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19 books match the query 'Prejudices'

cover of CERTAIN OTHER COUNTRIES: Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

CERTAIN OTHER COUNTRIES

Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

Carolyn A. Conley

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Even though England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were under a common Parliament in the nineteenth century, cultural, economic, and historical differences led to very different values and assumptions about crime and punishment. For example, though the Scots were the most likely to convict accused killers, English, Welsh, and Irish killers were two and a half times more likely to be executed for their crimes. In Certain Other Countries, Carolyn A. Conley explores how the concepts of national identity and criminal violence influenced each other in the Victorian-era United Kingdom. It also addresses the differences among the nations as well as the ways that homicide trials illuminate the issues of gender, ethnicity, family, privacy, property, and class. Homicides reflect assumptions about the proper balance of power in various relationships. For example, Englishmen were ten times more likely to kill women they were courting than were men in the Celtic nations.         

By combining quantitative techniques in the analysis of over seven thousand cases, as well as careful and detailed readings of individual cases, the book exposes trends and patterns that might not have been evident in works using only one method. For instance, by examining all homicide trials rather than concentrating exclusively on a few highly celebrated ones, it becomes clear that most female killers were not viewed with particular horror, but were treated much like their male counterparts.

The conclusions offer challenges and correctives to existing scholarship on gender, ethnicity, class, and violence. The book also demonstrates that the Welsh, Scots, and English remained quite distinct long after their melding as Britons was announced and celebrated. By blending a study of trends in violent behavior with ideas about national identity, Conley brings together rich and hotly debated fields of modern history. This book will be valuable both for scholars of crime and violence as well as for those studying British history.
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cover of Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Driven by Fear

Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Guenter B. Risse

University of Illinois Press, 2015

From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, authorities required San Francisco's Pesthouse to segregate the diseased from the rest of the city. Although the Pesthouse stood out of sight and largely out of mind, it existed at a vital nexus of civic life where issues of medicine, race, class, environment, morality, and citizenship entwined and played out. Guenter B. Risse places this forgotten institution within an emotional climate dominated by widespread public dread and disgust. In Driven by Fear, he analyzes the unique form of stigma generated by San Franciscans. Emotional states like xenophobia and racism played a part. Yet the phenomenon also included competing medical paradigms and unique economic needs that encouraged authorities to protect the city's reputation as a haven of health restoration. As Risse argues, public health history requires an understanding of irrational as well as rational motives. To that end he delves into the spectrum of emotions that drove extreme measures like segregation and isolation and fed psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges to scapegoat and stereotype victims--particularly Chinese victims--of smallpox, leprosy, plague, and syphilis.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary scholarship, Driven by Fear looks at the past to offer critical lessons for our age of bioterror threats and emerging infectious diseases.

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cover of From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

From Power to Prejudice

The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

Leah N. Gordon

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Americans believe strongly in the socially transformative power of education, and the idea that we can challenge racial injustice by reducing white prejudice has long been a core component of this faith. How did we get here? In this first-rate intellectual history, Leah N. Gordon jumps into this and other big questions about race, power, and social justice.
            To answer these questions, From Power to Prejudice examines American academia—both black and white—in the 1940s and ’50s. Gordon presents four competing visions of  “the race problem” and documents how an individualistic paradigm, which presented white attitudes as the source of racial injustice, gained traction. A number of factors, Gordon shows, explain racial individualism’s postwar influence: individuals were easier to measure than social forces; psychology was well funded; studying political economy was difficult amid McCarthyism; and individualism was useful in legal attacks on segregation. Highlighting vigorous midcentury debate over the meanings of racial justice and equality, From Power to Prejudice reveals how one particular vision of social justice won out among many contenders.
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cover of Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism

Inventing the Thrifty Gene

The Science of Settler Colonialism

Travis Hay

University of Manitoba Press, 2021

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cover of Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Not of Pure Blood

The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Jay Kinsbruner

Duke University Press, 1996

Countering the popular misconception that racial discrimination has largely not existed in Puerto Rico, Jay Kinsbruner’s Not of Pure Blood shows that racial prejudice has long had an insidious effect on Puerto Rican society. Kinsbruner’s study focuses on the free people of color—those of African descent who were considered nonwhite but were legally free during slavery—in order to explore the nature of racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. In considering the consequences of these nineteenth-century attitudes on twentieth-century Puerto Rico, Kinsbruner suggests that racial discrimination continues to limit opportunities for people of color.
Following a discussion of Puerto Rican racial prejudice in historical perspective, Kinsbruner describes residential patterns, marriages, births, deaths, occupations, and family and household matters to demonstrate that free people of color were a disadvantaged community whose political, social, and economic status was diminished by racism. He analyzes the complexities and contradictions of Puerto Rican racial prejudice and discrimination, explains the subtleties of “shade discrimination,” and examines the profoundly negative impact on race relations of the U.S. occupation of the island following the Spanish American War.
Looking behind the myth of Puerto Rican racial equity, Not of Pure Blood will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican history, and Latin America studies, and to scholars in a variety of fields investigating questions of racism and discrimination.
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cover of On Teacher Neutrality: Politics, Praxis, and Performativity

On Teacher Neutrality

Politics, Praxis, and Performativity

Daniel P. Richards

Utah State University Press, 2020

On Teacher Neutrality explores the consequences of ideological arguments about teacher neutrality in the context of higher education. It is the first edited collection to focus exclusively on this contentious concept, emphasizing the practical possibilities and impossibilities of neutrality in the teaching of writing, the deployment of neutrality as a political motif in the public discourse shaping policy in higher education, and the performativity of individual instructors in a variety of institutional contexts. The collection provides clarity on the contours around defining “neutrality,” depth in understanding how neutrality operates differently in various institutional settings, and nuance in the levels and degrees of neutrality—or what is meant by it—in the teaching of writing.
 
Higher education itself and its stakeholders are continually exploring the role of teachers in the classroom and the extent to which it is possible or ethical to engage in neutrality. Amplifying voices from teachers in underrepresented positions and institutions in discussions of teacher ideology, On Teacher Neutrality shapes the discourse around these topics both within the writing classroom and throughout higher education. The book offers a rich array of practices, pedagogies, and theories that will help ground instructors and posits a way forward toward better dialogue and connections with the various stakeholders of higher education in the United States.
 
Contributors:
Tristan Abbott, Kelly Blewett, Meaghan Brewer, Christopher Michael Brown, Chad Chisholm, Jessica Clements, Jason C. Evans, Heather Fester, Romeo García, Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, Mara Holt, Erika Johnson, Tawny LeBouef Tullia, Lauren F. Lichty, Adam Pacton, Daniel P. Richards, Patricia Roberts-Miller, Karen Rosenberg, Allison L. Rowland, Robert Samuels, David P. Stubblefield, Jennifer Thomas, John Trimbur
 
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cover of Parties and Prejudice: The Normalization of Antiminority Rhetoric in US Politics

Parties and Prejudice

The Normalization of Antiminority Rhetoric in US Politics

Maneesh Arora

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An essential guide to how the interactions between social norms, party politics, and expressions of prejudice are driving contemporary politics.

Antiminority rhetoric in American politics has grown more overt. What were once fringe comments on Stormfront have now become typical campaign appeals from many mainstream politicians. If there was ever a doubt, this is a poignant reminder that the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” to say and do are fluid and socially enforced.

In Parties and Prejudice, Maneesh Arora offers a broad framework for understanding this new political terrain. Arora argues that the interaction between social norms and party politics determines what the political consequence of prejudicial speech will be. He illuminates this nuanced relationship by showing that norms vary based on the targeted minority group and the intended audience.

Drawing on experiments, survey data, news coverage, and real-world examples, Parties and Prejudice examines the distinctive ways that egalitarian/inegalitarian norms have developed—within each party—for Black, Muslim, and LGBTQ+ Americans. It is essential reading for understanding Donald Trump’s rise to power, the modern conservative agenda (including opposition to critical race theory and transgender rights), and threats to the development of a multiracial democracy.

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cover of Pattern Discrimination

Pattern Discrimination

Clemens Apprich

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them?

How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection.

Instead of providing a more “objective” basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human—and nonhuman—cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?

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cover of Possessive Investment In Whiteness

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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cover of Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law

Prejudicial Appearances

The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law

Robert C. Post, with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Reva B. Siegel

Duke University Press, 2001

In Prejudicial Appearances noted legal scholar Robert C. Post argues modern American antidiscrimination law should not be conceived as protecting the transcendental dignity of individual persons but instead as transforming social practices that define and sustain potentially oppressive categories like race or gender. Arguing that the prevailing logic of American antidiscrimination law is misleading, Post lobbies for deploying sociological understandings to reevaluate the antidiscrimination project in ways that would render the law more effective and just.
Four distinguished commentators respond to Post’s provocative essay. Each adopts a distinctive perspective. K. Anthony Appiah investigates the philosophical logic of stereotyping and of equality. Questioning whether the law ought to endorse any social practices that define persons, Judith Butler explores the tension between sociological and postmodern approaches to antidiscrimination law. Thomas C. Grey examines whether Post’s proposal can be reconciled with the values of the rule of law. And Reva B. Siegel applies critical race theory to query whether antidiscrimination law’s reshaping of race and gender should best be understood in terms of practices of subordination and stratification.
By illuminating the consequential rhetorical maneuvers at the heart of contemporary U.S. antidiscrimination law, Prejudical Appearances forces readers to reappraise the relationship between courts of law and social behavior. As such, it will enrich scholars interested in the relationships between law, rhetoric, postmodernism, race, and gender.
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cover of Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy

Race and the Foundations of Knowledge

Cultural Amnesia in the Academy

Edited by Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel

University of Illinois Press, 2006

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cover of Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

Scapegoats of September 11th

Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

Welch, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 2006

From its largest cities to deep within its heartland, from its heavily trafficked airways to its meandering country byways, America has become a nation racked by anxiety about terrorism and national security. In response to the fears prompted by the tragedy of September 11th, the country has changed in countless ways. Airline security has tightened, mail service is closely examined, and restrictions on civil liberties are more readily imposed by the government and accepted by a wary public.

The altered American landscape, however, includes more than security measures and ID cards. The country's desperate quest for security is visible in many less obvious, yet more insidious ways. In Scapegoats of September 11th, criminologist Michael Welch argues that the "war on terror" is a political charade that delivers illusory comfort, stokes fear, and produces scapegoats used as emotional relief. Regrettably, much of the outrage that resulted from 9/11 has been targeted at those not involved in the attacks on the Pentagon or the Twin Towers. As this book explains, those people have become the scapegoats of September 11th. Welch takes on the uneasy task of sorting out the various manifestations of displaced aggression, most notably the hate crimes and state crimes that have become embarrassing hallmarks both at home and abroad.

Drawing on topics such as ethnic profiling, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Guantanamo Bay, and the controversial Patriot Act, Welch looks at the significance of knowledge, language, and emotion in a post-9/11 world. In the face of popular and political cheerleading in the war on terror, this book presents a careful and sober assessment, reminding us that sound counterterrorism policies must rise above, rather than participate in, the propagation of bigotry and victimization.
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cover of Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

Strangers in the Land

Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

Higham, John

Rutgers University Press, 1988

Nativism has been hard for historians to define. The word is distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830's and early 1840's. Yet it has a meaning so broad and indefinite that sometimes it seems to refer to a perennial human experience. Does nativism consist only of a particular complex of attitudes dominant in the anti-foreign crusade of the mid-nineteenth century? Or does it extend to every occasion when native inhabitants of a country turn their faces or raise their hands against strangers in their midst? What is nativism?
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cover of The Erotic Life of Racism

The Erotic Life of Racism

Sharon Patricia Holland

Duke University Press, 2012

A major intervention in the fields of critical race theory, black feminism, and queer theory, The Erotic Life of Racism contends that theoretical and political analyses of race have largely failed to understand and describe the profound ordinariness of racism and the ways that it operates as a quotidian practice. If racism has an everyday life, how does it remain so powerful and yet mask its very presence? To answer this question, Sharon Patricia Holland moves into the territory of the erotic, understanding racism's practice as constitutive to the practice of racial being and erotic choice.

Reemphasizing the black/white binary, Holland reinvigorates critical engagement with race and racism. She argues that only by bringing critical race theory, queer theory, and black feminist thought into conversation with each other can we fully envision the relationship between racism and the personal and political dimensions of our desire. The Erotic Life of Racism provocatively redirects our attention to a desire no longer independent of racism but rather embedded within it.

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cover of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

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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cover of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition

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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cover of The Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice

The Turk in America

The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice

Justin McCarthy

University of Utah Press, 2010

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

In The Turk in America, historian Justin McCarthy seeks to explain the historical basis for American prejudice towards Turks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The volume focuses on fraudulent characterizations of Turks, mostly stemming from an antipathy in Europe and America toward non-Christians, and especially Muslims.  Spanning one hundred and fifty years, this history explores the misinformation largely responsible for the negative stereotypes of Turks during this period.

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cover of Us and Them: The Science of Identity

Us and Them

The Science of Identity

David Berreby

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Democrat and Republican. Meat Eaters and Vegetarians. Black and White. As human beings we sort ourselves into groups. And once we identify ourselves as a member of a particular group—say, Red Sox fans—we tend to feel more comfortable with others of our own kind, rather than, say, Yankees fans. Yet we all belong to multiple groups at the same time—one might be a woman, a mother, an American, a violinist. How do we decide which identities matter and why they matter so much? And what makes us willing to die for, or to kill for, a religion, a nation, or a race?
            In this award-winning book, David Berreby describes how twenty-first-century science is addressing these age-old questions. Ably linking neuroscience, social psychology, anthropology, and other fields, Us and Them investigates humanity’s “tribal mind” and how this alters our thoughts, affects our health, and is manipulated for good and ill. From the medical effects of stress to the rhetoric of politics, our perceptions of group identity affect every part of our lives. Science, Berreby argues, shows how this part of human nature is both unexpectedly important and surprisingly misunderstood.
            Humans need our tribal sense—it tells us who we are, how we should behave, and links us to others as well as the past and future. Some condemn this instinct, while others celebrate it. Berreby offers in Us and Them a third alternative: how we can accept and understand our inescapable tribal mind.
“[A] brave book. . . . Berreby’s quest is to understand what he sees as a fundamental human urge to classify and identify with ‘human kinds.’”—Henry Gee, Scientific American
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cover of Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent

Words to Our Now

Imagination and Dissent

Thomas Glave

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws on his experiences as a politically committed, gay Jamaican American to deliver a condemnation of the prejudices, hatreds, and inhumanities that persist in the United States and elsewhere. Exposing the hypocrisies of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language to provide a model of creative writing as a tool for social change. From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth an ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities.

Thomas Glave is assistant professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. He is author of Whose Song? and Other Stories.

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