Oct 29, 2017 | 1:45 PM - 3:15 PM | Studio Theatre

Mary K. Ryan, MA

50 Years Later: The Kerner Commission, White Supremacy, and Police Brutality

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (hereinafter referenced as the Kerner Commission) report represents a rare moment when the federal government galvanized attention on the problems of race relations in the United States and their manifestation in vital social structures, political realities, and everyday life for all Americans. 2017 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report and I will examine the Kerner Commission’s recommendations regarding police-community relations which remain profoundly relevant in the status quo. A core component of the report focused on racial violence and its relationship to police behavior. The report found that the riots were caused by aggressive and abusive police practices often involving brutal beatings and shootings of unarmed Black men. Such practices spurred protest from the community which, in turn, led to even more aggressive police behavior, further inflaming communities. Police practices reveal systemic racism.

The Kerner Commission indicted white society for isolating and neglecting Black communities and rebuked the systemic exploitation of Black lives: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Decades later, as my supporting photos reveal, the U.S. Department of Justice confirms that the relationship between law enforcement and the African-American community remains troubled. This paper contends that white supremacy and systemic racism are crucial considerations in assessing how the Kerner Commission’s recommendations were received. Lastly, I will compare the Kerner Commission's recommendations alongside contemporary police reforms such as body cameras, independent civilian law enforcement review boards, and patrol officer training practices. In this analysis, I will describe contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matters in the face of ongoing police brutality and community struggles for social change.

Ronada Hewitt

Fire Next Time and White Fragility

This paper serves as an exploration into the creation of James Baldwin’s, Fire Next Time during social unrest of the 1960’s in America.  Within the text, Baldwin reinforces resistance to European ideas and stereotypes by promoting affirmation of the black body, culture and history.  In his attempt to affirms his nephew and the larger African American community, Baldwin focuses on the inability of white America to identify the and alter the role the society plays in the deconstruction of the black experience.  White fragility disallows acceptance of fault which in turn, renders them useless to aid in the development of black success.

Nehal El-Hadi, MA

The Production of Presence

In my current research, I’m working on exploring what I call “the production of presence,” which I define as “the creation, management, and distribution of content and stories that center the marginalised individual and reflect the being-in-the-world of marginalised groups in deliberately authentic and representative ways; these produced narratives then counter dominant hegemonic discourses of everyday life by providing alternate retellings and imaginings of everyday lived experiences.” This presentation defines what I mean by the production of presence using data gathered through participant interviews and archival research; in it, I describe the ways in which these women of colour produce their presence, and how they can, through their online activities, change space through accessing their right to the city. I then explore the possibilities presented by first-person narratives of city-life archived online. Using the content produced and posted online, I posit that the wealth of information available online allows for different – and more complex – understandings of place in Toronto that are deeply-nuanced. I believe that these online archives should be studied and data extrapolated from them; however, I caution against acts of surveillance and outline ethical implications for this kind of research. I believe that the production of presence can be engaged in multilayering understandings of space, and can serve in the enrichment and understanding of the stories we live and tell.

Anthony Mathieu, MA

White America's Valuation of Black Culture over Black Lives

Throughout American history, society’s dominant racial group has continually co-opted, re-appropriated, and misrepresented the cultural symbols, narratives, practices, and lexicon of racial subordinates. This paper argues that those who constitute white America value black culture over the lives of those who create it. The creation of culture is in fact labor that black folk are insubstantially compensated for, resulting in the subsequent alienation of cultural laborers from that which they produce. Black identity is manifested through black culture. Thus, if black folk are alienated from the culture that they produce, they will ultimately be stripped of their very identity.

This paper draws on Karl Marx’s notion of alienated labor, in which factory laborers during the rise of the Industrial Revolution were increasingly estranged from the physical products that were subsequently commodified for the consumer’s benefit. Marx’s discussion of alienated labor and Gayle Rubin’s assertion that assumption of traditional gender roles is in fact labor similarly reflect the ways in which black folk of American society produce cultural symbols, narratives, practices, and lexicon that are then utilized by white America for white America’s benefit. Historical examples and contemporary sites of cultural co-optation, re-appropriation, and misrepresentation against black folk will be outlined. This analysis of labor will be extended by demonstrating the ways in which the production of culture manifests itself into racial identity. Ultimately, black folk will be called upon to limit the extent to which they expose their culture to those constitute white America, in an attempt to stymie the process of cultural labor estrangement.