When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At ...
Global Black History
Editor: Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Past Editor: Keisha N. Blain
The Ambivalence of Appropriation
One day in the summer of 2001, English professor and cultural critic Eric Lott received a phone call from rock journalist Greil Marcus. Marcus had some news ...
“For the Black and White Youth of the South”
Speaking with Jerome Tarshis in 1974, Ernest J. Gaines talked about his desire to write a story with “the barber shop type of thing.” Looking at James Joyce’s “Ivy ...
Black Athletes, Black Activists
Today the 2018 Winter Olympics kick off in Pyeongchang, South Korea. With a US president who has gone out of his way to attack black athletes and Black Lives ...
Expanding the Black Geopolitical Imagination
In the wake of Michael Brown’s heinous murder, news of protests and social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, captured the attention of viewers around the globe. In the Middle East, Palestinians took to ...
The Devil Wears Pravda
In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the ...
Rewriting the History of Racist Ideas
While first reading Ibram X. Kendi’s kaleidoscopic and admirably lucid Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, I had a flashback to my days as a graduate ...
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Revolutions
“Today I have reached my conclusion,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois on October 1, 1961: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No ...
If You’re Woke You Dig It: William Melvin Kelley
William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful …
When Slaveholders Ran America
In 1837, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina strode into the US Senate chamber and thundered that slavery was a “positive good.” Black bondage was ...
What The Left Today Can Learn from Paul Robeson
Gerald Horne is one of the leading and most influential historians in the nation. His research explores racism in a variety of contexts, involving labor, politics ...
