Harvard University Press Blog

Speaking with SpeakOut Boston

We continue our celebration of Pride Month by talking with some of the speakers who volunteer with SpeakOUT Boston. They share their stories with a variety of audiences to foster a better understanding of the LGBTQ+ community, so we thought we’d ask them some questions of our own.

What does Pride mean to you?

My very first Pride celebration was in 2016. I had just come out (at almost 60 years old) and seeing thousands of others celebrating and living their truth was simply the most amazing feeling I had ever known. I was fortunate enough to march in three more Boston Pride Parades plus two in Portland, Maine. Seeing the streets filled with allies gave me hope that things are (even though slowly) getting better, but with a long way to go.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I have a few authors or reads that stand out to me. Amy Hoffman is a local author who lives in my neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. She features queer women and her stories make you feel you know these women. Her latest novel, Dot & Ralfie, features partners facing the fears of aging. I also loved Sarah McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different, her memoir. Though vastly different from my own story in areas like aging, it made me recall so many of my own feelings of growing up, coming out, and transitioning.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2017, encouraged by a friend. I was afraid (ok, terrified) of public speaking but needed to do it. Getting up to share honestly about who I was, and to hopefully answer questions to help others to understand who we are. Becoming a trainer and helping others to do the same is incredibly rewarding.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

I often run into people who have attended an engagement where we spoke. They will share how much one of our engagements helped open their eyes about not just LGBTQIA people, but other marginalized communities.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

People who hear us speak and see us answer difficult questions often become great allies, but they also pay it forward and help others learn as well. My biggest surprise was learning so much more about myself.

Gabrielle “Gabi” Morgan (she/her) is a transgender woman who came out later in life and a Boston native from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, where she now once again resides. Gabi hid her true gender identity and was totally closeted until finally revealing her authentic self in 2016, at almost 60 years old. She immediately became active in the transgender community, volunteering with SpeakOUT, among others. She recently joined The Fenway Institute’s LGBTQIA+ Aging Project as a transgender engagement specialist, where she continues her personal journey while working to improve conditions for older transgender and gender diverse persons.

What does Pride mean to you?

Pride to me is about recognizing, developing, and celebrating my own identity as well as celebrating other people’s identities. It’s important to recognize the whole person, not just their sexual and gender identities.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I appreciate the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose work in the arts brings modern characters to life in his plays and films. He was a co-writer of the film Moonlight, among other works.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2012 when I attended a SpeakOUT speaker training workshop. I was motivated to participate in the training because I was in pursuit of further developing my speaking skills when I saw an intersectional opportunity between my public speaking skills and nurturing my sexual identity.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

My most positive experience working with SpeakOUT is being a trainer in our speaker trainings. After each and every opportunity I have to attend a SpeakOUT training, I experience positivity from the day.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

Recognizing and protecting everyone’s identities. It’s important to know that some of us have suffered and continue to suffer because of the ignorance and abuse of those who refuse to recognize and protect certain identities.

Michael Bookman (he/him) is a transplant from South Carolina who has settled into Boston over the years. He has been involved with SpeakOUT for ten years and is a past board president and long-time training team member. He is currently a member of the SpeakOUT in Color affinity group for speakers of color in the organization.

What does Pride mean to you?

Show up as you are, and just be Proud.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I greatly admire the work of Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle, who describe their own evolution as women-loving women in their own stories, irrespective of any label. I have come to believe that if we’re paying attention and listening to that still small voice inside ourselves that we will shift and change and grow again and again and again throughout our lifetimes. Perhaps we are more a kaleidoscope than a rainbow, letting the light shine through all the mosaic moments of our lives. To this day I feel more comfortable describing myself as the “+” in LGBTQ+, a fluid femme who continues to ebb and flow in my own personal journey.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2017 to help illustrate that while there are plenty of people that might look incredibly different from you or me in our beautiful rainbow community, there are also plenty that might look just like you and me but actually walk a very different path altogether. And I believe it is equally important that we accept and embrace our similarities as we do our differences.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

I have always loved speaking at high schools with SpeakOUT. One incredibly memorable experience was when a female student approached me and told me that she was gay and was terrified to go home for break, as her parents did not accept her (she was staying with another family close to the school). By sharing my story, I gave this student a safe place to share hers, and we created a plan of self-care for her to follow through her most challenging times. Being able to help LGBTQ+ youth in this way is a true honor.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

As a feminine-presenting woman, the assumptions about me are endless. I must be straight, the ring on my finger must have been given to me by my husband, I must have carried our children. I “pass” so if I wanted to I could let the opportunity to educate pass on by just the same, but, for me, that has always felt like a disservice to the LGBTQ+ community. Because the truth is, while I might look like “most girls,” I am not straight. I am married to my dream wife, and together we have adopted and are raising our children as part of our blended family. I believe it’s critical that we challenge the views of what constitutes family norms and what configurations are acceptable and celebrated.

Dr. Jennelle Kariotis-Rice (she/her) is a psychologist by training and a relationship advisor and justice of the peace to the LGBTQ+ community by trade, as well as a part-time Psychology Professor at Bridgewater State University. Jennelle specializes in working with women who were previously in relationships with men and are now (or would like to be) in relationships with women and hosts a podcast and virtual community known as the Big Change of Heart. She lives in Pembroke with her wife and four children.

What does Pride mean to you?

Pride Month and many Pride events are opportunities for celebration, for finding and supporting all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, for honoring history and protecting the future, and for educating and including all types of people while keeping the focus on queer people and our lives. Pride is about survival, humor, creativity, strength, sadness, sexual and relational human rights, and speaking and being heard.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

Alison Bechdel, Charles M. Blow, John Paul Brammer, Roxane Gay, Kieron Gillen, Edgar Gomez, Christopher Gonzalez, Tony Kushner, Alice Oseman, and Brandon Taylor.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

Though I had been out as a bisexual/queer man to a small number of people since the mid-1990s, I didn’t come out to the rest of my family, nor widely and publicly, until May and June of 2014, when I marched in (and attended!) my first Boston Pride event. Having learned about SpeakOUT through Ellyn Ruthstrom and the Bisexual Resource Center, I attended my first board meeting in July that year and quickly became both a volunteer speaker and board member. I joined because I wanted to “make up for lost time” of having been mostly silent, realizing what a positive difference more stories from out bisexual men and other queer people would have made in my earlier life.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

The reciprocal flow of strength and compassion between myself and audience members. SpeakOUT helped me find and take pride in my story, my voice, my history and identity—and I have heard from so many of our listeners that our stories have done so for them. It’s an amazingly energizing and uplifting dynamic.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

I do think we all have a lot of work to do on increasing bisexual and pansexual visibility, particularly for bi and pan men, who continue to face misunderstanding and discrimination both outside of and even within the LGBTQIA+ community.

George Grattan (he/him) has worked as a teacher, writer, editor, and marketing and communications expert in a wide range of settings, focusing on the higher education and sustainability sectors. He joined the board of SpeakOUT in 2014, and served as board chair for three years. A proud bisexual/queer man, he lives with his wife, Mary, in Gloucester, MA, where he advises the nonprofit Seaside Sustainability—and tries to swim at least nine months of the year.

50 Years of Sharing LGBTQ+ Stories

As we celebrate Pride Month, we decided to take the opportunity to invite a local LGBTQ+ organization to tell us about the important work they do. Ellyn Ruthstrom is the Executive Director of SpeakOUT Boston and has been involved with LGBTQ+ activism for thirty years. As a former president of the Bisexual Resource Center, Ruthstrom co-organized the first White House Roundtable on Bisexual Issues in 2013 during the Obama Administration.

On the oppressive summer night of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Rebellion started in New York City. Drag queens, trans women and men, gay and bisexual people all stood up together and said “No more!” when the police yet again raided the Stonewall Inn that night. Those first few days of the rebellion didn’t start the LGBTQ+ movement, but it did ignite the sparks that had already been smoldering, and it galvanized activists to organize in a more cohesive way to demand change and to fight the discrimination and stigma that the queer community experienced on a daily basis. The bravery of Stonewall inspires the LGBTQ+ community to march, protest, and celebrate every June for Pride Month.

And just three years after Stonewall, members of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Homophile Union of Boston (some of the earliest gay rights organizations) joined forces to create the Gay Speakers Bureau in Boston. Believing in the power of personal storytelling, the Gay Speakers Bureau trained its members to tell authentic, personal stories that debunked the harmful stereotypes of the “lavender menace.” The organization added other identities to its name as the movement expanded, but eventually we left behind the old name to instead emphasize the importance of what we do: speak out.

SpeakOUT is a community of speakers working to create a world free of homo-bi-transphobia and other prejudice by telling the truths of LGBTQ+ lives. Sharing our stories and fostering a dialogue with a wide range of audiences—schools, colleges, businesses, faith communities, libraries—has always been at the core of SpeakOUT’s mission and work. After 50 years, you can imagine the thousands of stories we have shared! And now we are able to conduct our engagements in both in-person and online formats, reaching beyond the Greater Boston area.

SpeakOUT speakers shared their stories during the AIDS epidemic, the fight for marriage equality, the campaign against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and during the more recent fight for transgender civil rights. We will continue to speak out against the current backlash of laws that are targeting our schools, transgender youth, reproductive rights, and even marriage rights.

Forty or fifty years ago our members encountered a lot more hostility and resistance to what they shared with their audiences than we do now. At that time, audience members felt much more comfortable expressing anti-gay sentiments and our speakers were trained in how to defuse a situation, how to keep the discourse focused on personal experience, and how to use those points of conflict as teachable moments. Our training still includes those skills, even though it is much less likely now for our speakers to encounter extreme viewpoints. Not impossible, but less likely.

The biggest change from what was the Gay Speakers Bureau is the diverse range of identities that we represent. LGBTQ+ may seem like an unwieldy acronym, but it points to the complexity of both sexual orientation and gender identity. I have personally seen a huge change in our client’s willingness to discuss gender identity in just the last eight years when I came on as Executive Director. At that time there were still some clients that explicitly requested us not to send transgender speakers. Now, the majority of clients insist on having a transgender or nonbinary speaker on a panel and are eager to educate their constituencies about trans and nonbinary issues.

As part of our 50^th anniversary this year, we have just updated our logo to include the Progressive Pride flag colors, reflecting the organization’s commitment to the BIPOC and transgender communities. An affinity group called SpeakOUT in Color formed within the last two years to provide a social and support space for speakers of color. This group sparked more discussions within the organization to initiate a board-driven DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) committee that is centering racial diversity within our organization and will be a major focus for the organization going forward.

SpeakOUT’s personal storytelling continues to make a difference. I think of the year or so leading up to the anti-trans referendum in 2018 as being an example of when our format really helped to educate a lot of people out in the community to the importance of trans civil rights. I give props to our trans speakers who tirelessly spoke to faith communities, public forums at libraries, a lot of businesses, so many places. It took a statewide effort by many organizations and individuals and I’m very proud of the work that SpeakOUT did to help ensure the continued protections for our transgender citizens. A lot of our work goes under the radar—we don’t grab the headlines—but I believe the personal connections between our speakers and audience members makes for a meaningful change of attitudes that is an important part of larger social change.

The War in Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has people wondering how we got to this point. For those looking for a better understanding of the complicated, intertwined pasts of these two countries, and to learn more about Ukrainian history, these books provide answers and shed light on the current conflict. The first two titles are being published next month by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and could not be more timely.

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev

In this collection of dispatches, Stanislav Aseyev attempts to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the residents of the industrial region of Donbas. For the first time, an inside account shows the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that citizens continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.

The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Serhii Plokhy

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Yuri Kostenko

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff

Berkhoff describes how a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide in the Third Reich’s largest colony. He also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, explaining why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.

Russia: The Story of War
Gregory Carleton

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.

The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
William Jay Risch

Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

Five Reasons Why You Should Read Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality

In his surprising and powerful new work, A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. We asked him about his impassioned new book: why he wrote it, how it’s optimistic, and what we need to do to continue making progress on creating an equitable world.

This book draws on your earlier works but is also very different. How would you describe the mix?

It’s partly a response to readers’ requests for a short book. My three major books are around a thousand pages each, enough to discourage many motivated citizens from reading them. I review the main lessons from those books here, explaining the basic facts of inequality and the reasons for its persistence and recent growth. But the new book does not content itself with just synthesizing previous ideas and findings. It also presents a new perspective on the history of inequality.

This new perspective seems more optimistic.

It puts more stress on equality, that is, on positive developments over the long term. Since at least the end of the eighteenth century, with the French and American Revolutions and the revolt of the slaves in Haiti in 1791, there has been a general movement toward equality. The march has been nourished by revolts against injustice, within countries as well as internationally, moving us away from societies of privilege and colonialism. It is a movement that has never completely stopped. On income and assets, we are today very, very far from the concentration levels of the early twentieth century, as well as previous centuries. Even since the 1980s, a period of rising concentration, we have continued on the path toward equality as inequalities arising from gender and origin, and between the global North and South, have diminished. In the long term, the march toward equality is very clear. I really want to insist on that.

What does the book tell us about how to continue that progress?

Partly we need to learn our history, to recommit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that have promoted equality. We need to resist cultural separatism and excessive intellectual specialization. We also need to reverse certain trends. A few decades ago, for example, we invented an almost sacred right for people and companies to accumulate fortunes that depended on the public infrastructure of a country and then transfer assets to another jurisdiction, leaving the bill to the rest of the population. It is necessary to put an end to the free movement of capital without tax or social compensation.

You place a stronger emphasis on environmental questions and answers than in the past.

The questions are more urgent and are clearly bound up with questions of inequality. The richest 1% on the planet emit more carbon than the poorest 50%. Nearly four billion people live in the countries that will be the first to suffer the consequences of the lifestyles of the richest. A proportional carbon tax hitting the poor and the rich the same way—and in practice often exonerating the latter—is not the solution. It will only lead to new revolts in the North, as well as the South. Only a strong reduction of inequalities and the significant involvement of the richest countries will resolve these contradictions.

Overall, how would you describe the genre of the book? It’s academic, but also impassioned.

It’s a work of history and social sciences but also a call for civic mobilization. Looking at how we have moved toward equality helps us understand what needs to be done now. Unfortunately, this learning process is often weakened by historical amnesia and the compartmentalization of knowledge. I argue that economic issues are too important to be left to a small class of specialists and leaders. Citizens’ reappropriation of knowledge is essential for transforming power relations. This book contributes to that cause.

On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations,” says Hilton Als, “Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”

The little women lurk at the very heart of the modern, the place where Zora Neale Hurston and her girl Ethel [Waters] are keeping the beat. And of course, they were friends, that Zora and Ethel. It may have taken some time to meet each other “across the footlights,” as Hurston put it in her memoir, but once they connected through their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, the bond between this untrained singer and a woman referred to by some as “the Voice of an Era” was strong and intimate. Aesthetically too, they had more in common than one might think. Born in Philadelphia and raised in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood where, as Waters puts it, “whites, blacks, and yellows, were outcasts…together,” she made use of an “elephant memory and gift of mimicry” in school. As feminist blues archivist Rosetta Reitz contends, “It was this magnificent ear and the awareness that there was authority in language, that gave Ethel Waters an edge which she used to empower her life.”

Like Hurston, she mastered the art of multilingual colloquialisms and phrasings, assumed multiple personas in her vocal performances, and finessed the art of deeply performative storytelling as she crafted a distinctly theatrical, vaudevillian style of blues singing that was magnetic and lasting. Only her peer, the passionately adored stage ingenue Florence Mills (whose 1927 premature death rocked Harlem), could match Waters in this regard, having ushered in the 1920s as “the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling.” Of Waters, Hurston would marvel, “She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Listen to her burning up the scene with her slinky 1926 smash, “Shake That Thing,” and you’ll know what Hurston’s talking about. Dolling out double entendres left and right, Waters shifts personas with the turn of a phrase. She’s the swinging seductress one moment and the cool cultural observer the next. “Now it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,” she assures,

Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing
When everybody can shake that thing
Oh, I mean, shake that thing!
I’m gettin’ tired of telling you how to shake that thing!
Oooh, oooh, with this kind of music, who wouldn’t shake that thing?

Ascendant as the queen of Black 1920s vaudeville, Waters knew how to work the drama and suspense in a jook-joint hot number celebrating the joys of carnal movement. Hers is an anthem that condenses the shifting energies of an epoch encapsulating mammoth change: migrated Black peoples spilling into northern cities, bursting with socioeconomic aspiration and artistic ambition, revolting against the norms that had historically sought to violently police their profit as well as their pleasures. In other words, all that “shaking” was evocative of the tumult in Waters’s midst. As Saidiya Hartman points out, she “made music” out of the “noise” all around her in her adopted city of New York, soaking up and translating into her own sonic language “the sounds of life, the loving and fighting and laughter and suffering,” all the while “describ[ing] the deprivation and vitality of cramped living from the inside” of her own Harlem flat.

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

That Hurston not only theorized the sounds in her scholarship and incorporated them in her folk concerts but also performed them herself makes plain the ways that she embraced the act of singing as an extension of her critical ethnographic work. Zora’s singing traverses the presumptive boundaries between Diana Taylor’s conception of the archive and the repertoire, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” Zora’s singing intervenes in what she believed to be the so called hegemony of Harlem Renaissance Black concert hall culture with its refined music, sounds that she abhorred for, in her opinion, watering down the voices of the folk.

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

Traveling Black

All this month we are celebrating Black History Month with excerpts from some of our recent books. In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a book that Ibram X. Kendi calls "extraordinary," Mia Bay provides a riveting, character-rich account of racial segregation in America that reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws.

In 1922  Joseph K. Bowler told a reporter for the Chicago Defender that he never ventured to the South without a “Jim Crow traveling kit.” Designed to allow Bowler, a minister who lived in Massachusetts, to travel through segregated states in relative comfort, the kit included “a pair of soiled overalls purchased from an auto mechanic, a miniature gasoline stove and a small table top the size of a scrub board.” The contents of Bowler’s kit vividly illustrate some of the indignities and discomforts that Black travelers could expect to encounter in the “colored” railroad cars of his era. He wore the overalls, he explained, to avoid the expense of “soiling” good clothes in the “dirty Jim Crow coaches.” They protected him from the tobacco juice that white conductors and news vendors often spat on the seats, and were especially useful in “parts of the Mississippi [where] the white farmers use the Jim Crow coaches as luggage cars in which to transport chickens and hogs.” The stove and table top allowed him to prepare and eat meals. They were key components of his kit, given that “the dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned.” “White people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water fors everal days,” noted the intrepid traveler, who both carried and cooked all the food he consumed on his journey. If he had not, he explained, he would have had to “sneak into the back of some depot like a little poodle and ask for some food,” or “risk being shot to death by invading a dining car to secure my meals.”

Many Black travelers shared Bowler’s concerns—whether or not they chose to wear dirty overalls and carry stoves. African Americans loathed segregated streetcars and railway compartments more than virtually any other form of segregation. In the research for his detailed account of race relations in the American South, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (1908), journalist Ray Stannard Baker found that “no other point of contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” A third of a century later, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in his monumental study The American Dilemma (1944), made the same point: “It is a common observation that the Jim Crow Car is resented more bitterly among Negroes than most other forms of segregation.”

By the 1940s African Americans did not have to travel by train. They had new options to choose from, but they found all of them problematic. The intercity bus lines that first began operating in the late 1920s offered an afford­able alternative to traveling by rail, but during their early years of operation many bus companies refused to serve Black passengers. Even after the courts forced them to, they did so “only grudgingly and in the most uncomfortable seats.” “If you think riding a Jim Crow car out of the South is no fun,” wrote one Black traveler in 1943, “you should try bumping along on the back wheel of a bus, with the odors of the motor keeping you restless.”

Cars initially seemed to offer those who could afford them an escape from the humiliations of Jim Crow travel. But while Black motorists could choose their own seats in their own cars, they could not expect to be treated with respect once they stepped outside their vehicles. “It used to be that black people only took a trip [if] some body died or was dying,” remembered Chicago Tribune columnist Jeannye Thornton in 1972. Driving usually involved a “nonstop trip,” because hotels and motels that accepted Black guests were almost impossible to find. Even rest stops were hard to locate: “Bathrooms were always at the next service in the next town 50 miles down the road and when you finally got there, they were always separate and filthy.” African American travelers ended up driving “all night [and] sometimes traveling to a big city before even considering stopping to stretch.” Not only were road­side accommodations unappealing, driving through the South could be dangerous. “Who knows what could happen to a black family with northern license plates traveling some lonely road?”

Even travel by air was far from free of discrimination. Flying itself was never subject to southern segregation laws, but in the early days of air travel some airlines refused to carry Black passengers, and others assigned them to segregated seats. And when they escaped segregation in the air, Black flyers often encountered it on the ground. Southern airports had segregated waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms, and the taxis and ground transportation services that carried passengers to and from airports were divided by race.

American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom. Travel segregation began on the stagecoaches and steamships of the North­east—the nation’s earliest common carriers—and moved from there to rail­roads, train stations, restaurants, roadside rest stops, and gas station rest­rooms, all of which were eventually segregated by law in the South. As new modes of transportation and accommodations developed, new forms of segregation followed.

The Origin Story of Black Education

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens, saying it “would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”

Before Emancipation, the enslaved had to gain their education by “snatching learning in forbidden fields,” as Woodson characterized it. The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Stealing one’s self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy—for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement.

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities. Black people’s disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. This prohibition was absorbed into the dominant ideology of the nation, even as American common schools were established after American independence for the purpose of training a responsible citizenry; thus, conceptions of citizenship emerged as a metonym for whiteness. The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature.

Antiliteracy laws and the intellectual surveillance that accompanied them left great marks on the politics of black education. They enforced the idea that blacks were outside the social contract of American society—inconceivable as fully human, citizen, or student. Many enslaved and free blacks subverted these legal mandates by acquiring literacy through fugitive tactics—leaving a mark of equal or greater consequence.While the overwhelming majority of blacks were illiterate under slavery, approximately 10 percent learned to read and/or write; suggesting that literate slaves were not so unusual as to be unknown to other blacks. These literate slaves were recognized as leaders with a practical skill set that benefitted their community.

How did the 10 percent of blacks who learned to read and write in the South before Emancipation gain the gift of literacy? As Woodson recounted time and again in his writings: “Negroes themselves…stole away to secret places at night to study.” The historical record documents black Americans climbing into holes in the ground under the cover of night, attending schools run by free blacks, “playing school” with white children, “stealin’ a meetin’” in the woods, and trading food for lessons, among other covert means. In her remarkable narrative of black education in the antebellum South and early in Emancipation, Heather Williams reveals that black people were self-taught and their own biggest advocates for education, in slavery and in freedom.

Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland between the 1820s and 1830s, represents the best-known example of learning in secret. Left alone to look after the master’s house, he employed his own version of fugitive pedagogy. He spent his time “writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy book, copying what he had written.” Douglass wrote in the margins of the Webster Spelling Book, populating these in-between spaces with words he appropriated and mimicked, turning them toward his own semantic and political ends. Woodson’s nearby home state of Virginia passed laws prohibiting education for enslaved and free blacks as early as 1819. This legal precedent was reinforced through subsequent acts passed in Virginia leading up to Emancipation. In April 1831, for instance, an act was passed declaring “that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse, church, meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law then authorized whippings “at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.” Such legislation, and the sentiments of antiliteracy ideology, became nearly universal in the South. When the Civil War began, black Americans challenged the prohibition of their mental elevation. Their efforts to learn expanded in formal and public ways; they initiated “native schools” in the Contraband Camps, which prefigured the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and then the first public school system in the US South.

With the end of the Civil War came “jubilee,” as the formerly enslaved described the biblical time of freedom. No longer in bondage, black people across the South performed their first acts of freedom by occupying the classroom. Booker T. Washington recalled a “whole race trying to go to school,” and he noted: “Few were too young, and none were too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night schools as well.” The rush to the schoolhouse transcended any single location. Washington’s narrative described blacks’ quest for education throughout all the Southern states.

Once legally permitted to become educated in the postbellum South, black Americans continued to experience violence and other forms of opposition to their efforts. Yet they continued to resist in the best ways they knew how. Even as black education developed institutionally through the endeavors of blacks themselves and also in conjunction with white northern church denominations and philanthropists, black Americans nonetheless pursued critical parts of their educational lives in secret. As a class of political actors, black students and teachers emerged as persuasive advocates in fundraising for their respective institutions. And like black preachers, teachers (or, more expansively, Negroes “who had some learning”) were important leaders in black communities, not just because of their professional status but also as stokers and caretakers of the freedom dreams that helped initiate their escape from bondage. Black Americans shared an “equal rights” vision that remained unfulfilled. This vision fueled the emergence of black equal rights leagues and other organizational entities representative of black life during Reconstruction and the decades to follow. Black teachers’ associations reflected this collective drive on the part of a segment of leaders who signified the living history presented in Carter G. Woodson’s first classrooms.

Black people’s fugitive pedagogy lent itself to an origin story of black freedom. It was a central part of the general strike initiated by the absconded slaves who refused the political economic arrangement of slavery when they fled the plantations during the war. As a framework for learning, it contested ideas of black inferiority, while rejecting the superexploitation and ownership of black people as fungible laborers. The black schools and teachers after the war, by their very existence, symbolized the refutation of a knowledge realm that debased them, educational institutions that excluded them, and curricula that portrayed them as always already subjugated and “narratively condemned.” Fugitive pedagogy framed black educational life from the time of slavery through Jim Crow as a narrative plot that transcended the limited world in which black folks found themselves. It became more than a teaching method—more than utilitarian skills to be learned. Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be “a means of escape,” as Woodson wrote. Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. Carried over from slavery, fugitive pedagogy reflected the general story of black people’s shared past and present. In the postbellum era, black Americans continued to live their educational lives through the frame of this origin story. It continued to structure the relationship between education and the black political struggle more broadly. Woodson himself contributed to this long memory of education’s role in black America’s quest for freedom and justice.

John Rawls: Speaking in a Shared Political Language

On the occasion of the anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice, Andrius Gališanka, author of John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice, reflects on some of Rawls’s ideas on moral and political reasoning.  

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The book has had a vast influence in the Anglophone academic world. Written over a twenty-year period, it reflects a variety of intellectual discourses to which Rawls reacted and contributed. Partly for this reason, audiences from sociology and economics to political theory and philosophy have found at least something in it to criticize or build on.

In John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice, I wrote on the philosophical and political visions of A Theory of Justice. They focus on what it means to respect persons in discourses and political practices and institutions. These are undoubtedly questions of first importance, but my own interest in the book was sparked by Rawls’s remarks on an even broader subject: what it means to reason morally and politically. Moral and political judgment is a highly intuitive practice: it consists in giving reasons and trying to determine their weight. But many incompatible and irreducible reasons can be relevant in difficult discussions. How can we “weigh” them in a way that is clear to us, let alone convincing to others? Where do we find the weights?

I often re-read the short passages in section 7 of A Theory of Justice in which Rawls deals with this question, increasingly appreciating his conclusion that we cannot reduce reliance on intuition all that much. Still, he thought, we can go some way. We can group the variety of reasons we have when discussing specific questions of justice under broad principles of justice, and then order these principles in terms of importance. Essentially, we have to tell a broad story of a just society, and then place the more particular reasons within that broad story. Rawls’s proposed broad narrative was of a society that attributed political rights to everyone equally and organized economic inequalities for the benefit of the least advantaged.

How much clarity has this narrative brought to the muddles of our thinking about justice? Some, for sure. An argument that stands out to me concerns the role of desert, or deserving, in a just society. In a popular form, the difficulties with the concept came to light during the Obama-Romney “You didn’t build that” controversy in 2012. If I put in the effort to achieve something, does it not automatically mean that I deserve the achievement? Rawls claimed that desert—or what he ended up terming “legitimate expectations”—is tied to a picture of a just society. To determine a just society, we need to look at a range of possible societies and choose the one in which political rights are equal and the least advantaged persons are economically most well off. This just society, once chosen, then has rules that determine what can be deserved by one’s efforts. Of course, Rawls’s argument here is controversial, but it shows how the broad story about the inequalities we are willing to allow can help clarify other questions, such as those about desert.

The question of moral and political reasoning became all the more complicated when Rawls acknowledged in Political Liberalism (1993) that at least some political disagreement is permanent and reasonable. For example, ideologies as different as Marxism and libertarianism would bring different concepts to discussions about distributive justice. How do we decide which political institutions to adopt in such cases? Rawls’s suggestion was to stress the importance of a political language he thought we could all come to share: the language of public reason. This language, consisting of widely accepted rules of inquiry and shared political ideals, was to be used when deliberating about the most fundamental political questions, such as free speech. At least initially, Rawls argued that we should rephrase an argument into the terms of public reason if it actually stems from grounds that are not publicly shared.

Does public reason bring any more clarity to the decisions we have to make? As a historian of ideas, I appreciate diversity in arguments, so public reason actually obfuscates for me the real reasons of political debates. To make plausible the claim that public reason exists—that we do indeed share a political language—Rawls had to allow that broad terms, such as “liberty” and “equality,” could be interpreted and weighed differently by various parties to the debate. Rawls was acutely aware that using a shared language did not imply substantive agreement. So why use public reason and focus on that which is common? I think that, for Rawls, speaking the language that others shared was a way of respecting other persons. If I respond to your question in political terms that are alien to you, in a sense I do not address you at all: we speak past each other.

A good reason to return to A Theory of Justice now is to explore how plausible it is to express respect for others without speaking a shared political language with them. Perhaps that’s why I return to the book so often. I think that Rawls’s early thoughts on the nature of moral and political judgment show that this is a commitment he himself could embrace. Already then, he thought that the broad story of justice that we tell reduces reliance on intuition only somewhat. Other questions are left for intuitive weighing and vote. So what is needed is an argument that a genuine conversation can take place without a shared language, one in which we try to understand the fundamental commitments of each interlocutor in their own terms. Is it something A Theory of Justice can allow? Yes, but that is a consideration for another time.

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

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