Temple University Press Journals
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“You Have Living Legends among You”: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Chicago Young Lords
No full textIn late September 2018, multiple generations of Chicago’s storied social movements marched through Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood as part of the sold-out, three-day Young Lords Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium hosted by DePaul University—an institution that, alongside Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration, had played a sizeable role in transforming Lincoln Park into a neighborhood “primed for development.” Students, activists, and community members—from throughout Chicago, the Midwest, the East Coast, and even as far as Texas—converged to celebrate the history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago, the legacies of the Young Lords, and the promises and possibilities of resistance. As Elaine Brown, former chairwoman and minister of information for the Black Panther Party, told participants in the second day’s opening plenary, the struggle against racism, poverty, and gentrification and for self-determination and the general empowerment of marginalized people is a protracted one. “You have living legends among you,” Brown insisted, inviting us to associate as equals with the Young Lords members in our midst. Her plea encapsulated the ethos of that weekend’s celebrations: “If we want to be free, let us live the light of the Lords.
How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, by Laura Briggs
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Engaging the White Possessive
No full textIn this issue of Kalfou, my book The White Possessive: Power, Property, and Indigenous Sovereignty receives attention from three scholars whose work I admire and respect. George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics was seminal in conceptualizing the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty, while Fiona Nicoll’s From Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Australian National Identity heavily influenced my work on the formation of white national identity. Kim TallBear’s Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science has been instructive in shaping my new work on the possessive racial logics of Indigenous identity fraud. I am honored they h
Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018
No full textCivil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society
Everyday Political Whiteness and Diversity University
No full textThere is a paradoxical situation in higher education today: the discourse around the concept of “diversity” has become widely institutionalized, but advocates of equality still struggle to operate within a broader and deeper racialized political and everyday cultural context that is hostile to their success. A besieged current climate for the hopes and projects of pluralism, social equality, peace, and justice imbues the higher education concept and discourse of diversity with an enhanced aura of progressive institutional value and perhaps even a residual locus of political hope.
The vast majority of academic workers would not, in the abstract principle, object to the general good of diversity and educational pluralism, even as ideological and political currents may differ. Daily encounters with students and face-to-face relationships, in teaching, mentoring, or advising situations, provide many regular opportunities to engage with the lived experiences of diversity but often within an antagonistic context, where hierarchical institutions routinely place inclusion and equality as subordinate priorities in relation to other values, goals, and projects.
As Sara Ahmed notes, “Diversity work is hard because it can involve doing within institutions what would not otherwise be done by them. . . . The social desire to institutionalize diversity does not mean the institution is opened up; indeed, the wall might become all the more apparent, all the more a sign of immobility, the more the institution presents itself as being opened up.” Diversity in higher education is therefore a moral and polemical concept that points to a tacit awareness and often grudging collective recognition, despite the prevailing political mood, that the university as it is currently configured is a place of injustice and inequality and in need of social change
The White Possessive against and within the Neoliberal University
No full textAileen Moreton-Robinson’s book The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty shows how intimately knowledge production and exchange are linked to the value of property. This article uses her text to identify and challenge the camouflage of possessive white ignorance as virtue in the neoliberal university. I argue that The White Possessive does more than help readers to understand the global revival of white supremacist movements and “alt-right” intellectuals and media channels. It also explains why academic and activist projects organized around such seemingly virtuous objectives as fighting racism and recognizing Indigenous rights can ironically confine people within white racial schemas
A Seat at the Welcome Table: Remembering Chef Leah Chase, 1923–2019
No full textLeah Lange Chase, executive chef and co-owner of the venerable New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase’s, died June 1, 2019. She was ninety-six and still, almost to the very end, a regular fixture in that bustling kitchen, guiding her brigade; chopping the trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper; and salting her cooking advice with history and homilies. She was an artist, in that her process of creating and serving signature meals activated something inside us, her patrons—an experience turned ritual that marked and shaped us. She made us all think and see in new ways
Circles of Organizing: Collective Leadership, Social Relations, and Intergenerational Activism in Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara
No full textThe Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition (ESNSB) formed in December 2015 as a community-based, intergenerational collective with the goal of establishing an ethnic studies course as a high school graduation requirement in Santa Barbara, California. From the beginning, ESNSB understood that this work fit into a broader context of building democratic education and grassroots participation in our community. At the same time, ESNSB needed to work as a grassroots organization with the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) and the school board to achieve our immediate goal.
Several significant questions arise from our organizing. While it matters that activists work with institutional stakeholders to implement new policies, what changes when grassroots organizers are part of the process? How do activists work with institutions while countering the institutions’ tendency to absorb or co-opt their efforts? How does a multigenerational organization, such as ESNSB, work to develop youth leadership as well as to create structures that offset the tendency of adults to take charge and to take over? One partial response is that ESNSB operated on a model of collective leadership. But what is collective leadership? How might it work in practice? What is the relationship between models of organizing and democratic education? By addressing questions such as these, this article seeks to illuminate aspects of grassroots organizing that can help to build social movements for (and beyond) ethnic studies
We Still Want a Lifelong Commitment, Not Just Sweet Words: Asserting an Indigenous Vision for Education
No full textIn this article, I engage in storytelling as an act of resistance and an act of love, following the ways that Linda Tuhiwai Smith discusses storytelling as an Indigenous research project and methodology. The stories I share in this article are about on-the-ground examples of decolonizing education within colleges and universities, across multiple institutional settings and geographic locations. In these stories I portray certain administrators as trickster figures, and while I do not use actual names of administrators, their names could easily be researched. Their individual identities, however, are not the point. As critical scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson have taught us, the problem of whiteness encapsulated in the white possessive has to do with systems of historical and ongoing dispossession of aggrieved communities