In the wake of more murders of Black Americans by police over the last few weeks and the ongoing plague of murders of Black trans women, many white Americans are turning to reading lists to make sense of the present moment and perhaps unpack some of the racism within themselves.
JSTOR, one of the largest sites for accessing academic journals digitally, released its own reading list --”Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus”-- providing free synopses of some really important scholarship. At the same time, JSTOR increased the number of articles you can read after creating a free account. I wanted to highlight what I think are a few great picks from the “Syllabus” JSTOR put together as well as a few pieces on the history of Philadelphia that are relevant to our present:
“The Wages of Blackness: African American Workers and the Meanings of Race during Philadelphia's 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic” in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography by Jacquelyn C. Miller
Many observers have been comparing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to various outbreaks in our nation’s history, perhaps most notably the 1918 Spanish Flu. Miller’s account of the racial coding of Black nurses and caregivers during the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic, however, offers several parallels to our current moment.
“The Devastation of Black Wall Street” by Kimberly Fain for JSTOR Daily.
HBO’s Watchmen brought the Tulsa race riots of 1921 back into the national conversation last year, and it is honestly shocking that the incident isn’t in every school textbook in America. Fain provides a thorough summary of the riots--which killed some 300 people and left an estimated 9,000 homeless--while also linking to contemporary news coverage and other scholarly studies.
“Not in My Back Yard: The Contested Origins of the African American Museum of Philadelphia” from From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement by Andrea Burns
At a time when the African American Museum of Philadelphia faces a catastrophic drop in city funding--the kind of divestment that has doomed other Philly museums in recent years--the story of the fight to establish the museum in the first place is essential reading. Created out of organizing during the American Bicentennial of 1976, the AAMP faced significant challenges from the beginning. The debate over the a proposed location in Society Hill--then in the midst of urban renewal projects and gentrification--is a revealing look at fault lines still present in Philadelphia today.
EDIT: It looks like this book is still behind the paywall at JSTOR, but you may be able to access it through a library or university.
“A Black Feminist Statement” by the The Combahee River Collective
Black Feminism has been at the forefront of developing the prison abolition movement, which is receiving a lot of media attention these days. This statement from 1977 lays out the roots of the movement and the overlapping effects of gender, sexuality, race, and class that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw would later describe as “intersectional.”
“I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing” by Gene Demby for NPR
Okay, this isn’t on JSTOR, but this essay about the MOVE Bombing, written 30 years later is a thorough account not only of the standoff that led to the Philadelphia Police Department dropping a bomb on a home from a helicopter, but also of the long-term effects that the bombing has had on the neighborhood and this city.
“Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” by Heather Ann Thompson in The Journal of American History
If you want a quick primer on mass incarceration in America, the “Prisons Today” exhibit at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site is a pretty good place to start. Heather Ann Thompson’s essay goes above and beyond, fleshing out the data and the historical trends that led us here. How did the United States prison population boom between 1970 and the last decade? What effect did that mass incarceration have on urban spaces? (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t been good.)
- TM
The JSTOR syllabus offers many more points of entry into the complex and tangled history of systemic racism in this country and I recommend clicking through the summaries as well as reading the denser scholarship. If you have any recommended reading (or podcasts or documentaries or etc.), let us know on social media!