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Commonwealth Matters
Get PDF“COMMONWEALTH Matters” provides an overview of the articles in issue 19:2, information about subscribing to the journal, and an announcement of the 2018 publication of State of the Commonwealth: Annual Review of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy
Book Reviews
Get PDFThis section includes two book reviews: The first is Jack Treadway’s review of David Daley’s Ratf**cked: The True Story behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. The second is Andreea Maierean’s review of Walter M. Brasch’s Fracking America: Sacrificing Health and the Environment for Short-Term Economic Benefit
Making Black Lives Matter: Conjuring and Creative Place-Making in an Age of Austerity
No full textIn Houston’s Third Ward and Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, Black artists and activists and their allies combine conjuring and creative place-making in projects that fuse economic development with deepened social cohesion. Like the Black Lives Matter movement, Project Row Houses in Houston and the Rebuild Foundation’s Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago respond to the urgent needs of aggrieved communities in an era of austerity. They engage in practices, processes, and productions that hone and refine individual and collective capacities for finding value in undervalued places and, by extension, in undervalued people. They promote deliberative talk and face-to-face decision-making about the problems that Black people face. They set in motion dynamics that teach people to find something left to love in themselves and others in a society that can often make everyone feel unlovable. They envision and enact plans for reconstituting society and social relations from the bottom up on the basis of values directly antithetical to the dominant logics of racialized capitalism
Apology
No full textWhat happens when a government apologizes, and what does it mean for a government to apologize for violence, abuse, and oppression? Apart from concerns about sincerity, who has the power to apologize, who crafts the exact wording, who is commiserating, and who stands to gain or lose? Are these apologies meant to rearticulate a fractured national public around emergent mass feeling, producing a quasi-assimilationist frame in which everyone will presumably think and feel the same way about the past and inhabit a reconciliatory mood? To what extent does this genre of apology operate as a technology of rule that further strengthens the power and legitimacy of national elites or undermines the capacity of victimized, marginalized, or aggrieved populations to act and feel unapologetically demanding, mournful, or angry? Do these apologies create clean slates, make for more perfect unions, and recast perpetrators or privileged national subjects as innocent or forgiven? Is white guilt a mobilizing force for social justice or a kind of wallowing? Do these apologies perhaps benefit white people by “restructuring” a “sense of national subjectivity,” as scholars have argued for Australia’s annual apologies for the institutionalized mistreatment of indigenous people, where “sorry people” who feel a “bad conscience” and “shame” acquire, as a result of the apology, “a lifeline through which a legitimate sense of belonging in the nation may be restituted”
Robert Coleman-Senghor, 1940–2011
No full textRobert Coleman-Senghor, Bob, was an intellectual giant. A maverick. An iconoclast. This was, in fact, not fully acknowledged—or respected—until after his death. Bob lived and breathed the life of the mind, every day. He loved education. He loved the university. He loved attaining and exchanging knowledge. He loved demonstrating his facility to cross fields and disciplines. There wasn’t a reference, an allusion, a classic or contemporary literary text, or a theory that you could ask him about with which he was not conversant. Yet during his lifetime, as so many faculty of color have experienced, the university, a place he loved to occupy, did not treat Bob kindly. Bob felt and experienced deeply his marginalization as a minoritized subject dogged by the university’s contradictions. Nonetheless, he was widely known for mastering these dictates of Western culture and society and using his mastery to confront and expose the university’s masked hegemony and circumscribed democracy. Bob insisted on making space for himself and other minoritized university subjects. He never backed down. He never wavered. He endured inside what Fred Moten describes as a space “always in the break, always the supplement of the general intellect and its source.
The Great Divide: Public Perceptions of Shale Gas Extraction and Hydraulic Fracturing in Pennsylvania and New York
Get PDFThis study compares public perceptions of shale gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing in two of the most populous states with significant shale gas reserves but with vastly different approaches to developing this resource. Drawing on data from a comparative survey administered to two statewide samples in Pennsylvania (n = 411) and New York (n = 404), the study examines the correlates of support for hydraulic fracturing, as well as general levels of public awareness, and perceptions of effects of hydraulic fracturing within the Marcellus shale play. Though the level of awareness of the fracking issue among residents of Pennsylvania and New York is found to be similarly high, levels of support for fracking differ, mirroring distinctive policy approaches found in these neighboring states. The correlates of support for fracking include being Republican, having a conservative ideology, and being male. The study also finds that residents of New York are more aware of fracking policy and debate in Pennsylvania than vice versa, with many New York residents perceiving negative effects on their home state as a result of fracking in neighboring Pennsylvania. This asymmetric level of awareness and concern raises new questions on the role of cross-border perceptions in shaping opinion toward hydraulic fracturing in adjacent states
The Black Church: A Tree with Many Branches
No full text“The Black Church” is a popular phrase, often uttered with little consideration of the historical dissonances that make up Black Christianity. Despite the ways Black Christianity has shared in the common aim of dignity, humanity, and freedom asserted throughout the broader history of Black religion, there has never been one monolithic Black Church. However, when viewed as a “tree with many branches,” to borrow Christopher Small’s terminology for describing the tradition of Black music making, the Black Church represents a tradition with multiple performance practices and politics that have changed throughout history. Today, many young Black activists have turned to the Black church for political support only to find most clergy unwilling to make the kind of bold gestures of resistance seen in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Also, younger Black activists have found the current church particularly hostile toward queer identities. The church they face, however, is not the sum total of the Black Church as a tradition. This essay is a mediation in and meditation on the Black Church’s interaction with contemporary Black activism and the tradition of Black working-class church activism as a “usable past,” a spiritual resource for the current crossroads in Black citizenship. I speak of Black working-class churches as a descriptive frame rather than in the exclusively demographic sense. Black working-class communities brought Black labor activism into churches, but further investigation is needed to adequately describe the membership of congregations discussed here. As an alternative to traditional Black Church historiography, viewing some of the connections among class, culture, and queerness can reveal how Black spirituality thrives beyond the view of the church from the top down, but it also demonstrates how and why this version of the Black church had to be sacrificed in the onslaught of neoliberalism
“A Relatively New Discovery in the Modern West”: #BlackLivesMatter and the Evolution of Black Humanism
No full textPrompted by the current debate and cognitive dissonance surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter protest campaign’s desired goals of securing freedom, justice, equality, and human dignity for people of African descent in the United States, this article addresses this social movement as an extension of Black humanism. This claim is a direct result of the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s sui generis origin and evolution beyond any identifiable Black religious institution. Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us that “insisting that we are human and productive members of [American] society has been a first principle of Black abolitionist politics since at least the eighteenth century.” Thus it is important to recognize the contemporary significance of #BlackLivesMatter by placing it within a broader historical context that resonates with many tenets of the traditional Black freedom struggle yet also charts future directions, including nontheistic thought and praxis such as atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and other expressions of unbelief as part of the broader African American experience. In 2009, Pew Research Center data on religious pluralism in the United States revealed that more than 12 percent of African Americans nationwide readily self-identified as being unaffiliated with any particular religion. This group of Black nonbelievers constitutes the third largest cohort within African American religious life—a major development in the history of African American faith and culture that ought to be more fully explored and explained. Scholars have discussed the origins and varied nature of Black humanism at considerable length; this article builds upon that existing research by examining the origins and nature of Black humanism within the history of the Black freedom struggle
When César Chávez and Dolores Huerta Came to Napa
No full textThis story is seemingly about César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and an event in the Napa Valley. The event involved the unveiling of two statues commemorating the historic presence of these Chicana/o freedom fighters in the valley. Yet as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, in historical accounts, there is always a story within a story. This essay aims to examine the layered narratives that surrounded this event and the purposes served by this particular commemoration. It offers a broader critique of how historical commemorations can compartmentalize the past and constrict the present, and how selective celebration of a sanitized version of historical social justice struggles can protect and perpetuate injustice in the present
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No full textOn November 5, 2016, hundreds of people convened at the historical landmark of Chicano Park in Barrio Logan, San Diego, to celebrate the life of one of the community’s most revered elders, Ramón “Chunky” Moroyoqui Sánchez. Nuestro querido maestro falleció el día 28 de octubre de 2016. Sánchez, endearingly known as Chunky, was synonymous with Barrio Logan, Chicano Park, Chicano/a music, and San Diego in general. In this city, an auditorium is named in his honor. His image is incorporated in murals. The Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash developed a vignette about Chunky, and upon his passing the San Diego Chargers’ website featured him in a blog post that included a photo of him with players and cheerleaders. Chunky was also well known beyond the Imperial Valley. The music of Los Alacranes Mojados (the group he started with his brother, Ricardo Sánchez) continues to be embraced in Mexicano/a and Chicano/a communities throughout California and the Southwest. The news of Sánchez’s passing reverberated throughout California like the violent ripples of a pond into which a boulder has been dropped. Ese vato will be missed