Black Studies Or African American Studies

The Caribbean saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas. Contemporary scholarship on the early Caribbean, thus, tends to focus on plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even as scholars draw attention to these vital topics, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, evinces distinct concerns with matters other than slavery, such as ideas of sovereignty. If slavery ‘established a set of relationships, discourses, and institutions which continued to metastasize across the Empire long after the trading ceased’, so too did the multiple forms of freedom and independence that unfolded both preand post-emancipation in the circum-Caribbean. Rather than illustrating an obsessive desire to portray racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, in the vein of many European colonial writers, an entire cadre of authors from the Caribbean demonstrate through their writing a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of newly sovereign identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.

Mireille Miller-Young visited San Francisco for a conversation with porn producer and director Shine Louise Houston. They met at Houston's home to discuss her award-winning feature film Champion and her independent film company Pink and White Productions.

Published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press, this volume is the only critical history of African American poetry from its origins to the present. Starting with the transatlantic African slave trade, it traces African American poetry from slave songs to today’s award-winning poets. Covering a wide range of styles and forms, canonical figures like Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar are brought side by side with lesser-known poets deserving of greater attention. Calling for a revised and expanded canon, this book shows how some poems were suppressed while others were lauded. In particular, it shows that African American poetry has a history of avant-garde practice from its origins to today. The roles of music, women, and art as political action are central themes. In conceiving of a new canon, it shows the influential role of African American poetry in defining and reflecting the United States at all points in the nation’s history. It contains rare illustrations, poems, and commentary on literary criticism and theory. Written in clear and accessible prose, it will appeal to students at all levels, experts, and general readers.

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA) – the production of food in cities – argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio-temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and white supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on, UA's contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self-determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, " both/and " nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city.

Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro and Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, this review revisits and examines sociological research on urban Black Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the approaches, frameworks, and sociological insights that emerged over this period, we examine this scholarship within two broad frames: the deficit frame and the asset frame. The deficit frame includes scholarship emphasizing both the structures that negatively affect Black urban life (e.g., disappearance of work, residential segregation, poor education, urban poverty) and the cultural " deficits " that either are adaptations to those structural realities or (as some deficit scholars argue) are the cause of urban Black hardships. The asset frame includes scholarship focusing on the agency and cultural contributions of urban Black Americans. Detailing the historical origins and contemporary use of these frames, we demonstrate how the sociology of urban Black America remains a reflection of the possibilities and problems of the broader discipline. The review concludes by outlining new conceptual opportunities offered by what we refer to as chocolate city sociology.

While the educational difficulties of poor black students are well documented and have been dis- cussed extensively, the academic performance of well-off African American children has received much less attention. Even with economic and educational resources in the home, well-off African American youth are not achieving at the levels of their white peers. Why is this? A review of rel- evant literature identifies a set of social processes that pose formidable barriers to the academic and personal development of middle-class African American youth, the closing of the black-white achievement gap, and the preservation of African American family advantage across genera- tions. Constituting a social ecology of African American family life, these processes emanate out- ward from the immediate home environment, through peers and friends, into neighborhoods and schools, and to society at large.

CITATION: Stinson, D. W. (2008). Negotiating sociocultural discourses: The counter-storytelling of academically (and mathematically) successful African American male students. American Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 975–1010.

ABSTRACT: This study documents the counterstories of four academically (and mathematically) successful African American male students. Using participative inquiry, the participants were asked to read, reflect on, and respond to historical and current research literature regarding the schooling experiences of African American students. Their responses were analyzed using a somewhat eclectic theoretical framework that included poststructural theory, critical race theory, and critical theory. Collectively, the participants’ counterstories revealed that each had acquired a robust mathematics identity as a component of his overall efforts toward success. How the participants acquired such “uncharacteristic” mathematics identities was to be found in part in how they understood sociocultural discourses of U.S. society and how they negotiated the specific discourses that surround male African Americans. Present throughout the counterstories of each participant was a recognition of himself as a discursive formation who could negotiate sociocultural discourses as a means to subversively repeat his constituted “raced” self.

CITATION: Stinson, D. W. (2006). African American male adolescents, schooling (and mathematics): Deficiency, rejection, and achievement. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 477–506.

ABSTRACT: The academic achievement gap, particularly the mathematics achievement gap, between Black students and their White counterparts has been well documented with numerical facts. As mathematics education researchers attempt to develop theories and practices that assist in eradicating the gap, they would serve mathematics education well if they would expand the sphere of their research into the sociocultural arena. To assist in expanding the sphere, this article presents a review of key historical and current theoretical perspectives regarding the schooling experiences of African American students, with an emphasis on African American male students, borrowed from the disciplines of anthropology, social psychology, and sociology. The review is organized around three discourse clusters: the discourse of deficiency, the discourse of rejection, and the discourse of achievement. The author suggests that researchers move away from the discourses of deficiency and rejection and toward the discourse of achievement when developing sound education theories and classroom practices that assist in eradicating the academic (and mathematics) achievement gap.

The War on Drugs in the United States has been part of a system of social control targeting low-income black and Latinx communities. While this statement has been contested, its validity is clear from an encompassing framework that considers the history of racially motivated laws and practices and moral panics among whites who have blamed drug-related social problems and crime on marginalized racial groups. We develop a holistic and reproductive approach to understanding racial oppression by analyzing racial meanings and structural racism related to the War on Drugs. To uncover structural racism, we propose a framework that captures the relationship between drug policies and enforcement practices, racialized mass incarceration, the distribution of resources, and the reproduction of racial oppression in the United States. To examine racial meanings, we present findings from an in-depth content analysis of newspaper articles and digital media discussing the War on Drugs. Based on over 30 years of news content—394 op-eds, letters to the editor, and news articles and 3,145 comments drawn from the comments sections of online news articles—we argue that criminal justice practices and the distribution of racial meanings through the media act as racialized structuring mechanisms. We demonstrate how those mechanisms work in tandem to strengthen and naturalize the connection between racial groups and unequal social positions. We uncover how dominant racial meanings act as symbolic resources that maintain forms of structural racism such as the War on Drugs. Finally, we discuss the benefits of our approach and suggest relevant and necessary future research and practices.

Presented in this article is a counternarrative concerning one particular message that is consistently reinforced in academic and public discourse about Black male students: they don’t care about education. Little is known about those who graduate from high school, enroll in college, and subsequently commit themselves to various career pathways in education fields (K-12 teaching and administration, the postsecondary professoriate, education policy, etc.). What compels these men to care so much about education, despite what is routinely reported in the literature regarding their gradual disinvestment in schooling? This question is explored in the article using data from 304 Black male undergraduates attending 209 colleges and universities across the United States. It counters longstanding perspectives on Black men’s oppositional responses to inequitable schooling.

A number of texts have addressed desires for and iterations of freedom throughout the Black diaspora. Although conceptualizations of freedom are often employed and interrogated in critical scholarship, less attention is given to the landscapes onto which politics are performed. This article draws from scholarship in Black and Ethnic Studies along with Geography to argue that the ability of select fugitive groups to obtain forms of spatial autonomy is reliant on their ability to seek, find, and settle within difficult and seemingly uninhabitable landscapes. Using marronage as a conceptual tool, I posit that quests for freedom through fugitivity have often relied on the topographic and geomorphologic traits of natural environments. To
illustrate marronage as a landscape of political possibility, I close with examples from the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam to demonstrate how across time and space, devalued landscapes have serviced subterfuge and provided sustenance for long-suffering communities.

Based upon an analysis of the print and online media, this article examines the discourse of the "new politics of race" between 2007 and 2014. Part of the politics of postracialism, the new race politics first emerged as a set of guidelines for candidate Barack Obama, concerning how he should and should not handle racial matters if he hoped to win the presidency. In a larger sense, however, the new race politics is a class-specific discourse of racial color blindness, one which positions the black upper middle class as a 21st-century model minority, racialized in contradistinction to the black poor.

Recent scholarship across various disciplines since the U.S. housing crisis of 2008 has deepened our understanding of racial wealth gaps, especially as it pertains to housing. This article focuses on two less-developed dimensions of Black and Latino home ownership, voting and immigration, respectively. The Black home ownership rate has fallen to 41% as of 2019, the lowest level since the 1968 Fair Housing Act. I contend that the continued decline of Black home ownership reduces voting turnout. A multivariate fixed effects analysis of state-level Black voter turnout in presidential elections since 2000 lends support to this contention. In contrast, the Latino home ownership rate has rebounded, climbing to nearly 48% in 2019. I argue that this rise is as much a mirage as sign of progress—an artifact of the deportation of millions of Latin Americans and the end of undocumented Mexican migration. Such changes inflate Latino ownership rates by reducing the denominator rather than increasing the numerator of homeowners. Examining state-level data, my multivariate analysis shows that the decline in the undocumented population and, to a lesser extent, the increase of DACA recipients explain the level and change in Latino ownership more than the change in the share of Latino citizens or documented non-citizens. I conclude that the color line has reinforced a new Black/non-Black divide in home ownership that undermines the social mobility and electoral representation of Black Americans. Meanwhile, a tri-racial divide by legal status and race stratifies Latino home ownership. Intra-Latino inequality masquerades as success because of the expulsion of vulnerable Latino immigrants and their US citizen children. The social consequences distort the home ownership rate calculation and pose another threat to multiracial democracy.

The Place Beyond the Fence: Slavery and Cultural Invention on a Delaware Tenant Farm ABSTRACT Information about the lives and material culture of 18th-and early 19th-century enslaved African American laborers was recovered from Locus 1 of the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric site (7NCF112) in St. Georges Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware. This site contained the remains of multiple slave quarters and associated cultural features, evidence of which is rarely found in Delaware. Data from the site elucidate current understanding of slave life, housing, diet and cultural practices within a northern state situated in a transition area or cultural borderland between New England and the Tidewater regions. Locus 1 exhibited aspects of cultural traditions amongst enslaved communities in both regions as slaves in this upper Mid-Atlantic state coped with the stresses of slavery, while simultaneously selectively modifying and re-inventing their own practices and customs to define themselves culturally.

Employed at the Library of Congress for more than a half century (1871-1923), Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925) was the institution’s first African American professional. His life and career sheds light on four broad themes in African American history. First, Murray and his network of public intellectuals debated the most pressing social, political, and cultural issues of the time. Murray wrote voluminously on African American literacy, history, and bibliography, on racial science, and on industrial work; further, he spent much of his career cobbling together an African American encyclopedia. Second, Murray’s life and work showed the combustible intersection of class and race that often cleaved the black community as they debated the best strategies to achieve full citizenship in Jim Crow America. Third, as a professional librarian, Murray engaged the public sphere, marshaling his intellectual authority in service of racial uplift purposes. Finally, Murray adds to our understanding of African American social, cultural, professional, and political life in Washington D.C. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."

Despite the evidence in other domains that Black individuals can experience discriminatory treatment, marketing research offers few insights into how Black salespersons (as compared to White salespersons) are perceived and treated within buyer-seller negotiations. We address this limitation in the literature by conducting three studies. First, our findings show that White buyers with a higher social dominance orientation expect Black salespersons to bargain (i.e., negotiate) less than White salespersons. Second, White buyers with a higher social dominance orientation perceive Black salespersons to have bargained more than White counterparts (who have bargained the same). Third, when negotiating with White buyers with a higher social dominance orientation, Black salespersons receive lower product prices than White salespersons. Fourth, when negotiating with White buyers with a higher social dominance orientation, Black salespersons are less likely to be referred to other prospective buyers than White salespersons. Interestingly, no differences exist for White buyers lower on social dominance orientation. Combined, these findings offer insight into the type of discrimination that Black salespersons can encounter within buyer-seller negotiations by revealing how White buyers perceive (i.e., expect them to negotiate less; perceive them to have bargained more than they actually did), behave (i.e., offer them lower prices) and intend to behave (i.e., less willing to refer them to other buyers) toward Black salespersons as compared to White salespersons.

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Background/Context: Over the last three decades, considerable attention has been given to the social and educational conditions of Black males. Such observations have led to the accusation that Black males are "in crisis." Although such pronouncements call national attention to the needs of Black males, these discourses have helped to normalize and fasten in place an unchanging and reworked narrative for discussing or addressing the conditions of Black males. The intent of this article is to show how, for numerous decades, both the findings and theories used to make sense of Black males within the social science and education literature have helped to produce a common-sense narrative about all Black males. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to trouble historical and contemporary beliefs about Black males and to help prompt new theories, research, and interventions that account for the complex needs of Black males' lives. This article historically documents the social science and educational literature about Black males from the 1930s to the present. Two interrelated questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the common and recycled discourses employed within and across historical periods to make sense of the social and educational conditions of Black males? (2) To what extent and in what ways have these discourses closed off the kinds of questions one can ask in the present to address the social and educational conditions of Black males? This article concludes with a discussion of how researchers and educators can begin to ask new questions about Black males that explore the complexities of Black males' lives, while also challenging the same old stories that pervade educational discourse. Research Design: Historicizing of knowledge was the method used in this project. Historicizing of knowledge as a method of analysis examines how trajectories of the past help to shape how "ideas and events of the present are constructed," in the words of Thomas Popkewitz. Employing this historical approach, this study focused on the visibility and

The analytic paradigms of race and nation have dominated scholarship on the Dominican Republic and have framed social and cultural analysis in ways that have limited the theorizing of Dominican materials to a narrow focus on identity. These gatekeeping concepts have been especially influential in shaping Dominican studies in the United States and in defining the predominant questions of interest in the field. This article assesses the conceptual limits of race and nation as persistent modes of analysis applied to the Dominican Republic and evaluates how these restrictive themes both shape and are shaped by conventional ideas about Dominican society. We argue for deeper engagement with homegrown scholarship and voices on the ground in order to move beyond repetitive and provincial concerns with "Dominicanness" and to trouble the far-too-common portrayal of the country as a novel racial problem.

Los paradigmas analíticos de raza y nación han dominado las cuestiones académicas sobre la República Dominicana y han enmarcado el análisis socio-cultural de la isla de manera que se ha limitado la teorización a un estrecho enfoque en la identidad. Estos conceptos barrera ("gatekeeping concepts") han sido especialmente formativos en la creación de los estudios dominicanos en los Estados Unidos y han definido las cuestiones dominantes en este campo académico. El siguiente ensayo crítico evalúa los límites conceptuales de raza y nación como modos persistentes de análisis aplicados a la República Dominicana y analiza cómo estos temas limitantes forman ideas convencionales sobre la sociedad dominicana. Argumentamos por un compromiso más profundo con la producción académica de la isla y también por un compromiso con otras voces locales no-académicas para ir más allá de nociones repetitivas y provinciales sobre la "dominicanidad". Complicamos la muy repetida imagen del país como un siempre nuevo problema racial que merece más investigación.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.

While scholars working in the sociology of gender, body, health, sport and media have begun to address the paucity of research into media representations of men and masculinities, the literature to date has failed consistently to address the racialised aspects of media dwelling male athletic bodies. The same critique can be applied to recent explorations of popular men’s magazine, Men’s Health. Current research has thus systematically underplayed the significance of “race” as a defining feature of idealised, mediated masculinities. During this paper then, I use Critical Race Theory to guide a semiotic analysis of a year’s worth of Men’s Health magazine. Firstly, I argue that white male athletic bodiesare represented as idealised masculine types, possessing both the virtues of body and mind, while their black male counterparts, to varying degrees, are depicted as spectacular, violent and hyper-masculine. Secondly, I go on to argue further that this idealisation of the white male athletic body is a reaction to broader social and cultural transformations, indicative of late-modern societies. That is, I suggest Men’s Health’s mantra of self-regulation is better understood as a call to white men to exercise greater embodied control in order to reaffirm jurisdiction and supremacy, during an epoch of uncertainty. Thirdly, following this line of argument, the paper contends that future readings of Men’s Health, and men’s magazines more broadly, must seek to understand better how racialised discourses inform dominant media representations of masculinities.

This paper explores police stop and search activities in Canada using data from a 2007 survey of Toronto residents. The paper begins by demonstrating that black respondents are more likely to view racial profiling as a major problem in Canada than whites or Asians. By contrast, white and Asian respondents are more likely to believe that profiling is a useful crime-fighting tool. Further analysis reveals that the black community's concern with racial profiling may be justified. Indeed, black respondents are much more likely to report being stopped and searched by the police over the past two years than respondents from other racial backgrounds. Blacks are also much more likely to report vicarious experiences with racial profiling. Importantly, racial differences in police stop and search experiences remain statistically significant after controlling for other relevant factors. The theoretical implications of these findings – and their meaning within Canada's multicultural framework – are discussed.

Trending social media has indicated that there are currently two pandemics: Covid-19 and racism. While this typology and terminology can be critiqued, it is rather clear that the virus and White supremacy are key concerns of social movements in various parts of the world, particularly in nation states that experienced European colonisation and imperialism. The wake of Covid-19 has perhaps brought greater attention and support to #BlackLivesMatter-oriented protest movements, including by those labelled people of colour (POC) or ‘minorities’ in the North American context, such as Latinx and Asian communities. But with the amplified protest movement have come deeper calls for systemic change, from policy to ideology to everyday practice. Some of these critiques have been directed at the privilege, positionality, and participation of Asian communities not only with #BLM-oriented activism, but also in education and general society. This paper seeks to contribute to this critical discourse through a brief discussion of historical solidarity between Black and Asian activists and social movements, and how these practices might help inform activism within North America as well as other protest movements. Going beyond one-dimensional ‘but we experience racism too’ discourse of Asian communities that has recently increased due to anti-Asian hate crimes and scapegoating regarding ‘The Chinese Flu’, this paper explores some of the ways that historical Black-Asian solidarity can inform more intersectional and transnational analyses and pedagogies of Asian students, educators, and activists.

The health effects of police surveillance practices for the community at-large are unknown. Using microlevel health data from the 2009-2012 New York City Community Health Survey (NYC-CHS) nested within mesolevel data from the 2009-2012 NYC Stop, Question, and Frisk (NYC-SQF) dataset, this study evaluates contextual and ethnoracially-variant associations between invasive aspects of pedestrian stops and multiple dimensions of poor health. Results reveal that living in neighborhoods where pedestrian stops are more likely to become invasive is associated with worse health. Living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to result in frisking show the most consistent negative associations. More limited deleterious effects can be attributed to living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to involve use of force or in neighborhoods with larger ethnoracial disparities in frisking or use of force. However, the health effects of pedestrian stops vary by ethnoracial group in complex ways. For instance, minorities who live in neighborhoods with a wider racial disparity in police behavior have poorer health outcomes in most respects, but Blacks have lower odds of diabetes when they live in neighborhoods where they face a higher risk that a stop will involve use of force by police than do Whites. The findings suggest that the consequences of institutionalizing a carceral state are far-reaching.

Working within black (religious) studies and theorized against the backdrop of the horrific events of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017, this article considers the sacred as proximately black, where the sacred here signals that frenzied surplus whose sociopoetic force discloses another horizon of existence beyond the terms of order. This practice of a sacral blackness I here think about under the rubric of “black malpractice” as a poetics of the sacred. Among my interlocutors are Georges Bataille, Nathaniel Mackey, Dawn Lundy Martin, Fred Moten, Cedric Robinson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Sylvia Wynter.

Public art and urban renewal have become integral to reconstructing urban landscapes. In this essay we assess how these two spatial practices converge and diverge in the historically and predominately Black community of the Third Ward in Houston, Texas. The essay examines the work of MF Problem and The Black Guys, two Black artist collectives based in the Third Ward. We argue that their public performances critically engage the spatial processes of gentrification and ghettoization in their neighborhood. Furthermore, these performances indicate a unique spatial imaginary held by Black artists that privileges the use value of public and private space over the potential exchange value rooted in the spatial imaginaries urban renewal projects.

The substantial incorporation of people of color into government and quasi-government employment raises previously unexplored questions about the significance of race, class, and gender in street-level bureaucracies. Relying on interview data collected from black and Latino supervisors and caseworkers implementing welfare reform, I look at whether and how race and other social group memberships are deployed as tools in the delivery of casework services to black and Latino clients. Contrary to our assumptions about the level of impersonality entrenched in public bureaucracies, I find that most caseworkers and supervisors of color conceptualize and operationalize welfare reform in ways that link their goals and experiences as agency employees, members of racial communities, and implementers of social policy. They identify with the circumstances of their clients, but interpret the politics of welfare through not only racialized but also classed and gendered lenses. Consequently, they support and challenge clients of color in a variety of ways. In order to trace the origins of these strategies, I explore how the combination of institutional politics, environmental phenomenon, and black and Latino bureaucrats' personal histories contribute to their understanding of how they should do their jobs. This article suggests that not only inter-racial but also intra-racial politics inform institutional processes within street-level bureaucracies.

Recent scholarship asserts that members of racial groups can transcend their ethnic differences, but other research asserts that ethnoracial identities must be reinforced in order to participate in multiracial churches. Analysis of field notes and interview data from a large, black-white Protestant congregation shows that while the core membership of African Americans come specifically for its ethnic and racial diversity, they also look for markers that affirm a distinctive African-American experience. Ethnic reinforcement attracts highly race-conscious participants who eventually move toward processes of ethnic transcendence and congregational integration. The value for researchers is that distinguishing ethnically transcendent and ethnically reinforcing processes encourages the discovery of subtle, racially specific, and continually reinforced affinities that would otherwise remain hidden in seemingly ethnically transcendent settings.

James Turner has been at the center of the modern Black Studies Movement since its emergence in the 1960s, as an extension of the Black Power Movement. Since his days as a student activist at Northwestern University he has remained a consistent voice in the struggle to expand the discipline and re-write scholarship on the people of Africa and the African Diaspora. This detailed oral history interview chronicles the life of the initiator of the term "Africana Studies" and the founding director of Cornell University's Africana Studies and Research Center. Aside from addressing contemporary debates and interrogating his own writings in this area, the interview also draws parallels between Turner's unique career as a scholar-activist and the experiences of others working in African-American, African Diaspora and Africana Studies.

By investigating the place of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cities of the Atlantic world, this article explores many of the themes of this Special Issue across empires, with an emphasis on the Americas in the late eighteenth century, the eve of abolition. The article finds that, in nearly every manual occupation, slaves were integrated with free laborers and, not infrequently, slaves who had reached the level of jour-neyman or master directed the work of free apprentices. The limited number of slave insurrections in cities may be explained by the fact that they often worked semi-independently , earning money to supplement the livelihood provided by the master, or sometimes almost entirely on their own. To them, city life offered advantages that would have been inconceivable for their rural counterparts, especially the scope of autonomy they enjoyed and the possibilities to secure manumission. S L AV E RY What are cities? One historian has called them "concentrations of wealth and power".  Another has written that a city is a place "where people do different things, and the more different things they do, the more the place is a city".  Cities are sites of specialized activity, variegated employment opportunities, exchange of information, and intermingling of people. Cities in the Atlantic world were in many ways the counterparts of the relatively self-contained rural plantations or haciendas. They were indeed concentrations of wealth and power, as the seat of regional or supra-regional institutions and the preferred dwelling places of absentee planters who craved company and conspicuous consumption. Atlantic cities were also marketplaces, information . Marjolein 't Hart, "The Glorious City: Monumentalism and Public Space in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam", in Patrick O'Brien et al. (eds), Urban Achievement in Early Modern

Paul Robeson is one of the greatest yet most unknown figures of the 20th century. This article goes beyond the traditional bibliographic style of documenting this great life, toward constructing a usable philosophical framework from it. Utilizing Robeson's own works, and building on the small critical literature already in existence, I present his philosophical framework-comprised of anti-colonialism, socialism, and human rights. I present these dense, interconnected, and ever-expansive philosophical stances into a form of communication that can be easily understood, evaluated, taught, and compared. Understanding the philosophies, actions, and examples of his ideological framework will provide the appropriate contextual background for understanding (to play off the title of Robeson's 1958 book, Here I Stand) where Paul Robeson philosophically stood.

UNPRECEDENTED legislative resolutions apologize for the perpetuation of slavery and call for racial healing and reconciliation. Although the text of each resolution varies, they all fail to provide any form of concrete remedial measures. Building upon work in political science, legal scholarship, and critical race theory, this article provides an interest convergence analysis (Bell 1980) of the US House, Senate and seven state legislative resolutions apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow. It argues that although these apologies appear to promote racial healing and reconciliation they actually promulgate white supremacy: by covertly thwarting reparations claims or other racial justice efforts for black Americans they perpetuate a system of white political dominance while providing the illusion of substantive racial reconciliation and progress.