#black studies

[trans-axolotl]

"How to Go Mad is animated by deep concern for black people, mad people, and other beleaguered beings. If this project brings attention to people who have been persecuted because of their blackness and/or/as madness; if it alerts rationalist readers to the grave repercussions of demeaning the mentally ill; if it teaches techniques for practicing ethical, radical, critical, and beautiful madness; if it instigates righteous rage in the interest of social transformation; if it broadens understanding of who and what comprises a black radical tradition; if it encourages black studies to more carefully address madness; if it prompts mad studies to think more rigorously through blackness; if it urges black studies and mad studies to join forces; if it testifies to the possibility of bearing fruit in a "fruitless expanse" and finding home "nowhere at all"; if it models radical compassion; if it urges us toward liberation; or if it simply contributes to someone's relief or healing, then, to my mind, this book succeeds.

For some, healing might mean banishing madness. For others, healing might mean harnessing madness and putting it to good use--a readiness to rally the voices inside one's head rather than silence them. "

-How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, 2021. By La Marr Jurelle Bruce, pg 34.

#personal #disability studies #black studies #mad studies #quotes #mad liberation

[racefortheironthrone]

On a previous ask, someone asked about racial capitalism and like what makes it different from regular capitalism

Yeah, I didn't explain what the term meant, although I wasn't asked that before.

To start with, according to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (1983), there is no difference because all forms of capitalism are racial capitalism, that capitalism by its nature produces racial oppression when it produces inequality.

So why coin the term?

The main thing that Robinson was trying to do was to shift the focus of Marxist thought on capitalism towards the way that capitalism extracts value specifically from the racially marginalized.

This has a lot to do with fights within Marxism about how to think about capitalism - for example, Robinson isn't a fan of the idea from Marx that capitalism was a progressive force vis-a-vis feudalism, and argues that capitalism simply displaced caste systems from Europe to Europe's colonies in the Americas, Asia, Africa, etc. through slavery and colonialism and later systems of racial oppression.

#history #political science #black studies #racial capitalism #cedric robinson #marxism

[librarycards]

I think that “trans” is one word for it that is not just one word among others. You know what I’m saying? I have all these shorthand ways of putting shit that I steal from other people, but what I mean is that there are other words that one could use, but none of those words is replaceable. Not only are they not replaceable, they are not substitutable. . . . I’m beginning to think that these things [blackness and transness] converge in an irreducible way. They can’t be thought separately from one another, because both manifest themselves in regard to ritual practice. I don’t think about blackness as an identity. I think about blackness as a ritual practice, and I feel like I should think this about transness too.

Fred Moten, "All Terror, All Beauty."

[emphasis added]

#FRED MOTEN MY BELOVED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #fred moten #readings #trans #blackness #black studies #gender #mine

[caribbeanart]

I have known about Victoria Santa Cruz's work about as far back as secondary school but this is truly the most thorough and comprehensive article I've read on her work that does a great job of situating her in a broader, cross-cultural context; or in other words the "why" her work matters beyond borders.

Some powerful quotes that struck me:

"In a 2007 interview, Santa Cruz described how as a little girl, she had been playing with a group of friends when a new girl with blond hair joined them and stated that if Santa Cruz remained, she would leave. Her friends promptly told Santa Cruz to leave, which to her, exemplified who held power and who had the right to wield that power."

The author does a great job building context with this line:

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Black activists in the United States, like Santa Cruz in Peru and Paris, redefined and recreated what it meant to be Black. Black with a capital 'B' is about self-naming, self-defining, and self-determining, which can be seen in the work of Santa Cruz. It is, at times, biographical, exhibiting the arduous process she has endured to form an identity that isn’t controlled or concerned with outdated stereotypes and instead honors a rich heritage inherited and a [sense of self] not founded in shame."

Victoria Santa Cruz is originally from Perú, not the Caribbean, but as I touched on in a previous post, sharing this work is a part of a broader personal initiative to expand the narrative when talking about Latin America and the Caribbean and its diáspora.

#memoria ancestral #ancestral memory #victoria santa cruz #afrolatina #afrolatino #afrolatinx #peru #diaspora #diáspora #black studies #black studyblr #black diaspora #what i'm reading #perú #lima perú #lima peru

[historysisco]

On This Day in New York City History February 20, 1895: Former slave, abolitionist and civil rights advocate Frederick Douglass (February 1818 - February 20, 1895) passes away at the age of 77 or 78.

Douglass escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad arriving in NYC in 1838. Douglass would figure heavily in the history of NYC's abolition movement leading up to and during the Civil War. Douglass gave a series of speeches at Cooper Union including The Proclamation and the Negro Army which was given on February 3, 1863.

Post Civil War, Douglass continued to work for the freedom of not only blacks but of women in the areas of voting rights and would lend his support to Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching campaign.

Douglass would pass away at either the age of 77 or 78 in Washington D.C.

#FrederickDouglass #UndergroundRailroad #BlackHistory #BlackStudies #BlackHistoryMatters #AfricanAmericanHistory #AfricanAmericanStudies #CivilRightsHistory #NewYorkHistory #NYHistory #NYCHistory #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco

https://www.instagram.com/p/Co55GyMuygs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#Frederick Douglass #Underground Railroad #Black History #Black Studies #Black History Matters #African American History #African American Studies #Civil Rights History #New York History #NY History #NYC history #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco

[protoslacker]

The evolution of my thinking comes from a combination of elevating my own political education by reading the works of Black radical thinkers and being in conversation with Black radical organizers. These are the types of experiences that helped to inform the work and political framework of Know Your Rights Camp, a nonprofit organization I co-founded in service of building power in our communities.

Colin Kaepernick in interview with Indigo Oliver in The New Republic. “Black History Is an Absolute Necessity.”

A conversation with Colin Kaepernick on Black studies, white supremacy, and capitalism

Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Haymarket Books is a great book publisher and they're offering this book as a free Ebook. It's important to support organizations like Haymarket.

#black studies #black radical tradition #racial capitalism #book

[ordinaryfailure]

We might all die, but we do not all die under the same conditions.

Deborah E. McDowell, “Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,” in The Familial Gaze (1999)

#critical theory #black studies #death #spectacle #family pictures #photography #newspapers #Deborah E. McDowell #deborah mcdowell #black feminist theory #1999

[exery]

I wish there were more black people here to hear it

#audre lorde #black studies #poetry

[trans-axolotl]

"Thus primed, I propose that madness encompasses at least four overlapping entities in the modern West.

First is phenomenal madness: an intense unruliness of mind--producing fundamental crises of perception, emotion, meaning, and selfhood--as experienced in the consciousness of the mad subject. This unruliness is not necessarily painful, nor is it categorically pleasurable; it may induce distress, despair, exhilaration, euphoria, and myriad other sensations. In elaborating this mode of madness, I favor a phenomenological attitude attuned to whatever presents itself to consciousness, including hallucinations and delusions that have no material basis. Most important, phenomenal madness centers the lived experience and first person interiority of the mad subject, rather than, say, diagnoses imposed by medical authority.

Such diagnoses are the basis of medicalized madness, the second category in this schema. Medicalized madness encompasses a range of "serious mental illnesses" and psychopathologies codified by the psy sciences of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. These "serious" conditions include schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the antiquated diagnosis of medical "insanity," among others. I label this category medicalized madness, emphasizing the suffix -ize, meaning to become or to cause to become--to signal that mental illness is a politicized process, epistemological, operation, and sociohistorical construction, rather than an ontological given...

...Even forms of medicalized madness that are measurable in brain tissue physiology, neuroelectric currents, and other empirical criteria are infiltrated (and sometimes constituted) by sociocultural forces. The creation, standardization, collection, and interpretation of psychiatric metrics take place in the crucible of culture. Likewise, clinical procedures are designed and carried out by subjective persons embedded in webs of social relations. And furthermore, psychiatry is susceptible to ideology. Exploiting that susceptibility, various antiblack, proslavery, patriarchal, colonialist, homophobic, and transphobic regimes have wielded psychiatry as a tool of domination. Thus, acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been pathologized by Western psychiatric science. Beyond these overt examples of hegemonic psychiatry, I want to emphasize that no diagnosis is innocently objective. No etiology escapes the touch and taint of ideology. No science is pure.

The third mode of madness is rage: an affective state of intense and aggressive displeasure (which is surely phenomenal, but warrants analytic distinction from the unruliness above). Black people in the United States and elsewhere have been subjected to heinous violence and degradation, but rarely granted recourse. Consequently, as singer-songwriter Solange Knowles reminds us, black people "got the right to be mad" and "got a lot to be mad about." Alas, when they articulate rage in American public spheres, black people are often criminalized as threats to public safety, lampooned as angry black caricatures, and pathologized as insane. That latter process--the conflation of black anger and black insanity--parallels the Anglophone confluence of madness meaning anger and madness meaning insanity. In short, when black people get mad (as in angry), antiblack logics tend to presume they've gone mad (as in crazy).

The fourth and most capacious category in this framework is psychosocial madness: radical deviation from the normal within a given psychosocial milieu. Any person or practice that perplexes and vexes the psychonormative status quo is liable to be labeled crazy. The arbiters of psychosocial madness are not elite cohorts of psychiatric experts, but rather multitudes of avowedly Reasonable people and publics who abide by psychonormative common sense. Thus, psychosocial madness reflects how avowedly sane majorities interpellate and often denigrate difference. What I have already stated about medicalized madness can also be adapted to psychosocial madness: acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been ostracized as crazy by sane majorities who adhere to Reasonable common sense...

...Yet it seems to me that psychosocial madness reveals more about the avowedly sane society branding an object crazy than about the so branded. When you point at someone or something and shout Crazy!, you have revealed more about yourself--about your sensibility, your values, your attentions, your notion of the normal, the limits of your imagination in processing dramatic difference, the terms you use to describe the world, the reach of your pointing finger, the lilt of your accusatory voice--than you have revealed about that supposedly mad entity."

-How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce, 2021, pg 6-8.

#personal #mad studies #black studies #disability studies #mad liberation #antipsychiatry #mad pride #psych abolition

[openlyandfreely]

#poetry #black queer life #black studies #lgbtq community #race and the law #coming out #black poetry #black history #mass incarceration

[youngbloodoldsoul]

Could #AbbottElementary even have afforded to employ a teacher to come up there and teach Black History for #BlackHistoryMonth? Unless they were willing to work for even lower pay or school credits or it was a volunteer position I doubt it.

Seriously, I'd be all for a Black teacher teaching Black history (even though Jacob did do a great job) but did this man expect a school that can't even afford supplies or one computer to pay for a teacher that's only going to be around for 28 days?

Doesn't Melissa teach two grades and they have to basically pay out of pocket for school and cleaning supplies?

Imagine taking this job (or volunteer position) for #BlackHistoryMonth then finding out you have to buy your own supplies and books for each student. (If not each history class). So that's your entire pay for that month. You're paying to work.

I copied and pasted this from my Twitter thread.

I have one more question. Would Jacob still be getting paid or would be jobless and without a paycheck for a month to for the sub while the sub basically has to spend both their paycheck on books and supplies?

#abbott elementary #black history month #black studies #african american studies #black history #abc #jacob hill #quick question #ava coleman

[historysisco]

On This Day in New York City History February 2, 1935: Dancer Anne Raven Wilkinson (February 2, 1935 – December 17, 2018) was born in New York City, New York. Wilkinson has the distinction of being the first African-American woman to dance for a major classical ballet company.

Wilkinson was born into a middle class black family in Harlem. Her father was a medical doctor and her mother a ballet dancer. Her love for ballet was born from watching a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a dance group that she would make history with.

Wilkinson would face difficulties in getting accepted to the Ballet Russe de Monter Carlo. Twice she was rejected before she was accepted at the age of 20 in 1955 by the director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Serge Denham.

After leaving the group in the early 1960, Wilkinson would dance with a number row groups before retiring in 1974. That would be a short lived retirement. In the same year Wilkinson would join the New York City Opera and dance for them until 1985. In her later years she would serve as mentor to Misty Copeland who was a trailblazer in her own right. Copeland was the first African American to become a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre.

Wilkinson passed away on December 17, 2018 at the age of 83.

#AnneRavenWilkinson #BalletRusseDeMonteCarlo #AfricanAmericanHistory #AfricanAmericanStudies #BlackHistory #BlackStudies #BlackHistoryMatters #WomensHistory #WomensStudies #HERStory #DanceHistory #NewYorkHistory #NYHistory #NYCHistory #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco

https://www.instagram.com/p/CoKa8wxuhZG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#Anne Raven Wilkinson #Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo #African American History #African American Studies #Black History #Black Studies #Black History Matters #Women's History #Women's Studies #HERstory #Dance History #New York History #NY History #NYC history #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco

[thiswomxnswerk]

Tables

Live mushrooms feeding on dead humans. New assemblage?

Where does life end and Death--

Where does Death--

and life--?

Death is always around, at the cellular level, microbial, astronomical

Some of those lumps of cells that crawled out of the water to birth our present world didn't make it. (Sometimes, I envy them.)

What if Death is just becoming one with nature again,

de-estranged, re-naturalized

Even when I study life and its functionalities--birth, midwifery, preservation, development, medical and spiritual care--Death is always there to take Her due.

We eat of Death's bounty and She allows it because one day we too will be on her table of offerings, to breath life into something somewhere else.

Where are you? Are you grass beneath my feet, the roots and twigs,

the food I eat?

#poetry #death work #anthropology #black studies

[criticallyproclaimed]

"It is estimated that 40% of missing children are children of color and 33% are Black children. The media intentionally lacks coverage of missing Black children, with only 7% of their news coverage referencing us."

Please get into my latest blog article via Medium, this one really hit close to home 🙏🏾.

#black studies #black history #writing #journalist #writing community #writerslift #christmas #holiday #travel

[beastbent]

How to Draw a Perfect Circle, by Terrance Hayes (2014)

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head, Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle, The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman. To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her wedding, The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing, In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows, But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel, A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers, The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy. I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat. An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness, All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open, They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed. I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased, Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops, A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests, When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell, Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle. The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid Until the drawing is complete.

#black studies #carceral state #abolition #disability #poetry #black poetry #Terrance Hayes #contour drawing