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Where We Know From:
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee"), Final Report - Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, April 23, 1976.
Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam. UNC Press Books, 2017.
Paul Gilroy, "Driving while black." In Car Cultures, Routledge Press, 2020.
Barbara Fields and Karen E. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Verso Books, 2022.
Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & fFghting for those Left Behind. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010.
Dark Matters: Imma Stare Right Back
Season 1, Episode 4
Hey, friends! In this episode we're talking about Simone Browne's term: dark matters. An idea that names blackness as a "key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and enacted," (9).
Before we give you the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, we discuss the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. A program designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists" and other organizations they deemed a threat to U.S. interests, including the Social Workers Party and the American Indian Movement.
Iman is hyped because this is one of her favorite topics as a Muzlim, and Kohar shares stories of her own surveillance experiences at airports, on road trips, and on Twitter.
As always, we close out with our half-baked thoughts. The segment where we share ideas we haven't fleshed out, but stand fully behind. You'll just have to listen to the episode to hear those.