Bringing John Langston Gwaltney’s Core Black ethnography under Krip-Hop theory looks like a decolonial, arts-based, and activist-driven approach that centers the lived experiences of Black disabled people, moving beyond traditional “damage-centered” narratives to focus on
resistance, culture, and liberation. It “krips” (applies a disability justice lens to) Black radical thought, merging Black Studies, Disability Studies, and Hip-Hop culture to challenge both ableism and racism simultaneously.

Knowing that John Langston Gwaltney aimed was to dismiss historical images of Black people as “marginal” or “exotic” and criticized mainstream anthropology for failing to capture the realistic exposition of Black attitudes, Leroy is taking Gwaltney’s concept further to dismiss historical colonial attitudes of Black disabled people as a deficit to reframe as people who have many experiences to add to the history, cultural and political activism of Black movements, history, community and arts of the Black community and the African diaspora. To be continued in my dissertation and video clips on Krip-Hop Nation’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/A0IxZhCNduA?si=4hDn2y6OTL9Um2NW.

John Langston Gwaltney was a Black blind anthropologist, author and visual artists (September 25, 1928 – August 29, 1998). His books are:

1. The Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness and Other Disasters in a Mexican
   Community 1970 ( his dissertation)
2. Drylongso: A Self-portrait of Black America 1980
3. The Dissenters: Voices from Contemporary America 1986

I see John Langston Gwaltney as part of the Black Radical Tradition and what I’m calling the growing Black Disabled Intellectual Tradition and of course a Black disabled ancestor that Krip-Hop recognized.

To be continue!