reflections

If you attended the lecture by Dr. Xach Williams on Oct. 7, here is your opportunity to earn some extra credit! Just write a brief reflection on what you learned from the lecture. What points stood out to you? Were there parts of the lecture that confused you? What did you think of the exchanges during the Q&A? What connections can you make between Dr. Williams’ lecture and our course content? How might you relate this lecture to your own life experiences or to current public events?

Address these questions in a reflection of c. 500 words, save your work as a DOC or RTF (no “.pages” files, as my computer cannot open them!), and upload this extra-credit assignment using the SUBMIT button.

lecture by Dr. Xach Williams, “Views of Race, Reparations, and U.S. Settler Colonialism from the Place of Blackness in the Pacific Northwest,” will have the opportunity to earn extra credit by writing a short reflection on the lecture. I would HIGHLY encourage you all to attend if possible – it will definitely be a great talk! Here again is Dr. Xach’s bio:

Xach Williams is the UCSD Black Studies Project 2020 – 2021 Post-Doctoral Fellow. Originally from Seattle, Dr. Williams received his PhD in Ethnic Studies from UCSD in 2019 and before that completed a BA in Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University in 2011. Dr. Williams’s dissertation, titled Didn’t It Rain?: Religiosity, Swingin’ Jazz, and Black Community Formations in the Pacific Northwest, explores the ways that material conditions of anti-black racism, segregation, and exclusion affect the development of the Pacific Northwest from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

In addition to academic writing, Dr. Williams is also an emcee and hip-hop lyrical composer under the name Xyz(X), using music as a medium to explore the meanings and experiences of being black in the PNW.

… and here’s the abstract for the lecture:

This paper will engage with contemporary national calls for reparations for chattel slavery in the US through a regionally specific framing of histories of blackness in the Pacific Northwest. In the wake of the state-perpetrated murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the subsequent protests against police brutality across the nation, the US has experienced renewed conversations around the meanings of race, violence, and inequality in US society. However, what is often lost in national discussions of race and violence are the ways in which race functions in differentiated ways across space. By approaching a national conversation on reparations through a regionally specific lens, this paper intends to demonstrate the potential of a multiscalar approach to account for nuanced and regionally differentiated meanings of blackness, white supremacy, and power, and to highlight the importance of theoretical approaches that identify connections between structures of chattel slavery and settler colonialism in the US.