Historical Background

 

We start with this thread, from Megan Francis. Click on the tweet for the whole thread.

And here is a foloow-up: https://twitter.com/meganfrancis/status/1267210645218504705?s=21

 

The Medieval Academy of America has shared these resources:

Here are some links to bibliography and resources about people of color during the Middle Ages…a topic that is vastly misinterpreted, chronically misunderstood, and dangerously misappropriated:
Here is the recent webinar hosted by the Medieval Academy on the latest in Black Death research, also a topic that has relevance to thinking about race and racism, since the white supremacist movement often interprets COVID as a type of “racial cleansing,” using the medieval plague as a reference point:
And associated (massive!) bibliography:

 

From poet Evie Shockley, we have this contribution:

I taught last semester from this book: Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.  It includes very helpful essays about historical and contemporary  African American elegies generally, but with an emphasis on poems for victims of lynching and police violence.  It also collects new poems from the Black Lives Matter period. There are materials from the #FergusonSyllabus (and similar efforts) that would speak to issues raised by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others in this moment.  We can also go back to materials pulled together for teaching Hurricane Katrina, to help students think about how “natural disasters” (like Covid-19) have unnatural, disproportionate impacts on Black people and other people of color.
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Fiction writer NK Jemisin sent us to this, on Twitter, to help us understand the history of the infiltration of social movements:
A thread from @ClaireWilett, on COINTELPRO:
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MLA member Ben Railton, who tweets as @AmericanStudier, teaches at Framingham State, and writes for The Saturday Evening Post, gives us this history of the Tulsa Massacre:

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Here’s a site by Hannah Alpert-Abrams, with lots of useful sources on the history of policing: http://www.halperta.com/posts/blog/police-bib/
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University of Denver:

Inclusive teaching practices require us to engage the wealth of intersecting social identities and positionalities that faculty and students bring to the classroom. Whether face-to-face or online, inclusion must not be an afterthought. Rather, it should permeate every aspect of curriculum and course design, classroom management, and assessment of teaching and learning.

Through this site, we invite you to advance your praxis, create dynamic courses, remove barriers to learning, and dismantle oppressive practices by implementing inclusive pedagogies. Explore critical diversity considerations that shape higher education in real-time, read academic articles, visit suggested websites, and watch recommended TED talks and videos.

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The National Museum of African American History Talking about Race web portal. Portal helps people explore issues of race, racism, and racial identity
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A survivor of a lynching tells his harrowing tale.