A Book Celebrating Black History in Philadelphia

This week in North Philly Notes, Amy Jane Cohen, author of Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, writes about Philadelphia’s African American experience.

When Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926, he was not advocating for Black history to be the focus of only seven days of the year. In his view, “Negro History Week is the week set aside by the Association for the Study of Negro Life & History for the purpose of emphasizing what has already been learned about the Negro during the year.” Unfortunately, Woodson’s vision did not come to fruition. Even when expanded to a month in 1976, far too many American educators came to think of February as the one time of year to pay attention to the Black experience.

Fortunately, however, students in Philadelphia’s public high schools have the privilege of spending an entire year studying African American history. In 2005 the School Reform Commission unanimously passed a mandate making African American history a graduation requirement. I had the privilege of teaching that course from its inception until I retired from the school district in 2013. I have continued, however, to read and write about Black history, with an emphasis on the Philadelphia experience.

I’ve been particularly interested in how that history—much of which has received increased attention in recent years—is reflected in the landscape. Whether through the many blue and gold historical markers sprinkled through the city, or as a full-fledged monument such as the Octavius V. Catto memorial at City Hall, Philadelphia is full of information about the long and continuing presence of Black Philadelphians.

When Black History Month 2024 began, my book, Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, had just been published. The book is meant for anyone with an interest in Philadelphia history. For those not familiar with the city’s Black history, the nineteen chapters will provide a solid overview of African Americans in Philadelphia from the late seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth century. People already knowledgeable about this history will be able to view it through a new lens.

Consider, for example, Reverend Richard Allen. Born enslaved to Benjamin Chew, the first Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Allen later bought his freedom and became a Methodist preacher in late 18^th century Philadelphia, the national center of free Black life. Along with Absalom Jones, Allen founded the Free African Society, a mutual aid society that was the first independent Black organization in the United States.

After being part of a group of Black worshippers evicted from St. George’s United Methodist Church (still an active congregation at Fourth and Vine Streets), Allen purchased a lot at Sixth and Lombard Streets that has been home to what became known as Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church since before the turn of the nineteenth century. No other property in the nation has been Black owned for this long a time. The name of the church is a reference to its being the founding home of the AME denomination of Christianity, a sect that has spread throughout the country and the world.

A remarkable leader, Richard Allen has long been honored in the Philadelphia landscape. Philadelphia’s first federally funded public housing project, the Richard Allen Homes, was named in 1941. Historical markers for both Mother Bethel and the Free African Society were installed at Sixth and Lombard in the early 1990s thanks to an effort by the late Charles Blockson. To commemorate the bicentennial of the founding of the AME denomination, in 2016 a statue of Allen was installed at the corner of Sixth and Lombard in the Mother Bethel parking lot, and a large mural of Allen was painted at 38th and Market Streets.

An additional mural depicting Richard Allen was recently unveiled on Washington Avenue in Queen Village. In 1830, the last year of Allen’s life, he organized the first Colored Convention, a meeting of Black leaders to strategize on improvements to the lives of African Americans. Colored Conventions continued to be held until the 1890s, and eight of them took place in Philadelphia. The mural depicts Richard Allen perched atop a triangle-shaped pantheon of Colored Convention leaders and participants.

Most significant to me as a resident of Allens Lane in Mount Airy, one block of Allens Lane (named for William Allen, a Philadelphia mayor and an enslaver) was renamed Richard Allen Lane in February 2022. Eight months later, our SEPTA Regional Rail station was renamed Richard Allen Lane station and two informational panels about Allen and Mother Bethel were installed nearby. There is poetic justice in the fact that this station is situated less than half a mile from Chew Avenue, the street named for Allen’s enslaver.

These alterations to the landscape may seem small and insignificant, but as State Representative Chris Rabb said at the dedication ceremony for Richard Allen Lane, “When we take time to research our history, it gives us a chance to reflect and correct choices made with the inclusion or consideration of a diversity of stakeholders. We must closely examine the history we choose to memorialize and honor, especially versions of the past validated by false narratives that marginalize the value of Black people and other communities of struggle.”

As Black History Month 2024 comes to a close, I hope you’ll join me in seeking out, and perhaps even advocating for, reflections of Philadelphia’s African American experience. Please check my website for upcoming speaking engagements or to inquire about inviting me to speak (amyjanecohen.com).

An interview with Jonathan Graubart

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost an interview with Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, which first appeared in the Academe blog on November 6.

BY JENNIFER RUTH

The situation in the Middle East demands the best of all of us. Yet so many capitalize on the moment to harness the conflict to their own domestic “culture wars” agenda. Typical are op-eds like this one, arguing that contextualization, when in support of Palestinian refugees, amounts to little more than illiberal “identity politics.” In another one, Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing for the Atlantic, short-circuits attempts to raise the context of mid-century colonialism by heaping scorn on “the decolonization narrative,” calling it “a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19^th century.” We need more forums where we hear from academics who have thought long and hard about the history and can move us past the binaries that have come to dominate the discourse—academics like Jonathan Graubart, professor of political science at San Diego State, who wrote this post and whose book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs was published this year.

Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism places readers in dialogue with thinkers like Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Ella Shohat, and, of course, as the subtitle indicates, Hannah Arendt. I just finished Graubart’s chapter on Arendt and was reminded of all the reasons why “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man” in Origins of Totalitarianism remains one of the most important pieces ever written. The “solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees,” Arendt wrote, demonstrating how linking self-determination to nation-states has produced a crisis of statelessness in every part of the globe. Graubart’s deeply insightful and necessary book enlists Arendt and other voices to establish “a foundation for a contemporary dissenting Jewish perspective, which challenges the fundamental premise of Zionism and reconceives Jewish self-determination to require a just and interactive co-existence among Jews and Palestinians” (4).

I asked Jonathan if he were willing to answer a few questions for the blog and he graciously agreed.

JR:  Why did you feel compelled to write this book?

JG: I’ve been active in the Jewish peace and dissent movement for about thirty-five years and in scholarly research on Israel-Palestine for two decades. The grim direction of Israeli society and its stance toward Palestinians led me to undergo a fundamental probing of what went wrong with Zionism and of how to reimagine Jewish self-determination to be compatible with a just coexistence of Jews and Palestinian Arabs. For inspiration, I looked back to a group of far-sighted dissenting Jewish Zionists from the pre-state era, who I label Humanist Zionists. They looked to the ancient holy Jewish site of Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing just institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In opposition to the mainstream Zionists, they opposed a Jewish nation-state because doing so would subjugate and displace the majority Arab population in Palestine and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. More generally, the Humanist Zionists warned the Zionist movement—albeit with no success—against embracing nationalism and imperialism, the two umbrella dynamics that proved devastating to Europe, the world, and to the Jews in particular.

These dissenters were not a large group but included influential Jewish figures, such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and, my personal favorite, Hannah Arendt. They proposed a binational federation that would allow for a just and egalitarian coexistence of Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities. Although the Humanist Zionist vision lost out, I have found that its insights for advancing both a reckoning of the harms inflicted by the Zionist project and a new vision of Jewish self-determination have become more important than ever.

JR: Has the reception of your book been impacted by the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza?

JG: These events have sparked greater interest in my book. I’ve had receptive audiences when presenting my book to universities in the US and England and been invited to speak on multiple media outlets, including Al Jazeera Arabic, a progressive Black radio station in Philadelphia, and the Majority Report with Sam Seder. People are much more interested in learning about alternative visions and programs for coexistence. Most gratifying has been the warm reactions I’ve received from Jewish college students. To be sure, my book talk was cancelled at both Oxford University and Cambridge University because of pressure placed on the sponsoring departments to avoid topics that appeared overly critical of Zionism.

JR: Apart from the book, you have a long record of criticizing Israel’s grave abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law, as reflected most recently in your op-ed for Common Dreams, “Why One-Sided US Condemnation of Hamas is Morally Tone-Deaf, Self-Absolving, and Counter-Productive.” You have also raised regular concerns about the efforts of mainstream American Jewish organizations to chill critical discussion on college campuses of Israeli policies. What do your experiences tell us about the current state of academic freedom in the US?

JG: There has been a growing disjuncture over the past several decades on American campuses. On one side is a robust criticism of Israeli policies and US complicity and empathy for Palestinians. This shift extends to Jewish students, who are much more likely than older Jews to consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid. On the other side are campus Hillels, affiliated Israel-advocacy groups, and a network of well-endowed Israel-advocacy groups ranging from far-right groups, such as the Canary Mission, and centrist ones, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Part of their advocacy consists of weaponizing the charge of antisemitism to discredit individuals and organizations they deem hostile to Israel. Guided by the definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which employs the expansive language of “double standards” and disproportionality, the Israel-advocacy networks have lobbied colleges and universities to classify anti-Zionism, support for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and other strong criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. Crucially, they are backed by high-end donors and leading politicians. In 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order that empowers the Department of Education to apply the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a guide to find violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  President Biden has not rescinded this order. Advocacy groups have already mobilized this new legal tool to take on university programs linked to Middle East issues. [JR: See the AAUP’s 2022 Statement “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism”]

The Israel-advocacy networks primarily target two categories of people and organizations. One is critical Jewish academics, such as myself, who link our analysis to a distinct Jewish perspective. We are seen as dangerous for disrupting the narrative that all Jews identify closely with the position taken by the establishment advocacy groups. At San Diego State, a number of local groups and individuals have warned Jewish students away from certain of my classes, and appealed to university leaders to either have me removed from public panels on Palestine-Israel or properly “balanced” by a supposed “pro-Israel” Jewish voice. Because I am a tenured professor sufficiently invested in these issues to sustain personal attacks and at a campus where academic freedom is mostly protected, I have not been silenced. Not all Jewish academic critics, however, have enjoyed my luck.

The second targeted group are primarily Arab and other Muslim students and groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Hard-right Israel-advocacy groups, such as the Canary Mission and Stand with Us, openly intimidate students with hostile questions, especially women wearing hijabs, and place students on various “wanted” lists of antisemites and terrorist supporters. At SDSU, I have seen a number of students traumatized by such “doxing” and others who have decided not to express a critical opinion in public. The organization Palestine Legal maintains a more comprehensive compilation across the country of such instances.

The current conflict has intensified the intimidation campaigns. Hillel International, the ADL, and others are encouraging Jewish students to file Title VI complaints. The ADL and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law are imploring universities to investigate their SJP chapter for giving material support to terrorists. Florida has already moved to ban SJP from its colleges. Importantly, the attacks are not limited to those who arguably expressed support for the initial Hamas invasion but extend to all those who added an “and” to their condemnation of Hamas’ atrocities. Anyone who has provided a broader context and/or also condemned the nature of Israel’s horrific response has been accused of “moral equivalency” and soft on terrorists. In other words, the very act of providing a broader understanding, an essential task of universities, is now deemed as antisemitism or, in the case of Jewish critics, “self-hating.”

Sadly, antisemitism, as well as Islamophobia, has surged in the US, including on college campuses, and demands condemnation and proactive measures. But mobilizing the charge of antisemitism to suppress much-needed scrutiny of Israeli actions is not the way to proceed. As Hannah Arendt argued decades ago, the answer lies in solidarity with all oppressed and probing scrutiny not just of outside persecution but the wrongful actions of one’s own community. The zero-sum, hardline nationalist path chosen by partisan Israel-advocates represents a step backward, an anti-antisemitism of fools.  It is, thus, more urgent than ever to reinvigorate robust discussion and scrutiny, which demands vigorous defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.

Jonathan Graubart is a professor of political science at San Diego State University who specializes in the areas of international relations, international law, Zionism and Jewish dissent, Israel-Palestine, the United Nations, normative theory, and resistance politics and the author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs.

Identity Politics and Racialized Gang Conflict

This week in North Philly Notes, Robert Weide, author of Divide & Conquer, writes about growing up surrounded by racial division and sectarian conflict.

Since I was a child, racial divisions and gang conflicts have permeated my experience. I grew up in Los Angeles, the reputed “gang capitol” of the United States, during the peak years of the violent crime rate in the late 1980s and 1990s. I was 15 years old in the peak year of violent crime in Los Angeles (and the nation) in 1993. Like many children my age, I joined a neighborhood crew that could be described as a gang at the age of 13. The principle draw for my associations and affiliations was that that I was of mixed-race heritage. Having always been excluded from every category in America’s racial taxonomy, I found a sense of belonging and camaraderie with my homeboys.

Ours was a sort of junior gang known colloquially as “tagbangers”, associated by friendships and family with the two predominantly Latino Sureño affiliated gangs in our community, Culver City 13 and 18 Street, each of whom were embroiled in racialized conflicts with African American Crip and Blood affiliated gangs respectively. While gang violence was endemic to our existence at the time and funerals for boys and young men were a regularly occurring ritual in our world, one particular murder, that occurred less than a month after my 18^th birthday, had an indelible impact on me. I recount the narrative of my friend Eddie’s murder at the hand of an African American Blood affiliated gang member in the opening stanza of my book. At the time we took for granted the presumption that predominantly Latino Sureño and predominantly African American Crip and Blood affiliated gangs were natural enemies and the animosity that carried over both gang and racial lines seemed as inevitable to us as the sky is blue.

I wasn’t until I became educated that I began to question how and why we had found ourselves in those racialized gang identities and how those oppositional identities served to orient us in conflict with one another across racialized gang lines. After reading about the history of capitalism, the race concept, and nationalist ideology, I realized that our fratricidal blood feuds only served to insulate the real cause of our frustration and anger, the ruling classes whose wealth and privilege only exist at our expense. That epiphany melted away decades of racial resentment and sectarian hostility I had harbored compelling me to finally realize that there is no them and us, there’s just us. That is the epiphany that I hope this book brings to many other young men like me both in the U.S. context and around the world—that we have been used for generations as the instruments of our own oppression, fighting one another instead of defending one another in the face of skyrocketing wealth stratification, burgeoning neo-fascist movements, and impending ecological collapse.

As a result of my education I also realized that the race concept, nationalist ideology, and the contemporary identity politics so pervasive in academia and the media are the conceptual tools that American oligarchy uses to compel us to oppose one another, just as white supremacy did for generations before us (and in many ways still does today). That is why I wrote this book, not just to examine racialized gang conflict, but, moreover, to expose the conceptual foundations of racialized sectarian conflict in contemporary America and the modern world at large. The foundations of these conflicts are predicated on and continue to be perpetuated by purveyors of identity politics in academia and the media. This book is an attempt to challenge those who perpetuate identity division and sectarian conflict.

Only by understanding the history of how we have been divided can we discard our oppositional identities and instead join in solidarity to resist our collective oppression. While I harbor little hope of dissuading the contemporary purveyors of identity politics in academia and the media who are personally and professionally invested in perpetuating identity divisions in our society, my ambition is that the book I have written will trigger the same epiphany I had in scholars who have not staked their careers on promoting division and conflict, and most importantly, provoke that epiphany in the parties to sectarian conflicts themselves, particularly gang members. Facing unprecedented wealth stratification, burgeoning neo-fascist movements, and ecological calamity the likes of which the human race has never known, we cannot miss the opportunity to put our differences aside and join in solidarity to save our children’s future before it’s too late.

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to build community

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to build community

Paul Farber and Ken Lum, co-editors of our new book Monument Lab penned this entry on community building.

From coeditor Paul Farber:

When we started Monument Lab, it was not a fully-realized curatorial project or intervention—it was a classroom experiment. Ken and I were teaching in Fine Arts and Urban Studies, respectively, and were galvanized by our conversations with our students about representation, equity, and memory. We each spent time with scholarly texts and we also moved outside of our classes into public spaces as their own primary sources. We met one another, and connected with a circle of collaborators after that expanded what we could have ever dreamed of on our own. We iterated and took our questions outside to the courtyard of City Hall in 2015 for our first discovery phase exhibition. We eventually that moved to public squares and parks around the city for the citywide project with Mural Arts Philadelphia documented in the book, and now work in other cities with similar goals of critically engaging monuments we have inherited and unearthing the next generation of monuments.

We have been fortunate to work with a range of artists, writers, and organizers*. Some have artworks and essays represented in this book. Others put fingerprints and directed their own forms of expertise to the project to make this possible. We hope people will read the essays, but we hope people also tend to the captions, credits, and thank you’s, as they give insights into how monuments could be and are made, critiqued, and re-imagined. This was a profoundly collaborative effort and that is the point.

There is no single fix to our monumental landscape. There are ways of engaging the moment worth nodding to by many people representing previously exisiting and ongoing approaches. This includes antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer, ecological, and other systems of social justice perspectives that take long first steps toward redress. These practitioners understand we live at once in the deep seated past, changing present, and unknowable future. The book and the work of Monument Lab is meant to document collective aspirations for art and justice and serve an active, living approach to history.

Enter Karyn Olivier, The Battle is Joined, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

Sharon Hayes, If They Should Ask, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

From editor Ken Lum

I just received Deborah Thomas’ book Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. She is an esteemed colleague at Penn and we both co-taught a course in Kingston, Jamaica that looks at a major violent incursion that took place in the impoverished neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in 2010. From this moment of eruption, there followed an uneven and halting pattern of attempts at recognition, redress and reconciliation for the many human lives affected, and continues to affect, by the incursion. Although a different context, as I started reading this book, it made me think about Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, the new book from Temple University Press that Paul Farber and I edited. 

There are many sites all over the world, even sites within sites, such as neighborhoods within neighborhoods or streets within streets, whereby were they truly examined in a holistically democratic and critical sense, would reveal many of the same flailing patterns that stymies institutional and official initiatives that attempt to confront issues of human trauma and under-recognition. I started thinking about how Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia is not just a book but also a method of thinking about matters of address and redress that offers no presaged prescription or anticipated conclusion. What Monument Lab offers is a way of thinking about the world in as open a manner as possible. Monument Lab is a project of inclusion including the real inclusion of Philadelphia’s many unheard voices. Monument Lab recognizes the untapped wisdom of the unacknowledged peoples and the truths that they offer. Monument Lab is a means rather than an end, but one that produces hope in the coming together of voices. 

Monument Lab draws on visual art, oral histories, scholarship and subjugated knowledges—there is no one knowledge that takes precedence over another. It is this openness in both thinking and method that accounts for whatever success Monument Labhas been able to achieve.

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*Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry, and the editors 

Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson

Is It McCarthyism Yet?

This week in North Philly Notes, Rachel Ida Buff, author of Against the Deportation Terror, writes about immigrant rights in this xenophobic era.

Travel bans based on nations of origin; local law enforcement officials compelled to perform federal surveillance work; lists of suspected subversives; prohibition of solidarity or sanctuary work; massive deportation; and the disappearance of the names of the deported from mass media. These recent trends are part of a renewed xenophobic turn in U.S. politics. They also have historical precedent in the infamous era of McCarthyism.

Often filtered through middle school readings of The Crucible, memories of McCarthyism tend to feature an honest person confronting the inquisitorial voices of Joe McCarthy and his notorious House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC). But the McCarthyist Red Scare featured assaults against foreign-born activists as well as a massive and well-publicized roundup of Mexican Americans in the Southwest and California: Operation Wetback.

Well before the heyday of HUAC, anti-communist legislators succeeded in passing laws aimed at curtailing the allegedly subversive activities of “foreign-born radicals.” The 1940 Smith, or Alien Registration, Act made advocating governmental overthrow, or belonging to any group believed to advance such an agenda, deportable offenses. Subsequent laws extended deportability to include guilt by association, as well as targeting particular areas of the globe as undesirable nations of origin for immigrants attempting to enter the United States.

These anti-subversive laws were frequently used against immigrant labor and community leaders accused of “UnAmerican activities,” like organizing for wages and rights.  These foreign-born Americans were vulnerable to McCarthyism, much as contemporary Muslim and Arab American leaders are subject to enhanced scrutiny and the possibility of detention and deportation.

Under the Smith Act and subsequent McCarthy era laws, local law enforcement agents often provided evidence in the trials of immigrants accused of subversive activities.  The push for 287(g) and “secure communities” policies today has clear antecedent in this use of municipal forces. As many police unions point out, however, this use of local policing for surveillance and repression alienates immigrants, making all communities more dangerous.

Billed as “cleaning up the border” of “illegal aliens” suspected of political subversion, Operation Wetback commenced in 1954. This Immigration and Naturalization Service campaign eventually resulted in the deportation of a quarter million Mexican Americans, some of them legal residents and American citizens. (Estimates vary; in 2015 then-candidate Donald Trump claimed that this program resulted in 1.5 million deportations.)

While unsuccessful in stopping the flow of migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetback institutionalized the kind of deportation sweeps of immigrant communities currently taking place. And it was during this campaign that the names of those in deportation proceedings vanished from popular media accounts, being replaced by the ominous science fiction of the “illegal alien.” How many people who do not interact regularly with immigrant communities can name just one of the over two hundred thousand deported in 2017?

Campaigns of repression, like McCarthyism or the wave of xenophobia prevalent today, portray foreign-born people as dangerous, subversive, and UnAmerican. Their power is to rob vulnerable non-citizens of their power and livelihoods. For example, the announcement of the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was timed to coincide with the first day of school, forcing thousands of young DACA recipients to experience this traditional time of excitement with dread.

Brave individuals stood before HUAC and refused to name names, eventually exposing the grim machinations of repression as the real UnAmerican activities. Similarly, immigrant rights advocates labor to defend the rights of those targeted by the forces of xenophobia and hate. Their efforts are part of the struggle to defeat McCarthyism, then and now.

Examining institutional responses to campus sexual violence

This week in North Philly Notes, the co-editors of Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses address the state of rape accusations on college campuses under the current administration, and why we need to redouble our efforts to eliminate sexual violence.

As the editors of Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, we thought we were prepared for what a new White House and Federal administration would mean for institutional responses to sexual violence against college students. The progress over the last several years has been palpable, especially given the confluence of student and survivor activism, policy enactments, expanding assessment and etiology research, as well as institutions of higher education’s significant efforts to improve their responses to victims and innovative prevention efforts. Given indicators that the new administration would not maintain the course of the previous one, in the months after the election we discussed with each other what the possible impact could be. Perhaps reduced funding for the Department of Education, a contraction of the number of investigations by the Office for Civil Rights, and/or a redefinition of the current interpretation of Title IX. All of these situations would remove the burden and promise of institutional Title IX responses to campus violence. These concerns led us to wonder in the Preface of our book, that if Title IX was redefined via a new “Dear Colleague” letter, what could be the future of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the Clery Act, and the Campus SaVE Act—repeal, strip funding, or fail to enforce? If any of these changes occurred, we posited, the corresponding effects on institutions of higher education, and more importantly their students, would be substantial.

We are now on the brink of the changes we feared, when the progress anti-violence scholars, activists and legislators have made might begin to crumble under the weight of the new, shifting narrative created by the Department of Education. As the stage is set for sweeping policy dismantling, there emerges a narrative of women as falsely accusing men, rape as “drunken sex,” and the reporting of sexual violence as women changing their minds about “our last sleeping together was not quite right.” This rhetoric, along with the narrative that presumes that only women are raped, is disheartening as it negates all of the work survivors, activists, and academics have done to address violence against all genders. We are dismayed—nay, angered—that those responsible for enforcing regulations on violence on college campuses, such as Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, would assert, publicly, a victim-blaming discourse. She not only discounts victims’ voices but also endorses an understanding of offenders as victims too, making survivors and the schools that try to hold the offenders accountable the “real” perpetrators. Bringing “claims” of rape or adjudicating such claims is to discriminate, the logic goes.

This shift in defining who our government must protect in cases of sexual assault is possible because rape itself—at least according to Ms. Jackson—is no longer the rape that activists defined and legislators later codified in sexual assault legislation, but rather the mere imaginings of a college woman recovering from drunken sex. Though Ms. Jackson later apologized for what she termed a “flippant” remark, the problem is that this remark reifies the victim-blaming culture within which survivors already must try to seek justice. Now, though, they must do so under official federal endorsement of a narrative in which women have regrettable sex and then men are falsely accused. The data, as presented in Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, does not support this narrative. But of course there has long been rape deniers and widespread endorsement of rape myths (including the oft-repeated belief that rape victims lie) in our society. We did not imagine, however, that our government officials appointed to address sexual violence would publicly endorse such beliefs in this day and age.

We therefore join the call of the 50 organizations who recently demanded that Ms. Jackson reject her own comments publicly and consistently, as Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz wrote about in The Chronicle of Higher Education, on July 20, 2017. And, in the face of Ms. Jackson’s comments, we need college administrators to continue to push their campuses to “do the right thing.” They must do everything that have been striving to do to prevent, respond to, and adjudicate violence, which may involve rejecting a call from the administration for reduced enforcement in the future. We also call upon college students to accelerate their incredible efforts to change the social climate on college campuses and directly confront and reject victim-blaming narratives.

Our concern for what will happen under this current administration—as researchers and women—is growing.  But we also believe in the power of many to eliminate violence against women. Historically, legislation about violence against women has followed from the tireless efforts of activists. We encourage students, faculty, and officials of institutions of higher education to be those activists that refuse to see harm done to college students on college campuses.

Somalis in the Twin Cites and Columbus in the Twin Cities

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost Rain Taxi‘s recent blog entry about Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus author Stefanie Chambers presenting her book in the Twin Cities.

From left to right, Jaylani Hussein, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, Stefanie Chambers, R. T. Rybak. Photo by Jennifer Simonson.

Rain Taxi presented a discussion featuring authors Stefanie Chambers (Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus, Temple University Press) and Ahmed Ismail Yusuf (Somalis in Minnesota, Minnesota Historical Society Press), and moderated by Jaylani Hussein, Executive Director of CAIR-Minnesota. The event was introduced by former mayor of Minneapolis R. T. Rybak, author of Pothole Confidential (University of Minnesota Press). The event was co-presented with Trinity College and Minneapolis Foundation.

From left to right, Jaylani Hussein, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, and Stefanie Chambers. Photo by Jennifer Simonson

Stefanie Chambers and Ahmed Ismail Yusuf sign books.. Photo by Jennifer Simonson.

The Twin Cities are home to the largest Somali American population in the United States, and this community has made important contributions to the political, economic, and social fabric of the region. Given the current uncertainty about immigrant and refugee policy, combined with the challenges the Muslim community faces under the current administration, Rain Taxi hosted this important event at Open Book in Minneapolis. Book sales were handled by Milkweed Books.

Meet Davarian Baldwin, co-editor of the Press’s Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series

This week, in North Philly Notes, a Q&A with Davarian Baldwin, the new editor for Temple University Press’ Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series.

You have written about migration and Black Urban Life. What drew you to that field of study within American studies?
I am the child of the Great Migration. I am the first generation in my family to be born in the north during the Second Great Migration. While many of my family stopped and settled in other cities like Chicago, my segment of the family kept moving on to a smaller town called Beloit, Wisconsin because I think, even though full of factories it, in some ways, reminded them more of their Mississippi home.

10-041 – Trinity – Davarian – Web Feature

Can you talk about the kinds of books you are looking to acquire for the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series?
I would love to acquire books that make bold arguments while, if historical, work closely with less examined archives. I would love to see books that are both global and local in scope…books that feature the city as a crossroads for different people, ideas, and aspirations all deeply grounded within the details of their urban spaces. I want to see books that don’t look at the city as just the repository for social and historical experience, but understand the built environment as equally influential, as a central actor in the storyline…books that balance their attention on the structure of cities and the agency of human lives. For me, recent books that have some or all of these qualities include Beryl Satter’s Family Properties, Nathan D.B. Connolly’s A World More Concrete, and Andrew Needham’s Power Lines.

What book (or books) made you fall in love with reading and the power of words?
While I write and edit non-fiction academic work, I must be honest and say that fiction has always been my first love. In fact I make sure to read interesting and provocative fiction when I am writing more scholarly work. As a child the books were Beverly Cleary and alternative Star Wars fiction. As a teenager The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon changed my life. The book that has stayed with me and challenged me with its combination of searing social commentary and elegant and witty prose remains Ellison’s Invisible Man. I have built an entire course around this book and I find something new in that novel every time I teach the course. To be sure, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was the next generation version of that book but added a decidedly more urban flavor to Ellison’s racial satire. I think in the more academic realm, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and C.L. R. James Beyond a Boundary have done the same thing for me.

What was the last great book you read?
I am a big fan of science fiction and mystery/police procedurals, especially when the genres are both in the same book…so that makes Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife definitely the last great book I read. For me it sort of offers the prose response to one of my favorite non-fiction urban studies; Mike Davis’ City of Quartz.

What one book would you recommend everyone read?
Again mystery books/procedurals are fabulous because the great ones have amazing social commentary about gender, race, social position, inequality and so many feature the city as a central character in the story. I would recommend everyone read Paco Ignacio Taibo’s Some Clouds.

What book did you find overrated or just disappointing?
Certainly not disappointing, but as a scholar of the Great Migration, I didn’t find anything new or exciting in The Warmth of Other Suns. Yet I certainly appreciated how its prose style made decades of scholarship more accessible to a much wider audience. On the fiction side, I found Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections a bit overrated. 

What book do you wish more people knew about?
Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, is an unheralded master work, not just because of its inventive prose but because the ideas in the book are expressed in the paper quality, the typeset, and materials used in the making of the very book itself. I wish the publishing market would allow more books to reflect their ideas and themes in the construction of the actual book

What author(s), living or dead, would you be most interested in having over for dinner? WOW, I hate that I don’t cook! Not just because we share the same surname but certainly James Baldwin because of his courageousness, force of nature, ethical posture, faithfulness to everyday people, impatience with pettiness, and all qualities held with flare and wit. I think I would also want to hang out with Steig Larsson…what would it be like to push out a trilogy of prose in the face of your impending death? The courage that must take as a writer when one could easily curl up in a ball

What Temple University Press title could you not put down and why?
George Lipsitz’s Possessive Investments in Whiteness was certainly from a different time, a time when the mainstream took more seriously the idea that racial identity can in fact shape life chances and access to important resources etc. But while in the 1990’s a whole shelf of books came out in the form of memoirs or celebrations of whiteness, Lipsitz’s was a thoughtful essay so rich in archival depth demonstrating clearly how state power and private wealth have been so closely tethered to white racial identity. Here the idea that race is a social construction did not justify a dismissal of the concept but called for a more rigorous understanding of its social and hence lived power.

Meet Temple University Press’ new acquisitions editor, Ryan Mulligan

This week, in North Philly Notes, a Q&A with our new acquisitions editor, Ryan Mulligan.

You are acquiring books in sociology, criminology, and sports as well as regional titles. What is your affinity for these discipline?
I worked on sociology books in my previous position and found the discipline to be so vibrant and necessary. Sociology places the human faces we see into the contexts that shape them and make them the way they are. Conversely, it also puts real, complex, human faces on the contexts we make assumptions about. So much of academia is rightly concerned with showing the ways the real world resists our assumptions and heuristics, but sociology is extra important because assumptions and heuristics about people can be so dangerous.

This is a great moment to be getting into criminology, as there is so much skepticism and room for questions and answers in law and order today. Criminology has a close relationship with sociology. It has been mostly published by larger publishers and I’m excited about the opportunity to take a more targeted topical approach to specific subfields that merit a tighter focus but have broad implications.

Everyone who knows me knows I love sports and Philadelphia sports in particular. Everyone describes Philadelphia fans as passionate but we are also demanding and informed, which makes us a voracious readers and consumers of perspectives and information. In other words, it’s a great environment in which to be publishing sports books. Beyond my own fandom I’m also excited about the sports list as a publishing opportunity. So much of sports publishing has traditionally been nostalgic and I think there’s a real opportunity, especially for a university press, to publish books that are curious, socially engaged, forward looking, and concerned about how sports arrived at where they are and where they are going. I see so many outlets online serving a broadly interested and educated sports fan and think that shows a readership underserved by many of the sports books on the bookstore shelf.

I’ll especially look to continue Temple University Press’s strengths in urban sociology, criminology, labor studies, social movements, social stratification, and sexuality and gender studies.

What book (or books) made you fall in love with reading and the power of words?
I’m going to go to my childhood with E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. It was interesting, later on, to read White’s indispensable writing guide, The Elements of Style (with William Strunk, Jr.) and see him explicitly outline what had enlivened his writing for me as a child: a charming honesty and understated directness. Ray Bradbury deserves a shout-out, too.

What was the last great book you read? (Can be academic or not)
Just before starting work here on the sports list, I read The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, published last May, a book by two analytics-oriented baseball writers who had the opportunity to take over baseball operations for an independent league baseball team. They describe the victories, defeats, and culture clashes resulting from their attempt to put the strategic consensus of the SABR community in to the game plans of the all-too-real coaches and players that inhabit their would-be sandbox. It underscores how hard it still is to get everyone, whatever their view of baseball, to come to grips with their uncertainty, more than a decade after Moneyball.

What one book would you recommend everyone read?
As long as I’m talking about uncertainty and data, everyone should read Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. The fun of it is reading well-told stories from several fields—weather, politics, economics, sports, earthquakes—on how the best prognosticators make the best predictions. Everyone can learn something about how the best in a field you don’t know find sense within the mountain of information available to them. But the message that I think should resonate for scholars and civilians like myself alike is how the most knowledgeable people are honest with themselves about what they don’t know

What book or author do you wish more people knew about?
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy. This is an intervention in one of those debates where there are two cogent sides but neither approaches the crux of the problem: Leovy shows that whether we institute more policing or less policing, we would benefit from better policing.

What titles might we be surprised to discover on your bookshelf?
Learn to Surf, by James Maclaren. Not really the vibe I give off – maybe because I haven’t been very successful at it.

What author(s), living or dead, would you be most interested in meeting, or having over for dinner?
Shakespeare. There’s a Titus Andronicus joke to be made here, but I can’t quite work my way around to it.

What Temple University Press title could you not put down?
If declaring a favorite child is an unwise parenting strategy, choosing a favorite child among the many you just inherited seems doubly fraught, so I’m going to venture outside my own lists here at Temple and choose a great book on Temple’s backlist that I read as an undergrad philosophy student: The Philosophy of Alain Locke, edited by Leonard Harris. Locke’s philosophy provides background and context for the Harlem Renaissance and for so many pride movements to follow.

 

 

Temple University Press adds two new editors to the Asian American History and Culture series

This week in North Philly Notes, we announce the two new editors joining our Asian American History and Culture series.

Temple University Press is pleased to announce the addition of Rick Bonus, Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, to the Asian American History and Culture series editorial team. They will be replacing editors Linda Trinh Võ and K. Scott Wong, who will be transitioning into editors emeriti roles.

Both Bonus and Lee have published books in the series with Temple University Press. Rick Bonus published Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space in 2000, and co-edited Contemporary Asian American Communities: Intersections and Divergences with outgoing AAHC editor, Võ. Shelley Sang-Hee Lee published Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America with Temple in 2012. They join current series editor Cathy Schlund-Vials.

Schlund-Vials is enthusiastic about the new team. She observed, “Rick Bonus and Shelley Lee’s work has proved aspirational for me and the field. Both Bonus and Lee bring established reputations to the series. They are keen interlocutors, leading scholars, and dedicated practitioners. It is truly an honor to have them on board, and I am humbled to be in their midst.”

Shelley Lee says she is “looking forward to helping shape the series with my co-editors.” Her work will focus on “honoring the AAHC’s distinguished legacy and building on its strengths, while also searching out titles that represent exciting and important directions in Asian American history.”

Bonus is also excited to be part of the editorial team. He acknowledged, “Temple has been a pioneering intellectual force in Asian American Studies and continues to make possible new and emerging directions in the scholarship on Asian American Studies.”

He continued, “My vision for the press includes the perpetuation of the amazing work all my predecessors have accomplished. I hope to assist the press in treading new and emerging directions in Asian American Studies by strategically pursuing works that are directly or intersectionally conversant with fields like transnationalism, science and technology studies, cross-regional and cross-disciplinary studies, queer studies, and education and social work studies. All of these, I hope, will enable transformative insights into Asian American Studies and move forward Temple’s record in enhancing the field’s depth and breadth.”

Schlund-Vials reflected about the outgoing series editors, Linda Trinh Võ and K. Scott Wong as the torch was being passed. She said, “During their illustrious time as series editors, Võ and Wong consistently ushered projects that reflected the ever-growing, ever-expansive contours of Asian American Studies as provocative interdiscipline. Under their guidance, the series expanded its sights and sites to encompass the complexities of diaspora and dynamics of transnationalism. They were, quite frankly, ideal mentors for me as a new series editor: I benefitted greatly from their extensive knowledge of the field, their commitment to scholarly mentorship, and their willingness to see multiple possibilities. Their mark on the series is unquestionable, and they deserve much of the credit for the very high reputation Temple University Press has within Asian American Studies. I am certainly not alone in this assessment, as evidenced by the many awards given to books they shepherded throughout their tenure.”

About the Series

Temple University Press published the first two titles in the Asian American History and Culture series — Entry Denied, by series founder Sucheng Chan and Cane Fires, by Gary Okihiro — in the spring of 1991. There are now more than 70 titles in the series, which is edited by Sara Cohen.

Founded by Sucheng Chan in 1991, the Asian American History and Culture series has sponsored innovative scholarship that has redefined, expanded, and advanced the field of Asian American studies while strengthening its links to related areas of scholarly inquiry and engaged critique. Like the field from which it emerged, the series remains rooted in the social sciences and humanities, encompassing multiple regions, formations, communities, and identities. Extending the vision of founding editor Sucheng Chan and editors emeriti Michael Omi and David Palumbo-Liu, series editors Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rick Bonus and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee continue to develop a foundational collection that embodies a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to Asian American studies.