Inverting the Norm describes how a few Christian congregations in apartheid South Africa achieved racial integration despite the state's legal enforcement of segregation. The book analyzes how this paradoxical racial integration, alongside state segregation, relates to historical shifts in global and national norms.
"Bishop Paul Verryn knew he had a problem when xenophobic violence erupted in May 2008 and the threat of it spreading to Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg became very real. There were over a thousand migrants living in the church ... Verryn's open door policy had plenty of critics, both from within and outside the Church ..."--Back cover.
LGBT, faith, and academic thought-leaders explore prospects for laws protecting each community's core interests and possible resolutions for culture-war conflicts.
Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early twentieth century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them. Documenting changing patterns of segregation and their political mechanisms, Trounstine argues that city governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Contrary to leading theories of urban politics, local democracy has not functioned to represent all residents. The result is unequal access to fundamental local services - from schools, to safe neighborhoods, to clean water.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.
The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the reinvigorated Civil Rights Movement spurred American colleges and universities by the early 1960s to a good-faith effort to achieve racial integration. To overcome the shortage of black students who were prepared for elite academic programs, universities such as Yale began to admit substantial numbers of under-qualified black students. Disaster ensued. More than a third of these students dropped out in the first year and those who remained were often embittered by the experience. They turned to each other for support and found inspiration in black nationalism. What emerged by the late sixties were radical and sometimes militant black groups on campus, rejecting the ideal of racial integration and voicing a new separatist ethic. On campus after campus, black separatists won concessions from administrators who were afraid of further alienating blacks. The pattern of college administrators rolling over to black separatist demands came to dominate much of American higher education. The old integrationist ideal has been sacrificed almost entirely. Instead of offering opportunities for students to mix freely with students of dissimilar backgrounds, colleges promote ethnic enclaves, stoke racial resentment, and build organizational structures on the basis of group grievance.Neo-segregation is the voluntary racial segregation of students, aided by college institutions, into racially exclusive housing and common spaces, orientation and commencement ceremonies, student associations, scholarships, and classes. This case study of Yale University is part of a larger project from the National Association of Scholars, Separate but Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education. The Yale case study explains: 1) Yale's attempt to deal with the academic deficiencies of black students alternately by segregating them into remedial programs or mainstreaming them into programs they couldn't handle. 2) The readiness of black students to adopt race nationalist ideas and theatrics in preference to the ideals of racial integration. 3) Yale's willingness to buy temporary racial peace on campus by conceding to segregationist demands, even when this meant sacrificing academic standards and principles of equal application of rules regardless of race.
2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit? By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation. Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.
