Racial Stasis

Racial Stasis

Author: Christopher D. DeSante

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 022664362X

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


Racial Stasis

Racial Stasis

Author: Christopher D. DeSante

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 022664376X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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


Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

Author: Darren W. Davis

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-12-27

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 022681484X

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


Black Madness :

Black Madness :

Author: Therí Alyce Pickens

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-06-07

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1478005505

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


Redlining Culture

Redlining Culture

Author: Richard Jean So

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0231552319

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


Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Author: David Ikard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 022649263X

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


Not in Our Lifetimes

Not in Our Lifetimes

Author: Michael C. Dawson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-10-25

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 022670534X

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


Marx at the Margins

Marx at the Margins

Author: Kevin B. Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-02-12

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 022634570X

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In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.


Listening to Images

Listening to Images

Author: Tina M. Campt

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0822373580

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


Creating a New Racial Order

Creating a New Racial Order

Author: Jennifer L. Hochschild

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-02-26

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1400841941

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A groundbreaking exploration of how race in America is being redefined The American racial order—the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation's races and ethnicities—is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come. The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama's election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices. Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.