Black Studies PhD | I write/teach/research historical memory of civil rights, neoliberalism & Black visuality | He/Him/el | Asst. Prof of History | 14x an uncle
Today, 87 books arrived in my office as part of a $60,000 3-year library collections development in Black studies proposal titled, “A Map to Black Studies” that I recently got approval for at this Southwest Louisiana regional public school. The goal is to add 4,000 titles.
My father worked in these Alabama mines for 36 yrs and yet most folx think Appalachia = coal mining or West Virginia or white working class…I come from generations of Black Alabama coal miners and they organize.
Writing on this now bc the way civil rights memory has been commodified & visually mapped onto Black politicians, activists, celebrities, etc. says a LOT about how neoliberalism narrows Black freedom dreams, movements and histories in the service of U.S. empire...
Donate to the 102 yr old Black Chicago historian Tim Black if you can. He’s been writing on Black life, teaching and organizing for a better world for decades and decades. Our elders deserve more, always.
All I can think about today is that young Black boy who became "known" for hugging a cop while crying in Colorado I believe only to have his two white adopted parents run him & his black siblings off a cliff. It's not about an individualistic notion of forgiveness but the image.
Ruby Bridges ≠ Kamala Harris. Resist the neoliberal progress narrative that conscripts the history of Ruby Bridges & modern civil rights movement as the visual shadow through which such a narrow gendered-sexual-racial representational frame circulates as “Black excellence.”
As a Black person w/ a white parent from a city marked by racial terror (Birmingham) I really loathe the way Trevor Noah & Obama wield their “mixedness” as a progressive politics of hope. My parents were not brave for copulating nor am I a product of racial progress as a result.
Just this morning I successfully defended my dissertation, Post-Civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory. An official Dr. Foster in the bldg.
I’m so glad I read for the first time tonight June Jordan’s short essay “Life After Lebanon” (1985) as I search for words and context from Black artists, scholars, poets and activists who’ve practiced solidarity with Palestinian peoples. We can all read more and do more.
Interesting how CLR James be absent from a lot of anti-racist reading lists. The Black Jacobins should be essential reading for these times. I just got so much from returning to it today.
Thinking a lot today about Angela Davis’ unawarding of a human rights award from my beloved Birmingham Civil Rights Institute because of a willful misreading of her decades long solidarity w/ Palestinian peoples.
The caucasity of this meme is revealing of how historians reproduce the epistemic violence of the Western liberal academy. Black study disrupts elitist professionalizing norms of "doing history" if we take Michel Rolph-Trouillot's work seriously.
I’m excited to finally share that I’ll be returning to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to continue teaching Black history & Black studies this Fall. Some places call us home to ourselves and to community and I’m grateful for how Chicago & Louisiana do that distinctly.
Quiet as it’s kept, the curriculum of many African American Studies programs in the South already black lists critical Black studies scholarship as a result of neoliberal austerity & admin appointing folx w/ no training or writing in the field to gut it like Florida is doing
On the uses and misuses of the Edmund Pettus Bridge or how historic sites of anti-Black violence & terror become the vehicles thru which the Black neoliberal quells dissent & quarantines Black radical imagination as ritual praxis
A student in my “Archives & Blackness” course shared she had no clue what an archive was beyond the feature on IG...so we started from there to consider the function & form of this digital archive for public/personal/corporate uses & misuses.
"The history of Black Literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom, its extent and limits, than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society" -Angela Davis
@GI__JACKSON
See…only a caucastic theology could authorize this “study” of Black life. Not saying white folx can’t write on Black life, culture & history but how its done and for who matters more and so this is a mess on multiple accounts…
I find the juxtaposition of Notre Dame to the three historically Black churches burned by a 21 year old white man in a region in Louisiana well known for the afterlife of French settler-colonialism or Creole & Cajun culture one of historical amnesia & dissociation.
“The possessive investment in whiteness can’t be rectified by learning “how to be more antiracist.” It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition...” -Saidiya Hartman
Today is a day for Taurus revolutionaries!
-Malcom X born 1925
-Ho Chi Minh born 1890
-Lorraine Hansberry born 1930
-Augusto César Sandino born 1895
-Yuri Kochiyama born 1921
For a MUCH better elaboration of the problematic in African American/Black history I theorize & research see this excellent book by Clarence Lang I build upon:
This lecture was originally published in 1971 by the N.Y. Committee to Free Angela Davis while she was imprisoned in California. In jail she wrote “The Role of Black Women in the Community of Slaves" published by
@TheBlackSchlr
that became "Women, Race, & Class" (1983).
"Black people have exposed, by their very existence, the
inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very
theoretical formulation." -Angela Davis
Excited to finally share I’ll be returning to live in Chicago later this month and starting a new TT position teaching Black history & Black studies for
@BenU1887
in their Dept. of History, Philosophy & Theology.
Hugging cops, marching cops and kneeling cops is no woke response to the inter generational trauma they represent and the rage in the streets. Please reconsider the “progress” you find in those images, read the room & do not share the propaganda.
Most black academics who sanction or dismiss Afropessimist analysis reveal big Black investments in neoliberal regimes of institutionaity & academic celebrity, often bc it displaces their monopoly on Black thought approved by publishing cliques of the Ivy League + wannabe ivies
Some excerpts from lectures on the course: "The pivotal theme of this course will thus be the idea of freedom as it is unfolded in the literary undertaking of Black people." -Angela Davis
We should normalize paying graduate students to be guest speakers/lecturers in our classes...or even for teaching required dept. courses beyond the stipend that barely makes grad life livable.
"Consider the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly described by his adversaries as a communist, and not because he was actually a member of the Communist Party, but because the cause of racial equality was assumed to be a communist creation.” -Angela Davis
I keep this as a reminder of who I come from. I have yet to meet an academic whose parents were coal miners like mine…I don’t like “first gen” rhetoric or logic but also I am not cut from the same cloth as most in the academy, Black or otherwise and I’m grateful for that.
"Most important here will be the crucial transformation of the concept of freedom as a static, given principle into the concept of liberation, the dynamic, active struggle for freedom. The morality peculiar to an oppressed
people is something we will have to come to grips with."
My older brother Matthew w/ Down Syndrome started working at
@ChuckECheese
June 2000 during his senior year in HS. Yesterday was his first day back after suffering a stroke this July. I’m so proud of him and the great dignity he finds working, 21 years later.
We’re excited to share info about UL’s “Conversations in Black Study” series of 5 virtual talks between 10 mostly junior scholars in Black Studies organized by our university reading group that starts this week! Register here:
@Nomadrich
My point is that interracial sex under any regime of white supremacist order, legal or de facto, chattel slavery or its afterlife, U.S. or South African nation-states should not be the raw material for a politics of hope or racial progress.
When Michaela Cole said “do not be afraid to disappear for a while” it took me back to Imani Perry’s excellent writing on Gayl Jones & a Black anonymity, opacity or retreat…still searching for language.
Millennials & Gen Z are tired of MLK Day for good reason. They want to move beyond the neoliberal A-side of MLK iconization/service/volunteerism & move to the B-side of MLK radicalism (anti-war/imperialism, anti-capitalism/poverty & anti-racism/whiteness).
I really appreciated how this op ed is rooted in the university as a site of struggle and not just celebrity, a place where labor is exploited & efforts to transform that condition never stopped.
We’re discussing James Weldon Johnson today in class so I watched Andra Day from last night and recall how Rev. Dr. William Barber II explained how problematic it is to only sing the first verse bc it ignores the journey & process of Black life post Reconstruction.
My namesake was born 1906 in Marion, AL. He worked in a shaft mine (Black Diamond) and after injuring his back, he sold moonshine & died 1979 while his wife & matriarch, Janie Mae Foster, labored as bread winner of 10, doubling domestic work in the day & club cleaning at night.
Also wanted to pass this threshold before sharing this fall I’ll be starting a TT assistant professor position in African American History in a Dept of History, Geography and Philosophy @ University of Louisiana - Lafayette!
Excited to share Dr. Selamawit Terrefe is the first of six Black studies scholars & artists for a Spring speaker series titled “Black Study Within & Beyond Crisis.” Join the
@ul_arts
for Dr. Terrefe’s talk, “Death & the Object’s Desire” next Wednesday March 10th 4-5PM CT.
Poetry is so essential to Black studies and I would argue History as a discipline and the limitations of historical “narrative as a degraded form” (Hartman) of story telling or analysis that poets like Natasha Trethewey unsettle.
I’m always interested in learning more about histories and politics of Black resistance & community from folx writing on places like the Great Dismal Swamp & Fort Mose in the Southeastern United States.
A brief 🧵:
This Spring I co-organized a series of virtual talks given by mostly junior scholars, artists & cultural organizers in Black studies. The five recorded below will form the basis of an Intro to a critical Black studies class I will teach in the Fall and I’m so grateful.
Next week we will have a Zoom launch event that I’ll advertise for tomorrow with some dope Black women historians, literary scholars and archivist/librarians.
I finished my PhD at 31 a year ago yesterday & so cherish my two years between the end of my MA (2011) and start of PhD (2013). Growth during that time away from grad life & returning home deepened my sense of purpose as an educator, trouble maker & (failed) organizer/writer.
I finished my PhD at 26. I regret this. Take time off between grad school and undergrad. Live your life. Defer, read, work, explore, party, save, make art, sleep. Don’t rush. Grad school is not the safety net you think it is. The degree will be there when you’re done. Enjoy life!
Legal scholar & former SNCC staffer who represented Angela Davis in 1970, Margaret A. Burnham brought this poem to my attention in her new book, By Hands Now Known (2022) that is blowing my mind:
The situation in TX is truly horrible. I’ve been stuck here since Monday w/ no water and limited access to power. I’m deeply concerned about the death toll and would love to share in Houston mutual aid threads or links, plz share and reply to this tweet with what you can.
My mother gifted me this for the holidays and it comes at the right time as I revamp my Black history survey course syllabus. I don’t think my generation of academics read enough Manning Marable and this collection of primary sources is beautifully edited.
"I want people to know I'm great. I love myself. I don't like people to make fun of me. It makes me feel bad. I'm not making fun of them. I have Down syndrome and I'm black. You can't say the "n" word--that's bad." -Matthew Foster (my older brother who turns 38 today)
My mom was at the doctor’s office & the doc was Ecuadorian so my mom shared w/ him my research on Afro Ecuadorian history and culture and Dr. Morales said she must be mistaken and mean Equatorial Guinea 😂😂😂 the anti-Blackness jumped out quick!
It was so affirming to be wrapping up teaching a close reading of Saidiya Hartman's "The Time of Slavery" (2002) with students in my Black History course and lead w/ her MacArthur award video where she describes in her own words her practice of "critical fabulation" in context.
If you know any high school sophomores interested in a free summer academic program in Critical Black and Ethnic Studies 6/24-8/4 2017
@Cornell
&
@UMich
please encourage them to apply to
@TellurideAssoc
Sophomore Seminar, application available online due Jan. 9th!
Katherine McKittrick’s “Plantation Futures” (2013) helps me think through my father, grandfather & 3 uncles 80+ years laboring in the coal mines of central Alabama. I’m not sure “Black Appalachia” accounts for how time, space & terror is racialized in Abernant, AL.
I’m curious what novels y’all assign for an Intro to Black or African American Studies course?
-I’ve taught:
1. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016)
2. Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987)
3. Maryse Condé’s Segu (1987)
Hearing of Abloh’s death at 41 warped me back to the devastation learning of Chadwick Boseman’s death at 43, also from an aggressive form of cancer. I have so so many Black friends and family experiencing acute forms of universal illness and disease. Longevity is never promised.
For grad student folx steady applying to all of the things, don’t stop. At this point last year I was quite deflated & defeated after all of the rejections & colleagues’ successes securing a bag. I didn’t apply to the TT gig I was eventually offered until 3/15, offer came 5/15.
I never really claimed first gen PhD but I’m pretty sure few of my colleagues’ father dug graves w/ their father for $30 at age 8 or drove the school bus in HS or drafted at 19 in 1970…the more I learn the more I’m in awe of his Black country upbringing in central Alabama.
This tired asst prof has now OFFICIALLY submitted final grades for 90+ students for my first semester on the tenure track!
3 Black history classes ✅
All digital texts for the FREE ✅
1 weekend of research travel✅
1 international conference in VA✅
6 honors contracts ✅
Sanity✅
Rosa did not sit for empire.
Ruby did not walk for empire.
We can do better to honor Black history than flatten the politics of MISS Rosa Parks or Ruby Bridges into racial progress memes detached from context.
Also thinking about the crisis management PR machine of Birmingham’s black elite that worked hard to police the crisis thru a short lived “Birmingham Truth & Reconciliation Committee.” I don’t think we ever got to the truth of it and reconciled ourselves to civil rights myths.
"Selma Police Chief Spencer Collier has said, 'Domestic violence is a crime that knows no racial, geographic or socioeconomic boundary.' But Black women are disproportionately represented among homicide victims in this category."
The interviewer is longtime Black Chicago radio (WVON) host Walli Sidiq (then Lou House). He produced a massive archive of radio interviews during the 1960s of all the major Black civil rights leaders passing through Chicago prior to his work with Black Journal.
“the man has backed the black writer into a cultural bag, he will only allow him to write about the black problem.”
— melvin van peebles on “black journal” in 1968. clip via
@amarchivepub
💗
"I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm." -Septima Clark
Transitioning from Louisiana to Chicago this winter has been rough and full of loss & grief so this sonic care package came right on time.
😭🙏🏽🥰 (doubled up on
@kelelam
)
Honoring the life of Lorne Cress Love today in Chicago. Her contributions to Black life and freedom are far too many to name but among them she was a founding member of the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC & longtime educator & organizer & launched Pacifica radio in 1977. axé.
I’m truly fortunate to be teaching back down south at a public university. It’s unfortunate that simply being a Black professor in the anti-Black climate of Southwest Louisiana positioned me as the subject of a public library spectacle.
One of my favorite essays by Denise Ferreira da Silva on post-racialism and the 2013 Shelby Co. v Holder decision. Her reframing of racial violence & the “limits of the liberal account of racial justice” signaled in that decision.
If you are curious about how anarchism from a Black author and organizer intersects with your conception of Black radical thought or politics or traditions or critical theory then you’ll appreciate this
@NPR
interview William C Anderson (
@williamcson
)
I went on NPR's 1A to discuss some of the principles of anarchism with
@GrimKim
and Ruth Kinna. This is a much bigger conversation than what could fit in this show, but hopefully, it was generative for some people.
Conferences be a lot: Take time to stretch, hydrate, nap, and leave that tip ($5 a day per hotel stay) bc it’s a whole ecosystem of underpaid workers & volunteers set up to facilitate the gig.
How to be an anti-racist and ignore whiteness, anti-blackness & racial capitalism or how neoliberalism won by producing an anti-racist industrial complex that makes “JEDI” (justice, equity, diversity & inclusion) a feel good project.
Looking forward to our final Black studies speaker of the semester tomorrow at 4:00 PM CST/5:00PM EST! Join
@ul_arts
for a talk by
@blacklikewho
titled “On Reparations: Ontological Incoherence & Living In A Catastrophe”
Register here:
I love talking about Black proverbs and Black elders. Amidst a rising tide of grief, I found some peace writing this short essay for a local publication dedicated to Black Freedom movement veterans Curtis Hayes Muhammad & Fred Prejean.