American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Politics/Public Policy, Religion, Slavery, Social Science, United States on 2012-10-08 17:31Z by Steven

American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy

Harper and Brothers Publishing
1944
822 pages

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)

With the Assistance of

Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose

This landmark effort to understand African-American people in the New World provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks.

CONTENTS

  • Foreword, by Frederick P. Keppel
  • Author’s Preface
  • Introduction
    1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue
    2. Valuations and Beliefs
    3. A White Man’s Problem
    4. Not an Isolated Problem
    5. Some Further Notes on the Scope and Direction of This Study
    6. A Warning to the Reader
  • PART I. THE APPROACH
    • Chapter 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience
      1. Unity of Ideals and Diversity of Culture
      2. American Nationalism
      3. Some Historical Reflections
      4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment
      5. The Roots in Christianity
      6. The Roots in English Law
      7. American Conservatism
      8. The American Conception of Law and Order
      9. Natural Law and American Puritanism
      10. The Faltering Judicial Order
      11. Intellectual Defeatism
      12. “Lip-Service”
      13. Value Premises in This Study
    • Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem
      1. On the Minds of the Whites
      2. To the Negroes Themselves
      3. Explaining the Problem Away
      4. Explorations in Escape
      5. The Etiquette of Discussion
      6. The Convenience of Ignorance
      7. Negro and White Voices
      8. The North and the South
    • Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem
      1. American Minority Problems
      2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
      3. The White Man’s Theory of Color Caste
      4. The “Rank Order of Discriminations”
      5. Relationships between Lower Class Groups
      6. The Manifoldness and the Unity of the Negro Problem
      7. The Theory of the Vicious Circle
      8. A Theory of Democracy
  • PART II. RACE
    • Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
      1. Biology and Moral Equalitarianism
      2. The Ideological Clash in America
      3. The Ideological Compromise
      4. Reflections in Science
      5. The Position of the Negro Writers
      6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
      7. Beliefs with a Purpose
      8. Specific Rationalization Needs
      9. Rectifying Beliefs
      10. The Study of Beliefs
    • Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry
      1. The American Definition of “Negro”
      2. African Ancestry
      3. Changes in Physical Appearance
      4. Early Miscegenation
      5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
      6. Miscegenation in Recent Times
      7. Passing
      8. Social and Biological Selection
      9. Present and Future Genetic Composition Trends
    • Chapter 6. Racial Characteristics
      1. Physical Traits
      2. Biological Susceptibility to Disease
      3. Psychic Traits
      4. Frontiers of Constructive Research
  • PART III. POPULATION AND MIGRATION
    • Chapter 7. Population
      1. The Growth of the Negro Population
      2. Births and Deaths
      3. Summary
      4. Ends and Means of Population Policy
      5. Controlling the Death Rate
      6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate
      7. Birth Control Facilities Tor Negroes
    • Chapter 8. Migration
      1. Overview
      2. A Closer View
      3. The Great Migration to the Urban North
      4. Continued Northward Migration
      5. The Future of Negro Migration
  • PART IV. ECONOMICS
    • Chapter 9. Economic Inequality
      1. Negro Poverty
      2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle
      3. The Value Premises
      4. The Conflict of Valuations
    • Chapter 10. The Tradition of Slavery
      1. Economic Exploitation
      2. Slavery and Caste
      3. The Land Problem
      4. The Tenancy Problem
    • Chapter 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer
      1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
      2. Overpopulation and Soil Erosion
      3. Tenancy, Credit and Cotton
      4. The Boll Weevil
      5. Main Agricultural Classes
      6. The Negro Landowner
      7. Historical Reasons for the Relative Lack of Negro Farm Owners
      8. Tenants and Wage Laborers
      9. The Plantation Tenant
    • Chapter 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the Thirties: Trends and Policies
      1. Agricultural Trends during the ‘Thirties
      2. The Disappearing Sharecropper
      3. The Role of the A.A.A. in Regard to Cotton
      4. A.A.A. and the Negro
      5. The Local Administration of the A.A.A.
      6. Mechanization
      7. Labor Organizations
      8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
      9. Economic Evaluation of the A.A.A.
      10. Social Evaluation of the A.A.A.
      11. Constructive Measures
      12. Farm Security Programs
    • Chapter 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture
      1. Perspective on the Urbanization of the Negro People
      2. In the South
      3. A Closer View
      4. Southern Trends during the Thirties
      5. In the North
      6. A Closer View on Northern Trends
      7. The Employment Hazards of Unskilled Work
      8. The Size of the Negro Labor Force and Negro Employment
      9. Negro and White Unemployment
    • Chapter 14. The Negro in Business, the Professions, Public Service and Other White Collar Occupations
      1. Overview
      2. The Negro in Business
      3. Negro Finance
      4. The Negro Teacher
      5. The Negro Minister
      6. The Negro in Medical Professions
      7. Other Negro Professionals
      8. Negro Officials and White Collar Workers in Public Service
      9. Negro Professionals on the Stage, Screen and Orchestra
      10. Note on Shady Occupations
    • Chapter 15. The Negro in the Public Economy
      1. The Public Budget
      2. Discrimination in Public Service
      3. Education
      4. Public Health
      5. Recreational Facilities
      6. Public Housing Policies
      7. Social Security and Public Assistance
      8. Specialized Social Welfare Programs during the Period After
      9. The Social Security Program
      10. Assistance to Special Groups
      11. Work Relief
      12. Assistance to Youth
      13. General Relief and Assistance in Kind
    • Chapter 16. Income, Consumption and Housing
      1. Family Income
      2. Income and Family Size
      3. The Family Budget
      4. Budget Items
      5. Food Consumption
      6. Housing Conditions
    • Chapter 17. The Mechanics of Economic Discrimination as a Practical Problem
      1. The Practical Problem
      2. The Ignorance and Lack of Concern of Northern Whites
      3. Migration Policy
      4. The Regular Industrial Labor Market in the North
      5. The Problem of Vocational Training
      6. The Self-Perpetuating Color Bar
      7. A Position or “Indifferent Equilibrium”
      8. In the South
    • Chapter 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro
      1. The Wages and Hours Law and the Dilemma of the Marginal Worker
      2. Other Economic Policies
      3. Labor Unions and the Negro
      4. A Weak Movement Getting Strong Powers
    • Chapter 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter
      1. The Negro Wage Earner and the War Boom
      2. A Closer View
      3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War Production
      4. The Negro in the Armed Forces
      5. …And Afterwards?
  • PART V. POLITICS
    • Chapter 20. Underlying Factors
      1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue
      2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
      3. The North and the South
      4. The Southern Defense Ideology
      5. The Reconstruction Amendments
      6. Memories of Reconstruction
      7. The Tradition of Illegality
    • Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism
      1. The “Solid South”
      2. Southern Conservatism
      3. Is the South Fascist?
      4. The Changing South
      5. Southern Liberalism
    • Chapter 22. Political Practices Today
      1. The Southern Political Scene
      2. Southern Techniques for Disfranchising the Negroes
      3. The Negro Vote m the South
      4. The Negro in Northern Politics
      5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
    • Chapter 23. Trends and Possibilities
      1. The Negro’s Political Bargaining Power
      2. The Negro’s Party Allegiance
      3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
      4. An Unstable Situation
      5. The Stake of the North
      6. Practical Conclusions
  • PART VI. JUSTICE
    • Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice
      1. Democracy and Justice
      2. Relative Equality in the North
      3. The Southern Heritage
    • Chapter 25. The Police and Other Public Contacts
      1. Local Petty Officials
      2. The Southern Policeman
      3. The Policeman in the Negro Neighborhood
      4. Trends and Outlook
      5. Another Type of Public Contact
    • Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons
      1. The Southern Courts
      2. Discrimination in Court
      3. Sentences and Prisons
      4. Trends and Outlook
    • Chapter 27. Violence and Intimidation
      1. The Pattern of Violence
      2. Lynching
      3. The Psychopathology of Lynching
      4. Trends and Outlook
      5. Riots
  • PART VII. SOCIAL INEQUALITY
    • Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality
      1. The Value Premise
      2. a. The One-Sidedness of the System of Segregation
      3. The Beginning in Slavery
      4. The Jim Crow Laws
      5. Beliefs Supporting Social Inequality
      6. The Popular Theory of “No Social Equality”
      7. Critical Evaluation of the “No Social Equality” Theory
      8. Attitudes among Different Classes of Whites in the South
      9. Social Segregation and Discrimination in the North
    • Chapter 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination
      1. Facts and Beliefs Regarding Segregation and Discrimination
      2. Segregation and Discrimination in interpersonal Relations
      3. Housing Segregation
      4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
      5. The General Character of Institutional Segregation
      6. Segregation in Specific Types of Institutions
    • Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality
      1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
      2. Increasing Isolation
      3. Interracial Contacts
      4. The Factor of Ignorance
      5. Present Dynamics
  • PART VIII. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
    • Chapter 31. Caste and Class
      1. The Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
      2. The “Meaning” of the Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
      3. The Caste Struggle
      4. Crossing the Caste Line
    • Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure
      1. The Negro Class Order in the American Caste System
      2. Caste Determines Class
      3. Color and Class
      4. The Classes in the Negro Community
  • PART IX. LEADERSHIP AND CONCERTED ACTION
    • Chapter 33. The American Pattern of Individual Leadership and Mass Passivity
      1. “Intelligent Leadership”
      2. “Community Leaders”
      3. Mass Passivity
      4. The Patterns Exemplified in Politics and throughout the American Social Structure
    • Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership
      1. Leadership and Caste
      2. The Interests of Whites and Negroes with Respect to Negro leadership
      3. In the North and on the National Scene
      4. The “Glass Plate”
      5. Accommodating Leadership and Class
      6. Several Qualifications
      7. Accommodating Leaders in the North
      8. The Glamour Personalities
    • Chapter 35. The Negro Protest
      1. The Slave Revolts
      2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
      3. The Tuskegee Compromise
      4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
      5. The Protest Is Still Rising
      6. The Shock of the First World War and the Post-War Crisis
      7. The Garvey Movement
      8. Post-War Radicalism among Negro Intellectuals
      9. Negro History and Culture
      10. The Great Depression and the Second World War
    • Chapter 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality
      1. A Mental Reservation
      2. The Struggle Against Defeatism
      3. The Struggle for Balance
      4. Negro Sensitiveness
      5. Negro Aggression
      6. Upper Class Reactions
      7. The “Function” of Racial Solidarity
    • Chapter 37. Compromise Leadership
      1. The Daily Compromise
      2. The Vulnerability of the Negro Leader
      3. Impersonal Motives
      4. The Protest Motive
      5. The Double Role
      6. Negro Leadership Techniques
      7. Moral Consequences
      8. Leadership Rivalry
      9. Qualifications
      10. In Southern Cities
      11. In the North
      12. On the National Scene
    • Chapter 38. Negro Popular Theories
      1. Instability
      2. Negro Provincialism
      3. The Thinking on the Negro Problem
      4. Courting the “Best People Among the Whites”
      5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
      6. Some Critical Observations
      7. The Pragmatic “Truth” of the Labor Solidarity Doctrine
      8. “The Advantages of the Disadvantages”
      9. Condoning Segregation
      10. Boosting Negro Business
      11. Criticism of Negro Business Chauvinism
      12. “Back to Africa”
      13. Miscellaneous Ideologies
    • Chapter 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations
      1. A General American Pattern
      2. Nationalist Movements
      3. Business and Professional Organizations
      4. The National Negro Congress Movement
      5. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
      6. The N.A.A.C.P. Branches
      7. The N.A.A.C.P. National Office
      8. The Strategy of the N.A.A.C.P.
      9. Critique of the N.A.A.C.P.
      10. The Urban League
      11. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
      12. The Negro Organizations during the War
      13. Negro Strategy
    • Chapter 40. The Negro Church
      1. Non-Political Agencies for Negro Concerted Action
      2. Some Historical Notes
      3. The Negro Church and the General American Pattern of
      4. Religious Activity
      5. A Segregated Church
      6. Its Weakness
      7. Trends and Outlook
    • Chapter 41. The Negro School
      1. Negro Education as Concerted Action
      2. Education in American Thought and Life
      3. The Development of Negro Education in the South
      4. The Whites’ Attitudes toward Negro Education
      5. “Industrial” versus “Classical” Education of Negroes
      6. Negro Attitudes
      7. Trends and Problems
    • Chapter 42. The Negro Press
      1. An Organ for the Negro Protest
      2. The Growth of the Negro Press
      3. Characteristics of the Negro Press
      4. The Controls of the Negro Press
      5. Outlook
  • PART X. THE NEGRO COMMUNITY
    • Chapter 43. Institutions
      1. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community
      2. The Negro Family
      3. The Negro Church in the Negro Community
      4. The Negro School and Negro Education
      5. Voluntary Associations
    • Chapter 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community
      1. “Peculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
      2. Crime
      3. Mental Disorders and Suicide
      4. Recreation
      5. Negro Achievements
  • PART XI. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA
    • Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem
      1. The Negro Problem and the War
      2. Social Trends
      3. The Decay of the Caste Theory
      4. Negroes in the War Crisis
      5. The War and the Whites
      6. The North Moves Toward Equality
      7. Tension in the South
      8. International Aspects
      9. Making the Peace
      10. America’s Opportunity
  • Appendix 1. A Methodological Note on Valuations and Beliefs
    1. The Mechanism of Rationalization
    2. Theoretical Critique of the Concept “Mores”
    3. Valuation Dynamics
  • Appendix 2. A Methodological Note on Facts and Valuations in Social Science
    1. Biases in the Research on the American Negro Problem
    2. Methods of Mitigating Biases in Social Science
    3. The History and Logic of the Hidden Valuations in Social Science
    4. The Points of View Adopted in This Book
  • Appendix 3. A Methodological Note on the Principle of Accumulation
  • Appendix 4. Note on the Meaning of Regional Terms as Used in This Book
  • Appendix 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem
  • Appendix 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations
    1. General Characteristics of Negro Jobs
    2. Domestic Service
    3. Other Service Occupations
    4. Turpentine Farms
    5. Lumber
    6. The Fertilizer Industry
    7. Longshore Work.
    8. Building Workers
    9. Railroad Workers
    10. Tobacco Workers
    11. Textile Workers
    12. Coal Miners
    13. Iron and Steel Workers
    14. Automobile Workers
    15. The Slaughtering and Meat Packing Industry
  • Appendix 7. Distribution of Negro Residences in Selected Cities
  • Appendix 8. Research on Caste and Class in a Negro Community
  • Appendix 9. Research on Negro Leadership
  • Appendix 10. Quantitative Studies of Race Attitudes
    1. Existing Studies of Race Attitudes
    2. The Empirical Study of Valuations and Beliefs
    3. “Personal” and “Political” Opinions
    4. The Practical Study of Race Prejudice
  • List of Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Other Material Referred to in This Book
  • Numbered Footnotes
  • Index

From pages 102-106

If white Americans can believe that Negro Americans belong to a lower biological species than they themselves, this provides a motivation for their doctrine that the white race should be kept pure and that amalgamation should, by all means, be prevented. The theory of the inborn inferiority of the Negro people is, accordingly, used as an argument for the antiamalgamation doctrine. This doctrine, in its turn, has, as we have seen, a central position in the American system of color caste. The belief in biological inferiority is thus another basic support, in addition to the no-social-equality, anti-amalgamation doctrine, of the system of segregation and discrimination. Whereas the anti-amalgamation doctrine has its main importance in the “social” field, the belief in the Negro’s biological inferiority is basic to discrimination in all fields. White Americans have an interest in deprecating the Negro race in so far as they identify themselves with the prevailing system of color caste. They have such an interest, though in a lower degree, even if their only attachment to the caste order is that they do not stand up energetically as individuals and citizens to eradicate it…

…In adhering to this biological rationalization, specified in the six points stated above, the white man meets certain difficulties. A factual difficulty to begin with is that individual Negroes and even larger groups of Negroes often, in spite of the handicaps they encounter, show themselves to be better than they ought to be according to the popular theory. A whole defense system serves to minimize this disturbance of the racial dogma, which insists that all Negroes are inferior. From one point of view, segregation of the Negro people fulfills a function in this defense system. It is, of course, not consciously devised for this purpose, and it serves other purposes as well, but this does not make its defense function less important. Segregation isolates in particular the middle and upper class Negroes,” and thus permits the ordinary white man in America to avoid meeting an educated Negro. The systematic tendency to leave the Negro out when discussing public affairs and to avoid mentioning anything about Negroes in the press except their crimes also serves this purpose. The aggressive and derogatory altitude toward “uppity” Negroes and, in particular, the tendency to relegate all educated Negroes to this group also belongs to the defense system.

Since he has a psychological need to believe the popular theory of Negro racial inferiority, it is understandable why the ordinary white man is disincline to hear about good qualities or achievements of Negroes. ‘The merits of Negro soldiers should not be too warmly praised, especially in the presence of Americans,” reads one of the advices which the French Military Mission, stationed with the American Expeditionary Army during the First World War, circulated but later withdrew. It should be added that white people who work to help the Negro people and to improve race relations see the strategic importance of this factor and direct their work toward spreading information about Negroes of quality among the whites.

Another difficulty has always been the mulatto. White Americans want to keep biological distance from the out-race and will, therefore, be tempted to discount the proportion of mulattoes and believe that a greater part of the Negro people is pure bred than is warranted by the facts. A sort of collective guilt on the part of white people for the large-scale miscegenation, which has so apparently changed the racial character of the Negro people enforces this interest.

The literature on the Negro problem strengthens this hypothesis. Only some exceptional authors, usually Negroes, gave more adequate estimates of the proportion of mixed breeds, and it was left to Hrdlicka and Herskovits in the late ‘twenties to set this whole problem on a more scientific basis. The under-enumeration of mulattoes by the census takers decade after decade and also, until recently, the rather uncritical utilization of this material, indicate a tendency toward bias. The observations of the present author have, practically without exception, indicated that the nonexpert white population shows a systematic tendency grossly to underestimate the number of mulattoes in the Negro population.

It may, of course, be said against this assumption of a hidden purpose that one should not assume the ability of uninformed and untrained persons to distinguish a mulatto from a pure bred Negro. But the facts of historical and actual miscegenation are fairly well known, at least in the South, and are discussed with interest everywhere. And if a wrong estimate systematical goes in the same direction, there is reason to ask for a cause. It has also been observed that the ordinary white American gets disturbed when encountering the new scientific estimates that the great majority of American Negroes are not of pure African descent. Similarly, the ordinary white American is disturbed when he hears that Negroes sometimes pass for white. He wants, and he must want, to keep biological distance.

But the mulatto is a disturbance to the popular race theory not only because of his numbers. The question is also raised: Is the mulatto a deteriorated or an improved Negro? In fact, there seems never to have been popular agreement among white Americans whether the mulatto is worse than the pure bred Negro, or whether he is better because of his partially white ancestry. The former belief should per se strengthen the anti-amalgamation doctrine, in fact, make adherence to it to the interest of the entire society. The second belief can serve a purpose of explaining away Negro accomplishments which are, with few exceptions, made by mulattoes and which then could be ascribed to the white blood. Actually, I have often heard the same man use both arguments…

Read the entire book here.

Blackface, Whiteness and the Power of Definition in German Contemporary Theatre

Posted in Arts, Europe, Forthcoming Media, Live Events on 2012-10-08 03:21Z by Steven

Blackface, Whiteness and the Power of Definition in German Contemporary Theatre

The International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” invites Bühnenwatch
Studio 1 Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2 / 10 997 Berlin
2012-10-16, 11:00-16:30 CEST (Local Time)

With presentations by Sharon Otoo, Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, Dr. Daniele Daude, Dr. Azadeh Sharifi and Julia Lemmle

Moderated by Oliver Kontny

Program

11.00 Introduction by Oliver Kontny
11.30 “Reclaiming Innocence: Unmasking Representations of Whiteness in German Theatre,” Sharon Otoo
12.00 “Not just a Blackened Face: The Back Stage of a Stereotyp,” Sandrine Micossé-Aikins
12.30 “The (Un)Chosen Bodies of Myths. Performing Race on Opera Stage,” Dr. Daniele Daude
13.00-13.30 Discussion
Lunch
15.00 “Black artists in German theatre,” Dr. Azadeh Sharifi
15.30 ““Ich bin kein Nazi!” The blackface debate in the German mainstream media,” Julia Lemmle
16.00-16.30 Discussion…

For more information, click here.

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Anomaly – Film Screening and Performance

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2012-10-08 02:08Z by Steven

Anomaly – Film Screening and Performance

Bentley University
Wilder Pavilion – Adamian Academic Center
Waltham, Massachusetts
Wednesday, 2012-10-24, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Jessica Chen Drammeh, Director/Producer

Sharon Smith, Co-Producer

Anomaly is an award-winning documentary that provides a thought-provoking look at multiracial identity by combining personal narratives with the larger drama of mixed race in American culture. The characters use spoken word and music to tell their stories of navigating identity, family and community in a changing world. As it unfolds, Anomaly tells a story that is deeply personal, yet broadly American. Live music will follow the screening featuring Pete Shungu, who stars in the film.

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The nation’s poet

Posted in Articles, Biography, Media Archive, Poetry, United States, Women on 2012-10-08 01:11Z by Steven

The nation’s poet

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Personal Journeys
2012-10-06

Rosalind Bentley, Arts and Culture writer

Personal Journeys is a new weekly feature for readers who like good writing and good story-telling

The National Book Festival along the Mall in Washington is thronged with readers and authors who’ve come to revel in the written word on this fall day in 2004.

Just three years old, the festival has been forged by first lady Laura Bush and the Library of Congress in the belief that literature is a living thing, that the right words, composed in just the right way, can push a life forward.

To the podium steps poet Natasha Trethewey.

Her work illuminates people in the shadows: a seamstress stitching her way through segregation; an early 20th-century prostitute so fair skinned she can pass for white; a dock worker’s wife who keeps her husband’s supper warm as she waits for him well into the night.

Into some of her poems she has woven her own complex story: the blending of the black and white blood that made her; her blood tie to her native Mississippi; the blood of her mother, cruelly spilled.

What binds the characters? It is that in the body of American letters, they have routinely been pushed to the edge of the page by other protagonists deemed more “universal.” This day Natasha reads poems that bring their marginalized stories to the center…

…2012: It’s May. Natasha is the incoming chair of the creative writing program at Emory University and the newly minted poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi. She gets an unexpected call from the Library of Congress. Billington and his colleagues have been following her work since her first reading at the book festival. They are impressed with her 2007 collection, “Native Guard.” They are also taken with “Beyond Katrina,” her 2010 meditation on the psychological and structural wreckage dotting Mississippi’s Gulf Coast landscape years after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

Billington believes the time for this kind of poet is right now. She is only 46 and in the prime of her artistic life. This will signal that the library is looking forward. He offers her the highest United States honor a poet can achieve, poet laureate of the nation.

Saying yes isn’t hard, though the honor humbles her, even makes her a little nervous…

…Sept. 13, 2012: The audience in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington leaps to its feet. Applause crashes against the stage where a black woman in a dark dress stands, her hands clasped to her heart. Today, she looks as though she might burst with joy. This is U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, about to officially open the library’s literary season with a reading. She has come to tell an American story….

Read the entire article here.

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Afro-German Literature and Films

Posted in Course Offerings, Europe, Media Archive, United States on 2012-10-07 02:16Z by Steven

Afro-German Literature and Films

Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies, Oakland, California
4 two-hour classes

Marion Gerlind, Founder and Executive Director

This seminar will familiarize students with the history of a minority population in Germany who has gained significant visibility in German media since the 1980s. Having confronted racist stereotyping and media (mis)representations, Black Germans have formed empowering social and historical identities around the self-label “Afro-German.” Using the classic book Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colors), autobiographical essays, excerpts from novels and films, including later work by May Ayim and Ika Hügel-Marshall, students will study pre-colonial representations of Africa in Germany, Afro-Germans in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism, as well as after 1945 to the present.

This seminar will be conducted in German and/or English. Students are asked to read assigned texts prior to each session and be prepared to contribute to email discussions.

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Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany

Posted in Autobiography, Europe, Live Events, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2012-10-07 02:09Z by Steven

Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany

University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
Multicultural Community Center, Hearst Field Annex-D
2012-09-25, 12:40-14:00 PDT (Local Time)

A reading by Ika Hügel-Marshall

Ika Hügel-Marshall was the child of an African-American serviceman and a white German woman. Born and raised in post-Hitler Germany, she tells about her experience of anti-Black racism and how she came to terms with her identity as an Afro-German. Only at the age of 39 she met other Afro-Germans and was involved in setting up the “Initiative of Black Germans” (ISD). In 1993, she found her father in Chicago and met him and his family—a most profound experience.

For more infomation, click here.

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Review of Mazón, Patricia M.; Steingröver, Reinhild, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Europe, History, Media Archive on 2012-10-07 01:49Z by Steven

Review of Mazón, Patricia M.; Steingröver, Reinhild, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

H-German, H-Net Reviews
June 2009

Lynn Kutch, Assistant Professor of German
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Patricia M. Mazón, Reinhild Steingröver, eds. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. xvii + 247 pp. cloth ISBN 978-1-58046-183-2.

A Defiant “We” Announces Its Birth: Understanding the Complexity of Black German Identity

Given the long and varied history of cultural interactions between Africans and Germans–from the 1400s, when Africans populated Europe as slaves and court servants, to the pinnacle of German colonization in Africa in the late 1800s, to the post-World War I Rhineland occupation–the dominant German culture, perhaps understandably, has always viewed Africans as foreigners. This multifaceted collection interrogates the difficulty of categorizing the experience of Afro-Germans, a new organizing term in its own right. In each essay, the authors seek to expand the relatively limited current base of knowledge about the black German experience and to rectify the oftentimes ill-informed German and international reaction to that tradition. As a whole, the collected essays represent, as Sander Gilman puts it, a “major confrontation between the German image of Blackness and the reality of the Black” (p. 83). Gilman’s “confrontation” materializes in each essay’s distinctly articulated challenges to the common notion that racism toward blacks never existed in Germany. The book’s authors and editors not only dispute that comfortable assumption, they also sharpen the markedly German angle of the examination by claiming that attention paid to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, has consistently overshadowed the German colonial legacy and historical attitude about Africans. A vital reading given its multicultural approach to German studies, the book demonstrates that, despite the widespread cultural eclipse of this theme, historians, writers, and filmmakers have successfully exploited their talent to display a new self-confidence while educating others on overt acts of prejudice and racism in Germany.

Building upon previous research in the field and combining disciplines and methodologies, the editors have organized the volume into two thematic sections that will appeal to Afro-German readers as well as scholars with varying degrees of interest in and knowledge about the subject. The first subdivision, “Afro-Germans in Historical Perspective,” traces African intersections with German history from the colonial period through 1945. The second portion, “Cultural Representations and Self-Representations of Afro-Germans,” offers specific examples from various disciplines of the ever-changing perceived image over time and how the community of Afro-Germans seeks to define itself as a reaction to those general perceptions…

Read the entire review here.

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The Durability of Race

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-10-07 01:34Z by Steven

The Durability of Race

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-05

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of racism. Many believe that as the global demographics change and Generation Y rises, racism will fade in significance. Some even suggest that what we are witnessing in the Obama backlash is just death throes.
 
That argument ignores history.
 
Here’s what I mean.
 
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the abolitionist movement were enough to end slavery. Slavery was defeated in a Civil War that was fought not over race equality nor just for the cuase of freeing slaves, but over federal authority. The cynicism at the root of the “war against slavery” is revealed by the fact that when legal race slavery was finally defeated in 1865, the culture of  white supremacy survived, both in the North and the South.
 
Southern state governments, determined to maintain white supremacy, pivoted after the war and took advantage of an exception in the 13th Amendment that allowed for the indentured servitude of criminals. They created a set of legal codes that criminalized Black people. Crimes included changing employers without permission,vagrancy, and selling cotton after sunset.
 
Once imprisoned, African Americans were subjected to neo-slavery in the form of labor camps and chain gangs. But the impact of neo-slavery was not just on those enslaved. The system terrorized Blacks throughout the South keeping them subjugated to white employers who in many cases were their former masters…

Read the entire article here.

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Travels of self-discovery: African heritage in Mexico

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico on 2012-10-06 19:11Z by Steven

Travels of self-discovery: African heritage in Mexico

American Observer: American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine
American University, Washington, D.C.
2009-11-12

Carmen Castro

Cesareo Moreno clearly remembers his family visit to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2004.

He was on a mission to learn more about his Mexican heritage. Moreno told his uncle he wanted to learn more about the African culture.

His uncle thought Moreno was talking about a project [what project? Is it African-related?] on the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, Moreno says. When he told his uncle his research was about [African in?] their home state of Guanajuato, Moreno says his gave a look of disbelief.

“He tells me in a dead serious way … just no there isn’t. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Not in our backyard. Not in our family. Not in our hometown,” Moreno said.

It’s reactions like this that have motivated Moreno to put so much time into learning about the history of Afro-Mexicans, descendants of African slaves.  They were brought to Mexico during the Spanish colonization era in the early 16th century. It is a study that emerged in the 1940s with the groundbreaking research of anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán

Read the entire article here.

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Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Canada, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania, United States on 2012-10-06 01:51Z by Steven

Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

NewSouth Books (American Edition coming soon from Rutgers University Press)
July 2012
352 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781742233314

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

This is a beautifully written, deeply moving and well-researched account of the lives of mixed-race children of occupied Japan. The author artfully blends oral histories with an historical and political analysis of international race relations and immigration policy in North America and Australia, to highlight the little-known story of the thousands of children that resulted from the unions of Japanese women and Allied servicemen posted to Japan following WWII. It is a powerful narrative of loss, longing and reconnection, written by the ABC’s long-time Tokyo correspondent, Walter Hamilton.

Visit the website here.

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