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Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas is an essential
roadmap to understanding contemporary racial politics across the
Americas, where openly white supremacist politics are on the rise.
It is the product of a multiyear, transnational research project by
the Anti-racist Research and Action Network of the Americas in
collaboration with resistance movements confronting racial
retrenchment in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala,
Mexico, and the United States. How did we get here? And what
anti-racist strategies are equal to the dire task of confronting
resurgent racism? This volume provides powerful answers to these
pressing questions. 1) It traces the making and contestation of
state-led racial projects in response to black and indigenous
mobilization during an era of expansion of multicultural rights in
the context of neoliberal capitalism. 2) It identifies the origins
and manifestations of the backlash against hard-fought (but hardly
far-reaching) gains by marginalized peoples, showing that (contrary
to critiques of "identity politics") the losses and anxieties
produced by the failures of neoliberalism have been understood in
racial terms. 3) It distills a path forward for progressive
anti-racist activism in the Americas that looks beyond
state-centered, rights-seeking strategies and instead situates a
critique of racial capitalism as central to the contestation of
white supremacy.
How race shapes expectations about whose losses matter In
democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the
winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic
capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped
up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to
winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule
without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other
hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering
enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet
Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the
two most important forces driving racial politics in the United
States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is
exemplified by current protests against police violence—the
latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public
mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics
of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the
United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African
American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US
racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy.
She connects today’s Black Lives Matter protests to the use of
lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over
post–Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett
Till’s funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of
the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of
white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling
for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker
argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons
and to different ends.
Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas is an essential
roadmap to understanding contemporary racial politics across the
Americas, where openly white supremacist politics are on the rise.
It is the product of a multiyear, transnational research project by
the Anti-racist Research and Action Network of the Americas in
collaboration with resistance movements confronting racial
retrenchment in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala,
Mexico, and the United States. How did we get here? And what
anti-racist strategies are equal to the dire task of confronting
resurgent racism? This volume provides powerful answers to these
pressing questions. 1) It traces the making and contestation of
state-led racial projects in response to black and indigenous
mobilization during an era of expansion of multicultural rights in
the context of neoliberal capitalism. 2) It identifies the origins
and manifestations of the backlash against hard-fought (but hardly
far-reaching) gains by marginalized peoples, showing that (contrary
to critiques of "identity politics") the losses and anxieties
produced by the failures of neoliberalism have been understood in
racial terms. 3) It distills a path forward for progressive
anti-racist activism in the Americas that looks beyond
state-centered, rights-seeking strategies and instead situates a
critique of racial capitalism as central to the contestation of
white supremacy.
In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere-the Argentinean
statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave,
abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick
Douglass-both published their first works. Each would become the
most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers,
and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading
figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American
political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both
deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the
Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin
American thought more generally, are never read alongside each
other. This may be because their ideas about race differed
dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin
America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism,
while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of
black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two
together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography
of race that challenges political theory's preoccupation with and
assumptions about East/West comparisons, and questions the use of
comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy. By
juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century
thinkers-Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du
Bois, and Jose Vasconcelos-her book will be the first to bring
African-American and Latin American political thought into
conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas
about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of
transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so
doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and
Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the
"other" America to advance racial projects in their own countries.
Reading these four intellectuals hemispheric thinkers, Hooker
foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by
dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the
canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.
Drawing primarily on the US #blacklivesmatter movement,
contributors to this issue come to terms with the crisis in the
meaning of black politics during the post-civil rights era as
evidenced in the unknown trajectories of black protests. The
authors' timely essays frame black protests and the implications of
contemporary police killings of black people as symptomatic of a
crisis in black politics within the white limits of liberal
democracy. Topics in this issue include the contemporary politics
of black rage; the significance of the Ferguson and Baltimore black
protests in circumventing formal electoral politics; the ways in
which centering the dead black male body draws attention away from
other daily forms of racial and gender violence that particularly
affect black women; the problem of white nationalisms motivated by
a sense of white grievance; the international and decolonial
dimensions of black politics; and the relation between white
sovereignty and black life politics. Contributors. Barnor Hesse,
Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani, John Marquez, Junaid Rana, Deborah
Thompson, Shatema Threadcraft
In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere - the Argentinean
statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave,
abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick
Douglass - both published their first works. Each would become the
most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers,
and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading
figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American
political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both
deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the
Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin
American thought more generally, are never read alongside each
other. This may be because their ideas about race differed
dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin
America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism,
while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of
black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two
together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography
of race that challenges political theory's preoccupation with and
assumptions about East / West comparisons, and questions the use of
comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy. By
juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century
thinkers - Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du
Bois, and Jose Vasconcelos - her book will be the first to bring
African-American and Latin American political thought into
conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas
about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of
transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so
doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and
Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the
'other' America to advance racial projects in their own countries.
Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker
foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by
dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the
canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.
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