#clarence lusane

[tomorrowusa]

There is remarkably little difference between Trump and his main challengers for the presidential nomination when it comes to the politics and policies of the contemporary Republican Party. Take Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

[ … ]

In the end, the differences between the two of them are likely to prove superficial indeed. In the areas where Americans would be most severely affected, there’s hardly a fly’s hair of separation between them. Beyond the fact that both are mercurial, petty, narcissistic bigots, as well as textbook definitions of toxic masculinity, it’s in the realm of politics and public policy where they might take somewhat different roads that, unfortunately, would head this country toward the very same destination: an undemocratic, authoritarian state whose foundational creed would be racism and unrelenting bigotry.

— Clarence Lusane at The Nation.

There is little practical difference between Trump and DeSantis. Imagine a Nazi Party primary in Germany in 1932.

The ONLY way to defeat neo-fascist Republicans is to vote Democratic; though third party cultists and Russian bots may not like hearing that. But it was Democratic turnout in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada in 2020 which saved democracy in the US and subsequently in Ukraine.

[reasoningdaily]

The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]

This FREE BOOK DOWNLOAD is from THE BLACK TRUEBRARY

The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]

A collection of essays written by scholars and former Panthers incorporates participant-observer perspectives in an exploration of the party's organization, gender dynamics, and legacy

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Here is a searing, illuminating and unapologetic look at the Black Panther Party, whose 1966-1982 history is one of the most controversial and dynamic political dramas of our time.

Georgia State University African American studies professor Jones uses original writings from insiders, including former officials like former communication secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver (who now teaches law in N.Y.C.), who writes about the Algerian exile she and her then-husband Eldridge Cleaver experienced during that era; and rank-and-filers like Steve D. McCutchen, whose Panther-era diary makes engrossing reading. The 18 chapters include original essays and memoirs by, and interviews with, former Panthers.

Contributors include scholars of Panther history like Stanford's Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, Nakhil Pal Singh of N.Y.U., Clarence Lusane of American University and Trayce Mathews, a Chicago-based political activist whose dissertation explores gender dynamics in the Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland, Calif., by Bobby Seale and the late Huey P. Newton to promote armed self-defense of the black community from an allegedly brutal police force, the Panthers soon grew into a national force.

The Panthers, argues contributor Chris Booker, "embodied the highest aspirations of a generation of radical African American youth." These essays are mainly sympathetic to the Panthers' aims, and there lingers among some of them a bit of uncritical nostalgia. But contributors also critically investigate the party's complex attitude toward violence (police reprisals and inner-party conflict killed over two dozen Panthers from 1967 to 1969), inner-party gender relations, the consequences of the unstable membership mix of political activists and quasi-criminal types, and the group's romantic notions of social revolution.

From Library Journal

Revisiting the revolutionary reputation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) of the turbulent 1960s, political scientist Jones (African American studies, Georgia State Univ.) contributes a six-part, 18-chapter probe of the reality behind the rhetoric and the substance behind the much-maligned Panther image.

The anthology mixes interviews with analysis, reflections, and recollections. Former BPP members such as Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Regina Jennings, and Melvin E. Lewis and others delve into the contextual landscape of the BPP's founding in October 1966, recruitment of rank and file, organizational and gender dynamics, decline, and complex legacy.

This work provokes serious thought about how authority in government and media manipulate public perception of black protest. But even more, it unfolds dimensions of the BPP as a base of black nationalism and a bridge to intercommunalism, signaling a move beyond mere memoir to helpful scholarship on the BPP's integrity and interactions.

THIS BOOK IS PROVIDED FREE COURTESY OF THE BLACK TRUEBRARY here on Tumblr

[trmpt]

Clarence Lusane, Neither Law, Nor Order for You Know Who

POSTED ON FEBRUARY 13, 2024

[gnatswatting]

• In a forest of fascism, does it matter which tree is the tallest? —Clarence Lusane

The Nation   The Nation (at Internet Archive)

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — For another person in another country at another time, the case might have been a minor matter: an American citizen detained at an airport for allegedly possessing a cannabis derivative legal in much of the world.

But the circumstances for Brittney Griner couldn’t have been worse.

Griner, a WNBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist, was arrested in Russia, where the offense can mean years in prison, and at a moment when tensions with the U.S. were rising to their highest point in decades. She is a prominent gay, Black woman facing trial in a country where authorities have been hostile to the LGBTQ community, and the country’s nationalist zeal has raised concerns about how she will be treated.

“There are many countries around the world where you do not want to get in trouble, and Russia is one of them,” said Clarence Lusane, a Howard University political science professor who specializes in criminal justice and drug policy.

As extraordinary as her circumstances are, the details surrounding Griner’s case remain a mystery as a crucial court date approaches next month. Russian prosecutors have offered little clarity and the U.S. government has made only measured statements. Griner’s legal team has declined to speak out about the case as it works behind the scenes.

Griner is easily the most prominent American citizen known to be jailed by a foreign government, but in many ways her case isn’t unusual. Americans are frequently arrested overseas on drug and other charges and U.S. authorities are limited about what they can say or the help they can offer. The State Department generally can’t do much to help beyond consular visits and helping the American get an attorney. It also can’t say much unless the person arrested waives privacy rights, which Griner hasn’t fully done.

In some cases, U.S. officials do speak out loudly when they’re convinced an American has been wrongly detained. But Griner’s case is barely two months old and officials have yet to make that determination. A State Department office that works to free American hostages and unjust detainees is not known to be involved.

The Phoenix Mercury star was detained at a Moscow airport in mid-February after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges that allegedly contained oil derived from cannabis — accusations that could carry up to 10 years in prison, though some experts predict she’d get much less if convicted. She was returning to the country after the Russian League, in which she also plays, was taking a break for the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournament.

U.S. officials have said they are tracking the case but have not spoken extensively about it, in part because Griner has not signed a full Privacy Act Waiver. The statements so far have been careful and restrained, focused on ensuring she has access to U.S. consular affairs officials — she had a meeting last month — rather than explicitly demanding her immediate release.

There’s little the U.S. government can do diplomatically to end a criminal prosecution in another country, particularly in the early days of a case. Any deal that would require concessions by the U.S. would seem a nonstarter, especially with Russia at war with Ukraine and the U.S. coordinating actions involving Russia with Western allies.

“It’s a trial lawyer’s nightmare since you have to conduct a trial when the larger political environment is negative,” said William Butler, a Russian law expert and professor at Penn State Dickinson Law.

The State Department has been “doing everything we can to support Brittney Griner to support her family, and to work with them to do everything we can, to see that she is treated appropriately and to seek her release,” spokesman Ned Price said last month. Last week, he said the U.S. was in frequent contact with her legal team and “broader network.”

[teenslib]

By Martha S. Jones FEBRUARY 9, 2021

Martha S. Jones, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, is most recently the author of “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.”

When I wrote a book about Black women’s long struggle for voting rights in the United States, I knew the story was partly about how racism has shaped our democracy. I never expected that a public library today would refuse to host a discussion featuring my book.

“Vanguard” recounts how many suffragists and lawmakers who sought to ratify the 19th Amendment accommodated and, in some cases, embraced anti-Black racism even as they worked to expand access to a fundamental democratic right. Jim Crow laws — poll taxes, literacy tests and more — prevented Black women from casting ballots for decades after the 19th Amendment became law in 1920.

Facing these ties between racism and democracy can be difficult. People forget that history is not merely a recounting of past events but also a battle over who writes it, from which perspective and what those stories teach about who we are as a nation.

After my book was published in September, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities invited me to give a lecture in connection with an educational initiative on the history of voting rights and voter suppression. My book was to be featured with five others, including “Bending Toward Justice,” a study of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by Gary May. I jumped at the chance to talk about the women of “Vanguard” in cooperation with the state’s public libraries, which make learning free and accessible to all.

Late last year, the endowment invited the Lafayette Parish library board to join its initiative — called “Who Gets to Vote?” — and offered it a $2,700 supporting grant. In December, the board approved applying for the grant — with conditions. To ensure that the program and library “remain apolitical and neutral” and to “garner community support,” a board member suggested adding “two speakers from opposing sides to offer differing perspectives.”

My book, I was sure, fit the bill. It recounts the clashing perspectives that animated voting rights struggles: suffragists against anti-suffragists, white supremacists vs. anti-racists, women countering men, and Americans opposing others of different color. What precisely troubled the board? “Vanguard” foregrounds the Black women who, for 200-plus years, struggled to expand access to political rights for all. It argues that they are among the architects of American democracy.

The library board ultimately voted Jan. 25 to reject the grant, effectively refusing to host a community discussion on voting rights. The board’s president cast the decision as an effort to “bring political neutrality back to our Library System,” saying in a statement that the local presenters “were clearly from the same side of the political debate.”

I’m not sure precisely what debate the board had in mind.

One state senator ventured an answer, explaining: “The question was raised as to the other side being represented and part of the discussion. … [T]he other side falls in the category of ‘Jim Crow Laws’ and the ‘KKK.’ ”

History is more than a matter of academic debate. Events over the past year — including pushback against the New York Times’s 1619 Project and counterprotests to the Black Lives Matter movement — illustrate the fraught challenge of unearthing racism in America, past or present.

Nor is suppression of reading material a relic of the past. The American Library Association tracked 377 “banned and challenged books” in 2019. Among these are works on the history of racism and some that take the perspective of Black Americans. Authors include David W. Blight, Lerone Bennett Jr., John Hope Franklin, Gerald Horne, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerda Lerner, C. Eric Lincoln, Clarence Lusane, Tim Madigan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Daniel J. Sharfstein and Joy Ann Williamson. There’s one by my former teacher, the late Manning Marable. The list even includes Harriet Jacobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” a firsthand account published in the 1860s.

This list is a grim reminder that Black history — its ideas and the books that contain them — is still often unwelcome. The subject rankles officials such as those in Lafayette because it is inextricably tied to ongoing striving for freedom, equality and the just acknowledgment of the perspectives of Black Americans.

“Vanguard” shows how Black women put provocative ideas to paper even in the face of marginalization and violence. Throughout American history, Black women have aimed to be of consequence. They knew that with the capacity to publish their ideas came the power to make change. They mobilized the past to create a new future. Black History Month may be a time to acknowledge the many suppressed works on African Americans — and to reflect on how history arms us to challenge racism in the present.

[librelivrevivre]

Books and podcasts about black history/struggle around the world

BOOKS

- Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light by Tyler Stovall

- Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany by Ika Hugel-Marshall

- Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany by Hans J. Massaquoi

- Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer

- Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain by Edward Scobie

- Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era by Clarence Lusane

- Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

- Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby (Editor)

- Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great Warby Stephen Bourne

- Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

- Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness by Trica Danielle Keaton (Editor)

- Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography by Mark Mathabane

- Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa by Antjie Krog

- No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu

- I Write What I Like: Selected Writings by Steve Biko

- Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

- Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

- Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

- Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

- African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean by Herbert S. Klein

- Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia by Claudia Leal

- The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius Scott

PODCASTS

- Talking Heads

- Jesus & Jollof

- Not Another Book Podcast

[lauralzielke]

Posted @withregram • @freedomcenternc #Repost @zinneducationproject ・・・ "Schools across the country are adorned with posters of the U.S. presidents and the years they served in office. U.S. history textbooks describe the accomplishments and challenges of the major presidential administrations—George Washington had the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln the Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt the Spanish-American War, and so on. Children’s books put students on a first-name basis with the presidents, engaging readers with stories of their dogs in the Rose Garden or childhood escapades. Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution welcomes visitors to an exhibit of the first ladies’ gowns and White House furnishings. . . Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery. These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit. Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in bondage at the White House. For this reason, there is little doubt that the first person of African descent to enter the White House—or the presidential homes used in New York (1788–90) and Philadelphia (1790–1800) before construction of the White House was complete—was an enslaved person. . . The White House itself, the home of presidents and quintessential symbol of the U.S. presidency, was built with slave labor, just like most other major building projects had been in the 18th-century United States, including many of our most famous buildings like Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s Montpelier. President Washington initially wanted to hire foreign labor to build the White House, but when he realized how costly it would be to pay people fairly, he resorted to slave labor.” . . Continue reading from Clarence Lusane, professor and author of The Black History of the White House, at https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/hidden-black-history-of-white-house/ . . #TeachOutsideTextbook #PeoplesHistory #RethinkingPresidentsDay #blackhistorymonth https://www.instagram.com/p/B8s3v7zpYwQ/?igshid=1a3cukaf3lcln

[doriansbookshelf]

THE BLACK HISTORY OF THE WHITE HOUSE // Clarence Lusane // 2010. . Synopsis: For many Americans, the White House stands as a symbol of liberty and justice. But its gleaming facade hides harsh realities, from the slaves who built the home to the presidents who lived there and shaped the country's racial history, often for the worse. In The Black History of the White House, Clarence Lusane traces the path of race relations in America by telling a very specific history — the stories of those African-Americans who built, worked at and visited the White House. [📝: NPR] . #blackpride #blacktwitter #speeches #blackexcellence #speaktruth #speaktruthtopower #independentmedia #unapologeticallyblack #blackmanhood #becauseofreading #bibliophile #bookwormlife #epicreads #bookstagrammer #booksofig #blackhistory #justread #bookshelf #igbooks #blackwriters #writers #readblackwriters #antiquarianbooks #booklover #goodreads #bookcommunity #diversespines https://www.instagram.com/p/B7vvfllABFQ/?igshid=107rd7v1bwac2

[tomferringblog-blog]

This thought paper which exemplifies how Hip Hop artists used their music as a way to express present day problems in politics and society. I Decided to use the readings “ Rap, Race, and Politics” by Clarence Lusane and , “Organizing a Hip Hop generation” by Angela Ards

[nocomfortinreality]

Barbara Ehrenreich ColumnistTime Magazine

Richard Healy DirectorGrassroots Policy Project

Clarence Lusane Graduate StudentHoward University->Political Science

Mari Matsuda ProfessorGeorgetown University Law Center

Roland Roebuck

Lori Tsang Poet

Cornel West ProfessorHarvard University->Afro-American Studies

[bunkie2021]

On October 13, 1792, the White House cornerstone was laid. While the Obamas were the first African American "First Family," they were not the first African American residents of the White House. Clarence Lusane's thoroughly researched and gripping book, "The Black History of the White House," shares the untold stories of some of the people who were enslaved by U.S. presidents, including stories of resistance and escape. Lusane describes the myriad ways that the White House and the lives of African Americans have been intertwined throughout U.S. history, from the building of the White House to the present day. Learn more from a Zinn Education Project article by Lusane: http://bit.ly/1LLgqqA and the book: http://bit.ly/hOVYn0 #blackhistory #knowyourhistory

[postrevolutioncuba-blog]

Fidel Castro and Race Relations

In`1966, Fidel Castro was addressing the Cuban people in a public speech when he historically stated that “the blood of Africa runs deep in the Cuban people’s veins” (Lusane, 73). This statement is apart of many other statements that contribute to the speculation of how Fidel Castro really felt about race relations. Although he claimed to be accepting of all races, he approached it from a populist manner, and simply tried to ignore the systematic, economic, and political oppression Black Cubans still experience today. He simply would state throughout the years as the regime progressed that racism did not exist in Cuba anymore because when the revolution happened everyone became equal. Needless to say, this is yet another example of the neglect the Castro regime has inflicted on it’s people throughout the revolution. 

References

Lusane, Clarence. (1999) From Black Cuban to Afro-Cuban: Researching Race in Cuba, Souls, 1:2, DOI: 10.1080/10999949909362164

[thetheblackboardurbannews]

The affects of Globalization on African American Communities.

Excerpted from: Clarence Lusane, Persisting Disparities: Globalization and the Economic Status of African Americans , 2 Howard Law Journal 431-450, 436-439 , 450 (Spring 1999) (118 Footnotes) Writing during the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, scholar Sidney Wilhelm argued that African Americans were being made obsolete as workers by new technologies and automation. He wrote, with the onset of automation, the Negro moves out of his historical state of... The affects of Globalization on African American Communities. http://dlvr.it/PQ8VbL

[rtamerica-blog]

The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann​

Bloody Sunday 50 Years Later: Author of The Black History of the White House, Dr. Clarence Lusane, Hilary Shelton of the NAACP, and Joe Madison, host of the 'Joe Madison Show' join Thom Hartmann on set.