Thank you to Crystal Belle and the organizers of the Trayvon Martin Effect Conference at Teachers College for this weekend's events!

1. “When They Reminisce
Over You, My God!”:
Reminiscing Racial Violence,
In and Out of School
Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Associate Professor of English

3. “They Reminisce Over You”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKJ9fRa2MTc
(Pete Rock and CL Smooth on Arsenio Hall)
End of first verse and C.L. Smooth’s last two bars:
Déjà vu, Tell You What I’m Gonna Do
When They Reminisce Over You, My God!
The weight and impact of such re-remembering is
exactly what schools quite actively and deliberately
keep us from doing.

4. Zeus Leonardo’s work asks us to
understand:
•Problems of research and action theorized
solely from the location of white privilege
•“White privilege” is a passive description of white
racial domination
•Racial domination never happens without active
agents
• Whiteness is not a state of being dominant
•Whiteness is a calculated and calculating series
of racist processes.

5. “Backwater Blues” by Bessie Smith
I woke up this mornin', can't even get out of
my door I woke up this mornin', can't even get
out of my door There's been enough trouble
to make a poor girl wonder where she want to
go…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRTHHk
eQ8sE
In 1927, the Mississippi River broke out of its levee
system in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles

6. Structural and institutional
racism are NOT subtle or
invisible.
Oppression could never work
if it were invisible or unfelt.

7. “I must feel the fire of my
soul so my intellectual
blues can set others
on fire.”
~Cornel West, Brother West

8. “Being oppressed
means the absence of
choices.”
~bell hooks

9. “The blues women did not passively
reflect the vast social changes of their
time; they provided new ways of
thinking about these changes,
alternative conceptions of the physical
and social world for their audience of
migrating and urban women and men,
and social models for women who
aspired to escape from and now
improve their conditions of existence.”
~Hazel Carby

10. Excerpt from my syllabus:
Writing about texts is perhaps the
singlemost, common trademark for the
kind of writing and thinking that is
expected of you in the academy.
However, this does NOT mean: that you
write about things you don’t care about,
that you write as if you sound like an
encyclopedia/ wikipedia, that you omit
your own voice and perspective, that
you cannot be creative and energetic….

11. … that you must sound like the type of
person who might wear wool/plaid
jackets with suede patches on the
elbows in order to be taken seriously,
that you cannot be everything that
makes up your multiple selves, that you
cannot be Hip Hop, Soul, Bachata,
Bomba, Metal, or Rock-N-Roll, that you
cannot have some fun with it. You do
not give up who you are to be an
academic writer; on the contrary, you
take who are even MORE seriously.

12. From the Feminist Wire…
Monica Casper makes a compelling
case: that we need to talk about
“specifically the historical, systemic
racism of white women.” And Heather
Laine Talley makes it clear that
expressions like “well, not all white
women/white feminists are like that” is a
form of white denial and bad allying.

13. From Fannie Lou Hamer…
“I’m just up here to rap
and tell you what it is
and to tell it like it is.”
“Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either”
(1971 speech ay UW-Madison)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZYin
mLyOxI

15. “When They Reminisce Over You,
My God!”: Reminiscing Racial
Violence, In & Out of School
Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
ckynard@jjay.cuny.edu