Editorial Edition: Black Liberation

THE SANKOFA JOURNAL EDITORIAL EDITION

Davidson College Black Liberation Edition Summer 2020

The Sankofa Journal

Editorial Edition

The Sankofa Journal is a multidisciplinary, intercollegiate, undergraduate, scholarly journal of peer-reviewed academic essays and articles on matters relating to Africa and the African Diaspora. In the spirit of the interdisciplinarity of Africana Studies at Davidson College, contributions in all academic fields are welcome.

Eurocentric articles and essays that focus on European administrators, settlers, or colonial policies are not a part of our operation unless they deal substantially with interactions among or the lives of Africans or people of African descent.

Statement from Editor

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Editorial Edition Statement from Editor In Chief

We are in the midst of a revolution centering the liberation of darker people of the world. We are sitting in a pivotal moment in history that will decide if things get better or a lot worse. For the past few months, a cascade of revelations exposed the reality of tremendous ignorance, misinformation, and misunderstandings. Sentiments my peers, mentors, teachers, and heroes taught for years found itself plastered all over Instagram walls. I suppose this awakening demonstrated that we all have much unlearning and learning to do. Our current global system oppresses almost all of us but almost all of us oppress others. Therefore, we all need to do our part. We all have different roles in fighting for social change. Find it. For me, I understand that policies, laws, oppressive mindsets, and programs are not formed in a vacuum. All of these elements of our society are informed or influenced by knowledge production. Sadly, most disciplines fail to incorporate texts not written by racist, sexist, classist, imperialistic white heterosexual men. Gratefully, Africana Studies, as a whole, attempts to give us the tools and understanding in which we can alter our world. At the same time, I understand that the gatekeeping and institutions of knowledge production even in Africana Studies are oppressive. The information is not always available and it is also not always comprehensible. It is a privilege to be able to sit in a class and be able to engage texts that deal with the structure and ills of society.

Furthermore, knowledge is ever changing and growing as people change and grow themselves. However, if we are able, we must do our best to educate ourselves. If we can, ignorance is not excusable. The information is there. The information is written.

People have dreamed of new societies and ways to fix ours for centuries. We just need to keep listening, reading, and opening ourselves up to learning. This is my attempt to distribute knowledge in an accessible and comprehensible way. Liberation is the core of Africana Studies and the theme of this edition. Thus, I hope this journal satisfies the heightened cravings for knowledge surrounding the global oppression of people around the world. You may stumble on a source you like or an author you connect with. You may change your mind or equip yourself with the tools to change others.

Hopefully this will push you to research and read other scholars or take classes you did not before and further push you to resist and fight. At the very least, I hope you enjoy reading this thought provoking, liberation seeking, exciting body of work. Enjoy these songs of freedom.

Gabrielle Thomas Founder & Editor in Chief Davidson College Class 2021

The Sankofa Journal

Editorial Edition Collective Statement

The Sankofa Journal created this edition due to the recent events this month. It was our aim to highlight the perspectives of those who could speak on the liberation of black people using their unique voices and methods of creation. Requirements were intentionally vague and open to interpretation so as to allow applicants to have a full range of original expression.

This edition originally was supposed to reflect our editorial board at Davidson College and their academia. However, we received over 50 essays, poetry, pictures, and prose from across the country. In terms of the contributors, every essay written in this body of work is written by an undergraduate student or a recent class of 2020 graduate. Furthermore, all of the submissions we received came from people who identify as oppressed genders, as well as people who identify as a Black/ Indigenous/ Person of Color. But We also were blessed to have received essays covering the diaspora. This allowed us to grapple with the “American gaze” and voices of the diaspora.

We, the Sankofa board, are all women of color who are happy to disperse this rich Africana knowledge and education – especially the central theme of liberation. Please enjoy our third edition of the Sankofa Journal.

Sincerely, The Sankofa Journal Editorial and Logistics Board: Livaslou Tanjoung, Phoebe Son Oh, Idalina Pina, Sabria Jackson, and Gabrielle Thomas.

Editors Gabrielle Thomas [she/her] Editor in Chief/Founder Gabrielle Thomas is a class of 2021 Jamaican born and raised aspiring lawyer at Davidson College, where she is a degree candidate for Africana Studies with a concentration in Political Economy, Development, Africana Philosophy, and Political Science. She is the President and Founder of the Sankofa Society which is an Africana Studies student-run academic organization connected to the faculty led Sankofa Society. She has taking classes surrounding international development, black Marxism and radicalism, ecolonial thought, black radical feminist thought, africana anthropopology, African-American political philosophy, aesthetics of blackness, the Carribean, South America, Africa, and South Asia.

Livaslou Tanjong [she/her] Senior Editor

Livaslou is a 2021 degree candidate for Africana Studies & English at Davidson College. Although she has her roots in Southwest Cameroon, with a great deal of intellectual curiosity, respect for black and brown cultures, and love of travel Livaslou finds her home in a multitude of cities and towns across the globe.

Interested in story-telling and the critical nature of POC cultural productions, Livaslou aims to merge her interest with tech as she pursues a career in digital marketing and sales. (She-her-hers)

Sabria Jackson [she/her] Junior Editor Sabria Jackson is a poet born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland who is currently based in the small town of Hillsborough, North Carolina. She is a Davidson College class of 2023 Africana Studies and Psychology double major. She is one who enjoys traveling, reading and writing poetry, listening to music of almost any genre, photography, and being in nature. In the future, Sabria plans to use her refined platform to inform others of the importance of mental health within the black community and provide necessary resources.

Editors Idalina Pina [she/her] Design Editor Idalina Pina is a creative writer, photographer, and gardener based in Boston, Massachusetts. Born and raised on the islands of Cape Verde, Idalina immigrated with her family to the United States at the age of nine. She acclimated well, eventually going boarding school during her high school years.

She now attends Davidson College pursuing a double major in Anthropology and Africana Studies. Idalina enjoys traveling the world, taking pictures of her cat, Morgan, and long walks on the beach. (she/her/hers)

Phoebe Son Oh [she/her] Design Editor

Phoebe is a rising junior Africana Studies major from Hong Kong and Charlotte, North Carolina. She is one of the codesign editors for the Sankofa Journal. She hopes to combine her passion for Africana with a career in the mental health field to further destigmatize mental health and make it more accessible for BIPOC communities, as well as to help decolonize the methodologies and approaches to therapy and counseling.

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Contributors

Amanda Taylor Amanda Taylor, Barnard College ‘22, Combined Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies, she/her/hers. She is the founder of Unplug Collective Magazine for black and brown oppressed genders which reimagines beauty, physical & mental health.

Chisom Illogu Chisom Ilogu is a Class of 21 scholar at Princeton University Department of History Certificates in African Studies and Journalism. She is the founder of https://misschis.wordpress.com and an active advocate for black and small businesses. Special focus on Nigeria, West Africa, PostColonial Africa and Inter-Diasporic Movements.

Chloe deBeus Chloe deBeus, she/her, Davidson College, Class of 2021. Sociology major and enjoys photography on the side. I’ve always enjoyed taking candids, but Mak especially helped me be more open with my photography. I love this photo of Makayla because she really brightened the week this picture was taken, reshaped my summer, and helped me see how much liberation starts within us and our individual passions. And it’s Black folk like Makayla and the many influential Black people in my life who inspire me to keep loving and keep fighting until we are all free.

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Gentle Ramirez Gentle Ramirez (21) (They/Them) is a Bronx Native trans non-binary poet majoring in Africana Studies, and minoring in Creative Writing and Computer Science at New York University. Gentle R. Poetry is a Class of 2022 student at New York University. Inspired by Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, they hope to join freedom struggles domestically and abroad.

Since 2015 they have been a member of numerous collective-oriented organizations such as BYP 100 NYC, New York Metro American Student Association, and TakeBackTheBronx. Most recently Gentle’s activism has centered jail support, critical street first aid, poetry spaces as a source of connection and healing, and sharing digital resources on digital & data property and rights. A 2020 Lyvo Fellow and a recipient of the 2020 Oluwatoyin Salua Freedom Fighters Grant their work has been featured in NYUnited, Bryant Park Poetry, West 10th, The Columbia Spectator, The Providence Journal, PoetNY, Write About Now Poetry, Alchemy Magazine, in anthologies and more. Finally, Gentle and most recently the author of their first book, Ultram (KDP 2018).

Inayah Bashir Inayah Bashir is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University (Class of 2020); she graduated with a B.S. in College of Social Studies and a minor in Creative Writing. Inayah has always been an educational advocate and she has used much of her career to support the re-education of Black people, especially in regards to the mistruths of American history. Her piece, "A Call to Heal America" is an excerpt from her thesis Healing Our World: ReEvaluating American Legal Foundations for the Development of Restorative Practices.

She wanted to include this excerpt in the Sankofa Journal because she believes that it is invaluable for people to always question the validity and truth of any and all things that accept. Furthermore, she hopes that her Black readers will be inspired to use their work to imagine the world for what it needs to be. It is her belief that the more we detail a healthy world, the more likely we are to bring a more holistic reality to life

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Kowlanne Felix Born in Haiti, and raised in Miami Florida, Kwolanne Felix is a rising Junior at Columbia College studying the History of the African Diaspora.

Kwolanne's passion for international politics, social justice, and gender equality has led her to work with organizations such as the Malala Fund and the Council of Foreign Relations; as well as to start Inclusion and Diversity Task Force to address inequities on her college campus. In her free time, she writes in the Columbia Spectator, Ms. Magazine, and the Malala Fund's Assembly, reflecting on nuanced intersectional issues of her community. Kwolanne uses she/her pronouns. My piece "Remembering Violence: Fanon and CĂŠsaire discussing Slavery in the Framework of Colonial Violence" was written for my class Africa and France. The class discussed relations between African states and France throughout colonial and the postcolonial period. I found Cesaire and Fanon to offer unique visions of decolonization and use slavery as a metaphor. Both authors hailed from Martinique, and are descendants of enslaved people, yet they draw upon their shared history in very different ways. I hope this piece speaks to the ways in which slavery is remembered and contextualized in relations to liberation.

Makayla Binter Makayla Binter is a recent Davidson College 2020 graduate who majored in Biology and Studio Art. Her pronouns are she/her/hers. As an artist, I have always looked at the multi-dimensional pieces of the Black experience, especially as Black women, and how that often impacts our ability to be our full selves at all times. As Black women, our identities and traits are often stereotyped, personified, and commercialized, used to sell to an audience without having a Black person portray them. The movement and motion in these photographs shows the transitions from space to space, and interaction to interaction where I am not able to be fully whole. I see each image as a whole expression of the multiple pieces of each subject and how

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in our transitions and transformations between spaces, I am always in motion.

Morgan Henderson My name is Morgan Henderson. I'm a member of the Class of 2023 at Davidson College. My pronouns are she/her/hers, and I'm currently an undecided major. I am looking at majoring in psychology with a minor in communications. I want to help adolescents struggling with mental health, and bring awareness to mental health in underrepresented communities.

My piece(s) were inspired by the resurgence of the BLM movement. I did a home photoshoot that I saw many black tiktokers doing. I found their pictures empowering, and I wanted to recreate that. I chose to comb out my hair and put it into a ponytail instead of trying to contain it, because black hair can be big and beautiful (something I've learned finally). I wanted to try working with darker lighting and clothing. I'm trying to have for self confidence, so I wanted share it. The other piece is the American flag created from the words "Am I Next?". Black people are constantly fearing for their lives (an issue since America's founding). I think it's important to read in between the lines, and consider the true meaning of the flag.

Uyen Nyguyen Uyen Nguyen is a cum laude graduate of Davidson College, where she pursued an education in Africana Studies and Economics. She is passionate to promote social justice and to reform the criminal justice system.

Witnessing the brutal injustice that her father, an undocumented man, experienced in immigration custody changes the direction of her life.

Infuriated by her father’s injustice, she channeled her outrage into learning the judicial system and combating injustice in the criminal justice system.

She was recently named as the 2020-2021 Davidson Impact Fellow at the Georgia Justice Project. Uyen’s long-term goal is to become a lawyer who advocates for individuals who are wrongly accused of crimes and treated

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unfairly in the criminal justice system. Through legal advocacy, Uyen hopes to reform the system that deprives the human rights of undocumented immigrants and incarcerated individuals.

The Sankofa Journal

Editorial Edition Table of Contents

Today, Africana Studies is More Important than Ever

by Dr. Benson Page 1 Decentering Whiteness and Politics of Respectability in Social Justice Movements by Uyen Nyguyen Page 5 Idalina Art Page 7 “Stop Di Slackness”: The Dichotomy of Respectability vs. Reputation for Jamaican Women in Urban Culture by Amanda Taylor Page 8 “I PLEDGE BETRAYAL” by Gentle Ramirez Page 16 Freedom and Imprisonment: Angela Davis’ Perspective by Idalina Pina Page 18 “Elegy For The Working Body” by Gentle Ramirez Page 26 Makayla Binter Artwork I Page 27 Sovereignty and the Lack Thereof by Gentle Ramirez Page 28 “SIGNED, TIRED” by Gentle Ramirez Page 30 Makayla Binter Artwork II

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The Role of African Americans in African Liberation Struggles by Chisom Illogu Page 33 “The Truth” by Sabria Jackson Page 45 Makayla Binter Artwork III Page 48 Hip-Hop in France by Phoebe Son Oh Page 49 “To Survive The Revolution after Legendary by Nicole Sealey” by Gentle Ramirez Page 53 The Social Construction of the News in “What Would a World Without Prison Look Like?” by Gentle Ramirez Page 54 “Name for the Order” by Gentle Ramirez Page 57 Makayla Binter Artwork IV Page 58 Remembering Violence: Fanon and Césaire discussing Slavery in the Framework of Colonial Violencz by Kowlanne Felix Page 59 “New Moons are Invisible” by Gentle Ramirez Page 66

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Exploring Linguistic Structure’s Role in the Development of Gender Relations by Gentle Ramirez Page 69 “A Magic Trick” by Gentle Ramirez Page 77 Morgan Henderson Artwork I Page 79 The Jamaican “Higgler Woman”: A Master of Resilience, Resourcefulness & Resistance by Amanda Taylor ‘ Page 80 “Sambo” by Gentle Ramirez Page 86 Morgan Henderson Artwork II Page 88 A Call to Heal America by Inayah Bashir Page 89 “AKA Death to America” by Gentle Ramirez Page 98 Chloe duBues Arwork Page 99 Africana Department Spotlight Page 100 Davidson Initiatives Highlight

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Today, Africana Studies is More Important than Ever Devyn Spence Benson When Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, it is unlikely that they or anyone knew that those 8 minutes and 46 seconds would spark national outrage and lead to the marches against racism and police brutality and for Black Lives all around the world. Making national protests where thousands and thousands of folks gathered in solidarity against anti-Black racism even more unlikely was the fact that the country was in the midst of a national pandemic threatening the very essence of our public health structures, forcing many states to shut down all but the most essential operations, and killing Black, Latinx, and Native Americans at high rates. Yet protests did happen. Not in spite of the pandemic, but because of it. As COVID-19 ravaged communities of color with little to no answers from public health officials as to how to stop the spread, it became clear that the global pandemic was just one more example of the type of anti-Black racism that had led to Floyd’s murder.

Across the country, national and state leaders seemed stumped, asked basic questions like: • Why are so many Black, Latinx, and Native Americans dying from Covid19?

• Why would these same communities risk their lives to protest?

• How do we address the legacy of racism and racial violence in our society?

And yet, the very Africana Studies scholar-activists poised to answer these questions have been marginalized in their fields and institutions both in the past and in the present. Africana Studies initially grew out of 1960s’ Civil Rights protests where Black students occupied administrative buildings across the country and demanded predominantly white institutions

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integrate both their curriculum and faculty. As such, social activism is a core tenant of the field with the ultimate goal of spreading radical and revisionist education to liberate Black people worldwide.

In some ways, institutions like Davidson have succeeded in establishing Africana Studies departments that have hired Black faculty and offered innovative curriculum that study Black politics, history, literature, gender & sexuality, religions, social movements, and much more. But, in other ways we still have work to do to provide Africana Studies faculty and students with the same opportunities as other more established majors at the college.

At Davidson, we struggle to retain Black faculty. A Black faculty or high profile staff member has left the college in each of my 5 years on campus.

In the larger field of higher education this turnover is even more stark.

Because when less than 3% of all Full Professors are women of color (and only 1% is Black) we see that retention is not enough without clear and fair paths to promotion.

Africana Studies programs have always struggled to obtain funding as well.

The new budget crisis in higher education as a result of Covid-19 endangers these programs even more. Historically during economic shortfalls “diversity� programs were the first things cut. This same pattern continues in 2020. In May, Twitter was full of professors posting about how their universities were implementing hiring freezes and laying off employees. In more than one instance, the first faculty fired were from Africana and Black Studies departments. Even Africana Studies departments that survived the cuts will be forced by administrators to cut operational budgets. If a department’s annual budget is already exceptionally low, as in the case of the Africana Studies department at Davidson, this type of trimming will result in a scarcity of resources for 2

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students, faculty, and staff. Luckily, this lack of attention and support from university administrators does not reflect the significant work being done in Africana Studies departments.

Africana Studies is the hub for the antiracist education of the future.

Covid-19 presents complex problems that require complex answers. We need public health leaders with an anti-white supremacist lens to discredit the deficit-thinking often lauded to explain why so many Black and brown people are dying. We need educational leaders who can imagine virtual learning that meets everyone needs—especially, educators who can answers questions about how we protect our most vulnerable students and teachers.

We need historians of not only pandemics, but who focus specifically on how pandemics affect Black and brown communities and who know the history of the distrustful relationship between African Americans and medicine in the United States. Universities had always been a fan of global relationships, but now they need to prioritize those relationships with an eye toward the African Diaspora. What would it look like if researchers across the globe had existing connections to share information about this public health crisis without having to rely on US administrators or US politics? In the field of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Caribbean solidarity and sharing often initiated by Cuba has sent doctors to Jamaica, Haiti, St. Vincent, and Brazil. These are topics explored by Africana Studies majors across the country.

The Covid-19 pandemic teaches us that it is more important than ever to have diverse faculty, curriculums, and departments on every campus. Only then can we begin to hope to find answers to the world’s most pressing questions. The national push for antiracism offers institutions like Davidson the opportunity to shift their economic and financial priorities to meet the questions of the future head on. Many, if not all of those questions revolve around racial equity, anti-white supremacy, and 3

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anticolonialism. It is not the time to divest from racially diverse faculties, student bodies, and curriculum, it is the time to invest. To build departments and institutions that will help resist the next global pandemic, the next instance of police brutality, the next natural disaster and the disproportional effects on Black and brown communities caused by these events. Doing so, means funding Africana and other ethnic Studies departments and the faculty, students, and staff who support them because Black Lives Matter Today and Always. ***Devyn Spence Benson is an Associate Professor of Africana and Latin American Studies and the Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She is a historian of 19th-20th century Latin America with a focus on race and revolution in Cuba. Benson's first book, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (UNC Press, 2016) was based on over 18 months of field research in Cuba where she has traveled annually since 2003. Follow her at Twitter @BensonDevyn.

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Decentering Whiteness and Politics of Respectability in Social Justice Movements Uyen Nguyen Over the past few months, our country experienced two wars: racism and Covid-19. Both wars have had fatal consequences on the Black and Brown communities in this county. In response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless Black lives at the hands of racist police officers, half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States to demand justice for Black people.

Racism is not something that we people of color, especially Back and Brown people, discover this year. We have spoken about racism for our whole entire existence. However, to some white people, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, marks their first times speaking publicly against racism. A hashtag #BlackOutTuesday inundated all social media platforms, where non-black and white people posted a black square to express their solidarity to black people. Because of this hashtag, important information regarding Black Lives Matter protests such as protest locations, bail bonds, protesting strategies, were replaced with black squares. These black squares were a declaration that some white people made against racism. Instead of turning outrage into actions, a lot nonblack allies use this as a way to exempt themselves from being “a part of the problem” and how to be a part of the solution.

These black squares were mainly posted by non-black allies, specifically white allies. Black journalist Holiday Phillips once defines performative allyship as “when someone from that same non-marginalized group professes to support and solidarity with a marginalized group in a way that either isn’t helpful or that actively harms that group.” Under this rhetoric, members of dominant groups successfully conceal their 5

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complicity in perpetuating oppression against marginalized groups while centering their voices over the voice of the silenced. With the language of saviorism and activism, performative allies hope to convey to the public and their peers that they are “good people� and they have nothing to do with racism. Instead of focusing on challenging racist systems, performative allies have one goal: to whitewash their personal role in perpetuating the subordination of people of color.

In the midst of a racial justice movement and global pandemic that disproportionately killed the poor and people of color, how is posting a black square sufficient?

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“Stop Di Slackness”: The Dichotomy of Respectability vs.

Reputation for Jamaican Women in Urban Culture Amanda Taylor The “pre” and “post” colonial realities of the Caribbean have made it clear that the Jamaican woman’s body does not belong solely to her. This unspoken and spoken rule, that what a Jamaican woman can do with her body is dictated by outside forces, can be traced back to slavery and has since become deeply ingrained in Jamaican culture presenting as a universal truth. Scholarship often strays away from such vast generalization, however, the specificities of this lack of bodily autonomy can be illustrated through historical, cultural and ethnographical threads of Jamaican society.

From slavery to modern day urbanized Jamaica, a typical Jamaican woman is born into a culture that—both in the public and private sphere—relies on her body for labor, reproduction and sexual pleasure. There is a deeply colonial tension between respectability and reputation that gives this oppression within Jamaican cultural contexts an insidious nature. Despite this, poor Jamaican women in urban areas use their bodies as sites of resistance and resilience.

The devaluation of the Jamaican woman’s body is one that is rooted in respectability. In his book, Crab Antics, Peter Wilson explains that there are two opposing value systems in the Caribbean: respectability and reputation. He illustrates that “respectability” is the value system of the colonizers. This concept is made up of the institutions and behaviors in society that reinforce social hierarchy, for example, marriage, education, work, church, etc. Wilson states that “reputation is the counter-system of respectability,” that it is based on personal worth in society, skills and experience. Wilson equates respectability with women and reputation with men. Besson complicates his argument by asserting that women play a role in shaping and reinforcing both respectability and reputation. Caribbean women are expected to balance both systems. Specifically as it relates to 8

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bodily autonomy, women are often expected to be both pious, wellbehaved and well-dressed as that aligns with the colonial respectability of church and school, while also expected to be readily available for sex, and having skills and experience outside of work, school and church in their day to day lives.

The issue of respectability vs. reputation in the Caribbean dates back to slavery. In Reddock’s Women Labor & Politics in Trinidad and Tobago, she tells us that according to Patterson, “marriage became associated with high class and privilege” during slavery, which was an extension of Christian beliefs and laws spread by the colonizers to reinforce social hierarchy. Though marriage among slaves was first permitted, and then encouraged, “based on their own material and historical experiences, [slaves] had come to their own understanding of what their relationships should be.” Simply put, Black men and women slaves were aware that it was difficult to maintain long term relationships under slavery because of expectations of their slave masters. Despite this, even after slavery was abolished, values of respectability dominated the government’s assertions and laws on familial structure. Throughout the 1970s, family planning gained great visibility and importance for Jamaica’s “development agenda.”

The government created a campaign that coordinated and promoted “family planning services in Jamaica”, which of course, aligned closely with patriarchal, heteronormative and respectable notions of “family.” This rhetoric often stated that fathers were the leaders of the home and mothers were to be gentle, pious and lady-like beings which did not align with reputational Jamaican identities and practices. Many men and women throughout every time period, specifically in Jamaica, remained unmarried and women were often the head, if not the only, parents of the home, leaving women to provide for themselves and their children while being forced to navigate both respectability and reputation. Similarly to during the era of slavery, society rewarded people who adhered to notions of respectability i.e. marriage, and subsequently discarded people who did not.

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This dichotomy disproportionately affects poor Jamaican women, who are likely descendants of slaves. Despite this devaluation, poor Jamaican women are still expected to make their bodies readily available for the benefit of both the economy and the individual.

Poor Jamaican women in particular, are often not seen as worthy of “respect” because they often do not fall into the category of “respectable.”

Since this is a deeply colonial category, poor Jamaican women are devalued and discarded, where often their only importance to society is the way that they can use their bodies. This is chillingly similar to slavery, where black women’s bodies were used for labor, reproduction and sexual pleasure while simultaneously perceived as unkempt, unworthy and uncivilized bodies. One of the most overlooked ways this dichotomy plays out in the Caribbean is in Dancehall culture. Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Looking at bodily autonomy through the lens of Dancehall culture in urbanized Jamaica gives insight into the daily lives and tensions between respectability and reputation. It is important to note that Dancehall itself was created as a protest of notions of respectability, though it has never been explicitly defined as such. The popular Jamaican genre was defined by Donna P. Hope as a “space for the cultural creation and dissemination of symbols and ideologies that reflect the lived inner realities of the inner cities of Jamaica.” Dancehall, in and of itself, is a celebration of postcolonial Jamaica and an alternative sphere where urban poor people can exist outside colonial boundaries. Whether this is through the use of patois instead of standard English in the music, the use of “inappropriate” and “vulgar” language, or the embracing of dance styles that the upper class or the world at large may deem to be “ghetto”, it is undoubtedly an embracement of reputational qualities in the culture.

Despite this need to exist freely and proudly as Jamaicans, the battle between ideals of colonialism and Jamaica’s newfound independence is seen in the everyday lives of poor Jamaican women. While Dancehall may 10

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be empowering for men, there is often a lack of gendered analysis.

Dancehall culture is both empowering and disempowering for women, laced with both lack of agency and newfound autonomy. Within the Dancehall culture, it is often overlooked that the biggest genre of Dancehall music is a sub-genre called “gyal-tunes”, which are entirely based on notions of “aggrandizing or uplifting the male identity, so [he] can take charge of [the] woman.” Whether explicitly or implicitly, it is the norm in Jamaican Dancehall culture to sing songs about not only a woman’s body, but what a man is supposed to do to a woman’s body with or without consent. This is seen not only in the lyrics but in practice, during nightly or weekly dances in the “Dancehall”. Dance styles such as “daggering” and “whining” state very clearly in body language that a man must take charge of a woman, bend her over and hold her down. As a norm and a cultural practice in Jamaica, this kind of patriarchal behavior of ownership is highly normalized, and therefore, it would be irresponsible and untrue to say that the average inner-city Jamaican woman views this kind of dancing, and the genre itself as “oppressive.” However, both patriarchy and classism are at work here, since Jamaican women can never truly be “free” even under a genre that seeks to create freedoms against respectability. Further, formal institutions and sometimes members of the upper class make it very clear that much of Dancehall music is inappropriate and vile, though it is by far the most popular cultural export and partaking. Jamaica’s Office of the Children’s Advocate said that Dancehall songs are “in no way uplifting or empowering” and in fact “subtly encourage aggression and violence, instead of love and healthy relationships.” Upper class journalist, Bettie Ann Blaine said, “It degrades women, the songs are disgusting. Every single one of us knows the difference between art and vulgarity, between ‘culture’ and ‘lewdness’.

But do we? What Blaine is speaking of is actually just the line between respectability and reputation. As an upper-class woman, she has reduced the lyrics and imagery of Dancehall to “degrading” while others 11

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have pushed back to say that this is the stifling of creative expression and culture. Blaine’s comments are a part of an age-old practice of defining Dancehall as “slackness.” Carolyn Cooper in her book Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, defines slackness as “feminized seduction that resists respectable culture”. Cooper argues that the “gender bias is evident in this unsettling shift of meaning from the domain of literal and superficial-dress and appearance to that of metaphorical and substantive-moral conduct. Therefore, a woman is “slack” not based on physical appearance alone but also when she behaves contrary to society’s accepted definitions of virtue and respectability.

Despite the obvious oppression and degradation of women both externally and internally in Dancehall, Dancehall could not exist in the same way without poor Jamaican women. The “Dancehall Queen” is a woman dancer known in the Dancehall scene for her charisma, latest dance moves and fashion sense. The tradition originated in Jamaican Dancehall parties in the ghettos, seeking the best local women dancers. Jamaicans who lived in inner city areas were banned from attending dances and parties held by upper class Jamaicans, so they created their own party spaces called Dancehalls. In an interview with Famous Red, a well known Dancehall sensation, he says “Women make Dancehall. No one wants to go in the club and only see men doing dances. They want to see female [dancers] and they want to see them “bruk out” [dance in ways perceived sexually]. Though this is obviously an overtly sexualized way of viewing women in the Dancehall, it cannot be ignored that much of their identity and value is constructed from this site of free sexual and gender expression. In her documentary, Bruk Out! The World's Most Intimate Dancehall Documentary, Cori McKenna asserts, “I think Dancehall lets them be ‘free’ to express themselves.” McKenna continued. “They can be anyone they want to be--there are no rules besides you have to be the ‘baddest.’ I think it helps a lot of women heal--by taking back their power

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and asserting themselves on the dance floor, they are not letting men judge or control them. They feel like they’re controlling the crowd or the party.”

Though the means of controlling the crowd, or becoming valuable in society is through sexualization of the body, in a way this is autonomy in and of itself. Ironically, it is often the same men who control the government or work in higher institutions in Jamaica who find women in Dancehall settings to take home. Many women are simply Dancehall queens, and do not part take in sex, for example, Carlene Samuels says in an interview, “I am selling sex, but you cannot buy it” (On Stage, 2017).

However, as aforementioned many women do take up the offers to go home with men that approach them after the dance, and this is informal sex work, where not much scholarship exists. The lines between Dancehall culture and sex work are extremely blurred, and strip clubs, a newer and more popular part of Dancehall culture make this clear. There are strip clubs in every Jamaican town and within Dancehall music and entertainment many popular Jamaican Dancehall queens are also “strippers.” In Kamala Kempadoo's, Sun, Sex & Gold, she asserts that “Sex work in the Caribbean cannot be viewed in isolation from the global political economy.” She explains how this is often a “strategy of advancement” for many Caribbean women that doesn’t just seek to solve short-term economic problems but to change their lives (and their families lives) in the long term.” Dancehall culture in and of itself and informal sex work as an extension are the height of the tensions between respectability and reputation. There is a longstanding history of men in power using poor Caribbean women for their sexual pleasure while also enforcing ideals of respectability that oppose their behaviors. As we see in Kempadoo’s book, “No European male in the Caribbean, who could afford it, was without his colored mistress, either a freedwoman or a slave.” While the majority of the Jamaican population is of African descent, race hierarchies have been replaced with shade and class hierarchies that directly implicate poor Jamaican women in the same repeated histories.

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It is incredibly important to view Dancehall culture with a nuanced lens, to understand that it is neither solely a site of resilience and freedom nor a site of oppression and submission. It is both. Further, the complex nature of Dancehall as it relates to bodily autonomy of women is also directly connected to social and economic mobility. Below are three ethnographical examples of informal sex workers in Jamaica taken from panoscaribbean.org: Blondie who is 41 years old, began working as a dancer relatively late, at the age of 32. She says she was sexually molested by a family member when she was about 14 or 15 years old, but says this did not influence her decision to become involved in sex work. She also attended church and was baptized.

Ann is 19 years old and has been working in a massage parlour for nearly one year. She became pregnant at 18 for a boyfriend who was eight years older than she was and was forced to drop out of high school. She had dreams of raising a family and starting her own business but her boyfriend was controlling: “Him used to give me a whole heap a problems. Him no want me to go to school. Him no want me to work. Him just want me to stay home.” She left that relationship and was faced with the task of providing for her young daughter by herself.

Lady Pixie is 28 years old. She says, “I always dreamt of becoming like my parents. … I have always dreamt of becoming just like them, becoming a housewife like my mom. Being married, have my husband and my kids, settle down you know? That’s the type of dream you know?….My parents wasn’t rich but I can say I had a very good life. A very good one. Sometimes it was hard, yes cause sometime [there was] no money. But how my mom and my dad 14

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live…is like we never use to have to worry…. It wasn’t that bad cause we go to school five days per week; Saturdays we go to church, Sundays we are back in church again. It was nice as a kid. We grow up loving, we didn’t fight or anything like that.”

The tensions between respectability and reputation in Dancehall culture are extremely relevant to poor Jamaican women’s bodily autonomy, livelihoods and agency. As made clear in the ethnographies above, poor Jamaican women in Dancehall settings cannot be reduced to overtly sexual beings or overtly ambitious beings who simply use sex as a political means to resist. These women are both. They are women who go to church, who dream of starting their own businesses, becoming parents and getting married. They are also women who find freedom, power and economic agency in sexualization and informal sex work. These two will only be able to exist simultaneously, when generations of reductive and oppressive notions of respectability in Jamaican culture are challenged and poor Jamaican women can be perceived as three-dimensional beings that exist for more reasons than to satisfy the values and needs of others.

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I PLEDGE BETRAYAL

By Gentle Ramirez WE PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE RED, BLACK, AND GREEN, OUR FLAG, THE SYMBOL OF OUR ETERNAL STRUGGLE, AND TO THE LAND WE MUST OBTAIN; ONE NATION OF BLACK PEOPLE, WITH ONE GOD OF US ALL, TOTALLY UNITED IN THE STRUGGLE, FOR BLACK LOVE, BLACK FREEDOM, AND BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION. I pledge allegiance to myself for this body. And to my Transectors and trans descendants who will never hear this poem. I pledge to be thankful, for all it can do and all it cannot. I pledge to feed you when you are hungry and to hold you unconditionally. And to gender dysphoria, I know you’ll choke.

Right hand right on the bible, I’ve been forced fed lies about this body and was told those lies were liberty, I tell you I drowned in the baptism pool with everyone to witness my skin, not even my own. I was made feminine before I was made free. And so, I’ve been chasing this exodus, this justice, my masculinity, my own namesake. I pledge allegiance to my body and to the liberation for which it stands. To black trans people domestically and abroad, for all the godlikeness in us. I pledge betrayal to gender. I say fuck it. What has it ever done for me? Or black folx for that matter. The history of hysterectomies and gynecology tell us that gender is a white people concept if it tells you nothing else. And so I tell you I got 16

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no interest in propelling colonization. That black little kids can be boys and girls and neither if they say it so. That being non-binary got nothing to do with womanhood. And - That the most unprotected person in America is the black trans woman.

Imagine what black people could build, as one body, we’d be indivisible, fighting for reparations, with love and peace for all.

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Freedom and Imprisonment: Angela Davis’ Perspective Idalina Pina The Age of Aquarius has become synonymous to revolution. Of course, there exists no person better equipped to bring forth this new age than the Aquarius queen herself– Angela Davis. As an Aquarius Sun, Moon, and Taurus Rising, no one understands freedom and responsibility quite like Davis. Since her first breath, on a cool January evening in Birmingham, Alabama, this multiverse entrusted Davis with the right tools to succeed in a lifelong fight for freedom. From this moment of life, Davis struggled with a freedom of existence, particularly one of a Black woman in the United States of America. Endowed with the mind of a great thinker, Davis started questioning her existence early on, but never doubted it. In this confidence is where one finds the marvelous freedom fighter that Angela Davis, to this day, continues to be. But what does it mean to be free? Such a complex moral question has plagued humanity since it became aware of its existence. It’s one Davis tried to answer in her own life and experiences. However, the life of a freedom fighter is one of political imprisonment. Throughout her life, Davis was confronted by a system of racism which oppresses Black and Brown people in order to maintain the same class structures present during slavery. After achieving her academia goals of becoming a professor of philosophy, Davis entrenched herself in the work of a true activist. It is around his time where we meet the Davis of today, the political prisoner who continuously fought for the well-being of the proletariat, even while behind bars. During this time, Davis answers the question of what it means to be free in the United States. Is freedom an attainable dream or a façade meant to further imprison the people?

Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. During her first couple years of life, she lived in government housing in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Soon, her family moved to a suburb on Cedar Street, a place in which Angela first started to internalize the race relations of the south. In the summer of 1949, a bombing of a Black home startled Angela and her family awake to the realities of their new neighborhood. The injustices in this area only continued and it was soon dubbed “Dynamite Hill.” However, Angela’s parents always assured their daughter that the “battle of white against Black 18

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was not written into the nature of things.” Instead, they taught her to “erase her anger with reasonableness.” Angela’s parents are the inspiration behind her own activism. Her mother was involved in anti-racism movements as a college student and her father reiterated these same values in his entrepreneurship, ensuring her a middle-class upbringing. At the age of fourteen, Angela had dreams of attending medical school, but after her father’s intervention, she decided to continue her studies at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City. It was here that Angela first encountered The Communist Manifesto, a book which she describes as the “answer to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas which had plagued” her. It was here she first felt her struggles acknowledged in academia: in a particular section of the Manifesto which impressed Angela, it reads, “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities… The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.” This image drove into her mind the idea of the lower class is the foundation for the freedom of all. When the most disadvantaged person is included, the rest of society will be as well. This discovery of passion for the struggle of the lower class prompted Davis to seek higher education at Brandeis University.

Brandeis University seems a peculiar choice for someone like Davis.

The predominantly white, liberal arts university in the suburbs of Boston, however, proved to be the perfect catalyst for Davis’ career in fighting injustice. During her undergraduate years, Davis got the opportunity to study abroad in France, a circumstance which finally allowed her to further involve herself in the Communist Party and agenda. Including oneself in another culture can be incentive for character development and that’s exactly what happened to Davis. She graduated from Brandeis University with magna cum laude honor in French literature, but changed her focus to philosophy for her graduate studies. Off she went again and this time to Germany! In her time studying in Germany, Davis joined a German Socialist Student Union. It was during this time, however, that Davis realized the struggle she’d been preparing to fight all her life was at its zenith back home. She enrolled at the University of California at San Diego to complete her doctoral program and started organizing with the community immediately. After graduating in the fall on 1969, Davis 19

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accepted a position as a Philosophy professor and practiced as she taught in her classroom. It was during this time that she finally made it into the FBI’s watch list: Davis had joined many political groups, particularly the Black Panther Party, and refused to be silenced because of her views. Once confronted by the University of California Board of Regents about her Communist affiliations, Davis responded saying, “Yes, I am a Communist.

And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me; they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.” This response marks a turning point in her life and career.

In the following paragraph, the details of the improvement of Angela Davis are articulated and analyzed, particularly focusing on its impact on her career afterward. Because Davis kept involving herself in highly critical cases, the FBI and other government organizations started taking notice of her. In the early 1970s, Davis became increasingly outspoken about the injustices of the judiciary system. After her involvement in the Soledad Brothers case, three Black prisoners unjustly accused of killing a prison guard, Ronald Reagan, then the Governor of California, attempted to take her teaching job away for the second time. Although he was successful, Davis had already garnered support for her struggle. Indeed, tarnishing her character was the next step for the state of California and the FBI. Davis was placed in the FBI’s Most Wanted List and arrested on October 13, 1970. President Richard Nixon celebrated her imprisonment, hoping she would serve as an example for “all other terrorist.” She was imprisoned in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City and held in solitary because of fears about her ability to inspire other prisoners. Writing on her condition, Davis noted, “there is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a low for one’s own distinct individual self-interest and violating it in the interest of a class or a people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called a criminal, but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner.” After a hectic trial and sixteen months in jail, Davis was released and acquitted of all charges on June 4, 1972. She returned to teaching, but her work had again taken a turn. Her focus now lay on the judiciary system and its utter failures.

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Davis continued to do her activist work, even though she repeatedly got in conflicts with government authorities. In the early 1980s, Davis released one of her major works, Women, Race, and Class. In her autobiography, which she released two years after being acquitted, Davis highlights her experiences in prison and how it shaped her own understanding of its evils. In this autobiography, Davis speaks of her condition as a political prisoner, stating that “the political prisoner has opposed unjust laws and explorative, racist social conditions in general, with ultimate aim of transforming these laws and this society into an order harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and interests of the vast majority of its members.” She mentions numerous other Black revolutionaries and activists, prompting a different understanding of what it means to defy the law, particularly revealing a deeper awareness of laws and their functions in this society as more oppressive than ordinal.

In her research of The Black Codes, Davis discovers that these laws were utilized to continue the practice of slavery in the South. Davis notes that “using slavery as its model, the convict lease system did not discriminate between male and female labor.” Davis intimates that as a result of this epidemic, “both employers and state authorities acquired a compelling economic interest in increasing the prison population,” a system she became victim of herself. Under the guise of Davis, the judiciary system and its many facets were exposed for its failure to do as its intended: Davis reveals that “the prison is a key component of the state’s coercive apparatus the overriding duction of which is to ensure social control.” Indeed, her analysis of the current prison system affirmed that “while cloaking itself with the bourgeois aura of universality, the prison has actually operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.” Although she realizes that the criminal justice system was oppressive to Black people as a whole, she recognized that “women were especially susceptible to the brutal assaults of the judicial system.” When in the grasps of this system, the individual no longer becomes such: in the words of Davis, “the captive is confronted with the realities of racism, not simply as individual acts dictated by attitudinal bias; rather he is compelled to come to grips with racism as an institutional phenomenon collectively experienced by the victims.” Although the prison system was enacted under the guise of 21

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protection, it turned into another tool of “the ruling circles of America to expand and intensify repressive measures designed to nip revolutionary movements in the bud as well as to curtail radical-democratic tendencies.”

Indeed, prison was not only a physical place, but a systematic and internal system. According to Davis, “Blacks are imprisoned in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent existence.” However, she highlights the current historical junction she and other found themselves entangled in. In her analysis she intimates that “Black people are rushing full speed ahead towards an understanding of the circumstances that give rise to exaggerated forms of political repression and thus an overabundance of political prisoners.” Indeed, that is the same junction Black people find themselves at, again and again throughout important moments of resistance.

Throughout her life, Davis had one goal: freedom. Like a true Aquarius, she yearned for freedom from the masses, from the chains of reality and she often asked herself, “are human beings free or are they not?” She positions herself and other Black thinkers as having answers to this profound question. According to Davis, “Afro-American literature incorporates the consciousness of a people who have been continually denied entrance until the real world of freedom, a people whose struggles and aspirations have exposed the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but also of its very theoretical formulation.” In a course aptly named “Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature,” Davis prompted to figure out this very question through her many predecessors– Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other contemporary writers– in an attempt “to develop other philosophical concepts such as the meaning of knowledge, the function of morality, and the perception of history peculiar to an oppressed people striving toward the goal of collective liberation.” In an attempt to understand freedom, Davis takes the perspective of an enslaved person in order to better understand this complex moral topic. According to Davis, once an enslaved person becomes “conscious of the fact that freedom is not a static quality, but rather the goal of an active process, something to be fought for, something to be gained in and through the process of struggle,” only then can he strive to achieve it with a clear goal in mind. The first step towards liberation is the rejection of the slave-status. No human being is a slave.

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That statement is an utter truth, one without ifs or buts, one with no exceptions. Once accepted, then the enslaved person no longer is such, no matter his current standing. The struggle for freedom is freedom itself.

Freedom, however, does not always equate to its full meaning, as Davis extensively explains and experiences herself. Emancipation was a distraction from the promises made to Black people. In her own understanding, Davis retails that “Black people were hardly celebrating the abstract principles of freedom when they hailed the advent of emancipation.” These people were thrown from a life of servitude into the chasms of capitalism, a very similar situation which they had just escaped.

Even though they broke out of one prison, Black people found themselves entangled in another system of oppression. It’s at this point in which Davis drives her understanding of freedom. She reiterates its intangible nature, highlighting that freedom is a continued struggle. Davis points to her predecessors, men like Frederick Douglass, whom continued to fight in the face of struggle. According to Davis, as long as Black people exist, so will freedom because Black people “have always manifested a deep-seated urge to acquire knowledge” and knowledge is freedom.

Throughout her life, Angela Davis exemplifies what it means to question the system. During her youth, her pursuit for freedom led her to choose a path laid out by her parents, one which ultimately led her to travel around the world as she gathered knowledge to better her understanding of the human condition, particularly that of Black people. As a Philosophy teacher at the University of California at San Diego, Davis joined the fight she had so long studied, one which she had always been a part of, however.

As a Black woman fighting for injustice, Davis became a target for government authorities; nevertheless, she persisted. In August 1970, Davis was arrested for crimes she did not commit– it was merely a conspiracy from the state. In the two years she stayed in prison, Davis wrote extensively about her condition as a political prisoner. In these statements, she made readers aware that every prisoner, no matter their crime, was a political prisoner. Using the judiciary system as a façade, the government further uses the law to oppress its people and maintain a class order which inherently benefits those at the top. The state which imprisons people with the hopes of bettering its economy is not one fit to mandate and ordain freedom. In her pursuit of freedom, from jail and from beyond, Davis 23

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found solitude in her predecessors, people who like herself had found themselves in the path of freedom. Davis articulates that Black Literature is the voice of freedom, for as long as it exists, so shall freedom.

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Elegy For The Working Body

By Gentle Ramirez Dearly beloved, We are gathered here to get through this thing called death, We are gathered here to lay myself to dust. Bury me with the bootstraps I was never white enough to wear. Gathered here to honor the dying hopes and dreams young purple bois from the Bronx have no business having Dearly beloved, here we are at the end of my labored survival. Every time I lit myself on fire, blown my back out for the hour, carried my time card and bag of bones- does not compare To my biggest accomplishment: getting out of bed on more days than I could not. Farewell 40 hours hating myself, 20 hours sweating over a computer, 10 mercury retrogrades, tossing and turning. Farewell working myself sick just to make myself sick.

Dearly beloved, we are here because I worked my ass off twice as hard And received nothing. Because I only planned to rest in the afterlife- where when I drown in work I become the work. And when my screams are drowned out, I become the water. I will live forever, returning to my real body at the bottom of the Atlantic and un-die over and over again to form atlantis.

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Sovereignty and the Lack Thereof Gentle Ramirez Throughout human history, nations, peoples, and states fought tirelessly for their own respective sovereignty. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Sovereignty” is defined as “supremacy in respect of power, domination, or rank; supreme dominion, authority, or rule”. Judith Butler’s “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification,” exemplifies the definition of sovereignty provided by Oxford English Dictionary. Most strikingly, however, Butler establishes that sovereignty in the formation of states robs people of their own individual sovereignty through subjugation; which is defined as the assignment of people to a value in society.

In “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification,” Judith Butler provides an analysis of Foucault’s terms of subjugation and identity, and how they relate to sovereignty precisely because it is something people lack. She explains the formation of social categories that endorse or take away different degrees of sovereignty. Moreover, she expresses these subjugated terms are complex because they have contextual power. "To be hailed asmay be heard or interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs” This mention of what is contained in a name is imperative to understanding how sovereignty is established and practiced. By stating that “there is often more than not some hesitation about whether or how to respond” Butler, explains that social category and the actor who imposes that subjugation on a person can land as a slur or an affirming reclamation.

Furthermore, this scenario then explains how sovereignty functions in the way power can be reinforced or rebelled against. The way someone may see themselves and others can perpetuate the assignment of the role of that person. It can also reinforce the subjected’s lack of power or the name can serve as a reclamation of the subjected to their right to rule over their own respective lives.

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Through subjugation, people who have been historically robbed of their own sovereignty by the reinforcement of social categories suggest that sovereignty is defined as who has it, and who has taken it away from someone else. These people whose subjection is produced, not in totality, but, through progression, simultaneously lose their dominion over their ruling over their own lives. When people have assigned values based on assumptions of their role, function, and worth in society, some people are vulnerable to premature death. More specifically, because of racial capitalism and slavery in the United States, to be hailed as “Black” means that statesanctioned social systems undervalue that human’s life. According to Prison Policy, in New York State African-Americans make up 16% of the population and disproportionately account for 53% of the incarcerated population. One reason for this unfortunate reality is because of New York City’s notorious School-To-Prison Pipeline. Black students, who have no control of their financial circumstances, account for 75% of the population attending New York City public schools. The systemic structures in public schools, such as the zero-tolerance policy and police presence make it so that students “are often arrested or receive court summonses for offenses that aren’t even crimes” . The fact of the matter is the public education system, that serves predominantly Black communities, prematurely exposes young Black pupils to policies that support suspension and the arrest of students and end up robbing these Black students of their dignity and sovereignty to proper and functional education. With premature exposure to the criminal justice system, Black students and their families may experience the challenges created by voter suppression laws because of a criminal record, which in turn, denies them the power to dictate what happens in their lives.

The School-To-Prison pipeline is just one example of the domino effect of what’s at stake in the quality of life that through the subjugation of a person as Black will have.

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Editorial Edition SIGNED, TIRED Gentle Ramirez

I get asked to write new poems, and all I see in my hands are sorrow.

And what am I to make of all this dejected sorrow. Why can’t I ever just let it be sorrow? I don’t know how to poetically say a lot of things. Like, I am so tired, like, when can I rest, like, how excellent do I need to be?

And I don’t mean that poetically. I don’t know how to make my pain sound poetic, ENOUGH, for y’all to hear me.

I get asked all the time to write happy poems. Get told that I should write stories about overcoming hard times- for my stories to not be so sad, and doesn’t that sound like the story black people love, overcoming adversity, not letting the devil win, I find it really ableist. People mourn, grieve differently, people don’t need to come out on another side to matter. I get asked to write happy poems, to inspire, and I think: will the rest of my life be like this? Why can’t we demolish the system that makes people suffer in the first place? Why does everybody gotta be ripped wide open to prove they’re worthy of grace?

I want to throw away the word resilience, and call it what it is, tolerance for bullshit. Resilience is not thinking about your oppression enough you become complacent in the system that will either kill you slowly or kill you quick.

Black doesn’t crack, black people don't break; they bend, and that motto prevents black people from breaking the system. Some days I just cry.

And write some words down, call it poems, call it, my soul tryna say 30

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something, call it, little old me trying to change something. Call it, little old me with a bad habit of not letting my sorrow just be sorrow.

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The Role of African Americans in African Liberation Struggles Chisom Ilogu Introduction The African Diaspora is often presented as inherently fractured; the damage created by the trans-Atlantic slave trade is pointed to as the original, tragic dispersal of black people across the globe, and the resulting distance has left us disconnected and disjointed, each people preoccupied with their unique, yet shared, struggle against white supremacy regardless of location. However, in this current era of interconnectivity, we bear witness to a renewed interest in blackness in terms of “the diaspora” in totality, prompting one to acknowledge previous efforts to communicate plans and ideas to “brothers and sisters” across oceans. In this essay I will demonstrate how the participation of African Americans in efforts to end colonialism on the African continent was ultimately a function of the dominant ideology within the black community at the time, and were largely considered extraneous to African American liberation struggles until later militant/Pan-Africanist movements gained traction in the U.S. African American contributions to African Liberation struggles were primarily ideological until the late seventies, when mounting pressure from outside governments and private U.S. citizens moved the anti-apartheid movement into the political sphere, and calls for economic sanctions against South Africa. tangibly damaged the nation’s economy thus creating incentives for desegregation. This paper will primarily focus on the case of South Africa and how African Americans aided in this later liberation struggle, however earlier efforts from Black Americans in other liberation movements will also be referenced (in addition to why they failed to be as effective as later campaigns related to South Africa). By exploring the role of non-Africans in post-colonial struggles on the African continent, one may better understand modern relationships between the United States and Africa, and ascertain the historic and current presence of people from the African diaspora within international discourse.

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Part I: Early Efforts from African Americans and Ideological Collaboration Across the Diaspora Prior to emancipation in the United States, the first interaction between formerly enslaved people and their so called “mother continent” was in some senses deportation; shipping freed Black people back to Africa was the chief mission of the American Colonization Society founded in 1816, and partially sponsored by the U.S. government. After the movement declined in popularity, African Americans remained wholly disconnected from Africa as a condition of their bondage until emancipation in 1863.

The next few decades, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, were generally fraught with domestic challenges for African Americans, and it wasn’t until the early 20th century that Black intellectuals began to connect with their brethren outside of the United States in what could be described as the first Pan-African “moment”. One source asserts that “Early twentieth century South African Black nationalists owe much to Booker T. Washington,” one, if not the most, influential Black man of his era, and a longtime champion of Black accommodationist policies. Washington sought to export his mantra of “setting down your bucket where you stand” to Black people across the world, including the Caribbean and Africa, and was an early supporter of international collaboration in order to achieve this goal. The South African Reverend John L. Dube was one of the first foreign “collaborators” with Washington, although the relationship was more similar to a mentorship due to Washington’s central belief that “Black American guidance was essential for Africans to organize and uplift themselves.” Booker T. Washington held that “the uncivilized Negro of Africa could improve himself and his society through individual initiative and the acceptance of Western religion and cosmology,” and the Black American was superior to their African peers simply because of interaction with the white man and their institutions. Washington’s conservatism remains a sore point in terms of his overall legacy, and while many of his 34

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contemporaries and scholars today decry his initiatives which often kowtowed to white supremacy in order to attain basic services and support for African Americans, individuals like Dube saw what Washington had accomplished and desired to replicate his “success” in their home countries. Dube, who would go on to serve as the first president of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, first visited Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1897 and was so impressed with the school (and the sheer fact that Black people were thriving within a white capitalist context) that he returned to South Africa and opened the Zulu Christian Industrial School in 1900, closely modeled off Booker T. Washington’s teachings.

In addition, various Pan-African associations were launched around the turn of the century, thus enabling a new worldwide circulation of ideas (despite these organizations initially functioning as mechanism to propagate accommodationist strategies). Although bitter enemies, W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington appeared at the first Pan-African Conference planned by Washington in London in 1900, along with representatives from across the Black diaspora. As ideologies fell out of fashion and others rose to take their places, these forums and ensuing networks would remain critical to the spread of ideas. With Washington’s decline and eventual passing in 1915, and the rise of Black intellectualism as a foil to cries for industrialization, discourses around Black liberation changed.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s brought about a new type of collaboration between Black Americans and Africans, a new relationship that emphasized the mutual benefits of interaction across the diaspora. The so-called “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Leroy Locke, envisioned Harlem as a melting pot of Black cultures and peoples, and was committed to making the Harlem Renaissance and related “New Negro” movement fully inclusive. This meant not only securing liberation, or “racial uplift” via an elite “talented tenth”, or exclusively serving African Americans in northern cities, but instead making sure that Black people 35

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across demographics and all over the world were enlightened, and part of the movement. In The New Negro, Locke writes that Harlem “has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; [Harlem] has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast.” This quote helps historians understand the global scope of the Harlem Renaissance, despite being based in New York City. Locke’s New Negro movement was characterized by a desire to break away from problematic stereotypes of Black people envisioned by white America, and as African and Caribbean immigration to the U.S. increased, these identities were welcomed by Locke and his contemporaries because of their “otherness”, and the ways in which they defied the typical image of the African American. The Harlem Renaissance was also characterized by a reflection on African American identity, which pushed many Black Americans towards Africa in a bid to learn more about their heritage.

Through this inquiry, African Americans became increasingly opposed to the imperialism that affected so many of their brethren; however, nostalgic and romanticized works about “longing for the motherland” were more prominent than the impassioned essays of the 1960s.

In the Harlem Renaissance era of Black prosperity, several key organizations emerged as U.S.-based opponents of colonialism. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had offices an office in South Africa, and was vocal about Black ancestral ties to the African continent. The organization actively campaigned for political and economic investment from African Americans in the broader movement to “liberate” Africa, and Garvey pushed this agenda in bold editorials with titles like “Africa the Land of Hope and Promise for Negroes All Over the World,” and with the Black owned and operated shipping company Black

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Star Line, Garvey hoped to encourage commerce between Black people across the Atlantic, and eventually transport people back to Africa.

Headline followed by an editorial by Garvey. February 19, 1921 The Negro World

A fundraising call for the Black Star Line. The Negro World, February 12, 1921.

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Headline supporting the resistance of North Africans against French Forces. The widely circulated newspaper was also influential in making African Americans aware of liberation struggles happening across the world. The Negro World, May 16, 1925.

The Great Depression brought the Harlem Renaissance and international activism from African-Americans to a standstill beginning in the early 1930s, and The Negro World folded in 1933. In the decline of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro, Negritude would emerge as a successor movement in Paris.

As America began to recover in the late 1930s, Harlem Renaissance alum Paul Robeson helped launch the Council on African Affairs in 1937, following a successful career as an entertainer, visits to the Continent, and a growing interest in politics and civil liberties. As the name implies, this was one of the first American organizations that primarily sought to change American foreign policy. The CAA was committed to improving the status of Africans, and was also one of the first to reach out to non-Black allies to help with their efforts. With the U.S. government supporting Jim Crow segregation in their own country, and openly supporting various colonial powers, Robeson and his organization turned towards Communism and leftist politics in their efforts towards African liberation, particularly in South Africa. The CAA was linked to the Soviet Union, and Robeson himself was closely linked with the People’s Republic of China; In fact, 38

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Robeson was known for recording and popularizing a rendition of the Chinese National anthem in 1940. Robeson and other Black leaders related to China’s own struggles with imperialism, as they faced aggression from not only the British, but also the Japanese. As Mao Zedong came to power and ushered in a non-white version of Communism with Maoism, leaders like Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, and others were enticed by the inclusivity and opportunity offered by a relationship with China (a relationship that the Chinese worked hard to strenghten, and continue to nurture).

Unfortunately, back home Robeson and the CAA were “hounded into oblivion” due to links to the Left and Communist Party. McCarthyism dominated the postwar era and the long-term Cold War that lasted well past the 1950s, limiting the effectiveness of Black anti-imperialist efforts.

The 1960s ushered in the Civil Rights Movement and PanAfricanism, along with a host of smaller movements helmed by niche groups in the late sixties into the seventies (one of the most prominent being the Black Power Movement helmed by the Black Panthers). Black Americans and South Africans resonated with each other’s struggles against white supremacy, and the ideological exchange that transpired in this era would give way to a new level of advocacy and activism from African Americans in relation to revolutionary struggles on the continent. The Anti Apartheid movement would last for decades, and the actions of African American civilians and politicians would be crucial to the success of the ANC and the end of apartheid in 1994.

Part II: The Hands-On Approach to South Africa Figures like Civil-Rights giant Martin Luther King Jr. and ANC President Albert Lutuli continued the long-existing exchange of ideas and support that African Americans and South Africans had fostered for decades, but took things to a new level in the early sixties. Although never meeting, both Nobel Peace Prize winners corresponded with one another expressing mutual admiration, they collaborated on Martin Luther King’s 39

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address to an audience on Human Rights Day 1962. In this “joint” appeal, King urges the public to lobby their representatives, boycott South African goods, and more. In this speech we see the major introduction of strategies later organizations would successfully employ on a much larger level in later years.

The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and the Africa Fund were two groups founded in the early 1950s that became central to the global Anti-Apartheid movement. While the “official” Anti-Apartheid Movement was run by a body of the same name based in London, these American groups worked with activists in London, Canada, and exiled South Africans in Africa to apply pressure to the government in Pretoria to end Apartheid. The African National Committee (ANC) had been the primary body of resistance to South African apartheid for decades when it was banned by the government in 1960, following the brutal Sharpeville Massacre that killed over sixty peaceful ANC protestors. Recalling the massacre in 1984, then-ANC president Oliver Tambo told the New York Times “'It is hard to overstate the impact that Sharpeville made on us. We were unarmed, we were peaceful, and they shot us down in the street. We knew then that we had no choice but to fight.'' The massacre marked a turning point in the Anti-apartheid movement internally and externally.

The once-pacifist movement became adopted a militant wing (Umkhonto we Sizwe [Spear of the Nation]), and had to shift its formal operations outside of South Africa. Externally, other nations such as Namibia, the United Kingdom, and the United States became hosts to ANC offices filled with South African exiles-- and with widespread news coverage, the rest of the world became aware of the atrocities being committed in South Africa.

The ANC had a functioning headquarters in New York, however most records from this era feature the ACOA and Africa Fund at the forefront of anti-apartheid activism in the United States. Nevertheless, the organizations worked together to circulate information about the injustice in South Africa, and how American civilians could fight the state via 40

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demonstrations, pamphlets, and periodicals like the ACOA’s Action News.

Black Americans were unilaterally present in these organizations, along with a significant number of white clergymen and missionaries.

Results took time to emerge; like many other western powers, the United States dragged their feet on anti-apartheid legislation and held on to the ANC’s previous associations with communist regimes. In a 1975 letter from Abdul S. Minty, secretary of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, to the chairman for the U.N. Special Committee against apartheid, Minty writes about the revelations of “a high level of military collaboration between South Africa and several western powers,” and that the apartheid government had access to NATO resources. However, as cold war tensions cooled off and increased pressure was applied by countless nongovernmental organizations, the U.S. government could only maintain their false neutrality for so much longer.

The ACOA began working closely with the Congressional Black Caucus after its formation in 1971, and the bodies worked together to produce the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Bill, which was first introduced by Congressman Ron Dellums in 1972 (and would finally be ratified in 1986). In 1977, Randall Robinson founded TransAfrica, the outgrowth of a CBC initiative to create a body that would “coordinate policy and lobby for action on African issues.”Robinson then joined Congressional Representative Walter Fauntroy and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary F. Berry to create the Free South Africa Movement in 1985, which united smaller organizations across the country to form one of the nation’s biggest Anti-Apartheid associations; one that was especially popular with young people. Scholarship from the time suggests that the popularity of FSAM was partly reactionary; “Coming on the heels of Reagan's re-election, this movement has captured the imagination and support of the thousands who had been active in the Jesse Jackson campaign and many more who oppose apartheid and fascism.” When

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Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Bill was overwrite in 1986, it was a clear victory for liberal and progressive Americans.

While the 1986 bill took care of federal ties to South Africa, FSAM and other organizations continued to pressure private corporations and institutions to divest from South Africa. In the eighties and nineties, divestment became a common cause on college campuses, particularly at HBCUs; the popular sitcom A Different World and Spike Lee’s film School Daze both acknowledged and explored this development, and both ultimately endorsed the movement.

A t-shirt expressing support for the Soweto Uprising as seen in 1988’s School Daze, an indication of the support of Black America and young people’s support of the Anti-Apartheid movement; and a sign that the movement was having a political and cultural moment.

By 1984, South Africa was already feeling the effects of widespread divestment campaigns, as proudly reported by organization like the ACOA and FSAM. According to a pamphlet from the same year produced by an FSAM offshoot, MassDivest, “state and municipal actions across the U.S. 42

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had mandated the withdrawal of over $1.3 billion in public funds from companies doing business in South Africa” by the end of the year. The document notes that the head of the South African Reserve Bank has already blamed political pressure for a declining FDI, and encourages other groups to keep going in their efforts. Longtime South African Statesman F.W. de Klerk was elected in 1989, and anticipating the changing times, de Klerk released Nelson Mandela and informally ended Apartheid in 1990 when he un-banned the ANC and other political parties. South Africa entered a time of transition following these major developments, and the ANC, the apartheid state’s National Party, and the lesser-known Inthaka Freedom Party all worked together in a unity government even after Mandela’s successful election in 1994. Nevertheless, Mandela’s release and subsequent electoral win were major victories for Black South Africans at home; and Black people in the United States as well.

Conclusion The involvement of African Americans in African revolutionary movements has a long and complicated history; while internationalism, the “Black diaspora” and Pan-Africanism were all socio-politically relevant to Black Americans at different times, the first portion of this paper demonstrates how domestic issues often prevented Black Americans from actualizing any concrete change on the African continent, aside from the exchange of ideas related to Black liberation. However, in the sixties, seventies and eighties, African-Americans rallied around the AntiApartheid movement in a never-before-seen way. With consistent agitation and collaboration across borders, the advocates in the United States and other countries successfully crippled the apartheid regime, delivering the final blow in a battle Black South Africans had been fighting for centuries.

The deep connection between African Americans and Black South Africans cannot be downplayed in understanding the role of African 43

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Americans in this particular anti-colonial struggle. Both peoples could relate to the pain of living as second class citizens in a country they should be able to take ownership over; whether through clear ancestral claims, or through the backbreaking labor that built the nation in the first place.

Rather than writing a complete “traditional” conclusion, I will end this essay with a quote and a link to a speech by Congressman Ron Dellums, both of which communicate the unique kinship these two groups shared; at least in theory. While diaspora wars rage on social media platforms, and Black identity remains as complicated and ill-defined as ever, the following sources speak to a shared experience that was able to unite Black people across the world.

“Politically aware African Americans and Black South Africans did not conceive of themselves as simply engaged in isolated combat with their own particular sets of white oppressors. From the early to mid-nineteenth century onward, they were keenly aware of the larger struggle of Africans and people of African descent throughout the world against the efforts of Europeans or people of European ancestry to enslave, colonize, disfranchise, and segregate people designated as Black. Hence AfricanAmericans and Black South Africans shared in a larger PanAfrican discourse and responded to changing international currents of Black thought and opinion. As a result of this Black internationalism, they influenced each other and also responded creatively to the same ideologies and movements, some specifically Pan-African and others anti-imperialist in a broader sense, that may have originated in neither the United States nor South Africa (such as Marxist-Leninism and Gandhian nonviolence).”

User Clip: Ron Dellums South Africa

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Editorial Edition “The Truth” Sabria Jackson

And the first tears I let myself cry...

Finally fell Years of unbearable pain Heating up to boil over; Spilling into areas I desperately wanted to keep clean Because his problem...Is my problem Her pain..,Is my pain Their battle...Is my battle We are all connected Our life experiences intrinsically weaving into one another We are all linked: Even when pretending it isn’t so seems easy We are not just “black" We are wonderfully made Rich in melanin and inner wisdom Ancient royalty dating back to the beginning of all of our time Humankind’s debut Indigenous to more places than history books Can afford to let us know “Magic” is too small of a word to encapsulate us 45

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Simple terms...they don’t do us justice Do you even realize who you are?

Even others sense that we are children of the sun Rooted in endless miracles Blessed with the eternal gift of creation Always innovative—even amid chaos— Animated in everything we do Down to the smallest bone in our bodies Powerful beyond measure yet still human Rhythm of our relentless heartbeats acting as currency Nothing short of worthy We speak life into this earth and realms beyond Don’t let anybody convince you of otherwise Pick up your crown Recognize when you are tired, but keep your head held up high This isn’t over but our liberation Will break the chains that entrap us all We will say “freedom” and not Simply speak of it as a distant hope We will use our respective capabilities with vigor

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Editorial Edition Hip Hop in France Phoebe Son Oh

The globalization of hip hop and black popular culture spread to France in the 1980’s, with help from one of American hip hop’s founding fathers, Afrika Bambaataa. Issues in both French and American society often overlap, especially when it comes to issues of the African diaspora.

So, although hip hop and rap in France has been greatly shaped by U.S. black popular culture, French rappers, who are mostly of African descent, indigenize hip hop by further complicating the definition of Blackness.

This Blackness is one that “transcends boundaries” of skin color by including the experiences of “North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, and Caribbeans,” emphasizing their shared connection to Africa, rather than being phenotypically black. French rappers also bring a unique African and French bicultural perspective that resonates with other racial minorities.

Just as Black and Brown artists in the U.S. have utilized hip hop as a political tool to privilege the voices of the most marginalized, French rappers of African descent are doing the same.

Much like the United States, the African diaspora in France is a direct result of slavery and colonialism. Black people have been extremely significant to the “building” of French history and culture. Unfortunately, their efforts have been continually erased through the white washing of the French education system. A French person being white seems like a given, because this is the standard image of France that it has portrayed to the rest of the world. In fact, it is rather difficult to break down the specifics of France’s racial demographic because of a law from 1872 that “prohibits the French Republic from conducting a census” that distinguishes citizens based on “race.” France’s “color-blind” attitude towards its policies and people is reminiscent of the country’s motto, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.”

Both ingrain blind nationalism and ignorance into the minds of white French people who believe in France’s superiority, yet ignore issues of 49

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injustice within their own community. According to Louis-Georges Tin, one of the founders of the Representative Council of Black Associations, “No one in France can say how many blacks live in this country,” simply because there is such a lack of racial statistics. For France, this is just another way in which its Black citizens are being erased from the country’s history. Regardless of France’s majority white population, there are still millions of ethnic minorities and the two largest minority populations are North Africans, known as Maghrebi, and Black people. These ethnic minorities are victims of “formulas of banalization,” which Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as the continual trivialization and erasure of a revolutionary people.

Even the geographical locations of Black and African people in France is telling of their social positioning. In Paris, for example, the wealthiest (and whitest) part of the city is right in the center. As you leave further and further away from the heart of the city and enter the outskirts, you arrive in the “banlieue,” the French suburbs where the majority of Black and Maghrebi people, citizens and immigrants alike, reside. The ways in which minorities in France are geographically marginalized reflects their invisibility in conventional French society. French hip hop artists sought to change this and wanted authentic portrayals of life in France for racial minorities.

One of the first famous French rap hits was “Les tam-tam de l’Afrique” by IAM, which explicitly talks about slavery and has many references to the group members’ African origins. Note only do French rappers confront the effects of colonialism and racial injustice on their communities, many also “glorify” the African continent within their lyrics, as a way to empower and isolate themselves from the anti-Black Eurocentric standards and values. This glorification of their Motherland is not only a form of empowerment, but it is also a platform that French rappers use to critique the erasure of Black people throughout French history. This is something that Senegalese French rapper, Teemour, 50

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addresses in his song, “Le message.” Teemour calls attention to noble African figures throughout history “who inhabit his pantheon,” giving agency back to the “birthplace of humankind”. Teemour is not only inclusive of diaspora narratives, but also seeks to iconize figures like “Sundjiata Keita,” the Lion King, as “francophone,” as he too is a product of the African diaspora with French influences. Other French rappers of African descent, just like Teemour, are privileging their own cultures and history as a means of challenging white standards in France. In doing this, these rappers are indigenizing their unique form of French hip hop and rap.

Unfortunately, rap songs that explicitly speak of France’s historical racial discrimination are hardly played or “promoted by mainstream radio stations,” which allows for racist attitudes amongst the majority white population to remain unbothered. It then comes as no surprise that French rap is most positively received and “popular” in the banlieue suburbs where the amount of “young French of African descent is high.” As rates of immigration among Africans moving to France continue to increase, so does the audience for French rap, as Black French rappers provide a platform for a large, but ignored, community. With the globalization of hip hop and rise of music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud, French rap has surpassed the borders of the banlieue and is now more popular amongst the younger white French generation.

However, it is critical that white consumers of rap understand the context of the content they intake, especially as a means to examine their own privileges. Yet this is unfortunately not the case most of the time, as French Black people are still an incredibly marginalized and neglected group who have little representation in French culture, where “Whiteness” is still the “standard.”

French rappers continue to use hip hop as a political tool against white oppression and as an art form to shed light on their rich and diverse cultures. They also indigenize hip hop by providing a unique point of view 51

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in their lyrics and artistry of an Afrocentric French identity that resonates with and empowers the youth of the banlieue. However, unless there is tangible change within and systemic restructuring of French society, its people of African descent will always be oppressed and thus hip-hop is just another form of challenging the white status quo in the greater battle for Black liberation around the world.

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To Survive The Revolution after Legendary by Nicole Sealey

By Gentle Ramirez First, we know who resists all systems by wearing black. If we are to be dead, graduated, married, it must be in black. Nothing borrowed or blue, old or new, only a black Top hat and tailcoat. The keys on the piano must be all black, Must blend into my body the way I blend it to the night -black.

All the guests at the wedding must have black Joy. Must bring children all and only black wearing all and only black. At the end I want a fist in the night for black Power. For black liberation. At the reception, we will burn sage black. Cooking sage wont do. Only bruja’s and candomblé black Girl magic. Resurrection from black death, get it black? How black death’s repetition in and of itself get it black?

How black death just black’s death how here, Black future is black me is black black is black.

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The Social Construction of the News in “What Would a World Without Prison Look Like?”

Gentle Ramirez The media thrives on hysteria and sensationalized lived experiences. In “The Social Production of News,” Stuart Hall expresses: “The media do not simply and transparently report events which are ‘naturally’ newsworthy in themselves. ‘News’ is the end-product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially constructed set of categories” . The production of news, therefore, is described by Hall as a complex process where writers enhance an element of the story and deploy keywords to promote reader interest. It is important to note, moreover, that while enhancing the reader interest is one element of the social production of news, these key words additionally “reinforce consensual notions.” In Patricia Leigh Brown’s “What Would a World Without Prisons Look Like?'', she examines an architect’s sovereignty over spaces that attempt to serve as healing alternatives to correctional facilities.

The article also utilizes keywords such as “prison,” “crime,” “inmate,” “activist,” and personal anecdotes from incarcerated individuals to emphasize tones of empowerment. While the article maintains a strong tone that supports reimagining the carceral system, the journalist also ultimately deploys these words as they fit dominant structures and, in the sentiment of Scott, “reproduce the definitions of the powerful.” It is unfortunate that, as the journalist includes these keywords in an effort of healing and inclusion, she concurrently participates in the familiar social production of news, and, by default, makes her intended sentiments fail at matching the message of prison abolition.

The article begins in a peculiar setting: a former drug house that now houses the Center for Court Innovation’s peacemaking program. Brown describes the new renovation and repurposed space as a positive development for community members with “a communal kitchen and lots 54

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of natural light”. The phrases in the article, “non-adversarial approach,” “resolved outside of the traditional criminal justice system,” “rethinking the architecture of justice,” and “calming space,” suggests the space is an empowering, substitute to the criminal justice system that disproportionately affects Black people at higher rates than all others. Moreover, these phrases acknowledge that there is a problem with the criminal justice system because precise efforts were made to resolve issues and create other options.

When the article introduces the architect, Deanna Van Buren, the reader is then made aware that Buren “has dedicated her career to rethinking the architecture of justice .”The article expresses that Buren “has committed her architecture practice to the question of ‘what a world without prisons look like?’” and additionally, explains that she is the co-founder of the nonprofit firm Designing Justice/ Designing Space. These key terms, “prison,” “justice,” and “space,” propel the idea that there is a solution underway and individuals like Buren have used their creative talents and mastery of skill to better people’s lives. The long list of her previous work, which includes, the “mobile refugee on wheels in San Francisco for women who have been released from jail at night. The refuge was intended to keep the women safe from sex traffickers and other predators,” and create a sense of community-oriented care and success. Additionally, the article mentions that Buren has remained involved in efforts dedicated to the “opposition to building new correctional facilities” and that Buren stated at the Black In Design conference at the Harvard Graduate School “There was something wrong to me about building better and prettier boxes to house black and brown people”. All of this language is important to create the undertones of progress, healing, and promote a for-us-by-us mentality.

Simultaneously, the keywords also aid in the perpetuation of the dominant norms. Buren’s question “what is the role of the designer in bringing about healing?” , uses the term healing instead of recognizing the reasons why there was a demand for designers to build new prison complexes. The language in the article provides a clear stance on how prison 55

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disproportionally affects Black and brown people but does not provide a stance on who or what is accountable for those realities and therefore, does not provide a concrete way of stopping prison expansion. To continue, as Brown mentions Buren’s work with the nonprofit Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency and a community church, the reader is aware of the selfempowering language present. Burden, the nonprofit, and the church worked on a “collapsible plywood living unit...for recently released inmates re-entering society,” and the article states “the units grew out of discussions with released inmates,”who expressed their need for privacy and ability to personalize space for their emotional health. While this elaboration is wellintended, the inclusion of the word “inmate” is a subjugated term that counters the presented empowering mission. The incarcerated people that the article aims to empower by way of elaborate nonprofit efforts end up reinforcing the dominant structures by calling them “inmates.”

Finally, it is unfortunate that this article speaks on efforts but not on policy. The absence of terms such as “race,” “voter suppression,” or any other link that ties the overrepresented prison population with the consequences of having a criminal record outside of the directly affected communities convinces readers that this article was an advanced thought experiment done by the New York Times.

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Name for the Order?

By Gentle Ramirez I change my name each time I place an order at Starbucks And my pronouns are sweetheart, sweethearts, or they, My sun pickled skin be my superpower —& gets me double take at Whole Foods, keeps me invisible.

Invisible like the streets of Sudan, like the burning at the border, like the water that doesn’t hydrate.

My whole time at Starbucks i've been drowning in diuretics the way capitalism destroys me but I keep showing up. Bloodthirsty and vulgar- I am thinking about living, I am thinking about surviving, I am thinking about what Is going to happen next.

Often times captivity, I mean caffeine, makes me feel like There is nowhere to run, and I am in no shape to try. I keep being voluntarily constrained, to learn civility from colonizers, where right and wrong keep my iced cold brew black. I transform every three months, keeping black hair illegal, Keeping the nephew of expression, guessing. Keep my damn self confused.

Because I don't need to be named in this country that don't know freedom. But I do need two shots of espresso over ice to stay woke I do need these batteries until the revolution starts. So that eventually. I’ll learn my name, Myself, myselves, myself.

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Remembering Violence: Fanon and Césaire discussing Slavery in the Framework of Colonial Violence Kwolanne Felix In the small island of Martinique hails two distinguished, yet sometimes oppositional figures in anti-colonial thought. Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon remain relevant names in postcolonial discourse, and are often in conversation with one another. In particular Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth both discuss violence, but they do so with very different approaches. Even with their different approaches to colonial violence, both draw upon their own cultural history of the transatlantic slave trade when explaining how violence affects those involved. In this essay I will be analyzing how Césaire and Fanon use their history of the transatlantic slave trade to help develop their opposing views on violence. Césaire expands slavery into a metaphor to stress the power dynamics between oppressor and the oppressed to illustrate the dehumanizing effect violence has on the oppressor. In contrast Fanon refers to slavery in a parallel relation to his contemporary colonial violence to help illustrate how violence acts as a force of empowerment for the oppressed. By doing so I will illuminate how such opposing views can draw from a shared history, and how this history can be reinterpreted in different ways.

Before examining their body of work in relations to each other and slavery, I will first develop a contextualizing history of each individual and how their experiences influenced their work as well as the French Caribbean slave trade. This is important because even as contemporaries such different approaches to a similar topic can be clarified by their backgrounds.

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Point Martinique on June 26th, 1913. Born into a humble family with five other siblings, Césaire’s intelect soon distinguished him. From a young age Césaire showed promise as he learned to read at age four by his grandmother, and went on to earn a scholarship to attend Lycee Louis-le-grand in Paris. During his eight years in Paris he met Leopold Senghor and Leon-Gontran Damas, where they explored literature as a form of expression of their African heritage.

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Coining the term Negritude in the 1930’s Césaire became an instrumental leader in the Negritude literary movement that challenged French colonial thought. Around the time he returned to Martinique in 1939 Césaire wrote his most famous poem “Cahier d'un retour au pays natal”. He worked as a teacher and continued to explore Negritude poetry in his works such as “Tropiques”, “Les Armes miraculeuses”, “Soleil cou coupe”, and “Corps perdu”. Césaire became widely published after the war as the Negritude movement gained steam.

Césaire soon entered politics in Martinique, and climbed the ranks rather quickly. In 1945 he became the mayor of Fort-France, and in 1946 he became the deputy of Martinique, representing the colony in the French national assembly. With a emphasis on decolonization, Césaire pushed for social and economical equality of Martinique in the French government.

He lead the push for Martinique to transition away from a colony into overseas department status in 1946. In theory this change would allow for greater representation in the French government. He became disillusioned with this promise as economic issues remained, and prospects as an overseas territory were limited. As the French Communist party lost power, Césaire became less active in politics and writing.

Upon Césaire’s return into the writing world he shifted his writing style away from Negritude for a more black militant style. He broke away from the French Communist Party in 1956 after years of being alienated due to the barriers of colonialism. He wrote plays that explored politics and decolonization in La Tragédie du Roi Christophe and Une Saison au Congo”. Césaire started his own political partyParti Progressiste Martiniquais, and pushed for culture as a force for maintaining independence in former colonies. Even though he stopped publishing work in 1969, he remained politically active until his retirement in 2001.

Frantz Fanon born in July 20th, 1925 in Fort-France Martinique into a middle class family. His family stressed assimilation and respectability as he was exposed to French culture throughout his life. In high school he was taught by no other than Césaire, where he started to question some of the values of French assimilation. At age 18 in 1943 Fanon joined the Free France efforts near the end of WWII. He continued his education in France studying medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon.

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Fanon then went on to treat Algerian soldiers during their war efforts, and was deeply affected by his work. Fanon noted the effects colonization and violence had on Algerians and he was interested in the psychological aspects. During this time he wrote “Black Skin, White Masks”, one of his first popular works that looked at colonialism’s psychological effects. He joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) an Algerian resistance group that lead war efforts against the French. He went on to become the FLN provisional ambassador for Ghana 1961, unfortunately his work was cut short by leukemia. Before he passed he finished his most iconic piece “The Wretched of the Earth”, which solidified his place as a intellectual in decolonization. After seeking treatment in the U.S. he passed shortly after from leukemia.

The particular national history of slavery that Césaire and Fanon both share started in 1635 when Martinique became a French possession. One of many French possessions the island was a plantation colony that exported sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, rum, and molasses. Martinique became the capital of the French caribbean colonies from 1669 to 1714.

The social structure mirrored many French colonies at the time, with a wealthy white slave owning class , a mulatto class who were granted freedom (gens de couleur), poor white working class (petit blancs) and the majority of the population were African slaves. The black population of the island used various tactics of resistances such as “...individual refusal to full-scale strikes, from malingering to work sabotage, from self-injury to deliberate contraception, from riot, revolt, insurrection, and armed struggle all the way to revolution” Immediately after the Haitian Revolution while other French Caribbean islands enjoyed freedom (1794-1802) until Bonaparte reinstated slavery, Martinique was under British occupation and continued to operate in slavery. However, the island’s black population have had large insurgencies such as in 1831 and 1848. Martinique continued to operate as a colony for the next century continuing to export raw materials, however residences all gained French citizenship. In 1946 under Césaire's leadership Martinique became a French overseas department which gave them greater representation in the French government.

In Discourse on Colonialism Césaire explores the effects colonialism has on European countries and their claim to civilization. He points out the 61

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hypocrisy of colonial structures, and asserts that colonial structures are actually “decivilizing”. When discussing violence and slavery he stresses the power dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor and uses slavery as a metaphor for his contemporary experiences. He explores this idea in his text, “No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn colonizing men into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.” In this text Césaire includes innocent forms of dominance with the harshest ones to illustrate how these forms of dominance are pervasive in western society. Even Though the slave driver would have existed a century ago, he reminds readers that these systems of dominance still prevail. His description of the colonizer creates a tool outside of the indigenous people is very interesting. Surely, Césaire’s Marxist background peaks out, as he continues to engage with communist thought in the extraction of labor. Here the power structures of colonialism are stressed as the colonizer takes on new forms of dominating power, and as the colonized must take on a role of submission. He uses these roles especially that of a slave driver metaphorically to illustrate the inherently violent colonial power. By drawing upon the more violent history Césaire reminds his audience of the pervasiveness of these power dynamics, and the diversity of forms of dominance.

Césaire goes on to further investigates the power structures throughout other parts of his text. He first asserts that those who shall condemn Europe for its egregious actions will “not [be] by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.” This unique power structure flips that of colonialism, as it is the very subjugated people who shall stand to judge their oppressors. Once again slavery is used metaphorically to describe the various stages of colonialism at hand. He draws on the ideas of communist ideals as the “European masses” standing against to judge the greater capitalist powers that include colonialism, as well as those subject to the violence of colonialism itself. He once again draws upon a metaphor of slavery to broadly cover the diverse forms of colonialism many face throughout the world. Even though some standards are certainly slavery as the Congolese workers of the railroad, others colonized people like Césaire enjoy a life of intellectualism and comfort.

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But they all rise from the metaphorical depths of slavery because they exist under colonial power, and therefore they all exist under subjugation and are metaphorical slaves. As slavery demonstrates the absolute worst of colonial power, by drawing on this metaphor that has shaped his history to other colonized states, he brings them together in a common struggle against the colonial systems that produced both.

Césaire also goes on to develop this idea of decivilization when exploring violence and its effects on the colonizer. He states, “Violence!

The violence of the weak. A significant thing: is not the head of civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.” Here Césaire illustrates how the violence that plagues colonialism ends up corrupting he who perpetuate it.

As performers of violence through colonial power in slavery, racism, and exploitation, this violence ends up corrupting the very morality of the colonial power. With this framework Césaire goes on to criticize European colonial thought, as he argues that they lack morality, and any”moral” attempt at justifying colonialism: improvement in colonial infrastructure, culture, and people are selfish and hollow. In turn this lack of morality Césaire theorizes ends up corrupting the system itself. He illustrates that through discussing Hitler’s brutality which essentially reflected colonial violence.

In Césaire’s work Discourse on Colonialism he draws upon imagery of slavery throughout his work. He uses slavery to highlight the power structures that allow for colonialism as well as the inherent violence that corrupts colonialism. Slavery is a metaphor that helps connect different parts of France’s colonial subjects. He bridges a gap from the 1635 acquisition of Martinique to the 1950’s liberation struggles of many French colonies by stating that they experience a slavery under colonialism. Even though the term tends to be reserved for a particular form of labor, he instead expands that term from his past to encompass the general subjugation of people. He is able to draw upon his own historical past to relate to the different experiences of colonized people throughout the world. By doing so he emphasises a constant struggle towards liberation, one that demands the abstract world wide scale of rising up.

Fanon has a different approach in understanding colonial violence, yet uses similar techniques of linking slavery to this struggle. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon actually quotes one of Césaire’s poems which describes a 63

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young rebel killing his master and recounting the story to his mother. “In his analysis of this poem Fanon explains, “The violence of the colonial regime and counter violence of the colonized balance each other and respond to the other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity.” In this part Fanon naturalizes the violence that Césaire describes as a reaction to colonial violence. He integrates the poem of Césaire about slavery into his work and creates a different relationship with his historic past as he then refers to colonialism. He seems to draw a chronological link where he acknowledges this particular form of slavery and the legacy of violence.

Unlike Césaire’s redefinition of slavery Fanon frames slavery as a violent past that colonialism continues to uphold in different forms. He reasons that similar occurrences of slave revolutions and uprising that lead to violence are reflected in his contemporary world: namely in the Algerian war. As a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers, and an active member of the FLN, much of “The Wretched of the Earth” looks at violence through his contemporary experiences. To draw his own history into the oppression of Algerians creates this wider struggle of colonialism that connects colonized people Fanon continues to draw this theme of violence and uses slavery to historicize and emphasize violence as a means of liberation. He states, “The colonized peoples, these slaves of modern times, have run out of patience. They know that such madness alone can deliver them from colonial oppression.” Once again he separates the slavery of the past, and that of his contemporary colonialism. He acknowledges that they are both slavery, but is careful to distance them just enough to draw a precedence.

As a Martinican Fanon would have had a grasp of his own history with slavery: the various uprisings in 1831 and 1848 of Martinique, the Haitian Revolution, and maybe the slave insurgences in the United States. By drawing a difference between the two forms of slavery he invites his audience to look into the past of other colonial bodies and how they reacted to violence. Even though these communities aren’t fully liberated, their similar reactions to colonial violence is noteworthy.

Fanon uses slavery to help somewhat historicize the use of violence in reaction to colonialism. He mentions slavery multiple time, yet he builds a distinguishment between the slavery of his past, and the slavery of colonialism. He does this to construct a reputable foundation for his claim 64

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to violence. By pointing at the older forms of slavery he is able to reference the violence that responded to colonial powers. Even though, he distances his contemporary colonialism to historical slavery, he is able to still draw a connection that links the two. He is able to solidify the powers of colonialism that have worked against slaves of both eras, and solidify the need for violence to displace these systems. As Fanon writes his book to create a more actionable framework for violence, by referencing historical cases he helps solidify his beliefs in reality, instead of an abstract scale.

Even as Fanon and Césaire may disagree on violence and its manifestations, they both draw upon a shared history to express their views. Fanon’s understanding of violence comes from a lot of first hand experience as he describes his own observations when working with Algerian soldiers. Wretched of the Earth he writes as a more actionable framework for responding to colonial violence, which is why he uses his history of slavery as an example of such violence. His use of more concrete responses for colonial violence comes from his own work in the FLN, an active group that opposes French colonialism with violence. Fanon’s biggest critique of Césaire, usually comes from the abstract nature of Césaire’s approaches. Cesaire as a representative of a former colony and a writer, does take a more abstract approach to addressing violence focusing on the perpetrator. He does use historical events to help articulate his points on colonial violence, but focuses on the history of the oppressors and their actions. He doesn’t lay out an actionable plan for liberation, but rather puts the onus on the colonizing government to preserve some form of morality. Their various approaches inform how they discuss slavery in their respective works. Césaire uses slavery as a metaphor and redefines slavery as a general subjugation by colonialism, by doing so Césaire creates the frame of a continuous struggle of all colonial people towards freedom.

Fanon refers to slavery as both a past and present phenomena, and uses his past as a guide for the present when responding to violence. By acknowledging the violence that has already responded to colonialism, Fanon invites his contemporaries to engage in similar but more effective violent responses. These contemporaries that share the same island and the same history of slavery have come with different approaches on decolonization, but continue to be relevant.

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Editorial Edition New Moons are Invisible Gentle Ramirez In a second life, in the museum of knives I’ve been preserved only through the Throats of women. There through the glass, you see my life is a bridge at the end of a cliff, with no other side, nor railing for balance.

The plaque reads: what I have learned from sleeping alone and the bottom of bottles is that black be phantoms before human. Tucked away in zones light cannot escape; in melanin so sharp, dense, and durable.

You’ll learn in the remains that I was often used to describe the invisible.

Observe the evolution of my point, as I grow tired- I grow unimportant. As I grow common, I carve knots of flesh tender.

Gutting others, I see all men were created equally to shiver at the thought of me. Hold me at all risks, knowing I might slip and bite them

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Editorial Edition Back. Knowing they too are at the mercy of my wrath.

I tell only my children who peer the corpse of their beloved That I growl when untouched, that I explode when unheld. I show them, only them, the prophecies at the altar and they glimpse at their destiny. Their steel won’t fall apart, it will only find new homes, Though I be in captivity, I will never be owned

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Exploring Linguistic Structure’s Role in the Development of Gender Relations Gentle Ramirez A language is a tool people use as a form of communication for articulating concepts and phenomenons that occur in nature. Additionally, words serve the purpose of sharing ideas and conceptualizing reality.

Language then makes something exist by means of recognition, however, some intentions behind the introduction of some terms in a language then allow groups to hold power because the language was born from and created for them. Thus, language can be weaponized to harm those groups of people it was not created to serve.

Whorf is a renowned white linguist who elaborated on his sentiments for language in Science and Linguistics. First, he reports that after studying multiple languages, linguists established that “the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas.” For my project on examining the linguistic structure’s responsibility in perpetuating the discrepancies of gender relations, this text is needed as my ideas emerge to argue that since language is the shaper of ideas, it is then able to frame that language then can and consciously and subconsciously reproduces an idea that is catered to the identity associated with the speaker.

Because people in power are the reproducers of knowledge, there is the opportunity for their biases to transform violently in the language to either affirm or diminish another identity that was not the creator of the language. Whorf furthers that, “formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but its part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars.” Ultimately we see this in the crux of understanding how gender developed differently depending on where it was based in because as 69

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people attempt to cut up nature the way in which it happens is not universal. To continue, Whorf writes, that “the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds” but as this happens based on the intention behind linguistic organization, the impressions allow or disallow for the recognition of an idea and then creates gaps in understanding of a person's humanhood or identity at large when the language is catered for the demise of a certain population.

Fundamentally, this essay seeks to present that some languages that exist today have enabled the demolition of people in society by exasperating the development of racism and sexism by way of linguistic structure. Moreover, while simultaneously critiquing the credibility of sources with the language I have available, the essay will serve to come to a consensus that language does fundamentally uphold values of a society and can therefore adapt as language lives with the people who speak it. Under connotations, denotations, subtext and direct terminology to critique on someone's humanity, language has always been a way to share the concept of someones merit, to humanity and their role in society. I will then discuss the language structure in Oyěwùmí Oyèrónkẹ́ and Oyeronke Olajubu as they write about Yorubaland, the claims and criticism present in Tinsley’s “Songs for Ezili: Vodou Epistemologies of (Trans) Gender,” and the Spanish language structure using the Zine Latino, Latinx, Latine in The Latinx Project.

Yoruba The preface of “Seeing through a Woman’s Eye: Yoruba Religious Traditions and Gender Relations,” states that Olajubu will aproach Oyěwùmí’s “Visualizing the Body,” with a contrary idea against Oyěwùmí’s argument that gender concepts don’t exist in the Yoruba culture or is not as fixed as the west, it is arguable that these two texts actually complement each other to relay the same message. Both writers expand on the idea that 70

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gender could have not existed at all in some cultures because the language does or does not exist for it. Additionally, then, that if gendered language did not exist, the idea is prompted that without language to express reality, gender construction and the limitation of gender could have not existed. It is also possible that with the proposal that gendered language could have not existed, someone’s experience could be completely disregarded because there would have been no vocabulary adequate enough to propel the idea of gender and gender identity forward.

The Oyěwùmí and Olajubu texts make the most sense for my project as I engage with works that discuss the way language has been an agent in affirming and favoring certain identities over others as the people using these languages favor a commonality which then gets retold and passed on while some are - with or without intention- actively erased and

disregarded. In Oyěwùmí’s texts, she analyzes: “The biologization inherent in the Western articulation of social difference is, however, by no means universal. The debate in feminism about what roles and which identities are natural and what aspects are constructed only has meaning in a culture where social categories are conceived as having no independent logic of their own.” She holds that the constructions of biology have been the foundational structure of many different social categories in the West.

Following this exploration she claims “Thus, gender, being a social construction, is also a historical and cultural phenomenon. Consequently, it is logical to assume that in some societies, gender construction need not have existed at all.” Essentially her extensive lists provides a great example of other non-gendered or alternative gendered words that exists in other native tongues. These words then support that depending on the globally regional perspective of the person and their language (as language is the shaper of ideas) she proves Whorf’s claim that words describing natural phenomenons are contingent upon the culture and context in which these words were created in.

Complementary to exploring the language of Yorubaland is Olajubu’s “Seeing through a Woman’s Eye: Yoruba Religious Tradition and Gender Relations.” She says that based on context and conception, gender exists due to the way the specific terminology of masculine and feiminie deities that promoted and shaped the idea of gender in religious cultures, and interpersonal relationships.

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Conceptions of gender in Africa are often culture- and context-bound.

Oyewium's work exemplifies the contextualization of gender among the Yoruba. Biological anatomy is not a limitation to social status such as that of husbands, wives, mothers, or fathers among the Yoruba. In addition, the Yoruba language, unlike Western discourse, provides no pronoun for sexual distinction. The notion of gender among the Yoruba is complex and multidimensional; hence, Oyewiumi states that the Yoruba world is not dichotomized into male and female. The existence of gender constructs among the Yoruba may be discerned from their mythology, which presents expectations for the female and male in the society at both the mythical and practical levels.

Essentially because religion plays a role in how ideas of gender were developed, the relation between gender is not naturalized according to sex as much as it is a product of context. Likewise, because the Yoruba language was shaped on the ideas of deities being masculine or feminine, the construction of gender was based off of what was already multifaceted.

To me, Olajubu’s and Oyěwùmí’s perspectives remain in conversation with each other on examining how gender development differences were exactly correlated to the usage of words to describe a socially constructed identity independent of dichotomy and elaborate gender’s fluidity which is then present in how people live their daily lives. These, nevertheless, actually agree with Whorf that the actual language available can lead to erasure or misalignment due to gaps in understanding or description of the word or affirm an existence. Most importantly though, it has and can continue to lead to the erasure structurally and fundamentally in the west surrounding the identities of black people, the descendants of black people, women, and LGBTQIA people and has then had its own consequences.

TINSLEY Throughout history many linguists have come to the same conclusion that in an effort to translate meaning rendering word for word is deemed necessary and that a reproduction of general style and content is most important. “Letter 57” from Saint Jerome contains the argument that “a literal translation from one language into another obscures the sense,” and that translators should “seek to give the meaning rather than the words,” in 72

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efforts to convey a message written in a different language. As I was reading the Tinsley source, the incredibly specific and intentional language that with or without care can be mistranslated easily made me wonder if the fact that languages propelling ideas can fail at reproducing the idea it was intended to convey when a translation in another language of the word or phrases do not exist.

In relationship to the language the interviewees use in the documentary showed at the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender, “Despite the film's title, its interviewees refer to themselves not as "men" but as masisi, a Kreyol word that references male femininity or womanness in conjunction with male same-sex desire. Although the word may be related to se (sister), Roberto Strongman intriguingly speculates that it is in fact derived from the Fon word mamisisi, for devotees of Mami Wata, an African counterpart of one of Ezili's emanations; mamisisi are either female women or males who dress and braid their hair like—or perhaps, as— women.” This quote exemplifies that based on where a term is derived from, “masisi” it does not directly translate to “men” and instead has a specific way to describe reality for the users of this term that is more accurate to their lived experience.

In the essay “Songs for Ezili,” Tinsley provided a criticsm the director recieved about the film that called for: “a caution against its linguistic carelessness in translating

masisi and madivine as "gay"/"lesbian" in subtitles when "these men use Kreyol terms to name their lived experience: masisi, madivinez, en kachet."” The caution for the linguistic “carelessness” proves that other people share a concern that their identities are erased at times when translations are not as appropriate as they could be. Strongman’s response to the criticism about mistranslation includes a claim about gender as a whole, “I want to ask what happens when we take seriously not only that masisi does not "mean" gay man but that it also may not mean any kind of man—when we resist global Northern terminology.” The response highlights a disconnect in the act of transcribing an experience. The questions that Strongman raises about considering the results of what happens when “Northern terminology” acknowledges that the northern

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language is not universal and the language that was created had a certain experience in mind, resulting in an exclusion of non normative genders.

The Tinsley article was a great source to help demonstrate that language as a shaper of thoughts and propeller of ideas is limiting because another language with a different semantic structure may then fail at affirming an idea in another language.

It is evident that similarly to Yorubaland, religion played an important role in how gender dynamics were developed in the society. A Haitian masisi wrote a blues counterpoint “White’ gender and sexual standards imposed on [Africans in the Americas] as part of religious discipline,” that modeled how “Vodou musical and/as epistemological repertoires hold space for alternative archives of gendered expressions where no version of lyrics, femininities, or desires is ever either final or dominant. And within this open-ended repertoire of gender and sexuality, the song's lyrics evoke an Ezilian multiplicity of meanings.” It is arguable to then say that the terms used have an entirely separate subcontext than the language that attempts to contain gender in English. The specificity of “Vodou musical and/as epistemological repertoires'' distinguish that the context based religious language held space for “alternative archives of gendered expressions” are fluid, as compared to the language developed in the North to discuss gender and sexuality. Based on this example in particular, the terminology is credited to the words available in the language as a shaper of thoughts and propeller of a midset to gender and sexual relations different than in the United States. The thoughts promoted are directly related to the language and therefore shows greatly that the values in which the language was created are different.

LATINE/SPANISH At the Latinx Project, the zine “Latino, Latinx, Latine. A bilingual guide to inclusive language. Una guía bilingüe para el lenguaje inclusivo” highlighted the usage of binary phrases and the way it has excluded people who exist out of a binary spectrum. In an effort to explore and discuss linguistic structure's role in the development of how gender is understood regionally, the zine demonstrated that the linguistic structure of Spanish 74

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creates an idea of a binary reality that then gets promoted and moreover, denies other identities.

On page 7, there is a large page that says “OVERTURN PATRIARCHY! FEMALE PRONOUNS ARE EXCLUDED EVEN WHEN WOMEN ARE PRESENT IN A GROUP! CREATING A SPACE WHERE WOMEN AND NON-BINARY PEOPLE ARE BEING EXCLUDED.” to argue that the default male term used to describe someone who is in a space. This male default makes an expectation that the people in the space are men, and the male pronoun default and assumption perpetuates patriarchal ideas in society. Further, the idea and utterance that signifies an object or phrase or identity, is rooted in the perpetuation of the patriarchy. The call for gender inclusive pronouns such as “le,” “les,” and gender inclusive endings on binary terms such as “es,” “us,” and “u,” throughout the zine was to transform the language rooted in serving the male existence to, in fact, affirm those that by making the default male gender the term end up failing. The writer acknowledges that “Spanish was a language imposed by colonizers to Latinx” and encourages for Spanish speaking Latinx people to realize that “Changing the language is also a way to decolonize your speech.” Gender is a product of colonization and an effort to change terminology ultimately is a call for acknowledging people who colonization attempted to erase. The inclusive language respects and affirms people that the exclusive binary language denied.

The zine closes with: “Language is ever-changing! New words are being invented and added to our vocabulary every day. Words like “selfie” did not exist 20 years ago and now they are recognized in dictionaries. If you are accepting of these changes it shouldn't be hard for you to embrace LATINX.” This sentiment is a great note to end on by the writer. When the intention of inclusion is behind the creation of new words, those disenfranchised will not have to be subject to scrutiny or invalidation of their lived experience. While new words are being invented and added and 75

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verified by dictionaries and establishments, I believe that embracing new language for identities that have existed before the language developed can create a better society.

Conclusion After exploring the ways in which languages evolved and exasperated gender dynamics in different societies, I have had many realizations.

Culture inspires and creates language as shown in Kreyol, Spanish, and Yorubaland. Depending on the culture, the emitted terminology and language can deny an existence. It is arguable that creating a culture where all marginalized identities are included and affirmed will then create a language that affirms and propels inclusion. I think that while this is a hopeful approach to inclusion, changing culture and simultaneously using colonizer languages while attempting to do so is counter-intuitive. I would argue that as English and Spanish emerged, the words used in the context of colonization was created with white supremancist men centered and involved. Using that foundation will then limit the possibility of what language can be. Moreover, I would argue that in order to acknowledge identities that are described with words such as, “masisi,� these terms should be integrated in English and in Spanish instead of searching for an English or Spanish translation that fails. I also know that my range of knowledge is limited and my capability to think and associate ideas are limited because I process my existence in the English language. Ultimately I would call for a dismantling of society that grounds itself on gender assumptions and on the erasure and lack of acknowledgement of gender non-conforming people.

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A Magic Trick

By Gentle Ramirez PART 1 My buried black body peels off the covers, gets dressed And goes outside this time, the graves are not shrieking this time, the phones don’t ring, angels aren’t calling me home, this time death is patient and heaven can wait.

My body blooms, the carcasses split in half, My palms are only read for revival, I know I’m loved when she oils my scalp Magic means black hair stay put and don’t move til I say so. means I don’t speak frizz. I am the sun's favorite offspring. I know I’m loved when she lays and prays on me.

PART TWIST: Nat Turner yells give me liberty or give me death. And America couldn’t find a blade sharp enough or a rope long enough and now has to deal with differentiating the night time and the negro.

A white woman’s lie killed Emmett Till. Cornerstone Caroline almost murdered Jeremiah Harvey. Black folx legacy stay contingent upon the white woman’s LIE narrative and All the indifference white men cared not to muster about negating innocent black lives. Llegacies is where the river is running towards. No longer do we talk of trans rights without talk trans death -Whether it be a murder or a depression diagnosis- My same black

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body comes back, returns to bed Strips and recognizes itself. Remembers and revels its voice, hones it’s magic: black and asreal as ever.

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The Jamaican “Higgler Woman”: A Master of Resilience, Resourcefulness & Resistance Amanda Taylor The “higgler” or market woman has been a symbol of the quintessential Jamaican woman from the beginning of Jamaica’s existence to modern day. Whether exemplified by the Jamaican national costume, the commonly sung Jamaican folk song “Linstead Market” or the recitation of Miss Lou’s poems, the higgler woman has always been essentialized and neatly packaged for the tourism industry. In everyday reality, this prototypal representation is somewhat accurate. The higgler woman is an embodiment of much of the strength, resilience and resourcefulness of Jamaican women. However, the lack of interest in the personal lives/livelihoods of higgler women by private and government sectors in Jamaica has led to decades of struggle. This tactic of reductionism/essentialism by the Jamaican government has been a long standing attempt to informalize the labor of the higgler woman and limit her independence. Despite this, the Jamaican “higgler woman” has not become subsumed by the limitless expansion of global capitalism, but rather, propelled by it. The higgler woman is an agentive force as she single-handedly builds a future for herself and her family. By making the histories of the higgler woman legible, one gains insight into her undeniable strength as she seeks to survive rigid capitalist frameworks on both a local and international scale. The higgler woman is one of the most powerful figures in Jamaican history and present day. Her resilience has often withstood the brutality of the effects of global capitalism, all while allowing her the agency to create new definitions of Jamaican womanhood for herself, her family and future generations. The higgler woman’s existence blurs the lines between production and consumption, freedom and bondage, and creation and limitation.

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As Carla Freeman illustrates in “Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization”, the “higgler” woman’s role under slavery was profound. The conception of the higgler identity in Jamaica begins during slavery when plantation owners relied on the transportation of crops, ground provisions and more to feed the slaves.

While higglering allowed her to experience an autonomy and movement across Jamaica that was atypical of women in slavery, or even women globally at the time, it is important to remember that the higgler woman was and is still typically a dark-skinned woman, severely limiting her “freedom”. As Gina Ulysse asserts in “Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica”, throughout different structures of Jamaica’s economic history, whether slavery, post-independence or under modern day neoliberalism, a major thread is the undeniable oppression dark-skinned Jamaican women face. Though not all higglers are dark-skinned women, the majority are and this has led to the higgler woman’s work remaining “informal” or delegitimized as other racial groups have slowly gained more economic footing. For example, Jamaica’s population also includes Indian and Chinese indentured laborers, but their skin tone/features often created a perceived proximity to whiteness that allowed for more social mobility through generations. As a result, the “higgler woman” became an identity of many dark-skinned Jamaican women and has transcended time periods and created new ways of cultural production for dark-skinned women. This cultural production is profound because for centuries, femininity has been defined through a lens of whiteness, one that as Freeman puts it, is defined by as “traditional, homebound, informal, and consumption oriented.”

Higgler women are everything but the aforementioned.

In September 1939, in honor of King George the IV, Coronation Market opened to the public in Kingston, Jamaica. This would become a defining moment for Jamaican cultural production by higgler women.

Marketing (higglering) has its roots under slavery, as mentioned, and 81

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became a sustained response to economic oppression as a coping and survival mechanism. Higglering under slavery created a relationship to production that was a rarity for slaves globally. “At these Sunday markets slaves both skilled and unskilled were able to sell any item they could produce or create, this allowed them to earn extra currency which for some was used to purchase their freedom or to purchase items they desired including land after emancipation.” This allows for higgler women as the identity evolves throughout time to have a spatial relationship to land, movement and cultural production. It must be made clear that this was historically and is presently the response to the oppressive economic circumstances within the current economic system at the time. Despite her immense struggle, the higgler woman is a force to reckon with. As Freeman puts it, “The country higgler was the key bearer not only of produce and other consumer goods between country and town but of news, information and gossip. Her style of banter and prowess over modes of negotiation are well-known and admired traits of West-Indian womanhood.” While slave and plantation owners in Jamaica often aimed to remove all forms of West African culture from slaves, i.e. their way of dress, language, religion, the one thing they could not take away from the higgler woman was her livelihood. An unintentional side effect of the higgler woman’s travel across the country, was her participation and reproduction of social norms, i.e. ways of speaking, interacting, kinds of colorful clothing, etc. that gave Jamaicans a collective identity. This collective identity arguably led to cultural expression and collaboration and may not have been achieved without the presence of the higgler woman. Now, not only does slavery and subsequently global capitalism rely on the labor of the higgler woman, but it is heavily influenced by her personhood, demeanor, way of dress and womanhood.

Part of this “collective identity” that the higgler woman produces is a spirit of entrepreneurship. As higglering becomes contemporary, a culture of resilience and resourcefulness is passed down through generations. It is 82

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very often found that a higgler’s mother was a higgler, and her mother’s mother was a higgler. Likely learned and passed down from slavery, higgler women have been constantly faced with having to transcend the bounds of global capitalism to continue to exist. Simply put, a higgler woman in her existence is antithetical to everything in means to be “lady-like” in a Caribbean context. To be read as legible to society as a woman in Jamaica, one must embody lady-like behavior and appearance that has been inherited from European femininity, which a “higgler woman” does not.

Phrased by Ulysse, “A rude gal is a tough, lawless, hard-hearted, inhabited and unrestrained female. Slackness flows out of her mouth as she speaks her mind, and she is not afraid of anyone. Historically, the higgler was viewed as a troublemaker.” This view of the higgler as a troublemaker is deeply ingrained in the minds of Jamaicans as she sits at the market or on the roadside with her legs wide open, her hair often “unkept” and her voice ringing loudly and “aggressively” through the streets as she fights to sell her stock for the day. It is important to unpack the colonial and patriarchal origins of the higgler’s characterization as a troublemaker. This “trouble” must be reframed as resourcefulness and resilience. The higgler woman is not a mindless seller of whatever she can find on the street, she is an instrumental and agentive force and business woman. The higgler woman finds a solution to her problem, finds her target audience and even has a marketing strategy. The higgler woman, specifically in Kingston, knows intuitively and generationally that the “problem” is that cheap produce in Kingston is hard to come about, especially as imported fruit, vegetables and ground provisions become exponentially more expensive. She identifies a solution, which is to source food from the countryside or other rural areas, and re-sells them at a minimally to moderately higher rate that is still lower than that of the supermarkets. The higgler woman often identifies her target audience to be “uptown” and “middle class” who she knows, though they are struggling less than she may be, are still often unable to make ends meet under the scope of global capitalism. Lastly, the 83

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higgler woman’s marketing strategy is to shout. It is to embody her “rude gyal” spirit and frankly, this spirit and livelihood from slavery until modern day, has allowed her to manipulate capital and move through social spaces.

The dark-skinned higgler woman is viewed as “out of place” in uptown society. Jamaican uptowners drive up to their stalls in their “rolled-up, tinted-window cars” as higgler women sit with agency and prowess in their fruit and vegetable stalls. In modern day Jamaica, higglers transcend class rules and structures. Moving from Coronation Market into typically “uptown” and “middle-class” areas like Barbican Square, Papine and Norbrook, the higgler woman is an important part of the daily life of uptowners. She often interacts with uptowners in a way that is unprecedented and inadvertently becomes a part of their daily lives.

Though uptowners may still scorn her existence, or see her as less hardworking than themselves, she provides them with a service they cannot do without and often makes an impact on Jamaica culture without even realizing it, whether through verbal expression and demeanor or her way of dress and life.

Though this dynamic of superiority/inferiority has become a deeply ingrained social norm, it is an awful remnant of colonialism. The downtown woman and the “dark-skinned” woman have become almost synonymous, leading her to face cultural, ideological and structural oppression on a day to day basis. The sustenance of her existence through generations is arguably revolutionary, as she has been ostracizing at every stage in her life. The higgler-woman is forced to create and sustain her own business model while simultaneously encountering bureaucratic mazes, neighborhood territoriality and ingrained racial and cultural prejudice. “For them, it requires nothing less than a herculean effort to realize their entrepreneurial dreams.” Despite the higgler woman’s undeniable influence on cultural and economic production, her work is still seen as “informal labor.” This means the higgler woman has no access to labor rights, health care or much legislative protection. To continue to deem higglering as 84

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informal work, allows for the Jamaican and global governments to remove her stalls from neighborhoods as frequent new construction goes up and to limit her ability to earn a living for herself and her family. Yet still, the higgler woman persists and continues to be a beautifully accurate representation of the strength of a Jamaican woman, a matriarch, and an entrepreneur.

The silencing and ostracization of the higgler/market woman is deeply ironic. Jamaica, as a nation, has never known itself to be a nation without the responsibility of production. A huge part of the nation’s identity, from slavery to emancipation and now modern day, has always been to produce and export crops for the benefit of the global economy.

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other large global powers continue to demand structural adjustments and debt payments that affect Jamaican income, trade and economy. This has come with so many hardships not just for individuals, but for the nation as a whole. It is possible then, that instead of silencing her, the government and society should look to the higgler woman: the first ever Jamaican entrepreneur, the queen of production and the master of resilience, as a role model and a guide for navigating and not becoming subsumed by limitless expansion of global capitalism.

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SAMBO

By Gentle Ramirez My roommate says that I am too dark to be Latino- And I know she doesn't mean just my skin. She means my childhood of speaking broken Spanish wasn’t enough. That I’m not enough. That I shouldn’t be able to roll my r’s or choke on my g’s. That erasing a native tongue is only for those with 3b hair and caramel skin.

My roommate says “ Dominicans aren’t black, they’re Dominican” -as if she doesn't understand the concept of synonyms. As if she never learned all of Latin America was just another station stop on the slave train. News flash, Pendeja, Africans were scattered across Hispaniola, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Ecuador. But This -isn't a history lesson- This -is the ghost of my ancestors showing a DNA test.

I’m not Latino despite my blackness, but because of it and I know why you want to distance yourself from your heritage. I can understand the shame in looking back on your history knowing you were raped into existence. To have generations pass down black fetishes to crack in the mirror every time you acknowledge your conditioning.

But every time you deny the plantation our ancestors rose from, you spit on the resting places of Africans that survived the Atlantic. You forget that lashings sound the same in every language. You can’t translate a scream; it's already understood. Dark enslaved people are fluent in survival. And ain't that what blackness is? Alchemy despite location.

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Both our mothers can't pass the brown paper bag test but the difference between you and I is that my mother never tried.

My Mother told me we were stolen on stolen land so in one fist I punch black power, in the other “Que Bonita Bandera” African Diaspora ain't a binary. Race knocks down every attempted exclusionary ethnicity, and builds an empire out of forced dispersion- Maintaining the melanin through generations to remind people where the magic came from.

Did you forget your abuelita is the same complexion as me. Do you hide her in a closet with the other ancestors you won’t claim? Deny her claim to latinidad? And do you tell her she’s too dark to be Latino, too? Don’t you see the abuelita you came from in me? You tell me I’m too dark to be Latino Don’t you see I’m too dark to be anything but.

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Editorial Edition A Call to Heal America Inayah Bashir

There are certain values—or better described as dreams—coded into the DNA of American society. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have remained idealistic concepts towards which every American generation strides. Making men cry, what more could Blacks want? What more could women want? What more could they want? American citizens should no longer accept the broken promises of the American dream.

Instead, America needs to move towards a reality that reconciles with the anti-freedom (i.e. slavery, exploitation, genocide) inherent in the nation’s social, political, and moral foundations.

The American dream, a national ethos and global myth, represents America’s promise that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The American dream tells a fantasy of a nation where anyone with talent and hard work should be able to achieve the highest of their aspirations. Like American belief in the nation’s “manifest destiny,” this ethos promotes the idea that improvement and expansion of one’s life, power, and success is justified, inevitable, and divinely supported.

As American ideals of “richer,” “fuller,” and “better” continue to expand, this dream is exposed as a nightmarish ethos with shaky moral foundations.

The Western mindset teaches that one should always focus on the development of their own power and success because everyone is naturally selfish and doing the same. This places the individual in contrast with their community, a concept that was foreign to most cultures, especially Black and indigenous ones! This individualistic belief creates an environment in which an individual feels they are constantly in competition with the needs of others. In this view, success is a pie with limited slices that need to be fought for individually by an individual, rather than viewing everyone’s success as helping the pie to maintain health or balance.

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Nonetheless, American notions of life and liberty continue to allure generation after generation, with Western ideology becoming a globalized mentality. Western notions of life tend to denounce the knowledge of many cultures, which has led to the genocide of peoples, traditions, and balance. As the lungs of the world burn and oceans become landfills, the antithetical nature of the American liberal system is revealed as a threat to humanity. Historically, American ideals of success have dictated oppression, destruction, and genocide on a personal, local, regional, and global scale. From the trauma of broken homes to the obliteration of poor countries, the implications of genocide continue to follow America. In order for the nation to truly develop systems of justice and equality, the American people must rectify the misconceptions that form the nation’s sociopolitical systems. America believes in forms of liberty and freedom that were prescribed by a room full of high class, white men who could not grasp the intelligence and wisdom beneath my ancestors’ Black skin. These same men would reject my existence, as they struggle to believe in the humanity and brilliance alive within me. Therefore, these immoral men can no longer determine the morality behind my conceptions of freedom, life, and liberty. In order to move beyond its traumatic foundations, the American nation must redefine its dreams and systems by re-evaluating what it means to be free, what it means to live, and what it means to love.

Ultimately, America should no longer accept systems of injustice that are founded on ill-conceived notions of humanity and freedom. The American system was crafted by an “elite” group of wealthy white men.

The safeguards put into place by the “ founding fathers” were created to protect minorities. Their legal reasonings perpetuated fear of majority rule; therefore, preventing anarchy became more important than avoiding tyranny. Yet, it is unsurprising that a small group of men, a minority, would be more concerned with creating rights to protect minorities from the majority. Simply put, the “founding fathers” created rights to protect minorities because they were aiming to protect their own minor faction of 90

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white wealthy people. This is exemplified in the fact that the creation of laws to protect minorities coexisted with slavery. Slavery was a tyranny of the majority that was maintained by widespread, immoral conceptions about the humanity of a people. Since its inception, the Constitution has only been helpful for those who can afford to invoke its protections.

Throughout history, powerless minorities have barely been capable of utilizing the law to protect their rights.

Essentially, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights most successfully protect the wealthy minority while failing to protect minorities who are usually attacked by the injustices of the law. In a modern context, this can be understood as the contrast between a wealthy white man’s ability to receive due process of the law and a poor Bllack man’s inability to do the same. To elaborate, a wealthy white man, a minority in America, can effectively invoke his Fourth Amendment right to protections against, “unreasonable search and seizure” because he has a team of lawyers, resources, and adequate education of the law. While a poor Black man, a minority in America, doesn’t have enough resources to ensure due process from a legal system that is notorious for stripping humanity from people who look like him. For centuries, wealthy white people have crafted a system that allows them to invoke the privilege of fighting the law, while others are left to live within its unjust parameters. Concurrently, the American legal system purposefully criminalizes Blackness and poverty, with prisons mainly functioning as a mechanism for controlling the masses- Black, Brown, and poor people. Ultimately, wealthy white people have always used the law to their advantage, as they simultaneously dictate American notions of right and wrong.

Regardless of its origin stories, the American legal system never succeeded in the creation of a democracy. It has only ever achieved the construction of an oligarchy in which wealthy, white men were the only people afforded a voice in the determinations of society. From the beginning, the ownership of land was a requirement for voting, as well as 91

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being white and male. It took centuries to expand the vote to include more citizens, and many people remain disenfranchised due to voter suppression.

This speaks to the American truth that the majority’s voice is primarily excluded from the actions of government. The checks and balances of the system have succeeded in preventing “anarchy,” but it has also made it difficult for the average citizen to feel heard and acknowledged.

Unfortunately, the checks and balances have failed to prevent tyranny, which is illustrated in the financial elite whose interests are overwhelmingly acknowledged in American legislation.

From the demands of white wealthy slave owners to the demands of white wealthy CEOs, the American legal system has and continues to protect wealthy minorities, economically and politically. The “founding fathers” never envisioned a country or a community that was not controlled by the most economically successful and “educated” men.

Ultimately, the “founding fathers” preached democracy, but created a system that reinforces oligarchy. Thus, if America continues following the prescriptions of the founding fathers, the country will never achieve liberty or freedom for all because that was not the intention of the nation’s legal blueprints. Many groups were excluded--and continue to be excluded-from the determinations of morality that shape American values. Over the years, more diverse perspectives have been able to enter the political sphere, but America still fails to effectively incorporate the voices of the unheard. It is time for the American nation to stop fearing the majority, and trust that a diversity of perspectives from one’s own community can produce more effective and creative solutions than a small, detached subset of the population can.

Fortunately, in recent years, there has been a shift in American history and politics that is working to openly expose the roots of white supremacy that are deeply intertwined in American notions of self and freedom. By reclaiming stories and characters that were integral to the development of the nation, America is beginning to create a more holistic narrative of its nation’s past. Specifically, Black and Brown people are pioneering this movement towards the truth by unveiling the stories that have been silenced for so long. Once again, Black people serve the nation 92

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by demanding the “upkeep” of the nation’s democratic promises. This is most clearly illustrated in the works of Black scholars and activists exposing the plight of the American injustice system. From Michelle Alexander to Angela Davis, a realistic understanding of the American criminal system is emerging in the political sphere. It is becoming more clear to the general public that the purpose of the American legal system is and has always been to punish, control, and condemn the poor and dispossessed members of society. The startling facts about the gross impingements on life and liberty, especially for Black people in America, have become a widely discussed issue in the political landscape. As narratives emerge, the nation has the opportunity to utilize diverse perspectives and voices from the people most impacted by the system.

The treatment of Black people serves as proof that the American injustice system has always abandoned rationality in favor of maintaining white dominance. During slavery, restrictions on Black mobility and Black bodies had been a key factor in maintaining the social, economic, and political power of white people. The tradition of restricting Black bodies was re-fashioned after emancipation, so that white people could continue to benefit economically, politically, and otherwise from Black suppression.

In Jen Manion’s Liberty’s Prisoners, the author quite aptly declares that the penitentiary was a part of “a continuum of institutions that advanced the state’s effort to establish order and assert greater social control in the unstable decades of the early nineteenth century” (Manion, 2019). When the modern prison emerged during the nineteenth century, convict leasing and penal labor were the primary focus of the institutions, which stemmed from the white desire to utilize free labor for their economic benefit.

According to Wright’s labor study, American prison labor in the fiscal year of 1885 contributed $29 million to the economy, which is equivalent to $30 billion dollars in 2005. White people found a new way to “legally” exploit Black people for economic and social benefit, which supported the creation of mass incarceration, or the continued mass exploitation of Black and Brown people. This assertion of social and economic domination can be seen repeatedly in the horrific history of the American legal system.

Beyond the economic benefits, a great concern for most white people was the fear of Black people and their alleged “propensity” to criminality. Many whites feared that Black people would infringe upon white safety and 93

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success. After freedom was legally granted to Black people, the state’s purpose was to re-exert control over Black bodies. White people successfully controlled Black freedom by formalizing unjust practices of policing, detainment, and punishment. The idea that is immortalized in the American legal system—and the American narrative more generally—is that Black people must be treated more harshly because they have criminal tendencies. White people shaped the law to define criminality in conjunction with Blackness. Michelle Alexander states, “Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be Black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be Black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of Blackness in America: Black people, especially Black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be Black”. The American legal system was created to define Blackness as unlawful, which perpetuates an irrational and harmful conception of humanity and justice.

Yet, American history and culture claim that the legal system is objective and moral. The idea that at its foundation the legal system was created with justice in mind is a partial story that ignores the corruption and oppression that truly define America’s roots. The current American legal system needs to develop better ways to successfully encourage systems that are rational, moral, and effective. In fact, Black people--our identity, existence, resilience, and resistance--have historically demanded the fulfillment of democracy’s promises. The disenfranchised of America are profoundly aware of the systems’ failure to provide justice and equality, which is why the legitimacy of the American legal system is being questioned in the 21st century. As people notice the connections between poverty and punishment, greed and suffering, rich and poor, breaking cycles of systematic oppression becomes an even more daunting task.

When re-evaluating the objectives of the justice system, Americans are left with the question of how to create legal institutions that do not replicate harm and genocide in the name of freedom.

From slavery to contract leasing to the New Jim Crow to the prisonindustrial complex, the American legal system has found a way to continue cycles of harm, especially against Black and Brown people. The inequalities inherent to the American legal system have gone unaddressed since America’s birth. Today, the sociopolitical legitimacy of the American legal 94

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system seems to be depreciating. Citizens are demanding better processes that fairly address the issues faced within their communities. In America’s rights-based orientation to justice, morality is conceived as respect for rules; however, people are failing to find virtue in the rules that supposedly dictate morality and fairness. In a nation that is grappling with the lack of virtue in its legal systems, Americans are left with the task of breaking away from the immorality embedded in its socio political foundations.

In order to restore legitimacy, America must reconcile with its long history of trauma by creating systems that center healing justice. For healing justice to become the principle of American systems, the legal institutions and narratives must reflect values of peacekeeping and community building. In other words, the objective of the justice system needs to be centered on healing, building, protecting, and supporting communities. This would require the legal process to transform the “professionalized” and fallaciously “rationalized” legal system into a process that encourages community participation, respectful discussion, and healthy solutions. Systems that are dialogical and inclusive would be more reflective of true democratic principles, as its processes value group decision making in effecting change.

In the 1990s, the rise of the restorative justice movement can be seen as a step towards valuing healing in communities. The restorative justice movement has mainly been applied to non-violent criminal acts and school communities. However, restorative justice requires a holistic appreciation of interdependence and community, qualities that are lacking within the American ethos. Restorative justice principles originate from ancient practices of law and justice in indigenous communities around the world.

These indigenous communities that rely on finding ways to reconcile conflict, duly recognize the importance of community in the individual’s life. In studying the implementation of restorative justice in the West, it becomes clear that activists and politicians are trying to squeeze ancient justice practices into a system that is plagued with an individualized and capitalistic perception of life and liberty. Unless America truly considers the damaging tendencies of its current belief system, the nation will continue to implement reforms that only reinforce a traumatic hierarchy.

The framers of the American constitution built America’s foundations on immoral conceptions of humanity, and the American legal 95

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system has continued to honor these immoral notions, which has caused the re-creation of systems that oppress Black, Brown, and low income people. The current state of the American political system suggests that the nation can no longer survive by tolerating unhealthy notions of self, community, and government. If change is to be enacted, then America must stop reiterating the same oppressive, racist, and elitist practices that have come to define its legacy. In order to change the injustice that has always traumatized the American community, those who are continuously oppressed must be given an opportunity to propose solutions. Utilizing the power of technology, America must reconsider the ways in which legal practices can incorporate contemporary needs. With large populations and diverse communities, there must be a way for citizens to express their interests while also being able to actively engage in their community’s wellbeing. As a nation, America has grown far beyond the imaginings of the founding fathers. Their conceptions cannot account for the needs of the 21st century community; therefore, it is time to consider how the nation’s foundations can be rebuilt to serve the needs of diverse perspectives.

The healthiest recreation of America’s foundation would be certain to include the voices of those who have long been excluded from the decision making consensus. Low-income and minority people who continue to live in the perils of the American injustice system should be given the opportunity to create solutions and systems that support their communities and livelihood. As a middle-class Black woman raised by a single mother, I am well acquainted with the traumas of injustice, poverty, and inequality. I am concerned with the ways that Black history and culture can serve as a blueprint for developing restorative democratic systems. As it exists, the American injustice system is a crime against humanity, and the nation is in dire need of problem solvers who can develop practical solutions to revolutionize the ways in which we conceptualize and actualize justice.

Instead of considering how restorative practices and other reforms can make the current system incrementally improved; America needs to truly consider the underpinning values and morals that define the purpose of its legal systems.

The trauma induced by the American injustice system partnered with a deteriorating civil society perpetuates a cycle of harm within American communities. In order to move beyond this, America needs to re-evaluate 96

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community, individuality, and the role of government. The criminal system is the greatest exemplar of the ways that American legal practices magnify and deepen the fissures in its civil society. Simply put, the American criminal system “harms people who harm people to show that harming people is wrong”. Rather than defining justice as retribution, we need to work to create an American justice system that centralizes social peace and healing within its communities. Working to diminish social conflict by prioritizing social peace not only has the potential to create a truly just system, but it also seems to be a viable solution for developing stronger, healthier, and more cohesive communities. In many ways, America has to work to revitalize the spirituality that is inherent and needed for social responsibility.

Recognizably, it is important to detail the history and failures of our current system, especially in a climate where it seems increasingly necessary to do so. Nonetheless, as scholars, thinkers, artists, creatives, and changemakers, we need to learn to shift our focus on ideas, visions, and realities for the future. In “Moving Towards the New Millennium: Toward a Feminist Vision of Justice,” M. Kay Harris states, “We need to begin picturing the new order in our minds, fantasizing it, playing with possibilities...An exercise in first stepping into a desired future in imagination, then consciously elaborating the structures needed to maintain it” I use all of my work to validate and support a better future. A future that truthfully grapples with humanity.

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Death to America

By Gentle Ramirez Waiting on racism to end is waiting for Jesus to return. AKA Death to America: And they say, we ended racism. That Jesus returned down to earth just to see it. And witnesses finally believe Jesus isn’t the only one able to perform miracles. And they ask how, and I say, together. Me and my trans, me and my queer, me and my black selves. We all we got. We, today, blasted our favorite song, and danced. Looked for a way out and found it. Held myself as a nurturer would. Mourned for another person I did not know. Mourned at the frequency that happens. There is no way to make a virtual funeral sound poetic. Nor a viral funeral and so I won’t. I tell them the story of the time I did not need my grief to be inspiring. And wrote this truth to remind myself that I am among the living, to be tenderly loving to myself as I live, some more.

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Davidson Africana Studies Department Faculty Highlight Dr. Alice Wiemers Professor of History with a particular interest in twentieth-century Africa, Dr. Alice Wiemers not only serves as a pivotal figure within the Department of History but within Africana Studies as well. As faculty advisor to the Africana Society and voice to the Sankofa Society, Dr. Wiemers’ tireless, behind-the-scenes work and energetic zeal frequently keep things running. Along with her commitment to the study, Dr. Wiemers watches out for students and assists with exploring academic and personal interest. Whether it means encouraging students to speak up or assisting them in creating the platform to do so, for many students Dr.Wiemers is a professor that makes their intellectual journeys possible.

Dr. Douge-Prosper Dr. Douge-Prosper is a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her work focuses on decolonial thought and the construction of neo colonial nationalism. Her works revolve around race, class, gender, sexuality, education, language and religion. She teaches courses on Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, Black Cultures and Social Movements, and the Caribbean. She is a new advisor to the Sankofa Journal and has dedicated her time to advising, advocating, and mentoring students. She is committed to the radical unlearning process that the Sankofa Journal pushes for.

Dr. Harper-Shipman Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Dr. Harper-Shipman is a key and dedicated educator of the Africana Studies Department. Despite joining Davidson’s faculty only three years ago, Dr. Harper-Shipman has made a resounding impact on the department through her commitment to academic excellence and the success of her students. Her teaching, which encompasses the political economies of development, gender relations and 100

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human rights throughout the African diaspora, has opened the minds of many, which is further demonstrated by the success of her recently published, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa. Undoubtedly, Dr. Harper-Shipman.

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Davidson Student Initiative Highlights The Monument Initiative, Spotlight The Monument Initiative began with a Perspectives piece in the Davidsonian by Alexander Suarez, calling for a re-evaluation of the distribution of space along Patterson Court, specifically regarding the six white fraternity houses. The initiative has continued through social media, @monuments_davidson on Instagram, to ensure that the discussion prompted in the Perspectives piece does not subside until access to the spaces along Patterson Court is more equitable. Patterson Court is a central social location for students and, as it stands, the six white fraternities are allowed to monopolize these spaces. The initiative aims to bring light to how this distribution of space speaks to the landscape of the campus. Why does the college allot entire buildings to organizations that have historically served the white male while disallowing this same access to organizations that represent a different student demographic? The initiative hopes to provide equitable representation for the interest of the student body and to reimagine Patterson Court in a way that is in line with student interest.

After this has been accomplished, the initiative will continue to prompt discussion on how the allocation of space and resources on the campus speak to what kind of institution Davidson College is.

Fits for Change, Spotlight Fits For Change is an initiative created by Valeria Donoso, Abigail Santiago, and Charlotte Berl, three women from Davidson College’s Class of 2022, to redistribute wealth and donate to organizations that are doing important work among BIPOC communities. The organization sells second-hand clothing at low prices for monetary donations to amplify and support BIPOC voices and organizations. Fits For Change also works to promote sustainable fashion through selling second-hand clothing to hopefully decrease the negative impact fast fashion has on our environment. Fast fashion exists through racial oppression, as it relies on the systemic discrimination of WOC making the clothing in poor conditions and extremely low wages. Since its founding, the organization 102

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has donated to Black Transwomen Inc, Davidson Community Fund, and Know Your IX. As it moves forward as an organization, it hopes to expand so that it can continue to donate to the organizations and people it wants to support.

The Complexion Newsletter, Spotlight The Complexion Newsletter is by, for, and about the community of people of color that make Davidson College vibrant. We aim to highlight the achievements and experiences that contribute to the lively and complicated culture present at the college. We value the intersectional identities that help make each and every person of color who they are. Complexion is a place for people of color to receive the recognition, support, and creative freedom we all deserve. If you would like to contribute to the Complexion Team please email complexion@davidson.edu.

Black Women Association at Davidson College, Message from CoFounder and Co-Chair: Chiname Amechi Oluwatoyin Salau, Tatiana Hall, Breonna Taylor, Meg Thee Stallion A few examples of how the world continues to fail black women. Do black women not deserve unconditional love and respect that is not rooted in their respectability, physical attractiveness or familial relation to you? A question several black women at Davidson, and around the globe, have posed to whoever would listen. It should not be ignored that monolithic definitions of blackness, and patriarchal systems, have isolated a lot of Black women on this campus. From Project ’87 to the Africana Society; Black women and femmes on this campus have been leading efforts to make Davidson a safer place for all students. Despite their efforts rarely being reciprocated, they are still expected to gracefully bear the burdens of racism, colorism, misogynoir, homophobia, hypersexualization, transphobia, gaslighting, and unrecognized labor from their white peers and black men on our campus. Black Women at Davidson was created simply because rest for black women is radical and necessary. It has been designed as a space for community, healing, and relaxation for all self103

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identifying black women and femmes. Here, they do not need to be the activist, the queen, the selfless sister, or the resilient overachiever. It is a space where they can be vulnerable, laugh, feel seen, heard, and valued by a community that upholds shared values of: Uplifting black womanhood in all forms of its manifestation, Respect, Accountability, Community, and Socio-cultural empowerment.

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“ Stop Di Slackness”: The Dichotomy of Respectability vs.

Reputation for Jamaican Women in Urban Culture “'BRUK OUT!': The World's Most Intimate Dancehall Documentary.” I AM A JAMAICAN, 15 Jan. 2016, iamajamaican.net/music/2016/01/bruk-out-the-world-of-dancehallqueens/ Boucher, Lisa (2003) "Respectability and Reputation: A Balancing Act," Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology: Vol. 11: Iss. 1, Article 12. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/totem/vol11/iss1/12 Cooper, Carolyn. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

“Dancehall.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 May 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancehall.

Kempadoo, Kamala. Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.

Oral Testimonies of Jamaican Sex Workers. Panos Institute Caribbean, 2010.

Reddock, Rhoda. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: a History.

Zed Books, 1994.

Sterling, Marvin Dale. “Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall (Donna P. Hope).” Dancecult, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 129–131., Wilson, Peter J. Crab Antics: a Caribbean Case Study of the Conflict between Reputation and Respectability. Waveland Press, 1995.

Freedom and Imprisonment: Angela Davis’ Perspective Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne). Angela Davis--an Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 1988.

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Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne), Ruchell Magee, and Julian Bond. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance New York, N.Y: The Third Press, 1971.

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