Month: April 2018

“A Womanist Perspective of the Black Power Movement” by Akinyele Umoja

“Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era represents an essential development in a new generation of Black Power scholarship. Farmer’s contribution is a woman-centered overview of the Black Power movement. Like Peniel Joseph’s work, Remaking Black Power will reinforce the significance of recognizing Black Power studies as a sub-field in African American history and Africana studies. Preceded by Rhonda Williams’s Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the Twentieth Century and Robyn Spencer’s The Revolution has Come, Farmer’s Remaking Black Power continues a trend within Black Power scholarship that challenges masculinist narratives of the movement.

Remaking Black Power is cutting edge as it offers a comprehensive-womanist perspective of the Black Power movement. Farmer’s interpretation of various categories of women’s activism is unique and illuminating. From the “Militant Black Domestic” to “Revolutionary Black Woman,” “African/Afrikan Woman,” and “Third World Woman,” Farmer offers frameworks to explore the representation of activist women with a variety of ideological developments within Black Power. The “Militant Black Domestic” parallels the antecedents of the Black Power movement through grassroots civil rights and Old Left intersections with the Black freedom movement. The “Revolutionary Black Woman” highlights women’s engagement with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and self-described revolutionary nationalism. The focus of “African Woman” is in the cultural-nationalist ideological trend, specifically Kawaida, from the Organization Us to the Congress of African People. The “Afrikan Woman” is a variation of cultural nationalism to the development of Pan-Afrikan nationalism, which was a dominant ideological trend of the Black Power movement in the early 1970s.¹ Finally, the “Third World Woman” examines the revolutionary intersectional development of the Black Women’s Alliance and the Third World Women’s Alliance.”

This past Wednesday Rosa Clemente, a comunity organizer, journalist, hip hop activist, and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential running mate of  Cynthia McKinney.  She divided into subjects ranging from her time of being a poor Black Puerto Rican in the South Bronx to moving  one of the the richest suburbs in the country. The new environment gave her better opportunities and a chance that none of her family members never got, a college education.

She was able to get a degree in African American Studies at the University of Albany and went on to Cornell University. She used her education to take on journalism and write about the injustices hurting the black and brown communities in the United States. When visiting Puerto Rice, she witnessed the terrible conditions hidden in the country. Dilapidated houses, no electricity, a poor economy,  and hurricanes repeatedly touching down and destroying communities.  The poor conditions for Clemente was shocking as she didn’t expect a country supposedly part of the United States would be ignored.

Clemente also talked about her time organizing for #BlackLivesMatter protests such as for Michael Brown.  She remembered at one point police officers had pointed guns at her and her friends at the rally. That was a point she realized the dangers of protesting in America.  Her talk was very informative and inspiring as you could feel the passion in her activism and the good she is trying to instill in our society 

In this episode of Adam Ruins Everything, “Suburbs,” with some comedy and candor, he explains state-sanctioned racism in housing and how it impacted school segregation. Adam also invites journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to further explain housing and school segregation, as well as the ways that similar forms of discrimination and segregation impact black and brown neighborhoods presently. For Hannah-Jones’s article on current school segregation, Choosing a School for My Daughter.

 

Two Societies 

“Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come north to help Chicago’s civil rights leaders in their nonviolent struggle against segregated housing. Their efforts pit them against Chicago’s powerful mayor, Richard Daley. When a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods draws violence, King and Daley negotiate with mixed results. In Detroit, a police raid in a black neighborhood sparks an urban uprising that lasts five days, leaving 43 people dead. The Kerner Commission finds that America is becoming “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission, ignores the report.”

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article on the history of state-sanctioned housing discrimination,“Case for Reparations.”

Here’s a critique of Coates, “Case Against Reparations” by Kevin Williamson