Abstract
On February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, on the sixtieth anniver-sary of the publication of Invisible Man, a seventeen-year-old unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a self- identified “Hispanic” neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed it was a matter of self-defense. Two years later, on July 14, 2014—in what was an eerie parallel to one of Invisible Man’s characters, Tod Clifton, an unarmed black man, former Brotherhood member, shot dead by white New York City police offi-cers for peddling black dolls—another unarmed black man, forty-three-year-old Eric Garner, was strangled to death by a white New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who believed Garner was resisting arrest for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on a street in Staten Island. The incident was video-recorded. Less than a month later, on August 9, 2014, still another unarmed eighteen-year-old African American man, Michael Brown, was shot twelve times by another white police officer, Darren Wilson, who claimed to have feared for his life. The event occurred in broad daylight in Ferguson, Missouri.
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Notes
See Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Andrew Dilts, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership and the Limits of American Liberalism ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2014 ).
For discussions about race in the age of Obama see Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 )
David R. Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon ( New York: Verso, 2008 ).
Whitman, Democratic Vistas; Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998 ).
Baldwin’s, Ellison’s and Morrison’s work shows memory to be politically valuable, countering those who argue against it and call for strategic coalitions and political strategy oriented toward the future. For those who resist memory see John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006 )
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 ).
For a normative defense of emotion and rhetoric in democracy see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 ).
Critics of talented-tenth thesis include Adolph Reed, W. E. B Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 )
Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals ( New York: Routledge, 1996 ).
See Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Glaude, In a Shade of Blue.
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© 2015 Alex Zamalin
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Zamalin, A. (2015). Conclusion: Racial Justice Today. In: African American Political Thought and American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528100_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528100_5
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