‘The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win.’
—Colin Kaepernick
Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.
Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,
Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.
Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.
Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.
To read
Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.
Tabella dei contenuti
Contents
Preface by Colin Kaepernick ix
Part One: HOW WE GOT HERE
On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory,
and Other Felonious Ideas 2
Robin D. G. Kelley
Black Studies Is Political, Radical, Indispensable, and Insurgent 16
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Part Two: THE HISTORY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) 26
David Walker
“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852) 28
Frederick Douglass
“The New Master and Mistress” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) 33
Harriet Jacobs
“Our Raison D’être” from A Voice from the South (1892) 35
Anna Julia Cooper
“Introduction” from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (1931) 37
Zora Neale Hurston
“Political Education Neglected” from The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) 41
Carter G. Woodson
“The Propaganda of History” from Black Reconstruction in America (1935) 44
W. E. B. Du Bois
“The San Domingo Masses Begin” from The Black Jacobins (1938) 48
C. L. R. James
“The Origin of Negro Slavery” from Capitalism and Slavery (1944) 50
Eric Williams
“A Talk to Teachers” (October 16, 1963) 53
James Baldwin
Circa l’autore
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020, and From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a 2021 Mac Arthur Foundation Fellow. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, among others. Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
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