Monday, March 18, 2024

Historian, Scholar, and Activist Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley On How Robert Fitch’s critique of American “union democracy” as well as his work on international labor solidarity can help us understand the current divisions within U.S. organized labor over the question of Palestine.

Robin D. G. Kelley: Working Class Democracy and the Question of Palestine


Robin D. G. Kelley will deliver the 13th Annual Robert Fitch Memorial lecture at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY on Monday, March 18th at 1 pm. Introduced by Doug Henwood. BOSTON REVIEW is a magazine of ideas, politics, and culture, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Animated by hope and committed to equality, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world. 
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6zDvSacg1c


ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
 
UCLA History Department 
 
Robin D. G. Kelley

Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

 
Biography

My research has explored the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music and visual culture; Surrealism, Marxism, among other things. My essays have appeared in a wide variety of professional journals as well as general publications, including the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, Counterpunch, Souls,Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text ,The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which I also serve as Contributing Editor.

My books include, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); The lonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) [Vol. 10 of the Young Oxford History of African Americans series]; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

I am also co-editor of the following books: Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (with Jesse Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2018); The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (with Stephen Tuck) (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (with Franklin Rosemont) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (Oxford University Press, 2000), volumes 1 and 2; Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (with Sidney J. Lemelle) (London: Verso Books, 1995); and the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (1995-1998).

I am currently completing three book projects:

Black Bodies Swinging: An American Postmortem (Metropolitan Books) is a genealogy of the Black Spring protests of 2020 by way of a deep examination of state-sanctioned racialized violence and a history of resistance. To understand how we arrived at this moment requires a different kind of autopsy—an historical postmortem that can lay bare the structural conditions responsible for premature death. Borrowing a metaphor from Abel Meeropol’s iconic song “Strange Fruit,” the book traces the deaths and the lives of our most recent casualties to the “blood at the root”—the racial terror at the base of our system of exploitation and wealth accumulation. The blood at the root is “racial capitalism.” The kind of historical autopsy I am proposing is intended to make visible the history and workings of racial capitalism. It exposes not only effects of racist policing but the extraction of wealth from black people, land dispossession, displacement, predatory lending, taxation, disfranchisement, environmental catastrophe, and the long history of looting through terror and government policies that suppressed black wages, relieved us of property, excluded black people from better schools and public accommodations, suppressed black home values, and subsidized white wealth accumulation. But Black Bodies Swinging is also a history of resistance, arguing that the new abolitionists represent the “Third Reconstruction generation” whose organizational genesis begins in the 1990s but whose political lineage can be traced back to slavery and settler colonialism.


Field of Study

United States, African-American and African Diaspora, Global Jazz Studies 

Publications

Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009).

Best Book About Jazz 2009, Jazz
Journalists Association
Music in American Culture Award, American
Musicological Association
Ambassador Award for Book of Special
Distinction, English Speaking Union;
PEN Open Book Award, PEN American Center
ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award
Best Non-Fiction Book, Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award.
Booklist – Starred Review
Selected by New York Times Book Review –
Top 100 books of 2009

**Italian translation: Thelonious Monk: Storia di un Genio Americano, trans. Marco Bertoli (Roma: Minimum Fax, 2012).

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002)

with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001)

Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

Selected Best book of 1997 by Village
Voice; Outstanding Book on Human Rights,
Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of
Human Rights in the United States,
1997-98.

**Translated in Japanese, as Yo Mama’s DisFunktional!: Representing America’s Urban Crisis (Hanmoto Publishers, 2007), translated by Kosuzu Abe and Katsuyuki Murata. New foreword by author

Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

Outstanding Book, National Conference of
Black Political Scientists, 1995.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

Elliot Rudwick Prize, Organization of
American Historians, 1991;
Francis Butler Simkins Prize, Southern
Historical Association
Outstanding book on Human Rights,
Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of
Human Rights in the United States, 1991.

Edited Books and Collections

Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World, eds. Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2018)

Co-edited with Stephen Tuck, The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2015)

Co-edited with Franklin Rosemont, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

Winner, American Book Award, the Before
Columbus Foundation.

Co-edited with Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2000). Two Volume edition, 2004.

Selection of History Book Club and Choice
Outstanding Academic Title.
Chosen as an Outstanding book on Human
Rights, Gustavus Myers Center for the
Study of Human Rights in the United
States, 2002.

Co-edited with Sidney J. Lemelle, Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (London: Verso Books, 1995).

Degrees

  • Ph.D. American History, UCLA, 1987
  • M.A. African History, UCLA, 1985
  • B.A. History, Cal State University Long Beach, 1983
 

 

In Homage and Tribute To Dr. Clyde Taylor (1931-2024): Outstanding Scholar, Historian, Film Critic, Writer, Cultural Theorist, Public Intellectual, Activist, Curator, and Educator

“...The work of African American cultural critic, NYU professor, and film historian Clyde R. Taylor, whose extraordinary book The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film & Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998) is a major, groundbreaking advance in U.S. cultural studies, poetics, and critical theory, is crucial to a fresh perspective and analysis of this highly complex subject. In his book Taylor aggressively takes on the present crisis of knowledge in the United States by directly engaging in a historically informed critique of the aesthetic from a breathtaking interrogation of its many theoretical, ideological, and political uses in Western literature, film, painting, sculpture, and philosophy since the Renaissance, with a special emphasis on investigating and analyzing these uses and the myriad counter-modalities of radical resistance, opposition, and self-determining alternatives within the context of 20th century America. This necessarily brief survey cannot possibly do justice to the profound contributions that Dr. Taylor makes to our understanding and knowledge of the meaning of the “cultural politics of representation” and the political economy of art, but it does indicate that in the past forty years alongside such original and exciting contemporary African American thinkers, writers, artists and critics as Greg Tate, Nathaniel Mackey, Imani Perry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Beatty, Harryette Mullen, Tricia Rose, Erica Hunt, DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Brent Hayes Edwards, Will Alexander, Fred Moten, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nelson George, bell hooks, Robert O'Meally, Mark Anthony Neal, Kara Walker, Saidiya Hartman, George E. Lewis, Steve Coleman, Frank B. Wilderson III, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Wallace, Jayne Cortez, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Julius Hemphill, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey Wadada Leo Smith,  Muhal Richard Abrams, Charles Mills, and Kevin Young, among many others a strikingly new sensibility is making itself known. One that simultaneously embraces, critiques, and goes far beyond previous myopic and ultimately reductive white and black modernist notions of the ‘avant-garde.’…”
–From the introduction to What is An Aesthetic?: Writings On American Culture (1980-Present) by Kofi Natambu. © 2024
 
The Mask of Art
Clyde Taylor, Literary Scholar Who Elevated Black Cinema, Dies at 92

A leading figure in the field of Black studies in the 1970s, he identified work by Black filmmakers as worthy of serious intellectual attention.


PHOTO: Clyde Taylor in the 1970s, when he was at the epicenter of a push to bring the study of Black culture into academia. Credit: via Taylor family

by Clay Risen
February 6, 2024
New York Times


Clyde Taylor, a scholar who in the 1970s and ’80s played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on Jan. 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.

His daughter, Rahdi Taylor, a filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

As a young professor in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s — first at California State University, Long Beach, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles — Dr. Taylor was at the epicenter of a push to bring the study of Black culture into academia.

Black culture was not merely an appendage to white culture, he argued, but had its own logic, history and dynamics that grew out of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. And filmmaking, he said, was just as important to Black culture as literature and art.


Dr. Taylor in 1958 when he was a student at Howard University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. Credit:  via Taylor family

He was especially taken by the work of a circle of young Black filmmakers in the 1970s that he would later call the “L.A. Rebellion.” Among them were the directors Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, all of whom went on to have immense impact on Black directors like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.

As Dr. Taylor documented, these directors created their own, stripped-down approach to narrative and form. They borrowed from French New Wave, Italian neorealism and Brazil’s Cinema Novo to offer an unblinkered look at everyday Black life, often filming in Watts and other Black neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.

“He was doing the work on the ground, discovering new filmmakers and bringing them into the academic conversation,” Ellen Scott, a professor of film studies at U.C.L.A., said in a phone interview.

To these directors, film was more than just art; it was a tool that used the camera to illuminate the ways in which racial disparities shaped the lives of Black Americans.

Dr. Taylor praised their work as a vital part of the revolutionary changes underway across Black America. In an essay accompanying a 1986 exhibit on Black filmmakers at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, he wrote that their “bold, even extravagant innovation sought filmic equivalents of Black social and cultural discourse.”

“These young filmmakers made a commitment to dramatic films,” he added, “a commitment fired by the discomfort of dwelling in the belly of the beast: Minutes away, Hollywood was reviving itself economically through a glut of mercenary Black exploitation movies.”

Clyde Russell Taylor was born on July 3, 1931, in Boston, the youngest of eight children. Both parents were active in the civil rights movement. His father, Frank Taylor, was a Pullman train porter and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the country’s largest Black unions; his mother, E. Alice (Tyson) Taylor, was an entrepreneur and a longtime board member of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Boston chapter.

Dr. Taylor attended Howard University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English in 1953 and a master’s in the subject in 1959. Howard was the country’s premier historically Black university, and he met a long list of future artistic luminaries there, including the novelist Toni Morrison and the playwright Amiri Baraka.

He also fell under the sway of one of Howard’s leading intellectual lights, the philosopher Alain Locke, whose concept of “the New Negro” and promotion of Blackness as a social and cultural category helped shape the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s — and would later prove influential to Dr. Taylor’s own work.


Dr. Taylor in 2010. His extensive work in the academic world and beyond made him a lodestar for generations of younger scholars. Credit: via Taylor family

He attended Wayne State University in Detroit for his doctorate, which he received in 1968 with a dissertation on the English poet and painter William Blake.

By then he was teaching at California State University, Long Beach, where he became chairman of the Black studies department in 1969. He later taught at U.C.L.A.; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and Mills College (now a part of Northeastern University) in Oakland, Calif., before moving east to Tufts in 1982. He retired from N.Y.U. in 2008.

Dr. Taylor married JoAnn Spencer in 1960; they divorced in 1970. His second marriage, to Marti Wilson, also ended in divorce. Along with his daughter Ms. Taylor, he is survived by a granddaughter. Another daughter, Shelley Zinzi Taylor, died in 2007.

Although he wrote just one major book, “The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract — Film and Literature” (1998), Dr. Taylor was prolific in other ways.

With Beth Deare, he wrote the script for the documentary “Midnight Ramble” (1994), about the early Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. He also curated several major museum exhibits, wrote extensively in journals like Jump Cut and Black Film Review, and appeared as a commentator in documentaries about Black actors like Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

Such work made him a lodestar for generations of younger scholars, and a gravitational center of Black cultural studies even today.

“You have to deal with Clyde if you talk about Black cinema,” Manthia Diawara, a professor of film studies at New York University, said by phone, “just as you have to deal with certain people if you talk about African-American literature.”

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2024, Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Clyde Taylor, 92, Scholar Who Elevated Black Cinema. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper


https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2024/02/13/eminent-literary-and-film-scholar-dr-clyde-taylor-dies-at-92/


Obits
 
Eminent literary and film scholar Dr. Clyde Taylor dies at 92

by Herb Boyd
February 13, 2024
Amsterdam News



PHOTO: Clyde Taylor courtesy of NYU Gallatin School

“We live in days of Great Change, a shuffling of status and symbols,” Dr. Clyde Taylor wrote in 1973. “Yeats’ cry ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ is good news in the Third World; a ferment rises in the young bloods in the bush. And stepping out of the shelter of their place in the shadows of American exceptionalist rationalizations.”

Taylor, an example of the activist scholars of his day, composed this as part of an essay about “Black Consciousness in the Vietnam Years,” reflective of his stance against the Vietnam War. That strong voice of the Black liberation movement took a final breath on January 24. He was 92 and died in Los Angeles. According to his daughter, Rahdi Taylor, the cause of his death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Born Clyde Russell Taylor on July 3, 1931, in Boston, he was the youngest of eight children of his parents, Frank and E. Alice (Tyson) Taylor. His father was a member of the legendary Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and his mother was an entrepreneur who was active with the NAACP’s Boston chapter.

Not much is known of Taylor’s formative years, although we do know that he was a graduate of English High School and later Howard University, where he received his B.A. degree in 1953 and six years later, his master’s in the same subject. It was there that he met several Black literary and political activists, including Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka.

After graduation from Howard, Taylor enlisted in the Air Force as an intelligence officer and left service as a first lieutenant; he was honorably discharged with a National Defense Service Medal. At Wayne State University in Detroit, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the works of William Blake and the ideology of art. In 1960, he married JoAnn Spencer and they had two daughters, Rahdi and Shelley Zinzi Taylor. They divorced in 1970.

Two years later, Taylor moved to San Francisco and married Martella Wilson. Together, they founded the African Film Society. By the mid-’90s, the marriage had dissolved. Taylor moved to New York City and began teaching at New York University.

Throughout these turbulent times, Taylor was on the ramparts of the Black studies movement, particularly at UCLA, with a critical role in advancing revolutionary cinema, most notably as a presenter and commentator: “The making of ‘O Povo Organizado’ [‘The People Organized’] in Mozambique by Bob Van Lierop, an African American, or of ‘Sambizanga,’ about Angola by Guadoupian Sara Maldoror, or the Ethiopian Haile Gerima’s ‘Bush Mama,’ set in Los Angeles, or Pontecorvo’s ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ or the several Latin American and African films created by Cubans, or the many Third World films made by Europeans and white Americans––all suggest the cross-fertilizations of an embryonic transnational Third World cinema movement.” Taylor figured prominently in this development.

A book certainly could have been forged from Taylor’s extensive study of cinema, and one was published: “The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract––Film and Literature in 1988.”

In one of his last essays, Taylor expounded on the differences between Africa and Hollywood: “Africa stands today (2021) at the other end of the spectrum from Hollywood. If Americans view cinema from the center of profitable, monopolistic production and distribution, Africa is a laboratory for the study of film’s relation to society from the vantage point of the exploited.”

Right down to the end of his extraordinary life, Clyde Taylor possessed a keen analysis and passionate commitment to the world of cinema and its prospects here and abroad.


https://gallatin.nyu.edu/news/2024/02/clyde-taylor--nyu-gallatin-professor-emeritus--passes-away.html
 
 
Clyde Taylor, NYU Gallatin Professor Emeritus, Passes Away
February 12, 2024
New York University




Clyde Taylor, Professor Emeritus at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and a scholar whose work was integral to elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on January 24, 2024. He was 92.

At the beginning of his career as a professor in the late 1960s in the Los Angeles area, Dr. Taylor was a leader in bringing the study of Black culture, including Black film, into the academy. He saw Black culture as having its own logic, history, and dynamics, and he felt that filmmaking was as integral to Black culture as art and literature. According to e. Frances White, Professor Emerita of Individualized Study and former Dean at Gallatin, "Dr. Taylor's work on Black cinema helped students and young filmmakers see a way to produce Black art when there appeared to be no way for them to express themselves."

Dr. Taylor was especially intrigued by a group of young Black filmmakers in the 1970s that included Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima. A circle he would come to call the “LA Rebellion,” these directors innovated their own approach to narrative and form—an approach that would eventually have an outsized impact on the likes of Ava DuVernay and Spike Lee.

Dr. Taylor joined the NYU Gallatin community in the Fall of 1997 having already established himself as a pioneer in the field of Black Cinema Studies. As an exemplar of the School’s interdisciplinary approach to teaching, learning, and research, his interests ranged from art criticism and curation to political theory and social movements, from literature to epistemology, and so much more. Founding Gallatin Professor Emerita Sharon Friedman shares that Dr. Taylor “was always challenging us to think more adventurously,” an apt reflection on his own academic range.

The courses he taught at Gallatin were a wonderful showcase of this range, with such titles as “Slavery and Culture in the US and Brazil,” “Narratives of African Civilization,” and “Modernism and Imperialism: Objects of Transcultural Desire.” Dr. Taylor’s professional work also highlighted his broad focus of scholarship, inquiry, and exploration. His book The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract - Film and Literature (1998) is a cornerstone text across disciplines, as are his edited collections Vietnam and Black America (1973) and Black Genius (2000), his documentary on Oscar Micheaux (1994), and his curation of exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum.

Following Dr. Taylor’s retirement in 2008, and in recognition of his contributions to the School and the fields he helped define, Gallatin created the Clyde Taylor Award for Distinguished Work in African-American and Africana Studies. This honor is offered to one graduating BA student and one graduating MA student each year to recognize their high-caliber work in African American or Africana Studies.

We at Gallatin were fortunate to benefit from Dr. Taylor’s groundbreaking work, scholarship, and teaching, and we join his loved ones and those who he impacted in celebrating his life and mourning his loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Taylor

Dr. Clyde Taylor
1931-2024




Born
July 3, 1931


Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Died
January 24, 2024 (aged 92)


Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Citizenship: American

Occupation(s): Film scholar, writer, and cultural critic

Children:  2


Clyde Russell Taylor (July 3, 1931 – January 24, 2024) was an American film scholar, writer and cultural critic who made contributions to the fields of cinema studies and African American studies. He was an emeritus professor at New York University. His scholarship and commentary often focused on Black film and culture.
 
Career

Clyde Taylor wrote and published numerous scholarly articles, essays, and reviews.[1] Taylor is best known for coining the term 'L.A. Rebellion', which refers to the group of African American filmmakers who emerged from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in the 1970s.[2][3][4] This movement was characterized by its emphasis on social realism and its rejection of Hollywood conventions.

Clyde held faculty positions at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Mills College, then returned to Boston for a position in the Department of English at Tufts University.[5][6][7] After over a decade at Tufts University, Taylor accepted a position at New York University.[8] He remained at NYU in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Department of Africana Studies, until he retired, Professor Emeritus in 2008.

Taylor was the author of the book, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract – Film and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998), which was awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 1999.[9][10] He co-wrote the screenplay for Midnight Ramble, a seminal feature documentary about the work and legacy of Oscar Micheaux released by American Experience on PBS in 1995.[11] He was a frequent contributor to journals such as Black Film Review and Jump Cut.[12][13][14][15][16][17]

Other accolades for Taylor included induction into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, by the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center; the 1982 Callaloo Creative Writing Award for Non-Fiction Prose, an "Indie" Award for critical writing on cinema of people of color from the Association of Independent Video and Film (AIVF); and the Richard Wright Award for Literacy Criticism from Black World.[18][19] He was the recipient of a FulbrightFellowship, as well as Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (Whitney Scholar-in-Residency Fellowship), the Ford Foundation Fellowship (DuBois Institute, Harvard University), the Rockefeller Foundation (Fellowship, NYU Center for Culture, Media and History), as well as two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
 
Early life

Clyde Taylor was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 3, 1931, the youngest of eight children, to E. Alice Taylor and Frank Taylor. He graduated from The English High School and later from Howard University.

Once at Howard University, Clyde studied in the Department of English in collegial engagement with fellow students like Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison. At Howard he studied under professors such as Alain LeRoy Locke. Taylor earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English.

After graduation, Taylor enlisted in the United States Air Force as an intelligence officer, earning the rank of First Lieutenant. He was honorably discharged and recognized with a National Defense Service Medal. He continued his studies, pursuing a graduate degree in English at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. He wrote his dissertation on the works of William Blake and the Ideology of Art, and earned a Ph.D.[20]
Personal life

While at Wayne State University, he met student JoAnn Spencer from Detroit, pursuing her degree in education. They married in June 1960 in Detroit and had two children, daughters Shelley Zinzi Taylor and Rahdi Taylor. Their marriage dissolved in 1970. In 1972, Taylor moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he went on to marry Martella Wilson, a young leader in the world of philanthropy and social impact charities. Together they co-founded and led the African Film Society, which hosted screenings of cinema from Western Africa and discussions of their aesthetic and social vision. In the mid 90s, the couple dissolved the marriage but continued living and working in Boston until Taylor moved to Manhattan for a position at New York University in 1998.

Taylor died on January 24, 2024, at the age of 92.[21]



The Massive Destruction of Schools, The Genocidal Attack on Children and the Widespread Assault On the Public Education of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel

 
Israel Has Ruined 76 Percent of Gaza’s Schools in Systematic Attack on Education

Denying Palestinians’ right to education has been central to Israel’s settler-colonial project for eight decades.

by Thea Renda Abu El-Haj , Fida J. Adely , and Jo Kelcey
March 17, 2024
Truthout



PHOTO: Muhammad Al-Khudari, a teacher from Gaza who lost most of his family due to Israeli attacks and had to flee to Rafah, is seen teaching children in Rafah, Gaza on March 8, 2024. Khudari has set up a classroom among tents in al-Barakasat camp, north of Rafah city, for children deprived of their right to education due to the attacks. Ahmed Zaqout / Anadolu via Getty Images

Gaza has become a “graveyard for children.” Israel’s bombing has killed least 12,300 children — and more than 31,000people total — since October. Thousands more are unaccounted for and are likely to be found under the rubble of their destroyed homes and shelters. In addition to the relentless bombing, Israel has been waging a starvation campaign: While all Gazans are facing food insecurity, 1.17 million Gazans have reached emergency levels of hunger, and half a million are at catastrophic levels.

Against this backdrop of extreme violence, Israel has also been perpetrating a very particular form of violence that has disproportionate and long-term effects on children and youth: “scholasticide,” or the systematic destruction of the entire education system.

The destruction of Gaza’s education system has garnered less attention than has that of the health care system. But the consequences for children, youth and future generations of Palestinians are severe. In late January 2024, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that Israel had destroyed or damaged 378 school buildings (76 percent of the total school buildings in Gaza).

Many of the schools that are still standing have been transformed into displaced persons camps to accommodate some of the 1.9 million Gazans forced to flee their homes. Children who started the new school year with dreams of becoming teachers, nurses or doctors are now sleeping on the floor of their classrooms, with hundreds of people sharing a toilet. Still there’s no safety. Schools serving as shelters are being bombed and besieged, sniped at and blown up. Schools that haven’t been totally destroyed have been emptied of their furniture and textbooks, which were burned in the absence of needed fuel.

Gaza’s higher education system has also been decimated. All 12 universities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The almost complete closure of the Gaza Strip has also prevented 555 students from taking up scholarship-funded studies abroad. Even more devasting, Israeli forces have killed 100 Palestinian academics in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Among them were professor Sufian Tayeh, killed with his family on December 2. He was a prominent scientist and the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, the Strip’s leading academic institution.

On December 7, Refaat Alareer, professor of world literature and creative writing at Islamic University, and the editor of Gaza Writes Back, was killed along with six of his family members, with at least one report that he had been informed by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces that he was a target. On February 20, 2024, professor Nasser Abu Al-Nour, dean of the faculty of nursing at the Islamic University in Gaza, was killed along with six of his family members. As with all statistics coming out of Gaza, these numbers severely underestimate the real toll.

In January, in response to the video of Israa University being blown up, a UN special rapporteur posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education system should constitute a distinct and new crime under international law: “educaricide.” In fact, Palestinians have been sounding the alarm about this for some time. Educaricide — or scholasticide — speak to the wholesale and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education system by the Israeli state. Little wonder then that a group of Palestinian children in Gaza recently asked a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) official why the organization bothered to teach them human rights when these values clearly don’t apply to them.

In the face of this destruction, the overwhelming majority of U.S. government officials have said nothing. Instead, the response of the U.S. government (and many of its allies) to the still unproven Israeli accusation that a small number of UNRWA’s approximately 13,000 employees were involved in the October 7 attacks has been suspension of all aid to the organization. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian organization in Gaza and one of the primary educational providers. In contrast, the U.S. Congress is trying to send Israel another $14 billion in military aid, in spite of the recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel and third parties do everything they can to prevent death, destruction and acts of genocide from happening in Gaza.
 
Gazan Education in Context

Before October 7, the K-12 education system in Gaza included 625,000 students who attended public, private and UN-run schools and 22,564 teachers. Palestinians are among the most educated populations in the Middle East. In spite of the 17-year siege, frequent Israeli bombings and disruptions to education, Gaza’s students often rank among the top performing students in the Palestinian territories.

Israel had destroyed or damaged 378 school buildings (76 percent of the total school buildings in Gaza).

Statistics tell only part of the story. The significance of education to Palestinians is rooted in their anti-colonial struggle. It was Palestinians who set up the first refugee schools in 1948. By the mid-1960s, almost all Palestinian refugees completed the compulsory cycle of schooling at access rates that were far in advance of the public systems in some of their host states. As the Palestinian national movement gained traction in the 1960s and ‘70s, education emerged as integral to Palestinian nonviolent resistance. In the 1970s, for example, the Palestine Liberation Organization developed a dedicated philosophy of education, mobilized youth to provide literacy classes to first generation refugees, and supported the publication of children’s books designed to provide young Palestinians with a sense of their history and identity. Later, during the First Intifada, popular community-based education initiatives were created to overcome Israel’s prolonged closure of schools. When the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in 1994, one of its first acts was to assume control of the education system and develop a dedicated Palestinian curriculum. In recent years, Gaza’s educators have been at the forefront of educational innovations in the region. UNRWA’s online learning platform was, for example, developed by teachers in Gaza who sought to continue schooling through the periods of disruptive violence. Subsequently developed into a regionwide platform, these efforts supported continuity of learning for Palestinian refugees in other countries.

Palestinians are not unique in the value they ascribe to education. Refugees, migrants and racially marginalized communities everywhere often refer to the importance of education for a better future. However, the extreme oppression that Palestinians live under — especially those in Gaza, 70 percent of whom are refugees — lends education a particular importance and urgency. Education and knowledge are portable assets that can transcend dispossession, diaspora and statelessness. Education is also a key social and cultural institution — one that simultaneously assures a continuity with the past and an orientation toward a better future. For a population whose history, national identity and rights have been consistently denied, education has a formidable potential. This is precisely why the denial of Palestinians’ right to education has been a persistent feature of Israel’s settler-colonial project over the last eight decades.

Alongside killing, arrests, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, land appropriation, domicide and the targeting of health and media sectors, Israel’s history of targeting Palestinian education is designed to erase Palestinian presence in the land of historic Palestine. For decades, schools have been bombed, bulldozed and forcibly closed. The Israeli military has arrested and beaten students and shot them in their classrooms. The Kafkaesque restrictions on Palestinians’ right to movement (including checkpoints, earth mounds, the wall and restricted residency laws) also make it difficult, if not impossible, for students to attend school and universities. Palestinian citizens of Israel face largefunding inequities, and unrecognized Palestinian communities are denied the right to have their own schools.

These attacks on education extend to accusations leveled against the Palestinian curriculum. Across the West Bank and Gaza, including in UN-administered schools, students learn the curriculum developed by the PA. This curriculum was first developed in the late 1990s by the renowned Palestinian educator and academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Like any curriculum, it offers a shared narrative and projects a collective vision for society. Yet unlike almost any other contemporary curriculum, it is taught in a context of military occupation and settler-colonial dispossession. Consequently, it must contend with the oppressive political context that has shaped the lives of generations of Palestinians.

All 12 universities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

Since the late 1990s, several highly partisan organizations have accused the PA curriculum of promoting hatred and antisemitism. The fact that these accusations have come from extremist polemical organizations whose methods and findings have been called into question time and again has had no impact on U.S. and EU officials who continue to promote these damaging falsehoods. Nor is there any discussion of the ways in which the Israeli curriculum is promoting anti-Palestinian violence and hatred. The result has been sustained and obsessive focus on the content of the PA curriculum by major Western donors and significant pressure on the PA and UNRWA to decontextualize education

The Right to a Palestinian Education

The famous philosopher John Dewey argued that the proper role of education is to foster cooperation on real world issues of direct importance. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire took this idea further, articulating a pedagogical vision that directly engaged with the source of his students’ oppression. Palestinian educators understand this all too well. As many Palestinian teachers we know have told us, “knowledge is our only weapon.” Perhaps it is this fundamental truth that best explains Israel’s determination to destroy the education system in Gaza, in an attempt to retain its oppressive status quo.

The destruction of the entire system of education in Gaza cannot be counted only in terms of the lives lost and infrastructure destroyed. More than 200 out of 325 cultural sites have been destroyed or severely damaged, including museums, libraries, archeological sites and publishing houses. When this latest round of violence ends in Gaza, there will likely be another infusion of international humanitarian projects that seek to rebuild schools, teach a new generation of educators, and launch trauma-informed programs to address the psychosocial needs of Palestinian children and youth who have grown up entirely under siege and war. However, these programs will only address a fraction of what is needed to challenge the colonial oppression, dispossession and violence that have affected generations of Palestinians.

Palestinian children, youth and educators in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora need and deserve to learn in safety. But for Palestinians, safety goes hand in hand with contesting the oppression that frames their daily lives and preserving their cultural identity. This can only be achieved through “dangerous” knowledge that challenges the realities of dispossession, colonization and statelessness, and teaches each new generation the historical and cultural wisdom necessary to secure a free and just future.

Protecting the expression of this “dangerous” knowledge in the U.S. is also critical at this historic moment in which academic freedom is also under attack, especially on college and university campuses. Student activism was key to enlightening and changing U.S. public opinion about the horrors of the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa. Given the outsized role that the U.S. government plays in supporting Israel’s current war on Gaza and its apartheid policies, it is imperative that we in the U.S. fiercely protect academic freedom and spaces for “dangerous” political critique and analysis that is central to education for justice.


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:


Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is professor of education at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11 and Elusive Justice: Wrestling with difference and educational equity in everyday practice.

Fida J. Adely is an associate professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress. 
 
Jo Kelcey is an assistant professor of education at the Lebanese America University who has written extensively on UNRWA’s education program.

 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 22

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/magazine/nikole-hannah-jones-colorblind-racial-justice.html

Five Takeaways From Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Essay on the ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a 50-year campaign has undermined the progress of the civil rights movement.

PHOTO:  Credit:  Shuran Huang for The New York Times
March 13, 2024
New York Times

Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in college admissions was not constitutional. After the decision, much of the discussion was about its impact on the complexions of college campuses. But in an essay in The Times Magazine, I argue that we were missing the much bigger and more frightening story: that the death of affirmative action marks the culmination of a radical 50-year strategy to subvert the goal of colorblindness put forth by civil rights activists, by transforming it into a means of undermining racial justice efforts in a way that will threaten our multiracial democracy.

What do I mean by this? Here are the basic points of my essay:

Conservatives are interpreting the court’s ruling broadly, and since last summer, they have used it to attack racial-justice programs outside the field of higher education. Since the decision, conservative groups have filed and threatened lawsuits against a range of programs that consider race, from diversity fellowships at law firms to maternal-health programs. One such group has even challenged the medical school of Howard University, one of the nation’s pre-eminent historically Black universities. Founded to educate people who had been enslaved, Howard’s mission has been to serve Black Americans who had for generations been systematically excluded from American higher education. These challenges to racial-justice programs will have a lasting impact on the nation’s ability to address the vast disparities that Black people experience.

In my essay, I demonstrate that these challenges to racial-justice programs often deploy the logic of “colorblindness,” the idea that the Constitution prohibits the use of race to distinguish citizens and that the goal of a diverse, democratic nation should be a society in which race does not determine outcomes for anyone. Civil rights leaders used the idea of colorblindness to challenge racial apartheid laws and policies, but over the last 50 years, conservatives have successfully co-opted both the rhetoric and the legal legacy of the civil rights era not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. And, I’d argue, reverse it.

Though the civil rights movement is celebrated and commemorated as a proud period in American history, it faced an immediate backlash. The progressive activists who advanced civil rights for Black Americans argued that in a society that used race against Black Americans for most of our history, colorblindness is a goal. They believed that achieving colorblindness requires race-conscious policies, such as affirmative action, that worked specifically to help Black people overcome their disadvantages in order to get to a point where race no longer hindered them. Conservatives, however, invoke the idea of colorblindness to make the case that race-conscious programs, even to help those whose race had been used against them for generations, are antithetical to the Constitution. In the affirmative-action decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, embraced this idea of colorblindness, saying: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

But mandating colorblindness in this way erases the fact that Black Americans still suffer inequality in every measurable aspect of American life — from poverty to access to quality neighborhoods and schools to health outcomes to wealth — and that this inequality stems from centuries of oppressive race-specific laws and policies. This way of thinking about colorblindness has reached its legal apotheosis on the Roberts court, where through rulings on schools and voting the Supreme Court has helped constitutionalize a colorblindness that leaves racial disparities intact while striking down efforts to ameliorate them.

These past decisions have culminated in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which can be seen as the Supreme Court clearing the way to eliminate the last legal tools to try to level the playing field for people who descend from slavery.

Part of the issue, I argue, is that the purpose of affirmative action got muddled in the 1970s. It was originally designed to reduce the suffering and improve the material conditions of people whose ancestors had been enslaved in this country. But the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1978 Bakke case changed the legally permissible goals of affirmative action, turning it into a generalized diversity program. That has opened the door for conservatives to attack the program for focusing on superficial traits like skin color, rather than addressing affirmative action's original purpose, which was to provide redress for the disadvantages descendants of slavery experienced after generations of oppression and subordination.

When this country finally abolished slavery, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which wielded race-conscious policies and laws to enslave and oppress Black people, create a society in which race no longer matters? After the short-lived period of Reconstruction, lawmakers intent on helping those who had been enslaved become full citizens passed a slate of race-conscious laws. Even then, right at the end of slavery, the idea that this nation owed something special to those who had suffered under the singular institution of slavery faced strident opposition, and efforts at redress were killed just 12 years later with Reconstruction’s end. Instead, during the nearly 100-year period known as Jim Crow, descendants of slavery were violently subjected to a dragnet of racist laws that kept them from most opportunities and also prevented America from becoming a true democracy. During the civil rights era, when Black Americans were finally assured full legal rights of citizenship, this question once again presented itself: In order to address the disadvantage Black Americans faced, do we ignore race to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms? Affirmative action and other racial-justice programs were born of that era, but now, once again, we are in a period of retrenchment and backlash that threatens the stability of our nation. My essay argues that if we are to preserve our multiracial democracy, we must find a way to address our original sin.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. 

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