Turmoil" - Rico Mosby Part IV - Student Voices Chapter 13: "Unsung, Underpaid, and Unafraid: Black Graduate Students'' Response To Academic and Social Anti-Blackness" - Marlon Bailey, Shaina Hall, Carly Coleman, and Nolan Krueger Chapter 14: "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" - Marlie Harris, Mercedes Holmes, Kuukuwa Koomson, and Brianna McBride Chapter 15: "From Segregation and Disinclusion: The Anti-Black Experience of Graduate School" - Keoshia Harris and TaShara Williams Read the press release to learn more about Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism.