Keywords

Anti-Blackness

As the world watched George Floyd handcuffed, tortured by being pinned to the ground, suffocating from the knees from now incarcerated former officer Derek Chauvin, the façade of a ‘post-racial’ America evaporated once and for all. Popular culture, corporations, civil rights organizations, and civil society actors in the United States addressed the specificities of anti-Black racism in a moment of social consciousness. However, as social movement wielded openings toward real anti-reformist reform (Gilmore 2020), the will to do anti-racist reorganizing of the world by the dominant power was brief. Many of the demands from the uprisings of 2020, not unlike uprisings of the past, were acknowledged but not met. Nevertheless, folks agreed that what happened to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others were more insidious, global, and pervasive than racist logic. But dominant discourse did not pinpoint this specificity.

Dr. kihana miraya ross named it for the N.Y. Times and against the cultural wars of the U.S. In her article, "Call it What It Is: Anti-Blackness," ross contends that racism is not specific to explain the type of racism that Black people fought against in the United States. Racism is quickly appropriated to describe the subjugation of other racialized and classed groups. Yet, these groups can still harbor an antagonistic relationship with Black people. For ross, as echoed by Dr. Frank Wilderson and other scholars concerned with Anti-Blackness through their work on Afro-pessimism, Anti-Blackness is a "theoretical framework that illuminates society's inability to recognize our humanity — the disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence." My intervention for this keyword complicates how who is invoked when the "our '' is named. In the past decade, racialization has been analyzed particularly with a focus on anti-Blackness, through theoretical frameworks such as Afro pessimism mentioned above, racial capitalism, caste system through the work of Isabel Wilkerson, and critical race theory. Yet, the complicated work of deciphering the "who" as in who is Black, is the unifying point through these pieces to target the harm committed against someone or a group of people. Therefore, I hold that xenophobia, colorism, and the concept of ‘social death’ from those who experience terror and subjugation from the afterlives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade are also dimensions that make up anti-Blackness as a logic that organizes the world.

Following ross’ interpolation, highlighting the specificities of anti-Blackness proves to be more nuanced than racism. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Martinique philosopher Franz Fanon illustrated Black alienation as a matrix through the limits of "epidermalization of inferiority" and economic constriction (13). For Fanon, the “epidermalization of inferiority” is a pathology via racialization through skin color. This upends the notion that ‘race as social construct’ for Fanon advances that the pathologies create hierarchical relationships between those who have the power to racialize others through narrative and social stratification and those who are racialized by others. Black Historian Saidiya Hartman also works on the specificity of Black alienation and Black subjectivity with her conceptual, temporal framework of the 'afterlives of slavery." In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Hartman lays out a conceptual framework toward materializing the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Her work demonstrates the violence and dehumanizing effects of the slave trade contribute to the pathologies that create Black subjectivity in an anti-Black world. She insists that these pathologies for Black people to exist within a libidinal economy- a specific new world psyche that places Black humanity as contradictory to a global modernity facilitated by transatlantic slave trade. Black critical theorists like Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson, proponents of the theoretical turn called Afro-Pessimism, argue that this dynamic is fully realized, ahistorical and determines Black life through Orlando Patterson's concept of 'social death', the outward natal alienation of the enslaved, which includes folks of African descent. However, as Fanon advances, there is a particular materiality to Black subjugation that can be surveyed through historical materialism. The element of economic stratification is necessary to isolate. As slavery shifts within modernity, it appears as unfree labor. As Black enslavement relates to Black economic exploitation, we can further nuance and specify the processes of Black alienation that sustain claims against Anti-Blackness.

One way to nuance the specificity of Black alienation through processes of racialization is to think about how this occurs within space-time. Katherine McKittrick suggests the plantation as a place and space to insert as an analytical framework toward interpreting Black life with care. In her article "Plantation Futures" and in her book, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, the slave ship is not absolute; instead, it is "it is a site of violent subjugation that reveals, rather than conceals, the racial-sexual location of Black cultures in the face of unfreedoms." The slave ship is the technology of modernity. Black subjectivity contains the effects of "the ship, its crew, Black subjects, the ocean and ports in which the moving technology creates.. differential and contextual histories". For McKittrick, the slave ship and plantations are the places and moments in time we can both charge genocide and yet celebrate how Black life persisted despite dehumanizing conditions. Both places are sites of tremendous terror and cultural resistance. The slave ship and the plantation are also places where racialized logics were formed and proliferated as organizing tools for a settler society like the United States and colonial states found in Latin America and the Caribbean. These pervasive logics have limited global imagination around Blackness and mobility, as when in study, Black is related to the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and non-citizenship. Moreover, within various legal state apparatus, Blackness has also been utilized to create second-class citizenship and limited democratic representation. This specific process, relegated as the Black codes- written in the metropole or the core of societies and expanded to the colonies and settler states, was intended to control Blackness by organizing society against Black subjectivity.

Analyzing anti-Blackness through Black space and place-making can nuance our understanding around the dimensions of anti-Black racism and alienation. Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright are both geographers who have turned the field of Black Geographies to take anti-Blackness as a concept to think about how our world organizes itself and sustains anti-Black racism within the built environment. In the piece, "The anti-Blackness of Global Capital," both authors use their seemingly disparate field experiences, one in Bahia the other in the U.S. south, to demonstrate how Black exploitation is an integral factor to capitalist accumulation. As globalization and capitalism grow and connect the world, anti-Blackness becomes permeated as the logic to which people and places are circumscribed into a global hegemonic framework. In both locations, the authors isolate that capitalist development and unregulated growth are dependent on Black folks who are systematically dispossessed of their land and alienated from their labor. Yet, as anti-Black violence happens, dialectically, organizing against this violence speaks to the openings toward life. Their work demonstrates that everyday Black life gives us perspective of how humanity is claimed against capitalist colonial genocidal logics.

Anthropologist Cedric Robinson, widely known for his work on racial capitalism, stipulated that racialization was embedded in modernity and capitalism. Initially, he coined the term and theoretical framework of racial capitalism after observing South African apartheid, tracking how the continent Africa came to be organized within global world systems via racialization and capitalist exploitation. In Robinsons' work entitled Black Marxism, the origins of the nation-state and racialization began in Europe- and this resistance to racial subjugation can be a space of analysis to understand procedures of dehumanization and alienation to organize against them. As Bledsoe and Wright give us room to speak about specific episodes of Anti-Black racism diasporic as systematic, Robison stretches Blackness to encapsulate those furthest alienated by racial capitalism.

In conclusion, anti-Blackness has been used recently as a term to at least indicate a specific type of alienation that occurs against people that are racialized as Black- phenotypically and ontologically. Afro-pessimists as critical theorists believe that this condition is synonymous with our current world. To undo an anti-Black world means to undo the world as it is currently organized. As incredible and daunting as this project seems, Black geographers suggest tracing these events of alienation and thinking through the ways our lives are organized by these events, places, and spaces, as a way to build consciousness around dehumanization processes. There are theorists like Cedric Robinson or even Sylvia Wynter that believe anti-Blackness (and racialization) is locked as one, but not the only logic that organizes modernity. For this reason, Wynter and Robinson, along with others, would find anti-Blackness as a construct limiting to explain the nuances of Black subjectivity. - OD Enobabor

Black Bodies

The term Black bodies is a term used by Ronald Jackson(2006) in the origins of Black body politics- which he defines as the historical ways in which the Black body has been scripted with society’s xenophobic tendencies. He states, “ race is currently enacted at the moment of the gaze, and how this spectatorial surveillance complicates social relations because of how it is historically and inextricably situated and lodged in the US collective consciousness and the American ethos via popular media”. Black bodies imply the social construction of Blackness and the ways in which Black bodies are inscribed as others. The usage of the term Black bodies highlights the ways in which Black bodies are constantly (re)inscribed based on the societal construction of Blackness. Black youth are constantly under surveillance, their Black bodies seen as the site of criminality and in need of constant monitoring. - Crystal Welch-Scott

Black Reproductive Futurity

Black Reproductive Futurity is a call to imagine how we Black folks get to the future – a written corrective and radical addendum (Cahill, 2021) to the current struggles of Black women and Black birthing people in the United States to achieve liberation through the ability to be able to conceive, give life on their terms, and parent children in communities free of police violence, a carceral state, and inadequate resources. Black Reproductive Futurity grows on the shoulders of the Black feminists who loved and cared about Black people so much they pushed past the limitations of reproductive rights and health frameworks to build theories, methods, praxes, movements, and visions that necessitate Black life.

Black Rerproductive Futurity (BRF) is my attempt to further expand and operationalize reproductive justice as rooted in the movements of our time namely, The Movement for Black Lives, The Abortion Justice movement, the Birth Justice movement, and the Me Too movement. I propose Black Reproductive Futurity as an emergent lens and praxis, built on the shoulders of reproductive justice (Avery & Stanton, 2020), wake work (Sharpe, 2016), abolition, Afrofuturism, and pleasure activism (brown, 2019) that demands a multi-pronged approach to eliminating Black sexual and reproductive health disparities, obstetric racism (Davis, 2019), the experiences of violence for Black women, girls and non-binary folks and the historical and contemporary marginal narratives, practices and policies that constrict, limit or eliminate Black life. BRF addresses the need and an altering proclamation to curate and define scholarship for Black reproductive futures that fully recognizes how we Black people actually get to the future — and eliminates everything that keeps us from fully recognizing that vision. - Brittany Brathwaite

Black Feminist Intuition

Intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.” Through this ability to understand, does intuition allow us to unequivocally know things?

Rooted in imperialism and settler coloniality, occidental knowledge paradigms have a fixed hierarchical structure which places the seat of the intuition –especially the intuitive or felt expressions of BIPOPC women—at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge. Specifically, African diasporic women, both in United States and transnationally have historically been, and often still are “distorted within or excluded from what counts as knowledge,” especially within euro-centric, capitalist, cis-white-male-controlled social, academic, and professional institutions. (Collins, 269).

Indeed, the word intuition “may strike some worrisome, for it seems conventionally to refer to mere instinctive emotion, rather than to the engagement with external factors that is understood to be the rightful province of critical thought,” (Harper 2020). However, the etymology of the word intuition, from the Latin intueri, meaning "look at, consider," from the root in meaning “at, on” + tueri meaning "to look at, watch over", highlights early steps in the process of critical thought.

The historical extraction of data, nature (flora and fauna), labor, bodies, and natural resources from the colonized world or global south created a flow of knowledge from geographies like Africa and the Americas, to imperial metropoles and their institutions. Though there are now more conduits of knowledge within imperial centers, thanks to Black diasporas and their local mobilisations of knowledge, the extraction of knowledge from the south for assembly and restructuring in the north is ongoing and has been uninterrupted by political independence in formerly colonized spaces.

These histories are important to highlight in the discussion of intuition as a source of knowledge because it provides a vessel for seeing what we have been colonized, socialized, and educated to perceive (and believe) are valid sources of knowledge; and more importantly, what to identify as invalid, deficient, or lacking, which in many cases may just be the missing or forgotten.

So, what is it to know something? Is it based on experience, theory, or intuition? Can knowing be a combination of all three? Can we ever really know about the future, or can we only ever narrate about the past and present? How do we relocate missing or forgotten knowledge? Are the missing or forgotten accessible to us via our intuitions? Which materialisations and temporalities of knowledge are prioritized, validated, and why? Is there use for an Intuitive Epistemology in (re)locating Black diasporic feminist futurity?

Black diasporic feminist consciousness and writing often embraces an expansive view of the locations of sources of knowledge by seeing and utilising a variety of forms of (re)production and expression, situating the self or one’s own experience at the centre of a narrative to illustrate a bigger picture about society, one’s community, and the world.

Black diasporic women continue to push the boundaries of traditional epistemology by creating, using and being accountable for new sources of knowledge. Black women “use music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behaviour as important locations for constructing a Black feminist consciousness,” (Collins 270).

Similarly, Katherine McKittrick’s theory of Black geographies and the spatiality of diasporic politics highlights the centrality of “daily forms of Black existence that connect the material and the imaginary and the past and the present”, and I’d add, the future too, (21).

I hear and see the intuitive and prophetic voice of Black feminist consciousness every day, in the parent/auntie/best friend who, at the end of the day appears stealthily in the doorway, and whose face alone says, I told you so, after you done went and did what they said not to do, usually from no other source more divine than their own hard-won experience. I hear the prophetic voice of Black feminist consciousness in my own mother who’d say, Becca, go turn off the rice, it’s done, and I’d say, but how you know? and she’d say, because I know it is, and suck her teeth, schuuppss.

Patricia Hill Collins identifies and distinguishes between two types of knowing: knowledge and wisdom (275). The difference between knowledge and wisdom is the “use of experience”, which is the key to Black women’s survival as members of a subaltern group (Collins, 276). Collins’ language here is especially important: use. One may have experience, but it is of little value if one does not use or share it, whether it be for deciding who to go out with or for cooking food. “In the context of intersecting oppression, the distinction is essential. Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate,” (Collins, 276).

Can wisdom, as Collins defines it—essential to the survival of the subordinate—be reaped from our own intuitions, or an intuitive source, an ancient one, like an ancestor (dead or alive), ancestral memory, collective intuition, past life experiences, wisdom from a dream or from a method of divination (like reading shells/bones/tea leaves/cards)? I offer that individual and collective intuitions can be activated to relocate and remember wisdom that our Black diasporic ancestors knew were essential for survival and continued life.

We operationalise our intuitions daily. Folks will say “something told me to/that...” “I have a mind to...” and even, “I’m finna/ fixin’ to...”. These are powerful quotidian groundings that operationalise intuition as a method of critical thinking. External factors are being engaged and considered, and a decision about the future is made and expressed from the inner knowing narrative.

A collective operationalisation of intuition that sits centrally in my mind is traditional birthwork. In response to the disproportionately high maternal death rate of Black birthers in the United States, there has been a remembering and relocating of traditional West African birthing practices, by Black midwives and doulas in the U.S. In addition to physiological western medical knowledge, Black birthworkers utilise an immense amount of remembered and relocated wisdoms along with their personal intuitive wisdoms to guide their clients during moments of transition, such as birth, safe abortion, miscarriage, or loss. Though, occidental medical and scientific knowledge is important, it seldom gets operationalised to the benefit of Black wellness, life, and lives. Remembering, relocating and intuiting traditional birthwork practices is a critique of the medical industrial complex which causes Black birthers deaths. And so, while offering Black diasporic women “new knowledge about our own experiences can be empowering… activating epistemologies that criticize prevailing knowledge and that enable us to define our own realities on our own terms has far greater implications,” (Collins 292).

I situate intuition as akin to wisdom because of its propensity to both directly and indirectly bring about—not only survival—but living, on our own terms. - Kayla Reece

Blackspotting

Blackspotting is a new term I propose to address the ongoing, deliberate attempts to reinsert Blackness, Black bodies, lives, thought and presence, in spaces where they have been intentionally erased and obscured. A practice as old and necessary as the racialized dynamics that have prevented, removed, or ignored Black Existence and creations, Blackspotting attends and calls attention to the myriad ways Blacks see through and intervene, reasserting Black agency and life by utilizing the very tools, theories, aesthetics and disciplines that prescribe and record Black subjugation, erasure, and/or annihilation. Most evident in visual and literary arts, Blackspotting occurs widely and multimodally, as buried and stolen histories are recovered, “Black Firsts” and breakthroughs into historically white spaces and industries charted, revisioning spatio-temporal dimensions where we remain excluded or unrecognized.

Aside from North African Islamic cultures with consistent European interaction during Moorish rule from 700-1400CE, the majority of African art (a contestable and insufficient term) seemed unconcerned with depictions of whiteness, as they had little to no contact with Europeans prior to 15^th c. colonial invasions. However, since the earliest African contact with Europeans during medieval times, representations of Blackness in Western art have been deeply intertwined with and influenced by political, moral, and aesthetic concerns, on all sides of the color lines.

In both performance and visual arts, European depictions of Blackness were based on exotification and domination, emerging alongside colonial exploration and expansion. Rogin (1998) notes:

The first white European in recorded history to Black her face was Queen Anne, wife of James I, Stuart of England. . . before 1605. . . there had been no darkening of skin . . . Blackface is a product of European imperialism, the material and psychological investment in the peoples being incorporated in the capitalist world system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (p. 19)

Similar exaggerations and subjugations appeared in tapestries and oil paintings as biblical representations reserved for display in chapels and homes of the wealthy elite were replaced by portraiture and landscapes, dominant Renaissance genres reflecting the socio-political, economic and cultural interests of wealthy nobles and merchants investing in detailed depictions and visual narratives of their luxurious and/or holy selves, and possessions. Black figures were notably absent or included as servants, slaves, and savages encountered during colonialism (Berger, 1972). Whether in royally or religiously commissioned paintings, travelogues, poetry, plays, literature or scientific writing, Black bodies were viewed as inferior, racialized others that were foreign and generally grotesque, designed to be controlled and subjected to white domination.

Throughout nearly 400 years of legalized slave trade, millions of West Africans were brutally extracted and uprooted, transported cross-Atlantic through the Middle Passage, sold and dispersed among a wide array of individuals, plantation and later factory owners, religious and educational institutions as European colonizers developed and formalized notions of race and racial superiority through legal and political doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic. Harsh, dehumanizing conditions led to high mortality rates among enslaved Blacks who were often beaten, raped, and worked to death, but exclusion and subjugation did not destroy or silence the African spirit or creativity. Proximity and geography largely determined how Africans adapted and developed, impacted by the intensity of Dutch, British, French, Spanish or Portuguese colonial surveillance and demographics.

Arts and aesthetics of the Black Americas reflected their unique experience and positionality, innovative and diverse syncretization of colonial influences while maintaining cultural traditions, even as they participated in the capitalist market and critiqued their social abjection. Berlin (1980) reveals an early act of Blackspotting in 18th C. colonial North America and the Caribbean:

Negro election day, a ritual festival of role reversal common throughout West Africa and celebrated openly by Blacks in New England. . . with the selection of Black kings, governors, and judges. . . While the Black governors held court, adjudicating minor disputes, the Blacks paraded and partied, dressed in their masters’ clothes and mounted on their master’s horses. (pp. 53-54)

Intertwining the political, personal and performative, despite disfranchisement and access to formalized education or artistic training, Black artists and people have been determined to display their complexity, beauty, inherent value and belonging while highlighting racialized violence and erasure.

From the earliest published slave narratives, as in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1814) and The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), predated by Black American poets like Lucy Terry’s “Bars Fight” (1746), Jupiter Hammon’s An Evening Thought (1760) and Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), these writers demonstrate tremendous capacity to thrive despite slave society, craft beautiful texts in a language and form Blacks were presumed unable to “master,” providing substantive social critique while celebrating their identities and connection to a larger Black community. The first Black American to publish a book of poetry and famously forced to testify in 1772, before “a panel of influential thinkers and politicians regarding the authorship of her poem[,]” Wheatley was stolen from the Sene/Gambia region as a child (Gates, 2003). Yet her poetry also reflects internalized racism in the rejection of her motherland, even as Wheatley critiques anti-Black racism and demands full acceptance into the white Christian American community in “On Being Brought From Africa to America” (1768):

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / . . . Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / ‘Their color is a diabolic die.’ / Remember Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” (auth. emphasis, 1-2, 5-8)

These early interventions illustrate the complicated challenges Blacks face when negotiating identity and representation, reflecting a diversity of perspectives, including directly confrontational texts of political scholars and leaders like David Walker’s Appeal (1829), Henry Highland Garnet’s “An Address To Slaves Of The United States of America” (1843). Or Sojourner Truth’s intersectional analysis in “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) which is predated by Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1833) who begins her call to action with Blackspotting:

African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States. . . When I cast my eyes on the long list of illustrious names that are enrolled on the bright annals of fame amongst the whites, I turn my eyes within, and ask my thoughts, ‘Where are the names of our illustrious ones?’” (41)

Black rhetoric is bound up with ancient traditions of call and response, the power of the word and communal duties, even as self-identification and representation is explored while recognizing attempts at Black erasure and obfuscation. Similar strains appear in the writings of Martin Delany (The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of The United States, Politically Considered, 1852) and much of Frederick Douglass’ work as an author, journalist, abolitionist and community leader.

Simultaneously, in the mid 19th and early 20th c., Robert S. Duncanson, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Henry Ossowa Tanner and Edmonia Lewis were some of the earliest Black American oil painters and sculptors to gain national and international recognition (“5 Afr. Am. Artists”, 2021). Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller, “also an accomplished poet, painter, and theatre designer. . . was a protégé of sculptor August Rodin[,]” involved in anti-lynching and suffrage groups who “left the [suffrage] movement when she realized that Black women were not included in the fight for equal voting rights” (Jean, 2021). Post-emancipation, most academic institutions refused integration, though a few opened their doors. The lack of reparations and sustained government support of Black Americans compounded by un/official Jim Crow segregation throughout the country led to the swift formation of Black community aid organizations, schools and colleges, exponentially increasing the amount of formally educated Blacks. Rampant deadly violence and segregation pushed multitudes of Blacks north and even overseas where many Blacks artists, like Warrick and Louise Maillot, found better reception and tutelage in Europe where the demographics, distance from slave societies and proclaimed liberal ethics enabled a different racial dynamics than found in the United States.

Black art has always served multiple purposes and at least W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 assertion of a Black “double-consciousness” contending with competing racial and national identities, beneath a white gaze that Others (p. 45). The same concerns present in The Souls of Black Folks are reflected in Langston Hughes’ 1926 essay on aesthetics, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain". And in the work of Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison who produces the Black Book (1974) to interrogate archival imaging and Black representations. bell hooks (1992) extends DuBois’ notion nearly ninety years later, utilizing theorists Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault to articulate the “oppositional Black gaze” at work throughout slavery and its afterlives; an agential resistance that “defiantly declared, ‘Not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality’” (p. 463). Black art emerges out of and extends this gaze, a distinct perspective based in the social conditions, lineage and aesthetics of the Black experience. As hooks notes, “When most Black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing white supremacy. . . [and Blacks] responded to these looking relations by developing independent Black cinema” (ibid). Oscar Micheaux’s work directly responds to D.W. Griffith’s unsurprisingly popular Birth of A Nation (1915) that celebrates white fears of Black political and socioeconomic advancements, perpetuating and cementing false, negative images of Black ignorance, savagery and criminality. Considering that Blackface minstrelsy was one of the nation’s most popular musical and theatrical creations and exports, these stereotypes have continued to proliferate media representations of Blacks despite the immense creativity and counter narratives contributed by early 20th c. Black artists and scholars like writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry; performers like Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, Billie Holliday; composers like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, James Weldon and John R. Johnson, and Thomas Andrew Dorsey (Composers), artists Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Romare Bearden, and Gordon Parks.

Art and activism blended once again on the page, stage, screen and booth with artists like Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, became involved in the civil rights movement alongside major groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC), Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Congress of Race Equality (CORE). The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, led by visual and literary artivists Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Ishmael Reed, Haki Madhhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Faith Ringold, Bettye Saar, Jayne Cortez, Maya Angelou and Ntozake Shange in cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland is aesthetically linked with spiritual and experimental jazz and funk music from Sun Ra and “transformative” aims demanded by far left groups like the Black Panther Party. Emory Douglas, “Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture” for the BPP, exemplifies the period’s use of print-making techniques and re-visioned artistic styles popularized in Europe throughout WWII, co-opting propaganda protocol to counteract the dangerously negative media portrayals of the Panthers. Faith Ringgold incorporates Blackspotting by featuring Black people in her narrative quilts along with handwritten textual borders, many of which become children’s books, and she has often inserted the Black experience into famous European artworks and sites like the Louvre’s “Mona Lisa” and Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act heralds a significant socio-political shift but is tainted by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. MLK Jr., Robert and John F. Kennedy Jr., as well as the horrific (often deadly) violence towards the predominantly Black protestors by white citizens and law enforcement, without repercussion. Ironically, this same violence and its media coverage in newspapers and television reveals the brutal conditions of racial injustice across the nation and world. The media strategies developed throughout the movement are instrumental, as well as the energy and beauty of “Black Power” a term coined by Stokley Carmichael of the BPP. The development of Pan-African and Pro-Black organizations across the US embraced an intentional return to a Black consciousness and love for one’s “natural” self and people, who needed to return to their West African traditions and cultures, even as they located themselves centuries and a continent away. Theories of “Afrocentricity” later articulated by Dr. Molefi K. Asante, along with the push for Kwanzaa as an African American alternative to Christmas and the creation of Black History Month emerge out of Carter G. Woodson’s initial Black History Week.

Emerging in the early days of hip hop’s astronomical rise and influence on American and global culture, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti style painting and his major acceptance into the world of contemporary art made a tremendous, lasting impact on the ways Black artists are seen and valued in the arts world. Kara Walker’s silhouettes, an 18th and 19th century form of portraiture tied to colonial and antebellum proprietorship, not only centers Black figures but often refigures white slaveowners in grotesque, sexualized ways to confront the legacy of slavery and history of rape and desire, reflecting the theories of Audre Lorde, The Combahee River Collective, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Cedric G. Robinson engaging with the gendered, economic, archival and aesthetic afterlives of slavery. Kerry James Marshall is another significant painter contributing to the act of Blackspotting as he not only centered contemporary Black subjects and spaces like the segregated housing and hair salons of Chicago in the 80s and 90s, but created a unique palette of Black shades to depict African American skin tones which were often lightened in media images.

With the election of President Barack Obama and installation of the first Black family in the White House in 2008, Black visibility and recognition shifted incalculably on local, national, and global levels. Simultaneously, the achievements and economic prosperity of the Black middle and upper classes re-situated the significance of celebrating and collecting Black Art, preserving Black culture and uncovering archives and history that had been discarded, misplaced or erased as a result of white Euro-American socio-political and cultural interests and domination of North America. Already widely accepted and consumed as musical and aesthetic influence, hip hop artists and moving image creators played a major role in centering and elevating Black arts and aesthetics by referencing and using Black arts, even as they established their own aesthetic styles, symbols, and imagery.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, established in December 2003 and opened to the public in 2016, during the final months of Obama’s two-term presidency, was a momentous and monumental shift in the recognition of Black life and arts. A Smithsonian Institute, the Black designed architecture is notably distinct from the other nearby museums and is the first national museum completely dedicated to the Black American experience and influence on the US. Simultaneously, the success of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Movement for Black Lives (MBL) in response to police brutality, murders of unarmed Black citizens, increased and unaddressed anti-Black policy and publics, have raised tremendous awareness of the realities of what was termed by many, a “post-racial America” after the Obama election and inauguration (of the real first Black president).

Monuments and large installations have been controversial sites of entanglement for arts and politics on local and national scales as there has been significant push to remove an unprecedented number of monuments celebrating America’s violent racist history including statues of white confederate, presidential, scientific and international figures like JeffersonDavis, Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Marion J. Sims, and Christopher Columbus. At the same time, museum curators and grant-making institutions began providing Black artists with major commissions to erect a variety of large scale installations inserting Blackness in prominent spaces where it cannot be ignored, often in the same locations where memorials to white racial violence formerly stood. The Kara Walker mammy sugar sphinx and sugar babies CreativeTime project A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2014 seemed to initiate a procession of contemporary Black visual artists with voluminous exhibitions in public spaces, inclusion in major museums and biennials, such as Simone Leigh who will “make history at the Venice Biennale by representing the United States in 2022.” (Greenberger, 2020). Or the selection of two Black painters, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, for the official portraits of the former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama. Wiley’s presidential portrait is the first of a Black president created by a Black artist, injecting several layers of Blackness in his vibrant, iconoclastic and immediately recognizable neo-Renaissance, hyper-realist photographic portraiture style that features everyday Black and queer folks with lavish positioning, Ankara inspired, richly detailed backgrounds. Kehinde Wiley cites “‘Classical European paintings of noblemen, royalty and aristocrats’” as inspirations as he refigures subjects “‘assuming the poses of colonial masters, the former bosses of the Old World. . . [and he] take[s] the figure out of its original environment and place[s] it in something completely made up’” disruptions that center Black and Brown bodies in conspicuously beautiful ways (Wiley par 10). Recently Wiley was commissioned for the re-designed 34th Street/Penn Station terminal’s Moynihan Train Hall.

Blackspotting continues across a variety of genres and disciplines, most notably in visual and performance arts. In 2021, the Metropolitan Opera debuted its first Black written, directed and cast production. Black actors and actresses continue to be the first to hold white lead roles in Broadway musicals like Phantom of The Opera. Drew Shade, Broadway Black’s founder and creative director noted that while the 2021 season featured “seven Black shows coming to Broadway–it’s unprecedented. . . especially after the racial reckoning we’ve had in this society over the past year, and more specifically in the theater industry . . . But we also have to be realistic about the placement . . . about what this may mean for Black artists going forward’” (Fischels, 2021).

That impermanence and lack of sustained commitment to change persists through every attempt to break racial barriers, since that first arrival of enslaved Blacks in 1619. Another consideration is the intervention of white artists who engage blakspotting, recognizing the absence of Black leads or lives in genres like science fiction, comins, and adaptations. Damon Lindelhoff redesigned the white-centered and arguably racist graphic novel Watchmen (1987) to center a Black lead and narrative of the Tulsa Massacre, starring Regina King in the 2019 HBO limited series. In an interesting turn, Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country (2016), which features a Black family battling the monstrous violence of Jim Crow segregation and supernatural, white supremacist forces, is adapted by Black showrunner Misha Green as another limited series (HBO, 2020). Blackspotting on Blackspotting.

In a digital age, issues of appropriation such as Blackfishing, where non-Black users use makeup or digital enhancement to present or code themselves as Black, surveillance and security issues, as well as the same dominant racial biases present in the structure and programming of software make the construction of safe and liberated Black digital spaces complicated to say the least. Vast and largely unregulated, the digital domain is yet another space where Blackspotting continues to expand and respond to issues with Black mis/representation, inclusion, and recognition. Whether engaging with the past, present or possible futures, Blackspotting names the consistent practice of identifying, rejecting and rectifying the continuous attempts at racialized exclusion and erasure, demanding and making room for Black brilliance and existence without limits. - Janelle Poe

Carceral

Carcerality and Carceral state, described by Rudy Tapia during the first ever Carceral state project symposium states it “captures the many ways in which the carceral state shapes and organizes society and culture through policies and logic of control, surveillance, criminalization, and un-freedom. Tapia calls these "punitive orientations'' that revolve around the "promise and threat of criminalization" and the "possibility/solution of incarceration." The carceral state, operating through these punitive orientations, functions as an obstacle and a substitute for "humane solutions to social problems" such as poverty, racism, citizenship status, and other forms of inequality and discrimination. - Crystal Welch-Scott

For nearly 400 years the meaning of carceral was limited to imprisonment or incarceration, yet in recent decades the concept of carcerality has been a site of intense political and intellectual struggle. Scholars and activists have engaged the concept, and its realities, to generate meaning and possibilities, exploding its myopic focus on the practice and institutions of imprisonment to consider an array of extensive factors and systems that govern to surveil, control, and punish segments of a population. Here, the carceral is explored through two general framings: the carceral archipelago / continuum and carceral logics. The earliest evidenced use of carceral dates to the late 16^th century. Carceral, and the related word incarceration, have roots in the Latin carcer, which translates to prison (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Carcer was also the name of the ancient prison in Rome where state punishment in the form of detention and executions was carried out (Platner, 2015). The shared etymology of carceral and incarceration reflects the original and long-standing use of carceral to refer solely to the practice of imprisonment and the physical structures—the prisons—in which people were held for punishment.

Foucault (1977) developed the concept of the carceral beyond the prison to describe an expansive web of systems that function to control people’s behavior. Some examples of institutions Foucault identified as belonging to the carceral state included colonies for the poor, almshouses, and workhouses. The carceral state also included institutions that both supported and surveilled the “lower classes” with the aim to reform their assumed immorality: charitable organizations and housing associations. These institutions understood their beneficiaries’ impoverished statuses to be rooted in their immoral values. Hence, individuals were identified as the problem in need of being refashioned in accordance with white Euro-American middle class sensibilities (Meiners, 2007). Some scholars have even reframed teachers, schools and the United States education system, not as distinct from but, as a “soft extension of the carceral, or punishing, state.” (Meiners & Tolliver, 2016, p. 107; Shedd, 2015). The relationships between and diffuse spread of carceral institutions amounts to a carceral archipelago, “transporting the disciplinary techniques of the prison into the social body as a whole” (Moran et al., 2017, p. 668). In the same vein of Foucault’s carceral archipelago, Wacquant (2000) conceptualized the carceral continuum as the relationship between the Black ghetto and the prison. Wacquant contextualized mass incarceration, and the prison, in the longstanding repression of Black communities in the United States from slavery to Jim Crow, ghettos in northern cities, and the carceral continuum. Here, Wacquant grounded anti-Blackness as inseparable from carcerality in the United States, while attending to the emergent function of the social welfare system in surveilling and punishing Black families (Roberts, 2012). While Wacquant (2000) demonstrated the centrality of anti-Blackness in his formulation of carcerality, Haley’s (2016) and Meiners’ (2007) analyses of carcerality foreground gender and race, and the formation of whiteness.

Haley (2016) offered detailed accounts of the forced labor provided by paroled Black women as domestic laborers for white families. Such forced labor allowed for white wives and mothers to be homemakers within the domestic carceral sphere. Employing a framework to consider the roles of labor, anti-Blackness, gender, whiteness, and class, Haley asserted that the construction of white womanhood was reliant upon Black women’s exploitation in the carceral continuum under Jim Crow. Thus Haley extended the concept of carcerality not simply as an apparatus to subjugate Black women, but as a fundamental factor in the economic development of the American South and the formation of white middle class womanhood in the early 20^th century. Meiners (2007) similarly established a role between white women’s labor and the carceral continuum throughout the history of the United States. White women’s roles as “White Lady Bountiful” across various social service sectors, including education and social work, often functioned to hold considerable control over Black families and children (Meiners, 2007, p. 46). In addition to framing the carceral as relating to the links between punitive anti-Black institutions and systems (Shange, 2019), scholars have considered the logics and ideologies that undergird the carceral continuum.

As a paradigm, carceral logics prioritize retribution instead of rehabilitation and societal solutions (Kaba & Meiners, 2014). They “center a punitive orientation and a control-through-violence framework that belies the ideology, ethics, institutions and practices built to regulate human economies, relations, differences and problems” (Coyle & Nagel, 2021, p. 1). These logics may operate in individuals, collectives, laws, disciplines, and institutions and have roots in colonialist, white-supremacist, racial-capitalistic, and heteropatriarchal norms and assumptions (Coyle & Nagel, 2021). Consider how carceral logics are spread through tough-on-crime political stances, which promise to rectify societal ails (Hinton, 2016). Carceral logics can also be observed within attempts to ameliorate disproportionate minority contact through police diversity initiatives (Fan, 2015) and in rhetoric that distinguishes between those who do and do not deserve to be in prison (Gilmore, 2018). A wholly non-exhaustive range of projects are presented here that both make visible and challenge carceral logics.

Some scholars have contended with carceral logics within disciplines that shape policy and knowledge. Researchers’ recognition of carceral logics requires an analytical shift, one that understands carceral involvement resulting from one’s deficiencies, but attends to the realities of the prison industrial complex. More so, researchers must confront the carceral logics within academic disciplines, and how academic and non-profit institutions are complicit in the perpetuation of carceral logics (Davies et al., 2021; Mogul et al., 2011). Other researchers have interrogated carceral logics in the digital sphere, which result in surveillance and censorship of Black women. Gray and Stein (2021), for example, highlight how Black women are harmed by increased practices to secure users on digital platforms. These new practices disparately target Black women for speaking about misogynoir-istic incidents and are consequently punished for organizing on social media. Carceral logics have also been a primary focus of scholars’ analysis of the evolution of the anti-violence movement. These scholars link how underlying carceral logics among anti-violence movement activists, advocates, and policymakers led to an eventual collaboration with the carceral state, expanding its scope of punishment (Kim, 2020; Richie, 2012; Richie & Martensen, 2020; Whalley & Hackett, 2017). The collaboration between the anti-violence movement and the carceral state also emphasizes the entrenchment of the carceral system, and its logics, in people’s political imaginations (Kaba, 2021).

The last 50 years have seen a ferocious engagement with the carceral, transforming the concept to better understand the scope of carceral violence and possibilities for opposition. In its initial formulation the carceral focused solely on the prison and those imprisoned; the prison was considered an ideal space for a “bad” person to refashion themselves through silent reflection and work (Davis, 2003). Now, nearly all uses of the carceral underscore to some degree a sense of carceral encroachment: the selective and intentional intrusion of the expansive carceral state into people’s lives, with some paying particular attention to the distinctly destructive impact on Black women and femmes (Richards-Calathes, 2021). As to be expected, this short piece is but an all too brief survey of the carceral; other critical and vibrant dimensions not included here are carceral geographies (Gilmore, 2007) and carceral visualities (Fleetwood et al., 2020; Schept, 2014). Rather than simply seeking to identify logics and practices of harm, contemporary uses of carceral are closely aligned with abolition and aim to undo them while opening up space for possible societal transformation (Gilmore, 2007). - Josh Adler

Criminalization

Khalil Gibran Muhammad in The condemnation of Blackness describes Criminalization as "the process by which behaviors and individuals are transformed into crime and criminals". Previously legal acts may be transformed into crimes by legislation or judicial decision. It is this ideology that perpetuates the school to prison pipeline because it has been central in the ways in which zero tolerance policy such as expulsion and suspensions disproportionately impacts Black youth. - Crystal Welch-Scott

Educational Disparities

Educational disparities as defined by Preble and Locke (2018) is the unequal distribution of academic resources, including but not limited to; school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, books, and technologies to socially excluded communities. These communities tend to be historically disadvantaged and oppressed. Individuals belonging to these marginalized groups are often denied access to schools with adequate resources. Inequality leads to major differences in the educational success or efficiency of these individuals and ultimately suppresses social and economic mobility. Inequality in education is broken down in different types: Regional inequality, inequality by sex, inequality by social stratification, inequality by parental income, inequality by parent occupation, and many more.

Exploring educational disparities is central to my research questions, specifically as it relates to Black youth in explaining how these disparities contribute to the school to prison pipeline. Equally important are the ways in which Black youth specifically often attend schools that are in poorer communities and attending schools that lack both resources and qualified teaching staff, which also contributes to the types of educational access Black youth are afforded. - Crystal Welch-Scott

Freedom of Movement

When I think of the phrase “freedom of movement,” I am often transported back to the classroom of an undergraduate seminar titled Major Texts of the Middle East. We had just finished reading about the travels of Ibn Battuta, a 14^th century scholar who had started what he had intended to be his one-year pilgrimage to Mecca and instead set off on a 30-year journey throughout much of the Asian and African continents (Ibn-Battuta 2003). At the time, and to my professor’s great shock, I couldn’t help but question why this book was so significant that it would be considered a major text. Frankly, I found it boring and could not appreciate the significance of a world in which a man could simply leave his home in Tangier and go everywhere from Cairo to Mozambique, Baghdad, and Beijing.

Not long thereafter I had a conversation with a loved one inviting him to come visit me in New York. I knew he had had a few run-ins with police, but because he was not incarcerated at the time, I had not considered what that meant for his ability to travel. A flight to New York would have taken no more than 3 hours but, due to his probation, he could not cross state lines to see me. Suddenly, the significance of a world without borders, a world few of us know or can recall, weighed on me. I was wrong about the importance of Ibn Battuta’s travels that day in class and I have carried the humility of that knowledge since.

I approach the notion of freedom of movement from a perspective grounded in the abolition of policing and surveillance as practices that restrict mobility through the construction and enforcement of borders (Aiken & Silverman, 2021; Brotherton & Kretsedemas, 2018; De Genova, 2010; Golash-Boza, 2015). Contrary to how we are commonly taught to conceive of borders as lines in the sand, scholars of migration and border studies understand them as practices that police human mobility and interaction across physical space and national boundaries . This includes the designation of various residency and citizenship statuses, the securitization and enforcement of borders and ports of entry, and the ever growing interconnectedness of criminal legal systems and immigration policies (Loyd & Mountz, 2018; J. Stumpf, 2006; J. P. Stumpf, 2010; Walia, 2021). These practices are part of a larger project of nation-state building, where countries categorize human life based on the citizenship rights it owes them. With the exception of those with access to significant amounts of capital, those without citizenship status, either in the “right” country or at all, cannot engage in international travel without undergoing extensive processes of documentation and interrogation (Miller, 2019; Ngai, 2005; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). And while supporters of these border regimes argue that these are necessary for the purpose of security and anti-terrorism efforts, research has shown that the 20^th century construction and enforcement of borders has coincided with one of the bloodiest and most politically volatile periods in global history (Tilly).

The refugee crises of the 20^th century marked the largest period of migration since the kidnapping of over 10 million African people in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the dispossession of millions more Indigenous people in the Americas. It’s notable that only after this forced movement of African and Native people through horrific violence did migration become more restrictive. As the violence of slavery and colonization reshaped the world, it also changed what it meant to be mobile and who could do so. In the United States, for example, Whiteness became constructed alongside the ideals of American expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the conquering of the “great frontier,” while every movement of enslaved Black people was monitored by overseers and slave patrols (Beltrán, 2020; Walia, 2021). Cristina Beltrán further argues that the American notion of expansion as duty and destiny could not be divorced from the violence of dispossession, enslavement, and genocide. The right to movement was thus, exclusively a right of citizenship; a category reserved for whiteness, and which could only maintain legitimacy by denying human dignity to Black and Indigenous people (Beltrán, 2020). In other words, the citizen’s right to colonial expansion simultaneously produced the criminalization of the non-citizen’s movement. This was reinforced by the Supreme Court decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. In this case, Dred Scott sued for his family’s freedom and argued that, when his slave masters moved him and his family from Missouri to Illinois where slavery was outlawed, he became a free man in the eyes of the law. However, the court dismissed the case on procedural grounds and ruled that the descendants of slaves, regardless of their own condition of servitude, were not considered citizens under the constitution. While Black people eventually won their recognition as citizens of the US, the legacy of this decision rests in the idea that human dignity is inextricably bound to notions of citizenship. Scott and his family were not moving across state lines as people but rather they were moved about as property (60 US 393 (1857)).

While the U.S. continued its expansion, it became ever more difficult for communities to cross its increasingly impermeable borders (Kanstroom, 2010; Ngai, 2005). From the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late 19^th century into present concerns around the Haitian refugee crisis at the southern border, the last 150 years of American immigration policy has focused on racialized exclusion as a means of reifying borders. So much so that even after WWI, when Europe was trying to figure out what to do about the millions of uprooted people, American President Woodrow Wilson argued that monitoring the movement of people was more important than ever and necessitated a border regime facilitated by passport and visas (citation). The great irony of restricting movement amid a crisis of mass dislocation only begins to make sense when examined from the perspective of nation-state building. As states are concerned with the supposed threat to sovereignty (which they frame as an issue of security and anti-terrorism) that is posed when those they have excluded from the rights of citizenship take residence, monitoring and restricting the flow of these groups as the state sees fit becomes as reflection of its own power (Agamben, 1998; Arendt, 1973; Kanstroom, 2010). Guest worker programs, such as the Bracero program in the United States, perfectly encapsulate this dynamic. In times of economic crises and labor shortages, states will allow migrants, often low wage workers from the Global South, to mitigate these shortages and then revoke these programs as soon as the economy has been revived, leaving millions of immigrants in precarious legal status and unable to return to their countries of origin for fear of state violence and loss of income (Ngai, 2005).

In contrast to the notion that one has a legal right to travel, relocate, or colonize, freedom of movement, as a principle, must be divorced from citizenship. It is a concept that can only be meaningfully engaged when we untangle human dignity from the nation-state and the violence of its borders. Black people have engaged in this type of movement and diaspora building for centuries, establishing connections with one another across the Caribbean, Latin America, the U.S., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Historians of Black migration like Lara Putnam and Frank Guridy have argued that to fully understand the cultural and political contributions of the Black Diaspora it is not enough to merely look at “roots,” we must also look at “routes” (Putnam 2013) and the bonds that unite communities across borders. By transgressing these carceral logics of bounded space, Black communities have not only forged space of radical and international solidarity, but also maintained that there is dignity in coming and going (Guridy, 2010; Putnam, 2013).. The moral necessity of a world that values and protects our freedom of movement rests in the notion that there is justice in allowing ourselves and one another to find refuge and seek new experiences, to have the autonomy to make decisions about where and how to live, and to maintain the sanctity of the homes we choose to leave, remain in, or return to. - Darializa Avila Chevalier

Heritage

Heritage is a Temporal Relationship

Heritage is a deeply multidimensional word that captures meanings both literal and highly metaphorical. Its most generally applicable meaning is profoundly temporal: something that was received from the past, something that remains in the present. What was received, how it was given, the ways in which it is valued or ignored can differ in range in vastly different ways. Heritage can be ignored, and it can even be imagined. Yet implied in all its temporal meanings is relation: heritage is a medium representing the relationship between the past and present. A bridge between the past and us, we beings that exist now. These relationships can be biological, motif-based derivatives, or nationalistic, and they can be all of these things at the same time depending on scale and the perspective which one privileges. Below is an explanation of some of the many meanings of heritage using the example of the Dominican Republic as an application.

Heritage as Historical

Within the discipline of history, "heritage" is a reference to events or places or processes that hold a special meaning in group memory. I am curious why these things hold a special place, what purpose they serve, and how events become heritage. These things are connections to a real or imagined past (often a mix between these things) that can be natural like the Dominican mountain ranges or man-made like stone paintings and the colonial district of Santo Domingo. These places often help to anchor history in group memory, to prove it is real, to prove that it happened. Particularly in Latin America these ideas can be fraught and complex, celebrated and reviled at the same time. A particular point of historical heritage in Dominican culture is Columbus and his first landing in America at what is now the Dominican Republic. This is a profound piece of Dominican heritage and its influence runs profoundly throughout the nation particularly in Santo Domingo as something that makes the Dominican Republic Dominican. I seek to question the role this type of heritage has played in Dominican national identity and the development of space, while also exploring what type of heritage has been ignored vs. emphasized, and what is the reality of the inheritance today vs the group perception.

Heritage as Nation Space

Important to my work is the concept of the heritage site, a physical place that is embodying this connection to the past because of (in large part) governmental authority. What does it mean when the state demands that we remember, and they protect or build a place to attempt to enforce that memory? The heritage site is a special example of historical heritage that has value explicitly because it has been registered by a governmental agency as being of national importance to the history of that nation. Meaning it is both an expression of heritage as culture, as place, as space, as history and most importantly as nation and nationalized identity. The area I wish to understand in Santo Domingo is a national heritage site full of state sponsored monuments from a deposed regime. It is both deeply tied to Dominican history and also a reminder of an ugly past. It is also in reality quite different from what was imagined when these monuments were built, and from how they are described in a brochure. What does it mean for a heritage site to be lived in, and occupied by the present? What does it mean when that present is deeply divergent from the heritage as it is prescribed or as it is propagated? I seek to understand these heritage sites both for their historical importance as a bridge to DR’s past, but also as a modern site of marginal livelihoods and a transgressive space. Are these incoherencies connected?

Heritage as Culture

Heritage can also be understood as culture. Meaning it is the legacy from the past of the intangible attributes of a group or society, of what makes a Dominican a Dominican. This means that heritage can be personality. It can be the macho-ness of local men, the quintessential concept of the man as tigre or tiger— a predator full of sex appeal and flamboyance. It can be homophobia because of Catholic heritage, and a cultural need to tacitly understand while also ignoring homosexual behavior. It can be the creole cuisine of the DR which represents Spanish food made with local Caribbean ingredients or it can be the traditional African food across the island which is now seen as Spanish or Latin food. It can be the language which is deeply Spanish, and literally influences the way Dominicans think of themselves and the culture they consume, even as they speak their own dialect full of African and native Taino influences. Heritage can be the way Dominicans think of themselves because of how those before them thought of themselves. It can be the fears or seduction of the dictator and the inconsistent patriarchy that parents express onto their children. The cultural heritage of the Dominican is one that is typically celebrated and cherry-picked to be something that both matches national visions of heritage, and sets Dominicans as being deeply Latin American and deeply Hispanic, while also setting them apart as a special group with unique identities to be proud of. Perhaps most important to my project is that heritage can be what we ignore, refuse, and erase as well. Which parts of our culture do we not celebrate, and do we not center or see as reasons to be proud? The complex relationship of Dominicans with their African heritage and with their queerness underlines these contesting points.

Heritage as Embodied

Heritage can be biological. It can be sexual, and it can be passed on through family and biological processes that are both devoid and deeply influenced by the nation state. Natural heritage is a nation’s inheritance of plants and animals, its obsession with a tree or a bird or some fruit as being inherently representative of who they are as a people, because of the living thing being naturally found within that state’s geography. Heritage can be the DNA and the furniture and the mental trauma that you inherit from your parents, the things passed on to our descendants across generations, baked into the heart of family affairs and determining how we look, how we act, and how successful we are within our society. Heritage goes beyond typical understandings of inheritance when it becomes an ontology that helps people in the present understand themselves and their existence, their being. These forms of heritage are often embodied, they determine an individual’s physical characteristics, their mental attributes, what makes them independent beings even beyond national identity and group heritage, is also due to what they received from other people and from the past. What Dominicans eat and drink, how they clothe themselves, carry themselves, and how they relate to others is all an embodiment of heritage. Particularly for those existing and forced into the margins of society, this heritage can be deeply fraught. I am interested in how, in particular, working class, Afro-descendant, Black, petty criminals, sex workers, and queer people occupy spaces in heritage sites, namely the Centro de los Heroes (The Hero Center) in Santo Domingo, and how they navigate the heritage they have embodied through culture, music, food, language, and biology. Do they reject or refute state messages of heritage? Do they create their own? How do they negotiate a heritage which continues to erase and ignore them, and how do they understand their own occupation of historic sites that the nation has said should define them as a people?

Heritage as Choice

Heritage is celebratory. It is preserved. It is often a collective or an organization whose sole purpose is to preserve itself, monumentalize itself, reedify and concretize itself. Heritage can be conceptualized as a negative though, as something worth destroying just as much as it be celebrated. The heritage of sexism or of homophobia, of marginalization and racism and poverty? How do we remember them as things that create us, but not hold on to the tools that they gave us, concepts and thoughts which recycle and recreate oppression? Ultimately, I seek to frame heritage as a political choice for the oppressed and the colonized, to recenter choice in inheritance instead of passive consumption. Heritage as an active participatory program instead of state message, colonial pride, or half-truth mythology. Heritage as embracing the erased and growing beyond the hideous qualities of the past, even as we enjoy Spanish food, Spanish language, Spanish Music (themselves all deep heritages). When asking who gets to make this choice, I hope to recenter as actors the marginalized masses: groups of peoples both excluded from heritage narratives, and forced to embody and inhabit heritage diametrically opposed to their very identities. - Jose Michell Brito

Intersectionality

Kimberle Crenshaw defines intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”. More specifically, it addresses, “ how certain aspects of who you are will increase your access to the good things or your exposure to the bad things in life”. Identifying the significance of race as a social construct and racism as behaviors and ideology that reinforces the construct of race, while also examining how these two areas impact and influence the ways in which school policy is executed. - Crystal Welch-Scott

Malcriada

According to the Oxford Lexico dictionary and translation, mal-cria-da(o) refers to a person who is “ill-mannered, ill-bred (person), past participle of malcriar to bring up badly from mal- + criar to rear, instruct, educate from classical Latin creāre.” More specifically, it is designated to children whose behavior is deemed “uncivil” and, at times, spoiled or rude (Educalingo). In the book Malcriada & Other Stories by Lorraine Avila, she begins to unpack the infamous word “malcriada” used by our immediate family and society. Avila (2019) defines malcriada as someone who refuses to behave or contort themselves to patriarchal-misogynistic definitions of behaving well and girl/girlhood. Refusal is defined as the act of refusing or choosing not to engage. For this context, we will take on a Black feminist approach– where refusing is choosing not to acknowledge, align or agree with something. In this case, we refuse to agree or submit ourselves to labels such as malcriada. Reclaiming is defined as choosing to claim back, whether it was taken away or imposed on them. Refusal and reclaiming work hand in hand with malcriada. In the preface to Malcriada & Other Stories, Avila (2019) shares her upbringing as a Black Dominican American labeled malcriada since childhood, how the word malcriada travels with her across the diaspora. Avila chooses to reclaim the phrase malcriada as she understands it to present a liberated Black woman who stands her ground. It's important to note that refusing and reclaiming is not an either-or situation. Rather, refusing is to dispel the negative connotations of malcriada and reclaiming that the word as an act of resistance to the patriarchal-misogynistic contortions of what it means to be a “civil” and “well behaved” girl. - Rosa Angela

Racialized Surveillance

Racialized surveillance is a term first used by Simone Browne(2015) in Dark Matters: on the surveillance of Blackness. Browne defines Racialized surveillance as, “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). Browne further examines racializing surveillance more broadly within spatiotemporal boundaries, “signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance” (16). Racialized surveillance seeks to (re)inscribe Blackness as “other”, thereby creating a narrative that supports and upholds the disparate treatment along racial lines. - Crystal Welch-Scott

School Social Work

One of the factors that led to the creation of school social work in the early part of the 20^th century was the United States (U.S.) government recognizing the need to formally school its youngest inhabitants. However, the provision of formal schooling was an uneven project since immigration, rampant child labor, and the aftermath of enslavement positioned swaths of children as the recipients of inequitable social treatment that spilled over to schooling (Frey et al. 2017). For example, the dawn of emancipated life for Black Americans saw them receive inconsistent support from the federal government regarding schooling for children (Driver, 2018; Fairclough, 2007). This spurred Black Americans’ efforts to establish schooling facilities to pursue their own educational endeavors (Fairclough, 2007). Social work has had a role in public schooling since the early 1900s (Shaffer & Fisher, 2017) and the factors above are part of the historical context in which school social work first emerged.

Primary and secondary public schooling is an institution that has become a social pillar in the U.S. Whether public schools are held up as essential to preparing the next generation of workers or as an expression of a country’s moral obligation to its youngest, almost everyone in the U.S. today has interacted with a public school at some point in their lives (Driver, 2018). The basic features and functions of schools have come to be relatively stable across the U.S. (Marshall et al., 2020). One such feature is social work practice, which in public schools settings is usually referred to as school social work. School social work is the practice of connecting students to resources to alleviate stressors that they may be encountering at home, in schooling environments, or within the broader communities to which they belong and that are causing disruptions to their learning (Frey et al., 2017).

The origins of social work have been identified as reflecting anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous perspectives (Chapman & Withers, 2018; Yellow Bird & Gray, 2009). While it remains unclear the extent to which such perspectives fed the formation of school social work practice, it is hard to imagine school social work being practiced under drastically different ideological strands given that its development ran parallel to that of social work overall. One significant distinction is that school social work is necessarily tethered to the institution of schooling as its practice setting.

Children’s educational achievement has always underpinned school social workers’ efforts. School social work’s institutional reach extends beyond schools. An early role for school social workers involved visiting the homes of students who were not attending school regularly. These school social workers were known as visiting teachers, signaling the centrality of the institution of schooling. Visiting teachers, however, did not provide instruction during their visits to homes. Their roles in these visits were consistent with what we have come to know as social work and invoked the family and community domains of school social work practice (Shaffer & Fisher, 2017).

Since then, school social work practice has favored a clinical orientation. This approach entails work with students, individually and in small groups, who are identified as needing support due to concerns about academic performance or social-emotional well-being (Lucio, 2015). This orientation has persisted despite periodic efforts to reconceptualize school social work as needing to adopt social justice and policy-level foci (Constable & Kelly, 2022; Massat & Essex, 2022). Policy decisions within the schooling context have always been tethered to other systems and institutions like assimilationist projects targeting immigrants, empire-building, racism, and capitalism (Gutfreund, 2017; Stratton, 2016; Turner, 2020). Reconceptualizing school social work may be pivotal in addressing injustices born from these legacies, like the disproportionalities that negatively affect Black students and other racialized students, among other injustices.

Sugrue (2017) identified three ways that early-period school social workers functioned in relationship to schools: connector, interpreter, adjuster. As connectors, school social workers sought to ensure that students felt a sense of belonging in schools. In the earlier parts of the twentieth century, the U.S. wanted to assimilate many European immigrants and since schooling was fast becoming a main feature of childhood, there was an incentive to help students feel like they belonged. As interpreters, school social workers helped families and school personnel understand the realities of these respective environments as an avenue to foster any amount of interdependence that was feasible between both settings. As adjusters, school social workers helped to improve fit between a given student and the school setting.

In these roles one can see linkages between the institutions of school social work and schools. The role of connector may be thought of as being realized in the physical act of school social workers visiting homes as agents of schools to perform a social work function of helping children access a public good. Taken more expansively, the connector role may have implicitly functioned to help accelerate the assimilation of European immigrants into the U.S. schooling project. The interpreter role might be seen as having discursively brought the school into one’s home and vice versa through the statements that a school social worker may have made on behalf of school administrators during visits to homes. Lastly, as an adjuster, school social workers enacted their practice while physically in a school setting. This gives us an opportunity to consider the fluid ways that school social work has instituted its purpose alongside schools.

These three roles point to a practice orientation rooted in ecological models of human development. One might consider the connector, interpreter, and adjuster roles of school social work’s early history as the kind of roles that would find resonance in the context of current school social work norms and practices if they were resurrected. Given that many families continue to experience an array of stressors on multiple levels and across various timespans, the ability of school social workers to forge ahead on a path that diverges from its historical roots may prove crucial. However, there would likely need to be an unspooling of school social work’s individual-level focus.

This last point strikes at a tension between both institutions that has been insufficiently attended to in practice. Areas of need related to academic achievement and social-emotional well-being will continually emerge, which will demand a great amount of attention from school social workers. The ways in which school social workers respond to such needs will rest heavily on the foundation of its history and current approaches to practice. Because social work, in general, continues to espouse a commitment to social justice and systems-level change, there may be opportunities for school social workers to expand their orientation. - Ruben Mina

Surveillance

Surveillance characterizes the lives of Black people in America and particularly Black women-led families. This keyword entry aims to define surveillance in the context of the contemporary racialized control and oversight of Black communities by state actors and technology.

Beginning with the philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical framework, the sociogenic principle, surveillance can be understood as a means of controlling humanity - what is human and what is not human, with Blackness positioned as a cite of the ongoing inquiry, de-valuation, and control (Wynter, 2001). Advancing Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon & Markmann, 1967) and calling upon W.E.B. DuBois’, “double consciousness”, Wynter suggests a more precise and broadening definition of the formation of human experience beyond the underlying physical processes of the mind. Quoting Leon Poliakov, Wynter establishes the animus of racialized surveillance, “Blackness, and with it, a great range of evil associations was contrasted with whiteness, as was innocence with crime, vice with virtue, and bestiality with humanity" (Poliakov & Howard, 1974; Wynter, 2001, p. 135). As an object of surveillance, Wynter situates Blackness as an identifiable, traceable,

It is this same theoretical framing that underpins Simone Browne’s illumination of surveillance in Dark Matters. Browne (2016) outlines the ways that the police and carceral state controls Black life. As Lingel (2016) summarizes, Dark Matters “is an anthology of surveillance as a set of processes, and specifically, those processes that are used to monitor, control and restrict the movements and rights of people of color” (p. 2). Browne shows how Blackness does not exist at the periphery of the construction of surveillance institutionally, but that such tools from the panopticon, slave ships, plantations, and slave auctions were intentionally designed with the control, ownership, and secure containment of Blackness in mind. As a scholar of Black Studies and cyber-feminism, Browne (2016) draws from physics to explain the unseen forces (e.g., practices, policies) that both illuminate and contain Black life as modernity. This work centers Black life as an object within the modes of surveillance and how Blackness is almost inseparable from the construct and theorizing of surveillance.

In Race After Technology, sociologist Ruha Benjamin offers a socio-technical lens to understand surveillance as coded. The author makes these objects of surveillance readable and identifiable in various forms of technology that replicate history and existing forms of control and oppression. In this way, Benjamin builds on Browne’s definition of racialized surveillance as upgraded through technologies like (e.g., data, algorithms) and suggests that race and racism are sorts of technologies (Benjamin, 2019). She suggests that codes tell stories, which are decoded/translated and operationalized within powerful socio-technical systems. These systems have the agency to make Blackness visible, invisible, and distorted. Similar to Browne (2016), Benjamin draws an inextricable connection between race and surveillance.

Benjamin (2019) explicates the five tenets of Critical Race Theory in the following ways: 1) technology encompasses the permanence and racist architecture of society coding, replicating, and upgrading systemic oppression; 2) data science and artificial intelligence should not supersede or bypass lived realities as "numbers [algorithms] do not speak for themselves” (Hetey & Eberhardt, p.183) and “data will not save us" (Benjamin, 2021, 6:47; 3) technologies (e.g., algorithms, social media) learn and protect the privileges of whiteness and white dominant culture as preferential and characteristics of Blackness as inferior and undesirable; 4) justice cannot be achieved through the pursuit of race-blind technology nor the ideas that technology is inherently altruistic, fair, and objective; and 5) technologies advance in the social, economic, and political interests of white supremacy, and the speed at which technology innovation occurs is conflated with social progress, ignoring the constraints that persist or become fixed for marginalized groups. As stated by Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara, "not all speed is movement" (Benjamin, 2021, 2:13; Bambara, 1970, p. 112).

As a framework, CRT moves beyond locating racialized surveillance technologies and suggests activism (Delgado & Stefancic, 1998) that invites participation from marginalized groups, creation of technological systems that resist oppression (Benjamin, 2019), and build new worlds. Imagination can be pursued through distributing power between those who construct and those who are impacted by technological surveillance (Davis et al., 2021; Kalluri, 2020). This approach to activism reimagines systems that build power for those who are marginalized.

CRT and Intersectionality have been used for examining policing and criminal sentencing algorithms (Humerick, 2019), advancing the definition of algorithmic fairness in computational systems (Hanna et al., 2020), decolonizing computational sciences (Birhane & Guest, 2020), human-computer interactions (Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al., 2020), and designing technology for social justice (Abebe et al., 2020). These are a few of the ways that communities of color are seeking to locate oppression of technology surveillance while also imagining a world without it. - Ashleigh Washington

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