#evelyn brooks higginbotham

[thatssodivine]

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham African American Lives

[edwardmichealsmith]

References

Anonymous, “Letter to the Editor,” The Rosebud 4, 1 (September 22, 1832).

Aulette, Judy, Judith Wittner, and Kristin Blakely. Gendered Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a slave (1837). 3rd edition. Pittsburgh: John T. Shryock, 1854.

Bourke, Joanna. Rape: Sex, Violence, and History. Great Britain: Virago Press, 2007.

Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn. “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race” Signs 17 (1992): 251-274.

Brownmiller, Susan. On Our Backs: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

Caron, Simone M. Who Chooses? American Reproductive History Since 1830. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2008.

Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Random House, Inc., 1982.

Elder, Robert, “A Twice Sacred Circle: Women, Evangelicalism, and Honor in the Deep South, 1784-1860.” The Journal of Southern History 78, 3 (2012): 579-614.

Foster, Thomas A. “Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery.” Journal of History and Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 445-464.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel-Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race” Signs 17 (1992): 251-274.

Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Hooper, William, “Address on Female Education,” Address on female education, given to the Sedgwick Female Seminary, Raleigh, N.C. (February 27, 1847).

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl., Written by Herself. Edited by Maria Fairchild. Boston: Published for the author, 1861. Accessed online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/eaf/.

Powell, Anastasia. Sex, Power and Consent: Youth Culture and the Unwritten Rules. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Young, Iris Marion. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” Signs 29, 1 (2003): 11-25.

Young, Vernetta D. and Zoe Spencer. “Multiple Jeopardy: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Slavery on Women in Antebellum America,” in Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror, edited by Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, 65-76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

[goodblacknews]

Advanced Placement African American Studies Classes Debut at 60 U.S. High Schools

Advanced Placement African American Studies Classes Debut at 60 U.S. High Schools

The College Board has announced it will begin offering an Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies course at 60 high schools across the U.S. this fall. The AP program, which traditionally gives high school students an opportunity to take college-level courses before graduation, currently covers 38 subjects, including  U.S. government and politics, biology, chemistry, English, European…

[gravalicious]

When Righteous Discontent first came out, it won several book prizes from the American Academy of Religion. The year that it won, we had a big session just around the book. I remember there were people there who made comments to the effect of, "This respectability, it's so snobbish, and it's so middle class." I remember saying to them, you didn't read it carefully then, because this is exactly what it is speaking against. I think that the word respectability connotes a variety of things to people. The word respect has a meaning that is somewhat straightforward. The only reason I say somewhat straightforward is that on the street, you can kill somebody because they disrespected you, but the idea of respect means that you look upon me in a way that makes me feel that you believe there's something of worth in me. That's respect. There's something about the word respectability that I think does conjure in people's minds this front, this facade of feeling that you are better than other people when, in fact, that's not really the meaning of respectability. When I was writing about it, I was interested in how these people who were primarily maids and teachers, for the most part this is a movement made of low-income women, how do they fight for their civil rights? How do they fight for greater voice in their own communities and especially in the churches with these men? As I listened to them in my head give their speeches, as I read their minutes, as I look at the words that they use, I came up with this concept of the politics of respectability, because it is political. Kim, put yourself back in 1950 [with] the segregation signs. You have to go through the backdoor. There's lynching. There's everything from the outside society that's telling you you are inferior and you are not worthy of respect. You are not able to be disrespected. What someone like Nannie Helen Burroughs says, and she's the great champion of this, she says that you are not made in these contexts that are demeaning you. Your definition of yourself, the worth of who you are isn't determined in these contexts of racial discrimination. If you believe that you are worthy of respect and if you live a life that is worthy of respect, then nothing anybody else can say about you can define you. This is really important because now what is a life worthy of respect? For them, it's religious. It's a christian ideology. I think that is what makes some people think, "Oh well, this is middle class." When you go to church, they do teach you certain things like love your neighbor as yourself. Do good to those who aren't necessarily good to you. There is a message of character. That message of character, on some levels, dovetails with what society considers proper behavior. I think we see it best in somebody like a Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King would embody both the values that a very much consonant with what America thinks of itself, I mean America in its ideology, in its creeds, in its precepts. This nation stands for democracy, it stands for freedom, it stands for equality and justice. That's what America has always stood for. We know in reality it doesn't practice any of that. Somebody like a Martin Luther King would espouse those same values of the nation. As a person who went to Morehouse and came from a family that was, by the standards of its time, a middle class family, he would have been taught certain ways to talk to women and to behave in public. Then he has this Christian ideal which also motivates him as a civil rights leader to get out there and fight for civil rights. He's not fighting in a violent way. He's fighting in a nonviolent way. The politics of respectability, and this is the key thing about it, gives you a moral authority to say to the outside world, "I am worthy of respect. You don't respect me, but I'm worthy of respect. You don't treat me like an equal person, but I know that I am an equal person, and because I am an equal person, I'm going to fight for my rights. I'm going to demand equality. I'm not going to let you treat me like a second class citizen." That's the way they interpreted this.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

wrestling with respectability in the age of #blacklivesmatter: a dialogue (forharriet.com 13/10/2015)

[woman-loving]

Politics of Respectability

Selection from Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 1993. As I understand it, this is where the concept of “respectability politics” originated.

The history of black Baptist women discloses not only the gender dimension of the church’s racial mission, but its class dimension as well.[41] The leadership of the women’s convention movement formed part of an emergent class of school administrators, journalists, businesswomen, and reformers who served an all-black community. This educated female elite, frequently consisting of teachers or wives of ministers associated with educational institutions, promoted middle- class ideals among the masses of blacks in the belief that such ideals ensured the dual goals of racial self-help and respect from white America. Especially in the roles of missionary and teacher, black church women were conveyers of culture and vital contributors to the fostering of middle-class ideals and aspirations in the black community. Duty-bound to teach the value of religion, education, and hard work, the women of the black Baptist church adhered to a politics of respectability that equated public behavior with individual self-respect and with the advancement of African Americans as a group. They felt certain that “respectable” behavior in public would earn their people a measure of esteem from white America, and hence they strove to win the black lower class’s psychological allegiance to temperance, industriousness, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual morals.

On the one hand the politics of respectability rallied poor working-class blacks to the cause of racial self-help, by inspiring them to save, sacrifice, and pool their scant resources for the support of black-owned institutions. Whether through white-imposed segregation or black-preferred separatism, the black community’s support of its middle class surely accounted for the development and growth of black-owned institutions, including those of the Baptist church. On the other hand, the effort to forge a community that would command whites’ respect revealed class tensions among blacks themselves. The zealous efforts of black women’s religious organizations to transform certain behavioral patterns of their people disavowed and opposed the culture of the “folk”—the expressive culture of many poor, uneducated, and “unassimilated” black men and women dispersed throughout the rural South or newly huddled in urban centers.[42]

The Baptist women’s preoccupation with respectability reflected a bourgeois vision that vacillated between an attack on the failure of America to live up to its liberal ideals of equality and justice and an attack on the values and lifestyle of those blacks who transgressed white middle-class propriety. Thus the women’s pronouncements appeared to swing from radical to conservative. They revealed their conservatism when they attributed institutional racism to the “negative” public behavior of their people—as if rejection of “gaudy” colors in dress, snuff dipping, baseball games on Sunday, and other forms of “improper” decorum could eradicate the pervasive racial barriers that surrounded black Americans. The Baptist women never conceded that rejection of white middle-class values by poor blacks afforded survival strategies, in fact spaces of resistance, albeit different from their own. Equally important, while the female leaders of the black Baptist church sought to broaden women’s job opportunities and religious responsibilities, they revealed their conservatism in their unquestioning acceptance of man’s sole right to the clergy.

[femgeniuses]

Center-Stage: The Social Performance Issue

Center-Stage: The Social Performance Issue

Created by Sakina Bhatti (Editor), Basimah Curry (Editorial Assistant), Devin Cata (Journalist), Mar Wilson (Journalist), and Daya Stanley (Graphic Designer) during Block 5 2021 “If you’re a young person of color in America, you’ve probably spent a lot of time thinking about how your life is different from that of others, just because of the color of your skin or where your family is from.…

[rauthschild]

Biden Ordered To Pick Black Woman For Vice President—Chooses Slave Owning Asian Instead

By: Sorcha Faal

A gripping new Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) report circulating in the Kremlin today noting the statement made by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the date of the summit of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council is yet to be set, says the reliance on this international body to solve global disputes, that’s already in disarray because of uncertainties surrounding whom the next American leader will be, has suffered another setback due to the bizarre action taking yesterday by socialist Democrat Party leader Joe Biden—the presumptive nominee of his party who was confronted this week by 100 top influential American black men ordering him that: “Failing to select a Black woman in 2020 means YOU WILL lose the election, we don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils, we don’t want to vote the devil we know vs. the devil we don’t because we’re tired of voting for devils period”—an order Biden promptly ignored, and saw him instead choosing as his running mate the first Asian-American vice presidential contender—a person named Kamala Harris, whose mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated to the United States from Tamil Nadu-India in 1960—and whose father Donald Harris, emigrated to the United States from British Jamaica in 1961, thus meaning that Kamala Harris is directly descended from one of the largest slave owners in Jamaica, and as fully acknowledged as true by her own father—is a racist family history belonging to Kamala Harris that’s justifiable in mentioning because the leftist media has already attacked top Republican Party leader US Senator Mitch McConnell because his ancestors were slave owners—though it remains uncertain how one should refer to Kamala Harris, as women no longer exist according to her own socialist ideology—all of which makes it understandable why astute political analysts in the US are now saying things like “Joe Biden actually finds a running mate who’s done more damage to minorities than himself”. 

According to this report, the choosing of a vice presidential running mate by major political party candidates in America has always been a sideshow spectacle, as research has long proved that voters make their choice based on who the presidential candidate is—though in this instance sees Kamala Harris being more consequential due to fears Joe Biden is mentally unfit to hold office, and if winning would see her near immediately becoming president.

In past American elections, this report details, vice president running mates were chosen from States that a presidential candidate needed help in securing—such as in 2016 when Hillary Clinton choose as her running mate a US Senator from Virginia she needed help in winning—but with Kamala Harris being from the socialist Democrat Party stronghold State of California, her choice makes no sense because the voters there are as likely to vote for President Trump as they are to jump in the ocean and swim to India where Harris comes from.

As to the true reason Joe Biden choose Kamala Harris, though, this report notes, is due to the unbending fact that without near 90% of the black vote, no socialist Democrat Party candidate can beat President Trump—a fact based on the reality that blacks comprise 13.4% of the American population, while whites comprise 77%—which means that if these blacks don’t vote as single monolithic whole, the Biden-Harris ticket is doomed—and is a doom rapidly rushing towards them as new polling shows President Trump has an astounding 36% approval rating among black voters.

With Joe Biden now trying to pass off Kamala Harris as being a black person, this report continues, he would have been best advised to have first read the book written by Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham titled “Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920”—wherein Biden would have learned that black mothers reject white America’s depiction of black women as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect or protection by teaching their black daughters to mind their manners, dress and speak appropriately, and remain free from sexual and other vices—a critical fact Biden should’ve known because Kamala Harris launched her political career in a bedroom as the mistress of married Mayor Willie Brown—the same Mayor Brown who warned Kamala Harris last year that “She Can’t Beat Trump”—and this week was the same Mayor Brown that pleaded with Kamala Harris not to accept Biden’s offer to be his vice presidential running mate.

Though little known to the American people, this report explains, Willie Brown is one of the most powerful Democrat Party leaders in California—a power he accumulated over decades of political experience being guided by research such as that done by Dr. Karis Campion of the Department of Sociology University of Manchester—who aside from confirming Professor Brook’s findings that black women detest promiscuous blacks like Kamala Harris that sleep their way into power, revealed in her astounding research paper “You Think You’re Black? Exploring Black Mixed-Race Experiences Of Black Rejection” the concept of “horizontal hostility”—a scientific concept Dr. Campion proves shows why real black people detest mixed-race Asians like Kamala Harris who pretend their black—research that makes clear why 15 socialist Democrat Party presidential candidates lasted longer than Kamala Harris did in the primaries, as virtually no blacks voted for her—and makes explainable why Kamala Harris has only 7% approval in her own home State of California.

Supporting the blatant lie that Asian-American Kamala Harris is a black person, this report continues, is the entire leftist mainstream propaganda media establishment—that when noticing yesterday that Joe Biden needed a script when calling Kamala Harris to tell her she was his running mate pick—while holding his phone upside down—doctored the images of it to keep the American people from seeing what really happened—that was quickly followed by leftist editors at Wikipedia sanitizing the Kamala Harris page to keep other truths about her hidden—but is expected from a leftist media that in the past 24-hours alone, called videos of Black Lives Matters terrorists burning Bibles “Russian disinformation” because a Russian journalist filmed it—and has kept the American people from knowing that another black terrorist in North Carolina walked up to a five-year-old white child named Cannon Hinnant and executed him with a shot to the head as this child’s terrified 7- and 8-year-old sisters looked on—an execution if done by a white man against a black child would ignite a nationwide uproar—but because this child was white, the entire leftist media has ignored it because it doesn’t fit their demonic narrative.

The execution of 5-year-old white child Cannon Hinnant (above left) by black terrorist Darius Sessoms (above right) led newscasts throughout the entire world—except in America where it was ignored.

In an America where it’s now being grimly observed: “There is growing worry these days about whether or not we are headed for another civil war, and whether the divisions in American society are as bad as they were in the run-up to what is still the bloodiest war in American history…In fact, there is no comparison between the divisions between Americans today and in the run-up to the Civil War…The ones today are far worse”, this report concludes, left nearly alone to keep telling the truth about fake black socialist Kamala Harris is President Trump—who yesterday while noting that Kamala Harris was “nasty” and “disrespectful” to Joe Biden, said “She Was My Number One Draft Pick”—after which President Trump branded the Biden-Harris ticket “Slow Joe and Phony Kamala” and released a campaign video about them that was viewed over 3-million time in its first hour of release on social media—and then saw President Trump warning the American people that if the Biden-Harris ticket wins, “You'll Have to Learn to Speak Chinese”—a reference to the Communist Chinese takeover of America should Biden and Harris win—though this doesn’t seem likely to occur according to top American investor genius Jeff Gundlach, “Who Correctly Called The 2016 Presidential Election, And Predicts Trump Will Win Again”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhhVosb0TWc&feature=emb_logo

[instapicsil1]

Educator. Activist. Institution-builder. Nannie Helen Burroughs dedicated her career to preparing African American women to lead—both in the professional world and public life. As a young woman, Burroughs spearheaded efforts to form the Women's Convention (WC) Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention. Swipe to see her Women's Convention conference badge, which features the organization's slogan: "The world for Christ. Women Arise. He calleth for thee." ⛪ With more than a million members, the Women's Convention became a platform African American women used to ensure their voices were heard—both within the denomination and throughout the world. As the Women's Convention's corresponding secretary—a position she held for more than forty years—Burroughs was a driving force behind its growth. As historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham writes, during the organization's first year, Burroughs "labored 365 days, traveled 2,125 miles, delivered 215 speeches, organized 12 societies, wrote 9,235 letters, and received 4,820 letters." Burroughs later served as the organization's president. With the support of the National Baptist Convention as well as Washington D.C.'s African American community, Burroughs founded the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in the nation's capital. 🏫 For Burroughs, women's suffrage was an inextricably linked to African Americans' struggle for freedom, equality, and full citizenship. Writing for "The Crisis" in 1915, she told readers that "[w]hen the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written.” 🗳️ #19thAt100 #BecauseOfHerStory #WomensSuffrage #WomanSuffrage #WomenVote100 #HerVote100 #RightfullyHers #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #VoteHistory #PoliticalHistory #ReligiousHistory #EducationHistory #AfricanAmericanHistory #CivilRightsHistory #AmericanDemocracy #NationWeBuildTogether #FreedomStruggle https://www.instagram.com/p/ByS884dHkSb/

[chuch-ouse-blog]

A BRIEF NOTE ON THE LIVES OF ANNA JULIA COOPER & NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS: PROFILES OF AFRICAN WOMEN EDUCATORS BY RUNOKO RASHIDI & KAREN A. JOHNSON* DEDICATED TO DR. ADELAIDE SANFORD Among the most outstanding African-American educators of the post-reconstruction era of the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century were Dr. Anna Julia Cooper and Ms. Nannie Helen Burroughs. During this extremely difficult and rocky period for African-Americans these dedicated sisters were confronted with the arduous tasks of struggling for racial uplift, economic justice and social equality. Anna Julia Cooper (the eldest of the two women) was born Anna Julia Haywood on August 10, 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of an enslaved African woman, Hannah Stanley, and her White master. From early on Cooper possessed an unrelenting passion for learning and a sincere conviction that Black women were equipped to follow intellectual pursuits. This thinking ran strongly against the popular opinion of the day. To the contrary, Cooper later said that "not far from kindergarten age" she decided to become a teacher. In Cooper's words, speaking on the lack of the emphasis on formal education for Black girls, "Not the boys less, but the girls more." In 1867 Cooper entered St. Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh. In 1925, at the age of sixty-seven, she earned a Ph.D. from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, becoming only the fourth African-American woman to obtain such a degree. At the tender age of 105, after a lifetime of educating African-American youth, Dr. Cooper died peacefully in her home in Washington, D.C. Although exceptionally brilliant Anna Julie Cooper was not an isolated phenomenon. Nannie Helen Burroughs, another remarkable sister, was born on May 2, 1879 in Orange, Virginia, to John and Jennie Burroughs. Nannie Helen Burroughs, described as a "majestic, dark-skinned woman," was only twenty-one years old when she became a national leader, catapulted to fame after presenting a dynamic speech entitled "How the Sisters are Hindered from Helping" at the annual conference of the National Baptist Convention in Richmond, Virginia in 1900. Nannie Helen Burroughs became a school founder, educator and civil rights activist. She identified African-American teachers such as Anna Julia Cooper as important role models. She attended public schools in Washington, D.C., graduated with honors in 1896, studied business in 1902, and received an honorary M.A. degree from Eckstein-Norton University in Kentucky in 1907. An early pupil and eventual colleague of Cooper, Nannie Helen Burroughs devoted her energies to the uplift of African people. Burroughs was a brilliant and powerful orator. Both in the press and on the lecture circuit she denounced lynchings, racial segregation, employment discrimination and the European colonization of Africa. According to Burroughs biographer Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Burroughs' "verbal attacks were coupled with calls to action. During World War I, criticism of President Woodrow Wilson's silence on lynching led to her being placed under government surveillance. Her uncompromising stand on racial equality included a woman's right to vote and equal economic opportunity." Like Anna Julia Cooper, Nanny Helen Burroughs lived a full and accomplished life, dying on May 20, 1961 at the ripe age of eighty-two.

[yasbxxgie]

4 Feet Tall, in Men’s Clothing, She Was an Artistic Genius in 19th-Century Italy

The idea that in order to succeed an artist must first suffer is one with a long history. In that sense, the life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the first black sculptor to gain an international reputation, is instructive, since art historians have judged that “the obstacles [she] overcame are unparalleled in American art.” She suffered, and yet it did not kill her, or kill her career. In all, Lewis created about 60 unique and highly regarded sculptures.

The precise details of Lewis’ early years are unclear. She was most likely born in 1844 or 1845 near Albany, N.Y., to an African-American father and a mother who was of Native American descent. It is possible that the family, including a half-brother, Samuel, lived briefly in Newark, N.J., but by the age of 9, Lewis was orphaned and adopted by her mother’s aunts into a nomadic Mississauga band of the Ojibwe near Niagara Falls. As a child, she was given the Ojibwe name “Wildfire”; learned to catch and cook her own meals; and made and sold moccasins, baskets and other souvenirs.

In 1859 Lewis’ older brother Samuel, who by then had made a fortune in the California Gold Rush, paid Lewis’ tuition for the ladies preparatory program at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin was one of the few institutions open to blacks at that time.

Lewis’ experiences at Oberlin were shaped by the heightened racial tensions of the early Civil War years. When white housemates accused her of poisoning them with Spanish fly, a local mob, long opposed to Oberlin’s interracialism, beat Lewis’ tiny frame—she was only 4 feet tall—and left her for dead. She recovered, only to face her accusers again in court. The case, however, was dismissed for lack of evidence. The following year, 1863, Lewis was again falsely accused, this time of stealing art supplies, and was expelled from Oberlin.

She then moved to Boston, determined to become an artist, and cultivated links with abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child, and others who knew of her from Oberlin. Within a year she had produced her first works—clay-and-plaster medallions and busts of abolitionist and Civil War heroes—and sold more than 100 reproductions of her bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the famed, white colonel of the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. With the proceeds from sales to patriotic Unionists, the fiercely ambitious—and undeniably self-confident—Lewis financed a trip to Italy, first to Florence and then Rome, which was then regarded as the West’s foremost center for sculpture.

Lewis would produce most of her work in Rome, where there was already a vibrant community of expatriate artists—labeled by the writer Henry James as “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’”—with which she became associated, but she was never fully part of its inner circle. Fiercely independent, Lewis refused to hire assistants, and taught herself to carve marble, work that was both physically and artistically demanding.

By the 1870s her studio had become a fashionable place for American tourists to visit. They were intrigued by the diminutive and charming sculptor, often attired in men’s clothing and wearing a distinctive red cap. As in Boston, she continued to make money from terra-cotta or marble busts of Civil War and abolitionist icons, as well as copies of works from classical antiquity.

She produced her first large-scale marble sculpture, The Freed Woman and Her Child, in 1866. Now lost—along with half of her 60 major works—it was the first work by an African-American sculptor to depict the subject of emancipation. She revisited the theme in Forever Free (1867)—now held by Howard University—which she dedicated to Garrison, and which depicts a man and a woman casting off their slave shackles. Among her other notable works are several sculptures of Hagar, the female slave and concubine of Abraham in the Old Testament, with whose travails Lewis clearly identified. “I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered,” she told a journalist in 1871.

Inspired by her Mississauga upbringing and by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” Lewis also created several sculptures depicting Native themes, notably The Old Arrowmaker and His Daughter (also known as The Wooing of Hiawatha), now held by the Smithsonian. She was known for her depictions of American Indians as proud and peaceful, rather than the stereotypical images of half-naked savages.

In the mid-1870s, Lewis took several trips to the United States to exhibit and sell her work. Her most notable visit was in 1876 to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where she was the only African American whose work was exhibited. Her dramatic, life-size piece The Death of Cleopatra was visited by large crowds and was hailed as the one of the most original and striking exhibits at the exposition. As one artist noted, “The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent—and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics … does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.”

After exhibiting the piece again in Chicago in 1878, Lewis placed the 2-ton sculpture in storage in the Windy City and returned to Rome. Her masterpiece somehow ended up in a Chicago saloon and for a time served as a monument to an infamous gambler’s dead horse (also named Cleopatra) who was buried at a racetrack in suburban Chicago. It was discovered nearby in the 1980s, abandoned in the storage room of a shopping mall, having been painted over by a local Boy Scout troop. Following a lengthy and difficult $30,000 restoration, it now resides in the Smithsonian.

In the 1880s, Lewis continued to work and make her home in Rome, but her style was no longer in such great demand. The neoclassical tradition of sculpture was by then being eclipsed by the Romantic themes and style of Auguste Rodin and others. Bronze replaced marble as the medium of choice, and Paris overtook Rome as the center of the art world.

Until recently, the final years of Lewis’ life were largely unknown, other than her meeting with Frederick Douglass and his wife in Rome in 1887. But in 2012, historian Marilyn Richardson—an expert on Lewis’ work—located a death notice for Edmonia Lewis, which showed that her final years were spent in London. She died there in September 1907, in her early 60s, and left behind a modest financial estate.

Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the African American National Biography was first published by Oxford University Press in an award-winning, eight-volume print edition in 2008; a 12-volume second edition followed in 2012. As of 2015, more than 5,500 separate AANB entries are available online as part of OUP’s African American Studies Center. This biography was adapted from the AANB entry by Lisa Rivo.

Steven J. Niven is executive editor of the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Dictionary of African Biography, and the African American National Biography at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is also the author of Barack Obama: A Pocket Biography of Our 44th President.

Photograph:

Edmonia Lewis circa 1870 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)

[africandiasporaphd]

"The point of my article in 1992 was not simply to call attention to the unique intersectionality of black women as historical actors on their own terms. I also criticized monolithic and essentialized renderings of black women, questioning the idea of the “singularity of an Afro-American women’s standpoint”(Higginbotham 1992, 271) and stating that “even black women’s history, which has consciously sought to identify the importance of gender relations and the interworkings of race, class, and gender, nonetheless reflects the totalizing impulse of race in such concepts as ‘black womanhood’ or the ‘black woman crossculturally’—concepts that mask real differences of class, status and color, regional culture, and a host of other configurations of difference."

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

[respectallwomxn]

An Introduction to Respectability Politics

As womxn, we are taught from a young age to dress, talk and act “like a lady”. We are constantly sent implicit messages that there is a right and wrong way to be a womxn. “Good” womxn are docile, nurturing, modest, and quiet. By the time we hit puberty, we are given “the talk”. This talk is not the talk about sex, hormones, and physical growth, but instead a “talk” about self-respect. Womxn who respect themselves cover up their newfound curves. Womxn who respect themselves don’t “give it” up easily. “Good” womxn get married and become mothers. We are given a laundry list of things to do that imply self- respect and garner respect from others. This concept is known as respectability politics.

The term respectability politics was coined in the early 1990s by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a professor of African American history and religion. In her book Religious Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, she described “politics of respectability” disguised as “self-help” towards black womxn within the church. Although the term is relatively recent, the concept and phenomenon have been alive throughout most of history.

I personally define respectability politics as the ways in which we often blame marginalized groups for their oppression and negative experiences. It assumes that those who behave in a certain way will not experience discrimination because they are respectable. According to respectability politics, behaving “respectably” reaps certain social benefits. A culture rampant with respectability politics believes that certain voices, experiences, and bodies matter more than others. Although respectability politics can be found in all disenfranchised populations, we often overlook the ways in which we perpetuate this culture in our attitudes towards womxn. This concept is relevant today because, in the United States, women’s experiences are often invalidated and overlooked. As a result, my guiding question will be “who matters?”. This blog will not only answer the question of “who matters?” but “who does not matter?”. Why are certain bodies and voices more important than others?

[gravalicious]

If you think you are in a fundamentally immoral society, do you take the position of a Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Frederick Douglass that you must be moral, or do you take the position of someone who is immoral? I don't see that as the option. People talk about Malcolm X, but Malcolm X adhered to the politics of respectability. Think of how he looked, how he was dressed, how he spoke. He wasn't a preacher like Martin Luther King, but he had a wonderful speaking [sic]. There was a logic there. For him to say that you need to defend your children and your wives, was that an irrational statement to people who had just come back from World War II and the Korean War and they'd been fighting for other peoples children and other peoples lives? What he was saying wasn't irrational. Malcolm X did not like the "N word." He would never have used it. He didn't even like the word Negro, remember? He didn't like the idea of drugs in our community. That is the definition of respect. The way he differed from King was in the level of nonviolence that King was willing to die for. He didn't believe in the turning of the cheek philosophy of Christianity, so that was one of the big issues. Both of those men believed in a politics of respectability. Then you understand this not to mean something about snobbery or looking down at poor people or trying to be like white people. This is not what this is about. Again, it's about character, and it is about a moral compass.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Wrestling with Respectability in the Age of #blacklivesmatter: A Dialogue (13/10/2015) [For Harriet]

[woman-loving]

I’m curious about “respectability politics” and how it applies to variations on the “born this way“ / “it’s not a choice” argument for toleration of homosexuality.

I’ve heard that “respectability politics” was theorized by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920, which I have not read yet. (Although this might be a good time to start it, cause I’m just about to finish my current book!) My impression was that it referred to appeals to middle-class norms of respectability as a basis for claims to citizenship and protection and nondiscrimination under the law.

I associate the “it’s not a choice” discourse (and I’m not entirely sure if that’s a bit different from the “born this way” discourse) mostly with a counterargument to conservative Christian pronouncements about homosexuality in the US. I had previously rejected the idea that this argument was a form of “respectability politics,” because I didn’t think that “not being able to choose your sexuality” was a typical marker of middle-class respectable citizenship. I had instead described this argument as “toleration politics,” where, rather than being seen as meeting moral (or citizenship) requirements just as well as everyone else, a special exemption from the standard requirement was being requested based on a (tragic) inability to fulfill it.

But I’m thinking about some things I’ve read and feel like variations of these arguments (which each have their own particularity, but also some commonalities imo) may have more to do with respectability than I originally thought.

But the other part of the equation is that they may involve appeals to religious patriarchal moral authorities. And I’m curious about the relationship between patriarchal religious morality--which I would basically describe like that, although I’m trying to work “religious” out of it--and class and citizenship dynamics. Because it seems like, at least in Christianity (and also in Islam from what I know about it), the acknowledged orthodox sexual morality is patriarchal and doesn’t authorize sex outside heterosexual marriage, even if it overlooks it. (But what variations might I be overlooking because they’re not considered orthodox by more institutionalized authorities?) Is there an automatic link between orthodox patriarchal sexual morality and “middle-class respectability,” just because the former is taken as a basis for the later? In the US, appeals to Christian patriarchal morality are also important to citizenship given the influence of Christian conservatives in politics, but is this also/only about middle-class ideals? (This has all got me thinking about the argument I heard Naomi Goldenberg make on The Religious Studies Project that religions can be understood as vestigial states.) I’m also thinking of religious authority here in terms of patriarchal authority: is this a good way to think about it and how is it incomplete?

Anyway, there are some passages that have been fitting themselves together in my brain:

Karen, editor of Frauenliebe, used sexological concepts of congenital and acquired homosexuality to draw a strict boundary between the two. She argued that anyone seeking same-sex love out of enjoyment of transgression [acquired homosexuality] damaged society and should be "separated from the public." On the other hand, Karen continued, "Same-sex behavior, entered into voluntarily and clearly by both partners [congenital homosexuality], belongs, like every intimate heterosexual behavior, to the realm of things one accepts but does not talk about."[68] Karen also warned aspiring writers to avoid writing explicitly about sexual experience in their stories and essays.[69]

Categorical exclusion shaped a debate in Frauenliebe about bisexuality. Like prostitutes, bisexuals were excluded from homosexual community. Frauenliebe printed fifteen responses to a letter asking readers to express their view on women who had relationships with both sexes.[70] They saw homosexuality as moral and bisexuality as immoral. It was not only movement leaders who wanted to discipline sexual desire in their followers. Letters from readers grouped bisexual women with prostitutes and "sensual" heterosexual women, accusing all of seeking homosexual experiences out of curiosity or sensual desire rather than as an expression of inner character.[71] [...]

Vilification of bisexual women allowed women the opportunity to enter into the classification and definition work of sexology and to create a purified figure of the female homosexual suitable for political citizenship. The "sexual" in homosexual was tamed through strict denial that irresistible desire defined the category. Rejection of prostitutes and bisexuals allowed women to construct "female homosexuality" as materially and sexually pure. As a type, they argued, "true" homosexuals kept desire under the control of the individual will.

-- Marti M Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933, 2015 Fuller quote here. This one links sexual morality and citizenship most directly and perhaps in the most “respectable” way (the realm of things you don’t talk about).

To understand how MSM is read, it is important to examine how explicit and implicit boundaries are drawn around the category gay. Consider, for example, a passage from Paul Farmer in which he claims that, in recent years, there have been fewer HIV cases than predicted among gay men in the United States, a category he implicitly racializes as White via the contrast with “injection drug users, inner-city people of color, and persons originally from poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean.”21(p47) He further excludes gay from poor and suggests that “males involved in prostitution are almost universally poor, and it may be their poverty, rather than their sexual preference, that puts them at risk of HIV infection. Many men involved in homosexual prostitution, particularly minority adolescents, do not necessarily identify as gay.”21(p47) With this juxtaposition, Farmer seems to suggest that same-gender behavior among poor men of color (especially youth) is sex work rather than sex for pleasure and is devoid of identity and community; same-gender behavior among White men is read as synonymous with gay identity.

Compare these assumptions with a recent ethnographic report on men at risk for HIV in Dakar, Senegal.22 While many of these “men who have sex with men” are poor and engage in sex work, the authors found that they have indigenous sexual-minority identities that are differentiated and socially meaningful. Senegalese sexual-minority identities serve as a basis for social organization, including, but not limited to, sexual roles. The authors describe ibbi as men who “tend to adopt feminine mannerism[s] and to be less dominant in sexual interactions,”22(p505) whereas yoos are men who “are generally the insertive partner.” They also stress that the categories have “more to do with social identity and status than with sexual practices.”22(p506) [...]

Is MSM a useful term for describing groups that eschew prominent LGB categories? Much has been made of the fact that men on the DL lead secret lives and do not consider themselves gay.25,26 But DL is not a behavioral category that can be conveyed as MSM. As Frank Leon Roberts has put it, “DL is . . . about performing a new identity and embracing a hip-hop sensibility [italics added].”27DL functions not as a nonidentity but as an alternative sexual identity and community denoting same-gender interest, masculine gender roles distinct from the feminized sissy or faggot, Black racial/ethnic identity, and a dissociation from both White and Black middle-class gay cultures.26–28

-- “The Trouble With “MSM” and “WSW”: Erasure of the Sexual-Minority Person in Public Health Discourse,“ by Rebecca M Young and Ilan H Meyer, published in American Journal of Public Health, July 2005. This one doesn’t deal with the “it’s not a choice" argument directly, but suggests who people might want to exclude and have actually excluded in practice from categories of “sexual orientation" and “born this way” gay identity.

Omar’s analysis of linguistic terms has direct impact upon the issue of interpretation of the Qur’an. This analysis, published in 1997, predated the El-Moumni Affair by four years, yet illustrates exactly the conflation of terms which the imam pronounced in that controversial interview. Omar writes, “Many words are used to express sexual relationships that take place between man-and-man or between woman-and-woman. . . . Whether in modern standard Arabic or local dialects, there are terms like sexual deviance (al-shudhudh al-jinsiyya) and sodomy (al-liwat) and also homosexuality (al-junusiyya). . . . The problem is that most people use these different terms as synonyms, creating a situation of naming experiences with names that do not really fit, thereby generating misunderstanding and confusion about the topic of sexual orientation. . . . I see the critical importance of writing about homosexuality as the attempt to remove these confusing mix-ups of terms and issues.”[15] In this crucial passage, Omar explains that his project is to differentiate between homosexuality and sodomy. In his understanding, the Qur’an condemns sodomy as the act of anal penetration rather than homosexuality as sexual orientation, while the Islamic legal tradition mistakenly conflates the two.[16]

The distinction between homosexuality and sodomy makes sense if one asserts that there is a psychological reality called sexual orientation, which is separate from and prior to any sexual act. He writes, “Sex is a phenomenon that happens by way of the body, whereas sexuality is a matter existing at the level of psyche and personality.”[17] In his analysis, only a person with a psychological identity of constant and exclusive same-sex desire should be called “homosexual” (junusi in his terminology, or mithli jinsiyya in the Arabic terminology of other contemporary writers). The person who performs same-sex acts without doing so within the framework of exclusively homosexual orientation can be described as sodomite (luti). It is this behavior that characterizes the Tribe of Lot, who wanted to perform same-sex acts for reasons other than as a genuine expression of their sexual identity and psychological persona.[18] Omar’s analysis challenges classical Islamic law. Jurists instituted practical norms forbidding same-sex acts such as sodomy (liwat), with the assumption that those performing them were, in their inmost character, actually heterosexual (or at least functionally bisexual).

--Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, by Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, 2014. I read this one yesterday. I can’t be sure whether bisexual people are considered at all, even as a footnote, in Omar’s analysis, and if they are, whether their pursuit of same-gender sex would be categorized with the acceptable homosexuals or unacceptable heterosexuals. I’m not sure here if Omar has in mind for sodomy rape specifically, or any anal penetration, or sexual activity (anal or not) between men that’s perceived as ‘voluntary’ rather than following the demands of exclusive sexual orientation.

But I think it’s interesting how intent/context/constraint of orientation is factored into ethical analysis here and in the first quote, in a way that accepts some forms of or reasons for having same-gender sex as unethical or socially disruptive. And in the first quote, these ‘voluntary’ expressions are imagined to be rooted in hypersexuality and sex work, distinctly un-middle-class. The last quote is engaging with Islamic legal traditions as well as theology, and I don’t know much about how this articulates with “citizenship,” although the author was writing in the Netherlands where LGBT rights were guaranteed by secular authorities.

Anyway, that’s what was bouncing around my head last night.