Reflections on a Funhouse Mirror—Racist Violence, the Protection of Privilege, and the Limits of Tolerance

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (02) ◽  
pp. 571-576
Author(s):  
George I. Lovell
Keyword(s):  
Structural Feature ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Colorblind Racism ◽  
Racial Privilege ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Housing Segregation ◽  
Practical Barrier

Jeannine Bell's Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing provides an account of racist violence as a tool for maintaining housing segregation that challenges perceptions of rising tolerance and demonstrates the importance of understanding racism as a structural feature of social organization. Bell shows how some perpetrators of move in violence deploy claims about “property values” as a defense against charges of racism. The use of such claims starkly illustrates how colorblind racism allows assertions of racial privilege to resonate as neutral articulations of rational self-interest. The desire to defend racial privileges persists as a significant practical barrier to racial equality even when tolerance increases.

Constitutive Racism, Redemptive Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Golub
Keyword(s):  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Color Blindness ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Racial Awareness ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
Performative Contradiction

Equal protection law operates within a narrative structure of fall and redemption. Framed as a repudiation of race, color-blind constitutionalism appears to enact this redemption by aspiring to transcend racial consciousness. And yet prohibitions against racial classification in fact serve to heighten and preserve racial awareness, in direct contradiction of their stated goals and justification. This chapter examines the narrative structure and constraints of equal protection law, within which efforts to achieve racial equality appear as equivalent to state-sponsored racial segregation. Theorizing color-blindness as a kind of performative contradiction, it demonstrates the race-conscious logic of color-blind constitutionalism.

scholarly journals Re-Coding Planning

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33
Author(s):  
Mark Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Lower Cost ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
The State ◽  
Building Codes ◽  
Housing Shortage ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
History Of

This article looks at the barriers to dealing with California’s housing shortage and addressing climate change which are built into the existing regulations that govern development across the state. The history of planning and building codes is examined, showing that contrary to popular belief many of these rules were not implemented for health and safety reasons, but rather to boost property values by promoting economic and racial segregation. The article argues that the only way to deal with California’s current challenges is to start over with a new set of regulations that promote denser development at lower cost and steer the state away from building more automobile-dependent sprawl.

Is the Bible Racist?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Bob Jones University ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
K 12

The civil rights movement helped all Americans reevaluate their ideas about racial equality and justice. On the campuses of evangelical and fundamentalist schools, that debate was fueled by a conflicted history of racism and anti-racism among white evangelicals. A few schools, led by Bob Jones University, insisted that racial segregation was an intrinsic part of true fundamentalist religion. Most other institutions, however, moved in fits and starts toward greater racial egalitarianism. By the 1970s, those debates also included a new and expanding network of evangelical and fundamentalist K-12 schools, schools dependent on colleges and universities for their teachers and textbooks as well as for their guiding philosophies.

scholarly journals The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-231
Author(s):  
Deborah Archer
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Persistent Problem ◽  
Housing Segregation ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Racial Lines

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues to play a profound role in creating and legitimizing pat-terns of racial segregation all across America. Crime-free housing ordinances are one of the most salient examples of the role law plays in producing and sustaining racial segregation today. They are, in this respect, a critical mechanism for effectuating the new housing segregation. Crime-free housing ordinances are local laws that either encourage or require private landlords to evict or exclude tenants who have had varying levels of contact with the criminal legal system. Though formally race neutral, these laws facilitate racial segregation in a number of significant ways. This is the first article to explain precisely how they do so. The Article contends that crime-free housing ordinances enable racial segregation by importing the racial biases, racial logics, and racial disparities of the criminal legal system in-to private housing markets. While scholars have examined the important role local laws played in effectuating racial inequality, they have not paid attention to crime-free housing ordinances. In addition to foregrounding how crime-free housing ordinances reinforce and perpetuate racially segregated communities, this Article proposes an intervention: a “segregative effects” claim, an underutilized cause of action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, to challenge this segregative impact. While this intervention would not end the pervasive nature of housing segregation across the United States, it could eliminate at least one of the causes of this persistent problem: a body of law whose formal race neutrality has obscured its racially segregative effects.

scholarly journals The Care Economy as Alternative Economy

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Caritas In Veritate ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Care Economy

This essay explores the care economy, defined as activity oriented toward sustaining life and promoting basic well-being, whether that activity is paid or unpaid. The essay finds parallels between Pope Benedict XI’s concerns about neoclassical economics as expressed in Caritas in Veritate and feminist scholarship addressing the care economy. Both Benedict and feminist economists challenge sharp binaries between the market and the state and affirm a spectrum of motives driving economic activity. Both Benedict and feminist economists critique an individualistic, voluntaristic anthropology of self-interest, and both understand true economic development to promote the holistic well-being of all persons. However, Benedict does not draw on scholarship about development and the care economy. Progress toward the vision of development outlined in CV requires consideration of this economy and acceptance of a more complex and pluralist account of the social organization of caregiving than Benedict envisions.

Brown v. Board of Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Limited Power

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional state-mandated racial segregation in public schools, which at the time was policy in seventeen states. Brown v. Board of Education marked the culmination of a decades-long litigation campaign by the NAACP. White-controlled states across the South responded by launching a “massive resistance” campaign of defiance against Brown, which was followed by decades of struggles, inside and outside the courts, to desegregate the nation’s schools. Brown also signaled the new and often controversial direction the Supreme Court would take under leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren—one that read the rights protections of the Constitution more broadly than its predecessors and was more aggressive in using these rights to protect vulnerable minorities. Brown is nearly universally celebrated today, yet the terms of its celebration remain contested. Some see the case as a call for ambitious litigation strategies and judicial boldness, whereas others use it to demonstrate the limited power of the courts to effect social change. Some find in Brown a commitment to a principle of a “colorblind” Constitution, others a commitment to expunging practices that oppress racial minorities (often requiring race-conscious policies). Brown thus remains what it was in 1954: a bold statement of the principle of racial equality whose meaning the nation is still struggling to work out.

Christ of the American Road: E. Stanley Jones, India, and Civil Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 1117-1138
Author(s):  
DAVID R. SWARTZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality.

Responsible gambling:The need for collaborative government, industry, community and consumer involvement

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 307-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Blaszczynski
Keyword(s):  
Responsible Gambling ◽  
Consumer Involvement ◽  
Harm Minimization ◽  
Harm Minimisation ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Gambling Expenditure ◽  
Innovative Products ◽  
Industry Community

Abstract. Background: Tensions exist with various stakeholders facing competing interests in providing legal land-based and online regulated gambling products. Threats to revenue/taxation occur in response to harm minimisation and responsible gambling policies. Setting aside the concept of total prohibition, the objectives of responsible gambling are to encourage and/or restrict an individual’s gambling expenditure in terms of money and time to personally affordable limits. Stakeholder responsibilities: Governments craft the gambling environment through legislation, monitor compliance with regulatory requirements, and receive taxation revenue as a proportion of expenditure. Industry operators on the other hand, compete across market sectors through marketing and advertising, and through the development of commercially innovative products, reaping substantial financial rewards. Concurrently, governments are driven to respond to community pressures to minimize the range of negative gambling-related social, personal and economic harms and costs. Industry operators are exposed to the same pressures but additionally overlaid with the self-interest of avoiding the imposition of more stringent restrictive policies. Cooperation of stakeholders: The resulting tension between taxation revenue and profit making, harm minimization, and social impacts creates a climate of conflict between all involved parties. Data-driven policies become compromised by unsubstantiated claims of, and counter claims against, the nature and extent of gambling-related harms, effectiveness of policy strategies, with allegations of bias and influence associated with researchers supported by industry and government research funding sources. Conclusion: To effectively advance policies, it is argued that it is imperative that all parties collaborate in a cooperative manner to achieve the objectives of responsible gambling and harm minimization. This extends to and includes more transparent funding for researchers from both government and industry. Continued reliance on data collected from analogue populations or volunteers participating in simulated gambling tasks will not provide data capable of valid and reliable extrapolation to real gamblers in real venues risking their own funds. Failure to adhere to principles of corporate responsibility and consumer protection by both governments and industry will challenge the social licence to offer gambling products. Appropriate and transparent safeguards learnt from the tobacco and alcohol field, it is argued, can guide the conduct of gambling research.

Love and Self-Interest

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (7) ◽  
pp. 481-482
Author(s):  
Graham L. Staines
Keyword(s):  
Self Interest
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