Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America’s news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. “An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich.” —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality
This is a true story of the Americans of Guam. Abandoned by their government even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That abandonment opened the door for the Japanese conquest of Dutch East Indies, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines, and the brutal imprisonment of 25,000 American civilians in their own homelands. These American civilians, mostly Chamorros, suffered torture, rapes, and death for 31 months awaiting the return of military and naval forces of the country who had abandoned them. All through that occupation and uncivilized brutality they remained covertly and overtly loyal to America and Americans. Even today, these Americans of Guam struggle for recognition, restitution, and rewards for their unfailing contributions and loyalty to the United States of America. This is one of their many stories: Not too long ago, a young American soldier arrived home here from one of our recent wars in a foreign land. He arrived in a wooden casket, draped with an American flag. A guard of honor escorted his remains and local dignitaries honored his return home, greeting him at the airport in a manner all military war casualties deserve. He served his country honorably and gave his life, not only defending America, but giving the people in a foreign land the right to choose their own destiny - the right to vote for their leaders, the right to own property, the right to prosper by the sweat of their own brow, the right to receive benefits from the government that levies taxes on them, and protection from government's ability to take their property without due process. These are some of the things that young soldier fought and died for- things he cannot have. Before this young man entered military service - and had he lived to return here as a military veteran - he was and would have been ineligible to vote for his commander-in-chief, the president of the United States. He would be required to pay taxes, but would not receive the full benefits of that taxation. For example, he would pay tax for the Affordable Care Act but would not be eligible for its benefits. Where this young soldier is buried, and where his father lives, American flags fly from masts and standards, the Star Spangled Banner is sung, and pride for America is firmly rooted in the hearts and minds of every living soul. Indeed, here the World War II population - those Tom Brokaw forgot to write about in his "The Greatest Generation," the grandparents of this young soldier - was abandoned by its government to face imprisonment, brutality, torture and attempted extermination by Japan during 31 months of agony from December 1941 to July 1944. Their love and pride in America knows no bounds. And, even though limited U.S. citizenship was granted this population by Congress after the war, they have all the requirements and demands of citizenship, but not all of the rights of citizenship. They have no representation (law making vote) in the Congress of the United States. Yet, they continue to march to the sound of the guns when America calls. This is Guam, America's western outpost, occupied by the guardians of the outer limits on America's frontier. The first to see the sun rise over American soil are the people of Guam. As retired Marine Brigadier Gen. Vicente Blaz once told Congress about the people of Guam, "equal in war, unequal in peace." That statement appropriately describes these American military veterans and retired military residing here. It's a national disgrace the American people should tell Congress to correct. Soon! The author spent six months on the American island of Guam and over a year of intensive research, and reflects his admiration for the Chamorros of Guam, and his incomprehension of their treatment by the United States government. This book is to awaken the American people, all the American people, to the stories of a society of captives, and their dreams of justice.
The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s -- when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice -- remains unfulfilled. As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies -- racism, sexism, militarism -- liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America's minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated aim: true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country's least fortunate citizens. It therefore falls to the Right to defend the American dream. Only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the fraught legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality. Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism.
Since the early 1980s, when the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
Schneiderman explores the differing effects of shame and guilt on such institutions as government, the military, war, and work, and in people's personal lives--on sexuality, marriage, and family. His fresh insights help readers solve mysteries about themselves, their relationships with others, with society, and with other nations.
Gillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.
DIVFrom a highly respected thinker on race, gender, and American politics, a new consideration of black women and how distorted stereotypes affect their political beliefs/div
As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years. To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social, political, and military history to American literature and popular culture. He highlights the convergence of whiteness and honor in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama represent racial progress; the Tea Party movement represents the latest recoil. From exploring African American narratives to examining a 2009 episode of Hardball—in which two white commentators restore their honor by mocking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after he called Americans “cowards” for not talking more about race—Leverenz illustrates how white honor has prompted racial shaming and humiliation. The United States became a nation-state in which light-skinned people declared themselves white. The fear masked by white honor surfaces in such classics of American literature as The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the U.S. wars against the Barbary pirates from 1783 to 1815 and the Iraqi insurgents from 2003 to the present. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers is used to frame the 2008 presidential campaign as white honor’s last national stand. Honor Bound concludes by probing the endless attempts in 2009 and 2010 to preserve white honor through racial shaming, from the “birthers” and Tea Party protests to Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in Congress and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the front door of his own home. Leverenz is optimistic that, in the twenty-first century, racial shaming is itself becoming shameful.
David Vine recounts how the British & US governments created the Diego Garcia base, making the native Chagossians homeless in the process. He details the strategic significance of this remote location & also describes recent efforts by the exiles to regain their territory.
