High-res
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1898 – 1989) achieved a lot of firsts in her life.
She was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the first African American woman to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar, and was the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
The Afro Futurist Charity Costume Ball
Friday, October 28, 2011 at The Windows Factory in Philadelphia, PAProduced by Science-Is Fiction and co-sponsored by Philadelphia Printworks and feyasterling inc., join us as we celebrate and bring awareness to Afrofuturism through the works of local feature artists, authors, and performers whose creations connect back to Afrofuturism and Black Science-Fiction. You are cordially invited Black to the Future.
All proceeds of the event are being donated to Need In Deed, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children apply academics (literacy, math, social studies, science) to addressing problems in their communities and schools. Please find out more information about the organization at www.needindeed.org or on Facebook.
Part 1
Here are three videos from Jim Sidanius’s presentation from the 2008 Project on Law and Mind Sciences (PLMS) Conference on Social Dominance Theory.
Summary…
[I]nter-communal violence and genocide are obvious and immensely tragic, what is not as readily appreciated is the widespread extent and ferocity of the intergroup violence that is channeled through legal and criminal justice systems. Given the fact that the legal and criminal justice systems are disproportionately controlled by members of dominant rather than subordinate social groups, social dominance theory argues that a substantial portion of the output of the criminal justice system can be seen as a form of intergroup violence, the function of which is to maintain the structural integrity of group-based social hierarchy.
Part 3
High-res
Angela J. Davis speaking at a Center for American Progress panel discussion on Racial Bias and Criminal Prosecution
This is Angela J. Davis, a Professor of Law at the American University Washington College of Law where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Criminal Defense: Theory and Practice. She is the author of, “Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor.” Professor Davis’ publications include articles and book chapters on racism in the criminal justice system and prosecutorial discretion.
Click the link for the Angela you may be more familiar with.
-@mbi
Professor Maurice Stevens
has a PHD from the University of California’s History of Consciousness Department, the same department produced students like Huey P. Newton & acted as a home to professors like Angela Davis. He’s an associate professor of Department of Comparative Studies in Humanities at Ohio State University and adjunct faculty at The Pacifica Graduate Institute. His interest include Black Studies and Critical Theory in gender, race, identity, sexuality, and trauma. His work often highlights the interconnectedness of social relations and the history making of marginalized people as subjects constrained by dominate groups.
Heavy Faculty links you to Maurice Stevens’ complete lecture, “Photobiologics and Our Threadbare Social: Imagining a Critical Theory of Trauma.” It focuses on three excerpts from Dr. Stevens’ book, “Troubling Beginnings: Trans(per)forming African American History and Identity (Studies in African American History and Culture).” It was given at The Africana Studies Spring Lecture Series at John Hopkins University.
Part 1: The Clinic
Stevens theorizes on his time working in a progressive treatment center for psychotic and schizophrenic adolescents in San Fransisco, California. There he witnesses the traumagenic nature of institutionalized psychic colonization when the centers progressive staff and interns react to a symptomatic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) patient that is young, Black, big and male.
Part 2: The Tortured Body in Legal Discourse
Stevens theorizes the Bush Administration drew upon highly racialized institutional forms already existing within the United States and exported a uniquely American brand of sexualized racial terror to Abu Ghraib prison. He compares the photos of smiling torturers and anguished inmates at Abu Ghraib to the lynching images of Black men and women surrounded by smiling towns people of the south. Stevens discusses the current and historical contortion of legal discourse as a means to bestow exception status onto marginalized people and as a tool to exposed them for mistreatment and torture. Finally he cites Elaine Scarry on why states torture when they are at their weakest.
Part 3: Popular Visual Culture
In still moving pictures Dr. Stevens comments on the documentary style photos that emerged in the coverage of hurricane Katrina and how they were refocused and encoded into the American narrative of racialized poverty and absolute difference from the national identity. He highlights how the careful curation of those images played on preexisting racialized beliefs and exacerbated efforts to rescue Black storm survivors.
-@mbi
Speaks on Al Jazeera English
High-res
Social Dominance Theory..
If you don’t know who Jim Sidanus is, he’s a Professor in both the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Stockholm, Sweden and has taught at several universities in the United States and Europe. His primary research interests include the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of inter-group prejudice. He has authored and published more than 100 scientific papers.
Click the picture to get read the pdf of his book “Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression.”
Part 2
Here is another lecture from The John Hopkins Africana Studies Department. This lecture is by Dr. Rhonda Williams. She is an Associate Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. Williams’ first book, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality, is a historical narrative about Baltimore’s public housing development from its inception under the New Deal through much of the last decade of the 20th century. At that point, Baltimore City decided to raze public housing, displacing thousands of Blacks all over Baltimore County and points beyond.
-@mbi
High-res
Guess which one of these gentlemen this post is about?
This pic is from 1969 when he the first African-American trustee at Princeton. Henry currently sits on Princeton’s Advisory Council for the Center for African American Studies with the likes of Randall Kennedy, Hazel Carby, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan & Phylicia Rashad.
Click the pic for an egg.
-@mbi
High-res
“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon.”
“Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”
- David Levering Lewis, NYU historian & Pulitzer Prize winner.
-@mbi
