Virtual Theme Collection: Body Politics: Making Black Lives Matter

Preface

A few days before June 10, 2020 the day the statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy came crashing down in Richmond, Virginia I held a discussion with Martha Avtandilian, JBS’s SAGE social science publisher, about the immediacy of publishing a response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and what seemed like a third or fourth awakening of the American society to the realities of racial injustice in America. Unquestionably in her mind and mine was the urgency of the situation given the fact that the deep sores of discrimination and racism had festered too long and came bubbling to the front every time the police used their force to crush the life or shoot the life out of a black body. It is out of this discussion that I agreed to go back through issues of the journal and find articles that will show a history of JBS’s response to the continuing crisis of policing, derived from the old slavery paddy-rollers, to the abject numbing on-video portrayals of Black men with White men literally on their necks in contemporary society. Our response has been balanced, rational, and our editorial associates have sought to provide us with a platform for sane discourse on the question of police brutality, that is, where police take actions against unarmed black people with deadly consequences.

During the last year of the Trump Administration in the middle of the worst pandemic to hit the United States of America since the Flu of 1919–1920, the structural, and indeed the intellectual supports for racism seemed to be crumbling, sped on by the demonstrations after the barbaric murder on video of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police.

Fortunately for me where I live, I was able to witness and participate in the tremendous outpouring of what it truly means to be antiracist at heart. It seemed to me that millions of people across the United States had understood Ibram X. Kendi’s appeal for an antiracist movement. Kendi had been clear in his clarion call for more than being nonracist; one had to act in order to bring down the structures of racism.

The Journal of Black Studies was born out of the last great public call for equality, justice and nonviolence after the April 4. 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when Sara Miller McCune and George McCune of SAGE accepted the idea presented by me and Robert Singleton a few months after King’s death to create a journal that would address African American issues from a transdisciplinary perspective. Hence the original idea of JBS was a comprehensive response to all conceivable social issues in society. The first authors came from a variety of disciplines and put their academic skills and resources to the analysis of historical, rhetorical, and sociological concerns. With the publication of JBS in September 1970 the academy and the field of social sciences had opened a new door into the lived experiences of Africans in America and indeed throughout the African diaspora. This was not to be a field defined simply by the discipline of history but we sought to “sustain a full analytical” treatment of African people. No wonder those who published early and frequently during those first years were both activist and intellectual leaders in the field of Black Studies. Paying close attention to the expressions of African agency on the part of African American students at the major universities, including the predominantly white institutions as well as major historically black colleges and universities the authors in the Journal of Black Studies brought fresh scholarly insight into an area of study that had been dominated for a hundred years by those whose interests were usually framed in ways that supported the status quo society. Our authors were often considered “militant” or “revolutionary” though these terms were definitely overused; it would have been better to call our writers during those times nascent Afrocentrists in the sense that they were examining the various nuances, often missed by other scholars, of the sites for African American cultural agency.

The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. had exposed an open wound so deeply entrenched in the society that when it was all over and done with hundreds of cities had gone up in flames, thousands of people had been arrested and scores of African Americans were in jail. King, as phenomenal as he was as a leader of courage, was cowardly gunned down while standing on outside of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. But his death was really emblematic of the hundreds of deaths of Black people at the hands of White people who never wanted to see the end of our enslavement. Many of the people who participated in lynching, burning down black communities, and murdering black leaders were fascists whose aim was to revert to a system where the white race had complete power to suppress all expression of liberation and criticism of the system. They sought to regulate not only our economic condition, as a classical fascist system might, but also to regiment our education, future possibilities, physical bodies, mental attitudes, and competitive opportunities by supporting a racialized white nationalism. In effect, they wished for a slave system where Black people had no rights that Whites were bound to respect.

Many people have written on race and the journals and publications of SAGE Publishing, for example, have been out front in the research on and surrounding race. Alas, race is a problem, but the discourses have rarely been about the nature of racism itself, and this is precisely why Kendi’s work, How to be an Antiracist?, resonates with the nation.

The murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black American man, in Minneapolis by four police officers on May 25, 2020, broke the back of calm in the society and brought forth a flood of protest against police racism, brutality and lack of accountability. The image of a White policeman with his knee on the neck of a handcuffed Floyd lying on his stomach on the ground went around the world as the image of danger and arrogance. This act, and the image of it, fueled the pent-up emotions of a public long tired of the disdain for Black American lives. The police kill Black men at more than twice the rate they kill White men, and the murder of unarmed Black men is unprecedented in a civilized society.

Social scientists argue that race is an illusion and they are correct to announce that this canard has no merits of in science yet the biological illusion still needs more dynamic responses to the philosophies that generate the lack of respect for the black body. At the root of this problem is the hierarchical idea located in the notion of ranking individuals by their supposed race. There is a generator that drives the anxious desire to subdue and kill a black body that frightens the white police; it is the same perception of blacks that continues the unjust use of the court system, the probation procedures, and imprisonment of black people. Thomas Curry’s book, The Man, Not, makes good sense about the construction of myths around black men immediately after the Reconstruction.

I hope that these articles help us peel back the various skins on the onion of race and brutality to expose the core of the problem. The biological illusion of race is not only an invented farce, but it cannot be solved by a discussion about race only. I am convinced by the literature, the origin of race theories, the reaction of social scientists, and the practice of the masses that something more is generating the many mini-racist symptoms that we see in society as well as the grand symbols of infamy of statues and battlefields and military camps or violent outbursts of the racial murders of black people. Although none of the articles I have chosen deal specifically with this issue; they do provide the scholar and the student with a close reading of some of the literature that has appeared in one of SAGE’s journals over the years. Readers may access the online collection here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/jbs/body-politics

Introduction