Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s recent book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is a call for revolution. “Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness,” they write; “Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be… Read more →
Tag: Black Lives Matter
Walls of Moms: Maternal Bodies and Public Space in Portland and Argentina
On July 18, 2020 a group of mothers gathered on the streets of Portland. These women, the majority of whom were white, stood together as a living barrier between BLM protestors and armed federal agents. Wearing yellow and holding sunflowers, the women represented a particular vision of white, middle-class, US motherhood. Some of these women… Read more →
Why I Say “Black Lives Matter”
Two paragraphs in my forthcoming book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, continue to haunt me. The paragraphs reference the 1770 protests in New Bern, North Carolina. Like their seventeenth-century English ancestors, these protestors believed that the people had a duty to “regulate” the government, and particularly to step in when… Read more →
Asymptomatic Lethality: Cooper, COVID-19, and the Potential for Black Death
Black people in the United States have long known that all white people, at any time, have the potential to hurt them. For centuries, white people have had easy access to histories of racial power and deploy them, almost like a pathogen, against Black people. Against people like me. Before the country erupted into a… Read more →
Labor, Birth, and Superstitions
On the morning that my daughter-in-law went into labor, a small bird crashed into our apartment window and lay dead on the terrace. At least that’s what I assumed happened when I saw its small black and yellow body lying on its side. Our internet research told us it was a Blackburnian Warbler, a bird… Read more →
Gender, Health, & Marginalization: National Responses to HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Jamaica
After conducting Fulbright research on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in Jamaican women’s lives, I became interested in exploring how Afro-diasporic women matter in responses to the pandemic. This interest grew alongside both my personal experiences as an HIV tester in Detroit and my exploration of the global dilemmas surrounding sexual and reproductive health. The… Read more →
A Lesson in Protest: Teaching History and Citizenship in the Trump Era
This semester I am teaching a course called “Resisting State Violence: Race, Policing, and Social Justice in Twentieth-Century America.” One of the course objectives is to encourage students to investigate the histories of policing, surveillance, political repression, deportation, and incarceration, and the ways they intersect with racism, settler colonialism, xenophobia, economic exploitation, and sexism and… Read more →
Learning to Live Together: Murray Atkins Walls’s Fight for a Fairer Louisville
In the age of Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and #SayHerName, it may seem pedantic or even a bit naïve to say that nothing happens in a vacuum and that movements are never, even when histories claim otherwise, singularly focused. Still, the demand that participants in protest actions be pure and purely motivated — to… Read more →
Fears of a White Mother for her Biracial Son
My son could be Philandro Castile, the Minnesota cafeteria manager who was shot by police in July 2016 as he simply reached for his license during a traffic stop. I am a white woman in the South, raising a black son. I have grown used to the stares of surprise and barely-hidden shock. This is… Read more →
Teaching in an Era of Black Lives Matter
One of the functions of social movements is to raise consciousness around a particular problem or issue. The Black Lives Matter movement is no different. Activists have successfully used disruptive protest, policymaking, and social media to influence public debates around structural racism, state violence, policing, and mass incarceration. The movement, as well as my experiences… Read more →