Black IP Supplement - JDI 2024

Black IP Supplement
Solvency
Say Her Name
“Say Her Name” is necessary to forefront an understanding of the police violence Black women and girls face---Black women and girls are always folded into Black male frames of Jim Crow which obscures their harm, crowds out their stories and undermines their revolutionary capacity.
Crenshaw et al. ‘15 (Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer & Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, 2015. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3226) // 7/7/24- amya!!
Our failure to rally around Black women’s stories represents a broader failure to demand accountability for all Black lives targeted by the state. Families who lose Black women to police violence are not regularly invited to speak at rallies and do not receive the same level of community support or media and political attention as families who lose Black men. This leaves the families of Black women killed by the police not only to suffer the loss of their loved ones but also to confront the fact that no one seems to care. Yet the killings of Black women and girls are no less troubling than the killings of their male counterparts. Their families mourn no less for their lost loved ones, and they should not be left to suffer in solitude and silence. Black women have consistently played a leadership role in struggles against state violence—from the Underground Railroad to the anti-lynching movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the current Black Lives Matter movement—yet the forms of victimization they face at the hands of police are consistently left out of social movement demands. Black women leaders are often asked to speak only about their fears of losing their sons, brothers, partners, and comrades. Yet as the tragedies that have befallen many Black women who have died at the hands of the police reveal, Black women and girls also face real risks of lethal police violence, which must be contested along with those facing Black men and boys.
Our analysis of Jane Crow is key---attunements to the violence that marginalizes Black women is necessary to prevent misogynistic Afrofuturist imaginations.
Crenshaw et al. ‘15 (Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer & Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, 2015. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3226) // 7/7/24-MtaW
The resurgent racial justice movement in the United States has developed a clear frame to understand the police killings of Black men and boys, theorizing the ways in which they are systematically criminalized and feared across disparate class backgrounds and irrespective of circumstance. Yet Black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent from this frame even when their experiences are identical. When their experiences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—Black women remain invisible.Despite their marginalization in contemporary efforts to challenge anti-Black racism and police brutality, Black women and girls continue to lose their lives to racially motivated violence. The nation has been left reeling in the wake of the June 17th shooting in which a white gunman murdered nine Black parishioners at a historically Black church in Charleston in an explicit act of racial terror. Six of the nine people killed were women—the oldest, Susie Jackson, was an 87-year-old grandmother—demonstrating clearly that Black women also face the lethal risk of white supremacist violence.
Say Her Name!!! Say Mya Hall.
Crenshaw et al. ‘15 (Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer & Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, 2015. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3226) // 7/8/24- amya!!
Mya Hall was a Black transgender woman killed by National Security Agency (NSA) police just weeks before Freddie Gray’s case garnered national headlines. Alleged to be driving a stolen car, she took a wrong turn onto NSA property and was shot to death by officers after the car crashed into the security gate and a police cruiser. No effort to use nonlethal force was made even though there was no threat to the facility, and no one in the vehicle was armed. Friends remembered Hall as a kind and caring woman struggling to make ends meet in the face of entrenched structural discrimination against Black transgender women.14
Afrofuturism
Afrofuturist projects traverse antiblackness through radical world making and speculative futures.
Aghor ‘18, Nathalie Aghoro, 05-21-2018, "Agency in the Afrofuturist Ontologies of Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe," Open Cultural studies, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2018-0030/html // 7/7/24- amya!!
​​One of the sociocultural functions of speculative fiction in popular culture is to reflect on actual intersubjective dynamics through the relocation of world/subject constellations onto remote spaciotemporal planes. Particularly when the fictional worlding of alternate possible worlds combines the free play of speculation with references to or analogies for past and present human conditions, it fosters the expression of cultural critique and the promotion of social change. Afrofuturism, in particular, reinscribes lived experiences of othering and exclusion by associating these with science fiction tropes of extraterrestrial, alien lives. As the Afrofuturist cultural theorist, Kodwo Eshun, writes, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (289). Black diasporic experience resonates with outer space imaginaries because these display similar imbalances in power relations along disenfranchising dichotomies of racialization, gender, and class while telling stories about the crossing of thresholds, the exploration of new frontiers, or the multifarious assemblages1 of hybrid and liminal identities. Science fiction situates itself at the interstices of the social and thrives on the challenges and opportunities inherent to an in-between that bears a striking resemblance with the spaciotemporal networks of the black diaspora. The imaginary intermediate formations of science fiction in Afrofuturism recuperate the prerogative of interpretation and, therewith, the agency over black diasporic pasts, presents, and futures. Eshun describes the Afrofuturist political agenda “as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (301). The critical and aspirational interventions of Afrofuturism target the here and now of contemporary social formations and, therefore, ultimately seek to make sense of diasporic human experiences on earth in their excursions into digital, virtual realms as well as in their accounts of space and time travel. Womack also understands Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (9). According to her, the constitutive elements of this “artistic aesthetic and . . . framework for critical theory . . . [are] science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques” (9). In this artistic and cultural nexus, the liberation of hegemonic constraints is achieved through the transversal shift to utopian ideals and projections because the resulting what-if scenarios facilitate the recovery of the power of the subject in light of oppressive pasts of colonisation and slavery.
Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist imagination is a funky revolution---her intense intersectional critique destroys humanist logics---Q.U.E.E.N. proves.
Aghor ‘18, Nathalie Aghoro, 05-21-2018, "Agency in the Afrofuturist Ontologies of Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe," Open Cultural studies, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2018-0030/html // 7/7/24- amya!!
The protagonists of the video are literally and figuratively frozen in time in the beginning. They are in stasis like the exhibits of a Natural History Museum suggesting an intertextual reference to Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña in their performance “The Couple in the Cage” (1992-3). Wonder and Lightning’s bodies initially covered in sacred white chalk, in particular, refer to anthropological discourses of the discovery of supposedly premodern, undiscovered, and ahistorical peoples intended to legitimise Western conquests and settler colonialism while at the same time retracing the historical ancestry of the African Diaspora. Eventually, when the singers and musicians start to move and perform the song, they disrupt the space of the museum and break out of the discursive mould in which there were supposed to be cast forever as past relics. They reconquer previously conquered spaces of subjection and create a futuristic overlay of personalities who have exclusive knowledge about the future and its inventions, as Lillvis has convincingly demonstrated in her monograph (c.f. 67-9). Along the lines of Caroline Rody on African American and Caribbean women’s historical fiction, Lillvis proposes that “[b]lack narratives, such as those shared by Badu, Monáe, and Jones, function as ‘formerly unarticulated histories’ that work in the tradition of ethnic and postcolonial literatures and poststructuralist and postmodernist theories to destroy master narratives—such as that of the liberal humanist subject—and tell previously unheard or ignored tales” (Lillvis 63). I would add, that they also project future possible worlds onto the now by showcasing the radical interconnections between creation, destruction, and regeneration further expanded in the video when one of the Wondaland members types on a typewriter that they “will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years” and thus showcase the fertilizing properties of Afrofuturist practices Moreover, the singing performances are also explicitly gendered. Badu’s alter-ego Badoula Oblongata (the last name being an allusion to the spinal cord2) and Monáe in her trademark tuxedo confidently move on displaying multiple ways of being in the world through their singing that references traditions and contemporary forms of African American music. In keeping with the energetic Funk bass line, their voices shift from Monáe’s funk to soul and jazz in Badu’s intermezzo where she declares “here comes the freedom song” back to Monáe’s rap performance in the final stages of the song that aligns with the marching and protest that she calls for in the lyrics: March to the streets cause I’m willing and I’m able Categorize me, I defy every label And while you’re selling dope, we’re gonna keep selling hope We rising up now, you gotta deal you gotta cope Will you be electric sheep? Electric ladies, will you sleep? Or will you preach.
Spaceship
The spaceship is a heterotopic tool for Black resistance and time travel.
Risam & Josephs 21, Roopika Rasim & Kelly Baker Josephs, March 16th, 2021 (The Digital Black Atlantic), Roopika Risam is associate professor of secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University. She is author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Kelly Baker Josephs is professor of English and digital humanities at York College/CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center https://books.google.com/books?id=XksoEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT154&ots=WGVa9Vr0g-&dq=heterotopia%20and%20race&lr&pg=PT156#v=onepage&q&f=false // Wikidd 06-8-24
Foucault's notion of a heterotopia satisfies the following key principles (1) a constant across human groups and cultures (2) transformative by each generation each society and adaptable to history (3) capable of holding within a singular space, multiple places and spaces, (4) responsive to changes and breaks in time functions, (5) holding points of entry and departure" that both isolates them and makes them penetrable,” and (6) You're treating additional spaces, either illusory or Utopian in nature.(Footnote 4) If we consider maroon societies as more than the ideologies they produced, if we accept that they occupy both physical and intellectual space in the Caribbean history and lived experience, then we can perceive how they meet in these key principles and how they constitute the “heterotopia car excellence” As Foucault, imagine it imagines the ship: “a floating piece of space, A place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time given over into the Infinity of the sea” (footnote 5) As the ship gives into the sea, maroonage extends into the land, no matter how that space is settled by the colonizer or how much colonial forces deny the maroons’ Right into the ground on which they stand. And this defiance, maroon societies' identities position themselves as heterotopias of resistance, rejecting the denial of civility and sovereignty to Africans in the new world. Before and since the maroons, black people in the Atlantic have inland New world. Before and since the maroons, Black people in the Atlantic have negotiated their ability to carve out livable spaces, always in resistance or counterpoint to oppressive forces that deny them humanity, let alone their own space.
Solidarity/Allyship
AT “Bad Allies” / Perm NB
Nonblack people have a responsibility to confront antiblackness whenever they see it and act as committed “imperfect” allies---anti-racism allyship requires not just forwarding conversations that center Black people but conscious efforts to redistribute the labor of Black women doing anti-black critiques---the permutation is a form of indebted solidarity.
Park 20 [June 2, 2020 Sharon Park – BSBA from Northeastern University in marketing and interactive media] “Non-Black People of Color Need to Start Having Conversations About the Anti-Blackness in Our Communities” Do Something.Org https://dosomething.org/article/our-role-as-non-black-people-of-color-in-disrupting-racism
To all non-Black people of color — it’s time we speak up against the anti-Blackness in our communities. This guide is written to serve as a starting point for how non-Black people of color can engage in conversation regarding the anti-Blackness within our respective communities. A disclaimer: the term “people of color” (POC) encompasses people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We acknowledge and think actively about how each of these individual communities distinctly experience racism: Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and multiracial. I identify as Asian and have consulted the other folks in DoSomething’s POCI affinity group, which is comprised mostly of people who identify as Asian and Latinx. This is a guide for non-Black POC to stand in one form of solidarity with our Black community by tackling our anti-Blackness — but a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we don’t presume to speak for all Asian people, all Latinx people, or all non-Black people of color. We also acknowledge that anti-racist conversations do not center Black people, and real action is needed to uplift the Black community. As advocates for racial justice and as imperfect allies, we’re sharing this guide in the hopes that it helps some of you broach needed conversations with your loved ones. [table of contents] Learn More Living as non-white people in America, we are faced with varying instances of discrimination across our different identities every day. There is a thread of shared experiences of oppression which runs through all people of color. But as non-Black people of color, it's vital to recognize that being Black in America is not the same as being any other race in America. The internalized racism and anti-Blackness within each of our individual communities have long perpetuated white supremacy and the continued violence against the Black community. As non-Black people of color we too often settle into a harmful neutral territory when it comes to Black lives. To stand in solidarity with our Black community means we must be actively anti-racist and not simply “not racist” — to stop brushing aside the anti-Blackness many of us have learned and been complicit to within our respective communities. We've heard and excused it too often in our circles, with our friends & family: it's just how they are, they're old anyway, they're just joking, they had this one experience, they didn't mean it like that, they don't know better, it's not worth it. We need to do better and having direct and honest conversation is a start Prepare for the Conversation 1) Educate yourself. Learn about the systemic racism and oppression against Black people that have afforded you the comforts you have, even as a person of color. Learn about the history of your race in America and how the movements that have led to the privileges you have would not exist without the Black community. (Non-Black Latinx Resources on Anti-Blackness, South Asians and Black Lives, Addressing Anti-blackness Within the Vietnamese & Asian Community) 2) Recognize your anti-Blackness and consider where it stems from. One place to start is with an implicit bias test. Reflect on the anti-Blackness perpetuated in your home, amongst family members, in your friend group. Examine the colorism, the color hierarchy of complexions with fairer skin as “better than’ and darker skin as “less than,” in your community. Think about how you might be appropriating Black culture. Ask yourself of the ways in which you've been conditioned to believe in the superiority of whiteness, to “other” and place harmful stereotypes on Black people. To read: “30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday” 3) Choose who you want to talk to & how. Start with someone who you know well and trust. You’ll feel better equipped to engage in more conversations as you have them and continue to educate yourself, you don’t need to address your entire family at once. Considering how to have these conversations is also important. As opposed to engaging in potentially unproductive dialogue on social media, try engaging in one-on-one or small group conversation in-person or via video chat. 4) Establish goals for the conversation. Think about what you want to leave the conversation with. It’s worth having a clear understanding of what specific points you’d like to convey. Remember, one conversation won’t resolve the decades of unaddressed anti-Blackness. You might have a tangible goal, like asking your conversation partner to make a donation, call elected officials, attend a protest, or sign a petition. Another goal could be getting a better understanding of how your conversation partner is responding to this moment and what they’re feeling. Either way, it’s helpful to know what you want to achieve from the conversation. 5) Set expectations for yourself and your conversation partner. Talking about racism isn’t easy but it’s necessary. The first time you try it will likely be bumpy, but starting the conversation to dismantle anti-Blackness is more important than staying comfortable in silence. Expect discomfort and explore why. Set the expectation that this is a first conversation, and that you will try again if it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned. Be gentle with yourself. Remember: the path to addressing anti-Blackness is learning, unlearning, and relearning. It is not the role of your Black friends to offer themselves up to grant you the unsettling of your discomfort. Do not burden them in this way. Have the Conversa

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