It is safe to say that we have rounded a bend. And by “we” I have in mind, simultaneously, that enduring plea and effort contained in something dubbed a nation, a country, or, not so lately now, a republic; and, a specific and newly energized segment of U.S. civilization. Ten […]
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The slave, the nigger, the Negro, the Colored, the Afro-American, the African American, the Black does not and has never had the right to vote. To riff off of Calvin Warren’s assertion, “the figure [of the free Black] does not exist. It is impossible for any Black to be free […]
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Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd; Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get back. Let me root, root, root for the home team, If they don’t win, it’s a shame. For it’s one, two, three strikes, […]
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Remembering Sally Hemings* On November 5, 2008 Whose silken fetters all the senses bind And soft captivity involves the mind. Imagination! Who can sing thy force? (Phillis Wheatley. On Imagination.) Sally Hemings Albemarle County, Virginia Dear Miss Phillis Wheatley, Or would you prefer Mrs. Phillis Peters? A name contains so […]
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In our national discussions about sexual assault and sexism that swirled around the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, we veered toward the historical view of sexual assault as a gendered crime. Men played a variety of roles in this national drama—as perpetrators of sexual violence, as raging patriarchs who have been angered […]
“A November’s Tale: Assaults on the Franchise” lends the title and substance to Convergence 3, our spring/summer double-issue, which closes out our inaugural year. We aim here to turn the spotlight on the ballot–supposedly democracy’s proudest achievement and one of the central linchpins of Republican governance. The extent to which […]
Over time, voter suppression as political praxis has produced variously sophisticated means of keeping African Americans and others away from exercising the franchise. Even gerrymandering—the redrawing of electoral districts to produce an outcome favoring one political party and a quite ordinary way of cooking the vote—today seems passé. This notion […]
An tears will not satisfy I to preserve a democrisy whereby youtful lives pay de penalty for politicians’ irresponsibility Michael Smith In his essay “Notes on the House of Bondage,” James Baldwin, contemplating the dispiriting presidential choices in the 1980 election year, dismissed both major candidates for being “as well […]
The story of race in America is as much a story about American institutions as it is a story of individual and collective behaviors, beliefs, and ideals. The transformation of party positions on race equality and the development of institutional capacities to track, shape, and make “race” are central to […]
Somewhere below ground in Waco, Texas, the doomed moderate Belton Piedmont addresses the secretive all-black government in the final chapters of Sutton E. Griggs’s 1899 Afrofuturist novel Imperium in Imperio. A self-avowed patriot, Piedmont hopes to stave off the armed race war envisioned by his friend and revolutionary rival, Bernard […]
I. So there I was, almost at the crossroad Stuck in a sudden storm of bikers, men in leather, engines snarling. Flags spurt skywards. I froze at the metal barricade, the seam of sense unpicked, Brown body splayed. In the aftermath of light, what proof is there of love— Buoyancy […]
In the clash of motives that it inscribes, the term “freedman” and the conditions of existence that it signals are poignantly alluded to in the epigraph that Richard White chooses to inaugurate his exhaustive study of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless […]
There’s a joke in British politics that New Labour, the rebranding of the mainstream left led by Tony Blair in the mid-1990s, quickly morphed into neo-liberalism. Speak with a drawl and New Labour and neo liberal even sound similar. Voted in by the British electorate in 1997 on the promise […]
An interview Essay with Victor LaValle I first met Victor Lavalle in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Washington Heights (NYC) during the time he was drafting what would become his award-winning novel The Changeling. He was writing there, he told me, because it had just the right amount and kind of […]
