Blackness

is the paradigm, than the law, itself a product of the white-over-black hierarchy, cannot resolve this hierarchization. The initiary violence of slavery makes rights always already something to be restored or granted, never something inherent to Blackness. Farley (2005) writes that “[w]ithout the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not…

Black writers and actors were the only prominent black celebrities, and blacks had different opinions about how they represented the race and the morality of their actions. Booker T. Washington thought that black minstrel performers and writers were great representations of the black race. They did not complain about racial inequality, rather they made names for themselves and integrated into higher society by performing and writing plays. Washington wanted actors to speak about how minstrelsy…

The concepts of whiteness and blackness, which are on opposite ends of a dichotomy, can not exist without one another. In bell hooks’ article, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination, she argues that in the mind of a black individual, whiteness represents fear and dread. This fright is stemmed from the idea of the predominance of the white race in society. (hooks, 345-346.) The article continues on to discuss which group of people constructed the idea and context of whiteness, what it…

including, Mexicans, Latinos, Indians, African Americans, and Indigenous persons. Most notably, “blacks” are blatantly referenced in the Snowz advert. In Southern Africa, European colonialists propagated the ideology of white supremacy, which associated blackness with primitiveness and contamination (Glenn, 2008, p. 284). The Mexican concept of mestizaje is endorsed as the national ideal, in which racial and ethnic ancestries mix; however, it destroys a person’s identity, to generate a whiter…

society, society’s perceptions of race and crime, as well as, race and welfare. Karlan analyzes the role of voter disenfranchisement within black communities and felon disenfranchisement. Wacquant illuminates the vast affect of society’s views of blackness and the effects…

Black and other non-white LGBTs occupy a very unique position in the social world with their multiple marginalized identities and this affects the ways in which they navigate through their everyday lives. Previous studies argue that for black LGBTs, being situated in the mainstream LGBT domain and therefore, become aware of their doubly marginalized position leads to the higher salience of their racial/ethnic identity as well as resentment and bitterness towards the mainstream LGBT community…

matter of Marshall’s paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from African-American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing. Marshall shares that: “Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised. In Western Catholicism darkness was evil, in the colonial and imperial context dark skin was…

towards the Haitian workers, or as Sanabria would describe, the birth of the hegemonic racism that persists in the country. As Gates describes, “[the Haitians] became a new class…Because they were so homogenous in terms of their hue…their blackness became a type of blackness which was different from that of Dominicans.” The resulting…

In John L. Jackson’s book Harlemworld, he explains how Harlem was “made black”, both literally and figuratively, and he also describes how Harlem became, historically, a sort of epicenter of African-American culture; or as he puts it, the “black Mecca”. As for how Harlem came to be populated by a larger concentration of African-Americans than almost anywhere else, Jackson describes a brief history of the geographical location in northern Manhattan that was once known as Nieuw Haarlem, which…

In 1911, when W.E.B. DuBois published The Quest of the Silver Fleece, the African American community stood at a critical time in the course of black history. For the first time in America, they were “free.” Looming all around was the Negro question. The whites asked “what to do with the Negro,” while the blacks asked “what shall I become?” These questions are mentioned explicitly and implicitly through DuBois’ novel. Emphasis has always been put on “great whites” attempt to answer that question.…