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Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson
Situated Border Lives
Laura L. Cummings
University of Arizona Press, 2009
When the Zoot Suit Riots ignited in Los Angeles in 1943, they quickly became headline news across the country. At their center was a series of attacks by U.S. Marines and sailors on young Mexican American men who dressed in distinctive suits and called themselves pachucos. The media of the day portrayed these youths as miscreants and hoodlums. Even though the outspoken First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, quickly labeled them victims of race riots, the initial portrayal has distorted images ever since. A surprising amount of scholarship has reinforced those images, writes Laura Cummings, proceeding from what she calls “the deviance school of thought.”

This innovative study examines the pachuco phenomenon in a new way. Exploring its growth in Tucson, Arizona, the book combines ethnography, history, and sociolinguistics to contextualize the early years of the phenomenon, its diverse cultural roots, and its language development in Tucson.

Unlike other studies, it features first-person research with men and women who—despite a wide span of ages—self-identify as pachucos and pachucas. Through these interviews and her archival research, the author finds that pachuco culture has deep roots in Tucson and the Southwest. And she discovers the importance of the pachuco/caló language variety to a shared sense of pachuquismo. Further, she identifies previously neglected pachuco ties to indigenous Indian languages and cultures in Mexico and the United States.

Cummings stresses that the great majority of people conversant with the culture and language do not subscribe to the dynamics of contemporary hardcore gangs, but while zoot suits are no longer the rage today, the pachuco language and sensibilities do live on in Mexican American communities across the Southwest and throughout the United States.
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Panama in Black
Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century
Kaysha Corinealdi
Duke University Press, 2022
In Panama in Black, Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich array of sources including speeches, yearbooks, photographs, government reports, radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and oral histories, Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world that linked cities and towns like Colón, Kingston, Panamá City, Brooklyn, Bridgetown, and La Boca. In Panama, Afro-Caribbean Panamanians created a diasporic worldview of the Caribbean that privileged the potential of Black innovation. Corinealdi maps this innovation by examining the longest-running Black newspaper in Central America, the rise of civic associations created to counter policies that stripped Afro-Caribbean Panamanians of citizenship, the creation of scholarship-granting organizations that supported the education of Black students, and the emergence of national conferences and organizations that linked anti-imperialism and Black liberation. By showing how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians used these methods to navigate anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and white supremacy, Corinealdi offers a new mode of understanding activism, community, and diaspora formation.
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The Paper Bag Principle
Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.
Audrey Elisa Kerr
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
“This is, to my knowledge, the first full-length treatment of complexion legends and myths, filling a major gap in the literature. . . . It treats controversial issues with great sensitivity and insight.” —Nancy Bonvillain, Simon’s Rock College of Bard

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in Black communities,The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the Black elite and the Black “folk.” While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in Black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a Black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially. Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two Black Washingtons and that the Black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities. The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of Black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.

Audrey Kerr is associate professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her articles have appeared in Quodilibet: The Journal of Christian Theology and Philosophy, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Rhetorical Society Quarterly.
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Paper Families
Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion
Estelle T. Lau
Duke University Press, 2006
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. In Paper Families, Estelle T. Lau demonstrates how exclusion affected Chinese American communities and initiated the development of restrictive U.S. immigration policies and practices. Through the enforcement of the Exclusion Act and subsequent legislation, the U.S. immigration service developed new forms of record keeping and identification practices. Meanwhile, Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of “paper families,” in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or “paper,” children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of “crib sheets” outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing.

Drawing on these documents as well as immigration case files, legislative materials, and transcripts of interviews and court proceedings, Lau reveals immigration as an interactive process. Chinese immigrants and their U.S. families were subject to regulation and surveillance, but they also manipulated and thwarted those regulations, forcing the U.S. government to adapt its practices and policies. Lau points out that the Exclusion Acts and the pseudo-familial structures that emerged in response have had lasting effects on Chinese American identity. She concludes with a look at exclusion’s legacy, including the Confession Program of the 1960s that coerced people into divulging the names of paper family members and efforts made by Chinese American communities to recover their lost family histories.

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Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
Ohio University Press, 2011
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.
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The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume I
1942–1943
Clarence Mitchell Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2005

Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.

Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.

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The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume II
1944–1946
Clarence Mitchell Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2005

Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.

Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.

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The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V
The Struggle to Pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1958
Clarence Mitchell Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2021

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the Brown decision demolished the southerners’ argument. Mitchell then launched the decisive stage of the struggle to pass modern civil rights laws.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first comprehensive lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. Coming on the heels of the Brown decision, the 1957 law was a turning point in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution. The act’s passage, however, was nearly derailed in the Senate by southern opposition and Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-setting filibuster, which lasted more than twenty-four hours. Congress later weakened several provisions of the act but—crucially—it broke a psychological barrier to the legislative enactment of such measures.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

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The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume VI
The Struggle to Pass the 1960 Civil Rights Act, 1959–1960
Clarence Mitchell Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2021

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers reveal how the repercussions of these events affected the NAACP’s work in Washington and how, despite their dislike of demonstrations, NAACP officials used them to intensify the civil rights struggle.

Among the act’s seven titles were provisions authorizing federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and penalties for anyone attempting to interfere with voters on the basis of race or color. The law extended the powers of the US Commission on Civil Rights and broadened the legal definition of the verb to vote to encompass all elements of the process: registering, casting a ballot, and properly counting that ballot. Ultimately, Mitchell considered the 1960 act unsuccessful because Congress had failed to include key amendments that would have further strengthened the 1957 act. In the House, representatives used parliamentary tactics to stall employment protections, school desegregation, poll-tax elimination, and other meaningful civil rights reforms. The fight would continue.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

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The Paradoxes of Integration
Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America
J. Eric Oliver
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The United States is rapidly changing from a country monochromatically divided between black and white into a multiethnic society. The Paradoxes of Integration helps us to understand America’s racial future by revealing the complex relationships among integration, racial attitudes, and neighborhood life.

J. Eric Oliver demonstrates that the effects of integration differ tremendously, depending on which geographical level one is examining. Living among people of other races in a larger metropolitan area corresponds with greater racial intolerance, particularly for America’s white majority. But when whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans actually live in integrated neighborhoods, they feel less racial resentment. Paradoxically, this racial tolerance is usually also accompanied by feeling less connected to their community; it is no longer "theirs." Basing its findings on our most advanced means of gauging the impact of social environments on racial attitudes, The Paradoxes of Integration sensitively explores the benefits and at times, heavily borne, costs of integration.

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Parish Boundaries
The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North
John T. McGreevy
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Parish Boundaries chronicles the history of Catholic parishes in major cities such as Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, melding their unique place in the urban landscape to the course of twentieth century American race relations. In vivid portraits of parish life, John McGreevy examines the contacts and conflicts between Euro-American Catholics and their African-American neighbors. By tracing the transformation of a church, its people, and the nation, McGreevy illuminates the enormous impact of religious culture on modern American society.

"Parish Boundaries can take its place in the front ranks of the literature of urban race relations."—Jonathan Dorfman, Washington Post Book Review

"A prodigiously researched, gracefully written book distinguished especially by its seamless treatment of social and intellectual history."—Robert Orsi, American Historical Review

"Parish Boundaries will fascinate historians and anyone interested in the historic connection between parish and race."—Ed Marciniak, Chicago Tribune

"The history that remains to be written will rest on the firm foundation of Mr. McGreevy's remarkable book."—Richard Wightman Fox, New York Times Book Review
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Passage To England
Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home
John Western
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Since World War II London has become a significantly multiracial city. Some of the earliest agents of its transformation were young men and women recruited in the late 1950s from Barbados, then a British colony, to work in the metropolis’s nationalized public transportation system and in its hospitals. These Barbadians met, married, settled in London, and raised Londoner children. In 1987-88 John Western conducted a series of interviews with twelve such families--both parents and children. Their vivid words fill A Passage to England with insight, human, and, often, poignancy. Here is a rich perspective on thirty years or more of London social history.

Western structured the interviews to allow the Barbadians a lot of freedom to discuss whatever came to mind concerning either their own life histories and achievements, or wider themes of culture, politics, and society. Topics covered range from matters of “race” to Margaret Thatcher and the change her decade in power has wrought in Britain. One development, for example, is the strikingly entrepreneurial spirit now embraced by some of the young British blacks, veritably “Mrs. Thatcher’s Children.” Ultimately, many of the interviewees focused on the changes they see in their ancestral island in the Caribbean, to which all of them have returned for visits. For this migrant generation especially, as the prospect of retirement begins to grow increasingly important, inevitable questions regard the definitions of “home” and “belonging” must be confronted: Does one stay in London--with one’s children and grandchildren--or does one return to Barbados, which for many seems no longer the same island as the one they left a working lifetime ago? Within the context of an ever-increasing complement of geographically mobile people worldwide, Western’s study provides unique insights into the particular ambiguities a particular set of person have wrestled with at a particular moment in history...but the import of the Barbadian Londoners’ story is universal.
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Passing the Baton
Black Women Track Stars and American Identity
Cat M. Ariail
University of Illinois Press, 2020
After World War II, the United States used international sport to promote democratic values and its image of an ideal citizen. But African American women excelling in track and field upset such notions. Cat M. Ariail examines how athletes such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph forced American sport cultures—both white and Black—to reckon with the athleticism of African American women. Marginalized still further in a low-profile sport, young Black women nonetheless bypassed barriers to represent their country. Their athletic success soon threatened postwar America's dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. As Ariail shows, the wider culture defused these radical challenges by locking the athletes within roles that stressed conservative forms of femininity, blackness, and citizenship.

A rare exploration of African American women athletes and national identity, Passing the Baton reveals young Black women as active agents in the remaking of what it means to be American.

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Past Is Not Dead
Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes
Allan Pred
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

A study of the genealogy and perpetuation of stereotyping

Through one figure—Badin, an eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean slave given to the Swedish royal court—Allan Pred shows how stereotypes endure through the repeated confusion of facts and fiction, providing a highly original perspective on the perpetuation of racializing stereotypes in the West.

In the first of two interlocking montages inspired by Walter Benjamin, the book focuses on Badin, who died in Stockholm in 1822, and representations of his life that appeared from the 1840s through the 1990s. In the second montage, Pred brings the late nineteenth century and the present into play, shifting to urban sites where racialized stereotyping is on public display, including a museum that has exhibited the bodily remains of the African male.Intriguing for its insight into the workings of race and immigration on the national imagination of a European nation—but with implications and ramifications far beyond that specific example—The Past Is Not Dead is a bold inquiry into both the collective memory and the amnesia of those who stereotype versus the personal remembering and forgetting of the stereotyped.
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Patchwork Apartheid
Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality
Colin Gordon
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023
For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction—documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties—reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.
 
Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were accommodated by local zoning and federal housing policies. Explicit racial restrictions were replaced by the deceptive business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were in turn replaced by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.
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Pathways of Reconciliation
Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC's Calls to Action
Aimée Craft
University of Manitoba Press, 2020

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Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex
Race, Madness, Activism
Tony Perucci
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane. 
 
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances---the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956---Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States. His book provides a transformative new perspective on how the struggle over the politics of performance in the 1950s was also a domestic struggle over freedom and equality. The book closely examines both of these performance events as well as artifacts from Cold War culture---including congressional documents, FBI files, foreign policy papers, the popular literature on mental illness, and government propaganda films---to study the operation of power and activism in American Cold War culture.

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Peacekeeping on the Plains
Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas
Tony R. Mullis
University of Missouri Press, 2004

 

Historians have written on “Bleeding Kansas” and on the frontier army as a constabulary force, but little scholarship exists on how the army performed its peacekeeping operations in the 1850s. In Peacekeeping on the Plains, Tony R. Mullis is one of the first scholars to detail the military concerns associated with peace enforcement in Kansas and the trans-Missouri West.

 

Between 1854 and 1856, the Franklin Pierce administration called upon the U.S. Army to conduct a series of peace operations in the newly formed Kansas and Nebraska territories. The army responded to the president’s call by successfully completing a mission against the Lakota Sioux in 1855 and by aiding civil authorities in the imposition of peace among competing factions in Kansas during 1856.

 

Although these police duties were not always popular with the soldiers that conducted them, the purpose behind them remained constant—the maintenance of peace, order, and security. Given Americans’ misgivings about a standing army and their limited expectations for it as a domestic peacekeeper, its use in this fashion during the 1850s was a delicate proposition.

 

By drawing on diverse sources, including official army correspondence, personal papers of key military and political leaders, and local accounts of army activities, Mullis shows how peace operations were conducted by the U.S. Army long before the second half of the twentieth century. He alsopresents a thorough analysis of the professional dilemmas confronted by army officers, as well as the delicate command and control issues associated with the different types of peace operations.

 

Mullis’s assessment of the army’s peacekeeping efforts in the mid-1850s offers a full understanding of the constraints and frustrations involved. Many of the dilemmas faced by the army in Kansas parallel those encountered in various spots around the globe today. Peacekeeping on the Plains will provide any reader with a better insight into the nuances of peace operations in the 1850s and assist military historians in their understanding of these activities as they relate to the twenty-first century.
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A Peculiar Imbalance
The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Minnesota, 1837–1869
William D. Green
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

A Peculiar Imbalance is the little-known history of the black experience in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, a time of dramatic change in the region. William D. Green explains how, as white progressive politicians pushed for statehood, black men who had been integrated members of the community, owning businesses and maintaining good relationships with their neighbors, found themselves denied the right to vote or to run for office in those same communities.

As Minnesota was transformed from a wilderness territory to a state, the concepts of race and ethnicity and the distinctions among them made by Anglo-Americans grew more rigid and arbitrary. A black man might enjoy economic success and a middle-class lifestyle but was not considered a citizen under the law. In contrast, an Irish Catholic man was able to vote—as could a mixed-blood Indian—but might find himself struggling to build a business because of the ethnic and religious prejudices of the Anglo-American community. A Peculiar Imbalance examines these disparities, reflecting on the political, social, and legal experiences of black men from 1837 to 1869, the year of black suffrage.

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A Peculiar Paradise
A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940
Elizabeth McLagan
Oregon State University Press, 2022
Published in cooperation with Oregon Black Pioneers

A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon 1788–1940 remains the most comprehensive chronology of Black life in Oregon more than forty years after its original publication in 1980. The book has long been a resource for those seeking information on the legal and social barriers faced by people of African descent in Oregon. Elizabeth McLagan’s work reveals how in spite of those barriers, Black individuals and families made Oregon their home, and helped create the state’s modern Black communities. Long out of print, the book is available again through this co-publication with Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon’s statewide African American historical society. The revised second edition includes additional details for students and scholars, an expanded reading list, a new selection of historic images, and a new foreword by Gwen Carr and an afterword by Elizabeth McLagan.
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The People from Heaven
John Sanford
University of Illinois Press, 1996
An extraordinary novel, told partly in verse, The People from Heaven takes place in 1943 in Warrensburg, New York, where Eli Bishop, a white shopkeeper, initiates a reign of terror on the populace following his rape of America Smith, a black woman. The author, John Sanford, is considered by many to be one of the finest little-known writers of the twentieth century. In his introduction, Alan Wald provides an overview of Sanford's career, his art, and his politics.
 
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Peoples on Parade
Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Sadiah Qureshi
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In May 1853, Charles Dickens paid a visit to the “savages at Hyde Park Corner,” an exhibition of thirteen imported Zulus performing cultural rites ranging from songs and dances to a “witch-hunt” and marriage ceremony. Dickens was not the only Londoner intrigued by these “living curiosities”: displayed foreign peoples provided some of the most popular public entertainments of their day. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial difference, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work, and empire.
 
Peoples on Parade provides the first substantial overview of these human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain. Sadiah Qureshi considers these shows in their entirety—their production, promotion, management, and performance—to understand why they proved so commercially successful, how they shaped performers’ lives, how they were interpreted by their audiences, and what kinds of lasting influence they may have had on notions of race and empire. Qureshi supports her analysis with diverse visual materials, including promotional ephemera, travel paintings, theatrical scenery, art prints, and photography, and thus contributes to the wider understanding of the relationship between science and visual culture in the nineteenth century.
 
Through Qureshi’s vibrant telling and stunning images, readers will see how human exhibitions have left behind a lasting legacy both in the formation of early anthropological inquiry and in the creation of broader public attitudes toward racial difference.
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The People’s Zion
Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement
Joel Cabrita
Harvard University Press, 2018

In The People’s Zion, Joel Cabrita tells the transatlantic story of Southern Africa’s largest popular religious movement, Zionism. It began in Zion City, a utopian community established in 1900 just north of Chicago. The Zionist church, which promoted faith healing, drew tens of thousands of marginalized Americans from across racial and class divides. It also sent missionaries abroad, particularly to Southern Africa, where its uplifting spiritualism and pan-racialism resonated with urban working-class whites and blacks.

Circulated throughout Southern Africa by Zion City’s missionaries and literature, Zionism thrived among white and black workers drawn to Johannesburg by the discovery of gold. As in Chicago, these early devotees of faith healing hoped for a color-blind society in which they could acquire equal status and purpose amid demoralizing social and economic circumstances. Defying segregation and later apartheid, black and white Zionists formed a uniquely cosmopolitan community that played a key role in remaking the racial politics of modern Southern Africa.

Connecting cities, regions, and societies usually considered in isolation, Cabrita shows how Zionists on either side of the Atlantic used the democratic resources of evangelical Christianity to stake out a place of belonging within rapidly-changing societies. In doing so, they laid claim to nothing less than the Kingdom of God. Today, the number of American Zionists is small, but thousands of independent Zionist churches counting millions of members still dot the Southern African landscape.

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Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice
Catherine M. Cole
University of Michigan Press, 2020
 In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way, and in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, post-apartheid and postcolonial framings of change have exceeded their limits. Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice reveals how the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Embodied performance in South Africa has particular potency because apartheid was so centrally focused on the body: classifying bodies into racial categories, legislating where certain bodies could move and which bathrooms and drinking fountains certain bodies could use, and how different bodies carried meaning. The book considers key works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Robyn Orlin, Jay Pather, and Sello Pesa, artists imagining new forms and helping audiences see the contemporary moment as it is: an important intervention in a country long predicated on denial. They are also helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of African studies, black performance, dance studies, transitional justice, as well as theater and performance studies.
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Philadelphia
Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Post-Industrial City
Carolyn Adams
Temple University Press, 1993

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A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights
Cornelius L. Bynum
University of Illinois Press, 2010
A. Philip Randolph's career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist fundamentally shaped the course of black protest in the mid-twentieth century. Standing alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and others at the center of the cultural renaissance and political radicalism that shaped communities such as Harlem in the 1920s and into the 1930s, Randolph fashioned an understanding of social justice that reflected a deep awareness of how race complicated class concerns, especially among black laborers. Examining Randolph's work in lobbying for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatening to lead a march on Washington in 1941, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee, Cornelius L. Bynum shows that Randolph's push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform. Some of Randolph's pioneering plans for engineering change--which served as foundational strategies in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--included direct mass action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and purposeful coalitions between black and white workers. Bynum interweaves biographical information on Randolph with details on how he gradually shifted his thinking about race and class, full citizenship rights, industrial organization, trade unionism, and civil rights protest throughout his activist career.
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Photography on the Color Line
W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture
Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2004
Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.

Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

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Picture Man
The Legacy of Southeast Alaska Photographer Shoki Kayamori
Margaret Thomas
University of Alaska Press, 2015
In 1912, Shoki Kayamori and his box camera arrived in a small Tlingit village in southeast Alaska. At a time when Asian immigrants were forbidden to own property and faced intense racial pressure, the Japanese-born Kayamori put down roots and became part of the Yakutat community. For three decades he photographed daily life in the village, turning his lens on locals and migrants alike, and gaining the nickname “Picture Man.” But as World War II drew near, his passion for photography turned dangerous, as government officials called out Kayamori as a potential spy. Despondent, Kayamori committed suicide, leaving behind an enigmatic photographic legacy.
In Picture Man, Margaret Thomas views Kayamori’s life through multiple lenses. Using Kayamori’s original photos, she explores the economic and political realities that sent Kayamori and thousands like him out of Japan toward opportunity and adventure in the United States, especially the Pacific Northwest. She reveals the tensions around Asian immigrants on the West Coast and the racism that sent many young men north to work in the canneries of Alaska. And she illuminates the intersecting—and at times conflicting—lives of villagers and migrants in a time of enormous change. Part history, part biography, part photographic showcase, Picture Man offers a fascinating new view of Alaska history.
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Piety and Dissent
Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography
Eileen R. Elrod
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.
[more]

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A Place Called Sweet Shrub
The Second Novel in a Trilogy
Jane Roberts Wood
University of North Texas Press, 2000
Together for the first time as a classic Texas trilogy: The Train to Estelline A Place Called Sweet Shrub Dance a Little Longer The Lucinda "Lucy" Richards trilogy, spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s, has everything good books should have: a variety of landscapes, characters of all ages and social classes, an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality, and a sense of the comic amidst the tragic. Lucy is feisty, funny, and completely open-armed about life. Josh passionately confronts danger and greed and prejudice with courage and humor and, sometimes, with bare fists. Even the minor characters are so rife with color that you first turn the pages quickly to see what they will do next and, then, you turn them slowly so as to savor each page of this remarkable trilogy. A Place Called Sweet Shrub : In 1915 it has been three years since Lucy Richards left her teaching post in West Texas and returned home where she is busy being indispensable to her eccentric mother, keeping her Aunt Catherine comfortable, and taking on many of the chores her very pregnant sister no longer feels up to. She decides to choose a husband from the local beaus, but none of them stand a chance when handsome, irreverent Josh Arnold comes to town. The newlyweds move to the sleepy hamlet of Sweet Shrub, Arkansas, where they are soon caught up in the lives of their neighbors and discover that the surface tranquillity of the town hides simmering tensions and unrest that will inevitably result in tragedy.
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Places of Their Own
African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century
Andrew Wiese
University of Chicago Press, 2005
On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom.

For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class.

Tracing the precise contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs.
 
Winner of the 2005 John G. Cawelti Book Award from the American Culture 
Association.
Winner of the 2005 Award for Best Book in North American Urban 
History from the Urban History Association.
 
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Pleas and Petitions
Hispano Culture and Legislative Conflict in Territorial Colorado
Virginia Sánchez
University Press of Colorado, 2021
In Pleas and Petitions Virginia Sánchez sheds new light on the political obstacles, cultural conflicts, and institutional racism experienced by Hispano legislators in the wake of the legal establishment of the Territory of Colorado. The book reexamines the transformation of some 7,000 Hispano settlers from citizens of New Mexico territory to citizens of the newly formed Colorado territory, as well as the effects of territorial legislation on the lives of those residing in the region as a whole.
 
Sánchez highlights the struggles experienced by Hispano territorial assemblymen trying to create opportunity and a better life in the face of cultural conflict and the institutional racism used to effectively shut them out of the process of establishing new laws and social order. For example, the federal and Colorado territorial governments did not provide an interpreter for the Hispano assemblymen or translations of the laws passed by the legislature, and they taxed Hispano constituents without representation and denied them due process in court.
 
The first in-depth history of Hispano sociopolitical life during Colorado’s territorial period, Pleas and Petitions provides fundamental insight into Hispano settlers’ interactions with their Anglo neighbors, acknowledges the struggles and efforts of those Hispano assemblymen who represented southern Colorado during the territorial period, and augments the growing historical record of Hispanos who have influenced the course of Colorado’s history.
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Point of Reckoning
The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University
Theodore D. Segal
Duke University Press, 2021
On the morning of February 13, 1969, members of Duke University's Afro-American Society barricaded themselves inside the Allen administration building. That evening, police were summoned to clear the building, firing tear gas at students in the melee that followed. When it was over, nearly twenty people were taken to the hospital, and many more injured. In Point of Reckoning, Theodore D. Segal narrates the contested fight for racial justice at Duke from the enrollment of the first Black undergraduates in 1963 to the events that led to the Allen Building takeover and beyond. Segal shows that Duke's first Black students quickly recognized that the university was unwilling to acknowledge their presence or fully address its segregationist past. By exposing the tortuous dynamics that played out as racial progress stalled at Duke, Segal tells both a local and national story about the challenges that historically white colleges and universities throughout the country have faced and continue to face.
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Poison in the Ivy
Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses
Byrd, W. Carson
Rutgers University Press, 2017
The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort.

Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.  
 
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Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970
Doug McAdam
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this classic work of sociology, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical concerns to empirical analysis, he focuses on the crucial role of three institutions that foster protest: black churches, black colleges, and Southern chapters of the NAACP. He concludes that political opportunities, a heightened sense of political efficacy, and the development of these three institutions played a central role in shaping the civil rights movement. In his new introduction, McAdam revisits the civil rights struggle in light of recent scholarship on social movement origins and collective action.

"[A] first-rate analytical demonstration that the civil rights movement was the culmination of a long process of building institutions in the black community."—Raymond Wolters, Journal of American History

"A fresh, rich, and dynamic model to explain the rise and decline of the black insurgency movement in the United States."—James W. Lamare, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
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Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR
A Carnegie-Myrdal Report Emphasizing the American South
Ralph J. Bunche
University of Chicago Press, 1973

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Politics and Society in the South
Earl Black and Merle Black
Harvard University Press, 1987

This wide-ranging examination of the “newest” South is a leading candidate to replace the classic work by V. O. Key, now two generations old. Politics and Society in the South is a systematic interpretation of the most important national and state tendencies in southern politics since 1920. The authors begin by describing the salient features of the old southern politics, against which they then depict the emergence of the new South: the changing composition of the population, the growth of industry and cities, economic diversification, and the rise of an urban middle class. A major component of the greatest southern transformation since the Civil War is the altered status of blacks from a disfranchised underclass to a franchised citizenry, a change that the authors discuss in all its ramifications. The decline of the Democratic Party is charted and related to the rise of the black vote and the transitional attitudes of white southerners. Finally, regional trends in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial politics are set forth, and the overall political directions that are still reshaping southern politics and creating a two-party system for the first time are defined.

The authors contend that, notable improvements in race relations notwithstanding, the central tendencies in southern politics are primarily established by the values, beliefs, and objectives of the expanding white urban middle class. This is the crucible for a more competitive two-party politics that is emerging in the South.

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Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975
Edward Shannon LaMonte
University of Alabama Press, 1995

This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century:

• 1900-1917, the formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector;
• 1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need;
• the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant;
• 1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another.

From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chest’s Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.
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The Politics of Kinship
Race, Family, Governance
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2024
What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.
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The Politics of Sentiment
Imagining and Remembering Guayaquil
By O. Hugo Benavides
University of Texas Press, 2006

Between 1890 and 1930, the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, experienced a liberal revolution and a worker's movement—key elements in shaping the Ecuadorian national identity. In this book, O. Hugo Benavides examines these and other pivotal features in shaping Guayaquilean identity and immigrant identity formation in general in transnational communities such as those found in New York City.

Turn-of-the-century Ecuador witnessed an intriguing combination of transformations: the formation of a national citizenship; extension of the popular vote to members of a traditional underclass of Indians and those of African descent; provisions for union organizing while entering into world market capitalist relations; and a separation of church and state that led to the legalization of secular divorces. Assessing how these phenomena created a unique cultural history for Guayaquileans, Benavides reveals not only a specific cultural history but also a process of developing ethnic attachment in general. He also incorporates a study of works by Medardo Angel Silva, the Afro-Ecuadorian poet whose singular literature embodies the effects of Modernism's arrival in a locale steeped in contradictions of race, class, and sexuality.

Also comprising one of the first case studies of Raymond Williams's hypothesis on the relationship between structures of feeling and hegemony, this is an illuminating illustration of the powerful relationships between historically informed memories and contemporary national life.

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The Politics of Skin Tone
African American Experiences, Identity, and Attitudes
Nicole D. Yadon
University of Chicago Press, 2025

A nuanced examination of the salience of skin tone within African American politics.

Research shows that skin tone is associated with significant differences in life experiences. On average, African Americans with darker skin earn lower wages, suffer worse health outcomes, and endure more negative criminal justice experiences than lighter-skinned African Americans. Nicole D. Yadon conceptualizes skin tone as one facet of the multidimensional construct of race that powerfully influences racialized experiences which, in turn, can influence political identities and attitudes.

Drawing on evidence from one hundred in-depth interviews, multiple surveys, and a survey experiment, The Politics of Skin Tone investigates the political associations of skin tone. Yadon finds that skin tone correlates with political attitudes, particularly on issues where color-based disparities are especially pronounced such as criminal justice. Moreover, a sizable number of African Americans adopt a skin tone-based identity. In an era of shifting racial boundaries and growing color-based discrimination, The Politics of Skin Tone examines the implications for both scholars and policymakers.

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Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949
Glenn Feldman
University of Alabama Press, 1999
This first book-length examination of the Klan in Alabama represents
exhaustive research that challenges traditional interpretations.

The Ku Klux Klan has wielded considerable power both as
a terrorist group and as a political force. Usually viewed as appearing
in distinct incarnations, the Klans of the 20th century are now shown by
Glenn Feldman to have a greater degree of continuity than has been previously
suspected. Victims of Klan terrorism continued to be aliens, foreigners,
or outsiders in Alabama: the freed slave during Reconstruction, the 1920s
Catholic or Jew, the 1930s labor organizer or Communist, and the returning
black veteran of World War II were all considered a threat to the dominant
white culture.

 

Feldman offers new insights into this "qualified continuity"
among Klans of different eras, showing that the group remained active during
the 1930s and 1940s when it was presumed dormant, with elements of the
"Reconstruction syndrome" carrying over to the smaller Klan of the civil
rights era.

 

In addition, Feldman takes a critical look at opposition to
Klan activities by southern elites. He particularly shows how opponents
during the Great Depression and war years saw the Klan as an impediment
to attracting outside capital and federal relief or as a magnet for federal
action that would jeopardize traditional forms of racial and social control.
Other critics voiced concerns about negative national publicity, and others
deplored the violence and terrorism.

 

This in-depth examination of the Klan
in a single state, which features rare photographs, provides a means of
understanding the order's development throughout the South. Feldman's book
represents definitive research into the history of the Klan and makes a
major contribution to our understanding of both that organization and the
history of Alabama.

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Portland's Audacious Champion
How Bill Naito Overcame Anti-Japanese Hate and Became an Intrepid Civic Leader
Erica Naito-Campbell
Oregon State University Press, 2024

William “Bill” Sumio Naito (1925–1996) was a remarkable and visionary individual—the Portland-born son of Japanese immigrants who became one of the city’s most significant business and civic leaders. Every day thousands of people drive on Naito Parkway alongside Portland’s Waterfront Park, yet little has been written about the man for whom it was named.

In this first biography, Erica Naito-Campbell, Bill’s granddaughter, shows how his story is also the story of Portland, the city he loved. Naito’s life, from the Great Depression and World War II through Portland’s rebirth in the 1970s and its profound growth, tracked most of the major events in the city and was the catalyst for many of them. Through hard-earned success in importing and real estate with his brother Sam, Naito came to wield considerable power in the city, and his leadership led to much of what we consider iconic Portland today: the “Portland Oregon” sign near the Burnside Bridge, the annual Christmas tree in Pioneer Courthouse Square, and Harbor Drive’s conversion to Waterfront Park.

Naito’s name became synonymous with civic leadership, whether it was growing Portland’s urban tree canopy, revitalizing its downtown, or preserving historic buildings. But less is known about his difficult childhood—with a father who worked twelve-hour days and a mother whose treatment of him was harsh at best—and the racism he endured during World War II. After the expulsion of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor and his military service in Occupied Japan, Naito overcame great emotional turmoil to return to Portland and become one of its greatest change-makers.

Erica Naito-Campbell uses anecdotes, rich details, and previously unknown stories about Bill Naito to bring Portland’s history to life—while acknowledging that the cost of his success was a family rife with resentments and envy. Her book reveals the emotional wounds that drove Naito to become one of Portland’s most inspiring civic leaders, a pivotal player in the city’s journey from a moribund downtown to a national model for livability, urban renewal, and historic preservation.  

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Positively No Filipinos Allowed
Building Communities and Discourse
edited by Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr., Edgardo V. Gutierrez and Ricardo V. Gutierrez, foreword by Lisa Lowe
Temple University Press, 2006
From the perspectives of ethnic studies, history, literary criticism, and legal studies, the original essays in this volume examine the ways in which the colonial history of the Philippines has shaped Filipino American identity, culture, and community formation. The contributors address the dearth of scholarship in the field as well as show how an understanding of this complex history provides a foundation for new theoretical frameworks for Filipino American studies.
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Possessing the Pacific
Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska
Stuart Banner
Harvard University Press, 2007

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago—choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.

Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources.

Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

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Possessive Investment In Whiteness
George Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 1998
Attacking the common view that whiteness is a meaningless category of identity, Lipsitz shows that public policy and private prejudice insure that whites wind up on top of the social hierarchy. Passionately and clearly written, this wide-ranging book probes into the social and material rewards that accrue to "the possessive investment in whiteness." Lipsitz sums up the ways that public policy has virtually excluded communities of color from everything that American society defines as desirable: first-rate education, decent housing, asset accumulation, political power, social status, satisfying  work, and even the power it shape and narrate their own history. White supremacy is no thing of the past, no fringe movement. It is a pervasive and pernicious system that restricts the political and cultural agency of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos every day. Unearned and unacknowledged, race-based advantages, not greater merit or a superior work ethic, account for white privilege.

Lipsitz's ultimate point is not to condemn all white people as racists but to challenge everyone to begin a principled examination of personal actions and political commitments. Exposing the system of unfairness is not enough. People of all groups -- but  especially white people because they benefit from that system -- have to work toward eradicating the rewards of whiteness.
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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
How White People Profit from Identity Politics
George Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 2018

George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages.

In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism. 

As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy.

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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition
George Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 2006
In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.
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Postcolonial Grief
The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas
Jinah Kim
Duke University Press, 2019
In Postcolonial Grief Jinah Kim explores the relationship of mourning to transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics, and decolonial politics since World War II. Kim argues that Asian diasporic subjectivity exists in relation to afterlives because the deaths of those killed by U.S. imperialism and militarism in the Pacific remain unresolved and unaddressed. Kim shows how primarily U.S.-based Korean and Japanese diasporic writers, artists, and filmmakers negotiate the necropolitics of Asia and how their creative refusal to heal from imperial violence may generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics. She contests prevalent interpretations of melancholia by engaging with Frantz Fanon's and Hisaye Yamamoto's decolonial writings; uncovering the noir genre's relationship to the U.S. war in Korea; discussing the emergence of silenced colonial histories during the 1992 Los Angeles riots; and analyzing the 1996 hostage takeover of the Japanese ambassador's home in Peru. Kim highlights how the aesthetic and creative work of the Japanese and Korean diasporas offers new insights into twenty-first-century concerns surrounding the state's erasure of military violence and colonialism and the difficult work of remembering histories of war across the transpacific.
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Postnationalism Prefigured
Caribbean Borderlands
Carnegie, Charles V
Rutgers University Press, 2002
We do not consider it noteworthy when somebody moves three thousand miles from New York to Los Angeles. Yet we think that movement across borders requires a major degree of adjustment, and that an individual who migrates 750 miles from Haiti to Miami has done something extraordinary. Charles V. Carnegie suggests that to people from the Caribbean, migration is simply one of many ways to pursue a better future and to survive in a world over which they have little control

Carnegie shows not only that the nation-state is an exhausted form of political organization, but that in the Caribbean the ideological and political reach of the nation-state has always been tenuous at best. Caribbean peoples, he suggests, live continually in breach of the nation-state configuration. Drawing both on his own experiences as a Jamaican-born anthropologist and on the examples provided by those who have always considered national borders as little more than artificial administrative nuisances, Carnegie investigates a fascinating spectrum of individuals, including Marcus Garvey, traders, black albinos, and Caribbean Ba’hais. If these people have not themselves developed a scholarly doctrine of transnationalism, they have, nevertheless, effectively lived its demand and prefigured a postnational life.

[more]

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Post-Racial or Most-Racial?
Race and Politics in the Obama Era
Michael Tesler
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn’t lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans’ political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama’s presidency—in spite of his administration’s considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.
           
Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.

One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama’s presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.
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The Potlatch Papers
A Colonial Case History
Christopher Bracken
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a destruction of property, a system of banking, and a struggle for prestige, the potlatch is one of the founding concepts of anthropology. Some researchers even claim to have discovered traces of the potlatch in all the economies of the world.

However, as Christopher Bracken shows in this elegantly argued work, the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In addition to giving the world its own potlatch, the law also generated a random collection of "potlatch papers" dating from the 1860s to the 1930s. Bracken meticulously analyzes these documents—some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known—to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them. Rather than referring to objects that already exist, the "potlatch papers" instead gave themselves something to refer to; a mirror in which to observe not "the Indian," but "the European."
[more]

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Poverty and Place
Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City
Paul A. Jargowsky
Russell Sage Foundation, 1997
"[An] alarming report, a rigorous study packed with charts, tables, 1990 census data and [Jargowsky's] own extensive field work.... His careful analysis of enterprise zones, job-creation strategies, local economic development schemes and housing and tax policies rounds out an essential handbook for policy makers, a major contribution to public debate over ways to reverse indigence." —Publishers Weekly "A data-rich description and a conceptually innovative explanation of the spread of neighborhood poverty in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Urban scholars and policymakers alike should find Jargowsky's compelling arguments thought-provoking. "—Library Journal "A powerful book that allows us to really understand how ghettos have been changing over time and the forces behind these changes. It should be required reading of anyone who cares about urban poverty." —David Ellwood, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Poverty and Place documents the geographic spread of the nation's ghettos and shows how economic shifts have had a particularly devastating impact on certain regions, particularly in the rust-belt states of the Midwest. Author Paul Jargowsky's thoughtful analysis of the causes of ghetto formation clarifies the importance of widespread urban trends, particularly those changes in the labor and housing markets that have fostered income inequality and segregated the rich from the poor. Jargowsky also examines the sources of employment that do exist for ghetto dwellers, and describes how education and family structure further limit their prospects. Poverty and Place shows how the spread of high poverty neighborhoods has particularly trapped members of poor minorities, who account for nearly four out of five ghetto residents. Poverty and Place sets forth the facts necessary to inform the public understanding of the growth of concentrated poverty, and confronts essential questions about how the spiral of urban decay in our nation's cities can be reversed.
[more]

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Power in the Blood
A Family Narrative
Linda Tate
Ohio University Press, 2009

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative traces Linda Tate’s journey to rediscover the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of her family and provides an unflinching examination of the poverty, discrimination, and family violence that marked their lives. In her search for the truth of her own past, Tate scoured archives, libraries, and courthouses throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, and Missouri, visited numerous cemeteries, and combed through census records, marriage records, court cases, local histories, old maps, and photographs. As she began to locate distant relatives — fifth, sixth, seventh cousins, all descended from her great-greatgrandmother Louisiana — they gathered in kitchens and living rooms, held family reunions, and swapped stories. A past that had long been buried slowly came to light as family members shared the pieces of the family’s tale that had been passed along to them.

Power in the Blood is a dramatic family history that reads like a novel, as Tate’s compelling narrative reveals one mystery after another. Innovative and groundbreaking in its approach to research and storytelling, Power in the Blood shows that exploring a family story can enhance understanding of history, life, and culture and that honest examination of the past can lead to healing and liberation in the present.

[more]

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Power Lines
On the Subject of Feminist Alliances
Aimee Carrillo Rowe
Duke University Press, 2008
Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity.

Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.

[more]

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Power, Protest, and the Public Schools
Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City
Melissa F. Weiner
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Accounts of Jewish immigrants usually describe the role of education in helping youngsters earn a higher social position than their parents. Melissa F. Weiner argues that New York City schools did not serve as pathways to mobility for Jewish or African American students. Instead, at different points in the city's history, politicians and administrators erected similar racial barriers to social advancement by marginalizing and denying resources that other students enjoyed. Power, Protest, and the Public Schools explores how activists, particularly parents and children, responded to inequality; the short-term effects of their involvement; and the long-term benefits that would spearhead future activism. Weiner concludes by considering how today's Hispanic and Arab children face similar inequalities within public schools.
[more]

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The Powers of Dignity
The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass
Nick Bromell
Duke University Press, 2021
In The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell unpacks Frederick Douglass's 1867 claim that he had “elaborated a political philosophy” from his own “slave experience.” Bromell shows that Douglass devised his philosophy because he found that antebellum Americans' liberal-republican understanding of democracy did not provide a sufficient principled basis on which to fight anti-Black racism. To remedy this deficiency, Douglass deployed insights from his distinctively Black experience and developed a Black philosophy of democracy. He began by contesting the founders' racist assumptions about humanity and advancing instead a more robust theory of “the human” as a collection of human “powers.” He asserted further that the conscious exercise of those powers is what confirms human dignity and that human rights and democracy come into being as ways to affirm and protect that dignity. Thus, by emphasizing the powers and the dignity of all citizens, deriving democratic rights from these, and promoting a remarkably activist, power-oriented model of citizenship, Douglass's Black political philosophy aimed to rectify two major failings of US democracy in his time and ours: its complacence and its racism.
[more]

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Precarious Priviledge
Race and the Middle-Class Immigrant Experience
Irene Browne
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
In recent years crackdowns on immigrant labor and a shrinking job market in California, Arizona, and Texas have pushed Latine immigrants to new destinations, particularly places in the American South. Although many of these immigrants work in manufacturing or food-processing plants, a growing number belong to the professional middle class. These professionals find that despite their privileged social class and regardless of their national origin, many non-Latines assume that they are undocumented working-class Mexicans, the stereotype of the “typical Latine.” In Precarious Privilege, sociologist Irene Browne focuses on how first-generation middle-class Mexican and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta respond to this stigmatizing assumption.

Browne finds that when asked to identify themselves by race, these immigrants either reject racial identities entirely or draw on belief systems from Mexico and the Dominican Republic that emphasize European-indigenous mixed race identities. When branded as typical Latines in the U.S., Mexican middle-class immigrants emphasize their social class or explain that a typical Latine can be middle-class, while Dominicans simply indicate that they are not Mexican. Rather than blame systemic racism, both Mexican and Dominican middle-class immigrants often attribute misperceptions of their identity to non-Latines’ ignorance or to individual Latines’ lack of effort in trying to assimilate.

But these middle-class Latine immigrants do not simply seek to position themselves on par with the U.S.-born white middle class. Instead, they leverage their cosmopolitanism—for example, their multilingualism or their children’s experiences traveling abroad—to engage in what Browne calls “one-up assimilation,” a strategy that aims to position them above the white middle class, who are often monolingual and unaware of the world outside the United States. Middle-class Latines’ cosmopolitanism and valuing of diversity also lead them to have cordial relations with African Americans, but these immigrants do not see themselves as sharing African Americans’ status as oppressed minorities.

Although the stereotype of the typical Latine has made middle-class Latine immigrants susceptible to stigma, they insist that this stigma does not play a significant role in their lives. In many cases, they view the stereotype as a minor issue, feel that opportunities for upward mobility outweigh any negative experiences, or downplay racism by emphasizing their class privilege. Browne observes that while downplaying racism may help middle-class Latine immigrants maintain their dignity, it also perpetuates inequality by reinforcing the lower status of working-class undocumented immigrants. It is thus imperative, Browne argues, to repeal harsh anti-immigration policies, a move that will not only ease the lives of the undocumented but also send a message about who belongs in the country.
Offering a nuanced exploration of how race, social class, and immigration status intersect, Precarious Privilege provides a complex portrait of middle-class Latine immigrants in the United States today.
 
[more]

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The Predicament of Blackness
Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race
Jemima Pierre
University of Chicago Press, 2012
What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? While much has been written on Africa’s complex ethnic and tribal relationships, Jemima Pierre’s groundbreaking The Predicament of Blackness is the first book to tackle the question of race in West Africa through its postcolonial manifestations. Challenging the view of the African continent as a nonracialized space—as a fixed historic source for the African diaspora—she envisions Africa, and in particular the nation of Ghana, as a place whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics.
 
Against the backdrop of Ghana’s history as a major port in the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent and disruptive forces of colonialism and postcolonialism, Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of “whiteness” to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government’s active promotion of Pan-African “heritage tourism.” Drawing these and other examples together, she shows that race and racism have not only persisted in Ghana after colonialism, but also that the beliefs and practices of this modern society all occur within a global racial hierarchy. In doing so, she provides a powerful articulation of race on the continent and a new way of understanding contemporary Africa—and the modern African diaspora.
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Prejudice
Thomas F. Pettigrew, George M. Fredrickson, Dale T. Knobel, Nathan Glazer, and Reed Ueda
Harvard University Press, 1982

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.

Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

In Prejudice, the history and psychology of discriminatory policies is contrasted with efforts to overcome discrimination.

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Prejudice in Politics
Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute
Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan
Harvard University Press, 2006

This book presents a sociological study of how and why racial prejudice against members of a minority group comes to shape what happens to important political claims and aspirations of the group. Lawrence Bobo and Mia Tuan explore a lengthy controversy surrounding the fishing, hunting, and gathering rights of the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin. The controversy started in 1974, when two Chippewa Indians were arrested for off-reservation fishing, and persisted into the 1990s. It involved the efforts of the Chippewa to assert their traditional spearfishing rights, which met with angry, racially charged responses from whites.

Bobo and Tuan develop a "group position" perspective on racial attitudes that takes account of the complex interplay of racial stereotypes and negative group feelings as well as the vested interests, collective privileges, and political threats that form the basis of racialized political disputes. They explore whether theories that explain race politics in the case of black-white relations are applicable to understanding Indian-white relations. The book uses a carefully designed survey of public opinion to explore the dynamics of prejudice and political contestation, and to further our understanding of how and why racial prejudice enters into politics in the United States.

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Primary Lessons
Sarah Bracey White
CavanKerry Press, 2013
Ripped from middle-class life in Philadelphia, and transplanted to a single-parent household in the segregated south, Sarah, a precocious black child struggles to be the master of her fate. She refuses to accept the segregation that tries to confine her—a system her mother accepts as the southern way of life. A brave memoir that testifies to the author’s fiery spirit and sense of self that sustained her through family, social and cultural upheavals.
[more]

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Primitive Normativity
Race, Sexuality, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya
Elizabeth W. Williams
Duke University Press, 2024
In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.
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The Prism of Race
The Politics and Ideology of Affirmative Action in Brazil
David Lehmann
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.

In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.

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Prismatic Metropolis
Inequality in Los Angeles
Lawrence D. Bobo
Russell Sage Foundation, 2000
This book cuts through the powerful mythology surrounding Los Angeles to reveal the causes of inequality in a city that has weathered rapid population change, economic restructuring, and fractious ethnic relations. The sources of disadvantage and the means of getting ahead differ greatly among the city's myriad ethnic groups. The demand for unskilled labor is stronger here than in other cities, allowing Los Angeles's large population of immigrant workers with little education to find work in light manufacturing and low-paid service jobs. A less beneficial result of this trend is the increased marginalization of the city's low-skilled black workers, who do not enjoy the extended ethnic networks of many of the new immigrant groups and who must contend with persistent negative racial stereotypes. Patterns of residential segregation are also more diffuse in Los Angeles, with many once-black neighborhoods now split evenly between blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other minorities. Inequality in Los Angeles cannot be reduced to a simple black-white divide. Nonetheless, in this thoroughly multicultural city, race remains a crucial factor shaping economic fortunes. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
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Problem of the Century
Racial Stratification in the United States
Elijah Anderson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
In 1899 the great African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, published The Philadelphia Negro, the first systematic case study of an African American community and one of the foundations of American sociology. DuBois prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, Problem of the Century reflects upon his prophecy, exploring the ways in which the color line is still visible in the labor market, the housing market, education, family structure, and many other aspects of life at the turn of a new century. The book opens with a theoretical discussion of the way racial identity is constructed and institutionalized. When the government classifies races and confers group rights upon them, is it subtly reenforcing damaging racial divisions, or redressing the group privileges that whites monopolized for so long? The book also delineates the social dynamics that underpin racial inequality. The contributors explore the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality and low rates of marriage in black communities, as well as the way race affects a person's chances of economic success. African Americans may soon lose their historical position as America's majority minority, and the book also examines how race plays out in the sometimes fractious relations between blacks and immigrants. The final part of the book shows how the color line manifests itself at work and in schools. Contributors find racial issues at play on both ends of the occupational ladder—among absentee fathers paying child support from their meager earnings and among black executives prospering in the corporate world. In the schools, the book explores how race defines a student's peer group and how peer pressure affects a student's grades. Problem of the Century draws upon the distinguished faculty of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where DuBois conducted his research for The Philadelphia Negro. The contributors combine a scrupulous commitment to empirical inquiry with an eclectic openness to different methods and approaches. Problem of the Century blends ethnographies and surveys, statistics and content analyses, census data and historical records, to provide a far-reaching examination of racial inequality in all its contemporary manifestations.
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The Problem of the Color[blind]
Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance
Brandi Wilkins Catanese
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Catanese's beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses one of the most persistent sociopolitical questions in contemporary culture. She suggests that it is performance and the difference it makes that complicates the terms by which we can even understand 'multicultural' and 'colorblind' concepts. A tremendously illuminating study that promises to break new ground in the fields of theatre and performance studies, African American studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and film and television studies."
---Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"Adds immeasurably to the ways in which we can understand the contradictory aspects of racial discourse and performance as they have emerged during the last two decades.  An ambitious, smart, and fascinating book."
---Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke University

Are we a multicultural nation, or a colorblind one? The Problem of the Color[blind] examines this vexed question in American culture by focusing on black performance in theater, film, and television. The practice of colorblind casting---choosing actors without regard to race---assumes a performing body that is somehow race neutral. But where, exactly, is race neutrality located---in the eyes of the spectator, in the body of the performer, in the medium of the performance? In analyzing and theorizing such questions, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores a range of engaging and provocative subjects, including the infamous debate between playwright August Wilson and drama critic Robert Brustein, the film career of Denzel Washington, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, the phenomenon of postblackness (as represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition), the performer Ice Cube's transformation from icon of gangsta rap to family movie star, and the controversial reality television series Black. White. Concluding that ideologies of transcendence are ahistorical and therefore unenforceable, Catanese advances the concept of racial transgression---a process of acknowledging rather than ignoring the racialized histories of performance---as her chapters move between readings of dramatic texts, films, popular culture, and debates in critical race theory and the culture wars.

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Producers, Parasites, Patriots
Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity
Daniel Martinez HoSang
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

The shifting meaning of race and class in the age of Trump
 

The profound concentration of economic power in the United States in recent decades has produced surprising new forms of racialization. In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes show that while racial subordination is an enduring feature of U.S. political history, it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions, interests, and structures. 

The authors document the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump across a broad range of phenomena, showing how new forms of racialization work to alter the economic protections of whiteness while promoting some conservatives of color as models of the neoliberal regime. Through careful analyses of diverse political sites and conflicts—racially charged elections, attacks on public-sector unions, new forms of white precarity, the rise of black and brown political elites, militia uprisings, multiculturalism on the far right—they highlight new, interwoven deployments of race in the ascendant age of inequality. Using the concept of “racial transposition,” the authors demonstrate how racial meanings and signification can be transferred from one group to another to shore up both neoliberalism and racial hierarchy.

From the militia movement to the Alt-Right to the mainstream Republican Party, Producers, Parasites, Patriots brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics.

[more]

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Progressive Women in Conservative Times
Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism
Susan Lynn
Rutgers University Press, 1992

Susan Lynn explores women's progressive social reform efforts in the 1940s and 1950s, an era when women activists promoted a postwar vision of a society based on an expanded welfare state, a powerful labor movement, a strong tradition of civil liberties, racial equality, and a peaceful international order. Lynn focuses on two organizations, the YWCA and the American Friends Service Committee, to explore this agenda.

[more]

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A Promise And A Way Of Life
White Antiracist Activism
Becky Thompson
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

The first in-depth look at white people’s activism in fighting racism during the past fifty years.

Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when many white college students went south to fight against Jim Crow laws, has white antiracist activity held the public’s attention. Yet there have always been white people involved in fighting racism. In this passionate work, Becky Thompson looks at white Americans who have struggled against racism, offering examples of both successes and failures, inspirations, practical philosophies, and a way ahead.

A Promise and a Way of Life weaves an account of the past half-century based on the life histories of thirty-nine people who have placed antiracist activism at the center of their lives. Through a rich and fascinating narrative that links individual experiences with social and political history, Thompson shows the ways, both public and personal, in which whites have opposed racism during several social movements: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, multiracial feminism, the Central American peace movement, the struggle for antiracist education, and activism against the prison industry. Beginning with the diverse catalysts that started these activists on their journeys, this book demonstrates the contributions and limitations of white antiracism in key social justice movements.

Through these stories, crucial questions are raised: Does antiracist work require a repudiation of one’s whiteness or can that identity be transformed through political commitment and alliances? What do white people need to do to undermine white privilege? What would it take to build a multiracial movement in which white people are responsible for creating antiracist alliances while not co-opting people of color?

Unique in its depth and thoroughness, A Promise and a Way of Life is essential for anyone currently fighting racism or wondering how to do so. Through its demonstration of the extraordinary personal and social transformations ordinary people can make, it provides a new paradigm for movement activity, one that will help to incite and guide future antiracist activism.

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Promise of Justice
Essays on Brown v. Board of Education
Mac A. Stewart
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth century. It overturned the Court’s earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring the establishment of separate public schools for black and white students, as inherently unequal. This victory paved the way for integration in public schools and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Promise of Justice: Essays on Brown v. Board of Education assembles fourteen essays about Brown and its consequences in the fifty years following the decision.
 
Several of the essayists in this anthology provide personal recollections of the conditions before and immediately after the decision in Brown. One of the authors was a child plaintiff in a related case. Another was the federal district judge responsible for deciding in favor of, and then overseeing, integration in a major northern city. Contributors to this volume include legal specialists, sociologists, educators, and political scientists. A history of the legal milestones of integration is included, as well as judgments about the progress that has been made and the need for additional actions to assure racial equality under the law. Ten of these essays first appeared in a special issue of The Negro Educational Review published in January 2005, and four were written expressly for this volume.
 
 
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The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship
Race and Revolt in Education
Kevin L Clay
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
 

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

 

The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

 

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

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Protest and Propaganda
W. E. B. Du Bois, the CRISIS, and American History
Edited by Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere
University of Missouri Press, 2013

In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.

As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.

Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.

Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.

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front cover of Pudd’nhead Wilson
Pudd’nhead Wilson
Mark Twain
Harvard University Press, 2015

When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man.

In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Mark Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

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front cover of Pulling off the Sheets
Pulling off the Sheets
The Second Ku Klux Klan in Deep Southern Illinois
Darrel Dexter and John A. Beadles
Southern Illinois University Press, 2024

Unmasking old-time racism in southern Illinois

Pulling off the Sheets tells the previously obscured history of the Second Ku Klux Klan which formed in deep southern Illinois in the early 1920s. Through meticulous research into both public and private records, Darrel Dexter and John A. Beadles recount the Klan’s mythical origins, reemergence, and swift disappearance. This important historical account sets out to expose the lasting impact of the Klan on race relations today.

The ideation of the Klan as a savior of the white race and protector of white womanhood was perpetuated by books, plays, and local news sources of the time. The very real but misplaced fear of Black violence on whites created an environment in which the Second Klan thrived, and recruitment ran rampant in communities such as the Protestant church. Events like the murder of Daisy Wilson intensified the climate of racial segregation and white supremacy in the region, and despite attempts at bringing justice to the perpetrators, most failed. The Second Klan’s presence may have been short-lived, but the violence and fear it inflicted continues to linger.

This disturbing historical account challenges readers to “pull back the sheet” and confront the darkest corners of their past. Dexter and Beadles emphasize the importance of acknowledging the damage that white supremacy and racism cause and how we can move toward healing.

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front cover of Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River
Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River
The Global Fight for Indian Independence and Citizenship
Johanna Ogden
Oregon State University Press, 2024

Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world.

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind’s era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India’s British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires’ united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens. In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide.

Johanna Ogden’s detailed history of migrants’ experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people’s awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Punjabi Rebels mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but of multi-racial democracy.

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front cover of Putting Their Hands on Race
Putting Their Hands on Race
Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers
Danielle T. Phillips-Cunningham
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2020 Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association

Putting Their Hands on Race offers an important labor history of 19th and early 20th century Irish immigrant and US southern Black migrant domestic workers. Drawing on a range of archival sources, this intersectional study explores how these women were significant to the racial labor and citizenship politics of their time. Their migrations to northeastern cities challenged racial hierarchies and formations. Southern Black migrant women resisted the gendered racism of domestic service, and Irish immigrant women strove to expand whiteness to position themselves as deserving of labor rights. On the racially fractious terrain of labor, Black women and Irish immigrant women, including Victoria Earle Matthews, the “Irish Rambler”, Leonora Barry, and Anna Julia Cooper, gathered data, wrote letters and speeches, marched, protested, engaged in private acts of resistance in the workplace, and created women’s institutions and organizations to assert domestic workers’ right to living wages and protection.
 
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