Jenn M Jackson | Syracuse University (original) (raw)

Peer-reviewed Articles by Jenn M Jackson

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2024

We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago repa... more We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago. Furthermore, both programs are criticized to varying degrees as being exclusive in their design and implementation. We term this exclusion a process of deliberative marginalization, whereby some of the most vulnerable and most directly affected beneficiaries of a redress initiative are left out of deliberations and implementation decisions about the initiative’s design. Subsequently, this study shows both the promise and constraints of reparations policy at the level of local government.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022

In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article... more In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of memory as a site of identity and community formation and Charles Mills’s theory of “...

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2022

PS, Political Science & Politics, 2022

Social Science Quarterly, 2021

Objective: In this essay, we review and offer theoretical groundings and empirical approaches to ... more Objective: In this essay, we review and offer theoretical groundings
and empirical approaches to the study of abolition.
Methods: We begin by demonstrating the ways police and prisons
have been used to exploit and dominate marginalized people
and argue that abolition offers a path to finding solutions to
public safety and racial justice. We draw from black feminist and
abolitionist political thought to show how abolition makes space
to upend systems of power and domination and develop systems
that address the root causes of violence.
Results: We assert that abolitionist research will not only focus
on activists’ calls for dismantling the police but will also recognize
and engage with activists’ proposals for reimagining public
safety. We suggest that social scientists who study abolition,
American uprisings, and policing must understand the differences
between transformative changes based in abolitionist
frameworks versus those that center mass incarceration as a societal
given and, ultimately, further reproduce the status quo.
Conclusion: We conclude by suggesting that social scientists
must question how researcher practices and universities uphold
carceral logics and entrenched hierarchies, determining that abolitionist
study will meaningfully engage with the distribution of
power.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Public Culture, 2020

The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of... more The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical works of Black enslaved, postbellum, queer, and transgender contemporaries to show how Black women have resisted the fungibility of their bodies through processes of self-formation and self-reclamation. The author also relies on the theoretical works of critical race, queer, and feminist scholars to frame how that resistance—whether in the form of sexual freedom, reproductive choice, or independence from traditional systems of labor—represents a critical site of possibility for understanding Black women’s social and political life worlds today.

Portable Gray, 2020

Artists Carris Adams and Danny Giles converse with scholars Jenn M. Jackson and Jared Richardson ... more Artists Carris Adams and Danny Giles converse with scholars Jenn M. Jackson and Jared Richardson on the stakes of white terror and its gaze. Drawing from histories of social justice, police brutality, and recent happenings in popular culture, these four individuals ponder the intersectional entanglement of optics and affect in the time of potential state collapse. Ultimately, this discussion elucidates how white spectatorship in politics and popular culture shapes terror and horror: two states of affect bolstered by race, politics of representation, and pandemic. Accordingly, these forces constitute Black life and its modes of entertainment. At a time in which the genre of Black horror is being increasingly codified by scholars and eagerly consumed by movie-goers, white terror has, once again, illustrated the lethal dynamics of looking and feeling.

Me Too Political Science, 2020

In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out those in power, namely men, who engage... more In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out
those in power, namely men, who engage in sexual harassment
and toxic masculinity. Furthermore, scholars, whose personal
identities and research interests lie at the margins of
gender, race, class, and sexuality, have drawn increasing attention
to issues of gendered and racialized biases and harassment
in the Academy. During our pre-conference session at
the 2018 meeting of the American Political Science
Association, we discussed substantive methods for reckoning
with these conditions. We worked through the theoretical
frameworks of Black Feminist and queer scholarship to orient
ourselves toward actions that center the most marginalized.
We identified methods for generating transformative solutions
to campus and departmental problems facing students,
faculty, and staff with intersectional identities. In all, the workshop
proved both effective and generative for all in attendance,
providing those present with concrete tools to build
more equitable departments and classrooms.

Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018

News framing choices remain critical components in the formation of political attitudes and publi... more News framing choices remain critical components in the formation
of political attitudes and public opinion. Early findings, which
indicated that episodic framing of national issues like poverty and
unemployment informed public opinion about minority group
members, asserted that these framing choices often resulted in
the attribution of societal ills to individuals rather than society atlarge.
Moving this analytical framework into the twenty-first
century, I engage with literature on racial messaging to show that
shifting social norms surrounding implicit versus explicit racism
have transformed the ways that news frames function in mass
media. As such, this essay examines the canonical theory of news
frames as falling along a thematic-episodic continuum.
Fundamentally, I argue that implicit and explicit racial messaging
in news media coverage of crime could change the way viewers
form opinions of Black Americans and criminality. Thus, it is critical
to revisit longstanding theories of news frames to accommodate
the present political moment.

Book Chapters by Jenn M Jackson

Critical Pedagogical Strategies to Transcend Hegemonic Masculinity, Peter Lang, 2021

The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, 2021

Book Reviews by Jenn M Jackson

Political Science Quarterly

people trying to recover their "shattered lives" (p. 394) and imagine a way forward. The grim les... more people trying to recover their "shattered lives" (p. 394) and imagine a way forward. The grim lesson seems to be that overwhelming repression "works," from the new regime's standpoint: death, exile, and prison have exacerbated long-standing divides within the Brotherhood to such an extent that the organization can barely function. Here, Willi's oral history approach shines, giving us a human look at the multilayered disagreements that now characterize the Brotherhood-and, as he persuasively argues, always have.

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

The Movement for Black Lives catalyzed in the years following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon M... more The Movement for Black Lives catalyzed in the years following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. He was pursued, shot, and killed by citizen-vigilante George Zimmerman in 2012. It was in 2013 that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter made its debut on social media via the Twitter platform, when Alicia Garza, a Bay Area organizer, shared the message as a love letter to Black people. Zimmerman had just been acquitted, an outcome that stunned and disappointed many organizers and onlookers. In the coming weeks and months, Garza, along with her comrades Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, became the leaders of what would be known as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement or the Movement for Black Lives. The movement has been mischaracterized as focusing only on police brutality against Black Americans or being “leaderless.”Moreover, BLM’s existence in themass media has been mired in myth, misunderstanding, and stereotypes regarding its focus, modes of organizing, and the structural concerns toward which it is oriented. Stay Woke’s primary objective is to bring clarity to the motivations and critical events that shaped the actions and mobilizations of the early Movement for Black Lives. Specifically, it highlights the structural racism and systemic processes of anti-Blackness that long predated the movement and underlie its growth during the “first selfidentified Black President’s second term in office” (p. 2; emphasis in original). Stay Woke is much more than a theoretical exercise or analysis. Written as a manual for antiracist activists and thinkers interested in working against the status quo, the book is structured for ease of use and instruction. Each chapter ends with potential questions and debate topics, additional materials for review, and further research to assist readers as they apply the concepts from the book. Rather than writing the text in the impersonal third person, as is customary in much of academic writing, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have composed a text written personally, as a jargon-free conversation. This approach and tone render the text accessible and fully applicable to readers invested in embodying the lessons therein. Structurally, the chapters build directly from one another. The first chapter provides a background to the Movement of Black Lives, with an emphasis on offering tools and resources for those “who benefit from white privilege” (p. 3). Providing brief overviews of structural segregation, racial gaps in income and wealth distribution, policing and surveillance of Black communities, housing and employment inequity, and the implications these factors have for Black health outcomes, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith underscore the precise societal factors that motivated and sustained the BLM movement. The second chapter provides a full index of terms that are used throughout the book, terms that largely circulate in academic and movement communities. These terms are also bolded throughout the book, reminding readers of the terminology that often eludes those outside the Ivory Tower or social movement organizations. The third chapter synthesizes the historical underpinnings of Reconstruction era electoral politics and their long-term shifts into the Black Power Movement of the 1970s, led by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael). The fourth, and perhaps most critical, chapter examines the key differences between being “nonracist” and “antiracist.” In doing so, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith, through an investigation of “the scripts that many of us have learned in order to be good, friendly complicit racists” (p. 147), challenge readers to ask themselves whether they uphold white supremacy in their day-to-day lives. Engaging with such work as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s pathbreaking analysis of women’s early contributions to Black civil rights movement work in the postReconstruction moment, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880– 1920 (1993); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s canonical work on color-blindness, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2003); and Cathy Cramer’s in-depth analysis of white intragroup aggression post-recession, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness inWisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016), this chapter is a comprehensive lesson plan in debunking common misperceptions about the ways that individuals contribute to and reproduce racism. Furthermore, it offers tactics for performing tasks that actively resist white supremacy and racism. In the fifth chapter, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith hone in on the specific frames, messages, and intentions of the Black LivesMatter movement by focusing onmethods of creating social change. For example, this chapter highlights the deep political impacts of discriminatory voter ID laws, state and local budget restrictions that limit the amount of resources provided…

National Review of Black Politics, 2020

As Gladys Mitchell-Walthour makes clear in the conclusion of The Politics of Blackness , the curr... more As Gladys Mitchell-Walthour makes clear in the conclusion of The Politics of Blackness , the current political climate threatens the continuance of race-based programs in Brazil. According to the author, some black activists understand the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 in racialized terms and assert that Dilma's impeachment was a coup d'etat due to the political motivations of Michel Temer, who replaced her when she was subsequently removed from office. Prior to Rousseff's impeachment, the Brazilian media aired debates as to whether or not the cash program Bolsa Familia, which began under Lula (president from 2003-10) and continued under Rousseff, was a form of clientelism. Mitchell-Walthour contends that the media depicted Bolsa Familia recipients as lazy and desirous of government handouts. Undoubtedly, millions of Afro-Brazilian families benefited from Bolsa Familia programs. The Brazilian media perpetuated the idea that Rousseff was re-elected as a result of votes from Bolsa Familia recipients. The outcomes of the Bolsa Familia program for Afro-Brazilians, Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, and the election of an extreme right-wing president in 2018 national elections might prove to be a fruitful site for future studies on Afro-Brazilian political behavior and the impact of extreme right-wing politics on racial programs.

National Review of Black Politics, 2020

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2024

We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago repa... more We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago. Furthermore, both programs are criticized to varying degrees as being exclusive in their design and implementation. We term this exclusion a process of deliberative marginalization, whereby some of the most vulnerable and most directly affected beneficiaries of a redress initiative are left out of deliberations and implementation decisions about the initiative’s design. Subsequently, this study shows both the promise and constraints of reparations policy at the level of local government.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022

In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article... more In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of memory as a site of identity and community formation and Charles Mills’s theory of “...

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2022

PS, Political Science & Politics, 2022

Social Science Quarterly, 2021

Objective: In this essay, we review and offer theoretical groundings and empirical approaches to ... more Objective: In this essay, we review and offer theoretical groundings
and empirical approaches to the study of abolition.
Methods: We begin by demonstrating the ways police and prisons
have been used to exploit and dominate marginalized people
and argue that abolition offers a path to finding solutions to
public safety and racial justice. We draw from black feminist and
abolitionist political thought to show how abolition makes space
to upend systems of power and domination and develop systems
that address the root causes of violence.
Results: We assert that abolitionist research will not only focus
on activists’ calls for dismantling the police but will also recognize
and engage with activists’ proposals for reimagining public
safety. We suggest that social scientists who study abolition,
American uprisings, and policing must understand the differences
between transformative changes based in abolitionist
frameworks versus those that center mass incarceration as a societal
given and, ultimately, further reproduce the status quo.
Conclusion: We conclude by suggesting that social scientists
must question how researcher practices and universities uphold
carceral logics and entrenched hierarchies, determining that abolitionist
study will meaningfully engage with the distribution of
power.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Public Culture, 2020

The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of... more The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical works of Black enslaved, postbellum, queer, and transgender contemporaries to show how Black women have resisted the fungibility of their bodies through processes of self-formation and self-reclamation. The author also relies on the theoretical works of critical race, queer, and feminist scholars to frame how that resistance—whether in the form of sexual freedom, reproductive choice, or independence from traditional systems of labor—represents a critical site of possibility for understanding Black women’s social and political life worlds today.

Portable Gray, 2020

Artists Carris Adams and Danny Giles converse with scholars Jenn M. Jackson and Jared Richardson ... more Artists Carris Adams and Danny Giles converse with scholars Jenn M. Jackson and Jared Richardson on the stakes of white terror and its gaze. Drawing from histories of social justice, police brutality, and recent happenings in popular culture, these four individuals ponder the intersectional entanglement of optics and affect in the time of potential state collapse. Ultimately, this discussion elucidates how white spectatorship in politics and popular culture shapes terror and horror: two states of affect bolstered by race, politics of representation, and pandemic. Accordingly, these forces constitute Black life and its modes of entertainment. At a time in which the genre of Black horror is being increasingly codified by scholars and eagerly consumed by movie-goers, white terror has, once again, illustrated the lethal dynamics of looking and feeling.

Me Too Political Science, 2020

In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out those in power, namely men, who engage... more In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out
those in power, namely men, who engage in sexual harassment
and toxic masculinity. Furthermore, scholars, whose personal
identities and research interests lie at the margins of
gender, race, class, and sexuality, have drawn increasing attention
to issues of gendered and racialized biases and harassment
in the Academy. During our pre-conference session at
the 2018 meeting of the American Political Science
Association, we discussed substantive methods for reckoning
with these conditions. We worked through the theoretical
frameworks of Black Feminist and queer scholarship to orient
ourselves toward actions that center the most marginalized.
We identified methods for generating transformative solutions
to campus and departmental problems facing students,
faculty, and staff with intersectional identities. In all, the workshop
proved both effective and generative for all in attendance,
providing those present with concrete tools to build
more equitable departments and classrooms.

Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018

News framing choices remain critical components in the formation of political attitudes and publi... more News framing choices remain critical components in the formation
of political attitudes and public opinion. Early findings, which
indicated that episodic framing of national issues like poverty and
unemployment informed public opinion about minority group
members, asserted that these framing choices often resulted in
the attribution of societal ills to individuals rather than society atlarge.
Moving this analytical framework into the twenty-first
century, I engage with literature on racial messaging to show that
shifting social norms surrounding implicit versus explicit racism
have transformed the ways that news frames function in mass
media. As such, this essay examines the canonical theory of news
frames as falling along a thematic-episodic continuum.
Fundamentally, I argue that implicit and explicit racial messaging
in news media coverage of crime could change the way viewers
form opinions of Black Americans and criminality. Thus, it is critical
to revisit longstanding theories of news frames to accommodate
the present political moment.

Critical Pedagogical Strategies to Transcend Hegemonic Masculinity, Peter Lang, 2021

The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, 2021

Political Science Quarterly

people trying to recover their "shattered lives" (p. 394) and imagine a way forward. The grim les... more people trying to recover their "shattered lives" (p. 394) and imagine a way forward. The grim lesson seems to be that overwhelming repression "works," from the new regime's standpoint: death, exile, and prison have exacerbated long-standing divides within the Brotherhood to such an extent that the organization can barely function. Here, Willi's oral history approach shines, giving us a human look at the multilayered disagreements that now characterize the Brotherhood-and, as he persuasively argues, always have.

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

The Movement for Black Lives catalyzed in the years following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon M... more The Movement for Black Lives catalyzed in the years following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. He was pursued, shot, and killed by citizen-vigilante George Zimmerman in 2012. It was in 2013 that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter made its debut on social media via the Twitter platform, when Alicia Garza, a Bay Area organizer, shared the message as a love letter to Black people. Zimmerman had just been acquitted, an outcome that stunned and disappointed many organizers and onlookers. In the coming weeks and months, Garza, along with her comrades Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, became the leaders of what would be known as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement or the Movement for Black Lives. The movement has been mischaracterized as focusing only on police brutality against Black Americans or being “leaderless.”Moreover, BLM’s existence in themass media has been mired in myth, misunderstanding, and stereotypes regarding its focus, modes of organizing, and the structural concerns toward which it is oriented. Stay Woke’s primary objective is to bring clarity to the motivations and critical events that shaped the actions and mobilizations of the early Movement for Black Lives. Specifically, it highlights the structural racism and systemic processes of anti-Blackness that long predated the movement and underlie its growth during the “first selfidentified Black President’s second term in office” (p. 2; emphasis in original). Stay Woke is much more than a theoretical exercise or analysis. Written as a manual for antiracist activists and thinkers interested in working against the status quo, the book is structured for ease of use and instruction. Each chapter ends with potential questions and debate topics, additional materials for review, and further research to assist readers as they apply the concepts from the book. Rather than writing the text in the impersonal third person, as is customary in much of academic writing, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have composed a text written personally, as a jargon-free conversation. This approach and tone render the text accessible and fully applicable to readers invested in embodying the lessons therein. Structurally, the chapters build directly from one another. The first chapter provides a background to the Movement of Black Lives, with an emphasis on offering tools and resources for those “who benefit from white privilege” (p. 3). Providing brief overviews of structural segregation, racial gaps in income and wealth distribution, policing and surveillance of Black communities, housing and employment inequity, and the implications these factors have for Black health outcomes, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith underscore the precise societal factors that motivated and sustained the BLM movement. The second chapter provides a full index of terms that are used throughout the book, terms that largely circulate in academic and movement communities. These terms are also bolded throughout the book, reminding readers of the terminology that often eludes those outside the Ivory Tower or social movement organizations. The third chapter synthesizes the historical underpinnings of Reconstruction era electoral politics and their long-term shifts into the Black Power Movement of the 1970s, led by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael). The fourth, and perhaps most critical, chapter examines the key differences between being “nonracist” and “antiracist.” In doing so, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith, through an investigation of “the scripts that many of us have learned in order to be good, friendly complicit racists” (p. 147), challenge readers to ask themselves whether they uphold white supremacy in their day-to-day lives. Engaging with such work as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s pathbreaking analysis of women’s early contributions to Black civil rights movement work in the postReconstruction moment, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880– 1920 (1993); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s canonical work on color-blindness, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2003); and Cathy Cramer’s in-depth analysis of white intragroup aggression post-recession, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness inWisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016), this chapter is a comprehensive lesson plan in debunking common misperceptions about the ways that individuals contribute to and reproduce racism. Furthermore, it offers tactics for performing tasks that actively resist white supremacy and racism. In the fifth chapter, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith hone in on the specific frames, messages, and intentions of the Black LivesMatter movement by focusing onmethods of creating social change. For example, this chapter highlights the deep political impacts of discriminatory voter ID laws, state and local budget restrictions that limit the amount of resources provided…

National Review of Black Politics, 2020

As Gladys Mitchell-Walthour makes clear in the conclusion of The Politics of Blackness , the curr... more As Gladys Mitchell-Walthour makes clear in the conclusion of The Politics of Blackness , the current political climate threatens the continuance of race-based programs in Brazil. According to the author, some black activists understand the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 in racialized terms and assert that Dilma's impeachment was a coup d'etat due to the political motivations of Michel Temer, who replaced her when she was subsequently removed from office. Prior to Rousseff's impeachment, the Brazilian media aired debates as to whether or not the cash program Bolsa Familia, which began under Lula (president from 2003-10) and continued under Rousseff, was a form of clientelism. Mitchell-Walthour contends that the media depicted Bolsa Familia recipients as lazy and desirous of government handouts. Undoubtedly, millions of Afro-Brazilian families benefited from Bolsa Familia programs. The Brazilian media perpetuated the idea that Rousseff was re-elected as a result of votes from Bolsa Familia recipients. The outcomes of the Bolsa Familia program for Afro-Brazilians, Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, and the election of an extreme right-wing president in 2018 national elections might prove to be a fruitful site for future studies on Afro-Brazilian political behavior and the impact of extreme right-wing politics on racial programs.

National Review of Black Politics, 2020