COLONIALISM & INSTITUTIONS
White Colonial Ideologies and the Institutionalization of Power
the culture of black girl tokenism
Growing up, seeing black girls on television made me appreciate my skin color and inspired me to be an actress. But I never really paid close attention to the role of black girls on syndicated cable shows. Lately I've noticed that a lot of black roles in programs I watch are grounded in tokenism. Tokenism was established in the 1950s and was termed in the 1970s. In the late 60s and early 70s another form of token was established, “the token black”. According to Ruth Thibodeau in her piece From Racism to Tokenism:
John H. Bracey, Jr., a pioneer of Black Studies
Andrew Rosa, author (top row, second from left); John H. Bracey, Jr. (front row, fourth from left), Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, South Carolina Oct. 2, 2019.
WHITE PEOPLE CAN’T TALK ABOUT RACE
I am the grandson of a sharecropper on my father’s side. He had a simple philosophy about firearms: “better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” Racism, then as now, represented a mortal threat, be it physical violence of the lynch mob or the systematic violence exercised by the legal system. My maternal grandfather was raised by a single mother who was born into slavery and washed clothes for white folks for a living. Nevertheless, she made sure that her ten children learned to read
From Me to You
In this episode, I speak with Deidra R Moore Janvier, Esq. about her new book, From Me to You: The Power of Storytelling and Its Inherent Generational Wealth.