Afropessimism
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Afropessimism
Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the trans- Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman". Acco ...
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Racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity. Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. There have been attempts to legitimize racist beliefs through scientific means, such as scientific racism, which have been overwhelmingly shown to be unfounded. In terms of political systems (e.g. apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices or laws, racist ideolo ...
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Sylvia Wynter
''The Honourable'' Sylvia Wynter, O.J. ( Holguín, Cuba, 11 May 1928) is a Jamaican novelist, /sup> dramatist, /sup> critic, philosopher, and essayist. /sup> Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man." Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work. Biography Sylvia Wynter was born in Cuba to Jamaican parents, actress Lola Maude (Reid) Wynter and tailor Percival Wynter. At the age of two, she and her brother Hector and their parents returned to their home country of Jamaica. She attended the Ebenezer primary school in Kingston and, at the age of 9, won a scholarship to attend the St Andrew High School for Girls, also in Kingston. In 1946, she was competed for and won the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took ...
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African Slave Trade
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade (which started in the 16th century) began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practiced despite it being illegal. In the relevant literature African slavery is categorized into indigenous slavery and export slavery, depending on whether or not slaves were traded beyond the continent. Slavery in historical Africa was practised in many different forms: Debt slavery, enslavement of war captives, military slavery, slavery for prostitution, and enslavement of criminals were all practised in various parts of Africa. Slavery for domestic and court purposes was widespread throughout Africa. Pla ...
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African Diaspora
The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in the United States, Brazil and Haiti. However, the term can also be used to refer to the descendants of North Africans who immigrated to other parts of the world. Some scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa. The phrase ''African diaspora'' gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term ''diaspora'' originates from the Greek (''diaspora'', literally "scattering") which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations. Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to ...
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Black Skin, White Masks
''Black Skin, White Masks'' (french: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book by philosopher Frantz Fanon. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, in which Fanon shares his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority. The violent overtones in Fanon can be broken down into two categories: The violence of the colonizer through annihilation of body, psyche, culture, along with the demarcation of space. And secondly the violence of the colonized as an attempt to retrieve dignity, sense of self, and history through anti-colonial struggle. Summary ''Black Skin, White Masks'' applies a historical critique on the complex ways in which identity, particularly Blackness, is constructed and produced. Fanon confronts complex formations of colonized ps ...
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Kerner Report
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in to investigate the causes of urban riots in the United States during the summer of 1967, and to provide recommendations to the government for the future. The report was released in 1968, after seven months of investigation. It attributed the riots to lack of economic opportunity for African Americans and Latinos, failed social service programs, police brutality, racism, and the orientation of national media to white perspectives. The 426-page report was a bestseller. Background President Johnson appointed the commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit, Michigan. Mounting civil unrest since 1965 had resulted in riots in the black and Latino neighborhoods of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles ( Watts riot ...
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Orlando Patterson
Horace Orlando Patterson (born 5 June 1940) is a Jamaican historical and cultural sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race and slavery in the United States and Jamaica, as well as the sociology of development. He is the John Cowles professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His book ''Freedom, Volume One'', or ''Freedom in the Making of Western Culture'' (1991), won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction."National Book Awards – 1991"
. Retrieved 24 March 2012.


Early life and education

Horace Orlando Patterson was born on 5 June 1940 in

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Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." A socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the Black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism."Cornel Ronald West." ''Contemporary Black Biography'', Volume 33. Ed. Ashyia Henderson. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. Among his most influential books are ''Race Matters'' (1994) and ''Democracy Matters'' (2004). West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States. During his career, he has held professorships and fellowships at Harvard University, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Princeton Univ ...
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Lewis Gordon
Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born May 12, 1962) is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: ''Fear of Black Consciousness.'' Biography Gordon graduated in 1984 from Lehman College, CUNY, through the Lehman Scholars Program, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in philosophy in 1991 at Yale University, and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree with distinction from the same univ ...
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Derrick Bell
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi. After a decade as a civil rights lawyer, Bell moved into academia where he spent the second half of his life. He started teaching at USC Law School, then moved to Harvard Law School where he became the first tenured African-American professor of law in 1971. From 1991 until his death in 2011, Bell was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law, and a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. Bell developed important scholarship, writing many articles and multiple books, using his practical legal experience and his academic research to examine racism, particularly in the legal system. Bell questioned civil rights advocacy approaches, partially stemming from frustrations in his o ...
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Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (, ; ; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist, and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria's War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time". For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, S ...
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