What is Social Justice to a Slave?

"For those living with some comfort in the First World, the future no longer exists as a common reference point. Yet for human beings, being sane depends on the acknowledgment of a continuity between the long since dead and those waiting to be born. The richer societies are being increasingly deprived of a temporal dimension essential to any spiritual life." --John Berger, “Foreword: To Try and Understand,” in The Algebra of Infinite Justice, by Arundhati Roy (London: Flamingo, 2002), xvii

In the U.S., we've fallen into the dangerous habit of speaking of slavery and segregation as though the words represent some Time Long Past. Slavery as that Troubling Matter of whips and cotton and bent backs and Roots which is thankfully behind us now. Segregation as those hoses, dogs and embarrassing Southern ignorance we finally got rid of (as though Jim Crow was purely a Mississippi Delta phenomenon and racism existed solely below the Mason-Dixon line).

We hardly speak of chattel slavery as the foundation of our economic system, social inequalities, and political radicalism. Of slaves as the first freedom fighters, activists, and community organizers. Of Freedom Riders as part of the legacy of that activism. Of Rosa and Coretta, Etta and Fannie. And these are the well-known names.

We've moved on to More Important Things. Our histories have become stories have become myths mumbled out of obligation to our predecessors instead of out of a recognition that the ghost of the plantation (and the workshop, and the mill, and the kitchen) sits right over our shoulder. We invoke Ann Nixon Cooper as a symbol of a life lived and then ignore those who question the very role and relevance of what that life might mean. We seat a Sojourner in our Capital and celebrate our journey from slaves to citizens, but ask the welfare queen to put her tiara back on because this stimulus is only for "those who did everything right" and you ran your credit card balance just a little too high.

As the recession deepens, words and statues should accompany public policies that consider a legacy of unequal distribution of resources and acknowledge a history of violence and of resilience. But few economists extend their analysis of the current crisis further back than the last decade. Which means the importance of houses--of land itself--to a long since distressed African-American community is dismissed in the scramble for better credit plans and harder stress tests. Which means that black farmers--yes there are still black farmers--continue to clamor for change they can believe in.

Our forgetting extends with each monument and each moment because we desperately want to believe a page has turned and the past is finally presenting us with a clean slate.

But even our blank sheets of paper are bloodstained.

In the meantime, the past roars in the silence.

....

The UN Special Focus Report on the demolition of Palestian neighborhoods in East Jersualem begins simply:

"In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and unilaterally
annexed to its territory 70.5 km2 of the occupied area, which
were subsequently integrated within the Jersualem municipality. This annexation contravenes international law..."

Appropriation of land for "green areas," exorbitant legal fees and fines on Palestinan men and women attempting to block the demolition of their homes or plan construction of new ones, and re-re-zonings of pre-1967 neighborhoods all amount to a systematic effort to displace Palestinan landowners.

The report reads like a lesson in 1930s urban redlining. (Or perhaps "predatory lending in reverse").

...

"In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it."

The birth of the Taliban as we know it today.

...

On June 12, 1967, Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia:

"This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment."

Overturning the original trial judge's contention that:

"Almight God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with this arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

An uncomfortably familiar argument. And yes...he said malay.


...

This should not even be up for debate (you're a Jack Bauer kind of girl?)

....

It is our responsibility to remember, to research, to honor and re-honor our own dead. But the forgetting? That part isn't entirely our fault. Revisionist history is as American as fried chicken and apple pie. Black people in the U.S. manifest the best and worst of what this country has to offer. Its determined hope, drive and ambition for the future. Its self-centered and viral xenophobia. Its radical love and sense of global citizenship. And its selective amnesia to any and all facts that might restate, reshape, reimagine the case--whatever the case of the moment might be.

This existence, with all of its contradictions, has galvanized us but also threaten to tear us apart by blinding us to the truth.

And what is the truth?

What is social justice to a slave?

To struggle on a daily basis--

to love who we wanted when we wanted, to claim family despite the caprice of market prices, to love the land and hate the lash, to love our children and hate their father, to worship fire-breathing gods and goddesses whose power screamed through our skin that we were the chosen ones

--to live "while we are alive" not after we are dead.

It is our responsibility to remember our dead and to shape a politics that honors the struggles
of our ancestors. Only we can teach our children how to move forward because only we best recognize the potholes our labor pains left behind.

We can't learn from our experience if we are consistently forgetting it.

We can move forward human, sane and full-bodied if instead of relying on ideology or the caprice of this theoryexpertcounselorpoliticianacademic who happens to be center stage right now (yes, even Barack; yes, even little ole me) we rely on the whole of our experience in the modern world. All fraught and fragile 400+ years and of it. And conduct ourselves accordingly.

Academe. Again.

Which is why I love La Chola's 1, 2, 3, and 4-part take on academe--and respect the change being worked from all kinds of directions.

From a post I (Kismet) wrote a few weeks ago on understanding latinidad and the importance of praxis and theory to that understanding.

Because I don't believe you can have one without the other.

Despite the academic industrial complex.

And despite the vagaries of appointments, tenure, and promotion. And the spirit injury done to radical women of color academics in educational institutions across this country (the world).

I still believe...

That at the end of the day...

The textbooks that are circulated in schools...

They matter. A lot.

And the history that is done by men and women who care that the world is not ALL heterosexual, upper middle-class, Anglo-American and white....

That violence is done to make it appear that way...

That such violence wraps ALL of us in a history we have yet to understand....

That none of us are actually at peace and free to be until we are ALL at peace and free to be...

When that history is brought into a classroom and it is taught right....

I believe it changes lives.

Because it has changed mine.

(This was first. This was second. This will probably be third.)

Any questions?

Good.

Let's get on back to movement building.....

Thank you for listening.

Puerto Rican Women Writers

For those like me, who are searching...I am sharing....
Autorretrato VIII, by María de Mater O'Neill

From the introduction, by Consuelo Lopez Springfield:

This special issue of Callaloo is a colective effort by art and literary critics, translators, teachers, artists and writers to make Puerto Rican art and writing accessible to a wider audience. Inspired by its editor, Chalres Rowell, whose commitment to promoting the creative accomplishments of colonized peoples is exemplary, Callaloo is the first publication to offer outstanding art, photography, literature, interviews, and critical essays by and about Puerto Rican women. It is also the first feminist publication to unite exiled and island women in intellectual debate and artistic exchange on such major themes as the sexual control of women, the nature of identity, race, and class in colonized societies, and the challenges of bicultural life.

Check your local college/university collection. (If only I could post the articles here and not break copyright laws, I would!)

More Oooh. More Inspiration.

The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers. Their essays illuminate how--first as graduate students and then as professional historians--they entered and navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and dominated by whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish a new scholarly field.

Black women, alleged by affirmative-action supporters and opponents to be "twofers," recount how they have confronted racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses. They explore how the personal and the political intersect in historical research and writing and in the academy. Organized by the years the contributors earned their Ph.D.'s, these essays follow the black women who entered the field of history during and after the civil rights and black power movements, endured the turbulent 1970s, and opened up the field of black women's history in the 1980s. By comparing the experiences of older and younger generations, this collection makes visible the benefits and drawbacks of the institutionalization of African American and African American women's history. Telling Histories captures the voices of these pioneers, intimately and publicly.

Contributors:
Mia Bay, Rutgers University
Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland
Leslie Brown, Washington University, St. Louis
Crystal N. Feimster, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sharon Harley, University of Maryland
Wanda A. Hendricks, University of South Carolina
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
Chana Kai Lee, University of Georgia
Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University
Nell Irvin Painter, Newark, New Jersey
Merline Pitre, Texas Southern University
Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago
Julie Saville, University of Chicago
Brenda Elaine Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Ula Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University
Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University


About the Author
Deborah Gray White is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her previous books include Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 and Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.

My Twin put me on game. Thanks.

The Legacy of Slavery: Florida's Apology

On Wednesday, the Florida Legislature formally expressed its "profound regret" for its role in the enslavement of generations of Africans.

It is a testament to Florida's long, traumatic experience with the enslavement of human beings and the enforced legal discrimination of them under Jim Crow laws that it took so long to issue a formal apolo-gy.

Besides the terrible injustices involved, slavery struck at the core of American ideals.

Click Here.

Five other states have apologized for slavery: Virginia, Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and New Jersey.

Comments?

The Legacy of Slavery: Eden, North Carolina Mural Controversy

EDEN, N.C. -- As with any work of art, the mural that sits in Washington Street Park in Eden, N.C. is open for interpretation, but this mural is being interpreted on both ends of the political spectrum, as well.

Those who put it there say it celebrates early economic development, but Elretha Perkins, president of the Eden Political Action Committee, represents a group that thinks differently.

Click here. Watch the video for a close up of the mural.

Comments?

History Made (and in the Making)

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (L) and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf attend the Liberian Partners Forum at the World Bank February 13, 2007 in Washington, DC. Sirleaf outlined several areas of post-conflict development that she wants the partners to discuss during the forum, including building the country's security forces, rebuilding roads, job creation and debt relief. Rice announced that the United States will forgive $391 million in loans to Liberia. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I know. Someone is really going to get me for this. At the very least because this moment is over a year old.

However, I watched Iron Ladies of Liberia on Independent Lens tonight and one of the shots at the end really floored me. Just a split second image, but it was of these two women, side by side, after Rice made the announcement on the debt forgiveness.

And I must confess--for that split second, I loved it. As a woman of color.

Why?

Well, consider what it means that these two women in their capacities as Secretary of State of the United States and the President of Liberia, even exist. Their being means that the way the world represents power, what the world sees when it thinks "that is powerful" or "that is a leader," is not the same as it was ten years ago. It hasn't changed in a a radical way, a structural way. It doesn't necessarily make me feel safer when I walk out of the house in the morning or go to bed at night. I don't imagine that "oh, women of color are in positions of power now! we are liberated!" Not at all.

But it makes me think.

I do not agree with the tangled skein of politics that the photo embodies. But I don't have to like the situation to appreciate the site--to understand that this photo is very different from ones of world leaders I have seen before.

The Cleanse: Inspiration from Laurent DuBois

“What if, as we sought to understand the history of universalism in the Atlantic world, we could tell an integrated story that goes something like this: the discovery of the Americas generated a space for new ways of thinking about humanity and natural rights, and out of encounters between Native Americans, Africans and Europeans there emerged new ways of thinking about belonging, governance, subject-hood, and eventually citizenship. These new ways of thinking may have been written down overwhelmingly by the educated elites in Europe and the colonies, yet they drew on the circulation of meanings and ideas in which those who were not literate participated; through their labor but also through their resistance--both in actions and in speech--enslaved peoples in the Atlantic world both generated problems of governance and began to propose new solutions by insisting on their own dignity and denying the justifications issued for their enslavement; as thinkers in Europe argued against slavery and for the primacy of natural rights, drawing on this broader context of which they were a part, they in turn influenced colonial administrators who witnessed the actions and sufferings of the enslaved, who saw and heard them, and who in turn produced new interpretations that emphasized the need for limits on the power of masters and for abuse; these reformist tendencies, though certainly limited in scope and ultimately aimed at preserving colonial production and societies in which people of African descent were viewed primarily as sources of labor, nevertheless opened up windows and possibilities for change; in and through these decades of debate in France there was a parallel set of debates in communities of the enslaved on both sides of the Atlantic, about tactics but also about ideas; together, these debates laid the foundations for the intellectual and political explosion that would take place during the 1790s in the Caribbean.

“One could then, perhaps, go one step further and argue that this explosion then generated what we think of today as the true thinking of the Enlightenment--a concrete and radical universalism that overthrew profit for principle and defended human rights against the weapons of empire and the arguments of racial hierarchy. This advance, unsurprisingly, was met with hostility and with reaction; its victory was turned back in some ways; and it became saturated with many of the contradictions that infused the thinking of the Enlightenment itself. But precisely this process of reaction, the combination of planter nightmares and slave hopes, played out in crucial ways during the next decades to lead to other phases of liberation, followed by other phases of reaction, a cycle in which we still reside.

“What if we took up the task of writing such a story--or one like it?...”

Laurent DuBois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Re-Thinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic.”

History Repeating Itself....

1930s:

In the early 1930s shantytowns sprang up in cities across the United States, built by people made homeless by the Great Depression. The areas, like this one in Seattle, were nicknamed Hoovervilles because their inhabitants blamed United States president Herbert Hoover for their plight:

2008:

Tent cities have sprung up outside Los Angeles as people lose their homes in the mortgage crisis.

(This video deserves a Courtesy, but I can't find to whom. If you're that blogger, shoot me a comment and I'll give you you're due :)

Kara Walker v. Betye Saar

Intense.



NPR's News and Notes blogged recently on Kara Walker. Walker's work fascinates (and revolts) me on the same level that Betye Saar's work tantalizes and seduces me. The first reminds me that I'm a woman of color in a country that has a history of this....

Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies (1998)

And this...

Kara Walker, You Do (1993-4)

These are the mild ones. The video has more graphic silhouettes.

This art is troubling in the esoteric sense of the word. You look at them, and you shrug, or you look and you look away...but something is wrong. Something makes your stomach turn over. Something makes the bile rise. It is like Kara Walker gives you a real glimpse at the underworld of our modernity, our national belonging, our most racist and exploitable possibilities.

But Betye Saar....

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)


Betye Saar, Sambo's Banjo (1971-2)

Betye Saar, Midnight Madonnas (1996)

Saar steadies the world again. She hands Aunt Jemima a gun. She makes Sambo's guitar a fetish with the power to kill. She lifts black womanhood up to the sacred instead of defining it as the common denominator of virtuous whiteness.

At the end of the day. We need both...

"Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name...My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented." --Hortense J. Spillers

...but, to be honest, I don't feel like Kara Walker speaks my world. Maybe it's because that world is too scary. But, actually, I think its just that the black experience is about more than the obscene. It is also about taking your gun, taking your gris-gris, kissing your cross up to La Virgen, and stepping outside your door to struggle another day. Even when that struggle is in the form of dissemblance and signifyin' dat monkey, which it usually is. That is still insurgency, it is still resistance.

Betye Saar, Black Girl's Window (1969)

This is me. I'm the black girl in the window dreaming freedom dreams without which this history, this space, that memory, that moment would not exist. I'm the kindred and the wild seed. I am angry. I'm sweet, like honey. And "I've got the shotgun on your back."

I'm more than the world's beast of burden. I'm also its greatest inspiration.

Finally Found It!

I've been looking for inspiration all morning! Here we go....



In the summer of 2007, the Journal of Women's History (19:2) published a roundtable on "The History of Women and Slavery: Considering the Impact of Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South on the Twentieth Anniversary of Its Publication."

According to the introduction by Jennifer L. Morgan, the roundtable was originally a series of papers presented in June 2005 at the 13th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Scripps College in Claremont, California. The 7 articles consider Deborah Gray White's landmark work, Ar'n't I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (originally published in 1985) and the state of scholarship on women of color during the period of slavery, including strides made by enterprising women in the field. The article received the 2007 Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.

~.~.~.~

Roundtable: "The History of Women and Slavery: Considering the Impact of Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South on the Twentieth Anniversary of Its Publication."

Jennifer Morgan, "Introduction."

Daina Ramey Berry, "Teaching Ar'n't I a Woman?"

Stephanie M. H. Camp, "Ar'n't I a Woman? in the Vanguard of the History of Race and Sex in the United States."

Leslie M. Harris, "Ar'n't I a Woman?, Gender, and Slavery Studies."

Barbara Krauthamer, " Ar'n't I a Woman? Native Americans, Gender, and Slavery"

Jessica Millward, "More History Than Myth: African American Women's History Since the Publication of Ar'n't I a Woman?"

Deborah Gray White, "Afterword: A Response."

(No links because the articles aren't available online for free. The journal can be found online here at the Johns Hopkins University Press site, but for the articles you will need to frequent your local public or college/university library....)