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Time Magazine
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice
Larcenia Floyd died in 2018, two years before George. But when her son was being asphyxiated to death by Derek Chauvin, he screamed for her. It was the 'Mama!' heard around the world, an anguished incantation that called millions into the streets to protest. That wail of loss—the sound of a ripped-apart parent and child—to the cold hands of premature death has been a commonplace of Black American life throughout history. Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described it this way: 'Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.' Poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks put the same thought in these terms: 'we jazz June/we die soon,' she wrote in her seminal poem 'We Real Cool.' In 2010, fine artist Titus Kaphar completed the painting Father and Son. It depicts scholar W.E.B. DuBois—arguably the greatest thinker of the 20th century—with a cutout where his son might have been, lying across his lap. Kaphar's piece is a contemporary pieta, one not based in the story of Mary cradling the body of Jesus after his descent from the cross, but instead, one from Black history. In DuBois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, he included the autobiographical essay 'Of the Passing of the First Born' about the death of his toddler son Burghardt, a death that might have been avoided had the diphtheria vaccine been made available to Black people in Atlanta where DuBois was working as a professor at Atlanta University. DuBois carried that grief with him as he wrote essays, fiction, and pageants, as he edited The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, as he rose and fell as a leader when the nation and many of his peers grew to consider him too strident, too far left, too unflinching. Kaphar's stirring portrait was completed 107 years after Souls and 47 years after DuBois' death. It followed, but it also foretold. Father and Son preceded what we think of as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter era by three years, which we tend to date to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in 2013. Kaphar continued to paint portraits of parents without children in the second decade of this century as we saw the parade of sonless mothers who came to be known as 'Mothers of the Movement,' a chilling redux of images of the 1960s. These repetitions reveal a harrowing truth. Such a portrait is timeless as long as racial inequality far too frequently sinks life and chances of life in this country. And despite the shrill denials heard in anti-DEI and anti-'woke' platforms, the evidence is clear: Racial inequality is as it ever was in the United States. Art is a particularly powerful tool in this moment because it can offer more than just points for debate. Art can engage not just the intellect, but the soul, hence the aptly titled DuBois classic. It resonates with our greatest hopes and deepest frustrations. Above all, it buoys the spirit, enabling us to continue to press for a better future, but also to imagine what that future might be by refusing the idea that our bodies are fated for abuse and destruction. I have often attested to the beauty of raising Black children because I believe we deserve to feel something more than the fear of raising children in a dangerous and unequal world. I want to affirm that joy keeps us going when terror feels overwhelming using my art—writing—and my intellect as the vehicle for truth. But, having lived through the mass death of COVID-19 and now living in the age of backlash against everything that made my life possible as a Black woman professor, it is undeniable that notwithstanding the multimillion-strong season of protest in honor of George Floyd's life, we aren't on more solid ground. In fact, we have been pushed off land and find ourselves treading water. Ours is a living inside a cascade of crises that have compounded over the past 15, 10, five years, despite the moments of respite and promises of transformation. We have marched and sung. We have voted, protested, and pleaded. And yet, suffering persists, the water deepens. It makes you wanna holler a 'mama' of your own. (And perhaps you heard the echo of Marvin Gaye's 1971 track 'Inner City Blues.') It is no wonder, then, that in African American culture, art has flourished in the worst of times. In 1900, for instance, three years before DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, civil rights leader and poet James Weldon Johnson and musician J. Rosamund Johnson composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'—the song we now know as the Black National Anthem. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, 500 Black schoolchildren in Florida first sang it to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The song became incredibly popular with Black Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. It resonated because it told the story of Black Americans' struggle in epic terms, detailing endurance and fostering hope and collective responsibility. In 1926, when Carter G. Woodson formally declared 'Negro History Week' in February (a ritual that would grow to become Black History Month in the 1970s), the song became an integral part of that annual ritual celebrated in school, religious, and civic life. The effect of singing that anthem together deepened the faith of students and their communities in the possibility of justice and strengthened the conviction that each one had a hand in transformation. A noble inheritance demanded as much. 1926 was also the year in which DuBois published the article 'Criteria of Negro Art' in which he famously said 'all Art is propaganda' speaking directly to Black American artists. The message was that artists had a hand in the struggle for human and civil rights, and therefore, should put their gifts in service to that duty. Though I would not be as heavy-handed as DuBois—I don't believe all art must be propaganda—it is certainly clear to me that art (visual art, music, literature, and dance) is essential for freedom dreaming. This is no less true in 2025 than it was in 2020, 1926, or 1903. Still, like many I suspect, I wonder if my words work—if my art matters in these moments of struggle. I need only look to others to be reminded. Mario Moore's painting Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd hangs on my wall. In it, a Black woman in a purple embroidered robe faces the water. The title is powerful. Mary Ann Shadd was an abolitionist, a suffrage activist, the first Black woman publisher in North America and the second Black American woman to graduate from law school. Henry Bibb was born into slavery, escaped, and made his way to freedom through Detroit (Moore's hometown) to reach Canada. After emancipation, he would write an important abolitionist narrative. The woman in Moore's painting gazes at the Detroit River. In the antebellum era, crossing that watery border was a near-certain passage to freedom. The painting is for me, and I think for many who see it when it circulates in museums or on computer screens, a reminder of the once treacherous and even deadly pathways to freedom. Even more, it begs us to seek inspiration from those who traveled them as we face treachery today. I learned this implicitly in my own life course, too. I frequently say that as a writer I haunt the past. By that I mean I gaze into it to find the content through which we might craft our moral imaginations today. So many of the neglected and abused of generations past have a great deal to teach us. And if we can recognize the full ugliness in our past, we might be better at creating beauty in its stead for the future. It wasn't only in my studies that I learned this, but also in my encounters with art. Like so much of Generation X, I grew up on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life double album. His song 'Love's in Need of Love Today' was a particularly potent teacher. It gave credence to the ever-present terror that existed in a world filled to the brim with disasters. And yet, it also issued a belief that a disposition toward love—a discipline of hope, to borrow words from abolitionist Mariame Kaba—makes the difference. Recently, I have spent a lot of time listening to Milton + Esperanza, an album pairing octogenarian Brazilian jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist Milton Nascimiento and American bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding. Nascimiento has influenced generations of musicians across the globe. spalding is a contemporary phenom. Watching their NPR Tiny Desk Concert, I was as moved by the lush, exhilarating music as I was by their obvious deep friendship and love across generations. From Nascimiento to spalding there is inheritance, from spalding to Nascimiento there is homage. They are, like me, both descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and generations turned from centuries of racial violence and injustice. And through the current hysteria-inducing political chaos that engulfs us, I reach for the space they create, one where love and care are apparent. It is a salve and also a reminder of who we are and what we come from. It is hard to avoid cynicism, especially now. Especially with so much behind us and possibly even more before us. To bolster ourselves, many of us who do creative and intellectual work have been holding fast to a quote from Toni Morrison. It seems to be in constant circulation on social media platforms: '…This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!' What too often is left out in the meme-ing, however, is that Morrison attributed those words to a friend of hers. This friend was responding to Morrison's depression about national politics in 2004. That friend's words reminded Morrison of the dangerous conditions in which so much great art has been made. Morrison concluded the essay she wrote for the Nation that described this interaction by saying, 'I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.' Indeed, she kept creating until her final days, like DuBois, through war and injustice and even after the passing of her second-born son, Slade. Morrison's remarkable courage is a reminder that the value of art in these times is much greater than how it might inspire people to action alone. It exists in art's power to allow us to find meaning notwithstanding mourning, to imagine our way out of the morass of our present moment or personal challenges, and to keep us living rather than frozen in fear and anguish. Take, for example, the Blues—that foundational American music born on plantations and in penitentiaries—and how it insisted upon the full humanity of Black people in the harshest of conditions. Indeed, the Blues tradition might explain why George Floyd himself turned to one of Blues' musical descendants, hip-hop, when he was trying to turn his life around, an effort that ultimately brought him to Minneapolis, where he was killed. Art does not forestall injustice. It does not shape policy or create law. It is not the same work as political organizing or protest. But it is indispensable. One need only to look at the joy of line dancing on social media and the majesty of Mardi Gras krewes in New Orleans for current examples. Each season we find new iterations of old habits, ones that refresh culture but also keep tradition alive. That combination allows us to more deeply contemplate our condition— to meditate on that which would be right and good. Most of all, it helps us find and nourish love. Love is indeed in need of love today. For our children. For all of us. Over 20 years ago, when I first embarked on parenthood, I thought of all the music, all the dancing, all the literature, all the museum exhibitions, all of the folk wisdom, the seeds of folklore, and the creative language that I had to offer my children from my tradition. My heart was full with gifts. Despite the inevitability of racism, they were born to an abundant inheritance that I insisted upon affirming at every turn. That is what I was given, that is what I gave, that is what we must continue to give, even as our hearts are broken. Again. There are and will be more empty-armed parents and children. In my own family, we've embraced the empty-armed and felt empty-armed in the past two years with the deaths of two of my cousins who are survived by parents and children. I believe that, albeit indirectly, losing them, both men under age 60, is a legacy of the persistent seeping force of racial injustice, snaking like smoke through our lives. The question is not whether we will grieve (we are, mightily) but whether we will find the means to survive the grief and live to fight the injustice. Art is a way.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
Man representing the Freedman's Bureau stands between armed groups of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans, 1868. Credit - A.R. Waud—Library of Congress There is a curious passage in W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, that tries to capture the zeitgeist of those closing decades of the 19th century that ended Reconstruction and gave birth to Jim Crow. Reflecting on the epochal defeat of our country's post-Civil War experiment in Black emancipation and multiracial democracy, Du Bois characterizes the era as 'the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars.' I have taught Souls every year of my career as a professor of African American Studies. Still, I confess I never truly grasped the enduring significance of Du Bois' insistence on this peculiar description. Reading it amidst our era's rampant recriminations against 'identity politics,' 'diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),' and 'wokeness,' as well as the backlash against 'Black Lives Matter' and police reform, it is difficult to avoid the force of Du Bois' insight: Like with the demise of Reconstruction, the struggle over shame is key to understanding the reactionary politics that we see today in the post-BLM era. The rhetoric of racial reaction, to paraphrase economist Albert O. Hirschman, has successfully spread this debilitating emotion. In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020, for instance, support for Black Lives Matter soared to historic heights in polling and protest participation. Shortly thereafter, according to leading Pew Research Center surveys, public support—especially among white Americans and Republicans—fell precipitously as narratives and media coverage from the right reframed the movement. Early portrayals often treated antiracist activism as a disruptive but long overdue 'reckoning' with how racial stigma promotes police impunity or makes the citizenry tolerate enduring, intergenerational injustices like inner-city poverty. Now that the rhetoric of reaction is ascendent, leading narratives dramatize the movement as divisive, dangerous, and corrupt. Looming over this data is the ubiquitous gender gap in American politics. While women have historically been, especially during the Reconstruction era, advocates and underappreciated drivers of change and support, growing gender divisions structure public opinion. A March 2025 NBC News poll reports that among women ages 18 to 49, 67% say DEI programs should continue, while only 40% of men in the age bracket say the same. We are living through another of these 'psychological moments'—a time when much of the nation is recoiling in unwarranted shame or even resentment at the moral obligation to repair, remember, and reimagine. What once felt like a shared reckoning has, for many, become a source of fatigue or suspicion—a sobering reminder of how quickly a moral awakening can be reframed as a shameful mistake. Yet, this shame is not simply a private emotion. It is the result of a political strategy, one cultivated to sap the confidence and conviction of those who dared to be outraged about racial injustice, or thought that disruption and solidarity could overcome paralysis and fear. It is akin to the shame that followed Reconstruction, when the project of multiracial democracy was denounced as naïve, corrupt, and unnatural—not simply because it had failed on its own terms, but because of who was involved and what it threatened to upend. To understand our own moment's rhetoric of race politics, we must trace an ignoble inheritance passed down from the enemies of Reconstruction to the present. These so-called 'Redeemers,' as white conservative Democrats anointed their movement in the postbellum era, cast themselves as gallant saviors of a fallen South, determined to rescue their region from the sinful empowerment of formerly enslaved people, federal intervention, and the democratic possibilities unleashed by Reconstruction. With a deep investment in racial hierarchy and a romanticized vision of the antebellum order, they cloaked their counter-revolution in the language of salvation, insisting they were 'redeeming' their states from what they framed as the chaos, corruption, and illegitimate imposition of 'Negro rule.' In truth, the Redeemers waged a campaign of violent reassertion indifferent to injustice—past or present. Theirs was a restorationist project carried by terroristic violence, voter suppression and government usurpation, and the deliberate dismantling of government institutions like the Freedmen's Bureau and public schools. 'Redemption' became a euphemism for the suffocation of multiracial democracy in its infancy. Their rhetoric provided a rough draft for what Du Bois would later call 'the propaganda of history': the collective distortion of the past in textbooks, scholarship, popular culture, and memorials into a 'convenient fairy tale.' There are three key elements of the Redemptionist reaction that especially resonate in the present. First and foremost, the rhetoric of their movement insisted that racial equality is an inherently foolish and futile pursuit due to the intractable incompetence and inferiority of people of African descent wherever they are found on the globe. In an 1867 address to Congress, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that 'Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people…wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.' Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, in the majority opinion for Williams v. Mississippi, an 1898 ruling that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination claims to the explicit text of law, declared that the Negro race 'by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies,' has 'acquired or accentuated' certain habits, temperaments, and characteristics that mark them separate from whites in their carelessness, dishonesty, docility, and lack of 'forethought.' Popularly, the banner of Black incompetence was carried by demeaning depictions in material and theatrical culture, as well as in D.W. Griffith's racist epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Reconstruction-era Black legislators as 'comically' idiotic, necessitating the violent restoration of white rule. This rhetoric is, unfortunately, resonant with today's attacks on 'DEI,' with critics insisting that efforts to recruit, incorporate, and promote Black talent in higher education, the military, and in many workplaces amount to the dangerous promotion of incompetence. President Donald Trump, for example, immediately and falsely blamed a horrific Washington, D.C. plane crash on DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration, despite no supporting evidence and overwhelming testimony to the contrary from aviation officials. Meanwhile, figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made attacking and dismantling DEI a large part of their public persona, while ignoring legitimate concerns about their unprecedented lack of qualifications for their own roles. High-profile Black leaders like former Harvard president Claudine Gay or former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., have been targeted for defamation and harassment to drive them out of their positions, similarly to Black elected officials and business leaders in the Reconstruction era. The consequence of these campaigns is a revival, from the highest offices of the land, of the Redemptionist lie that common sense should treat Black people as presumptively unfit for positions of authority or public trust. Those who believe otherwise, then, are caricatured as foolish and sentimental. These arguments frequently draw their legitimacy from pseudoscientific racism and the related idea of the backwardness of African diasporic peoples—and expand much further than politics. From Silicon Valley to the media landscape, people in positions of power are reintroducing theories of racial hierarchy under the guise of defending 'free inquiry' or 'realism.' As the Scientific American and The Guardian have documented, a network of actors is actively working to launder eugenics-era thought into legitimacy, cloaked in appeals to genetic science, meritocracy, and market rationality. From Tucker Carlson's monologues, to Elon Musk's offhand remarks about intelligence and heredity, to the administration's executive order against teaching the social construction of 'race,' a new generation of elites is reanimating the old canard that racial inequality is not the legacy of injustice but the reflection of the fundamental inequality of natural 'racial' kinds. Second, we are encouraged to feel shame because of the perversity of consequences. Whatever the good intentions of the last decade or so of racial progressivism, we are told, we have only exacerbated crime, deepened distrust, and stood in the way of economic rationality. Take, for example, the so-called 'Ferguson Effect,' the notion that protests against police brutality demoralize police and exacerbate crime. Just as the reactionary historiography of Reconstruction, led by William Dunning, cast Reconstruction as a misguided, radical experiment in Black suffrage and governance, the Ferguson effect casts protest movements like Black Lives Matter as accelerants of violence and civic decay. Both assert a kind of intuitive 'common sense' that masks deep ideological anxieties. The Dunning historians appealed to the logic of natural racial hierarchy, while proponents of the Ferguson effect draw on a racialized sense of law and order where public safety is presumed to hang precariously on police exercising sweeping authority and compelling broad deference and admiration. In both cases, dissenting scholars have had to work uphill to replace myth with measurement. As social scientists like David Pyrooz and Richard Rosenfeld have shown, the Ferguson effect—when tested across dozens of major cities—fails to reveal a coherent national trend. Rigorous studies consistently find that changes in policing behavior, while real in some places, did not drive national crime patterns, and where proactive policing declined, crime often did not rise at all. Importantly, the best accounts have not only rejected the broad claims of de-policing as a driver of crime but have also emphasized the dangers of clinging to these narratives. The fact that cities like Boston and Baltimore are currently experiencing record homicide declines undercut the notion of a generalized crime wave and affirm something protestors proclaimed: that differences in police approaches matter immensely. Another pillar of Redemptionist rhetoric is the feminization of progressive politics. From Reconstruction to the present, reactionary voices have sometimes attempted to discredit movements for racial justice by portraying their advocates—especially white women—as naïve, sentimental, meddling, and destabilizing. During the postbellum years, white female abolitionists and teachers working with freedpeople were mocked as 'nigger schoolmarms,' accused of spreading delusion and disorder, and often singled out in violent retributions. These women played a vital role in founding schools, advocating suffrage, and supporting Black citizenship, but were often cast by their critics as insubordinate, hysterical, or morally corrupting. This gendered stigma echoed through how Reconstruction itself was characterized—less a serious project of transitional justice and constitutional refounding than a crusade driven by feminine sentimentality run amok. As recent historians have shown, many white women brought genuine moral and pedagogical commitments to the work of abolition and Reconstruction, but navigated a public discourse that portrayed their efforts as irrational and disruptive. Their work, particularly in the South, became one of the earliest battlegrounds where political femininity was equated with moral overreach, excess, and social breakdown. This trope has only persisted today as figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative intellectuals have revived a strikingly similar line of attack. Writing in City Journal, National Post, and across the digital right, they framed 'wokeness' and progressive racial discourse as symptoms of what they call the 'feminization of American culture.' The rise of DEI and new norms around pedagogy, student activism, and campus protest culture is attributed to a dangerous excess of 'feminine' traits—emotionality, overprotection, inclusivity, and moralistic judgment. This narrative not only ridicules the intellectual and political work of women but also seeks to cast entire movements for justice as self-indulgent and unserious. It is an old trick: to attribute the presence of injustice not to the powerful who perpetuate it, but to the women and marginalized people who criticize it. What makes this rhetoric particularly potent is that it insists on old gender hierarchies as the norm. To understand this history is not merely to lament its repetition, but to arm ourselves with clarity. The reemergence of scientific racism, the delegitimization of Black leadership and achievement, the panic over DEI and protest, the feminization of justice—are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a coherent tradition of backlash, one that knows how to speak the language of realism and reform while advancing the cause of domination. The task, then, is not simply to refute the lies with better data, though that matters. It is to refuse the shame that seeks to make us forget what we glimpsed, however briefly, in the streets in 2020 and beyond: the possibility that this country might confront how far it is from the scale and scope of its promises, and seize upon that reckoning to remake itself. We will either find a way to remember that aspiration without apology. Or, we will watch another moment where the tentative promise of reconstruction curdles and congeals into something genuinely worthy of our collective shame. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book is Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement This project was supported by funding from the Center for Policing Equity. Contact us at letters@
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
ASU founder's great niece offers keynote address during Founder's Day ceremony
ALBANY – Sitting on a brick retaining wall around a tree on Albany State University's lower campus area, athletic trainer Michael Moore reflected on the three gifts he has been blessed with at his alma mater: his education, standard of living and 'my beautiful wife of 34 years.' Moore was among the audience that attended the annual convocation that highlights the four days of Founder's Day activities at the institution, which included a Friday program at the Billy C. Black Auditorium, followed by the laying of wreaths at the graves of founder Joseph Winthrop Holley and former President William H. Dennis. 'I always come back for Founder's Day,' the 1984 graduate, former basketball coach and Millidgeville native said. 'It represents a past to cherish and a future to fulfil.' Prior to the ceremony, Holley's great-niece, Nikeya Taylor reflected on her family's involvement in the origins of the Albany Bible and Manual Institution in 1903. Her great-uncle, one of a large family whose parents were freed slaves in North Carolina, traveled to Albany to start the college. Inspired by W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote about Albany in his book 'The Souls of Black Folk,' Holly was joined by some of his siblings. 'When we were young, we were told one of our relatives built a college in a small town in Georgia,' Taylor said. 'I pictured one old shack that was long gone.' Later she learned about the history and became familiar with how the college dedicated to Bible studies and training teachers had become an important educational institution that thrived. Making the trek to Albany to 'strike a blow against ignorance,' Holley succeeded, she said. 'Today, we find ourselves under an attack on the foundations of our very democracy,' Taylor said. 'We're seeing attempts to roll back civil rights … all in an attempt to divide us. All of you sitting here right now are our next business leaders, professors, politicians and activists. Will we take action? Will we strike a blow to the ignorance?' Reflecting on the theme for 2025 — 'From Foundations to Frontiers: 122 Years of Progress and Promise' — Taylor said it is fitting for the times. 'This year's theme reminds us that while the founder laid the foundation, we are responsible for shaping the future,' she said. 'When you graduate, please do not forget where you came from. 'Return and invest in this institution and this community. This will ensure future generations have what you had. Make sure that you give back. Help continue the community Dr. Holley worked for. Let us promise to keep strong, to keep pushing barriers, because if not us, who will?' In learning her great-uncle's role as a leader, Taylor, who serves as president of the Jacksonville Chapter of the NETwork BICP (Black Integrated Communications Professionals) through which she leads initiatives in mentorship, professional development and service, said that she learned to be a leader herself. 'It is not about what we've achieved, it is about what's possible,' she said. 'I have learned it is important to keep our history alive.' Each year, ASU's Founder's Day programs bring alumni back to the school. Among those returning on Friday was Anne Brown of Atlanta. 'I come back every year for Founder's Day, for Homecoming, the Classic (football game) in Columbus,' Brown said. 'It's beautiful. I come back every year just to support the school.'
