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Fighting in the Core: Questioning the Last Century’s Debates over Race, Class, and Gender in Light of the Life and Works of Rod Bush
Abstract
This article explores Rod Bush’s intellectual and activist legacy in real terms by a former colleague of his at St. John’s University. Through historical notation, anecdote and substantive documentation and in relation to social movements and scholarship, the article articulates many lessons that Rod Bush provided about what is important and how to uphold that in practice. In particular the piece notes the critical role of radical Black scholars in providing an understanding of the dynamics of a social world designed to negate the humanity of African peoples.
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This chapter investigates how the intersections of race, age, and gender create life outcomes that represent an existential challenge for black and Latino male youths in urban areas. The laws that came out of the policies known as the “war on drugs” in the 1980s developed from a moral panic that categorized black and Latino male youths as the new “folk devils.” The continuation of the war on drugs has prolonged the “folk devil” status of black and Latino male youths over the course of the last two decades and contributed to the tendency for dominant forces to construct them as criminals. This status severely circumscribes their life choices and contributes to the racial profiling they experience from individuals and institutions alike.
In 1989, the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park made international headlines. Many accounts reported the incident as an example of “wilding”—episodes of poor, minority youths roaming the streets looking for trouble. Police intent on immediate justice for the victim coerced five African-American and Latino boys to plead guilty. The teenage boys were quickly convicted and imprisoned. Savage Portrayals' author, Natalie Byfield, covered the case for the New York Daily News, and now revisits the story of the Central Park Five from her perspective as a black female reporter.
Savage Portrayals illuminates the race, class, and gender bias in the massive media coverage of the crime and the prosecution of the now-exonerated defendants. Using sociological analysis and first-person account, the book persuasively argues that the racialized reportage of the case buttressed efforts to try juveniles as adults across the nation.
Savage Portrayals casts new light on this famous crime and its far-reaching consequences for the wrongly accused and the justice system.
This book seeks to analyze the issue of race in America after the election of Barack Obama. For the author, the U.S. criminal justice system functions can act as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it adheres to the principle of color blindness.
An "Indispensable" Book of The Black World Today website Much has been written about the Black Power movement in the United States. Most of this work, however, tends to focus on the personalities of the movement. In We Are Not What We Seem, Roderick D. Bush takes a fresh look at Black Power and other African American social movements with a specific emphasis on the role of the urban poor in the struggle for Black rights. Bush traces the trajectory of African American social movements from the time Booker T. Washington to the present, providing an integrated discussion of class. He addresses questions crucial to any understanding of Black politics: Is the Black Power movement simply another version of the traditional American ethnic politics, or does it have wider social import? What role has the federal government played in implicitly grooming social conservatives like Louis Farrakhan to assume leadership positions as opposed to leftist, grassroots, class-oriented leaders? Bush avoids the traditional liberal and social democratic approaches in favor of a more universalistic perspective that offers new insights into the history of Black movements in the U.S.
To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions.
Thoreau
This essay tries to problematize the relationship between race and intellectual work. Informed by feminist methodology, it considers the social location and subjectivity of the intellectual and the nature of the work produced. It uses autobiography to explore and reflect on the ways and the extent to which personal history shapes and mediates intellectual production. The essay suggests that the relationship between subjectivity and intellectual work is not inevitable, static, or unidirectional. Instead, it reflects a complex calculus that is also deeply shaped by the historical moment.
Radical History Review 90 (2004) 102-111
During the early 1980s I was part of a disciplined Marxist organization that tried to understand the difficulties and contradictions of working as a revolutionary organization within a hegemonic power in which the conditions for revolution did not exist. As a child of the 1960s Black Power movement, I had long been convinced of the notion, taken from Kwame Nkrumah and Lin Biao, that as the revolutionary third world liberated its territories from the yoke of capitalism and imperialism, revolutionary conditions would come to exist in the capitalist metropole, even in the belly of the beast, the fabled jewel of liberal capitalist civilization, the United States of America. In hindsight, this vision of revolutionary change was not much different from the "long march" position held by most of the post-1968 New Left. Years later, after our organization had dissolved, I asked my old comrades how this 1980s debate within our organization had been resolved since I had been relocated to the East Coast before the debate's conclusion. No one seemed to know. So I was quite shocked to find the answer to my question in Max Elbaum's new book, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che.
I say this as a testament to the brilliance and thoroughness of Elbaum's new volume, the first book about the sixties upheaval to provide us with a serious analysis of the post-1968 New Left, focusing on those who saw the need to build a new communist party to replace the "revisionist" CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA). Elbaum has performed a service of immense value to all of us by using his formidable analytical skills to fill the extensive gaps in our knowledge about this very important period in our history. In doing so, he has challenged the attempt to dismiss this period from our attention by the use of the facile "good sixties/bad sixties" framework that one finds in the work of many scholars of the New Left (including some former activists). This framework has looked favorably on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) of the early 1960s, whose cadre emerged as humane, sensible, and worthy of emulation in many academic accounts. The same scholars who praised SNCC and SDS mostly denounced the excesses of the post-1968 New Left, which, they held, had turned to violence, irrationalism, Black Power, anti-Americanism, third worldism, and radical feminism. They further argued that the excesses of the post-1968 New Left shattered the left liberal coalition that had won a societal consensus for an inclusive and social democratic program that held great promise for all Americans. In their view, this "Bad New Left" gave U.S. citizens the conservative backlash: George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.
Elbaum's work offers a substantive and powerful corrective to this myth. He locates the evolution of the post-1968 New Left within the context of popular mobilizations for justice and equality for people of color, women, and gays and lesbians; for an end to the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam; for an end to the blockade against Cuba; and for support of the anticolonial struggle in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. "All society was a battleground," argues Elbaum in the opening pages of the book (2). The revolutionary fervor of this period stemmed in part from the all-important recognition "that the power of the oppressed was on the rise and the strength of the status quo was on the wane" (2). In early 1971, polls reported that upwards of 3 million people thought a revolution was necessary in the United States (2).
But this statistic will be no less astounding for the post-1960s generation than to learn the central appeal of third world Marxism to these young rebels. This may indeed seem a powerful anomaly for a generation attuned to the vicissitudes of a political culture nourished within the womb of...
Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crime? For the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year, their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives. The product of an innovative field experiment, Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capableâyet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place. âUsing scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, [Pager] shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job. . . . Both informative and convincing.ââLibrary Journal âMarked is that rare book: a penetrating text that rings with moral concern couched in vivid proseâand one of the most useful sociological studies in years.ââMichael Eric Dyson
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004-Nonviolence_ Fighting in the Core Natalie P. Byfield Abstract This essay by Natalie P. Byfield, titled "Fighting in the Core: Questioning the Last Century's Debates over Race, Class, and Gender in Light of the Life and Works of Rod Bush
- See King
See King Jr., M. L. (1957), "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," The Christian
Century, February 6. See https://swap.stanford.edu/20141218230453/http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/papers/vol4/570206.004-Nonviolence_
Fighting in the Core
Natalie P. Byfield
Abstract
This essay by Natalie P. Byfield, titled "Fighting in the Core: Questioning the Last
Century's Debates over Race, Class, and Gender in Light of the Life and Works of
Rod Bush," is a chapter in the book Rod Bush: Lessons from a Radical Black Scholar
on Human Love and Liberation, edited by Melanie E. L. Bush, and co-edited by
The End of White World Supremacy
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Race to the Bottom: How Hillary Clinton' s campaign played the race card-and drove a wedge into the feminist movement
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