All posts by khytie15

Newly discovered WEB Du Bois science fiction story and the Future of Race

Future of Race Week 13

The story’s protagonist, Hannibal Johnson, is a black sociologist who uses a “megascope” to look across time and space. He demonstrates his gadget for a honeymooning couple, using it to look from the top of a NYC skyscraper into the fantastic past of Pittsburgh, in which supernatural beings play out an allegory about colonialism and race. It’s a critical piece of the history of Afrofuturism, a lineage that stretches forward to such writers as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler to Nalo Hopkinson and today’s explosion of African science fiction.

 

Full article here: Newly Discovered Du Bois Science Fiction

Considering the future of race and Anderson’s exercise in nonideal theory and political philosophy, I thought it apropos to include this piece on Du Bois’s newly discovered science fiction writings and Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is a way of imagining future possibilities through a black cultural lens.  Womack states that it’s the” intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.” (Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture ) It’s both a cultural and artistic aesthetic as well as a form of critical theory  and social commentary. It destabilizes notions of blackness and ” stretches the imagination far beyond the conventions of our time and the horizons of expectations , and kicks the box of blackness out of the solar system ” (22).

A lot of you questioned the practicality of the policy applications of Anderson, which are fair critiques. However, I posit  that changes in society often happen at the level of imagining possibilities, dreaming (Laurence Ralph’s word discusses this and even the words of Dr. King) and being able to envision the world in ways that defy the conventions of the current space and time.  Throughout the semester we’ve read both qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches within the field of sociology and have learned that there often is no single optimal solution, which is what Anderson attempts to get away from. Granted, our course is not one on political philosophy so some of the scholars she’s in conversation with , like Rawls who pioneers ideal theory, were missing from our understanding. Nevertheless a quick synopsis of ideal vs. non-ideal theory states:

John Rawls conceives of justice as fairness as a work of ideal theory. Ideal theory “assumes strict compliance and works out the principles that characterize a well-ordered society under favorable circumstances.”1 Nonideal theory, on the other hand, “is worked out after an ideal conception of justice has been chosen” and addresses what the parties are to do when conditions are not as perfect as they are assumed to be in ideal theory.

(http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/dictionary/ideal-nonideal-theory)

Non-ideal theory therefore chooses an ideal conception of justice, which Anderson situates in integration, and then advances ways to work on that ideal given imperfect circumstances. Having ideals is then not the issue at hand, a society needs ideals, the issue is where do we start to work through the imperfections to strive (even if we never quite achieve) for this ideal conception of justice?

Afrofuturism definitely responds to this conversation in imagining other worlds and new ideals. It has been critiqued by some as escapism but other scholars have argued that far from escapism, it allows for one to imagine the world as it could be and work towards those imagined possibilities.

Returning to DuBois, he was a man of empiricism, as we’ve read in Morris’s The Scholar Denied and Du Bois’s own works, yet he too realized that the space for imagining worlds, possibilities and telling counternarratives about origins and histories, which can then shape futures, was critical.

I’ll leave you guys with Janelle Monae’s song Many Moons. Monae herself is an artist who’s been described as an Afrofuturist and her songs , aesthetics, video directions certainly intersect imagination, technology, social commentary,  the future and liberation.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgbzNHVg0c

Excerpt of the lyrics:

We’re dancing free but we’re stuck here underground
And everybody trying to figure they way out
Hey hey hey, all we ever wanted to say
Was chased, erased and then thrown away
And day to day we live in a daze
We march all around til’ the sun goes down night children
Broken dreams, no sunshine, endless crimes, we long for freedom (for freedom)
You’re free but in your mind, your freedom’s in a bind
Oh make it rain, ain’t a thing in the sky to fall
(The silver bullet’s in your hand and the war’s heating up)
And when the truth goes bang the shouts splatter out
(Revolutionize your lives and find a way out)
And when you’re growing down instead of growing up
(You gotta ooo ah ah like a panther)
Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love?
(Na na na)

 

So strong for so long

All I wanna do is sing my simple song
Square or round, rich or poor
At the end of day and night all we want is more
I keep my feet on solid ground and use my wings when storms come around
I keep my feet on solid ground for freedom
You’re free but in your mind, your freedom’s in a bind

Oh make it rain, ain’t a thing in the sky to fall
(The silver bullet’s in your hand and the war’s heating up)
And when the truth goes bang the shouts splatter out
(Revolutionize your lives and find a way out)
And when you’re growing down instead of growing up
(You gotta ooo ah ah like a panther)
Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love?
(Na na na)

Civil rights, civil war
Hood rat, crack whore
Carefree, nightclub
Closet drunk, bathtub
Outcast, weirdo
Stepchild, freak show
Black girl, bad hair
Broad nose, cold stare
Tap shoes, Broadway
Tuxedo, holiday
Creative black, Love song
Stupid words, erased song
Gun shots, orange house
Dead man walking with a dirty mouth
Spoiled milk, stale bread
Welfare, bubonic plague
Record deal, light bulb
Keep back kid now corporate thug
Breast cancer, common cold
HIV, lost hope
Overweight, self esteem
Misfit, broken dream
Fish tank, small bowl
Closed mind, dark hold
Cybergirl, droid control
Get away now they trying to steal your soul
Microphone, one stage
Tomboy, outrage
Street fight, bloody war
Instigators, third floor
Promiscuous child, broken heart
STD, quarantine
Heroin user, coke head
Final chapter, death bed
Plastic sweat, metal skin
Metallic tears, mannequin
Carefree, night club
Closet drunk, bathtub
White house, Jim Crow
Dirty lies, my regards

When the world just treats you wrong
Just come with me and I’ll take you home
No need to pack a bag
Who put your life in the danger zone?
You running dropping like a rolling stone
No time to pack a bag
You just can’t stop your hurt from hanging on
The old man dies and then a baby’s born
Chan, chan, chan, change your life
And when the world just treats you wrong
Just come with us and you’ll take you home
Shan, shan shan shan-gri la
Na na na na na na na na na na na

Black Wealth/White Wealth: “The Continuity of Deep Structures”

Wealth Week 12

Tom Shapiro’s talk at the “Race Today: A Symposium on Race in America” at Brown university. The symposium “brought a group of the nation’s most respected intellectuals on race, racial theory and racial inequality together to consider the troubling state of black life in America today. What are the broader structural factors that shape race today? How do these factors work on the ground and institutionally and what are the consequences? What are the ideas about race, and racial identities that enable the normalcy of stark racial differences today? In particular, what role do key ideas such as “colorblindness” and “post race” play in shaping perception and outcomes? What can be done to challenge ideological and structural impediments to a racially egalitarian society?”

Also, the article Quinn raised in class:

Why White Parents Won’t Choose Black Schools

As is to be expected, parsing through the comments section (if you like to torture yourself) there is a lot of defensiveness and denial  about the author’s argument,  which reveals much of what Shapiro discusses in terms of the mechanisms of denial which insulate whites from their privilege.

Black Boys Have an Easier Time Fitting In at Suburban Schools Than Black Girls

Black Community, Schooling and Education Week 11

This article in The Atlantic by Aboubacar Ndiaye, Black Boys Have an Easier Time, touches upon some of the issues raised in Tyson’s work, and Prof. Bobo’s lecture,  in terms of integration, race, school structure and notions of oppositional culture. It especially addresses the lacunae in Tyson’s scholarship on the intersection of race and gender and its impact on education and integration.

 

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In an article published last year, Megan M. Holland, a professor at the University of Buffalo and a recent Harvard Ph.D., studied the social impact of a desegregation program on the minority students who were being bussed to a predominantly white high school in suburban Boston. She found that minority boys, because of stereotypes about their supposed athleticism and “coolness,” fit in better than minority girls because the school gave the boys better opportunities to interact with white students. Minority boys participated in sports and non-academic activities at much higher rates. Over the course of her study, she concluded that structural factors in the school as well as racial narratives about minority males resulted in increased social rewards for the boys, while those same factors contributed to the isolation of girls in the diversity program.

 

Minority young men are considered by their white peers to be cool and tough; minority young women, on the other hand, are stereotyped as “ghetto” and “loud.”

 

1986 CBS NEWS SPECIAL REPORT: The Vanishing Family– “Crisis in Black America”

The Black Family Week 10

While this documentary id dated, it’s useful to watch (even in parts and pieces if your time permits), as it concretizes (and we can problematize) many of the issues raised last class through our readings and discussions, as well as issues raised in previous weeks.

What can we make of Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology”  assertion?

What do we make of the notion of the “vanishing family?”

There were several structural issues which I did not get to raise in class, primarily that of mass incarceration and its effect on families as well as how it in turn shapes the foster care system in which black and Latino children are disproportionately represented.  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which was raises some weeks ago, is also again relevant to last week’s discussion.

 

A quote from Dorothy Roberts’s book on the subject:

 

“According to federal statistics, black children in the child welfare system are placed in foster care at twice the rate for white children. A national study of child protective services by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that “minority children, and in particular African American children, are more likely to be in foster care placement than receive in-home services, even when they have the same problems and characteristics as white children” [emphasis added]. Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9BKXQ8ROlw

Sharkey on Durable Urban Policy

Structural Racial Inequality Week 9

In an interview with CityLab Sharkey discusses “The Persistent Geography of  Disadvantage” further and underscores the issues surrounding durable urban policy and urban politics.

Read the full article here: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/07/persistent-geography-disadvantage/6231/

A useful feature he points us to is the The Justice Mapping Center’s website which uses GIS technology to communicate and evaluate criminal justice and other social reform policies. Check it out!

“Durable urban policy has three basic requirements. We have plenty of examples of policies that meet the first two—disrupting multigenerational patterns of neighborhood inequality and generating real and transformative changes in the places that people live. But we have few examples of policies that have been sustained when the public’s attention shifts away from issues of urban poverty or when the political winds shift away from the challenges of cities. A quick review of urban policy over the past four decades reveals a cycle in which urban issues receive a great deal of attention and exciting new initiatives are announced, only to be diluted or abandoned and forgotten before the programs have any chance to be effective.

I am not a political scientist and I don’t study social movements, so I have no expertise in how to generate a coalition of support behind durable urban investments. But there does seem to be growing recognition throughout the policy world that the key to sustainable prosperity lies in our cities and the urban areas that surround them. A related insight, and one that rarely makes its way into discussions of metropolitan policy, is that the fortunes of entire urban areas are compromised when cities contain sections featuring areas of severe concentrated disadvantage, low-quality schools, and high levels of crime and violence.

One final point on urban politics is that a durable urban policy does not necessarily require a massive influx of new funds into poor, nonwhite communities. Instead, what is required is a shift of priorities in the way that funds are spent in such communities. If you want to see some stunning visual representations of how much our nation already spends in low-income communities, check out The Justice Mapping Center’s maps of block-by-block expenditures, in New York City and elsewhere, used to lock up residents in prisons and jails. The point of these maps is that we are spending an enormous amount of resources in disadvantaged communities, but the resources are not being used to make investments in the families, core institutions, and organizations that are essential to creating enriching, safe, and prosperous community environments.”

Gang Members Set the Record Straight – Baltimore Uprising

Health and Community Week 8

Through Pattillo, Goffman and Ralph we’ve discussed how the authors have portrayed a more nuanced relationship between neighborhood gangs and their communities. In particular, Ralph’s work presents an even more in depth view of a neighborhood gang like the Divine Knights. They are not simply deviant members of the neighborhood,  but they can and do play constructive roles in shaping the community and its institutions as well as providing counter-narratives to concepts like injury , disability, memory,  historical consciousness and activism,

The following news clip,  prominent during the Baltimore uprising,  features members of the Black Guerrilla Family, the Bloods and the Crips talking to the channel  11 News, representing themselves and their communities and providing a counter-narrative to media portrayals and allegations which stated that they came to a  truce for the express purpose of harming police officers.

While there are aspects to critique, it nonetheless speaks to much of what Ralph’s ethnography elucidates and highlights the strategic and political elements of street gangs, as well as the idea of “renegades”  i.e. members that the old heads cannot necessarily control.

 

The Ethics of Ethnography

Policing the Carceral State Week 7

In class several of you raised important queries and critiques of Goffman’s methodology in particular and ethnography as a methodological tool in particular.

Quinn raised an important point, which the following article addresses: is it that Goffman’s methodology is especially suspect or is the nature of her field site, as well as the IRB protocols of ethnographic research with human subjects, partly responsible for what seems like inaccuracies and flaws?

Here are some excerpts from the article on Slate,  you can read the full article here:

The Ethics of Ethnography

 

“Alice Goffman’s heralded book about inner-city life has come under fire for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Is the author to blame—or does the fault lie with her field?”

“Ethnography can look like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.”

“The frustration is not merely a matter of academics resenting oversight out of principle. Many researchers think the uncompromising demand for total privacy has a detrimental effect on the quality of scholarship that comes out of the social sciences—in part because anonymization makes it impossible to fact-check the work.

“It makes it really hard to verify—you don’t even know if the people exist,” said Christopher Winship, a sociologist at Harvard University. He added, “The discipline thinks it’s fine and that’s probably totally wrong.”

University of Chicago sociologist Richard Taub doesn’t think it’s fine and explained why: “Your honor—your word—is the only thing you have to make your stuff believable, because your job is to not let anyone track these people down,” he told me. “It’s a terrible problem”

 

DeSean Jackson, Richard Sherman and Black American Economic Mobility

Ghetto Poverty Challenges for the Middle Class Week 5

 

“We didn’t run from where we grew up. We aren’t afraid to be associated with the people who came up with us.”

That’s Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks writing in defense of his friend, DeSean Jackson, who was cut from the Philadelphia Eagles amid reports of gang ties.

I don’t know if Sherman sees it or not—my hunch is that he does—but in a few sentences, he’s put his finger on the pulse of something overlooked in our discussions of poverty and economic mobility as they relate to black Americans: neighborhood. Sherman’s experience of being pulled back to a poor neighborhood, even as he accumulates wealth, is common among blacks.

 

Read the full article, which speaks to many of Pattillo’s points about neighborhoods, segregation, the spatial nature of racial hierarchies, the perils and privileges of the black middle class and their  close association with the poor, gangs and other behaviors Pattillo terms “deviant” or “delinquent.”

 

DeSean Jackson. Richard Sherman and Black American Economic Mobility

 

 

Black(ish)

Black Middle Class Week 4

This sitcom is a comical spin on the black bourgeoisie/black middle class. It raises several issues about consumption, professionalism, culture, identity, status, class and the meaning of blackness in America today among well-to-do blacks.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNqqjDv6_dU

The End of White America? The Rising Tide of Color?

DuBois Sociology Week 2
Mentioned in The Atlantic article “The End of White America,” the book reflected white anxiety in the 1920s about how to maintain white supremacy in the face of the “rising tide of color.”
Norman Mailer’s 1957 book on “the original hipster,” i.e. white youth disaffiliating from whiteness to adopt aspects of what was considered black culture.

 

 

The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

 

IF THEY’RE RIGHT—if white America is indeed “losing control,” and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.
For some, this renunciation can take a radical form. In 1994, a young graffiti artist and activist named William “Upski” Wimsatt, the son of a university professor, published Bomb the Suburbs, the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer’s celebratory 1957 essay, “The White Negro.” Wimsatt was deeply committed to hip-hop’s transformative powers, going so far as to embrace the status of the lowly “wigger,” a pejorative term popularized in the early 1990s to describe white kids who steep themselves in black culture. Wimsatt viewed the wigger’s immersion in two cultures as an engine for change. “If channeled in the right way,” he wrote, “the wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America.”

The  preceding quotes are taken from The Atlantic article The End of White America (an interesting read in its entirety that I recommend). Professor Bobo mentioned the article last class  in reference to the salient questions: “What is race?” and “What are the competing views of the deep structure of race?”

The article poses the questions: “What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?”

Considering what the end of whiteness might mean is inextricably linked to the meaning of  non-whiteness broadly and blackness, specifically, especially for our course as scholars thinking about the sociology of the black community. As many of you queried in class: what are the contours of  “the black community” as a sociological object of study?  And to go a step further, what are the contours of  “blackness” as an identity? 

 

 

The Declining Significance of Race?

Foundations Week 1
TIME magazine cover October 20, 2008

 

Demonstrators react to tear gas fired by police during protests over the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 18, 2014. Photo by Lucas Jackson/Reuters

 

One of our class members, Winnie, sent the link to this opinion piece on the Black Lives Matter Movement, written by Jason R. Wiley for the Wall Street Journal.

‘Black Lives Matter’—but Reality, Not So Much

Some quotes from the piece include:

“The reality is that Michael Brown is dead because he robbed a convenience store, assaulted a uniformed officer and then made a move for the officer’s gun. The reality is that a cop is six times more likely to be killed by someone black than the reverse. The reality is that the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police. “Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11,” wrote former New York City police detectiveEdward Conlon in a Journal essay on Saturday.”

“But the left has no interest in discussing ghetto pathology. Summer movies like “Straight Outta Compton” are too busy glorifying it, and summer books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” are too busy intellectualizing it. The Black Lives Matter crowd has become an appendage of the civil-rights industry, which uses the black underclass to push an agenda that invariably leaves the supposed beneficiaries worse off.”

While the piece is undoubtedly riddled with problems, logical fallacies and is, I would argue, myopic in many respects,  it has some use value in terms of placing it in conversation  with the week’s readings by Julius and Terry. The piece regurgitates many arguments that scholars, like Professor Bobo, through sociological research, have disproved. Riley recycles the trope of “ghetto pathology”  and his piece is an example of laissez-faire racism which  Bobo  and Smith argue is the current racial attitude of the age. The theory states that the United States has moved from overt bigotry and government sanctioned discrimination to a laissez-faire ideology where blacks (and other minorities) are themselves blamed for the socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites . Bobo  and Smith argue that laissez-faire racism is based on notions of black cultural inferiority (during Jim Crow it was biological inferiority). Within this ideology  efforts to ameliorate racist social conditions and institutions are actively resisted which allows for white comfort with and acceptance of persisting racial inequalities and exploitation.

Precisely because of its problem, we can use Riley’s opinion piece to think critically about the black poor and the relationship between race and class, the age of laissez-faire racism as well as engage constructive critiques of protest movements, which Julius and Terry both engage in their pieces which we read for this week.

Julius’s piece  “The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited and Revised” “relates racial issues to the economic and political arrangements of society” (55) and argues that while racial antagonisms and oppression still exist, the interaction between racial discrimination and class position have changed and are integral for understanding the contemporary moment. Julius asserts that there is a deep chasm in the African American community wherein the black poor are continuously falling further behind higher-income blacks. Julius further argues that “the real issue is improving the plight of the black lower class, whose conditions have not been addressed by programs like affirmative action” (62).

Terry’s piece “After Ferguson” addresses the purported end of the “age of Obama,” the emblematic “prophet of racial reconciliation” in light of the moral outrage and civic distrust erupting out of the Ferguson protests. Terry teases out the nuances of the Black Lives Matter movement, the criticisms and critiques it has faced, particularly in comparison to the Civil Rights movement, in which the former is deemed deficient in comparison, its positives and the ways in which it can move forward.  Of the many poignant critiques and suggestions Terry offers he contends that:

“the challenge for today’s inheritors of the civil rights example…can be met only by exposing the mechanisms of injustice through spectacular confrontation, but also by disclosing the limits of existing institutions – which entails the advancement of new models for the organization of society”

I find Terry’s notions of exposure and disclosure particularly salient as it seems as though the way in which laissez-faire racism operates (hand in hand with color-blind rhetoric) is to obscure particular realities of our institutions and structures, rendering them blurry or completely invisible.

Terry’s question is the question I’m also left with and will reiterate:

“How might these struggles best develop, and be informed by, the most incisive ideas concerning the reformation and reconstruction of our fundamental institutions an modes of citizenship?”

 

 

 

Introduce Yourself!

Introductions

Welcome to Sociology of the Black Community!

Please introduce yourselves so that we get a sense of who you are and what brings you to the course.

I’ll start!

  KHYTIEBEE (1)

My name is Khytie Brown and I’m a third year doctoral student in the African and African American Studies department and I’m excited to serve as teaching fellow for the course!

I’m an Atlanta resident who originally hails from the beautiful island of Jamaica. I graduated from Emory University in 2010, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and Religion and received my Master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2013 where I concentrated in the areas Religions of the Americas and Religion and the Social Sciences

My primary research emphasis is on religious expression and cultural production in the Caribbean and Afro-Antillean Panama, with particular attention to disruptions of the sacred/profane binary, sensory epistemologies, mediation, Afrophobia and the interplay between private religious discourses and public space.  My current research examines  affect, embodiment, somatic rituals, digitization and identity production as enacted in two traditionally disparate spaces: the sacred seal ground of Jamaica’s African-derived Revival Zion Christianity and the secular dancehall spaces of Kingston’s urban streets.

Sociology of the Black Community is a particularly engaging course that I’m thrilled to teach as many of the themes and questions our course addresses need to be reviewed with new lenses and fresh eyes for the contemporary moment. It is my hope that we’ll each bring our own knowledge and perspective  to the classroom and that we’ll  enjoy learning from each other.