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The website RaceBox.org has compiled a list of census forms stretching back to the country’s infancy, and it offers a fascinating look at how ideas about racial classification have evolved over time. 2010. 1990. 1970. 1950. 1930.
1860. 1850. 1840. [via [...] In my more militant youth, I used to argue that May 19 should have been a national holiday. And if it couldn’t be one, then at the least I could sacrifice a day of school or work to commemorate Malcolm X’s birthday. In retrospect, that was stupid (maybe immature is the better word) [...] Today, much has been said about Dr. Dorothy Height’s life and legacy. I don’t have much to add, aside from saying that she was highly revered by many of my classmates at Howard University. The WaPo has a great slideshow up now. I know some people are partial to her hats and sequins, [...]
cross-posted from U.S. of J Adam Serwer has more on Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s announcement that April is Confederate History Month: The “state’s rights” in question involved the ownership of black people, and the “federal intrusion” the Confederacy opposed was the efforts of the federal government to secure the rights [...] Ta-Nehisi says that Malcolm is his heart and King is his brain. I’d never really had the Malcolm obsession that seemed to hold so many people I grew up with in its thrall, particularly around the time Spike Lee’s biopic dropped. (In the perhaps unavoidable commodification of Malcolm’s image, every other person in [...]
Martin Luther King was never the saintly, beloved man in life that he has become in death. Ari Kelman over at Edge of the West gave us permission to re-run this fantastic post on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the sterilization of his image. The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as the safe Civil Rights leader. When shrunk to fit within the confines of soundbite history, the pages of a textbook, or the scenes of a primary school pageant, King is cleansed of anger, of ego, of sexuality, and even, perhaps, of some of his humanity. Counterpoised against the ostensibly violent Malcolm X, who supposedly would have forced America to change its ways by using “any means necessary,” King comes off as a cuddly moderate — a figure who loved everyone, enemies included, even whites who subjugated black people. Although there’s some truth lurking behind this myth, there was more (about both X and King) to the story: complexities and nuances that escape most popular recollections. Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe. On March 12, 1968, less than a month before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, King visited the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Largely white, Grosse Pointe was — and to some extent still is — a bastion of establishment power. By that point in his career, King had embraced issues that moved well beyond the struggle against de jure segregation in the South. He had begun focusing most of his energy on inequality nationwide — de facto issues of poverty, job discrimination, fair housing, and, as Matthew Yglesias notes, the Vietnam war. While in Grosse Pointe, King delivered a speech, “The Other America,”* which details the orator’s evolution over the course of his too-brief career:
That’s the story most Americans know: from the buses of Montgomery to the lunch counters of Greensboro to a jail cell in Birmingham to the March on Washington and maybe to Stockholm and then Selma. But more likely straight from giving the “I Have a Dream” speech in DC to Memphis, to murder, to martyrdom. This narrative skips over a number of chapters from late in King’s life, the period after he began organizing in the North, when success often proved elusive. Not to spend too much time on “Negrogate,” but Slate’s Brian Palmer has a good history of the word “Negro” that’s definitely worth reading: Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until WEB DuBois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (DuBois also used black in his [...] Shamefully enough, I had no clue who Percy Sutton was or why he was important until I stumbled across his obituary on page 3A of my local newspaper. And though I’m usually wary of venturing into hyperbole, the Rev. Al Sharpton is not too far off in summing up the incredibly interesting and distinctive [...]
By Black Scientist. So it’s no secret that there is a default of whiteness in normative culture. That is: unless otherwise noted, people are white. I think this default can be challenged in communities that are predominantly of color on an everyday level (telling stories with an anonymous “she”), but when we engage with the popular sphere (movies, tv characters, in other words “visible people” in narratives created by others and passed down to the masses), people are – generally speaking – expected and assumed to be/imagined as white. So, knowing this, why was I still disappointed in the white-middle-class-ness that tainted the narrative of Michael Moore’s capitalism: A Love Story? Is it because he’s touted as a progressive filmmaker, and to interrogate capitalism without also challenging the normativity of whiteness is to basically suck at understanding the intersections and complexity of oppressions? A shortcoming that results in merely symbolic and short-falling attempts at being subversive. because he knows about other stuff, is he supposed to also know how to make a film that doesn’t indulge in the usual habit of seeing things through a white historical lens? The problem i had with Moore’s film was that the “we” he constructed often translated into white middle class people. and this wasn’t something I can pretend was glaringly obvious, because it was mostly subtle. noted in the use of “we” and the implication that follows of who “they” were. More… The Robinsons. The New York Times conducted a study on Michelle Obama’s ancestry. In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl [...]
(x-posted from U.S. of J. and the League) The whiff of tokenism notwithstanding, I’m actually glad to see that there are credible black Republicans angling for high-level political office. I’ve long argued that it would be good for black people, and great for the country, if Republicans took the African-American community seriously. [...] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPKGUYcNNSg] (x-posted at U.S. of J and the League of Ordinary Gentlemen) When you get the chance, you should check out Kai Wright’s terrific piece in the American Prospect on the decline of the black middle class. The short of it is that widespread “wealth poverty” among middle-class black families (”By 2007, black families had a dime for every dollar of white family wealth, and Hispanics, 12 cents.”) coupled with the importance of housing equity to black wealth has – with the collapse of the housing market – dealt a serious blow to the black middle class. There’s actually far too much in the piece to adequately summarize (the above is just a snippet of the broader argument), and so instead, I want to focus on this passage, as it fits in with something I’ve spent a lot of time writing about:
One of the more cliche’ criticisms of American political discourse is that we have an utter disregard for history. I don’t think that’s true; on any number of issues, we rely on history’s lessons to guide or inform our actions (see: stimulus package). I think it’s far more accurate to say that we have an incredibly selective historical memory, which is in effect most especially when it comes to talking about race and its various policy dimensions. That is, we spend a lot of time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks, or even Malcolm X (though the mainstream conversation still isn’t at a point where it can acknowledge the – many – positive contributions of Malcolm X to the “dialogue). And likewise, we spend a fair amount of time on racism as an individual affliction, or on the long-term effects of slavery and segregation on the black family and black communities. More… My co-blogger Shani just twittered this comment on the confirmation hearings: The GOP’s roundabout way of saying that a woman of color has to work harder to be objective than a white male does is pissing me off. What pisses me off is this completely ahistorical sense on part of Republicans that the [...] |
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