Tag Archives: america

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

N***er: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. 

Randall Kennedy takes on not just the N-word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture —with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. 

The word, of course, is nigger, and in his lucidly argued book the legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.

Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?

Randall Kennedy is an American law professor at Harvard University where he teaches courses on criminal law, and the regulation of race relations.  He is the author of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002).

Randall Kennedy 2002

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Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

I’ll Make Me A World

Filmmaker Sam Pollard is a dedicated chronicler of the Black experience in America, moving freely across film and long-form television as well as narrative and documentary. His films explore complicated American figures and the extended aftershocks of racial inequality.

His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.  For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy.  Eight years later, he returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.  For the series, Mr. Pollard received The George Peabody Award.  Between 1990 and 2000, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee’s films:  Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, Bamboozled. 

I’ll Make Me A World: Sam Pollard 1999

Samuel Pollard is an American film director, editor, producer, and screenwriter. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. Currently he teaches filmmaking at NYU’s Tische School of the Arts.

Film at Lincoln Center: Meet Sam Pollard

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

Epic Journeys Of Freedom

Historian Cassandra Pybus traces the lives and adventures of the runaway slaves who absorbed the dreams of liberty from their masters during the American Revolution and fled to the British to find freedom.

Where did these hopeful and courageous idealists go? And what kind of lives did they make for themselves? 

Cassandra Pybus spoke at Cambridge Forum in 2006 about her groundbreaking research into the history of the American Revolution when thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Her book, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled to make liberty a reality in their own lives.

Epic Journeys Of Freedom: Cassandra Pybus 2006

Cassandra Jean Pybus is an Australian historian and writer. She is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, and has published extensively on Australian and American history.

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

Eyes On The Prize

EYES ON THE PRIZE tells the story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

The documentary film’s first part, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, chronicles the time period between the United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. It consists of six episodes, which premiered on January 21, 1987, and concluded on February 25, 1987. The second part, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985, chronicles the time period between the national emergence of Malcolm X during 1964 to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as the first African-American mayor of Chicago. 

The driving force behind Eyes on the Prize and Blackside, Henry Hampton won numerous awards for this landmark series and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  Speaking in 1987 at Cambridge Forum, Hampton talked about his vision of “the remarkable human drama that was the Civil Rights Movement” through the Eyes on the Prize documentary.

Eyes On The Prize – Henry Hampton

Henry Hampton ( 1940 –1998) was an African-American filmmaker. His production company, Blackside, produced over 80 programs—the most recognizable being the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which won Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards, and was nominated for an Oscar.

Black Voices Matter

Slavery And The Invention Of America

America must adopt a new paradigm that fully embraces all citizens and must include the abolishment of race, which is a social construct created to justify slavery…Slavery lasted for more than 240 years, and it will not be until about 2111 that people of African descent will have been free as long as their ancestors were enslaved. But if faced with courage, it need not be lived again.

― Former Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing

Civil rights activist Byron Rushing traces the theme of colonial domination and slavery in the shaping of America’s history and civilization, beginning with the “founding” of a country that was already known to its original inhabitants, the native Americans.  Political activist and historian Byron Rushing argues that America’s history has always been a creation of the victors in the struggle for land and prosperity. 

Here are seven things you probably didn’t know were connected to slavery

Slavery and the Invention of America
https://twitter.com/ByronRushing/status/1368557212549980160?s=20

Recorded in 2003 at Cambridge Forum

In 1969, Byron Rushing became the Director of the Urban Change Program for the Urban League. Later he worked as the president of Boston’s Museum of African-American History. In 1982, Rushing was elected as a representative of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was the chief sponsor of a law to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public schools, and has worked to launch community development investment of poor communities of Massachusetts.

Black Voices Matter

Brown

“I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten. ” 

― Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America.

In his book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and explores issues of race, arguing that America has been brown since its inception, as he himself is. The son of Mexican immigrants, he reflects on what it means to be  Hispanic in America and how Latino immigrants have impacted American culture, changing it from a society that has traditionally seen itself as simply black and white.

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: “Ports have names they call the sea.” Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

Recorded in 2003 at Cambridge Forum

Richard Rodriguez has authored a “trilogy” on American public life and his private life—Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown—concerned, respectively, with class, ethnicity, and race in America. He has also worked as a journalist on television and in print. 

Brown: Richard Rodriquez