The People v. Ossian Sweet
In the first decades of the twentieth century, no northern city drew more southern migrants than Detroit, ‘City of Tomorrow’.[i] As one Free Press reporter noted in 1917, ‘Detroit’s unexampled prosperity is the lodestone that is attracting thousands of Negroes’.[ii] Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit’s Black population increased almost eightfold, and then threefold again between 1920 and 1930.[iii] Over the same two decades, however, the geographical area into which these migrants were herded, ‘a densely populated, sixty-square-block section of the city’s Lower East Side’ called Black Bottom, did not grow at all.[iv] Those who lived in this segregated slum were crowded into dilapidated housing, and they suffered the ill-health that such conditions typically produce. According to the same Free Press reporter, residences in Black Bottom were ‘unspeakably vile’.[v] While the wages new migrants earned at Ford and other factories were relatively high, few had the means to challenge the deepening […]
Continue ReadingEssentialism and the Revival of Black Power: Re-inventing American Integrationist Discourse
On July 24 2015, around 500 advocacy groups representing African American communities from all over the country met in a three-day conference at Cleveland State University to deliberate on the creation of a unified political front. Outside the conference facilities, demonstrators shouted slogans decrying what they perceived as deliberate institutional indifference to the plight of their communities in face of the dramatic upsurge of anti-Black racism, police brutality and violence committed by white supremacist groups. The slogans echoed in essence those raised the year before in what historians now call the “Ferguson unrest” in reference to the riots which broke out in two waves over the next four months following the death of 18-year old Michael Brown. The effervescent crowd fuelled further enthusiasm for the participants at the CSU conference who were by now intent on launching a political resistance platform to translate the slogans that had for long remained […]
Continue ReadingHaunting History: Gordon Chang’s Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History
The building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) was a symbol and achievement of unification, of future imperial growth. In his USSO Book Hour Talk, Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History, Stanford historian of Sino-American relations Gordon Chang stated that so much of American history is railroad history. Most railroad history as American history is nationalistic, triumphalist, and technologically driven, focusing on ‘great white men’ and machines. In the name of Western expansion and “civilization,” technology changed Americans’ understanding of time, space, and distance. Paradoxically, the railroad simultaneously united and divided, connected and disconnected. A technologically advanced America in the late-nineteenth century was also the America of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Railroad history simultaneously involves the building of infrastructure and the ways in which a post-slavery America remained segregated after Reconstruction (Zoom 1:08:00-1:13:00). Moreover, it is also a […]
Continue ReadingThe Alt Right: Trump and Terrorism in the Digital Age (Part One)
In November 2016, former real-estate millionaire and reality television personality Donald J. Trump was announced as the 45th President of the United States. During the Presidential campaign, Trump faced off against Hillary Clinton, the intended Democrat successor to Barack Obama. However, Trump usurped Clinton after an unexpected surge of support came from what Clinton termed “…the basket of deplorables—the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” [1]. In acknowledging, and denouncing, the emerging Alternate Right – Clinton unknowingly bolstered their campaigns in support of Trump, as scholar Niko Heikkilä writes: “Rather than serve as a nail in the ideology’s coffin, Clinton’s speech instead catapulted the Alt-Right from obscurity into the national spotlight and its supporters could not have been more thrilled” [2]. Only a year later, in August of 2017, it became clear that Trump’s Presidency had legitimised the growing faction of ‘deplorables’; the Unite the Right rally in […]
Continue ReadingMAGA, White Evangelicals, and the Objection to Kamala Harris
Trump established his political career with the Obama birther conspiracy, which alleged that President Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the US and was, therefore, an illegitimate president. Since then, discrediting Black and Brown people’s full human standing, particularly women’s, has been a central feature of his presidency, as shown when he told “the Squad” to “go back” to wherever they came from; three were born in the US, and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, found asylum in the US as a child. Similarly, the Trump campaign attempts to chip away at Kamala Harris’s legitimacy as a presidential candidate with messaging underpinned by the white South’s historic veneration of manliness, suspicion regarding anyone who is not white, and fear of anarchy.[1] Trump’s ads against Harris and, through her, Joe Biden, contain elements of traditional, religion-laced white supremacy and sexism, which attempt to attract Trump’s white, evangelical Christian base through rhetorical […]
Continue ReadingFrederick Douglass’s Literary Appendix as a tool of Self-Representation
“Douglass re-invented the format of slave narrative in his pivotal My Bondage and its Appendix by reproducing, repurposing, and reimagining his public performances.”
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