Ratchet Black Lives Matter: Megan Thee Stallion, Intra‐Racial Violence, and the Elusion of Grief

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-297
Author(s):  
Nikki Lane
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin

The conclusion notes the ways that Malcolm X’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Congo, which he finds consistent with a larger disregard for the lives of Black people, globally conceived, is echoed in the words and actions of Black Lives Matter activists, who organized following the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the failure to prosecute his killer. Sanford is a town founded by Henry Shelton Sanford, who represented the United States at the Berlin Conference and worked as a lobbyist for King Leopold II, which helped to fund his Florida empire. This chapter notes that Sanford was directly at odds with George Washington Williams during their lifetime and up until their deaths, which suggests that the Congo appears as an integral part of the landscape of U.S. racial violence and that African American critics of colonialism have always been willing to use their voices to say so.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-323
Author(s):  
Chaz Briscoe

Using the year 2015 to frame and contextualize the discussion, this article asks why white backlash is an expected reaction to black resistance. In short, white backlash is built into the liberal construction of race. Utilizing Joel Olson’s conception of Herrenvolk democracy, this article analyzes how the color-blind norm of race moves race into a sphere of discourse where it is omnipresent but also disempowered for any legal remedy. Policing becomes an institution by which race is made apparent, as the inequitable treatment by the police dictates who is protected by the color line. Drawn from polling surveys and government reports, data is provided with regard to the unchanging perceptions of racial attitudes. Black Lives Matter takes up the Black radical tradition in order to reassert Black humanity in the face of a system that normalizes racial violence, racial terror, and its own racial ignorance. In this way BLM displays the counternarrative to white hegemony. This counternarrative forces us to realize the depth of the race problem by mobilizing a language of abolition. Circling back to Olson’s abolition democracy, this article concludes by looking at how far we must go in terms of applying abolition to our discourse, language, conception of humanity, and democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.


Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.


Author(s):  
Robin D. G. Kelley

Few activists who march behind the banner of Black Lives Matter conceive of their struggle as an appeal to white people for recognition, but until recently the movement’s objective echoed this implicit line of reasoning: if the dominant class, and/or the state, could just recognize that our lives matter, we would be treated differently. Such assumptions can easily lead us down a slippery slope of reducing five centuries of racism, slavery, and colonialism to a fixed ideology of anti-Blackness intrinsic to the European mind, or worse, mistaking a dynamic racial regime for negligence, ignorance, or “blindness” to our humanity, a humanity that requires a visible struggle to be seen. They can lead, that is to say, to a politics in which recognition takes precedence over revolution and reconstruction.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Lindsay Quigley ◽  
Phi Yen Nguyen ◽  
Haley Stone ◽  
David J. Heslop ◽  
Abrar Ahmad Chughtai ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Yvonne Sherwood

When I began work on this book, back in 2013, I had no nightmares of a man who would be elected to presidential office despite having been recorded bragging openly about ‘grab[bing]’ women ‘by the pussy’: a statement that echoes the worst of biblical pornoprophetic insults, as in Isaiah 3:17. Even the darkest of prophets could not have foretold the appointment of so many North American cabinet members accused of sexual assault, or such a concerted and centralized attack on Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, and queer and migrant/refugee rights. As the essays in this collection clearly show, issues such as hardening borders, guns, and ...


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