Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Slavery, United States, Virginia, Women on 2018-02-22 05:03Z by Steven

Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

Ballantine Books
2018-01-30
448 pages
6.3 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1101886243
Paperback ISBN: 978-0525524380

Catherine Kerrison, Associate Professor of History
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America

Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. In Jefferson’s Daughters, Catherine Kerrison, a scholar of early American and women’s history, recounts the remarkable journey of these three women—and how their struggle to define themselves reflects both the possibilities and the limitations that resulted from the American Revolution.

Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris—a hothouse of intellectual ferment whose celebrated salonnières are vividly brought to life in Kerrison’s narrative. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America.

Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery—apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future.

For this groundbreaking triple biography, Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters when they were in their teens, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. She has interviewed Hemings family descendants (and, with their cooperation, initiated DNA testing) and searched for descendants of Harriet Hemings.

The eventful lives of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters provide a unique vantage point from which to examine the complicated patrimony of the American Revolution itself. The richly interwoven story of these three strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies sheds new light on the ongoing movement toward human rights in America—and on the personal and political legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Lupita Nyong’o To Star In ‘Born A Crime’ Based On Trevor Noah’s Memoir

Posted in Africa, Articles, Arts, Autobiography, Media Archive, South Africa on 2018-02-22 04:47Z by Steven

Lupita Nyong’o To Star In ‘Born A Crime’ Based On Trevor Noah’s Memoir

Deadline Hollywood
2018-02-21

Amanda N’Duka


REX/Shutterstock

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, currently starring as Nakia in Disney/Marvel’s record-smashing, watershed hit Black Panther, has signed on to star in Born a Crime, the film adaptation of The Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s bestselling debut autobiography Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood.

Nyong’o will play Noah’s mom, Patricia, who served as an important figure to her son in his formative years. She was shot in the head by his stepfather while returning from a church service in 2009, but survived.

Noah is producing the project through his Ark Angel Productions alongside Norman Aladjem, Derek Van Pelt and Sanaz Yamin of Mainstay Entertainment, and Nyong’o…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Combating the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2018-02-22 02:28Z by Steven

Combating the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil

Primary Source: The Indiana University Undergraduate Journal of History
Volume IV: Issue I, Fall 2013
Page 17-22

Rebecca Pattillo

While Brazil and the United States share a history of slavery, the changes to race relations in Brazil following emancipation differ greatly from the African American experience in the United States. The United States continuously enacted discriminatory laws against people of color such as Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. From this emerged a society with government-institutionalized racism. In contrast, Brazil did not experience the same type of institutionalized racism and did not have overtly racist discriminatory laws. This is not to say that Afro-Brazilians did not struggle for social and racial equality following emancipation; rather, Brazil saw substantial differences in their racial social hierarchy due to their unique reasons for emancipation. Out of this emerged the opinion that racial prejudice and stratification existed more along the lines of wealth and class as opposed to the color of one’s skin. Sociologist Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães wrote in his essay “The Misadventures of Nonracialism in Brazil” that “in Brazil racism developed in a different way, present in social practice – a racism of attitudes – but unrecognized by the legal system and denied by the  nonracialist discourse of nationality.”1 Hence, a myth of racial democracy and inclusion emerged regarding Afro-Brazilians. Namely, this myth propagates that racism and inequality were not as prevalent in Brazil as they were in the United States and that blacks experienced little to no racial oppression…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,

Learning to Transgress: Law 10.639 and Teacher-Training Classrooms in São Paulo, Brazil

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Politics/Public Policy on 2018-02-22 02:01Z by Steven

Learning to Transgress: Law 10.639 and Teacher-Training Classrooms in São Paulo, Brazil

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 24, Issue 1, April 2016
Pages 70–79
DOI: 10.1111/traa.12058

Reighan Gillam, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

Signed in 2003, Law 10.639 makes teaching Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in primary school lessons. Training programs to educate teachers on this material have proliferated in the state of São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. This paper illuminates non-elite Brazilians’ lived, personal engagements with ideas of racial inequality by way of these training programs. Participants in these classrooms did not express direct rejection or acceptance of these ideas but rather relied on personal experiences to negotiate their conceptions of racial identity and racial inequality that deviate from traditional ideas of racial democracy. As Brazil takes further steps to consider race when facilitating access to resources and confronting racial inequality directly, it is imperative that the everyday iterations of this shift are understood.

As part of a series of training sessions1 to instruct teachers on how to integrate Afro-Brazilian history and culture into their curricula, trainer Flávia Gomes2 screened clips from the film Everyone’s Heroes (Heróis de Todo Mundo). This movie features prominent Afro-Brazilians and explains their role in national history. Flávia told the teachers that they could show this movie in their classrooms, or they could integrate the information from the movie into their lessons. Five female educators and I sat at our desks and quietly watched the clips that briefly recounted the lives and accomplishments of figures like Auta da Souza, an Afro-Brazilian writer, and Milton Santos, an Afro-Brazilian geographer. After showing the video, Flávia said a few words: “Violence is to whiten Black heroes. This silences the place of Blackness in the classroom. Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto. There is no way to silence this. (Não da para silenciar).” One of the participants raised her hand; Flávia called on her. She was a principal at an elementary school and participating in these classes to oversee the curricular changes at her school. Before saying anything, she began to sob, taking the entire class by surprise. “I feel so troubled because I didn’t know these people had been left out. I have heard of them but didn’t know they were Black. I liked reading the poems of Auta da Souza, but I always pictured her as White. The lack of information that we have…” Her comments trailed off as she wiped her tears. This response occurred toward the end of class, leaving Flávia with little time to initiate a conversation. Instead, she concluded class by adding a few words about using this video to educate children about the people presented in the movie before dismissing everyone for the day.

This scene played out in a teacher-training program in its first year in Flor do Campo, Brazil, in the state of São Paulo. These teacher-training programs resulted from the passage of Law 10.639, which made Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory material for all Brazilian public primary schools. Since its passage, teacher-training programs have proliferated throughout the country to provide teachers with classroom material about Afro-Brazilian history and culture to satisfy the legal mandate of Law 10.639. The teacher-training classrooms in which I participated were dynamic spaces of conversation, interaction, and engagement where Brazilians, like the principal above, could encounter new ways of thinking about race2 that run contrary to the common belief that racism cannot naturally exist in a mixed-race society. This article aims to examine changing understandings of race in Brazil, not as it transforms larger social and political structures, but as it is continuously reframed on the micro-social or everyday level. I argue that the critical practice of learning about and responding to subjugated knowledge and alternative experiences have the potential to transgress boundaries of belonging and recognition of racial difference in Brazil.

This article takes as a point of departure the issue of the personal in an era of changing conceptions of Brazilian race relations. This shift involves not only the macro changes of law and policy but also the personal, lived, everyday interactions of particular people as well. It uses the personal anecdotes, stories, and conversations of Brazilians offered during teacher-training sessions to examine how social change is a personal matter and how it plays out within everyday interactions. The “personal” broadly references the lived experiences of human beings. In several instances, the personal becomes the prism through which people perceive or react to macro-structural events and changing environments. I suggest that many Brazilians offer more personal responses to the shift from racial democracy based on their local and particular experiences as a way to account for the changes they are confronting in classroom education. While I would not say that these conversations were always successful at producing a shared understanding of the ways in which inequality can be tracked along racial lines, these teacher-training classrooms became sites and spaces of struggle over the limits and meanings of racial democracy and racial recognition, informed by the participants’ personal experiences of race that they frequently voiced….

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

February 20, 2018 – Lacey Schwartz & Mat Johnson

Posted in Census/Demographics, Interviews, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2018-02-22 01:20Z by Steven

February 20, 2018 – Lacey Schwartz & Mat Johnson

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper
Comedy Central
2018-02-20

Jordan Klepper, Host

Jordan offers advice to civic-minded teens, talks the #NeverAgain movement with student activists, and chats with Lacey Schwartz and Mat Johnson of “The Loving Generation.”

Watch the episode (00:21:15) here.

Tags: , , , ,

Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Live Events, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2018-02-22 01:08Z by Steven

Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean
University of South Florida
IBL Conference Room (FAO 296)
4202 E. Fowler Avenue
Tampa, Florida
Thursday, 2018-03-01, 14:00 EDT

Presenter

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Profess Mitchell-Walthour is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Posted in Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy on 2018-02-22 00:46Z by Steven

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Cambridge University Press
December 2017
260 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781107186101
Paperback ISBN: 9781316637043

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This book uses an intersectional approach to analyze the impact of the experience of race on Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Using a theoretical framework that takes into account racial group attachment and the experience of racial discrimination, it seeks to explain Afro-Brazilian political behavior with a focus on affirmative action policy and Law 10.639 (requiring that African and Afro-Brazilian history be taught in schools). It fills an important gap in studies of Afro-Brazilian underrepresentation by using an intersectional framework to examine the perspectives of everyday citizens. The book will be an important reference for scholars and students interested in the issue of racial politics in Latin America and beyond.

  • Uses an intersectional approach that allows readers to understand how race, class, gender, and aesthetics shape Afro-Brazilian political behavior
  • Appeals to social scientists using quantitative and qualitative methods to study race, gender, group behavior, and politics
  • Develops a theory of racial spatiality that gives readers a bottom-up understanding of political representation and its reliance on everyday Afro-Brazilian citizens

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. Afro-Brazilian political underrepresentation
  • 2. Blackness and racial identification in contemporary Brazil
  • 3. Negro group attachment in Brazil
  • 4. Negro linked fate and racial policies
  • 5. Afro-descendant perceptions of discrimination and support for affirmative action
Tags: , , , , ,