Africana/African American/Black Studies - Comprehensive Notes

Africana/African American/Black Studies Overview

• Key Concepts and Objectives:
  • Analyze concepts such as: Panafricanism, Black Power, Black Nationalism, discrimination, double consciousness, and controlling images.
  • Apply Black community theory and knowledge to describe histories, cultures, traditions, contributions, experiences, and struggles, emphasizing agency and group affirmation.
  • Critically analyze the intersections of race/racism with class, gender, sexuality, religion, and spirituality in Black communities.
  • Assess how Black communities' experiences with struggle, resistance, justice, solidarity, and liberation relate to current structural issues in communal, national, international, and transnational politics.
  • Describe anti-racist practices for building a just and equitable society.

Introduction to Africana/African American/Black Studies

• Origins: Emerged as a response to racial justice and civil rights movements.
• Purpose:
  • Provides an academic space for scholars to research and explain the experiences of people of African origin.
  • Aims to increase diversity and inclusion within higher education.
  • Supports broader movements for justice in various institutions.
• Terminology:
  • Africana and Black Studies: Refer broadly to people of African heritage worldwide.
  • African American Studies: Focuses specifically on the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.
• Chapter Focus:
  • Overview of history shaping the development of Black Studies.
  • Understanding political/historical contexts of Black liberation struggles in the 1800s and 1900s.
  • Examining exploitation and resistance through a Black Studies framework.
  • Analyzing systemic, cultural, and political dynamics relevant to Black Studies scholars and practitioners today.

Black Power and Black Studies

• Garveyism:
  • Founded by Marcus Garvey (born in Jamaica, 1887), a prominent political activist.
  • Emphasized pride, empowerment, and economic prosperity for Black communities.
  • Advocated for a united global Black community for economic, political, and cultural development.
  • Panafricanism was the foundation for Blackness and Black identity, uniting the experiences of people of African heritage worldwide. Including: African people, African immigrants, and communities with origins on the African continent that have been enslaved, trafficked, and settled in various parts of the world, especially in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Latin America.
• Political Frameworks:
  • Black Power: Movement emphasizing building Black-serving institutions and leadership, coined by Stokely Carmichael in 1966.
  • Black Nationalism: Ideology emphasizing Black pride, economic self-sufficiency, and separatism.
• Marcus Garvey's Legacy:
  • Lives on with political and social changes.
  • Celebrated as the first National Hero of Jamaica.

The Civil Rights Movement

• 1940s and 1950s Mobilization:
  • Black communities mobilized against Jim Crow laws and racial segregation.
  • Black people were barred from public life aspects: employment, education, housing, and voting.
  • Racial violence against Black people was rampant with impunity for white perpetrators.
• Community Focus:
  • Driven by women in partnership with churches.
  • Addressed immediate community needs: food, housing, education, and social services.
  • Churches provided services, and community members actively participated in activism.
  • The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) united religious groups in the movement.
• Leadership Dynamics:
  • Formal organizations often prioritized charismatic male leaders.
  • Figures like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. held positions of authority/power.
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC):
  • Founded in April 1960, known for sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration drives.
  • Advocated for a social order of justice permeated by love.
• Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and Fannie Lou Hamer:
  • MFDP co-founded in 1964 due to the Democratic Party in Mississippi barring participation from Black people.
  • Organized voter registration drives and supported Black leaders running for office.
  • Protested the legitimacy of the Democratic Party delegation at the National Convention.
  • Fannie Lou Hamer advocated for movement-wide perspective on leadership development and change.
  • Championed the idea that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
  • Hamer's activism led to violence and retaliation, including her house being bombed.

How We Got Here - Lifting “The Veil”

• The Veil and Double-Consciousness:
  • W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) argued that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."
  • Despite reductions in explicit racial discrimination, racial disparities persist globally.
  • Divisive national discourse and hate crimes have risen.
• Double Consciousness:
  • Symbolizes the psychological impact of living in a racist society for African Americans.
  • African Americans viewed themselves through the lens of White Americans.
  • Black Americans were not fully regarded as citizens, as contemporary Black Americans and other Americans of color experience.
• Pre-colonial Africa:
  • Complex human societies existed for over 10,000 years.
  • Families formed tribal groups with markers of culture and social organization.
  • Large empires and kingdoms existed with trade, taxation, and political representation systems.
• Kingdom of Aksum:
  • Was operated for nearly a thousand years in areas now claimed by Eritrea and Ethiopia.
• Kingdom of Ghana:
  • The first state with a system of political representation starting in 350 CE.
• External Influences:
  • Islam spread across northern Africa in the 600s.
  • Europeans began enslaving West Africans in the 15th century.
• Chattel Slavery:
  • By 1700, 50,000 people were enslaved annually; approximately 12 million total were trafficked to the western hemisphere.
  • Transatlantic Triangular Trade exploited West Africa and the Americas for European benefit.
  • The Transatlantic Triangular trade exploited the people and natural resources of West Africa and the eastern segments of North, Central, and South America for the financial benefit and production of industrialization in Europe and European colonies.

{\text{Europe} \rightarrow \text{West Africa}: \text{textiles, weapons, iron, alcohol}}
{\text{West Africa} \rightarrow \text{Europe}: \text{gold, spices, wood}}
{\text{West Africa} \rightarrow \text{South America}: \text{slaves}}
{\text{West Africa} \rightarrow \text{Caribbean}: \text{gold, slaves, spices}}
{\text{Caribbean} \rightarrow \text{West Africa}: \text{textiles, spices, alcohol, tools}}
{\text{Caribbean} \rightarrow \text{Southeastern colonies}: \text{slaves, spices}}
{\text{Southeastern colonies} \rightarrow \text{Caribbean}: \text{wood, flour, fish, meat}}
{\text{Colonies} \rightarrow \text{Europe}: \text{tobacco, wood, fur}}
{\text{Europe} \rightarrow \text{Colonies}: \text{textiles, luxury items}}

• Resistance to Enslavement:
  • Communities resisted colonization and exploitation through rebellions, self-harm, and solidarity.
  • At least 250 organized rebellions were conducted that included a group of 10 or more enslaved people, and countless more small-scale and individual rebellions were carried out (Zinn, 2015).
  • The colonial economy in the U.S. relied on slave labor for cotton plantations, infrastructure, and service industries.
• System of Chattel Slavery:
  • Enslaved status was inherited.
  • Racialized ideology of dehumanization was created to maintain inequity.
  • Black people were legally defined as property.
• Three-Fifths Compromise:
  • Enslaved people counted as 3/5ths of a person for representation but could not vote.
  • Slave-owning states gained increased representation.
  • The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Black people were not meant to be included within the terms of citizenship defined by the U.S. Constitution.
  • The government maintained and grew slavery.
• Abolition Movement:
  • Religious and political figures critiqued slavery.
  • Free Black people fought against racist laws and for human rights.
  • Harriet Tubman led self-emancipated people to freedom via the Underground Railroad.

Juneteenth and the 13th Amendment

• Emancipation Proclamation:
  • Issued during the Civil War, granting the U.S. army the right to free enslaved people in Confederate states.
• Juneteenth:
  • Celebrates the end of slavery, commemorating June 1865 when freedom was proclaimed in Texas.
• 13th Amendment:
  • Formally abolished chattel slavery, but with an exception for punishment for crime.
  • The amendment allows for slavery in cases where the individual is convicted of a crime.
  • Incarcerated individuals are paid paltry wages, constituting a continued version of legal slavery.
• 1619 Project:
  • Launched by Nikole Hannah-Jones to highlight the history and legacy of racialized slavery.
  • Conservative attempts to censor “Critical Race Theory” target the project.
  • There are seventeen states that have created a ban on Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools through state-level executive action or legislation, along with four states currently considering such measures, as of September 2022.
• Critical Race Theory
  • An advanced legal framework that examines the relationship between U.S. laws and systemic racism.
• Historical Censorship:
  • State-approved textbooks often exclude mention of slavery or use misleading language.
• Reconstruction Era:
  • Shift in the U.S. after the Civil War.
  • The government provided aid through the Freedmen’s Bureau, and religious organizations provided basic services for Black communities
  • Black communities exercised their right to vote and nurtured autonomous institutions of education, religion, and trade.
  • The promise of equal opportunity and citizenship faced resistance.
  • Formerly enslaved Black communities had their basic freedom restored, but this did not undo the legacy of hundreds of years of forced labor, institutionalized sex slavery, being barred from education, intentional separation of families, and the destruction of traditional religious and cultural practices rooted in West African traditions.
• Jim Crow Era:
  • Local and state laws maintained discrimination despite federal protections.
  • Black Codes restricted Black people’s abilities to own property, conduct business, lease land, and move freely.
  • Racial segregation was actively established in public institutions.
  • The Courts upheld this doctrine through the notion of “separate but equal,” which was codified in the 1896 decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
  • Racial identity became a legal category with the “one drop” rule.
• Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre:
  • The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a prosperous Black community.
  • The city was a testament to Black communities’ capacity and a centralized hub of intellectual and financial capital.
  • Massacred by a white mob in 1921, one of the largest acts of racialized terrorist violence in U.S. history.
  • Became an enduring symbol of the threat of white violence in the face of Black prosperity, fueling the flames of white supremacy.

Systemic Racism

• Incarceration:
  • Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" chronicles the disproportionate incarceration of communities of color.
  • White youth are criminalized less harshly than Black youth.
  • Crack cocaine has harsher penalties than powder cocaine, disproportionately affecting Black communities.
  • Affluent white neighborhoods have higher rates of drug dealing, but communities of color are surveilled more.
• Systemic Racism and Health:
  • Black women have higher maternal mortality rates, and Black children have higher infant mortality rates.
  • Lack of quality healthcare, doctors' bias, and other factors contribute to mortality rates.
  • Studies show that midwives are associated with improved birth outcomes, lower rates of infant death, and that Black pregnant women in the U.S. report greater satisfaction with the care they receive from midwives than from physicians.
  • Historically, Black women have turned to midwives when white doctors wouldn’t treat them.
• Educational Inequity: Schooling
  • Disproportionality: representation differs greatly compared to other groups or others within a group.
  • Teachers hold more negative attitudes about Black children compared to white children.
  • Children of color are treated differently in classrooms; less pushed academically or praised.
  • Black and Latino students experienced segregation at high rates, even in the 2000s.

Affirmative Action

• Definition:
  • Aims to eliminate unlawful discrimination, remedy prior discrimination, and prevent future discrimination.
  • Seeks to counter discrimination based on race, creed, color, and national origin.
• Court Cases:
  • Schools were accused of denying admission to students in order to admit supposed “less qualified” candidates such as in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), etc.
• Proposition 209 (California, 1996):
  • Banned consideration of race in public school admissions.
  • Results in reduced diversity at UC campuses.
  • Enrollment of African Americans at the top three selective schools since the banning dropped 34% at UC Berkeley, 22% at UCLA, and at 30% UC San Diego
• Comprehensive Review (University of California, 2002):
  • Applies weight to other admission factors, i.e., “students experiences and personal circumstances” and not just SAT scores and GPA.

Cultural and Political Representation

• Black Women's Representation:
  • Race has consequences because physical bodies have been constructed to be valued differently.
  • Representations of race, especially skin color, have come to signify meaning and ultimately mark such associations with a race.
  • Cultural representation impacts struggles and reflects conditions faced by Blacks.
  • Black women have been linked to slavery, sexual, and service economies in art history.

Images and Stereotypes of Black Women in the Media.

• Patricia Hill Collins’ “5 Controlling Images of Black Women” (1999) summarizes mainstream representations that perpetuate particular notions of Black womanhood.
  • The Mammy: obedient domestic servant.
  • The Matriarch: single working mother blamed for children's lack of achievement.
  • The Welfare Mother: stereotyped as lazy and without male authority.
  • The Black Lady: middle-class professional without time for a man, seen as unfair reverse racism.
  • The Jezebel/hoochie: sexually aggressive female.
• Black Liberation Figure:
  • Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created #BlackLivesMatter as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed.
  • Founded by queer Black women.
• African American Policy Forum:
  • Founded in 1996, The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) is an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality
  • Centers intersectionality and advocates for marginalized identities.
  • Kimberlé Crenshaw co-founded the forum.

Black Feminism

• Black feminism has a long history, even if not named as such.
• Fought for intersectional frameworks long before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term.
• “Racism and sexism frequently converge—and the condition of white women workers is often tied to the oppressive predicament of women of color. Thus the wages received by white women domestics have always been fixed by the racist criteria to calculate the wages of Black women servants.” (Davis, 1983, p. 94).
• bell hooks wrote Feminism is for Everybody and stipulated that if one isn’t putting equity at the forefront and considering race/gender/class disparities as central to the cause of feminism then one isn’t really for feminism.
• Black womanism is a particular term that some use to separate Black feminists from white feminists.

Summary/Review

• Addressed the history and context leading to the creation of Black Studies.
• The core theories and ideas presented in Black Studies, including Panafricanism, Black Power, Black Nationalism, discrimination, double consciousness, and controlling images, are central to a clear and truthful analysis of Black communities’ experiences and political context.
• Importance of intersectionality and multiple interlocking systems.
• Black Studies is rooted in liberation struggles, and this has led to the creation of theories and concepts that respond to and integrate the wisdom gained through intergenerational movements for social change.

Key Terms

• Garveyism: An ideology centered on the thinking of Marcus Garvey, which emphasized pride, empowerment, and economic prosperity for Black communities.
• Black Power: A movement and political belief system that emphasizes building Black-serving institutions and leaders. The term Black Power was coined by Stokely Carmichael during a speech after being arrested for the 27th time in 1966.
• Black Nationalism: An ideology that emphasizes pride in being Black, economic self-sufficiency, and Black separatism.
• Panafricanism: The foundation for the idea of Blackness and Black identity, which brings together the experience of people's heritage. This includes African people, African immigrants, and communities with origins on the African continent that have been enslaved, trafficked, and settled in various parts of the world, especially in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Latin America.
• Civil Rights Movement: A group working toward equality and legal rights for a marginalized group. Most commonly referring to the movement of organizations led by African Americans in the U.S. between the 1940s and 1970s that advocated for equality in education, employment, housing, voting, and other major civil rights areas.
• De Jure Racial Discrimination: Legally sanctioned discrimination that is supported by existing laws and political belief systems. De jure discrimination is the opposite of de facto discrimination, which is discrimination that happens due to structural patterns but not as a result of explicitly biased laws.
• Double Consciousness: The psychological impact of living in a racist society for African Americans in the years following the end of slavery. Specifically, double consciousness means the way that Black people have to see themselves through the lens of a racist society, in addition to an authentic self-perception and identity.
• Transatlantic Triangular Trade: The economic system that supported the colonization of the United States and the Americas by European countries. This arrangement exploited the people and natural resources of West Africa and the eastern segments of North, Central, and South America for the financial benefit and production of industrialization in Europe and European colonies.
• Chattel Slavery: The specific form of slavery in which the children of enslaved people are automatically considered to be slaves themselves. This system contributed to the creation of racial categories in colonial America.
• Three-Fifths Compromise: A decision in the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention that determined that while enslaved people were not eligible to vote, they would be counted toward the population when determining the number of representatives from each state, but only at 3/5th the rate of the free, white population. This meant that slave-owning states would have increased representation based on the number of enslaved people in their state despite those people not being represented in elections.
• Underground Railroad: A network of anti-slavery activists who operated to provide safe hiding spaces and routes of travel for self-emancipated people who were fleeing to places where slavery was not legal so they could begin life anew. This included Canada, Mexico, and for a period of time, the Spanish-controlled colony of Florida.
• 1619 Project: A project by historian Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times that recognized and investigated the 400th anniversary of racialized slavery in the United States. The project has become the target of conservative attempts to censor discussions of race, history, slavery, and racial disparities today.
• Freedmen’s Bureau: A federal agency that operated in the years following the U.S. Civil War to support recently freed communities of Black people in the southern United States. Despite early successes, the program was completely eliminated.
• Black Codes: Laws that created restrictions on Black people’s abilities to own property, conduct business, lease land, and move freely through public spaces. These regulations worked to keep separate the established white society from the lives of Black people.
• Jim Crow Era: A time where public institutions actively established racial segregation. Despite the promises of the 14th and 15th Amendment that Black people would enjoy the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship, segregation created an explicitly tiered version of citizenship. The Courts upheld this doctrine through the notion of “separate but equal,” which was codified in the 1896 decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. The term "Jim Crow" refers to minstrel shows where white actors would wear Blackface and portray negative stereotypes of Black men.
• Black Wall Street: The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was home to many thriving Black-owned businesses and families prior to being targeted by white supremacists in 1921 who massacred the area over two days, with hundreds missing or dead. It was one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in U.S. history.
• New Jim Crow: A book by legal scholar Michelle Alexander that demonstrates the historical continuity between the systems of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration today.
• Disproportionality: How representation differs greatly compared to other groups or others within a group
• Affirmative Action: An approach to achieving equity in public institutions, companies, and other organizations that experienced considerable resistance. Affirmative action includes practices meant to eliminate historical patterns of discrimination and to provide corrective adjustments that recognize the barriers faced by historically underrepresented groups.
• Controlling Images of Black Women: A perspective coined by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins that emphasizes the constellation of stereotypes that work to control and subordinate Black women in public society, including the Mammy, the Matriarch, and the Welfare Queen.
• Black Lives Matter: A movement of activists and organizations around the world that advocate against police brutality and killing of Black people. The movement has become a centerpiece in contemporary struggles for rights, equity, justice, and recognition.
• Black Feminism: The tradition of Black women using intellectual, social, cultural, and political strategies to end violence and exploitation.
• Combahee River Collective: A group of women, including prominent Black lesbians, who wrote a collective statement demonstrating their political analysis and commitment to addressing interlocking structures of discrimination, including sexism, heterosexism, and racism.