A plentiful collection of links today after we took some time to reflect on the legacy of Memorial Day last week! As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
General Links:
- Niall Boohoo and Russell Contreras, “Asian Americans back teaching about slavery, oppose race in college admissions,” Axios (May 29, 2024): LINK. “Asian Americans overwhelmingly support teaching historical topics like slavery, racism, and segregation in public schools but strongly oppose colleges using race and ethnicity in admissions, according to a new survey.”
- Morgan Curtis, “My ancestor was an enslaver. Here’s how I’m making reparations.” Faith and Leadership (May 28, 2024): LINK. A spiritual seeker wrestles with the legacy of enslavers in her family: “Sometimes, when I encounter the brutal truths of the harms my ancestors caused, I forget to breathe. Air catches in my throat. I become lightheaded. Then comes the instinct to do anything else but sit with the truth.”
- María Luisa Paúl, “N.C. residents sue to remove monument dedicated to ‘our faithful slaves,’” The Washington Post (May 23, 2024): LINK. “A group representing Black residents in a small North Carolina county has filed a federal lawsuit against local officials demanding that a 122-year-old monument outside a courthouse that honors ‘faithful slaves’ be removed.”
- “Created Equal: America’s ‘racial ghosts’ and how they influence society,” WDET (May 22, 2024): LINK. “The concept of racial ghosts is a counterargument to the claim that America is a post-racial, color-blind society. It refers to how African Americans’ present day outlooks are influenced by racial traumas experienced at other points in history.”
- Alexander N. Taylor, “Confederate Monuments in the Post-Reconstruction South,” CATO Institute (May 22, 2024): LINK. The author argues that “Confederate monument dedications intentionally created and conveyed information about a shared knowledge within their communities, acting as coordination mechanisms for the promotion of pro‐Confederate values that determined social and political behavior. Therefore, Confederate monuments are inseparable from the ideologies of those who identify with them today.”
Update from the CIC Network:
- Raj Ghoshal, “Sociologist published on how Americans appraise others’ race,” Elon University (May 29, 2024): LINK. Raj Ghoshal, associate professor of sociology at CIC member Elon University (NC), has published a new study about “racial appraisals.” From the abstract: “Racial appraisals, defined as people’s judgments of other people’s race, influence racial inequality and discrimination, anti-discrimination efforts, and collective identity…. I argue that four group-level differences in appraisal patterns uncovered here are rooted in specific aspects of America’s history of racial domination, and consider implications.”
Focus on Racial Discrimination:
- Lukas Althoff, “Policy approaches to addressing a history of racial discrimination,” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (May 2024): LINK. “Having established the impact that legalized discrimination continues to have on the socioeconomic status of Black Americans, the next question is how these persistent effects interact with race-blind policies to exacerbate systemic discrimination.”
- Jessica Guynn, “4 years after George Floyd’s death, has corporate America kept promises to Black America?” USA Today (May 31, 2024): LINK. Four years later, “what was supposed to be a watershed moment in the workplace has been waylaid by conservative activists waging aggressive campaigns against diversity, equity and inclusion in statehouses and courthouses across the country, diversity, equity and inclusion.”
- Mae Ngai, “The 100-Year-Old Racist Law That Broke America’s Immigration System,” Public Books (May 28, 2024): LINK. “The Immigration Act of 1924 consolidated a general entrenchment of white supremacy in national politics. That course had been set by the reversal of Reconstruction in 1877 and the advent of Jim Crow segregation, debt peonage, convict leasing, and violence against Black people in the South. It is no accident that Chinese exclusion passed Congress in 1882 with a solid alliance of the South and the West, the two sectional bastions of white supremacy.”
- Debra Kemin, “She Made an Offer on a Condo. Then the Seller Learned She Was Black.” New York Times (May 31, 2024): LINK. A Black scientist has filed a discrimination claim with the Virginia Fair Housing Office and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after a white woman refused to sell her a house in Virginia Beach on the basis of race.
Arts & Culture:
- Brandon Tensley, “Inside the Battle to Preserve ‘Black Wall Street,’” Capital B News (May 30, 2024): LINK. “The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on National Parks held a hearing this month considering a bipartisan bill that would establish Greenwood [a community destroyed during the 1921 Tulsa (OK) Race Riot] as a protected landmark.“
- Monique Jones, “How Gee’s Bend and Black Women Quilters Are Symbolizing Family Legacies, Stepping Out of the History Books and into Mainstream Fashion,” Blavity (May 29, 2024): LINK. “Gee’s Bend is known as living history due to the region’s generations of Black female quilters. The quilts, initially created for comfort and warmth, have become a symbol of Black survival and civil rights activism. But now the Alabama-based quilters are stepping out of the history books and into the mainstream fashion and home-good industries with the help of [a national nonprofit organization].”
- Dave Zirin, “Counting the Negro League Records is About More Than Numbers,” The Nation (May 29, 2024): LINK. Records set in the Negro Leagues prior to 1948 will be integrated into the official Major League Baseball (MLB) ledgers, however it is useful to contemplate how the MLB destroyed the Negro Leagues in the first place, mining them for talent and ultimately dashing hopes for Black ownership on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement.
- Ashawnta Jackson, “Finding Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman,” JSTOR Daily (May 27, 2024): LINK. Largely forgotten today, Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman was a major figure in late 19th century African American women’s literature. Her father was a graduate of CIC member Oberlin College (OH) and she was the first Black student to attend CIC member Lawrence University (WI)!
- “The Only Freedman’s Village in North Carolina,” North Carolina Weekend on PBS NC (May 23, 2024): LINK (video). Oberlin Rising Sculpture Park, an open-air museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, commemorates a “once-thriving Black neighborhood established by formerly enslaved people” during Reconstruction. The community was named in honor of the abolitionists associated with Oberlin College.
- Jennifer Schuessler, “A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces After Nearly 170 Years,” The New York Times (May 23, 2024): LINK. “John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist—and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged.” The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots is published by the University of Chicago Press.