AFRICAM 27AC Midterm Study Guide: Black Liberation, State Repression, and Necropolitics

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key terms, historical acts, and critical theories from Weeks 2 through 7 of the AFRICAM 27AC Midterm Study Guide.

Reactionary Suicide

The reaction of an individual who takes their own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm them and condemn them to hopelessness and spiritual death, reflecting conditions experienced by millions of Black people across the U.S.

Revolutionary Suicide

A concept coined by Huey P. Newton describing the willingness to risk death and fight against intolerable conditions to live with hope and human dignity, driven by the belief that one's death could further the revolutionary cause.

Race

A concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflict and interests by referring to human bodies.

Racial Formation

The socio-historical process defined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant through which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.

Isms

An act, a process, a prejudice, a discrimination, or an abnormal state or condition resulting from systemic power dynamics (e.g., white supremacism).

Racial Projects

Simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and an effort to organize and distribute resources along particular racial lines.

Racist Racial Projects

Racial projects that create and reproduce structures of racial inequality and domination.

Emancipatory Racial Projects

Racial projects that challenge, undermine, and destroy oppressive racial hierarchies and ideas.

Racial Dictatorship

A political and social order in the United States where 'American' was codified as white, non-white populations were systematically excluded and othered, and the color line was institutionalized across society.

Naturalization Act of 1790

A racist racial project that explicitly limited naturalized U.S. citizenship to 'free white persons' of good character/morals.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Federal legislation mandating that citizens and officials assist in the capture and return of escaped enslaved Black people, denying legal protections to free and enslaved individuals alike.

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The first significant federal law to explicitly suspend immigration targeting a specific racial group.

Operation Wetback (1954)

A major federal deportation campaign that enacted one of the largest mass removals of Mexican and Latino individuals from the United States.

Immigration Act of 1924

Legislation that drastically cut immigration from Europe by setting strict quotas favoring Western and Northern Europeans over Southern and Eastern Europeans.

Human Norm

An ideological standard rooted in whiteness that constructs anyone non-white as an abnormality and less human, rendering whiteness invisible as an un-raced baseline.

Drapetomania

A pseudoscientific 'mental frenzy' concocted by Samuel A. Cartwright claiming that enslaved people who ran away suffered from a mental illness, which he claimed could be 'cured' by whipping or physical mutilation.

Racial State

A state whose laws, institutions, policies, and uses of power help create, organize, enforce, or transform racial categories and hierarchies.

Bandung Conference (1955)

A gathering in Indonesia of 29 African and Asian nations uniting around shared goals of anti-colonialism, national sovereignty, racial equality, and political solidarity among formerly colonized peoples.

The Black Armed Guard

An armed community self-defense organization formed by Robert F. Williams in North Carolina that famously repelled a Ku Klux Klan assault on a Black physician's home in 1957.

The Mulford Act (1967)

A California state law, supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA), that prohibited the open carrying of loaded firearms in public without a permit to stop Black Panther Party police-patrols ('cop-watching').

The First Rainbow Coalition (1969)

A multiracial revolutionary alliance organized by Fred Hampton in Chicago connecting the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and other groups to resist common economic and racial oppression.

Pig (BPP Terminology)

A political term popularized by the Black Panther Party to refer to oppressors and agents of the ruling class (such as the police) who use militaristic force to uphold oppressive systems.

Power (Huey P. Newton)

Defined as 'first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly, the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.'

COINTELPRO (1956–1971)

A covert FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to disrupt, discredit, surveil, and neutralize domestic political and Black liberation organizations to prevent the rise of a unified movement or 'messiah.'

Five Techniques of Domestic Espionage

The sequential counterintelligence methods utilized by the state: Surveillance → Infiltration → Intelligence-gathering → Destabilization → Neutralization.

Black Propaganda

The fabrication and distribution of publications or leaflets designed to falsely mimic the materials of a targeted organization in order to cause internal conflict or misrepresent their ideology.

Gray Propaganda

The planting of misleading information or disinformation with the press originating from an uncredited, hidden, or ambiguous source without identifiable origins.

Vicious Propaganda (Edward Bernays)

The deliberate and conscious dissemination of information known by the sender to be false.

Modern Propaganda (Edward Bernays)

The organized, systematic practice of regimenting and molding the public mind.

Operation Mockingbird

A covert CIA operation launched in the early 1950s that recruited American journalists and media organizations to shape public opinion and counter Soviet influence, exposed by the 1975 Church Committee.

Necropolitics

A theoretical framework formulated by Achille Mbembe examining the use of political power to determine who is allowed to live, who is exposed to death, and whose lives are treated as disposable.

Death-Worlds

Social formations identified by Achille Mbembe in which weapons and power create conditions where vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the 'living dead.'

Triple Loss

Achille Mbembe’s formulation of the enslaved condition, comprising the loss of a 'home,' the loss of rights over one's body, and the loss of political status, resulting in absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death.

Biopower

A concept originated by Michel Foucault referring to the domain of life over which political power has taken control, particularly how nation-states manage, regulate, and administer biological life and populations.