News & Events

February 13, 2013

Insurgency: The Black Matter(s) Issuewww.thediasporablackmattersissue.comThe fall edition of The Diaspora, a biannual publication of the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, is now live!  Please visit the link above and share widely."Black lives matter. However, what that actually means to people in different locations, with different experiences and different life chances is decidedly more complicated. The complexities of mobilizing against anti-Black racism is reflected in the naming of this issue—aiming to be in conversation with the ongoing struggles in the streets and the assertions of Black humanity online, while at the same time reflecting the peculiar position of Black scholars writing from the ivory tower. The…

October 10, 2012

H. Samy Alim, Associate Professor in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies in Education (SHIPS) and Educational Linguistics, Stanford University Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking--as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, "Nah, we straight." Articulate While Black addresses language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of…