Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2024

https://mcachicago.org/about/who-we-are/people/arthur-jafa

Arthur Jafa

Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artifacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa's practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent power, beauty and alienation embedded within forms of black music in US culture?

Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York, and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, High Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Luma Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

b. November 30, 1960, Tupelo, MS; lives in Los Angeles, CA

Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection

Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2024

Arthur Jafa talks about his practice in this studio visit organized in conjunction with the exhibition.

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNdYIK-Dhk&t=4s

Elie Mystal In Conversation With Mehdi Hasan on Mystal's brilliant new book 'Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America’ and the essential fact that in the United States TODAY: 'The constitutional crisis is here. The fascism is here.'

Our Laws Function as 'Anti-Democratic': Legal Expert on How Trump Weaponizes the Constitution

Zeteo

April 5, 2025

Mehdi Unfiltered

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6RAbbo8K-E

Legal expert, lawyer, author, and The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal joins Mehdi Hasan for a new episode of ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ to discuss how some US laws are designed to be 'racist, sexist, and anti-democratic,' and how Donald Trump is weaponizing them. The United States Constitution was written nearly 240 years ago, laying the foundations for an independent, successful, democratic country. But, like most of the nation’s laws, it was written by and for wealthy white men. Mystal’s new book, ‘Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America,’ examines how the US legal system remains both outdated and discriminatory. In this interview, he argues that certain laws should be repealed—including the law that allows Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip people of their legal status without due process. Mystal explains that this law, dating back to the 1920s, was originally designed to prevent the 'mongrelization of the white race by inferior races.' Mystal also discusses the second Trump term. He tells Mehdi: 'The constitutional crisis is here. The fascism is here.' Watch the full interview and share your thoughts in the comments. 

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Legendary Artist, Filmmaker, Cultural Critic, Social Theorist, and Esteemed Raconteur Arthur Jafa Interviewed by Art Critic and Author Kellie Jones at Columbia University

"Getting away is the blackest thing you could do"

--Arthur Jafa

 

IRAAS-AAADSColumbiaU

March 27, 2025 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: LENFEST CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE SHAWN "JAY-Z" CARTER LECTURE

ARTHUR JAFA 

Interview by KELLIE JONES

 

VIDEO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udrvR_2pGmw

Renowned artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa discusses recent work Kellie Jones Chair, Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies and Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art- Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University Introduction by Jafari S. Allen, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Director. 

The Institute for Research in African American Studies-Columbia University Location: Lenfest Lantern Room , Lenfest Center for the Arts Arthur Jafa (b. November 30, 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist and filmmaker. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artifacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty and alienation" embedded within forms of black music in us culture? Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and black star film festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Stedelijk, Luma Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work include presentations at Luma Arles, France; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; ogr Torino, Italy; Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the best participant of The 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live In Interesting Times.” Presented In Collaboration with African American & African Diaspora Studies Department Columbia University, The Institute For Research In African-American Studies Columbia University, Columbia University School Of The Arts And The Institute For Social And Economic Research And Policy- Columbia University

 

A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/05/arts/design/jafa-taxi-driver-scorsese-film-art.html

 

https://lmcc.net/river-to-river-festival/arthur-jafa/

WS, a longer super nova
Directed by Arthur Jafa

Live screening on loop on June 10, 2021
9pm - 11pm

The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
107 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10006

View map +

Select digital streaming dates on June 12, 17, and 24 at 8pm; June 19 and 26 at 3pm, exclusively on LMCC.net

The digital screening will be accompanied by a conversation between Wayne Shorter, esperanza spalding, Greg Tate, and Craig Street.

Presented in partnership with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and The Broad Stage
RSVP for Digital Screening

Arthur Jafa separates sound from image, only to collide them, forcing both eye and ear to find their balance in heart connection. He is an artist in search of a precise proximity between the seen and heard. In his WS, a longer super nova, Jafa gives us a glimpse into the genius mind of Jazz Master Wayne Shorter being his inimitable stream of conscious self. Jafa records an ongoing and intimately wild conversation between Mestre Shorter and brilliantly inspired Jazz force esperanza spalding. The conversation takes place in the eclectic home of Shorter’s friend, architect Frank Gehry. The Gehry Residence, a famously deconstructed habitable art space, makes room for Mr. Shorter’s stories to, like his music, zig zag their way to the point. WS, a longer super nova, a slice of life profile, a blues haiku, captures the dark matter entity that is Wayne Shorter.

Each online screening of WS, a longer super nova will be followed by a separate, filmed conversation between spalding and Shorter, moderated by Greg Tate + Craig Street. This conversation will delve into the relationship between spalding and Shorter as they collaborate on building a new opera, Iphigenia.

https://www.nytimes.com/.../t-m.../arthur-jafa-in-bloom.html

Arthur Jafa in Bloom

Sought after by Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick, and Solange Knowles alike, the visual artist is changing representations of blackness in museums and beyond.

PHOTO: Arthur Jafa photographed at his studio in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles on May 21, 2019. Success has come late for the artist, 58, who has had a long career in commercial film — but it has also come all at once. Last spring, Jafa was awarded the Golden Lion for best participant at the Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Wayne Lawrence

PHOTO: Jafa at his studio. On the wall to the right is his sculpture “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017), inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a slave who had fled from a Louisiana plantation.Credit...Photograph by Wayne Lawrence. Artwork in background from left: Arthur Jafa, “Bloods,” 2019, Epson fine art print mounted on aluminum panel; Arthur Jafa, still from “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016, video; Arthur Jafa, “LeRage,” 2017, color print on dibond, aluminum plate stand; Arthur Jafa, “Ex-Slave Gordon,” 2017, vacuum formed plastic. All artwork courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

by Megan O’Grady
August 14, 2019
The New York Times Style Magazine

“VIBES,” SAYS ARTHUR JAFA, clicking through images on a screen in his Los Angeles studio, all part of an extended mood board for a future project — photographs from the Harlem Renaissance, glamorous black-and-whites of vintage cars and fashion, work by Roy DeCarava — “more vibes.” It’s the morning after Jafa’s 58th birthday, and the polymathic artist, cinematographer and theorist of black culture threw himself a party the night before in this space in the West Adams neighborhood, not far from his home in Ladera Heights. The spotless studio is now empty save for a suite of computers and a large-scale photographic printer the size of a refrigerator. On one wall, there’s a sculpture: a seated man, his horrifically fissured back turned to the viewer. The work was inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a former slave identified as Gordon — it is at once abject and regal and, in Jafa’s 2017 rendition, creepily mesmerizing. The space is new, a place to test out ideas before placing them in a gallery, and late in the day, he shows me a prototype that didn’t work out, tucked in the back: an adult-size oblong of industrial-grade plastic. It takes a few moments of mounting dread to understand that I’m looking at the bundled shape of a lynched woman, meant to be part of a series called “Hang Time.” “Now I have a $60,000 hat stand,” he says dryly.

Success has come late and all at once for Jafa — he still mostly goes by A.J. — but his influence was everywhere long before we knew his name, before he won the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Art Biennale last spring. He shot Spike Lee’s 1994 “Crooklyn” and did second-unit cinematography for Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut.” He co-directed the haunting video for Jay-Z’s 2017 “4:44,” which collages together images of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy and a pair of dancers, Okwui Okpokwasili and Storyboard P, locked in a pas de deux of sorrow and repentance. He shot Solange’s 2016 videos “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “Cranes in the Sky,” and his influence is evident in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” the film co-directed by his friend Kahlil Joseph and based on the 2016 album of the same name. Its aesthetics were inspired by Julie Dash’s landmark 1991 film, “Daughters of the Dust,” about an early 20th-century Gullah family’s migration from the Georgia Sea Islands to the mainland. The lushly gorgeous “Daughters,” a touchstone in black filmmaking from the moment it was released, was shot by Jafa — who also produced the film with Dash, then his wife — after their cinematographer took another job. Its distinctive look merges Dash’s concept with Jafa’s intuitive visual instincts. (The celebrated painter Kerry James Marshall served as production designer.) Jafa had never worked with a 35-millimeter camera before, but the film earned him the cinematography award at Sundance.

PHOTO: The multimedia artist discusses a video that he found on YouTube — a 1992 gospel performance by the Thomas Whitfield Company. Credit: Scott J. Ross

In addition to his commercial work, Jafa has also been a documentary cinematographer (on films about Malcolm X, Audre Lorde and W.E.B. Dubois); in the early aughts, he started and abandoned a fine-arts career. A low point followed his 50th birthday, in 2010; he had moved to California to be closer to his then 6-year-old son but didn’t feel he was making work that was meaningful to him. A major shift began in 2013, when he made a magnificent but under-seen 52-minute film essay called “Dreams Are Colder Than Death.” Framed as a meditation on the legacy of the civil rights movement, 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it includes interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists like Fred Moten, Kara Walker, Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, their faces and voices interspersed with slow-motion images of water and stills of deep space as they meditate on American blackness and its complicated inheritance, what Spillers calls the “flesh memory” of pain. What gives the film its lyricism and grandeur is its unusual range of scale, linking the intimately human to the geologic and cosmological. In 2016, he restarted his career as an artist when the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles included him in its “Made in L.A. 2016” biennial, inviting him to show the hundreds of binders of images he’d compiled over decades, culled from magazines and books — a kind of visual lexicon of diasporic blackness, including fashion photography, pictures of athletes and celebrities, art from superhero magazines and ethnographic imagery. The binders stretched across the gallery.

The tipping point for Jafa was a seven-and-a-half-minute film he made the same year, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” Composed to a large extent of found footage spliced together, it’s a kind of D.J. mix of pure chills, spun with urgency: The white South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shooting and killing the unarmed black forklift operator Walter Scott in 2015; a black Texas teenage girl in a bikini being hurled to the ground by a white policeman two months later; a clip of the British sprinter Derek Redmond pulling a hamstring in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, followed by his father rushing to help his injured son hobble to the finish line. We see swaying crowds and iconic faces — Coretta Scott King, Nina Simone, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” — as well as newer ones, like the young actress Amandla Stenberg, who asks, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?” In the finale, LeBron James gloriously dunks a basketball, the surface of the sun blazes and James Brown grabs a microphone stand and collapses onto a stage. A phantasmagoria of brutality and magnificence, the short unsparing film is an expansive, unshakable fever dream of blackness as both a creative force and an object of white violence, a kind of digital-age “Guernica.”

Jafa’s distaste for what he calls “microwave epiphanies” has led him to work that expands upon themes embedded in “Love Is the Message” and to play with new forms, including, in his 2018 show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, “Air Above Mountains, Unknown Pleasures,” an arresting set of seven-foot-high tires wrapped in chains. But his strongest work draws upon visual culture and its relationship with blackness, from ironic self-portraits — including one from 1988 titled “Monster” — to the visual representation of historical events, some of which may not be known to younger generations of Americans. In a 2017 show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions,” visitors were greeted with a wall-size reproduction of a press photograph of the 1970 Marin County courthouse siege, in which the teenage activist Jonathan Jackson — gun-toting, visibly nervous and very young — and three other Black Panthers took hostage a judge, three jurors and a deputy district attorney with the goal of freeing Jackson’s older brother and two others from prison.A clip from Arthur Jafa’s seven-and-a-half-minute film composed to a large extent of found footage spliced together. Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York/Rome

Jafa’s latest film, “The White Album,” which was shown at the Venice Art Biennale, turns a black lens on the fragility of white self-conception. A 30-minute film with longer clips than “Love Is the Message,” it contains material ranging from the intentionally banal (a dim teen explaining why she’s “the farthest thing from racist”; goths dancing to hip-hop) to the searing (like CCTV footage of Dylann Roof entering and exiting Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where he would shoot and kill nine worshipers in 2015). A series of bad dreams about race and power, it contains an almost unwatchably painful sequence, one that recalls the scene in “Love Is the Message” in which a black father stands his young son against a wall to show him “what the police do to you.” In the new film, we see a small, tender boy repeatedly reduced to tears by his adult brother’s teasing. In both cases, and in much of his career to this point, Jafa’s intention is clear: to show a kind of misguided, preparatory tough love, the overture to the coming nightmare.

THE ART DEALER Gavin Brown saw “Love Is the Message” during Art Basel in 2016 when Kahlil Joseph showed it as a prelude to a private screening of his cut of “Lemonade.” Brown tracked down Jafa’s number and called him directly. “I was driving my son to school at the time, so I was like, ‘Yes, I know who you are. What do you want?’” recalls Jafa. His film opened at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem in November 2016, just days after the presidential election. The timing was brilliant — it seemed to be a perfect riposte to the atavistic white fears evident in the electoral breakdown; the reception electric. Lines began to form inside Gavin Brown’s Enterprise as people flocked uptown to see it.

As Jafa tells it, “Love Is the Message” came together over the course of a few hours in editing, but it sprang from many years of thinking about how to make films in a vernacular that might intimate the African-American experience as well as popular music could — what Jafa has called “black visual intonation.” After Jafa was released from a commercial project for YouTube in honor of Black History Month (the direction he was taking the film was deemed too dark), he began stringing together archival images — a digital version of what he’d been doing for decades in notebook form, refining his ideas about ways to centralize black life in art apart from Eurocentric ideals. He refers to his juxtaposition of footage he shot himself with found imagery culled from archives and dash cams and unseen corners of the internet — “If my dope register goes off, I use it” — as “affective proximity,” borrowing a term from his friend, the British filmmaker John Akomfrah, and the result challenges viewers to know and feel on a deeper level things we might have thought we had already known and felt. The montage form brings to mind the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s hypnotic collages of word and image, or of the various ways in which Andy Warhol harnessed pop culture to reflect us back to ourselves, but neither comparison goes very far in describing the improvisational virtuosity of Jafa’s editing, with its changes in pace, jump cuts, drags and dissolves. It’s more useful to consider the film’s place within a lineage of black art, of making something new and transcendent from leftovers (giblets, not tenderloin; found footage, not a solid chunk of marble) — and of the potential for visceral truth-telling art to emerge from a state of emergency.

PHOTO: A self-portrait of Jafa titled “Monster” (1988). Credit: Arthur Jafa, “Monster,” 1988, gelatin silver print mounted on aluminum, courtesy of the Artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.



Jafa, an attractive man in a blue button-down and jeans, with braids, excellent glasses and a graying beard, is appealingly neurotic, an intellectual prone to conversational riffs that expand and loop back, inviting you into his thoughts. Two impulses seem to govern him: the need to, as he puts it, “keep it real,” despite the sudden attention, and a determination to advance the larger project of black representation in visual art and beyond. Initially, when Joseph, unbeknownst to Jafa, first began showing “Love Is the Message” in 2016 at the Underground Museum, the art space Joseph co-founded in Los Angeles, Jafa was confused, and then flattered, when people would approach him to say, “Much respect.” But he’s since become more ambivalent to the unequivocally positive response to “Love Is the Message,” which was quickly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others across the country — perhaps especially the reaction of white viewers.

“A thousand people have told me that they cried when they saw it,” he tells me, looking pained. So I ask him: “What do you do when you have a nice white lady coming at you weeping after seeing ‘Love Is the Message’? Surely there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘This isn’t really your experience or reaction to have.’”

Jafa laughs, cringing, “Fortunately, I haven’t had to see the full-blown white lady weeping. I’ve just had people coming up to me saying, ‘I was super moved,’ ‘I cried’ — a pretty moderate articulation of their experience. I’m very happy that people are moved, but I do think it’s complicated when you say, ‘I cried.’ O.K., is that what art is supposed to do? Does that make you any less whatever the hell it is you are? Is that transformative crying or is it just crying? I don’t know.”

Jafa at his studio. On the wall to the right is his sculpture “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017), inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a slave who had fled from a Louisiana plantation.

PHOTO: Jafa at his studio. On the wall to the right is his sculpture “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017), inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a slave who had fled from a Louisiana plantation. Credit: Photograph by Wayne Lawrence. Artwork in background from left: Arthur Jafa, “Bloods,” 2019, Epson fine art print mounted on aluminum panel; Arthur Jafa, still from “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016, video; Arthur Jafa, “LeRage,” 2017, color print on dibond, aluminum plate stand; Arthur Jafa, “Ex-Slave Gordon,” 2017, vacuum formed plastic. All artwork courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

As we talk, I think of what’s behind those earnestly felt but un-thought-through white tears: empathy, no doubt, but perhaps also — one hopes — a fresh recognition of unearned privilege and its ethical responsibilities, a sense of just how profoundly we’ve failed to rectify structures and vote out ways of thinking that deny or perpetuate racism. While things have begun to change in the art world, with increasing numbers of curators and gallerists and other gatekeepers of color, black artists still face all kinds of complicated questions. Who are they making art for? Who gets to decide what work is worthy and what isn’t? Are the people they actually want to see their work able to do so, or do they lack the institutional access or sense of cultural entitlement? To these questions, Jafa adds the strangeness of having presented — and sold — in a gallery something that he could have theoretically uploaded to YouTube. After some thin years, the money is nice — in addition to his daughter with Dash, who is now 35, with a child of her own, he has a son with the artist Suné Woods — and family and legacy are on his mind. Perhaps he’ll build that house he always imagined designing, back when he was studying architecture at Howard University. But it also feels a bit like “Monopoly money,” he says — not quite real.

JAFA WAS BORN in Tupelo, Miss., in 1960, into a middle-class family and an immediate awareness of “certain categorical constraints.” His parents were both educators. His mother taught business administration; his father taught math and science and coached football and basketball. His first-grade class was among the first to be integrated. He remembers being one of three African-American children in the class; 20 years later, his teacher attended his wedding. The following year, his parents took jobs in the largely segregated Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t feel aware of other people’s projections, of being invaded by the perceptions of others. As a young teen on family shopping trips, he avoided walking with his family, preferring to walk by himself across the mall or store. He mimes interlocking arms, a gesture of solidarity familiar from civil rights marches, one that also troubles Jafa in the way it perpetuates a perception of sameness, a kind of monolithic blackness — the very erasure of identity at the heart of the slave experience, of being separated from one’s family and specific ethnicity via the Middle Passage to become “a culture in free fall,” as he puts it. “And that’s part and parcel of what it means to be black, and that’s part and parcel of what it means to be subjected to white supremacy. It’s what I think I was responding to when I didn’t want to walk with my family. I don’t want to be leveled.”

PHOTO: A set of truck tires wrapped in chains, with one hanging as if from a gallows, from Jafa’s 2018 show “Air Above Mountains, Unknown Pleasures” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.Credit...Arthur Jafa, from left “Big Wheel II,” 2018, and “Big Wheel I,” 2018, installation view, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, courtesy of the Artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome, photo by Thomas Müller

With his brothers, he watched a lot of television growing up — “The Green Hornet,” “I Spy” — that ignited a sense of possibility and fantasy; science fiction, comics and fanzines, including Warren Publishing’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, were his obsession, though only later could he unpack his complex identification with the yetis and aliens in them. (In a 2017 piece that Jafa considers a self-portrait, a stand-up cutout image of a grayscale Incredible Hulk-like figure pounds his fist furiously into his little bit of earth. Jafa calls it “LeRage.”) When he was about 12, he started cutting kung fu film advertisements from the newspapers and pasting them in notebooks, and he became fixated on a nearby college library, staying there till 4 in the morning, falling asleep in the stacks (the librarian gave him a key), reading everything from Sports Illustrated and Life to Popular Mechanics, where he learned about technologies used in film special effects. It was in the library at Howard University several years later that he first encountered the concept of African retention, in LeRoi Jones’s book of essays, “Home.” “The idea that there was some sort of continuity between black people in America and black people in Africa around cultural practices was about as radical a concept as I’ve ever been confronted with, and my head just exploded right there,” he says. At Howard, Jafa learned of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s and began thinking more about where he might fit into a lineage of black aesthetics. One of the professors in the film department at Howard was Haile Gerima, who was part of the L.A. Rebellion, a loosely affiliated group of young African-American filmmakers who came out of U.C.L.A. film school that flourished roughly from the late ’60s to the late ’80s. Gerima introduced Jafa to Dash and Charles Burnett, the legendary director of “Killer of Sheep” (1978) and “To Sleep With Anger” (1990), for whom he briefly worked as a camera assistant in Los Angeles.

But as Jafa told it in a 2003 essay titled “My Black Death,” the bar had already been set for him at the age of 10, when he first saw Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), a film that remains a model for him of how powerful art can be. After the film ended, he emerged into the cinema’s lobby dazed and, though he was unaccustomed to “unchaperoned interactions with white people,” asked the theater’s manager, standing in the ticket booth, what the film was about. “Son,” he replied, “I’ve been looking at it all week and haven’t got a clue.” The film also provided a template for what Jafa would later understand as a common thread in science-fiction films of the time: a latent preoccupation with, and unprocessed anxiety about, blackness, which in America is never simply figurative. Decades later, when he was working on Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” his unit would often receive calls from the director, and an intermediary would relay Kubrick’s instructions and encouragement. Jafa waved the phone away whenever Kubrick asked to talk to him, ostensibly because he was too busy shooting. Shortly before the film was set for release, Kubrick died, and Jafa fell into a brief depression. “I wondered why, in over a year of working on the film, I’d never been available to speak to him. I realized that there’d been too much that I’d wanted to say. I’d unconsciously been waiting for the film’s completion in the hope that I’d be able to have a real conversation with him,” he recalled in the essay.

The other key to Jafa’s ambitions and inspiration lies in the Mississippi Delta itself, which he calls “the black Jurassic Park. It’s like this primordial, out-of-time kind of space, but it’s also like ground zero in terms of black musical culture, and if it’s ground zero in terms of black musical culture, then it’s ground zero in terms of American musical culture, which in the 20th century kind of means it’s ground zero in terms of American culture, period.” Delta blues is an origin point for rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop and other genres of music, but Jafa sees it also as an attitude and a mode of survival, a counterpoint to that offered by the black church, with its message of perseverance through suffering to reach the kingdom of God. Jafa’s 2018 film, “Akingdoncomethas,” illuminates this communal search for higher ground in a 105-minute collage of preaching African-American evangelists and gospel singers and their enthralled congregations — a spellbindingly bizarre extended catharsis. In contrast, black music, from blues to hip-hop, has become the place to talk about things like sex, drugs, violence, adultery and disenfranchisement: a place, in short, to keep it real. His current project, a feature film, is his life’s ambition: to create a visual experience that matches the impact of black music on American culture. “I just want to make things that look like they came out of some alternate universe, a universe in which black people have had way more leeway to make cinema,” says Jafa. “You know, something like unspoken dreams.”


JAFA DOESN’T DO UPLIFT. He rejects redemption stories, the myths of the American dream and fairness and opportunity for all — and as a parent, this can pose some quandaries. Recently, his son was learning about the civil rights movement in school. “He was like, ‘Dad, they had to sit in the back of the bus and it wasn’t fair.’ I just started laughing, because it’s the #MeToo generation, the whole #BlackLivesMatter generation. Millennials, they be like, ‘We have to change the system because it’s hurting our feelings.’ It’s just mind-boggling to me. On one level, I’m happy for it because I think black people should feel entitled, too, but that’s just not realistic. It’s not keeping it real. It’s not really seeing this for what it is, and I think that’s super critical. This whole idea of seeing is believing.” Jafa thinks a lot about how black identity has shifted over the years. “One of the basic conundrums of black being,” he tells me, “is that the very things that have oppressed us are the very things that define who we are, and if we erase all the suppression and stuff, we sort of erase ourselves.”

PHOTO: An Incredible Hulk-inspired self-portrait of Jafa titled “LeRage” (2017).Credit...Arthur Jafa, “LeRage,” 2017, color print on dibond, aluminum plate stand, installation view, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, image © Mike Din

Jafa’s work can be seen as a kind of missing link in our understanding of just how crucial it has been to civil rights to turn the camera back upon the white gaze in order to make the world see and believe. In 1955, Jet magazine published images of the mutilated face of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi a few days after he whistled at the wife of one of the men, helping to catalyze the civil rights movement. In 1965, when voting-rights marchers in Selma, Ala., were run down by policemen, tens of millions of Americans watched on the evening news. “We no longer will let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” Martin Luther King Jr. said soon after. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” #BlackLivesMatter became a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when the community organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi responded to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed the black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since then, it has become the banner under which disparate organizations and millions of individuals press for change, but even Jafa didn’t anticipate the ways in which citizen documentation by smartphone would become an instinct, a reaction to a social pressure that has been building against centuries of white denial. “I remember distinctly telling somebody, ‘That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. A camera in a phone?’ But here we are. Once someone documented [this brutality], it became a modus operandi. At a certain point, it wasn’t just that they knew they could do it — they felt compelled to do it.”

If Jafa’s late-career success also feels like a triumph for other artists striving to make films that exist outside Hollywood structures and conventions — more experimental filmmakers like Joseph, Ja’Tovia Gary and Terence Nance — it nearly didn’t happen. He recalls a conversation with Bradford Young, the cinematographer of 2014’s “Selma” and one of several friends who tried to intervene when the bottom fell out for Jafa in 2011. “I’m sitting in his car, and I’m really depressed, real suicidal,” Jafa says, “and Brad turned to me and he said, ‘Why do you think you’re not enough?’ And I was like, ‘Because I’m a big failure.’ He said, ‘Well for us, you are enough, because we all feel like you kinda ...’ And then he didn’t say anything for a long time.” Young broke the silence by saying that for young black filmmakers, “You’re like our Frodo,” the central character of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” who goes on an arduous journey to destroy the One Ring, an object of mysterious power. Jafa’s love of science fiction didn’t extend to fantasy (“I don’t like unicorns or fairies or stuff like that”), so Young explained the story for him: “And he said, ‘You have Aragorn, he’s a classic king with a sword and born into it. And you’ve got the elves, and they have the archery and telepathy skills. And you’ve got the dwarfs who can forge iron weapons. And then you have Frodo. Frodo was little. He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t the smartest. He wasn’t the bravest.’ ”

“But,” Young told Jafa, “he could bear the weight of the Ring.”

PHOTO: Arthur Jafa, still from “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016, video; Arthur Jafa, “LeRage,” 2017, color print on dibond, aluminum plate stand; Arthur Jafa, “Ex-Slave Gordon,” 2017, vacuum formed plastic. All artwork courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

PHOTO: Jafa at his studio. On the wall to the right is his sculpture “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017), inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a slave who had fled from a Louisiana plantation. Credit...Photograph by Wayne Lawrence. Artwork in background from left: Arthur Jafa, “Bloods,” 2019, Epson fine art print mounted on aluminum panel

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize Winning Novelist, Public Intellectual, Critic, and Teacher Toni Morrison (1931-2019) Is One of the Most Banned Authors in American Literary History. What Does This Tell You About the United States and the White Supremacist Politics Of Race, Class, and Gender in American Culture and the Notorious Western Literary Canon?

"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."

--Langston Hughes, 1902-1967

 

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2022/09/14/truth-trouble-toni-morrisons-advocacy-against-censorship
 

Truth Is Trouble: Toni Morrison’s Advocacy Against Censorship
by Leah Drayton, Communications
September 14, 2022
New York Public Library

Toni Morrison.  NYPL

In observation of Banned Books Week 2022, The New York Public Library is dedicating a spotlight to one of American literature’s most renowned authors and powerful advocates against censorship: Toni Morrison.

Both celebrated and censored, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Through all her renown, Morrison’s books are a regular fixture on the American Library Association (ALA)’s Frequently Challenged Books list, with her novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye consistently challenged in schools and libraries. Morrison’s novels, which explore the Black experience from slavery and Reconstruction to the Great Depression to the Korean War, have been challenged for their unflinching exposition of racism, violence, and sexism.

Celebrating Morrison’s legacy for Banned Books Week is more than just acknowledging the rich storytelling she gifted us through these narratives of the Black experience. Toni Morrison was an ebullient warrior against censorship, outwardly and powerfully advocating for libraries and open access to literature for decades.

“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded,” said Morrison. “Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say 'touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not a barrier.' If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.”

While spending five decades teaching, editing, supporting emerging writers, and publishing plays, novels, children’s books, essays, and even a libretto, Morrison was named a Library Lion in 1982, joined NYPL's board in 1985, and was named a Life Trustee of the Library in 2006.

As Morrison wrote “fear of unmonitored writing is justified—because truth is trouble” (Burn This Book, 2009). Join NYPL to take a stand against censorship by exploring Morrison’s advocacy for open access to reading.

As part of NYPL’s Banned Books Week celebration, The New York Public Library is honoring Morrison through giveaways, public programming, and book talks for Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and other commonly banned books for all ages. See more here.



Morrison's words are engraved on a wall at NYPL's 42nd Street flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building.

 
Read Morrison’s Most Challenged Books

The New York Public Library is honoring Banned Books Week (September 18–24) with instant digital access to Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye through our free e-reader app, SimplyE. Both these titles will be available for unlimited checkout to anyone with an NYPL library card from September 15 through October 31. There will also be giveaways of these books in our branches.


The Bluest Eye (1970)
 

Set in the Depression Era, The Bluest Eye follows 11-year-old African American Pecola Breedlove who is consistently regarded as "ugly" by those around her due to her mannerisms and dark skin. Facing increasingly violent racism and sexual abuse, Pecola prays for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye has been challenged for “depictions of child sexual abuse” and “sexually explicit content.”



Beloved (1987)
 

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this novel follows formerly enslaved Sethe, whose household is haunted by the malignant ghost of her baby. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, the controversy of the novel includes Sethe’s painful reflection on killing her own daughter to spare her from the horrors of slavery and the scathing exposition of the torture of American slavery.
Toni Morrison on Banned Books

The Letters in the Bathroom

This year, the ALA reports a record number of challenges to remove books from the shelves of schools and libraries. (The Bluest Eye is on 2021’s list.)

“I’m probably a little silly, perhaps, about the banning of my books,” said Morrison in a 2009 interview with NPR. “I tend not to pay an awful lot of attention to it, most of the instances I know about fall into the category of the absurd.”

Morrison’s awareness of the absurdity included the censorship and celebration of her voice. Listen to this NYPL talk with Angela Davis where she describes the two letters hanging in her bathroom—an invitation to accept her Nobel Peace Prize and a letter informing her that Paradise has been banned due to its potential to incite the “breakdown of prisons.”


Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 

Morrison’s most notable experience with a banned book was with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where she first expressed the same arguments those who contested the book had:

“Fear and alarm are what I remember the most about my first encounter [with the novel],” pens Morrison. “Palpable alarm. [The novel] chosen randomly, without guidance or recommendation, was deeply disturbing.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been challenged in public libraries across the country and taken off shelves for its use of profanity (namely the use of the n-word) and for the morality of the protagonist.

But a new outcry against book banning in the 1980s piqued Morrison’s interest as an adult. In a 1996 edition of the book, for which she wrote the introduction, she expressed her new stance on book banning:

“[Banning] stuck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.” Morrison admitted she now loved the book and explained the dangers of dismissing a book immediately.

A rare version of the Morrison edition is available in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building General Research Division.

Burn This Book

 

Morrison would go on to talk about book banning in Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement, a collection of essays she edited advocating for freedom of speech and against banning books in educational and public institutions. The book includes insights from contemporary authors with Morrison’s introduction focusing on the act of banning books:

“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
 

Read More of Toni Morrison's Works at NYPL

Novels:

The Bluest Eye (1970)

Sula (1973)

Song of Solomon (1977)

Tar Baby (1981)

Beloved (1987)

Jazz (1992)

Paradise (1997)

Love (2003)

A Mercy (2008)

Home (2012)

God Help the Child (2015)

A Selection of Children’s Books (written with her late son Slade Morrison):

Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)

The Tortoise or the Hare (2011)

Please, Louise (2014)

Poetry:

Five Poems

Music:

Margaret Garner: An Opera in Two Acts (composed by Richard Danielpour)

Morrison revisits the tragedy of Margeret Garner through opera. The libretto is a loose retelling of the tale that inspired Beloved.

Learn more about how the Library is observing Banned Books Week 2022, including our Banned Books Reading List, free programs and events discussing Banned Books and Toni Morrison’s work, book giveaways, and more.


https://time.com/6143127/toni-morrison-book-bans/

History
Education

 
Why Toni Morrison’s Books Are So Often the Target of Book Bans

A 1992 photo of author Toni Morrison at home 

James Keyser—Getty Images

by Olivia B. Waxman
January 31, 2022
TIME

In Florida’s Polk County, Nobel Literature Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Morrison’s Beloved were among 16 books “quarantined”—taken off shelves in public school libraries “so a thorough, thoughtful review of their content can take place,” a spokesperson explained to The Ledger—on Jan. 25 after a complaint. Less than a week earlier, a school board in Wentzville, Missouri had voted 4-3 to remove The Bluest Eye from the district’s high school libraries at a board meeting on Jan. 20. The decisions are just two examples of a wave of book bans and challenges to school libraries’ content currently occurring across the U.S.

“By all means, go buy the book for your child,” Sandy Garber, a director of the Wentzville school board, said at the meeting, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.” (Garber did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.)

The board members overruled recommendations by a committee of educators who reviewed the novel after a parent objected to depictions of pedophilia, incest, and rape. That committee had voted 8-1 to retain the book in district libraries. “This novel helps the reader step into and understand 1941 (pre WWII, pre civil rights movement), small town Black culture in a way no textbook can do,” the committee wrote in a report. “Removing the work would infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature.”

Read more: ‘Critical Race Theory Is Simply the Latest Bogeyman.’ Inside the Fight Over What Kids Learn About America’s History

Morrison’s works are a regular fixture on the American Library Association (ALA)’s annual list of the top 10 most challenged books. The Bluest Eye has appeared several times, in 2006, 2013, 2014, and 2020. Beloved, Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, is also on the 2006 and 2012 lists. And in the mid-1990s, Song of Solomon was repeatedly challenged in school districts in Colorado, Florida, and Georgia for “inappropriate” and “explicit” material.

In Oct. 2021, a Virginia mom who tried to get Beloved banned from her son’s high school in 2013 was featured in an ad for then-gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who made education a core part of his platform. He won the governorship the next month. (In 2016 and 2017, then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe—Youngkin’s opponent in the 2021 election—had vetoed so-called “Beloved bills,” efforts to enable parents to opt their children out from reading sexually-explicit novels at schools.)

Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, poses with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents in recent weeks on Dec. 16, 2021, in Salt Lake City. In Utah, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has opened an investigation after a suburban Salt Lake City district removed several books including Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye,” pending investigation into a parent complaint.Rick Bowmer—AP


Since the start of the 2021-2022 school year, the ALA says it’s seen an “unprecedented volume of challenges” aimed at books by, and about, people of color, and books that tackle topics like racism and sexual or gender identities. The moral panic is largely fueled by conservative advocacy groups spreading misinformation that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 schools. That is not the case.

Scholars say one of the reasons Morrison’s books in particular are controversial is because they address, unabashedly, nearly all of the above, centering on dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable for some people to talk about. Beloved, for example, is inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856 to spare her from slavery.

“What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, of Morrison’s body of work. “Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.”

A 2016 TIME analysis of college syllabi found that, at the time, Morrison was the third-most assigned female author in college classes.

Read more: Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88

Dana A. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society and dean of Howard University’s graduate school, adds that efforts to ban Morrison’s books are not only about their text, but also about Morrison herself, the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

“[Following] any advance by Black people, you will see some stirrings around banning a Toni Morrison book,” says Williams. “After the Black Lives Matter movement, after the 1619 Project, after the election of Barack Obama, any major moment in history where you see progress of people of color—Black people in particular—backlash will follow… Morrison books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.”

Morrison herself often spoke out against censorship, both of her work and more broadly. At a 1982 event, “An Evening of Forbidden Books,” she argued that such behavior constitutes “political control of a certain art form,” and that “there is some hysteria associated with the idea of reading that is all out of proportion to what is in fact happening when one reads.” And in the 2019 documentary The Pieces I Am, she talks about having a framed letter from the Texas prison system saying her book Paradise was removed because it could incite a riot, and thinking, “How powerful is that! I could tear up the whole place.”Her comments in the introduction of Burn This Book, a 2009 anthology of essays she edited on censorship issues, are especially appropriate for today. That same year a school district in Michigan had removed and then reinstated Song of Solomon from an AP English class. “Efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place,” she wrote. “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”

The Vicious and Debilitating All Out Assault On Education, Literacy, Social and Economic Justice, Truth, and Free Speech Under the U.S. Fascist Regime and Political Psychosis of the GOP, MAGA, and the Utterly Tyrannical Scumbag-in-Chief: Part 1

"I think it’s a mistake — a very tempting mistake to make — to take stock by looking at what we still have rather than what we have already lost. Two and a half months has not been enough time for Trump to quash every single opposition voice, dismantle the electoral system, successfully intimidate every single judge and bring every single publication to heel. Is that good? Of course. But there is no way he could have done all of that in less than three months. He has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage, and I think damage is the more meaningful metric right now."
--Masha Gessen, ‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America. New York Times, April 4, 2025

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/04/03/400-books-removed-naval-academy-library

 

400 Books Removed From Naval Academy Library
by Johanna Alonso
April 3, 2025
Inside Higher Education

The U.S. Naval Academy has culled 400 books deemed to promote to diversity, equity and/or inclusion from its library at the insistence of the Trump administration, according to the Associated Press.

Last week, the Naval Academy, located in Annapolis, Md., identified 900 potential books to review in response to orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to remove books containing DEI-related content, The New York Timesreported. That list included The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein on Race and Racism, and a biography of Jackie Robinson. A list of the books that were ultimately removed has not been released.

The nation's five military academies were also told in February to eliminate admissions “quotas” related to sex, ethnicity or race after President Trump signed an executive order to remove “any preference based on race or sex” from the military. Both the Naval and Air Force Academies have also completed curriculum reviews to remove materials that allegedly promote DEI, and a West Point official also told the AP that it was prepared to review both curriculum and library materials if directed to do so by the Army.

Most Popular: 

 

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https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/the-history-books-purged-from-the
 

The History Books Purged From the Naval Academy's Library

 
The Trump administration is engaged in something much worse than book burning. It is attempting to burn down the entire cultural infrastructure that supports the pursuit of history.

by Kevin M. Levin
April 5, 2025
Substack

We now have a list of the 381 books that have been removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in Annapolis, Maryland. Many of the books in the list fall under categories such as Critical Race Theory, Gender and Ethnic Studies, LGBTQ Studies, etc. They are easy targets in the Trump administration’s continuing war on free thought and the free exchange of ideas.

I have not read most of the books on this list, but I do want to single out six that I have read:

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew Delmont

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen


Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone

Bind Us Apart: How Enligtened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicolas Guyatt

The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen Cox

The six books listed here are all mainstream history texts, published by mainstream presses. All of these authors, apart from Loewen, who taught in a sociology department before his passing in 2021, are respected scholars, who teach in history departments around the country.

Delmont’s book is the most conspicuous of the group. Half American is an incredibly engaging narrative about African Americans, who fought and died for this country during World War II. Its story is the story of the Department of the Navy and every other military branch.

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Loewen and Yacovone write about the ways in which the textbooks in our classrooms have reinforced narratives of white supremacy and covered up racial violence.

Guyatt’s book focuses on the story of white liberals between the Revolution and the Civil War, who pushed for a color-blind society, only to end up advocating for separate republics for the races.

Gordon’s book does a fantastic job of exploring the rise of the second Klan in the 1920s above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Finally, Karen Cox’s book is the best introduction to the history and controversy surrounding Confederate monuments that we have.

There is nothing subversive about any of these books unless you believe that simply telling the story of American racism, in a way that is accessible to anyone, is problematic. I wouldn’t think twice about recommending any of these books to high school and college students or anyone else interested in these subjects.

I say this as someone who is conscious about the ways in which politics and other contemporary concerns can undercut scholarship. Though I certainly don’t believe that you need to be a trained historian to write history, I tend to recommend and read authors who have chosen to specialize in it. History is a craft and the ability to think historically is a skill that takes time.

Mainstream history has now become a target of the Trump administration. It’s no longer possible to argue that Trump and his goons are simply concerned with what they perceive to be ‘radical’ or ‘un-American’ scholarship. Anything that challenges or undermines a view of this country as never having struggled with any form of discrimination is now considered a legitimate target.

I’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating. This is not a conservative v. liberal or Democrat v. Republican issue. What we are witnessing goes far beyond any previous political or public debate about what should be permissible to exhibit, research, and teach about American history.

The Trump administration is engaged in something much worse than book burning. It is attempting to burn down the entire cultural infrastructure that supports the pursuit of history.

ttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/04/us/250404-list-of-removed-books-from-nimitz-library.html
 

Read the Naval Academy’s list of removed books
April 4, 2025
New York Times

A PDF version of this document with embedded text is available at the link below:

Download the original document (pdf):

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/b9f07d9ade92f6f0/fcc8f9ac-full.pdf

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/4146516/list-of-books-removed-from-usna-library/

Press Office  

Press Releases
 

List of Books Removed from USNA Library
April 4, 2025

U.S. Navy Press Office

Here is the full list of books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library collection March 31-April 1:

LINK HERE





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 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/supreme-court-trump-teacher-grants.html

Supreme Court Lets Trump Suspend Grants to Teachers

The justices allowed the Trump administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, which helped place teachers in poor and rural areas.


The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voting with the liberal justices in dissent, amounted to an early victory for the Trump administration before the court. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

by Adam Liptak and Abbie VanSickle
Reporting from Washington
April 4, 2025
New York Times

The Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants that the government contends would promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, an early victory for the administration in front of the justices.

The court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The temporary pause will remain in effect while the case is appealed.

The decision was 5 to 4, with five of the court’s conservatives — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh — in the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.

The order came in response to one of a series of emergency requests by the Trump administration asking the justices to intervene and overturn lower court rulings that have temporarily blocked parts of President Trump’s agenda.

The grants at issue in the case helped place teachers in poor and rural areas and aimed to recruit a diverse work force reflecting the communities it served.

In February, the Education Department sent grant recipients boilerplate form letters ending the funding, saying the programs “fail to serve the best interests of the United States” by taking account of factors other than “merit, fairness and excellence,” and by allowing waste and fraud.

Eight states, including California and New York, sued to stop the cuts, arguing that they would undermine both urban and rural school districts, requiring them to hire “long-term substitutes, teachers with emergency credentials and unlicensed teachers on waivers.”

Judge Myong J. Joun of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts temporarily ordered the grants to remain available while he considered the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, rejected a request from the Trump administration to undo Judge Joun’s order, saying the government’s arguments were based on “speculation and hyperbole.”

In temporarily blocking the cancellation of the grants, Judge Joun said that he sought to maintain the status quo. He wrote that if he failed to do so, “dozens of programs upon which public schools, public universities, students, teachers and faculty rely will be gutted.” On the other hand, he reasoned, if he did pause the Trump administration action, the groups would merely continue to receive funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

In its brief order, the court said that the challengers had “not refuted” the Trump administration’s claim that “it is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed.” By contrast, the order stated, “the government compellingly argues that respondents would not suffer irreparable harm” while the grants are paused. The court said it had relied on statements by the challengers that “they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running.”

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, countered that allowing the grants to be terminated would “inflict significant harm on grantees — a fact that the government barely contests.”

She added: “Worse still, the government does not even deign to defend the lawfulness of its actions.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the teacher training efforts would be harmed by the court’s action.

“States have consistently represented that the loss of these grants will force them — indeed, has already forced them — to curtail teacher training programs,” she wrote.


When the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote in an emergency application that Judge Joun’s order was one of many lower-court rulings thwarting government initiatives.

“The aim is clear: to stop the executive branch in its tracks and prevent the administration from changing direction on hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse that the executive branch considers contrary to the United States’ interests and fiscal health,” she wrote.

She added: “Only this court can right the ship — and the time to do so is now.”

In response, the states said that the justices should decide one dispute at a time.

The brief added that the cancellation of the grants had not been accompanied by reasoning specific to each grant. The boilerplate letters, it said, “did not explain how the grant-funded programs engaged in any of the purportedly disqualifying activities.”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

 

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting. More about Abbie VanSickle

 
A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2025, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Let Trump Halt Teacher-Training Funds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

See more on: U.S. Supreme Court, Education Department (US), U.S. Politics, Donald Trump