H-Afro-Am Blog

Tips for Avoiding “Voluntourism” in Haiti Statement from the Institute of Haitian Studies on Hurricane Matthew

Cécile Accilien, Ph.D. Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies - University of Kansas

Just 6 years after the January 12, 2010 deadly earthquake from which Haiti is still recuperating, a category 4 hurricane hit the southwestern region killing close to 1000 people (current estimates as of 10/10/2016) and destroying over 80% of towns like Les Cayes, and Jérémie and surrounding villages (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37596222 ).

Many people want to reach out and have

The Hazards of Concealed Firearms on Campus:

A Statement by the KU Department of African and African-American Studies

Between 2013 and 2014, at least thirty-three states introduced legislation to allow concealed firearms at their institutions of higher education.  At least eight states currently have some form of concealed-carry law in effect on college and university campuses.  Kansas will join these ranks in the fall of 2017, when postsecondary schools in the Regents system are set to lose their exemption from state legislation permitting concealed firearms in all public places.  Needless to

The Slave’s Cause and Abolition’s Presence

Julia Bernier, PhD Candidate - W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the world has witnessed the tremendous growth of a new movement for Black liberation. The Black Lives Matter movement has advanced crucial ideas about not only the structural violences of white supremacy and systemic racism that attempt to govern Black life, but has also worked to imagine and construct new meanings for, and within, the traditions of liberation, revolution, and abolition. Alicia

Langston’s Lawrence (Hughes Birthday)

Randal Maurice Jelks, American Studies and African & African-American Studies – University of Kansas

Author of Benjamin Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography

Langston’s Lawrence wasn’t idyllic. It was frequently Not Without Laughter as his first novel was titled. The Midwest’s racial segregation made it a heartless Heartland. Kansas wasn’t a “Free State” for all. Nor could good self-respecting colored folks miss the fact that they were tolerated rather than embrace. The narrative of Lawrence became how Quantrill’s raid killed white folks, not them

Contextualizing the N-word Controversy at the University of Kansas          

Clayton Finn, African American Studies Major, California State University-Fullerton

            The recent events at the University of Kansas regarding Dr. Andrea Quenette’s use of the N-word in her classroom have raised pertinent questions about linguistic reference to racial vitriol in a college classroom setting.  During a classroom discussion of racial discrimination on campus, Quenette claimed, “As a white woman I just never have seen the racism…It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray painted on walls…”[1] This remark

Campus Protests in Context -- Some Questions for 2016

Robert Greene II, Department of History, University of South Carolina

             The year 2015 began with the continuation of the Black Lives Matter campaign—a response to numerous stories of police brutality directed against African Americans. As the year progressed, however, the protests addressed a new front: college campuses. Where once colleges provided sympathy protests due to events in Ferguson, Missouri, or Staten Island, New York, college students began to pay closer attention to the legacies of racism and discrimination on their

Amiri Baraka and two consequential poems from 1965

Howard Rambsy II, Black Studies Program and the Department of English - Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. 

Author of The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry

In 1965, Amiri Baraka (then known as Le Roi Jones) produced “Black Art” and “A Poem for Black Hearts,” which became two of the most widely circulated poems of the time period. That the poems appeared at the outset of the Black Arts Movement is hardly coincidental. Baraka and his poems were instrumental to the formation of the movement.

On February 21

Manchild in the Promised Land at Fifty

James Smethurst, Afro-American Studies - University of Massachusetts Amherst

Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land appeared at a pivotal political and cultural moment in the United States fifty years ago. 1965 saw the murder of Malcolm X, the eruption of the Watts uprising, a great escalation of direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the issuing of the Moynihan Report, the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights marches, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School in Harlem, to name only a

Black Student Activists and the Hunger for History

By Ibram X. Kendi

Mizzou activists unabashedly planted their struggle in history this semester. They termed their activist group the Concerned Student 1950, a collective of Black students “dedicated to eradicating forces that keep black students systematically oppressed.” And they unabashedly planted their list of eight demands in history. Their third demand read, “We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.”

For me, the historical

Interest Convergence: A Revolutionary Theory for Athletic Reform

Billy Hawkins, PhD - University of Georigia

Author of The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports and Predominately White NCAA Institutions

The structural arrangement of the intercollegiate athletic system at the NCAA Division FBS level, in relations to Black male athletes in revenue generating specifically, has been classified as a plantation system. Similarities in the plantation system and the intercollegiate athletic system are: economic exploitation, social and cultural suppression, institutional racism, and political