#Ellison Booker

[milliondollarbaby87]

Nickel Boys (2024) Review

The friendship between Elwood and Turner as they help each other survive in a reform school in Florida, which was known for abusive treatment of the students. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Continue reading Nickel Boys (2024) Review

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Allison Janokwski at DNC:

5:30 PM

Call to Order Alex Hornbrook Executive Director of the 2024 Democratic National Convention Committee Gavel In The Honorable Cory Booker United States Senator, New Jersey Invocation Sri Rakesh Bhatt Sri Siva Vishnu Temple Bishop Leah D. Daughtry The House of the Lord Churches Pledge of Allegiance Students from Moreland Arts & Health Sciences Magnet School from St. Paul, MN National Anthem Jess Davis Presentation of Honorary Resolutions The Honorable Jaime Harrison Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Joined by Vice Chairs The Honorable Keisha Lance Bottoms, Ken Martin, Henry R. Muñoz III, Treasurer Virginia McGregor, and Finance Chair Chris Korge. Remarks Mini Timmaraju President and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All Remarks Alexis McGill Johnson President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund Remarks Cecile Richards Reproductive Rights Champion Remarks Kelley Robinson President of the Human Rights Campaign Remarks Jessica Mackler President of EMILYs List Remarks María Teresa Kumar Founding President and CEO of Voto Latino Remarks The Honorable Tom Suozzi Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, New York

6:00 PM

Welcome Remarks The Honorable Cory Booker United States Senator, New Jersey Joint Remarks The Honorable Aftab Pureval Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio The Honorable Cavalier Johnson Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin Joint Remarks Rashawn Spivey and Deanna Branch Lead pipe removal advocates Remarks The Honorable Lisa Blunt Rochester Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Delaware Remarks The Honorable Grace Meng Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, New York Remarks: “Project 2025—Chapter Three: Freedoms” The Honorable Jared Polis Governor of Colorado Remarks The Honorable Debbie Wasserman Schultz Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Florida Remarks The Honorable Suzan DelBene Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Remarks The Honorable Keith Ellison Attorney General of Minnesota Remarks The Honorable Dana Nessel Attorney General of Michigan Joint Remarks Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg Parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin Performance Maren Morris American singer-songwriter

7:00 PM

Remarks The Honorable Veronica Escobar Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Texas Remarks The Honorable Chris Murphy United States Senator, Connecticut Remarks The Honorable Javier Salazar Sheriff of Bexar County, Texas Remarks The Honorable Pete Aguilar Chair of the House Democratic Caucus Influencer Remarks Carlos Eduardo Espina Content creator Remarks Olivia Troye Former Trump administration national security official Remarks The Honorable Geoff Duncan Former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia Remarks The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mississippi Remarks Sergeant Aquilino Gonell Retired United States Capitol Police Officer Remarks The Honorable Andy Kim Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, New Jersey Influencer Remarks Olivia Julianna Content creator Performance Stevie Wonder American singer-songwriter and musician Remarks Kenan Thompson and Guests on Project 2025 American comedian and actor

8:00 PM

Host Introduction Mindy Kaling Remarks The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Remarks The Honorable Bill Clinton 42nd President of the United States Remarks The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker Emerita of the U.S. House of Representatives Remarks The Honorable Josh Shapiro Governor of Pennsylvania Remarks Alexander Hudlin Jasper Emhoff Arden Emhoff Remarks The Honorable Catherine Cortez Masto United States Senator, Nevada

9:00 PM

Performance Amanda Gorman National Youth Poet Laureate Remarks The Honorable Wes Moore Governor of Maryland Remarks The Honorable Pete Buttigieg Performance John Legend American singer-songwriter Sheila E. American singer and drummer Remarks The Honorable Amy Klobuchar United States Senator, Minnesota Remarks Benjamin C. Ingman Former student of Governor Walz Remarks The Honorable Tim Walz Governor of Minnesota Benediction William Emmanuel Hall Lead Pastor of St. James Church in Chicago

Apologies for the delay of night 3’s release of the DNC Speaker schedule.

The main speaker of tonight is Minnesota Governor and Kamala Harris VP pick Tim Walz.

Other notable Speakers: Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Geoff Duncan, Andy Kim, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Josh Shapiro, and Pete Buttigieg.

Grace Meng and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were initially set to speak on Monday, but got moved to tonight.

Performers: Maren Morris, John Legend, Amanda Gorman (poem), Stevie Wonder

[dianaladrislovebot]

hey there ! in australia it is currently 3:30am, meaning it is officially everyone’s favourite bitchboy’s birthday ! as i said a few days ago, i gave yall the choice between the list of birthdays i’ve made for the characters or my commentation on the books and across both tumblr and instagram the birthday list just managed to win 14 to 13 ! i played around w some of the years w some very shoddy math so without further ado, here are my fan made birthdays for all the characters ! (and don’t worry for those of you who voted for the commentary, it will still be coming ! the vote was just to see what would come first ! <3)

sam temple / caine soren : november 22, 1993 (sagittarius) (canon)

elwood booker : december 29, 1993 (capricorn)

frederico : january 20, 1994 (capricorn)

dahra baidoo : february 4, 1994 (aquarius)

quinn gaither : february 21, 1994 (pisces)

howard bassem : march 11, 1994 (pisces)

astrid ellison : march 25, 1994 (aries)

charles ‘orc’ merriman : april 2, 1994 (aries)

drake merwin : april 12, 1994 (aries) (canon)

dekka talent : may 10, 1994 (taurus)

mary terrafino : june 15, 1994 (gemini)

edilio escobar : july 30, 1994 (leo)

lana arwen lazar : august 15, 1994 (leo)

albert hillsborough : september 14, 1994 (virgo)

sanjit brattle-chance : september 29, 1994 (libra)

diana ladris : october 23, 1994 (scorpio)

roger : november 13, 1994 (scorpio)

sinder : july 14, 1995 (cancer)

penny : october 16, 1995 (libra)

brittney donegal : december 15, 1995 (sagittarius)

jack : january 16, 1996 (capricorn)

taylor : may 30, 1996 (gemini)

virtue brattle-chance : august 24, 1996 (virgo)

brianna berenson : december 12, 1996 (sagittarius)

bug : july 3, 1999 (cancer)

let me know if there’s any characters i missed or the ones here you agree w, i’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts headcanons and opinions <3

[thatstormygeek]

This is a blueprint for Begging the Question of America, one that says that all of the nation’s evil sits, definitionally, outside of its substance. When Nina Simone said “Mississippi Goddam,” she wasn’t cursing America’s soul, but rather expressing her deep but momentarily thwarted belief in our country. Republicans will kill ‘em all and let god sort it out. Democrats, more civilized, leave the sorting to historians.  The Democratic National Convention is a machine for the production of this sentiment. It is very good at its job. It takes in the ragged world and produces smooth unanimity. All inequities are recast as feel-good stories. Tom Suozzi, the blandest of cardboard Congressmen, proudly told the crowd that his father was elected the youngest judge in New York state. “What a country!” he said. An amazing country, where the son of a judge can become a Congressman.  There is rhetorical jujitsu and then there is the even more masterful form in which every edge of every issue has been sanded down so cleanly that they all flow by without any objectionable points that one might even grab onto. There was Keith Ellison, the progressive attorney general of Minnesota, dutifully assuring anyone worried about Kamala Harris’s and Tim Walz’s foreign policy that “everyone is included in their circle of compassion.”

The belief that political parties should be vessels of moral change is a minority view. The Democratic Party, evolving though it is, has not lost its muscle memory for bringing down a hammer on its own left flank. All week, the Uncommitted movement—the delegates who have been withholding their formal support of the ticket in order to try to force the Democrats to do something meaningful for the people of Gaza—have been asking the party to allow a Palestinian American to speak from the convention stage. The party said no. Instead, last night it gave a large block of time to the Chicago-born parents of a young man who had been attending the music festival in Israel when Hamas attacked on October 7, and who is still being held hostage. Their pain oozed from their faces. Their story was heart-wrenching. They even expressed a generic hope that someone, somewhere, will “stop the despair in Gaza,” as though despair is a naturally occurring phenomena, rather than one with a very specific source.  Their voices deserved to be heard. Their speeches would have been a perfect time to also feature remarks from one of the many Palestinian Democrats who have asked for a chance to give voice to the pain of their own friends and family. But no. What cannot be said on the stage of a political convention tells you just as much about a party’s values as the things that they allow you to hear.

[doyouknowthisbook-poll]

FINAL RESULT: The majority of voters have never read this book and did not like the excerpt posted. 😔

Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison. From Wikipedia: "Published in 1952, it addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.

Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African-American writer to win the award. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century."

Do you know which book this is from?

Please reblog the polls, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people read the excerpt with an open mind 💖📚 Title and author will be revealed after the poll's conclusion.

[fiinalgiirls-aa]

reggie & apollo, besthabit.

@besthabit​ asked guard or attention, from this meme. still accepting !

the building reggie rented for her dojo was located in a strip mall along the interstate. it wasn’t an especially dangerous neighborhood, but there were a couple of bars and a 24 hour gym in the same strip, so she’d become no stranger to breaking up the occasional fight. as she locked up, she could hear some commotion coming from around the corner and sighed as she resolved herself to check things out before heading to her car.

as she rounded the corner, she spotted two men--one obviously intoxicated bordering on belligerent and the other, it seemed to her, trying to diffuse the situation passively. tapping him on the shoulder, she was sure the belligerent one was insisting on an autograph and becoming more and more surly by the moment. “is this guy bothering you?” reggie asked softly, taking a step in front of him, while keeping her body angled at both men.

[godzilla-reads]

A Century of Books: 1900′s

1900′s

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum (1900)

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington (1901)

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906)

1910′s

Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (1911)

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)

The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915)

1920′s

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie (1920)

The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot (1922)

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (1922)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (1926)

1930′s

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1939)

1940′s

Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (1944)

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

1950′s

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (1952)

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

1960′s

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

The Autobiography of Malclom X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X (1965)

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

1970′s

Roots by ALex Haley (1976)

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)

The Shining by Stephen King (1977)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)

1980′s

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

1990′s

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)

Do you have a favorite literary decade?

[politicalsci]

[lets-talk-about-politics]

"But if they just want to have a retread of the 2015-16 primary, the center could just try to win dirty. The left, they might say (working hand-in-glove with sympathetic columnists), just doesn't like minority or female candidates because they are racist and sexist.”

Ryan Cooper is anticipating the counterargument to his column because, well, it’s a pretty accurate one. He’s attacking three politicians of color, one who is a woman. He attacks Neera Tanden in his article, yet another woman of color. When he talks about the policies that leftists champion, he talks about Medicare for all, social security, a rise in the minimum wage, and free college, none of which are specifically focusing on race or gender. When he talks about politicians he does like, he talks about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you know, white people. To his credit, he brings up Keith Ellison, but hey, you gotta tokenize somebody, right?

Leftists like to talk about conservatives being racist and sexist, but you know what, both of those are all over the left as well. And until leftists come to terms with that, nobody should take them seriously.

[richincolor]

The Rich in Color bloggers got together and compiled a list of some of our favorite YA books that came out in the last year-ish for Black History Month. How many of these have you read? What are some of your recent favorite books by Black authors?

Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett Knopf Books for Young Readers || Audrey’s review

In a community that isn’t always understanding, an HIV-positive teen must navigate fear, disclosure, and radical self-acceptance when she falls in love—and lust—for the first time. Powerful and uplifting, Full Disclosure will speak to fans of Angie Thomas and Nicola Yoon.

Simone Garcia-Hampton is starting over at a new school, and this time things will be different. She’s making real friends, making a name for herself as student director of Rent, and making a play for Miles, the guy who makes her melt every time he walks into a room. The last thing she wants is for word to get out that she’s HIV-positive, because last time . . . well, last time things got ugly.

Keeping her viral load under control is easy, but keeping her diagnosis under wraps is not so simple. As Simone and Miles start going out for real—shy kisses escalating into much more—she feels an uneasiness that goes beyond butterflies. She knows she has to tell him that she’s positive, especially if sex is a possibility, but she’s terrified of how he’ll react! And then she finds an anonymous note in her locker: I know you have HIV. You have until Thanksgiving to stop hanging out with Miles. Or everyone else will know too.

Simone’s first instinct is to protect her secret at all costs, but as she gains a deeper understanding of the prejudice and fear in her community, she begins to wonder if the only way to rise above is to face the haters head-on…

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis Tor Teen || K. Imani’s Review

Westworld meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this stunning fantasy adventure from debut author Charlotte Nicole Davis.

Aster, the protector Violet, the favorite Tansy, the medic Mallow, the fighter Clementine, the catalyst

THE GOOD LUCK GIRLS

The country of Arketta calls them Good Luck Girls–they know their luck is anything but. Sold to a “welcome house” as children and branded with cursed markings. Trapped in a life they would never have chosen.

When Clementine accidentally murders a man, the girls risk a dangerous escape and harrowing journey to find freedom, justice, and revenge in a country that wants them to have none of those things. Pursued by Arketta’s most vicious and powerful forces, both human and inhuman, their only hope lies in a bedtime story passed from one Good Luck Girl to another, a story that only the youngest or most desperate would ever believe.

It’s going to take more than luck for them all to survive.

I Wanna Be Where You Are by Kristina Forest Roaring Brook Press || Jessica’s Review

When Chloe Pierce’s mom forbids her to apply for a spot at the dance conservatory of her dreams, she devises a secret plan to drive two hundred miles to the nearest audition. But Chloe hits her first speed bump when her annoying neighbor Eli insists upon hitching a ride, threatening to tell Chloe’s mom if she leaves him and his smelly dog, Geezer, behind. So now Chloe’s chasing her ballet dreams down the east coast―two unwanted (but kinda cute) passengers in her car, butterflies in her stomach, and a really dope playlist on repeat.

Filled with roadside hijinks, heart-stirring romance, and a few broken rules, I Wanna Be Where You Are is a YA debut perfect for fans of Jenny Han and Sandhya Menon.

Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds Katherine Tegan Books || K. Imani’s Review

Jack Ellison King. King of Almost.

He almost made valedictorian.

He almost made varsity.

He almost got the girl . . .

When Jack and Kate meet at a party, bonding until sunrise over their mutual love of Fruit Loops and their favorite flicks, Jack knows he’s falling—hard. Soon she’s meeting his best friends, Jillian and Franny, and Kate wins them over as easily as she did Jack. Jack’s curse of almost is finally over.

But this love story is . . . complicated. It is an almost happily ever after. Because Kate dies. And their story should end there. Yet Kate’s death sends Jack back to the beginning, the moment they first meet, and Kate’s there again. Beautiful, radiant Kate. Healthy, happy, and charming as ever. Jack isn’t sure if he’s losing his mind. Still, if he has a chance to prevent Kate’s death, he’ll take it. Even if that means believing in time travel. However, Jack will learn that his actions are not without consequences. And when one choice turns deadly for someone else close to him, he has to figure out what he’s willing to do—and let go—to save the people he loves.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi Make Me a World

Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look?

There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown up with this lesson all her life. But when she meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colours and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question-How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

In their riveting and timely young adult debut, acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices a young person can make when the adults around them are in denial.

The Revolution of Birdie Randolph by Brandy Colbert Little Brown Books for Young Readers || K. Imani’s Review

Perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Nicola Yoon comes a novel about first love and family secrets from Stonewall Book Award winner Brandy Colbert.

Dove “Birdie” Randolph works hard to be the perfect daughter and follow the path her parents have laid out for her: She quit playing her beloved soccer, she keeps her nose buried in textbooks, and she’s on track to finish high school at the top of her class. But then Birdie falls hard for Booker, a sweet boy with a troubled past…whom she knows her parents will never approve of.

When her estranged aunt Carlene returns to Chicago and moves into the family’s apartment above their hair salon, Birdie notices the tension building at home. Carlene is sweet, friendly, and open-minded–she’s also spent decades in and out of treatment facilities for addiction. As Birdie becomes closer to both Booker and Carlene, she yearns to spread her wings. But when long-buried secrets rise to the surface, everything she’s known to be true is turned upside down.

Say Her Name by Zetta Elliott Disney || Crystal’s Review

Say her name and solemnly vow Never to forget, or allow Our sisters’ lives to be erased; Their presence cannot be replaced. This senseless slaughter must stop now.

Award-winning author Zetta Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls. Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists championing the Black Lives Matter cause. This compelling collection reveals the beauty, danger, and magic found at the intersection of race and gender.

Slay by Brittney Morris Simon Pulse || Group Discussion

By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Black man.”

But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for “anti-white discrimination.”

Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?

[northernstories]

African American Literature Suggestions from NMU English Department

The English Department at Northern Michigan University has prepared this list of several dozen suggested readings in African American literature, with some materials also addressing Native American history and culture. The first section contains books that will help provide a context for the Black Lives Matter movement. It includes books that will help readers examine their own privilege and act more effectively for the greater good. Following that list is another featuring many African American authors and books. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does provide readers a place to start. Almost all of these books are readily available in bookstores and public and university libraries.

Northern Michigan University’s English Department offers at least one course on African American literature every semester, at least one course on Native American literature every semester, and at least one additional course on non-western world literatures every semester. Department faculty also incorporate diverse material in many other courses. For more information, contact the department at english@nmu.edu. Nonfiction, primarily addressing current events, along with some classic texts: Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, editors. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. This classic collection of scholarly articles, essays, and interviews explores the links between social inequalities and unequal distribution of environmental risk. Attention is focused on the US context, but authors also consider global impacts. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A clear-eyed explication of how mass incarceration has created a new racial caste system obscured by the ideology of color-blindness. Essential reading for understanding our criminal justice system in relation to the histories of slavery and segregation. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. A very well-written but disturbing and direct analysis of the history of structural and institutionalized racism in the United States. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldua writes about the complexity of life on multiple borders, both literal (the border between the US/Mexico) and conceptual (the borders among languages, sexual identity, and gender). Anzaldua also crosses generic borders, moving among essay, story, history, and poetry. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. A classic indictment of white supremacy expressed in a searing, prophetic voice that is, simply, unmatched. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. A combination of personal narrative in the form of the author’s letter to his son, historical analysis, and contemporary reportage. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? In this succinct and carefully researched book, Davis exposes the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. This is a must-read for folks new to conversations about prison (and police) abolition. Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean To Be White? The author facilitates white people unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression through a variety of methods and extensive research. Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarshnha, editors. Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement. The book attempts to solve problems of violence at a grassroots level in minority communities, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The most well-known narrative written by one of the most well-known and accomplished enslaved persons in the United States. First published in 1845 when Douglass was approximately 28 years old. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. Collection of essays in which Dubois famously prophesied that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Must reading, a beautifully written, scholarly, and accessible discussion of American history from Reconstruction to the beginnings of the Jim Crow era. Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. In an attempt to locate relatives in Ghana, the author journeyed along the route her ancestors would have taken as they became enslaved in the United States. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. A collection of essays that analyze how white supremacy is systemically maintained through, among other activities, popular culture. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Narrative of a woman who escaped slavery by hiding in an attic for seven years. This book offers unique insights into the sexually predatory behavior of slave masters. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A detailed history not only of racist events in American history, but of the racist thinking that permitted and continues to permit these events. This excellent and readable book traces this thinking from the colonial period through the presidency of Barack Obama. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life Any of LaDuke's works belong on this list. This particular text explores the stories of several Indigenous communities as they struggle with environmental and cultural degradation. An incredible resource. Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir. An intense book that questions American myths of individual success written by a man who is able to situate his own life within a much larger whole. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color This foundational text brings together work by writers, scholars, and activists such as Audre Lorde, Chrystos, Barbara Smith, Norma Alarcon, Nellie Wong, and many others. The book has been called a manifesto and a call to action and remains just as important and relevant as when it was published nearly 40 years ago. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard. An invaluable collection of essays and speeches from the only black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Throughout her oeuvre, Morrison calls us to take "personal responsibility for alleviating social harm," an ethic she identified with Martin Luther King. Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity. Ore scrutinizes the history of lynching in America and contemporary manifestations of lynching, drawing upon the murder of Trayvon Martin and other contemporary manifestations of police brutality. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. A description and discussion of racial aggression and micro-aggression in contemporary America. The book was selected for NMU’s Diversity Common Reader Program in 2016. Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy. The author facilitates white people in unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression, while also helping them understand key critical social justice terminology. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, Alana Yu-lan Price, editors. Who do you Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. The essays examine "police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures." What are alternative measures to keep marginalized communities safe? Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? The authors, in very easy to read and engaging language, facilitate readers in understanding the ---isms (racism, sexism, ableism etc.) and how they intersect, helping readers see their positionality and how privilege and oppression work to perpetuate the status quo. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. An analysis of America’s criminal justice system by the lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. While upsetting, the book is also hopeful. Wendy S. Walters, Multiply / Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. In this collection of essays, Walters analyzes the racial psyche of several major American cities, emphasizing the ways bias can endanger entire communities. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery. Autobiography of the founder of Tuskegee Institute. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid. From the surgical experiments performed on enslaved black women to the contemporary recruitment of prison populations for medical research, Washington illuminates how American medicine has been--and continues to be shaped--by anti-black racism. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Autobiography of civil rights leader that traces his evolution as a thinker, speaker, and writer.

If you would like to enhance your knowledge of the rich tradition of African American literature, here are several of the most popular books and authors within that tradition, focused especially on the 20thand 21st centuries. Novels and Short Stories James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Passing Nella Larsen, Quicksand Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison, Beloved Richard Wright, Native Son Drama Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf August Wilson, Fences August Wilson, The Piano Lesson Poetry A good place to begin is an anthology, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton. It includes work by poets from the 18th century to the present, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claude McKay, Phillis Wheatley, and many others. Here are some more recent collections: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis Tyehimba Jess, Olio Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead

[astrologieez]

Influential/Talented Black Men and Masculine Nonbinary People of the Sun Signs

Aries:

- Keegan-Michael Key (March 22)

- Brian Tyree Henry (March 31)

- Booker T. Washington (April 5)

- Pharrell Williams (April 5)

- Sterling K. Brown (April 5)

- Montero “Lil Nas X” Hill (April 9)

- Tyler Mitchell (April 12)

- Martin Lawrence (April 16)

- Aliaune “Akon” Thiam (April 16)

- Chancelor “Chance the Rapper” Bennett (April 16)

Taurus:

- Frederick “August Wilson” Kittel, Jr. (April 27)

- Edward “Duke” Ellington (April 29)

- Shameik Moore (May 4)

- Stevland “Stevie Wonder” Morris (May 13)

- Malcolm X (May 19)

- Trevor “Busta Rhymes” Smith Jr. (May 20)

Gemini:

- Ryan Coogler (May 23)

- Steve Lacy (May 23)

- André “3000” Benjamin (May 27)

- Cameron Boyce (May 28)

- Aaron McGruder (May 29)

- Morgan Freeman (June 1)

- Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7)

- Khalif “Swae Lee” Brown (June 7)

- O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (June 15)

- Tupac “Makaveli” Shakur (June 16)

- James Weldon Johnson (June 17)

- Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (June 17)

Cancer:

- Donald Faison (June 22)

- Ricardo “6lack” Valentine (June 24)

- Paul Lawrence Dunbar (June 27)

- Mike Tyson (June 30)

- Thurgood Marshall (July 2)

- Vince Staples (July 2)

- Alex R. Hibbert (July 4)

- Jaden Smith (July 8)

- Chiwetel Ejiofor (July 10)

Leo:

- Marlon Wayans (July 23)

- Korey Wise (July 26)

- Laurence Fishburne (July 30)

- Terry Crews (July 30)

- Wesley Snipes (July 31)

- Symere “Lil Uzi Vert” Woods (July 31)

- Artis “Coolio” Ivey Jr. (August 1)

- James Baldwin (August 2)

- Louis Armstrong (August 4)

- Barack Obama (August 4)

- Alex Haley (August 11)

- Lakeith Stanfield (August 12)

- Anthony Anderson (August 15)

- Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom (August 15)

- Usian Bolt (August 21)

Virgo:

- David “Dave” Chapelle (August 24)

- Lewis Latimer (September 4)

- Richard Wright (September 4)

- Idris Elba (September 6)

- Christopher “Ludacris” Bridges (September 11)

- Festus “Claude” McKay (September 15)

- Christopher “Brent Faiyaz” Wood (September 19)

- Billy Porter (September 21)

- Ray Charles Robinson (September 23)

- Anthony Mackie (September 23)

Libra:

- Will Smith (September 25)

- Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover (September 26)

- Benjamin “Ben” King (September 28)

- Ta-Nehisi Coates (September 30)

- Nat Turner (October 2)

- Rakim “A$AP Rocky” Mayers (October 3)

- Amiri Baraka (October 7)

- Nick Cannon (October 8)

- Jharrel Jerome (October 9)

- Caleb McLaughlin (October 13)

- Usher Raymond IV (October 14)

- Andre Johnson (October 16)

- Tarell Alvin McCraney (October 17)

- Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus Jr. (October 20)

- Asante Blackk (October 20)

- Shéyaa “21 Savage” Abraham-Jospeh (October 22)

Scorpio:

- Ashton Sanders (October 24)

- Craig Robinson (October 25)

- Dallas Young (October 25)

- Frank Ocean (October 28)

- Cornell “Nelly” Haynes, Jr. (November 2)

- Colin Kaepernick (November 3)

- Earl “E-40” Stevens (November 15)

- Bobby Ray “B.o.B.” Simmons Jr. (November 15)

- Michael “Mike” Epps (November 18)

Sagittarius:

- DeRon Horton (November 25)

- Jimi Hendrix (November 27)

- Donald Cheadle Jr. (November 29)

- Chadwick Boseman (November 29)

- Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter (December 4)

- Jamie Foxx (December 13)

- Samuel L. Jackson (December 21)

Capricorn:

- Devonté “Blood Orange” Hynes (December 23)

- Cabell “Cab” Calloway III (December 25)

- Jaleel White (December 27)

- Denzel Washington (December 28)

- John Legend (December 28)

- Miles Brown (December 28)

- André Holland (December 28)

- John Singleton (January 6)

- Marcus Scribner (January 7)

- Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15)

- James Earl Jones (January 17)

- Muhammad Ali (January 17)

- Shawn Wayans (January 19)

Aquarius:

- Jermaine “J.” Cole (January 28)

- Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi (January 30)

- Jack “Jackie” Robinson (January 31)

- Langston Hughes (February 1)

- Antwon “Big Boi” Patton (February 1)

- Robert “Bob” Marley (February 6)

- Brandon “Anderson .Paak” Anderson (February 8)

- Trevante Rhodes (February 10)

- Khalid Robinson (February 11)

- Frederick Douglass (February 14)

- LeVar Burton (February 16)

- Mahershala Ali (February 16)

- Michael Jordan (February 17)

- Andre “Dr. Dre” Young (February 18)

Pisces:

- William “Smokey” Robinson, Jr. (February 19)

- Trevor Noah (February 20)

- Jordan Peele (February 21)

- Tituss Burgess (February 21)

- W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23)

- Ralph Ellison (March 1)

- Demetrius Harmon (March 1)

- Robert “Bobby” McFerrin, Jr. (March 11)

- Lonnie “Common” Lynn (March 13)

- Quincy Jones (March 14)

- Wardell “Steph” Curry (March 14)

- John Adegboyega (March 17)

- Shelton “Spike” Lee (March 20)

[blackkudos]

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death.

Early life

Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. He was the second of three sons; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916, after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen, when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, Ralph discovering as an adult that his father had hoped he would grow up to be a poet.

In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. According to Ellison, his mother felt that "my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north." When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant. From the father of a neighborhood friend, he received free lessons for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster.

Ida remarried three times after Lewis died. However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attending Douglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team. He graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons. At Douglass, he was influenced by principal Inman E. Page and his daughter, music teacher Zelia N. Breaux.

At Tuskegee Institute

Ellison applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.

Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." In passages of Invisible Man, "he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee."

Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor, Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthusiastically let Ellison share in his knowledge.

A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drezel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collection Shadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life." Through Sprague Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.

As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moved on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult. He discussed this passion in a December 1955 essay, "Living With Music," in High Fidelity magazine. Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form. Ellison remained at Tuskegee until 1936, and decided to leave before completing the requirements for a degree.

In New York

Desiring to study sculpture, he moved to New York City on 5 July 1936 and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America." He met Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing. Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.

He met several artists who would influence his later life, including the artist Romare Bearden and the author Richard Wright (with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship). After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull," inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.

Wright was then openly associated with the Communist Party, and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in Divided Minds. Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.

In 1938 Ellison met Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior. They were married in late 1938. Rose was a stage actress, and continued her career after their marriage. In biographer Arnold Rampersad's assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him--but not challenge his intellect." At first they lived at 312 West 122nd Street, Rose's apartment, but moved to 453 West 140th Street after her income shrank. In 1941 he briefly had an affair with Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterward, and in 1943 the marriage was over.

At the start of World War II, Ellison was classed 1A by the local Selective Service System, and thus eligible for the draft. However, he was not drafted. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine. In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa who was a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer for The Chicago Defender. She helped support Ellison financially while he wrote Invisible Man by working for American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers (the charity supporting Gordon S. Seagrave's medical missionary work). From 1947 to 1951, he earned some money writing book reviews but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted him in editing the typescript as it progressed.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

Later years

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Bard College, Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a Book Week poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2,000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

Awards and recognition

Invisible Man won the 1953 US National Book Award for Fiction.

The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. He eventually was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received two President's Medals (from Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) and a State Medal from France. He was the first African-American admitted to the Century Association and was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Harvard University. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument. In 1955 he traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957 Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest. Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period, and the two writers became close friends. Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and the Civil Rights Movement for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth. During the 1950s, he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the Civil Rights Movement, and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Legacy and posthumous publications

After Ellison's death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999 his second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of 40 years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting...

On February 18, 2014, the USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.

A park on 150th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem (near 730 Riverside Drive, Ellison's principal residence from the early 1950s until his death) was dedicated to Ellison on May 1, 2003. In the park stands a 15 by 8-foot bronze slab with a "cut-out man figure" inspired by his book, "Invisible Man."

Bibliography

Invisible Man (Random House, 1952). ISBN 0-679-60139-2

Flying Home and Other Stories (Random House, 1996). ISBN 0-679-45704-6; includes the short story "A Party Down at the Square"

Juneteenth (Random House, 1999). ISBN 0-394-46457-5

Three Days Before the Shooting... (Modern Library, 2010). ISBN 978-0-375-75953-6

Essay collections

Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964). ISBN 0-679-76000-8

Going to the Territory (Random House, 1986). ISBN 0-394-54050-6

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995). ISBN 0-679-60176-7

Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library, 2002). ISBN 0-375-76023-7

Letters

Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (Modern Library, 2000). ISBN 0-375-50367-6

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running close with Joe Biden among white voters, according to national polls. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, (and sometimes Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders) leads the former vice president in recent surveys of overwhelmingly white Iowa. But Biden still leads in national polls, largely because he has a substantial lead among African Americans.That support is keeping him at the top of the polls and is crucial to his path to the Democratic presidential nomination.

However, an important portion of the black community is very much not behind Biden: the black left. The question is how much that will matter electorally. There are important characteristics of the black left — the way it is structured and the way it exercises political power — that could make it difficult for its members to stop Biden from winning the nomination. And the black left may not try that hard to stop him anyway.

There is no official “black left.” What I’m describing here is a bloc of people who have gained power and prominence since the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that turned Black Lives Matter into one of the most important civil rights movements of the past decade. This bloc is distinct from what I would describe as the black establishment, which includes powerful black institutions and people: longtime civil rights activists and ministers like Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton; veteran members of the Congressional Black Caucus; groups like the National Urban League and the NAACP; and President Obama and his close allies.1

The black left includes:

The activists and groups who either were involved in protesting the 2012 killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, went to Ferguson two years later or subsequently organized in opposition to police practices that they felt were discriminatory against black people.

Black leaders of prominent liberal groups, such as Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party.

Left-leaning black academics and intellectuals who have big followings, such as authors Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay and regular MSNBC contributor and Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude.

New generation civil rights organizations such as Color of Change and Dream Defenders.

More liberal black elected officials, such as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Not everyone in the black left actively opposes Biden. (Nor does all of the black establishment support him.) But opposition is fairly widespread. For instance, Leslie Mac, the digital organizer for a group of progressive black women and gender non-conforming individuals called Black Womxn For, told me that in an informal survey the group conducted of about 500 people in their activists’ circles, not a single person favored Biden. (Black Womxn For has endorsed Warren.)

The beef the black left has with Biden isn’t much different from the concerns that white liberal activists have about the former vice president: Namely, that he’s too centrist and establishment.

“Joe Biden shouldn’t be president,” Coates said in an interview on “Democracy Now!” back in July, noting that Biden “wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails,” in earlier stages of his career.

What’s different for the black left — as opposed to the white left — is that its views are very deeply in tension with the broader black Democratic electorate, at least so far. Forty-three percent of black voters favor Biden, according to polling from The Economist/YouGov. That’s roughly 30 points more than anyone else. We don’t have a lot of polls breaking down black voters into smaller subgroups, but Morning Consult polling suggests Biden is leading even among blacks with college degrees.

Another candidate, like Warren, might catch up among black voters — or Biden might fall back. But no matter what happens, it’s worth asking why opposition to Biden on the black left hasn’t had more of an effect among rank-and-file black voters. And there are a couple of reasonable answers.

First, the black left has an unorthodox structure that might limit its electoral influence. The national office of Black Lives Matter can’t throw its weight behind Warren, Sanders or anyone else — there is no Black Lives Matter, at least in the sense of a formal organization with a board, a president and a physical headquarters. Instead, there is an informal Black Lives Matter Global Network, which has at least 15 U.S. Black Lives Matter chapters in cities around the country, plus one in Toronto. Key figures associated with the creation of the phrase Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson protests work at an array of different progressive organizations that focus on racial issues, rather than one single place. There is also a coalition of dozens of civil rights organizations, such as Dream Defenders, called The Movement for Black Lives.

More than five years after the protests in Ferguson, there is an active debate about whether this decentralized structure is the best approach to challenging policing practices and broader racial inequality in America. (It’s not totally clear if this structure was the intention of the activists, if it happened organically or if it’s something in between.)

This loose organizational structure is also largely untested in electoral politics. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement was in its infancy. During the Democratic primary, the activists criticized both Hillary Clinton and Sanders. The two candidates and their campaigns tried to appease the activists while also seeming a bit confused about what exactly Black Lives Matter was and who was leading it. Clinton overwhelmingly won the black vote, but she wasn’t as strongly opposed by the black left as Biden is now.

The black left has played a big role in helping to elect reform-minded local prosecutors in the years since the Ferguson protests, so I don’t want to suggest that it has no electoral power. And in theory, the black left is well-represented in spaces where some black voters are (social media, for example). Being the candidate backed by black figures with large Twitter followings should be helpful to a candidate.

“The church doesn’t have the power and influence it used to,” Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a San Francisco-based group created in 2018 that is focused on motivating liberal women of color, told me. (Allison’s group has not endorsed a candidate but Allison herself expressed wariness about Biden during my interview with her). “There are new and powerful people and networks that are being activated,” she added.

Maybe. But if I were a candidate running for president in 2020, I might prefer the tried-and-true networks that Biden is relying on, which are similar to those that helped Clinton win the black vote by more than 50 percentage points in 2016. If you are a Democratic presidential candidate aiming to win older black voters, in particular, there are clear, long-standing institutions to tap into (black churches) and political figures to court (Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina). Why is Biden currently leading with black voters? That’s a complicated question with a complicated answer (here are 2,000 words on the topic), but I think one factor is that he has spent decades in these black establishment spaces.

Beyond its structure, the black left might also struggle to wield electoral influence for a second reason: It’s not unified behind a single Democratic candidate, in part because it is somewhat wary of politicians in general.

Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris and former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro have all courted organizations on the black left, including making personal appeals (such as by appearing on their podcasts and at events they sponsor) but also by adopting some of their language and positions (for example, embracing the idea that reparations for black Americans should be studied). Biden hasn’t done as much of this — and it’s unlikely that his positions and rhetoric would have appealed to the black left anyway.

But the approach to Biden’s candidacy has varied widely among various individuals and organizations within the black left. Some have endorsed other candidates (Gay, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and the Working Families Party are with Warren; Ellison and Omar with Sanders; the progressive black women’s group Higher Heights for America with Harris).

The decision by Working Families, a major force in liberal politics that backed Sanders in 2016, to endorse Warren angered Sanders’s supporters. But in explaining that move, Mitchell emphasized that taking a more cautious posture in this primary wasn’t smart.

“You don’t defeat the moderate wing of Democrats through thought pieces or pithy tweets, you defeat their politics through organizing,” Mitchell told The New York Times.

But others in the black left haven’t gone that far. Some influential black liberal voices, such as Coates, are more commentators and writers than political figures — they give their opinions but aren’t in roles that would necessarily put them in position to organize people for or against a candidate. Another bloc of black left figures told me that they and others in the movement like several of the candidates (usually some combination of Castro, Harris, Sanders and Warren) and are now waiting for the field to narrow.

On criminal justice and policing issues, “Julián Castro has been the most outspoken of any of the candidates,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a co-founder of Campaign Zero, a policy-focused group that seeks to reduce the number of civilians killed by police. When I pressed him to choose among the candidates at the top of the polls, Sinyangwe praised Warren, but emphasized, “It’s early.”

Still another bloc says the field overall is flawed, and it’s not worth singling out Biden as worse than the more liberal candidates. For example, at a recent conference, the leaders of the group ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) said they will not endorse a Democratic candidate, arguing that none of the party’s leading contenders are sufficiently committed to pushing for reparations. That posture echoes early statements from some Black Lives Matter activists, many of whom were wary of the more cautious racial stands of basically all politicians, including Democrats and then-President Barack Obama. That’s both because the black left thinks the party is too centrist but also because it is in some ways an anti-establishment, anti-party movement. In its endorsement of Warren, Black Womxn For basically criticized the entire Democratic Party, writing, “the two-party system, elites within the Democratic establishment, and even the primary process itself continue to fall short of what is required to fully engage and honor the power” of black female voters.

“People were like, ‘you’ve sold out,’” said Chanelle Helm, a leader of the Black Lives Matter group in Louisville, Kentucky, describing the reaction after Helm and other black female activists attended a private meeting with Warren earlier this year. Helm is supporting the Massachusetts senator, who she said “speaks for the mamas in the margins.”

A kind of anti-politicians posture has the potential to result in a divided or disengaged black left, which could help Biden. In fact, in some ways that posture has probably already helped him. The surveys of the Democratic race are essentially an early contest of their own, as this year’s polls determine who makes the debate stage and who receives the accompanying money and attention. Candidates with low poll numbers drop out (Kirsten Gillibrand) or struggle to raise money (Booker, Castro). Biden has held a huge lead among older black voters throughout 2019, while a bunch of candidates, including Biden, are splitting the younger vote. The Democratic race would look worse for Biden if the younger black vote was more consolidated.

I don’t know where black voters will land overall, nor do I know what role the black left will ultimately play in 2020 primary. But what’s clear is that many in the black left don’t want Biden to be the Democratic nominee, and yet may not mobilize to stop him or may not be organized enough to stop him, even if they wanted to.

At the same time, a Biden primary win would not be catastrophic for their movement, these activists say. They note that the former Delaware senator has embraced many of the black left’s ideas for changing the criminal justice system, such as abolishing the death penalty.

“In many cases, he is fighting the policies he enacted,” said Sinyangwe. “I don’t think it’s an indictment of the movement if Biden wins. It isn’t dependent on a single candidate winning.”

[niftyfifties]

invisibility, conformity and the black experience during the 1950s

Invisibility: One of the best ways to talk about invisibility and the black experience during the 1950s is through Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”. In the “Invisible Man”, the narrator struggles with his black identity as he encounters different environments in a “white man's world”. The novel focuses on his struggle between embracing his black identity and seeking white approval, a metaphor for the debate between fighting back against white oppression and Booker T. Washington’s ideology (Kostelanetz). As he moves from an all-black college to becoming the face of a movement towards social equality, the narrator encounters one fundamental truth for himself: if he didn’t fit in, he was invisible. Many can argue that Ellison’s novel is a direct criticism of Booker T. Washington’s ideology of being a “good slave”. Ellison describes fitting in the white community as being a “good slave”: someone who seeks white approval while avoiding to challenge their fundamental beliefs regarding black communities. Throughout the story, Ellison argues that this ideology that was originally meant to help liberate black people in America, is actually oppressing them.

Let’s take a look at a scene between the narrator and Brockaway (the engineer at the paint factory in New York). After accidentally attending a labor union meeting and returning to the basement fo the factory, Brockaway is furious, threatening to kill the narrator. As Brockaway lunges towards him, the narrator reminds himself of how he should react:

“You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked” (Ellison 225). 

Despite the fact that he’s been “trained to accept [this] foolishness”, he gets mad and talks back to him anyway. By associating this blind “love’ and “intimidation” of white “power and authority” with “foolishness” and “clowns”, he’s directly calling Booker T. Washington’s ideology foolish. Furthermore, he states that this ideology means that you can’t make an effort to strike back, and your only goal is “to escape unmarked”. It is evident that Ellison finds his ideas as a way to survive, rather than a way to live. Booker T. Washington’s old ways force black people to ignore everything about their black identity and redefine themselves to conform to white standards and approval. This usually means that they are still stripped of their rights to freedom of expression. By showing that the narrator chooses to strike back instead, and showing that this is the only way he could’ve survived Brockaway’s outburst, Ellison shows that this ideology is useless, and is actually dangerous. 

Ellison continues to portray this way of life as harmful because it makes black individuals often feel invisible. Most black characters out of the narrator's line of work aren’t accepted by white people because they haven’t conformed to white standards. And the narrator is unaccepted by his own black community because they feel betrayed because he chose to conform to white standards and Booker T. Washington’s ideas. 

Conformity: As I touched on in the last section, conformity played a great role in invisibility and the overall black experience during the 1950s. Black success was based on the approval of white people, and how well black individuals can conform to their standards. The black experience was all about conformity, and the struggle between to conforming for the black community or the white one. In Invisible Man, the narrator wants to conform to white standards in the beginning, wanting to be just like Mr. Bledsoe who has gained respect from all of his white counterparts and is someone who was “influential with wealthy men; consulted in matter concerning the race...they could laugh at him but they couldn’t ignore him” (Ellison 101). However, Ellison criticizes this conformity and shows living outside of it can make people feel liberated through the scene after the narrator gets shock therapy. After the therapy, he feels “that [he] had been talking beyond [himself], [and he] had used words and expressed attitudes not [his own]...Or was it, [he thought]...that [he] was no longer afraid?...Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing that there was nothing which [he] could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid” (Ellison 249). He’s not “intimidated” by “trustees”  or “white people”, he is no longer afraid, and he finally feels like he’s “expressing” his own “words” and “attitudes”. He doesn’t have to conform, he feels free, and he no longer feels invisible. Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, the narrator encounters another group that forces him to conform: the Brotherhood. Emma, the woman who works there, often criticizes his hesitance to sing in a choir, asking whether or not he even is black. In this instance, the narrator needs to conform to black standards and is unable to on the first try, making him feel out of place, and invisible. 

[afrotumble]

Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison, published by Random House in 1952. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.