Precious African American Memories, Post-Racial Dreams & the American Nation

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waldo E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Democratic Movement ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Intractable Problem

This interdisciplinary essay explores a fundamental paradox at the heart of American race relations since the 1960s: “the changing same.” The more things change; the more they remain the same. Combining historical and social-scientific evidence with autobiographical reflections, this discussion critically probes the paradoxical decline and persistence of two dimensions of our enduring racial quagmire: racial inequality and white supremacy. The essay argues that these powerful and interrelated elements of America's continuing racial dilemma demand a massive democratic movement to alleviate both at once. This wide-ranging struggle to realize the promise of American democracy requires more than just a revitalized African American Freedom Struggle that is both intraracial and interracial. Progress toward resolving the seemingly intractable problem of racial inequality in the United States demands far more than intensified efforts to alleviate economic inequality; it requires alleviating white supremacy as well.

scholarly journals Structural Violence of Schooling: A Genealogy of a Critical Family History of Three Generations of African American Women in a Rural Community in Florida

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelyn Newman Phillips ◽  
Wangari Gichiru
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Children

Through the lens of structural violence, Black feminism and critical family history, this paper explores how societal structures informed by white supremacy shaped the lives of three generations of rural African American women in a family in Florida during the middle to the late twentieth century. Specifically, this study investigates how disparate funding, segregation, desegregation, poverty and post-desegregation policies shaped and limited the achievement trajectories among these women. Further, an oral historical examination of their lives reveals the strategies they employed despite their under-resourced and sometimes alienating schooling. The paper highlights the experiences of the Newman family, descendants of captive Africans in the United States that produced three college-educated daughters and a granddaughter despite structural barriers that threatened their progress. Using oral history interviews, archival resources and first-person accounts, this family’s story reveals a genealogy of educational achievement, barriers and agency despite racial and gendered limitations in a Southern town. The findings imply that their schooling mirrors many of the barriers that other Blacks face. However, this study shows that community investment in African American children, plus teachers that affirm students, and programs such as Upward Bound, help to advance Black students in marginalized communities. Further, these women’s lives suggest that school curriculums need to be anti-racist and public policies that affirm each person regardless of the color of their skin. A simple solution that requires the structural violence of whiteness be eliminated from the schooling spheres.

Amidst pandemic and racial upheaval: Where Asian Americans Fit

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Whitney Hua ◽  
Jane Junn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of

Abstract As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an overview of the unique racial history of Asians in the United States and analyzes the implications of dynamic racialization and status for Asian Americans. In particular, we examine the dynamism of Asian Americans' racial positionality relative to historical shifts in economic-based conceptions of their desirability as workers in American capitalism. Taking history, power, and institutions of white supremacy into account, we analyze where Asian Americans fit in contemporary U.S. politics, presenting a better understanding of the persistent structures underlying racial inequality and developing a foundation from which Asian Americans can work to enhance equality.

Assata Is Welcome Here

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teishan A. Latner
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Political Exile ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Eldridge Cleaver ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Chapter Five examines Cuba’s provision of formal political asylum to political dissidents from the United States. Focusing on black radical activists such as Robert F. Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, William Lee Brent, Charlie Hill, and Huey Newton, and organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika, the chapter explores the role that political exile and asylum has played within the larger relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the African American freedom struggle, and the impact of this engagement upon U.S.-Cuba relations amid the Cold War and the War on Terror. While some U.S. black activists looked to the Cuban Revolution as a hemispheric beacon of hope, Cuba in turn looked to U.S. black activists as allies in its geopolitical struggle with Washington, viewing the African American freedom struggle as its best hope for a radical ally in its northern neighbor.

Haunted Roadscapes in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Nicole Dib
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
The Road ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Unique Experience

Abstract In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.

Race and the (Para)Textual Condition

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth A. McCoy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Lynching Photography ◽  
Gerard Genette

When seen through the lens of the African American freedom struggle, the seemingly minor spaces and places federated by Gérard Genette under the term paratext take on a major role. Entangled throughout the margins and fringes of books and other kinds of texts (especially visual ones), the paratext (e.g., citations, prefaces, typeface) has served as a field through which white supremacy has been transacted indirectly: white-written prefaces to fugitive slave narratives are vivid examples. At the same time, the paratext has also served as a vector through which white power has been resisted. Examining the paratextual issues surrounding Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Without Sanctuary, James Allen's exhibition of lynching photography, this essay explores what is gained and lost when the paratext is used as a means of resisting racialized domination. (BAMcC)

scholarly journals The Economics of the Black Freedom Struggle

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-620
Author(s):  
TOM ADAM DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Subprime Mortgage ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

Mama Younger: Son, how come you talk so much ’bout money?Walter Lee Younger: Because it is life, Mama!Mama Younger: Oh. So now it's life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life – now It's money. I guess the world really do change.Walter Lee Younger: No – it was always money, Mama. We just didn't know about it.Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1958), 74 The disproportionate impact of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent economic recession on black families in the United States has helped to revive a long-standing debate about the relationship between race, inequality and the political and economic structures of American capitalist society. The seemingly unmistakable, and increasing, correlation between race and poverty in America has led many to challenge the powerful and pervasive idea – central to the colour-blind conservatism espoused by many on the American right – that the nation's problem of racial discrimination was overcome with the passage of civil and voting rights legislation in the mid-1960s. As part of this process, historians have begun increasingly to reconsider the place of economic questions, principles and aspirations in African American and other minority groups' struggles against racial inequality. Although these three books are very different in form, content, and scope, they each reflect the growing importance of this line of inquiry within the historiography.

Theorizing Race and Racism: Preliminary Reflections on the Medical Curriculum

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lundy Braun
Keyword(s):  
Medical Education ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Medical Curriculum ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Racial Capitalism

The current political economic crisis in the United States places in sharp relief the tensions and contradictions of racial capitalism as it manifests materially in health care and in knowledge-producing practices. Despite nearly two decades of investment in research on racial inequality in disease, inequality persists. While the reasons for persistence of inequality are manifold, little attention has been directed to the role of medical education. Importantly, medical education has failed to foster critical theorizing on race and racism to illuminate the often-invisible ways in which race and racism shape biomedical knowledge and clinical practice. Medical students across the nation are advocating for more critical anti-racist education that centers the perspectives and knowledge of marginalized communities. This Article examines the contemporary resurgence in explicit forms of white supremacy in light of growing student activism and research that privileges notions of innate differences between races. It calls for a theoretical framework that draws on Critical Race Theory and the Black Radical Tradition to interrogate epistemological practices and advocacy initiatives in medical education.

scholarly journals Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race

2015 ◽  
Vol 661 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hochschild ◽  
Maya Sen
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Genetic Factors ◽  
The United States ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Genetic Determinism ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Genetic Inheritance ◽  
Public Opinion Survey ◽  
New Public

We begin with a typology of Americans’ understanding of the links between genetic inheritance and racial or ethnic groups. The typology has two dimensions: one running from genetic determinism to social construction, and the other from technology optimism to technology pessimism. Construing each dimension as a dichotomy enables four distinct political perspectives on the possibilities for reducing racial inequality in the United States through genomics. We then use a new public opinion survey to analyze Americans’ use of the typology. Survey respondents who perceive that some phenotypes are more prevalent in one group than another due to genetic factors are disproportionately technology optimists. Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to hold that set of views, as are self-identified blacks, whites, and Latinos. The article discusses the findings and speculates about alternative interpretations of the fact that partisanship and group identity do not differentiate Americans in their views of the links between genetic inheritance and racial inequality.

3. African American Christianity: The early phase (1760–1863)

2014 ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Populations

The majority of African Americans are Christian. Black Christianity has played a critical role in the history of African American responses to white supremacy in the United States. ‘African American Christianity and Its Early Phase (1760–1863)’ is the first of four chapters that examine this complex history and introduce key moments and personalities, as well as the importance of black churches over the course of three historical periods. The early phase covers the period when the economy of slavery dominated political matters up to the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the plantation regime. Slavery defined the contours, even among free black populations, of black Christianity during this period.

The Twentieth-Century Black Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-240
Author(s):  
David D. Daniels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Church ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Dissent

Religious dissent within the Black Church focuses on defending the Christian gospel against the alliance of Christianity and the race order of white supremacy marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the dominant racial order. While the White Church in the United States has historically replicated the dominant racial order of African American subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church has resisted and subverted the dominant racial order in a way in which grace pre-empts race in the functional ecclesiology of the Black Church with Christian egalitarianism affirming the equality of the races, envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.

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