Chapter 1. Civil Rights Leader, Public Intellectual, and Feminist

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-35
Outsiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Zachary Kramer

Chapter 1 examines the stories and cases of three women, each of whom was unsuccessful in her attempt to use civil rights laws to redress an individual wrong. The transition from old to new discrimination is a story about identity. Despite their different jobs and distinct life experiences, the women in Chapter 1 share a common bond. They are outsiders. Discrimination evolves. While it used to be aimed at discrete outsider groups, discrimination is increasingly about the individual. And existing civil rights law is not equipped to deal with this shift. We need a new language to explain modern discrimination. Religious discrimination law holds the key.


2020 ◽  
pp. 175508822097900
Author(s):  
Liane Hartnett

Love has been long lauded for its salvific potential in U.S. anti-racist rhetoric. Yet, what does it mean to speak or act in love’s name to redress racism? Turning to the work of the North American public intellectual and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), this essay explores his contribution to normative theory on love’s role in the work of racial justice. Niebuhr was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and many prominent figures of the movement such as James Cone, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., J. Deotis Roberts and Cornel West drew on his theology. Indeed, Niebuhr underscores love’s promise and perils in politics, and its potential to respond to racism via the work of critique, compassion, and coercion. Engaging with Niebuhr’s theology on love and justice, then, not only helps us recover a rich realist resource on racism, but also an ethic of realism as antiracism.


Author(s):  
Harold D. Morales

Chapter 1 introduces the history of Islamic Spain and the remembrance of it by the first Latino Muslim group in the United States, la Alianza Islámica, the Islamic Alliance. Although there have been several recorded instances of individual Latinos embracing Islam since the 1920s, no direct historical link exists between Muslims in Spain and Latino Muslims in the United States. Instead, the memory of Islamic Spain has been used to frame Latinos as historically connected to Islam rather than completely foreign to it. Additionally, the Alianza drew from other civil rights organizational models to develop several centers in New York where they worked to propagate Islam, provide social services, and engage in political activism. Additionally, the Alianza experienced marginalization from broader Muslim organizations and sought to develop autonomously from them. Through its unique origin histories and various activities, the Alianza helped to crystalize a first wave of Latino Muslims.


Author(s):  
Candice Delmas

Chapter 1 surveys the literature on civil disobedience and places the author’s own approach to resistance and principled disobedience within this context. Public understanding of civil disobedience is the product of two different strands: the broadly Rawlsian philosophical conception of civil disobedience and the official narrative of the civil rights movement in the United States. This chapter calls upon history to show how the standard, broadly Rawlsian conception of civil disobedience (though not necessarily Rawls’s own) rests on an unrealistic and objectionable reading of the African American civil rights struggle. It also argues that the official reading of the civil rights movement functions as a counter-resistance ideology, deterring any form of protest against the status quo. It then examines and critiques recent “inclusive” accounts of civil disobedience, proposing instead a broad matrix of resistance that includes lawful acts of resistance and principled—civil and uncivil—disobedience.


Author(s):  
William D. Ferguson

This chapter augments Chapter 1’s foundations with detail on political and economic development, inequality, their interactions, and associated CAPs. Development entails sustained, widespread improvement of economic and political capabilities. Economic development includes steady growth in per capita income, education, health care, and infrastructure, with attention to deprivation, poverty, broader inequities, and associated avenues and barriers to achievement. It also involves creating functional economic institutions. Political development entails steady augmentation of a state’s ability to provide public goods and services; protect economic, political, and civil rights; and create and enforce impartial rules (a rule of law). It also involves broad access to political decision making, limiting authority, mobilizing public participation, and enhancing the legitimacy of underlying procedures. Inequality has multiple dimensions (income, wealth, access); achieving equity along one dimension often compromises that for another. Multiple types of inequality are both outcomes of and conditions that shape development. Multiple CAPs ensue.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-289
Author(s):  
Laura Meadows

This essay calls for academics to engage in a more publicly-focused, community-centered intellectualism. Highlighting James Baldwin’s role as a public intellectual in the civil rights movement of the tumultuous 1960s as a model, the essay argues for academics to leverage popular media to reach broader audiences, communicate truthfully but provocatively, and work with and within local communities.


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