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Reflections on Race:
- Kali Halloway, “We’re Caught in Another Cycle of Racial Progress and Retrenchment,” The Nation (July 16, 2024): LINK. Halloway argues that there have been minor achievements but significant backlash since the racial justice uprisings of 2020: “The wages of racial progress will always be a white backlash that itself necessitates correction. In the endless loop of American history, no secured right is ever guaranteed — hence the ongoing fight for rights that our grandparents already won.”
- Arun Venugopal, “Eric Garner’s ‘I can’t breathe’ continues to echo across NYC and the world 10 years after his death,” Gothamist (July 16, 2024): LINK. Reflecting on Eric Garner’s death a decade later, the author writes: “Despite … continuing reverberations, some Black scholars, police reformers and civil rights activists are disappointed there hasn’t been more progress. They count Garner’s death — among a string of police killings of unarmed Black men that came in quick succession — as a catalyst for the reform movement that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, a cause they see as stalled.”
- Renata Sago, “Living History: Black Reenactors Walk in Ancestors’ Footsteps,” Dallas Weekly (July 15, 2024): LINK. Not all historic re-enactors are paunchy White men in Confederate gray. Indeed, there is a growing number of “Black reenactors rang[ing] from Civil War troops to rebels fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. Reenactors offer insight into the lives of the enslaved and free peoples on and off of plantations, but it also brings a measure of racial healing by walking in the footsteps of their ancestors.”
- Tracy Fessenden, “Decades after Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Strange Fruit’ is still a searing testament to injustice — and of faithful solidarity with suffering,” The Conversation (July 15, 2024): LINK. A scholar of American religion and literature reflects on the religious imagery and legacy of Billie Holiday’s haunting song about racial violence.
- Daniel Shailer, “Plagued by Developers and Rising Seas, a Historic Black Haven Embraces Conservation,” Mother Jones (July 14, 2024): LINK. Ten Mile, a historic African American community near Charleston, South Carolina, is at risk of disappearing underwater. Preservationists look to preserve historic Black neighborhoods from “climate gentrification.”
Reparations:
- “In a California gold rush town, some Black families are fighting for land taken from their ancestors,” The Grio (July 21, 2024): LINK. “In a tiny town [Coloma] where the California gold rush began, Black families are seeking restitution for land that was taken from their ancestors to make way for a state park now frequented by fourth graders learning about the state’s history.”
- Jamil Smith, “How land is ‘a fellow victim and hostage’ to racial capitalism,” The Emancipator (July 16, 2024): LINK. A conversation with Brea Baker, author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership (Penguin Random House, 2024). The book explores the costs of dispossession from the perspectives of both people and the land: “This is land on which some of the greatest trauma our people have ever suffered…. But the land did not do that. The land was not just a witness to that trauma. Actually, it was also a fellow victim and hostage.”
- Giuliana Perrone, “Rehearsals for Reparations,” The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences (June 2024), 10 (2) 132-150: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.06. From the abstract: “This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, that there was a general agreement between enslaved and enslaver about the form reparations should take, and that there was a similar understanding that reparations should be generational.”
Mass Incarceration and Capital Punishment:
- Nick Weldon, “A Long Arc of Injustice,” Historic New Orleans Collection (July 18, 2024): LINK. A new exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration, explores the links between slavery and contemporary mass incarceration. The exhibit draws upon 18th century documents, prints and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, and testimonial videos from our own century.
- Giuliana Perrone, “California Moves to Ban Forced Prison Labor, But There’s Still More to Do,” Counterpunch (July 17, 2024): LINK. “California is finally taking steps to abolish slavery from its constitution by banning it in state prisons…. As of now though, California remains among the 16 states that allow the forced servitude of its prisoners.”
- Janis Parker, “Matters of Life and Death,” Bunk History (July 10, 2024): LINK. The history of racial injustice informed Virginia’s decision to abolish capital punishment in 2021, making Virginia the first Southern state to end the practice — and moving the state away from one of the “deeply entrenched legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.”