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George Floyd gasping for breath and Reverend Al Sharpton’s elegiac refrain, “Get your knee off our necks,” are painful historical metaphors of black life and black death under racism’s enabling socio-economic structures. Floyd’s murder is uniquely an American tragedy. Whether enslaved or free, Black contributions to America have been legion in...
Quaker Oats has announced that the image of Aunt Jemima will be removed from all packaging and the brand’s name will be changed. The move comes amid rapid cultural change in the wake of nationwide protests. TODAY’s Sheinelle Jones reports.Professor Riché Richardson is interviewed on the Today show. Watch the video on www.today.com
Naminata Diabate, associate professor of comparative literature, has been awarded the 2020 Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists.The Appel fellowships have recognized faculty excellence since 1995, giving each recipient a semester’s study leave at full salary to write, develop new courses, conduct research or...
...Those diminishing traits followed black women and girls out of slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil-rights movement, and continue to ensure that they are not treated with value or regard—much less gingerly—today. In a 2013 Time article, the Cornell University professor Noliwe M. Rooks asked, “Why are Black women seen as more...
Dear Graduate Students and Colleagues:It is not too hard to imagine that the last three months have been stressful for many of us. First came the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic did not just disrupt our classes and compel us to embrace unproven modes of teaching. The pandemic also altered how we live by causing us to separate from one another...
Retiring Aunt Jemima matters because the logo is "a retrograde image of Black womanhood on store shelves," Riché Richardson, an associate professor of African American literature at Cornell University, told the "TODAY" show Wednesday. "It's an image that hearkens back to the antebellum plantation. ... Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype that is...
Noliwe Rooks, an author and professor at Cornell University whose work explores race and gender, said in an email Tuesday that this year’s observance had added meaning.“As a holiday, Juneteenth perfectly encapsulates this moment which is almost equal parts anger over the reminders of how little regard there has generally been for Black life,...
...Noliwe Rooks, a professor of literature at Cornell University, previously told the Advance/SILive.com that school districts easily transitioning to online learning typically have students with the same skills and socioeconomic backgrounds. Students who know the basics, have an innate curiosity, and often test at the upper levels of standardized...
Carole Boyce-Davies, a professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, discusses whether George Floyd’s death will mark a turning point for global police reforms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC5YfxGfcXg
Like the whole world, we as Cornell’s Africana faculty witnessed the execution-style killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by law enforcement officers. Millions have watched Floyd’s brutal murder on social media minute by minute, reinscribing his and our collective trauma with each view. The heinous murders of black women and men, in most cases...
George Floyd died on May 26 at the knee of a Minneapolis Police Department officer whose casualness as life slowly went out of a writhing Floyd must discomfit any human. This happened while we were still processing the news of the death of Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of a father-son duo in Brunswick, Ga., earlier in the year. The news of both...
Like so many people around the world, I am horrified, saddened and deeply unsettled by the death of George Floyd at the hands of four police officers in Minneapolis, Minn. on May 25. His death reflected longstanding patterns of routinized violence against black men and women at the hands of law enforcement and white vigilantes. Last week, many...
Earlier this month, Governor Cuomo appointed an advisory panel to “reimagine education.” Noliwe Rooks, professor of literature and of Africana Studies, as well as the director of American Studies, at Cornell University and the author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (The New Press, 2017) talks about...
Kenya is where Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Department of English, first encountered what it meant to be Black in the United States—in his father’s library, reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright and issues of Ebony and Jet. Mukoma was born in Illinois to Kenyan parents in 1971. His family moved back to Kenya when he was still a baby. Returning to the...
...Given the experiences related above, I wondered (“Education Crisis: From Pre-K to Higher Ed, Students Face Unequal Access During Coronavirus Shutdown,” Democracy Now, April 29, 2020) how online instruction worked as masses of students had this kind of instruction as the only source of their education during this pandemic: This is Noliwe Rooks...
Online and other remote learning have become the norm for Central New York students from elementary school all the way through college. Will it have a negative impact on education? And should we have been more prepared?. As part of our Syracuse Speaks programming, WAER’s Chris Bolt spoke with Cornell University's Noliwe Rooks. She’s the W-E-B...
Noliwe Rooks, a professor of literature at Cornell University, said school districts easily transitioning to online learning typically have students with the same skills and socioeconomic backgrounds.“It would not seem to bode well for the New York City public schools, given the demographics -- but we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but...
...Complicating matters is the diverse character of the student body in the city’s public school system, where roughly 13% of students are English language-learners and one in five students has a disability, according to city data.Nearly three-quarters of New York’s school children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches due to low-income...
Marc Lacey ’87, national editor for The New York Times and the first Distinguished Visiting Journalist in a new College of Arts and Sciences program, shared advice with students, visited classes and learned about faculty research during a trip to campus Feb. 10-14.“There’s not a single class I took at Cornell that I haven’t used in some sense or...
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties to two islands intimately entangled by empire, Britain and Jamaica. Her new book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, is her answer to that...
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a book than preeminent black British feminist theorist Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019) to answer this fraught question. This exceptional book deserves...
Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art, volume 42–43, a double issue of the scholarly journal dedicated to the theme of Global Black Consciousness, was awarded runner-up for Best Special Issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals this past January.Under the coeditorship of Salah M. Hassan and Margo Natalie Crawford, this issue of Nka examines...
Africana joins the rest of the world in mourning Tejumola (Teju) Olaniyan, Louise Durham Mead Professor of English & Wole Soyinka Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, a Cornell alumnus, a friend of our department and one who never failed to lend a hand in our continuing work to fulfill our founding...
Wonder Women, a “Learning Where You Live” course for North Campus residents, engages participants in weekly discussions with guest speakers over personal definitions of success, decision-making and identity building. The course is presented by the Africana Studies and Research Center....Held in faculty-in-residence apartments, the fall class was...
...Together, their wins showed how the competitions have evolved from typically only validating features associated with white women, like lighter skin and straight hair. That evolution could influence communities globally, where blackness is rarely held as the standard of beauty, Noliwe Rooks, professor of Africana studies at Cornell University,...