Queering Black Politics

Blogger blackscientist offers an excellent argument for "queering" black politics:

Queerness in the black community — black folks are gay, not all black people are married, there are many multi-generational black households, and so on — is either ignored as though it doesn’t exist or referred to only as deviant. Why are we blaming single black mothers for the problems of a failing educational system and poorly designed social welfare programs that are supposed to act as some kind of end-all? Why do we have so much trouble turning to the state and looking at its role in perpetuating structural violence against non married (non heterosexual) households?

As Obama's historic election to the presidency of the United States provides opportunity and challenge to those of in African American Studies to rethink and retheorize race and blackness, arguments like these become particularly compelling.

Of Bailouts and Presidential Debates

Angry Black Bitch: We better stop, hey, what's that sound…
If someone had sent this bitch a prediction detailing the events of the past month I would have told them they had lost the damn mind, but truth truly is stranger than fiction and the world is rapidly going to shit.


Angry Black Woman: The subtext of McCain’s anger
Not so long ago in this country — within McCain’s adult lifetime, though not Obama’s — white men did not look at black men, except to order them around or warn them off white women. They did not address black men directly if they could help it — and if they had to, it was never done in a way that might suggest respect. Black men did not look at white men either, because that was the shortest path to death; a black man who dared to look a white man in the eye was “uppity”. Didn’t know his place. Needed to have a lesson taught him, usually with a bullet or a length of rope. Even today there’s a certain kind of white man — usually older ones from the South or from wealthy backgrounds — who still won’t accord a man of color the simple courtesy of looking him in the eye. They’ll look everywhere else, address “the air” rather than the person, and get progressively more irritated if that person doesn’t back off and go away.

Two Links With Info About The Denial Of Black Voting Rights

http://www.mica.edu/constitutionday/index.cfm

http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/

And, a new site developed by a CofC African American Studies student: CofC Votes

New Books: Sally Hemings in Paris and Race and Theology

The Root features author Annette Gordon-Reed discussing how she came to write The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Part of the story follows Sally Hemings and her brother James to Paris (where they worked for Jefferson while he was ambassador there), of which she writes:

I learned much about the varied experiences of people of African origin during the time of slavery. It was particularly fascinating to recreate the lives of young James and Sally Hemings in pre-Revolutionary Paris, a place where they could have claimed their freedom. The pair received wages that were above the norm for servants in the country and moved about in a city where no one had reason to think of them as anything other than free persons of color. What did the experience mean to them?

The Root is excerpting the book all week.

Also of note is the new book Race: A Theological Account by up and coming religious studies scholar J. Kameron Carter. Oxford University Press says that "Carter's claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem." If you are interested in an ongoing discussion of the arguments in this book, look here.

Two Great Articles on Black Music

First Daphne Brooks in The Nation writes on the black minstrelsy of Amy Winehouse:
To borrow a question from Winehouse herself, "what kind of fuckery is this?" Well beyond merely singing, as a white woman, about her desire for black men, Winehouse, in what is perhaps her real innovation, has created a record about a white woman wanting to be a black man--and an imaginary one at that, stitched together from hip-hop and bebop and juke-joint mythologies. She's a "ride or die chick" from another era, the Jewish English lass who's rolling with the boys, who morphs into the J. Hova gangsta driving the Jag herself.

Then Mark Anthony Neal reads the video for Raphael Saadiq's "I Love That Girl" through the lens of post-race nostalgia in the age of Obama and Palin:
More to the point, Saadiq's amorous (reckless) eyeballing would have likely been met by Klansmen and torches if "Love that Girl" was in true synchronicity with the historical era that informs it. And yet this is the beauty of the Obama-moment--the freedom to forget the country's not-so-far-fetched racial history--and the very reason so many of the old-race guard remain unswayed by the obvious possibilities the moment affords.

This Is Your Nation on White Privilege

So Tim Wise is not black, but he is a smart guy and this post on how white privilege cintinues to operate is spot on:

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

Read more.

Smart Black People on Barack Obama

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: Obama's Small Town Values
Speakers at the Republican National Convention talked a lot about small-town values. They told America that a man from Chicago could not relate to the homegrown ethics of ordinary people. I know better. Barack Obama was my state senator. Right in the middle of that Senate district is my beloved small town, Hyde Park. There is no small town that knows more about sacrifice, honesty, hard work, community and patriotism.

Sophia A. Nelson: If Obama Loses
Pollsters insist that while "race is a factor" in this campaign, they have not been able to accurately measure its impact. Many black Americans are holding their collective breath, hoping that the most stubborn of American issues will not be the thing that keeps Obama out of the White House. I suspect that many white Americans are, too.

Jelani Cobb: Obama and the Suicidal Left
Perhaps the most biting irony is a kind of reverse affirmative action, where Obama seems to face a higher bar for support than the white candidates who preceded him. The Congressional Black Caucus and black progressives asked virtually nothing from Kerry (at least not publicly) and not much more from Gore, yet a former civil rights attorney who has litigated employment and voting discrimination cases has to pass a "good faith" test.