Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.
The winner of the 2004 W.E.B. DuBois Book Award, NCOBPS and the2004 Michael Harrington Award "for an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world."
This essential new book presents a discussion of racial relations, Jungian psychology and politics as a dialogue between two Jungian analysts of different nationalities and ethnicities, providing insight into a previously unexplored area of Jungian psychology. Racial Legacies explores themes and historical events from the perspective of each author, and through the lens of psychology, politics and race, in the hopes of creating meaningful racial relationships. The historical ways the past has affected the authors' ancestors and their own lives today is explored in detail through essays and dialogue, demonstrating that past racial legacies continue to bind on both conscious and unconscious levels. This book distinguishes itself from other texts as the first of its kind to present a racial dialogue in the context of Jungian psychology. It will be of great value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students of Depth and Analytical Psychology.
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.
Contributors: Paul Burstein, University of WashingtonDavid B. Filvaroff, State University of New York, BuffaloLouis Ricardo Fraga, Stanford UniversityHugh Davis Graham, Vanderbilt UniversityJack Greenberg, Columbia UniversityGloria J. Hampton, Ohio State UniversityJoseph B. Kadane, Carnegie Mellon UniversityRandall Kennedy, Harvard Law SchoolJ. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of TechnologyRichard Lempert, University of MichiganPaula D. McCain, University of VirginiaCaroline Mitchell, Esq., Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaGary Orfield, Harvard UniversityJorge Ruiz-de-Velasco, Stanford UniversityBarbara Phillips Sullivan, Ford FoundationKatherine Tate, University of California, IrvineStephen L. Wasby, State University of New York, AlbanyRobin M. Williams Jr., Cornell UniversityRaymond E. Wolfinger, University of California, Berkeley
Traditional accounts of Colorado's history often reflect an Anglocentric perspective that begins with the 1859 Pikes Peak Gold Rush and Colorado's establishment as a state in 1876. Enduring Legacies expands the study of Colorado's past and present by adopting a borderlands perspective that emphasizes the multiplicity of peoples who have inhabited this region. Addressing the dearth of scholarship on the varied communities within Colorado-a zone in which collisions structured by forces of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality inevitably lead to the transformation of cultures and the emergence of new identities-this volume is the first to bring together comparative scholarship on historical and contemporary issues that span groups from Chicanas and Chicanos to African Americans to Asian Americans. This book will be relevant to students, academics, and general readers interested in Colorado history and ethnic studies.
When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the University of Virginia’s expansive community, many of whose members are involved in teaching issues of racism, public art, free speech, and social ethics. In the wake of this momentous incident, scholars, educators, and researchers have come together in this important new volume to thoughtfully reflect on the historic events of August 11 and 12, 2017. How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity brings together the work of these UVA faculty members catalyzed by last summer’s events to examine their community’s history more deeply and more broadly. Their essays—ranging from John Mason on the local legacy of the Lost Cause to Leslie Kendrick on free speech to Rachel Wahl on the paradoxes of activism—examine truth telling, engaged listening, and ethical responses, and aim to inspire individual reflection, as well as to provoke considered and responsible dialogue. This prescient new collection is a conversation that understands and owns America’s past and—crucially—shows that our past is very much part of our present. Contributors: Asher D. Biemann * Gregory B. Fairchild * Risa Goluboff * Bonnie Gordon * Claudrena N. Harold * Willis Jenkins * Leslie Kendrick * John Edwin Mason * Guian McKee * Louis P. Nelson * P. Preston Reynolds * Frederick Schauer * Elizabeth R. Varon * Rachel Wahl * Lisa Woolfork
This volume is the first book to examine issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy, laws and policies that are rooted in historical racism. It addresses intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and interracial adoption, familial incarceration, school punishment and the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants, and immigration law and policy.