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- Joyce Jones, “HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard team up to expand access to Black history,” The Harvard Gazette (March 8, 2023): LINK. Last week, “the HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard [University] Library announced a project to sustain and deepen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of African American history collections held in HBCU libraries and archives across the U.S.” About two dozen CIC members are part of the HBCU Library Alliance.
- Michael Friedrich, “A Matter of Truth,” John Jay College of Criminal Justice: Research Blog (2022): LINK. Another example of a collaborative project to recover, digitize, and share resources (in this case, records related to the history of enslaved people in the Northeast). One of the main collaborating institutions is CIC member Monmouth University in New Jersey.
- “White Supremacist Propaganda Soars to All-Time High in 2022,” The Anti-Defamation League (March 8, 2023): LINK. In 2022, the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) tracked a significant expansion in white supremacist propaganda, targeting Blacks, Jews, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ+ community (usually in some combination).
- Anissa Durham, “Black Children Deserve to be Children,¨ The Seattle Medium (March 8, 2023): LINK. Anti-Blackness and the adultitification of Black children are a legacy of slavery that directly impacts Black students in the classroom–even in Latin American/Hispanic spaces, the Black teenaged students in this article suggest they have been treated differently because of their race and their mature bodies: “Black youth become so accustomed and, in some ways, normalize the surveillance of their bodies. We are conditioned or trained to limit our expression, to monitor what we do with our bodies, to shrink. Because if we’re too big, if we’re too loud, if we are too outspoken, if we stand out too much, this can come with detrimental and sometimes fatal consequences.”
- Adam Bradley, “Building a New Canon of Black Literature,” The New York Times (March 7, 2023): LINK. Bradley, founding director of Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture at UCLA, notes that “[literary] canons may enshrine the past, [but] they are instruments of the present. So what do readers require of Black American literature today? Works that confront the resurgence of white supremacy. Works that challenge orthodoxies of racial representation. Works that unsettle assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Works that expand the frames of formal experimentation. Works that imagine Black futures.”
- Min Chen, “Artist Josie Williams Trained A.I. Chatbots on the Literary Achievements of Black Authors. The Result? ‘Virtual Poetry’,” Artnet News (March 8, 2023): LINK. In a completely different approach to rethinking the canon of Black cultural creativity, Williams “used the words of radical Black thought leaders in an A.I. dataset, so that was the only thing that a chatbot could use to formulate responses about itself or the world.”