Day: April 24, 2018

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Martin Luther King and Black Lives Matter

Was Martin Luther King more like Black Lives Matter than we think?

A while ago, I watched this video on NBC about Martin Luther King and the Black Lives Matter movement. It starts with a footage of Martin Luther King being arrested with his own voiceover saying: “I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience”. This scene is followed up with the question: “If you were around during the Civil Rights Movement, would you have supported Martin Luther King, Jr.,  our most celebrated leader of the time?” It then goes on to make the connection between MLK and BLM, arguing that there are more similarities between him and the current movement, in terms of goals and tactics.

Indeed, BLM is trying to address many problems that were once the concern of MLT, including police brutality, inequality in employment, etc. Many critics of BLM cite MLK’s non-violence philosophy to criticize the tactics and goals of BLM. Mike Huckabee is quoted in the video commenting: “All Lives Matter is not that any life matters more than another. That’s the whole message that I think Dr. King tried to present”.

Unsurprisingly, also featured in the video is Dr. Jeanne Theoharis, talking about the romanticized image of Dr. King promoted by many politicians and the media. People make claims about MLK and apply their understanding of him to current affairs without fully grasping the less idealized aspects of him. In this sense, Dr. King had much more in common with BLM than what is often associated with his legacy.

This video was posted a few weeks before April 4, the day of Dr. King’s assassination. I was really impressed, because such conversations are important, especially in the media, which plays a huge role in perpetuating the romanticized image of MLK, and often with an agenda. Such ideals can make people feel good about themselves and the perceived progress of America’s democracy, and avoid the more disturbing questions of segregation and racism today, in the 21st century.

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Another example of racial discrimination on job applications.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about the unfair background checks that target imposed on black and latino applicants and within twenty four hours i see another news report  on racial discrimination on job applications.

Chastity Jones, a black women from Alabama was offered a job as a customer service representative at a call center but the offer was revoked when Jones refused to cut her dreadlocks. The company argued at the time that dreadlocks were messy and thus weren’t company policy and that it wasn’t racial discrimination because her hair was a quality about her she could change instead of something like her skin color. As of now Jones is trying to take her case to the supreme court.

Jones instead argued that the company was “enforcing deeply entrenched work stereotypes that pressure black women to adopt white standards of beauty and professionalism”. Personally I think that it was unfair to revoke the job offer. Since jones was offered the position it means the company thought she was well qualified and suited for that position and to remove that offer just because of a hairstyle seems rude and wrong. I’d like to hear others opinions on this so please comment.

 

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A Womanist Perspective of the Black Power Movement

“A Womanist Perspective of the Black Power Movement” 

by Akinyele Umoja

“Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era represents an essential development in a new generation of Black Power scholarship. Farmer’s contribution is a woman-centered overview of the Black Power movement. Like Peniel Joseph’s work, Remaking Black Power will reinforce the significance of recognizing Black Power studies as a sub-field in African American history and Africana studies. Preceded by Rhonda Williams’s Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the Twentieth Century and Robyn Spencer’s The Revolution has Come, Farmer’s Remaking Black Power continues a trend within Black Power scholarship that challenges masculinist narratives of the movement.

Remaking Black Power is cutting edge as it offers a comprehensive-womanist perspective of the Black Power movement. Farmer’s interpretation of various categories of women’s activism is unique and illuminating. From the “Militant Black Domestic” to “Revolutionary Black Woman,” “African/Afrikan Woman,” and “Third World Woman,” Farmer offers frameworks to explore the representation of activist women with a variety of ideological developments within Black Power. The “Militant Black Domestic” parallels the antecedents of the Black Power movement through grassroots civil rights and Old Left intersections with the Black freedom movement. The “Revolutionary Black Woman” highlights women’s engagement with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and self-described revolutionary nationalism. The focus of “African Woman” is in the cultural-nationalist ideological trend, specifically Kawaida, from the Organization Us to the Congress of African People. The “Afrikan Woman” is a variation of cultural nationalism to the development of Pan-Afrikan nationalism, which was a dominant ideological trend of the Black Power movement in the early 1970s.1 Finally, the “Third World Woman” examines the revolutionary intersectional development of the Black Women’s Alliance and the Third World Women’s Alliance.”