#Dana Ain-Davis

[absmarchive]

UTSA hosts reproductive justice activists Dana-Ain Davis and Deirdre Cooper Owens

[brooklynblerd]

So You Want To Be An Ally

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been fielding many white-guilt questions at work and having very interesting conversations and Zoom calls. Overall, they have been well received, but I am not sure if anything will happen once this is no longer a hot topic. I hope we keep up the momentum, but the media and Politicians and other power holders will try to silence us as quickly as possible. All of the companies realizing that #BlackLivesMatter will inevitably fade away as well. WE HAVE TO KEEP THE PRESSURE ON. So I made a list of talking points for the company that I work for, I hope they put it to use. I will begin sending this to anyone that reaches out to me to “talk” or “to see if I am ok”. While I appreciate the concern (if it’s genuine), I cannot continue being your only Black friend or the only Black person that you feel comfortable speaking to. 

I saw this on Twitter recently, White privilege doesn't mean that your life hasn't been hard, it just means that the color of your skin isn't one of the things that makes it harder. I think this pretty much sums up what white people need to understand, what those people calling themselves our allies need to understand. Having Black pride & saying Black Lives Matter should not offend anyone. It does not mean that we are anti white people.

Black people are not a monolith. While we have all experienced racism in some form or another, we do not share the exact same experiences with it. To try and get an overall view of the different types of racism, you need to speak to many different Black people. Stop treating us as a collective, we are all individuals.  Racism has permeated every single institution in this country. Education, Housing, Banking, Healthcare, Criminal Justice, Entertainment, etc. Racism is very much systemic, not always overt. There are also many different microaggressions that do not present as overt racism. Also, if we are going to have these discussions, please make sure that we feel safe, that we will be heard without reprimand or cynicism or disbelief. Our silence is the reason why this has gone on for so long. We want to be heard. We are no longer willing to stay invisible. Fear makes many of us stay silent, not willing to upset the status quo.

Revamp your hiring strategy/quota. People and organizations tend to conflate diversity and inclusivity. They are NOT the same. While there are many women, LGBTQIA members, Black and other People of Color, the Executives, Sales Management, and HR do not reflect this.

Conversations about race and other social justice issues are uncomfortable. Having these conversations without any Black and People of color present is pointless. Make sure you have Black people and other People of Color in any discussions you have regarding race relations and any other social justice issues. Empathy and sympathy is great, but it will not replace an actual experience.

Understand that the current state of the world has been a long time coming. George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel's back. The only difference is that everyone has a camera now and the police aren't doing themselves any favors by brutalizing everyone who is protesting police brutality.

Acknowledge your privilege. Acknowledge that the system is built to benefit you more than it does us and that it always has.

Saying "I'm not racist" isn't enough anymore. You have to be anti-racist. You have to stop the jokes, stereotypes, etc amongst your circle of friends and family members. This will be hard. But Black and Brown lives have to matter more than offending anyone that is unwilling to change.

Racism is not up to Black people and other People of Color to solve. This wasn't created or instituted by us and as we remain the "minority" in positions of power, we are unable to change it. We only have the ability to fight it, to rise up and demand change. To show that we will no longer take it. We will no longer be silent. We were all taught to be quiet and hold our feelings in to make sure that white people are comfortable. To make sure that we don’t appear threatening or angry. That is changing. Things will not go back to the way that they were. 

Books to read in your journey of becoming an ally:

How To Be An Antiracist - Ibram X. Kensi

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism - Robin Diangelo

So You Want To Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo

Me and white Supremacy - Layla F. Saad

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America - Ibram X. Kendi

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates 

Notes of A Native Son - James Baldwin 

Born A Crime - Trevor Noah

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittany Cooper

Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth - Dana-Ain Davis

Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States - Edwardo Bonilla-Silva

Towards the Other America: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter - Chris Crass

Two Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage - Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin

How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide - Crystal Fleming

The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions - Vilna Bashi Treitler

Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach - Tanya Golash Boza

Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations - Joe Feagin

White Rage; the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide - Carol Anderson

Black Americans - Alphonso Pinkney

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to Present - Harriet Washington

The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry- Maryann Erigha

Code of the Street - Elijah Anderson

The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon

The Mis-Education of the Negro - Carter Woodson

UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol.1 - Joseph Zerbo

UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 2 - G. Mokhtar

Black Wealth/White Wealth - Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race - Beverly Daniel Tatum

Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice - Paul Kivel

Witnessing Whiteness - Shelly Tochluk

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race - Derald Wing Sue

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching about Race and Racism to People Who Don't Want to Know - Tema Jon Okun

Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race - Frances Kendall

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics - George Lipsitz

Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race - Debby Irving

How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood - Jim Grimsley

Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice: 15 Stories - editors = Eddie Moore, Marguerite W. Penick-Parks & Ali Michael

Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America - Joseph Barndt

Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History - Vron Ware

Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence - editors = Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams & Keisha N. Blain

We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America - editors = Elizabeth Betita Martinez, Matt Meyer & Mandy Carter. Forward by Cornel West. Afterword by Alice Walker & Sonia Sanchez

killing rage: Ending Racism - bell hooks

Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America - Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy - Chris Crass

White Like Me: Reflections on Race form A Privileged Son - Tim Wise

White Trash: Race and Class in America - editors = Annalee Newitz & Matt Wray

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces - Radley Balko

Race Traitor - editors = Noel Ignatiev & John Garvey

Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education (Cultural Pluralism #2) - Cheryl E. Matias

Disrupting White Supremacy

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times - AmySonnie, James Tracy

For White Folks Who Teach in The Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy) - Christopher Emdin

Benign Bigotry: The Psychology Subtle Prejudice - Kristin J. Anderson

Subversive Southern: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century) - Catherine Fosl

How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America - Karen Brodkin

America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America - Jim Wells

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge

Living Into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism in America - editor = Catherine Meeks

Promise And A Way Of Live: White Antiracist Activism - Becky Thompson

What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy (Counterpoints #398) - Robin Diangelo

[labofspeculativeethnology]

God’s Eye Views

Not long ago my friend Dana-Ain Davis reminded me to look at the charts and graphs that WEB DuBois had made for the 1900 exhibition in Paris.  Blog posts from a variety of web sites variously call them “infographics,” “data stories,” and “data visualizations,” and remark on their gorgeous, modernist aesthetics.

In Hyperallergic, Allison Meier writes:

Looking at the charts, they’re strikingly vibrant and modern, almost anticipating the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky. But they are in line with innovative 19th-century data visualization, which included Florence Nightingale’s “coxcomb” diagrams on causes of war mortality and William Farr’s dynamic cholera charts. Du Bois himself used horizontal bar graphs in his 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro.

I admit I am disturbed, or maybe jostled by the “But” part of this quote which somehow seems to me to be about diminishing the impact of these pieces.  By “but”?  It seems needlessly defensive.

Certainly when looking at this image, it’s hard NOT to think of Mondrian:

Wanting to explore these images further, I decided to print out a whole lot of the charts and put them up on the studio wall.  Once they were all together, they looked like this:

While I still saw the Mondrian reference what struck me even more was that the form and colors of the graphics reminded me much more of Gee's Bend quilts.  The quilts come from a community of African Americans in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and are renowned for their distinctive aesthetics as well as the ways that these differ from other quilting traditions.  In particular, from my point of view, the Gee’s Bend quilts show a dedication to the kinds of improvisation you find in African diasporic music and dance, that is, mastery of a structure that calls forth and values many many variations.  I started searching out images of the quilts and juxtaposing them with the graphics.

To my eye, these resonate together with such energy that Mondrian is no longer a relevant reference point.  The universalist aesthetics of Mondrian’s work don’t really fit what is powering the quilts and the graphs, either.  Both are emphatically oriented around the representation and understanding of Blackness.

In the bottom two images above, a quilt by Annie Mae Young is an example of the “work clothes”quilts often made in Gee’s Bend.  These quilts are constructed of old blue jeans and other work wear.  Next to it is the WEB DuBois chart “Occupations in Which American Negroes are Engaged.”  Their synergy is one I find stunning -- that a quilt made of old work clothes by a descendant of enslaved people would be made up of the same stuff as the DuBois graphs.  Both about the labor of Black men, both about representing that labor, both about putting it into a dignified form both about asserting aesthetic mastery in the telling of the story.

Another chart that showed land owned by “negroes” in Georgia looked very quilt-like, and in both form and color palette resonated strongly with a redlining map of Los Angeles from the 1930s. Two Gee’s Bend quilts also seemed to fit in visually.  Both are in a pattern called “housetop.”  Again the synergy.  God’s eye view in both quilt and redlining maps now clashing rather than coordinating, though their looks are similar.  The clear, handmade quality of the DuBois charts along with the quilts themselves, remind us of the ways in which geographies are socially produced.  Joining them together with the redlining maps, which appear much more authoritative because of their mechanically made images, pushes us to recognize even that landscape as the result of human work and effort.  This all got me to thinking about gerrymandered voting districts, a hot topic at the moment for a variety of reasons, not the least of them that the Supreme Court struck down gerrymandering in North Carolina and is scheduled to hear a Wisconsin case. Early in 2017, Alabama itself was ordered by the Supreme Court to redraw 12 voting districts because they amounted to “racial gerrymandering.” So even more synergy that the community in which the housetop quilts are made, gerrymandering is a directly relevant issue.

An all-black image of a gerrymandered district, on the upper right hand of my assemblage - looks a whole lot like one of Kara Walker’s paper cutouts to me.

All put together, I see a commentary on race, geography and the United States that juxtaposes the scrappy, willful hope of a quiltmaker creating “housetops,” with the fear-based power mapping built into redlining and gerrymandering.

This will go somewhere with the Lab this summer, not sure where.

[labofspeculativeethnology]

God’s Eye Views

Not long ago my friend Dana-Ain Davis reminded me to look at the charts and graphs that WEB DuBois had made for the 1900 exhibition in Paris.  Blog posts from a variety of web sites variously call them “infographics,” “data stories,” and “data visualizations,” and remark on their gorgeous, modernist aesthetics. 

In Hyperallergic, Allison Meier writes:

Looking at the charts, they’re strikingly vibrant and modern, almost anticipating the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky. But they are in line with innovative 19th-century data visualization, which included Florence Nightingale’s “coxcomb” diagrams on causes of war mortality and William Farr’s dynamic cholera charts. Du Bois himself used horizontal bar graphs in his 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro. 

Certainly when looking at this image, it’s hard NOT to think of Mondrian:

I decided to print out a whole lot of the charts and put them up on the studio wall.  Once they were all together, they looked like this (with a bunch of bling-y trim lined up next to them):