Racial Stasis

Racial Stasis PDF Author: Christopher D. DeSante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664376X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Racial progress in the United States has hit a wall, and the rise of white nationalism is but one manifestation of this. Most Americans continue to hope that the younger generation, which many believe manifests less racism and more acceptance of a multiracial society, will lead to more moderate racial politics—but this may not be happening. Overtly racist attitudes have declined, but anti-black stereotypes and racial resentment remain prevalent among white Americans. To add, the shape of racial attitudes has continued to evolve, but our existing measures have not evolved in step and cannot fully illuminate the challenge at hand. With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials’ language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations’, the end result is the same.

Racial Stasis

Racial Stasis PDF Author: Christopher D. DeSante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664376X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book

Book Description
Racial progress in the United States has hit a wall, and the rise of white nationalism is but one manifestation of this. Most Americans continue to hope that the younger generation, which many believe manifests less racism and more acceptance of a multiracial society, will lead to more moderate racial politics—but this may not be happening. Overtly racist attitudes have declined, but anti-black stereotypes and racial resentment remain prevalent among white Americans. To add, the shape of racial attitudes has continued to evolve, but our existing measures have not evolved in step and cannot fully illuminate the challenge at hand. With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials’ language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations’, the end result is the same.

Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

Racial Resentment in the Political Mind PDF Author: Darren W. Davis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681484X
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"The recent United States presidential election as well as the responses to the protests about the death of Blacks at the hands of the police has brought forward the question of racism among white voters. In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren Davis and David Wilson explore the idea that racial resentment, rather than simply racial prejudice, is the basis for growing resistance among whites to efforts to improve the circumstances faced by minorities in the United States. The authors start with the idea that there is growing sentiment among whites that they are "losing-out" and "being cut in line" by Blacks and other minorities, as reflected in an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, multiculturalism, trigger warnings, and political correctness, an increase in African Americans occupying powerful and prestigious positions, and the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president. The culprits, as they see it, are undeserving Blacks, as well as other minorities, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at whites' expense. This rewarding of unearned resources challenges the status quo and the "rules of the game," especially as they relate to justice and deservingness. These reactions may not stem from racial prejudice or hatred toward Blacks; instead, they may result from threats to whites' sense of justice, entitlement, and status. This sentiment is occurring among everyday citizens who do not subscribe to hate-filled racial or nationalistic ideologies but rather seek to treat everyone respectfully and equally, even those who are different, and understand that rejecting others because of racial prejudice is offensive"--

Redlining Culture

Redlining Culture PDF Author: Richard Jean So
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.

Black Madness

Black Madness PDF Author: Therí Alyce Pickens
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

Not in Our Lifetimes

Not in Our Lifetimes PDF Author: Michael C. Dawson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670534X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Reflects on black politics in America and what it will take to to see equality.

Black in White Space

Black in White Space PDF Author: Elijah Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country. A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “white space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America.

Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs PDF Author: David Ikard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649263X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Ikard investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature and popular media from Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help. He invalidates the fiction of a postracial society while awakening us to the sobering reality that we must continue to fight for racial equality or risk losing the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement. Through his close reading of novels, films, journalism, and political campaigns, Ikard analyzes willful white blindness and attendant master narratives of white redemption--arguing powerfully that he who controls the master narrative controls the perception of reality. The book sounds the alarm about seemingly innocuous tropes of white redemption that abound in our society and generate the notion that blacks are perpetually indebted to whites for liberating, civilizing, and enlightening them. --From publisher description.

Not Light, but Fire

Not Light, but Fire PDF Author: Matthew Kay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003841813
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Do you know how to initiate and facilitate productive dialogues about race in your classroom? Are you prepared to handle complex topics while keeping your students engaged?Inspired by Frederick Douglass's abolitionist call to action, it is not light that is needed, but fire-, author Matthew Kay demonstrateshow to move beyond surface-level discussionsand lead students through the most difficult race conversations. In Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom, Kay recognizes we often never graduate to the harder conversations,so he offers a method for getting them right, providing candid guidance on: How torecognize the difference between meaningful and inconsequential race conversations.How tobuild conversational safe spaces,- not merely declare them.How toinfuse race conversations with urgency and purpose.How tothrive in the face of unexpected challenges.How administrators mightequip teachers to thoughtfully engage in these conversations.With the right blend of reflection and humility, Kay assertsteachers can make school one of the best venues for young people to discuss race.

Listening to Images

Listening to Images PDF Author: Tina M. Campt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373580
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.

The Challenge of Blackness

The Challenge of Blackness PDF Author: Derrick E. White
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813059119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Challenge of Blackness examines the history and legacy of the Institute of the Black World (IBW), one of the most important Black Freedom Struggle organizations to emerge in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A think tank based in Atlanta, the IBW sought to answer King's question "Where do we go from here?" Its solution was to organize a broad array of leading Black activists, scholars, and intellectuals to find ways to combine the emerging academic discipline of Black Studies with the Black political agenda. Throughout the 1970s, debates over race and class in the Unites States grew increasingly hostile, and the IBW's approach was ultimately unable to challenge the growing conservatism. By using the IBW as the lens through which to view these turbulent years, Derrick White provides an exciting new interpretation of the immediate post-civil rights years in America.