Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the fourth in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America.

A life-long New Yorker, professor Morgan, 59, is currently on leave from New York University as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

She is a 1986 graduate of Oberlin College where she majored in Africana studies and received her PhD in history from Duke University in 1995.

Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the 16th and 17th centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world.

Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.

Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, “Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery” (2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men.

In Laboring Women, Morgan argues that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because of their reproductive potential. Enslaved women were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement.

Morgan’s analysis of wills, probate proceedings, and purchasing records reveals how slaveowners understood forced procreation as a strategy to maintain their labor supply (rather than importing more people to enslave as laborers from Africa).

In her second book, “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic” (2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade.

She argues that such data obscured and justified the violence enslavers inflicted upon human beings. Record-keepers largely left gender and parentage out of demographic and accounting records. By refusing to acknowledge kinship among enslaved people, enslavers could rationalize family separation.

Morgan links the so-called neutral data of the slave trade to the consolidation of a hierarchy of race, based on false narratives about the difference and inferiority of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Morgan recovers the humanity and agency of enslaved women.

She demonstrates that enslaved women understood that their captors exploited their ability to produce children to create wealth. Morgan also charts their efforts to resist the commodification of their motherhood.

Morgan is currently at work on “The Eve of Slavery”—a book about African women in 17th-century North America. It is organized around the life of Elizabeth Key, a woman of color who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free white man.

The lives of Key and other Black women who tried to protect themselves and their children offer an intimate window into the development of American slavery.

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Special to The Post

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

 Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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By Conway Jones

The San Francisco Foundation celebrated the 76^th anniversary of its founding in 1964 on Thursday, Oct. 24, at The Pearl in San Francisco.

Over 150 people came together with members of the SFF community whose intent was to fulfill the promise of the Bay: democracy, racial equity, affordable housing, and more.

A fireside chat featured SFF CEO Fred Blackwell in conversation with KQED Chief Content Officer and SFF Trustee Holly Kernan.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the past couple of years have been tough. From uncertainty about the future of our nation to ongoing wars and violence globally to Supreme Court decisions that rolled back decades of work on racial equity and reproductive rights – it’s easy to become cynical and fatigued,” said Blackwell.

“Resolve is what is necessary to keep us moving forward in the face of attacks on DEI and affirmative action, of an economy that undervalues arts and caretaking, of a housing shortage that keeps too many of our neighbors sleeping in the streets,” he continued.

Youth Speaks provided poetry and a musical performance by Audiopharmacy, a world-renowned hip-hop ensemble and cultural community arts collective.

The San Francisco Foundation is one of the largest community foundations in the United States. Its mission is to mobilize community leaders, nonprofits, government agencies, and donors to advance racial equity, diversity, and economic opportunity.

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