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Black Lives Matter is a global movement that has gained support from an increasingly diverse racial and ethnic demographic. Universities seek ways to provide an opportunity to increase the quantity and strength of the Black perspective. Using research methods, a fundamental social science course, this paper demonstrates that it is possible to view methods as a course where we can adequately reflect on conversations about race and other social inequities. Research methods does not have to only be about skills but can also convey perspective. Moreover, it highlights the possibilities of shifting any course away from the dominant perspective and centering Blackness in classroom conversation. This paper intends to continue the conversation of social justice teaching and stimulate discussion around lifting Black voices throughout the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I consider Meghji's implications for scholars of race, racism, and blackness/anti-blackness by providing an overview of Meghji's many interventions, and then pivoting to discussing its implications for understanding epistemological considerations of theorization of such questions and for understanding global solidarities around blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that anti-theatricality is entrenched in, even a manoeuvre of, anti-Blackness. The article begins by establishing the contexts of the first Black actor known to have played Othello in Britain – Ira Aldridge in the first half of the nineteenth century – and, conflictingly, the repeated efforts in Romantic-era performance and criticism to reject Othello's Blackness. These contexts highlight the default white perspective of Romantic theatrical texts, and the role anti-Blackness had in shaping Romantic dramatic criticism. Having introduced these concepts, I offer a close reading of Charles Lamb's essay 'On the Tragedies of Shakspeare' (1811, rpt. 1818) to demonstrate that Romantic anti-theatricality's desire to transcend embodiment is, specifically, a rejection of marginalised bodies in favour of an idealised imagination coded as white. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 64 games (roughly 200 hours of broadcast game content) of the first 4 weeks of the 2023–2024 NFL season was analyzed. While the majority of taxonomical areas yielded no significant differences, four areas were notable deviations as (a) quarterbacks of color were more likely than White quarterbacks to have their successes attributed to running ability, (b) White quarterbacks were more likely than quarterbacks of color to have their failures ascribed to a lack of experience, (c) White quarterbacks were more likely than quarterbacks of color to have unclassifiable "other" commentary, and (d) White announcers were more likely to be the ones advancing the comments about White quarterback inexperience than were quarterbacks of color. Ramifications for framing theory and sports media professionals are advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Zaya Wade came out as transgender, she has continued to take up prominence in popular culture and press coverage of Zaya has centered on her fashion. In this article, we analyze press coverage of Zaya to examine the intersections of Blackness, femininity, trans identity, and child celebrity. Building on scholarship about trans representation and performing Black femininity in popular media, we focus our attention on how Zaya is presented as authentic—a core theme in this scholarship. In our analysis, we illustrate how these representations appear seemingly positive by shedding light on Zaya's unique perspectives about family, beauty, and activism. Yet, we find the press coverage only promotes Zaya's unique identity to the extent her performance of authentic Black femininity upholds transnormativity. This article unpacks how authenticity is used as a strategy of transnormativity that is animated by Zaya's Blackness, femininity, and status as a child celebrity and activist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the emancipation, the African-Americans come to recognize the necessity of rebuilding their identity and redefining their blackness. This recognition is seemingly motivated by their post-civil war need to demolish the negative stereotypes long established and believed about them, change the American cultural context and enhance their living conditions. Taking into consideration its performative role and discursive nature, the African-American writers arrive to make an exceptional use of collective memory and its genuine narratives in order to recast their unique identity. As it has formerly been noticed, the process of collective remembering follows three major steps that are: construction, reconstruction and deconstruction. No doubt, these techniques have helped to condemn the lingering racist practices and their destructive outcomes, provide a more accurate conception of blackness and ultimately transcend the earlier established blacks' image into another one which is strong, innovative and full of possibilities. The theoretical background of this research will subsequently be applied on a number of Toni Morrison's novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though sexual violence can impact people across genders, sexual orientations, ages, and incomes, societal inequities can increase the risk of experiencing sexual violence. Such inequities are often intersectional in nature (e.g., racism and sexism) and may impact a person’s ability to engage in help-seeking for experiences of sexual violence, especially among those who perceive themselves to be a burden on others or society as a whole. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine the association between experiencing sexual violence, intersectional oppression, and perceived burdensomeness on barriers to help-seeking among Black American young adults. Participants (n = 289) completed an online questionnaire assessing constructs of interest. We found that half of our sample experienced any sexual violence and nearly three-fourths experienced more than one form of intersectional oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, and homophobia). Ultimately, we found that sexual violence and perceived burdensomeness – but not intersectional oppression – were correlates of experiencing barriers to help-seeking. Through incorporating multiple marginalized identities beyond Black race, our findings can expand our understanding of barriers to help-seeking among diverse Black sexual violence survivors, while revealing a new area for practitioners, healthcare providers, social workers, and related professionals to focus intervention strategies on: perceived burdensomeness. These findings are relevant to all who care for the health and well-being of those who have experienced sexual violence, chronic stress (due to singular and multiple forms of discrimination), and/or other traumas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marcus Anthony Hunter’s Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation presents a novel and interesting meditation on the issue of reparations. This review essay addresses the meaning and function of the three speculative parables Hunter presents in the book in three sections. First, by detailing the human travails of African people and their descendants during and in the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade in an engaging prose style, the book offers an important intervention as a form of public sociology, accessibly written for a popular audience. Second, Hunter’s parables also convey the complex humanity of Africans’ lives, detailing both their subjection and agency. Finally, the review essay understands the book’s critique of ascribed blackness as importantly de-racializing Africans and establishing an expansive form of reparations as necessary for the realisation of their humanity and repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? This manuscript thinks with theories of Blackness to explicate how the question of the human, specifically, what it means to be human, interrupts traditional methodological discourse, and requires a critical form of labor to account for the breadth and depth of Black liveliness and living. Diverging from traditional distance-oriented research practices, the author puts forth "Black methodological intonations" as methodological praxes. Unlike conventional methods that prioritize detachment, this manuscript advocates for a transformative attunement that actively engages with and alongside Black liveliness. Grounded in the embodied and relational concept of hapticity, the manuscript outlines the theoretical framework of Black methodological intonations, emphasizing the necessity of transcending mere spectatorship in research on Black life. In conversation with Arthur Jafa's film, "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" (2016), the manuscript employs haptic reflexivity to consider profound listening, viewing, and feeling experiences in connection with the Black quotidian. Jafa's film serves as a compelling example of reshaping the white gaze's racialized power dynamics. The analysis of the film through the lens of hapticity yields valuable insights, culminating in essential considerations for Black methodological intonations as methodological response-making. Key themes include attunement, impressions, slowness, and emanation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of methodological practices that engage with the precarity of Black liveliness and living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special section 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' suggests a framework within which studies of privilege in Asia can be situated. Animated by a global politics of Blackness and social movements that have renewed the focus on racialised inequality and hierarchy, we use this moment to urge an interrogation of the conceptual productivity of the notion of privilege. This project is particularly significant within a region that is often seen only as empirical site and not as a space for theory-building in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection traces my intellectual journey to geography. It focuses on the emergence of Global Black Geographies as a key methodological framework in my PhD research. The article explores its application to my work alongside my move from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. Global Black Geographies, which takes some of its cues from Black Geographies, is a field that powerfully interrogates the multiply complex definitions and geographies of Blackness in many parts of the world, including the Caribbean. I thus use the experience of my PhD research as a lens to demonstrate how Caribbean scholarship bridges Black Geographies scholarship and some of its more global concerns. In doing so, I reveal the central role Caribbean Studies have played in the development of Black Geographies, which ultimately connects my research interests to a context of several globally Black concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the centrality of mestizo people in the Mexican national political and social project of mestizaje. We argue that mestizos are far from homogenous, and that exploring their socio-economic and cultural differences sheds light on how racial hierarchies operate in contexts of mestizaje. Using data from the Project for Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), we (1) uncover the heterogeneity of the mestizo population in terms of Indigenous background; (2) show how skin color and place of residence predicts membership of different subgroups within the mestizo population that vary in terms of their Indigenous affiliations, and (3) reveal educational and socio-economic inequality within the mestizo population based on individuals' Indigenous affiliations and skin color. We provide a nuanced understanding of how anti-indigenous and anti-black racism conflate in contexts where racial mixing is part of the ideology and daily practices of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the use, production, and readings of images in antiracist work as processes in constant tension with racist logics. Racist logics are deceptive and entrapping, and the visible world is a particularly dynamic arena in which to analyse this. Images, specifically photographs, incorporate a nuanced and productive contradiction between their ability to illustrate, explain and evoke, on the one hand, while also ensnaring, on the other, partly through alluring and providing pleasure. This contradiction means that anti-racist projects may include the possibility of re-inscribing racist discourse and practice. Drawing on empirical examples from Mexico, this article interrogates how photographic representations of Blackness have been entangled with the racist logics and racial projects that feed them. Racialised images that emphasise the physical body of Black people raise questions about how mestizaje, Latin America's main racial formation, has coded the visual space of representation in confusing ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the seventeenth century, thinkers in various contexts attempted to account for differences in human skin color in ways that could accord with developing materialist doctrines. Among the most significant of such attempts is Robert Boyle's Experiments and Considerations Touching Colour (1664), which contains a section specifically focusing on potential causes for black skin. While repeatedly insisting that he is unable to offer a comprehensive theory of color and thus to make any material claims about black skin, Boyle nonetheless comes to serve as an important model for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iterations of scientific racism insofar as he applies the rhetoric of experimentalism to explaining what he calls an "accidental" phenomenon. In this essay, I work through Boyle's dense and heterogeneous arguments, putting his work in conversation with parodies of experimental writing, and tracing recurring iterations of the idea that black skin may assume a "pristine" state of whiteness at the Resurrection. I argue that Boyle enforces the superiority of whiteness against the ambiguity of his own experimental conclusions through his subtle but deliberate framing of blackness as potentially aberrant, secondary, or temporary. [A.S.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation used to make visible the lives of Black women in the archives and asks if it is possible that George Herbert, a white, Christian man, could engage in this methodology. I read Herbert's impersonation of an African woman in "Aethiopissa ambit Cestum Diversi Coloris Virum" ("Aethiopissa Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Color") (written c. 1620), to argue that the poet ventriloquizes Aethiopissa through tropes of blackness to reveal his identification with her––creating a representation that lies outside of normative early modern depictions of blackness. This essay demonstrates how Herbert presents Aethiopissa as a strong and rhetorically skilled speaker who employs what I call the "spectrum of darkness," a strategy she uses to appeal to her white addressee's senses to naturalize her blackness via natural phenomena. Herbert, I argue, sympathizes with Aethiopissa's erotic complaint as it can present the poet's own relation to his patron, Sir Francis Bacon. I conclude by maintaining that Herbert's "Aethiopissa" could be added to the canon of texts productively studied and taught by scholars in premodern critical race studies. [W.L.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soybean is an important protein and oil crop around the world, widely cultivated in Heilongjiang province, China. In the summer of 2021, soybean root rot samples were collected from farms in multiple regions of Heilongjiang province to isolate pathogens. Twenty‐seven fungal isolates with similar morphology were found, causing soybean root discolouration and blackness leading to root rot, but which had relatively mild pathogenicity, with an average disease index of 13.69–32.25. Morphological features and multilocus phylogenetic analyses divided these isolates into four species: Clonostachys rosea (48.2%), C. rosea f. sp. rosea (14.8%), C. chloroleuca (29.6%) and Clonostachys sp. (7.4%). Co‐inoculation of these four species with two important pathogenic Fusarium species that can cause soybean root rot, F. annulatum and Fusarium sp. 1 in the Fusarium oxysporum species complex (FOSC), showed that C. rosea and Clonostachys sp. significantly reduced the pathogenicity of F. annulatum to soybean root, while C. rosea f. sp. rosea and C. chloroleuca slightly increased the pathogenicity of F. annulatum. C. rosea, Clonostachys sp., C. chloroleuca and C. rosea f. sp. rosea slightly reduced the pathogenicity of Fusarium sp. 1 in the FOSC. Our research is the first to report Clonostachys sp., C. chloroleuca and C. rosea f. sp. rosea causing soybean root rot in Heilongjiang province, China, and that these four Clonostachys species can affect the pathogenicity of Fusarium species, alleviating or aggravating soybean root rot. The findings of this study provide new insights into exploring the interactions between pathogens and thus effectively controlling them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herein, the impact modifier of poly(butyl acrylate) grafted poly(styrene‐co‐acrylonitrile) (PBA‐g‐SAN) with 60% rubber content was prepared by emulsion grafting polymerization and subsequently blended with styrene–acrylonitrile copolymer (SAN) resin to construct acrylate styrene acrylonitrile (ASA) resins. The effects of acrylonitrile content of PBA‐g‐SAN copolymer and PBA size on the ASA resins' mechanical properties were investigated. Experimental results revealed that ASA resin's highest impact strength reached 27.75 kJ/m2. The lap shear adhesion test suggested that the PBA‐g‐SAN copolymer with 21% AN content exhibited excellent interfacial adhesion with SAN resin. The PBA‐g‐SAN particles with 100 and 400 nm poly (butyl acrylate) as core rubbers demonstrated a synergistic toughening effect for SAN resin. The high blackness ASA resin with excellent impact resistance was obtained when the 100 nm and the 400 nm poly (butyl acrylate) particle mass ratio reached 8/2. Highlights: The ASA resin with 27.75KJ/m2 impact strength was prepared.The synergistic toughening mechanisms were investigated.The high blackness ASA resin was constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racialized gendered body in consumer culture invokes the construction of identities and representation of beauty through embodiment practices. As companies hone in on consumer racial marker distinctions to enhance uniqueness as otherness for profit, an analysis of hair products marketed for Black hair textures provides an opportunity to analyze how products use these at the intersection of race, gender, and beauty. This study uses constructivist grounded theory to analyze the product names and long descriptions for 124 shampoos marketed for Black hair textures on the websites of two major retailers to answer the following questions: What message does the discourse of shampoo product descriptions marketed to Black hair textures communicate about beauty? What message does the discourse of shampoo product descriptions marketed to Black hair textures communicate about Blackness? How does this discourse define the embodiment of Black beauty through hair? The results reveal that the racialized gendered body in consumer culture invokes the construction of identities and representations of beauty through embodiment practices. Through advertisements and product descriptions, beauty companies create ideal images of the lived experiences achieved through consuming beauty products. By constructing visual interpretations of racial signifiers through text, marketing strategies encourage the consumption of otherness, creating a racialized space for Blackness consumption. Combining the five senses with the descriptions of shampoo products marketed for Black hair textures helps us see how beauty embodiment practices reinforce racialized and gendered practices to subjugate the Black body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a dual dynamic of simultaneous subordination and limited inclusion of Blackness in Latin America, using the example of a 1920s' Argentinian comic strip, "Página del Dólar". The comic's representations of Black people are racist, but also ambivalent and complex. Going beyond common characterisations of the exclusion/inclusion dynamic as a mask of inclusion hiding the reality of exclusion, I argue that the simultaneity and interpenetration of exclusion-plus-inclusion are important for understanding Latin American racial formations. The dynamic works in multiple ways are not fully appreciated in the literature, which emphasises the reproduction of racial hierarchy: as well, it lends specificity to images of the nation; and it provides a moral benchmark for middle classes, especially in relational and ambiguous class and racial locations. The domain of humour is apt for conveying ambivalent meanings, because it provides distance for the reader ("it's just a joke"), while also transmitting important affective charge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light-skin privilege is a term that is often used to describe the relative advantages that racially minoritized people who are socially recognised as "light-skinned" receive when navigating predominantly white spaces compared to their peers with darker-skin. This article considers the relationship between racism-induced stress and poor health outcomes amongst Black British women who self-identify as having light-, medium-, or dark-skin to examine the extent to which light-skin privilege mitigates the negative effects that racial discrimination has on health. Drawing on interviews conducted with 20 Black British women, I complicate the understanding that light-skin privilege invariably leads to better health outcomes for Black British women with light-skin by revealing how its operation at a systemic level can coincide with individual experiences of anti-Black racism that can, in turn, lead to poor health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though recent research has begun to problematize the enactment of anti-Black ideologies within dual language bilingual education (DLBE) research, fewer studies have explored how dominant raciolinguistic ideologies impact U.S. AfroLatinx learners. In this semi-systematic literature review, I examine how Blackness is (or is not) taken up in DLBE scholarship, focusing on three primary lines of inquiry: deficit orientations toward Black language, race-evasiveness, and the role of raciolinguistic ideologies in mediating identity development. This endeavor merges insights from raciolinguistic ideologies and Black-imiento to challenge the under-theorization of U.S. AfroLatinidad in DLBE and call for an expansion of research that specifically attends to the intersectional experiences of Black emergent bilinguals and developing an AfroLatinx historical consciousness in DLBE scholarship and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the representation of Blackness in the fiction of Colombian author Juan Cárdenas, particularly emphasising the novels The Strata and Shadow Elastic. It explores the challenges faced by Cárdenas when integrating Black characters into narratives narrated by white male protagonists. The novels question the perspective of the male narrator, which often extends beyond the confines of European rationality. As a result, the act of portraying Black life becomes intricate when a character’s lived experience exceeds that of the narrator, prompting a reconsideration of the storytelling itself. The concept of the ‘shadow archive’, inspired by Tavia Nyong’o, plays a central role in Cárdenas’s vision of Black life. This archive serves as a repository of memory and self-representation, defying conventional narratives by recovering stories suppressed or disregarded by the white world. Cárdenas employs the notion of ‘afro-fabulation’, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction and delving into the possibilities of what could have occurred by incorporating everyday, fantastic, and mythical elements. Through their elusive narratives, the novels disrupt hegemonic culture, challenge biased knowledge, and establish connections within Black cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes three ephemeral artworks by sculptor Beverly Buchanan that were created with the knowledge that they would disappear or be destroyed. I link the formal qualities of these artworks with the absented presence of blackness in modernity, whose violent exclusion enables the coherence of the normative social order. Psychoanalysis has inherited a sense of the Subject from within this social order and, as such, its unconscious and symbolic coordinates are haunted by anti/blackness. This essay engages Lacan's understanding of the artist's privileged relation to the unconscious to posit that blackness is an essential medium that reveals the socially and historically specific psychoanalytic unconscious to itself. I bring the blackened forms of Buchanan's sculpture to bear on clinical and structural analysis to illuminate the unmarked place of blackness and pose questions toward a psychoanalysis that is open to the destruction of a World founded on black nonbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies of musical blackness in France either focus on inter-war jazz or on post-1990 rap and "urban pop." This article bridges the gap by studying the songs and career of Henri Salvador (1917-2008), a singer and guitarist of Guadeloupean origin who successfully transitioned, in metropolitan France, from the 1930s fashion for Creole music to mainstream pop in the 1950s and beyond. His success as a métis or mixed-race artist straddled racial stereotyping and abstract Frenchness, revealing complexities around race that problematize the relevance of blackness and métissage (French-style multiculturalism) for framing the work of Black pop musicians in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I explore the emergence of mestizaje (mixedness) as a Latin American racial ideology that emerged in the early twentieth century. I begin by exploring the work of Mexican theorist José Vasconcelos and especially his work La Raza Cósmica , which emerged at the end of the Mexican Revolution that foresaw the emergence of a "cosmic race" that would render obsolete African and Indigenous races. From there, I explore Vasconcelos's influence on Mexican-American theologies and especially the doctrine of Christology in the work of Virgilio Elizondo. Finally, I explore the problems and possibilities of mestizaje for people whose Blackness plays an integral part of their mixedness—namely, "Blaxicans." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kim Kardashian is a White female celebrity influencer who also blackfishes. Blackfishing refers to altering one's appearance to appear Black, mixed-race, or racially ambiguous to appeal to a broader audience. In our case study, we examined blackfishing through the lens of celebrity and influencer, Kim Kardashian. We argue that blackfishers like Kardashian cosplay what they believe is Black womanhood for profit and fame at the expense of Black women. Using image repair theory and critical technocultural discourse analysis as our methodological approach, we explore how Kardashian uses social media to create and manage her image. Our study extends the concept of image repair theory by connecting the role social media with image repair, specifically through affordances and the "non-apology" apology. Our study shows the limits of image repair theory because there is little sanctioning of micro/celebrities due to their followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we drew on the m(ai)cro framework, which centers racism as a macrosystem, to examine how college-going emerging adults made meaning about society and themselves during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and 2021 inauguration. This period was marked by racial justice protests, a global pandemic, anti-Asian violence, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol by predominantly white Trump supporters. Using the constructs of critical consciousness and racial identity meaning making, we analyzed participants' reports of recent race related conversations. Our sample included 47 students (M age = 19.71, SD = 1.72; 81% female, 17% male, 2% other; 45% Asian/Asian American, 30% white, 13% Latinx/Hispanic, 4% Black/African American, 4% Multiracial, 2% Middle Eastern/Arab) at a private, predominantly white university in the U.S. Midwest. Hybrid inductive-deductive analysis showed that a majority reported conversations with peers, focused primarily on racial inequity and justice. For many participants of color, conversations about topics including protests and anti-Asian violence were woven into their racial identities. In contrast, although many white participants discussed events such as the Capitol insurrection, none made links to their racial identities. Our findings highlight connections between critical consciousness and racial identity, and the importance of context and participant positionality in developmental research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blackness in Malaysia is associated with Semang or "Negritos" and Indians, ranked groups based on a mix of biological and cultural attributes in colonial and postcolonial racial worldviews. They inhabited separate but lower rungs of "civilized" and "aboriginal" slots in colonial Malaya and are treated as second-class citizens in postcolonial Malaysia. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate their experiences of prejudice and discrimination in contemporary Malaysia. Kensiu Semang and Tamil Indian racial projects for improving their conditions interact with other racial projects serving different interests. The social and cultural configuration shapes their positive self-identities that are not rooted in Blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Some scholars suggest that right-leaning Europeans utilize sympathetic reactions toward women gender-based violence victims to justify discrimination against Black men. Thus, in the context of an alleged sexual assault at a university, we examined whether the relationship between White Europeans' support for punishing an accused Black man would be moderated by their racial identity and the extent that they humanized the woman complainant. We further examined the role of pejorative beliefs about the man. Method: White Europeans (n = 302) recruited through Prolific completed a racial identity measure and read about an alleged male-to-female sexual assault by a Black or White male university student and reported the extent they humanized the woman complainant. They then completed measures assessing their perpetrator-directed sexualized threat attributions (i.e., he was hypersexual, threatening) and endorsement of: (a) university (i.e., suspension) and (b) criminal (i.e., incarceration) punitive sanctions. Results: In the Black male target condition, among those who reported strong (but not weak) racial identification, stronger complainant humanization predicted greater endorsement for both forms of punitive reactions. The humanization-punitive reactions association was mediated by greater sexualized threat attributions. In the White male target condition, the interaction between racial identity and complainant humanization was not significant. Conclusions: Among strongly identified White Europeans, elevated humanization of a sexual assault complainant predicted greater punitive reactions toward an accused university Black man. However, this positive humanization-punitive responding relationship was not based on stable moral standards as it did not occur for a similarly accused university White man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an exploratory sample of focus groups and surveys, we captured university students' experiences of comedic/satirical videos. We mined students' feedback to determine if those videos could enhance critical perspectives/consciousness about racial inequities, especially inequities impacting Black Americans. The literature on humor overflows with psychological explanations; we are more interested in sociological explanations. We find that when students interpret comedic materials intended as springboards for university discussions about racial inequities, they pay attention to social factors. These factors include the diversity or mixed company of classrooms; the social, cultural, historical, and/or linguistic contexts in comedic/satirical performances; and the racial/ethnic identities of both the comedians and the butts of the comedians' jokes. Intersectional identities may also play a role in perceptions of marginalized and dominant group members featured in the video clips. More specifically, students are more tolerant of Black comedians poking fun at Black characters/issues or critiquing, with levity, dominant group members and structures that are sources of racial inequities, especially inequities impacting Black Americans. Appropriate attention to social factors like these may lay a foundation for comedic/satirical materials to facilitate a reading of the world that helps students to become more reflexive about social/racial injustices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black men's experiences in education are often marked by isolation, imposter syndrome, and racial microaggressions. This qualitative case study, guided by the five enactments of Cross and Fhagen Smith's (2001) model of Black identity development, explored the experiences of 20 Black men doctoral students as they navigated and continually redefined their racial identity in response to campus perceptions of their identity. Findings and implications include new theoretical framings for Cross and Fhagen-Smith's model and practical considerations for student affairs practitioners, faculty, and students. Additionally, these findings expand the use of Cross and Fhagen-Smith's model to include concepts of masculinity. We provide broader implications for practice and suggestions for theory and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay explores various meanings of the word crisis (krisis): in philosophy, law, and psychoanalysis; but also in relation to truth, law, judgement, and thinking. In various axioms—on truth and negation; and on being and reproduction—the essay asks why blackness is often excluded from crisis theory. I then go on to explore the unintended consequences and complications of this exclusion in respective works by Donald Winnicott (on tolerance and contraception), and then only through what is deemed to be neither an object nor a relation, neither a negation nor a phantasy. In the wake of these lacunae I conclude: blackness is an example of an unthought, and that this n'est pas cannot be thought, or determined, as krisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys Henry David Thoreau's extensive commentary on slavery and freedom in the 1840s and 50s, tracking the ways he toggles between the literal (i.e., the institutions of racial chattel and capital's value-form resisted by civil disobedience and reconfigured by civil war) and the figurative (i.e., the existential and spiritual slavery evaded by the individual and collective attainment of 'real values'), and how his natural philosophy at once illuminates and obscures the true stakes of his abolitionism and that of his fellow Transcendentalists. It notes that there is much to be said for and much yet to be done on the burgeoning intersectional critique of Transcendentalism, one that highlights both its strengths and limitations—or, at times, its outright problems—regarding race, nation, class, gender, sexuality et al. So too for the literature celebrating Thoreau 'as much for his politics as his aesthetics,' avowing how his 'reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn't rest on high-minded principles.' The focus here is adjacent and complementary: to consider the prospects of a Black Transcendentalism that is coeval with and prior to Thoreau's articulation of the principles of 'Elevation' and 'Emancipation.' Beyond that, it speculates about something like the blackness of Thoreau's own evolving relation to the political-intellectual movement of Transcendentalism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the spectacle of slavery that is death, and death only which continually persists as slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation or otherwise understood as a system of white-over-black. By observing the motionless movement of death perfecting itself (neither as life nor as historical time, progress, the human, or development), I argue that law makes death sovereign. The essay pursues this line of inquiry by considering a. capitalism as a system of spectacular relationships, a system of legal relationships, that places death atop everything and as a faith expressed in the gospel of legal method and its false promise of perpetual progress. And b. law as a structure analogous to the unconscious since it exists outside of time. In placing these two concerns together, it considers a sort of magical thinking of law—a make-believe realm in which rules appear to somehow govern themselves and an 'us' that seemingly masks over and absolves the system of white-over-black. Such banishment, whereby the system of white-over-black banished from the realm of the spectacle, is by that act repatriated to and given sovereignty over the world of the real, the world of historical time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "On Drawing on Blackness: Theory and Crisis," explores the concept of blackness in relation to drawing and philosophy. The author discusses the exercise of drawing with charcoal and how blackness is used to create figure and form. The article raises questions about the role of blackness in representation and the violence inherent in critique. It also examines the misrecognition and misrepresentation of blackness in philosophy and the need to understand what blackness means to philosophy. Overall, the article argues that blackness poses a crisis for theory and philosophy, challenging traditional notions and demanding a reevaluation of its significance. [Extracted from the article]

Johan Mijail (1990), born in the Dominican Republic, stands out a trans performer who systematically seeks to destabilize heteronormative culture and colonial legacies ingrained in the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. In her most famous performance Amor vegetal (2015), the naked artist does headstands while inserting small branches, leaves or flowers in her rectum. By placing the "obscene" at the center of her work, Mijail creates alternative knowledge that challenges traditional values of homophobia, Catholicism, and fear of Blackness, all located at the heart of libidinal politics in Abya Yala. In Amor vegetal the artist creates a procto-poetics of the obscene through excess, which offers up the anus/ass as a transfeminist, decolonial, and countersexual axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores the visual art and performance of Wynnie Mynerva (1992–), interpreting their aesthetic use of violence and sadism. My reading of Wynnie's work articulates cholanness in relation to Blackness, unearthing the colonial etymology of "cholo." I argue that the body of chola women is at very center of the "abigarrado cholo sex," a sexual/reproductive system of extraction of labor and pleasure. Wynnie's visual experimentation toys with castration and revenge, and with the non-generative pleasures of anal sex and anti-natalism. To think through the contemporary uses of chola, I use the work of Black feminist scholars in the US and the Caribbean, establishing hemispheric connections with Latin American feminist scholars and activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review discusses Norman Ajari's book "Darkening Blackness: Race, Gender, Class and Pessimism in 21st-Century Black Thought." The book explores Afropessimism and black male studies, examining the challenges faced by the black community. Ajari argues that the concept of blackness itself is the root problem of the black condition, analyzing historical and contemporary manifestations of anti-blackness. The book also explores the connection between black consciousness, Afropessimism, and black male studies. The reviewer finds the book to offer valuable insights into contemporary black thought, while also raising concerns about certain aspects of the analysis. [Extracted from the article]

"Our blood is becoming white." This was a constant lament I heard from siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India—third‐ and fourth‐generation descendants of East African slaves and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The article explores this siddi lament and the multivalent symbols—of color, blood, affect, belonging—latent in it. It draws on fieldwork conducted over the course of the last decade among siddis in Hyderabad, ambivalently situated as Indian citizens who are racialized as "Black" in an Indian and global order that denigrates Blackness and marked by their religious identification as Muslim in a virulently Hindu nation. The article unpacks these contexts, exploring the forces of empire and region and constructions of race, gender, and religion that have prodded and inflected siddi processes of becoming. In so doing, it unearths the ways in which Blackness, Muslimness, and masculinity are constituted as (intersecting) social and political categories, caught in the dialectics of alienation and intimacy, belonging and otherness, with enduring effects on the lives and cosmologies of siddis in Hyderabad and on the contemporary politics of race, gender, and religion in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the different ways in which American Enlightenment thinkers confronted the future of being white in the early republic as political economists, natural historians, physicians, and anatomists of the mind. Just as philosophes experimented on the nature of blackness in Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society supported novel approaches to the racial classification of whiteness. An appeal to Scottish Enlightenment racial theories connected the diverging thought of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Benjamin Rush as prominent members of this society between 1743 and 1826. In doing so, Franklin industrialised the political economy of a 'purely white' nation. Jefferson naturalised the language of whiteness. Smith universalised the intellectual and moral cultivation of whiteness. And Rush medicalised an architype of a healthy mind and body as white. This article argues that Scottish philosophy informed radically different ideas about how to become white in the early American republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows how Jimi Hendrix's experiments with fuzz anticipated notyet-audible sonic worlds and evinced Blackness in sound. Focusing on the American guitarist's debut album, Are You Experienced (1967), I describe fuzz as an entryway into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality. My analysis pivots on two axes: edgework and excess. I argue that Hendrix's pursuit of new sonic territory, as well as the mathematical-electrical engineering that brought such sounds into being, can be read as an aesthetic practice of edgework, but also that the resulting music—which early reviewers described as "hellish," "freaky," "unimaginable," and "manic"—acts as a sign of fuzz's unruly excess. Across my analysis, I am in conversation with Matthew Morrison's theory of "Blacksound," which shows how US popular music attempts to essentialize and delimit Black performativity. If Hendrix's fuzz tone is audible as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, I argue, then its unruly and anarchistic ethos refutes racial essentialism, insisting on agency, beauty, and life in the face of social death. Through this intervention, I develop a theory of "rehearsal" as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which living otherwise becomes imaginable and achievable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages relays between the origins of money and origins of slavery, using Marxist reconstructions of "substance" in order to approach the negative zone of anti-blackness. In one move, I read money and slavery as two sides of the same coin: expressions of anxieties concerning equivalences that cannot be in reality (money) and inequalities that persist in democratic life (slavery). In another, I continue to argue that slavery exerts an important role in the story of capitalism, not only as a past index for a "mode of production," but more importantly in encrypting a certain monetary form of domination that translates the realization of commensurability. While there have been connections drawn between the origin of freedom in slavery, the origin of subjectivity in the money-form, and the origin of money in slavery, the vanishing mediator in this triad is blackness, a negative substance whose flexible uses and appearances are driven towards its own actualized disappearance in scenes of racial violence. If money masks the impossibility of commensurability, and labor and race ground the conditions for commensurability exemplified in freedom, slavery marks the space of incommensurability itself. In the line from Aristotle to Marx, the slave can serve as the first non-substantialist origin story for exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dreams are a central feature of the extended realism of Ralph Ellison’s second novel, some drafts of which have been published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . In this novel, dreams help Ellison’s characters realize or present truths that cannot be presented in the language of straightforward realism. In a quasi- Freudian manner, Ellison’s dream narrations reveal his characters’ and novels’ most fundamental preoccupations. In this article I analyze part of a dream sequence from Book I of Three Days. This dream, had by a white liberal character, is centered on the figure of an iron groom (or hitching-post boy) who cannot be removed from the doorway to a house. I analyze the construction and function of this dream figure and narrative through the lens of (1) Ellison’s ritualist social criticism, (2) his extended-realist, tragicomic, and syncretic aesthetics, and (3) his allusive and narrative poiesis. The iron groom is constructed as a stereotype of blackness, linked to the major black characters of the novel and to figures in Ellison’s first novel. The groom-as-stereotype is subverted through verbal “signifying” and through the development of a tragicomic narrative rhythm. The dream functions to excavate the dreamer’s (and possibly the reader’s) “self-concealed racism” and to point the way toward what Ellison has called “the mystery of our unity-within- diversity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pretrial assessment instruments provide courtroom actors with information about the likelihood that someone who has been charged with a criminal offense would engage in criminal behavior if released prior to trial. Although prior research supports the ability of pretrial instruments to predict pretrial outcomes, there are concerns that pretrial instruments may inadvertently exacerbate racial-ethnic and sex disparities found in the larger criminal legal system. In the current study, we conduct multi-site predictive bias tests of a widely used pretrial instrument—the Public Safety Assessment (PSA)— across six racial-ethnic and sex groups (i.e., White males, White females, Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females). Study results support the PSA as a valid and consistent predictor of failure to appear, new criminal activity, and new violent criminal activity across these six racial-ethnic and sex groups. These findings support the use of the PSA and identify several areas for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the history of private and public executions in the United States, specifically focusing on the transition to private, state-run executions in the early twentieth century. The author argues that this transition aimed to maintain the anger of white mobs while disbanding the community-mindedness of public executions. The article also explores the cultural significance of the southern death penalty and its expression of southern distinctiveness. The author reflects on the history of the death penalty in relation to contemporary issues such as the state-run death penalty and public violence. [Extracted from the article]

The continuing power of racist ideology threatens liberal democracy, for racism is more than a personal bias or a social construction. It is an ideological framework that reduces human beings to an existence along a color-coded spectrum, with people designated as "white" at the top of the hierarchy and people designated as "black" at the bottom. One has to see this ideology clearly in order to choose a proper response and then act accordingly. First, the reality of "race" has been exposed as unscientific and illusory, and as based not on biology or genetics, but on a legacy of empowerment for some and enslavement for others. Second, this racist ideology, part of our disenchanted, secular age, is exposed as a continuing form of enchantment in its manner of seeing the world, opening the possibility for a spiritual response. Third, dismantling this racist ideology requires a reimagining of "blackness" as a source of life and spirituality, as a way of countering and rewriting the dominant racist narrative. Fourth, a postsecular spiritualty, based on the work of Pope Francis—that emphasizes the importance of protecting our common human dignity, of caring for each other, and of "walking together"—can be engaged as a path for action in the battle against racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]