The presence and experiences of Black people at elite universities have been largely underrepresented and erased from institutional histories. This book engages with a collection of these experiences that span half a century and reflect differences in class, gender, and national identifications among Black scholars. By mapping Black people’s experiences of studying and teaching at McGill University, this book reveals how the "whiteness" of the university both includes and exceeds the racial identities of students and professors. It highlights the specific functions of Blackness and of anti-Blackness within society in general and within the institution of higher education in particular, demonstrating how structures and practices of the university reproduce interlocking systems of oppression that uphold racial capitalism, reproduce colonial relations, and promote settler nationalism. Critically engaging the work of Black learners, academics, organizers, and activists within this dynamic political context, this book underscores the importance of Black Studies across North America.
Over the last sixty years, administrators on college campuses nationwide have responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible. This bold argument is at the center of Matthew Johnson's powerful and controversial book. Focusing on the University of Michigan, often a key talking point in national debates about racial justice thanks to the contentious Gratz v. Bollinger 2003 Supreme Court case, Johnson argues that UM leaders incorporated black student dissent selectively into the institution's policies, practices, and values. This strategy was used to prevent activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice. Despite knowing that racial disparities would likely continue, Johnson demonstrates that these administrators improbably saw themselves as champions of racial equity. What Johnson contends in Undermining Racial Justice is not that good intentions resulted in unforeseen negative consequences, but that the people who created and maintained racial inequities at premier institutions of higher education across the United States firmly believed they had good intentions in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The case of the University of Michigan fits into a broader pattern at elite colleges and universities and is a cautionary tale for all in higher education. As Matthew Johnson illustrates, inclusion has always been a secondary priority, and, as a result, the policies of the late 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new and enduring era of racial retrenchment on campuses nationwide.
Black Geographies is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in black geographic theory. Fourteen authors address specific geographic sites and develop their geopolitical relevance with regards to race, uneven geographies, and resistance. Multi-faceted and erudite, Black Geographies brings into focus the politics of place that black subjects, communities, and philosophers inhabit. Highlights include essays on the African diaspora and its interaction with citizenship and nationalism, critical readings of the blues and hip-hop, and thorough deconstructions of Nova Scotian and British Columbian black topography. Drawing on historical, contemporary, and theoretical black geographies from the USA, the Caribbean, and Canada, these essays provide an exploration of past and present black spatial theories and experiences. Katherine McKittrick lives in Toronto, Ontario, and teaches gender studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, and is also researching the writings of Sylvia Wynter. Clyde Woods lives in Santa Barbara, California, and teaches in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Woods is the author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta.
This book examines Afro-Brazilian individual and group identity and political behavior, and develops a theory of racial spatiality of Afro-Brazilian underrepresentation.
From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people’s lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world. Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.
Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.
In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.
The Black Power movement has often been portrayed in history and popular culture as the quintessential "bad boy" of modern black movement-making in America. Yet this impression misses the full extent of Black Power's contributions to U.S. society, especially in regard to black professionals in social work. Relying on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Joyce M. Bell follows two groups of black social workers in the 1960s and 1970s as they mobilized Black Power ideas, strategies, and tactics to change their national professional associations. Comparing black dissenters within the National Federation of Settlements (NFS), who fought for concessions from within their organization, and those within the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW), who ultimately adopted a separatist strategy, she shows how the Black Power influence was central to the creation and rise of black professional associations. She also provides a nuanced approach to studying race-based movements and offers a framework for understanding the role of social movements in shaping the non-state organizations of civil society.
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and activists to examine expressions of racism in contemporary policy areas, including education, labour, immigration, media, and urban planning. While anti-racist struggles during the twentieth century were largely pitched against overt forms of racism (e.g., pogroms, genocide, segregation, apartheid, and 'ethnic cleansing'), it has become increasingly apparent that there are other, less visible, forms of racism. These subtler incarnations are of special interest to the contributors. The intent of Race, Racialization, and Antiracism in Canada and Beyond is to probe systemic forms of racism, as well as to suggest strategies for addressing them. The collection is organized by themes pertinent to political and social expressions of racism in Canada and the wider world, such as the state and its mediation of race, education and the perpetuation of racist marginalization, and the role of the media. The contributors argue that, in order to effectively combat racism, various methodological approaches are required, approaches that are reflective of the diversity of the world we seek to understand.