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To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation's racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state's co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of \"multicultural dispossession.\" This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

This futuristic research illuminates pressing challenges historically Black college and university (HBCU) faculty encounter in supporting the unique social, cultural, and pedagogical needs of their first-year students. Using a BlackCrit framework, the author examines the ways in which Black students are positioned as a problem and in need of intervention and the Black suffering that this entails. This framework is particularly pressing because it highlights the subtle dehumanizing student development theories that frame the prevailing first-year seminar models. The author employed an emancipatory action and narrative research methodology to propose a re-imagining of first-year seminars at HBCUs; a futuristic first-year seminar that builds on the rich legacy of HBCU faculty and a critical humanizing sociocultural knowledge of antiblackness and Black suffering.

In his controversial 1973 book, Is God a White Racist?, William R. Jones sharply criticized black theologians for their agnostic approach to black suffering, noting that the doctrine of an ominibenevolent God poses very significant problems for a perennially oppressed community. He proposed a “humanocentric theism” which denies God’s sovereignty over human history and imputes autonomous agency to humans. By rendering humans alone responsible for moral evil, Jones’s theology freed blacks to revolt against the evil of oppression without revolting against God. This book now places Jones’s argument in conversation with the classical schools of Islamic theology. The problem confronting the black community is not simply proving that God exists, states this book, but rather establishing that God cares. No religious expression that fails to tackle the problem of black suffering can hope to enjoy a durable tenure in the black community. For the Muslim, therefore, it is essential to find a Quranic/Islamic grounding for the protest-oriented agenda of black religion. That is the task the book undertakes here.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Proslavery and Abolitionist Moral Defense In Their Own Words References

Black women in the United States experience sexual harassment and violence at rates much higher than do White women, suffering greater psychological and physical harm. We examined how White Racial Identity, race of the female victim, and characteristics of the perpetrator combine to influence White Americans’ willingness to respond in a supportive way toward the sexual harassment complainant (i.e., allyship). White US participants ( N  = 419) completed a racial identity measure and read about a White male supervisor’s alleged workplace sexual harassment (with violence) of a Black or White female subordinate. The supervisor was portrayed with characteristics to elicit perceptions of high or low supervisor benevolence. As hypothesized and consistent with the aversive racism framework, for the Black complainant only, in the high (but not low) supervisor benevolence condition, stronger White racial identity predicted markedly lower intervention intentions and less supervisor-directed punishment. The effects were mediated by lower perceived complainant suffering. These findings offer insights into the complex dynamics influencing allyship, making White Americans more aware of the factors that may subtly shape their willingness to intervene and offer support for Black women who are victims of interracial sexual harassment, as well informing the development of interventions to produce more equitable treatment of Black women in the workplace.

Video games prioritize “fun” and “immersion”, yet suffering can disrupt play. Using phenomenology of emotion, this study examines Black Myth: Wukong as a case where suffering is integral to gameplay and narrative. It argues that suffering awakens player subjectivity, enabling resistance to algorithmic and biopolitical constraints. As mass art, video games harness suffering’s affective power to transform players from passive participants to active agents, revealing their potential for resistance.

The theme of suffering is intimately tied to the possibilities of the blood as redemptive in theology. Potentially considered a universal pathway to salvation and racial transcendence for people of African descent, “Da Blood of Shesus” asks: Is there redeeming power in the blood for people of African descent? Turning to Womanist and lyrical theologians to postulate an African theological framework which explores redemptive suffering not glorified as inevitable and intricate to the historical Black experience and the church. Lyrical theologians affirm Jesus’ redemptive power of the blood in Hip Hop portraying the ways in which the cross reveals the attributes of God. Womanist theologians challenge the “classical” interpretation of redemptive suffering, illuminating the ways it contributes to Black oppression and wretchedness. Arguably, Womanist and lyrical theologians conjointly point towards liberatory and alternatives to examine redemptive suffering for people of African descent by offering sites to scrutinize and nuance the blood as an indispensable pathway to redemption. An African theological perspective decenters the logics of anti-Blackness proposing suffering is inevitable to Black life and the historical Black experience.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary,Slavery and the Culture of Tastedemonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks,Slavery and the Culture of Tastesets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

Background One legacy of slavery and colonialist structures is that minority populations, particularly the Black populations, experience higher rates of poverty, disease, job insecurity, and housing instability today — all indicators of poor health or negative social determinants of health (SDOH). While the historical legacy of slavery may explain why certain populations currently experience social determinants, they may also embody Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) through manifestations of negative health outcomes. Material and Methods Black female health and human services (HHS) workforce members, who have taken SDOH trainings through a medical-legal partnership (MLP), were recruited for an ethnographic study to determine how historical context, specifically PTSS, can help Black female HHS workforce members understand and advocate for their patients as well as challenge the medial and legal institutions. Results Themes emerged around how Black women in HHS have persisted and resisted, struggled, and strived to protect and raise a resistant community that is perpetually threatened. Black women constantly exist in the past, present, and future, negotiating their identities and reproducing the modeled behavior of the parents, particularly their Black mothers, who taught them how to exist in the world as Black women. Conclusions As sufferers of negative social determinants, Black women, especially those working in HHS, use their lived experiences and historical trauma to challenge the systems within which they work. They use their intersectional identities and their reimagined definitions of SDOH to rethink how the HHS workforce can move forward in working in the best interests of their patients. Future SDOH trainings may consider integrating historical legacies to challenge medical-legal institutions.

This paper argues that the philosophy of Buddhist emptiness not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart with its two most salient manifestationsdependent origination and impermanence, but is applied to alleviate suffering in the poetry, and the two approaches the poetry collection are (1) to recognize emptiness in times of crisis and (2) to cultivate bodhicitta through using emptiness to extend loving kindness to all beings. Furthermore, it is argued that emptiness enriches Buddhist womanism by strengthening its theoretical underpinnings, redirecting the focus from practice to cognitive transformation, and harmonizing the priorities of individual and communal wellbeing.