scholarly journals An Invitation to Civic Dialogue

2022 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Marvin T. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Climate ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
White People ◽  
Ethical Foundation ◽  
Civic Dialogue ◽  
National Monuments ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
Imaginary Dialogue

AbstractThose of us who have benefited from the climate of injustice need an invitation from others to join with them in changing our social climate to a climate of justice. The controversaries over national monuments opens the door to explore the question of who needs an invitation from whom and what white people need to learn in order to respond to the civilian invitation from others. The others include future generations, Syrian refugees, migrants at our Southern border, and personal invitations from People of Color. Personal invitations depend on our aptitude in engaging in dialogue, as is illustrated by an imaginary dialogue involving a white man and a black woman. Such dialogues can create the conditions for good conversations, and these conversation can move us toward a climate of justice—an ethical foundation for developing policies to protect our habitat for future generations.

Reflecting Diversity

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Lea Shaver
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
The People ◽  
Upper Middle Class

This chapter describes the book Underpants Dance, which only depicts four white people out of all the thirty characters. However, the book still shows quite a significant underrepresentation of America's diversity. In this story, none of the people of color are important enough to have names. They serve only as a sprinkling of color in the background. The book's settings and events also reflect a distinctly upper-middle-class lifestyle. The chapter further explains that there is nothing wrong with any single children's book being culturally specific to a white, upper-income, American experience. The problem is that this pattern is so strong that children's literature as a whole is systematically less attractive or even alienating to children who do not fit that mold.

Advocacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Linguistic Strategies ◽  
Natchez District ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter turns away from the linguistic strategies people of color mobilized in court to investigate white lawyers’ incentives to represent black litigants and white judges’ motivations when deciding cases involving African Americans’ claims. It assesses the role of white people in the story of black litigiousness. Of course, rhetoric remained important, but rhetoric rarely led to results without a particular institutional makeup. Understanding the institutional framework of the Natchez district bench and bar—in this case, the makeup of the legal professionals, the internal hierarchies and values, the incentive patterns, and the pressure points and tensions—provides insight into how and where marginalized peoples inserted themselves and under what circumstances.

Nigger and Home

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
White Children ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Free People

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.

Sacrificing the Patrol: Utilitarianism, Future Generations and Infinity

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luc Van Liedekerke ◽  
Luc Lauwers
Keyword(s):  
Decision Criterion ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Original Position ◽  
Distant Future ◽  
Ethical Foundation ◽  
Future People ◽  
Ranking Criterion ◽  
Average Utility

Many people believe that we have responsibility towards the distant future, but exactly how far this responsibility reaches and how we can find a reasonable ethical foundation for it has not been answered in any definitive manner. Future people have no power over us, they form no part of our moral community and it is unclear how we can represent them in a possible original position. All these problems can be circumvented when you take an impersonal decision criterion like maximizing total or average utility. Such a sum-ranking criterion is neutral with respect to distance in time or space: my utility, my neighbour's and that of our descendants all carry the same weight. This makes future people an integral part of present decisions. Time-neutrality was defended by, among others, Sidgwick, Pigou and Ramsey.

The Myth of the Chosen Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 32-59
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Native People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
White People ◽  
Negro Spirituals ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The One ◽  
Revolutionary Period

The American myth of the Chosen Nation has its deepest roots in the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the English Reformation, on the other. William Tyndale, through his 1534 translation of the New Testament, popularized the notion that England was a chosen nation. Convinced that England had broken its covenant with God, the New England Puritans applied that myth to themselves. In their hands, the chosen people myth became a tool that justified oppression of both native people and enslaved Africans. By the revolutionary period, this myth had become a staple of the American imagination, accepted and used even by America’s founders. The myth of the Chosen Nation assumed both the objective reality of “white people” and the superiority of “white people” over people of color. In the Negro spirituals, enslaved blacks turned the American myth of chosenness upside down, claiming that they were God’s chosen people, suffering in an American Egypt, and waiting for God to deliver them out of American bondage into a promised land, a story to which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed on the eve of his assassination in 1968. Other blacks developed countermyths such as “Yacub’s History,” related by Malcolm X.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Rob Waters
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Society ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
British Society ◽  
White People ◽  
Cultural Expression

Many people in Britain between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s—mostly people of color, but also white people—demanded that British society needed to start “thinking black.” In this demand, they indicated a practice of identifying, confronting, and overturning the racism that they saw not only structuring British society and politics from top to bottom but also upholding all manner of other inequalities. This chapter shows thinking black as a project that brought together a diverse constituency and that encompassed a range of practices from political organization to cultural expression. It proposes that we can read thinking black as an extensive and important project in the effort to decolonize Britain and build a fairer, more equal, and more democratic society out of Britain’s imperial past.

Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-217
Author(s):  
Kristin J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
White People ◽  
Group Position ◽  
Working People ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Divide And Rule

Chapter 6 explores the backlash to social progress by the entitled. Dominant group members are not accustomed to being bossed around. They tend to be ill-equipped to adapt to changing circumstances, and their resistance to change comes in many forms, with a range of consequences to themselves and others. Dominant group members are both highly sensitive to criticism and object to being sidelined. The history of divide and rule by elites toward poor and working people begins Chapter 6. This history helps us understand why a less-educated working- or middle-class White person comes to share a sense of the same group position to that of wealthy and influential Whites rather than working- or middle-class people of color. Some White people have so internalized their superiority over people of color, that even Whites who are in economic distress support legislation and politicians that have no intention of aiding them. They reject government assistance that they desperately need, they refuse to sign up for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) because they believe that these initiatives help undeserving minorities. These White people are dying of Whiteness. And politicians capitalize on this White racial resentment. The entitled resentment of those who feel their superior status is undermined manifests in various ways. White fragility and fragile masculinity are emotionally hyperbolic reactions by dominant group members when they are asked to acknowledge the existence of racism and sexism.

Diverse Quality Comedies in an Era of White Precarity

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-196
Author(s):  
Taylor Nygaard ◽  
Jorie Lagerwey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
White Women ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Primary Case ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Quality Programs ◽  
Central Characters

This chapter returns to the cultural context described in the Introduction and first chapter to explore what it means that the same historical conjuncture produced both Horrible White People shows and Diverse Quality Comedies, a broad range of content about and by people of color. Insecure, Master of None, Atlanta, Dear White People, and Friends from College are primary case studies because they most closely mirror the white-cast shows with regard to aesthetics, affect, and tone. Their central characters navigate the same emotional and financial obstacles as the millennial white women and men in the rest of the book, while representing culturally specific experiences of people of color in the 2010s United States that push back against the recentering of white people’s trauma in Trump’s America. Through these comparisons, the chapter argues that Insecure, Master of None, Atlanta, and others offer a counterpoint to the recentering of affluent but under-siege whiteness on so many “quality” programs but that they also have to carefully negotiate their diverse representations in relation to authenticity, affective resonance, and legibility to the main audience demographics and studio or network heads that continue to be predominantly white.

Writing Appalachia

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Prescription Drug Abuse ◽  
White People ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Selection Of

From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. Yet, locating an anthology that offers a representative selection of authors and texts from the earliest days to the present can be difficult. Katherine Ledford and Theresa Lloyd have produced an anthology to meet this need. Simultaneously representing, complicating, and furthering the discourse on the Appalachian region and its cultures, this anthology works to provides the historical depth and range of Appalachian literature that contemporary readers and scholars seek, from Cherokee oral narratives to fiction and drama about mountaintop removal and prescription drug abuse. It also aims to challenge the common stereotypes of Appalachian life and values by including stories of multiple, often less heard, viewpoints of Appalachian life: mountain and valley, rural and urban, folkloric and postmodern, traditional and contemporary, Northern and Southern, white people and people of color, straight and gay, insiders and outsiders—though, on some level, these dualisms are less concrete than previously imagined.

Marginalization as a Structural Constraint: How Group Position Shapes Out-Group Hostility

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110438
Author(s):  
Andrew Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Policy Support ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Structural Constraint ◽  
White People ◽  
Relational Analysis ◽  
Group Position ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
And Bisexual ◽  
Minority Policies ◽  
Egalitarian Attitudes

Theories of out-group hostility have long held that attitudes about marginalized groups are important predictors of policy support. These theories, however, have mostly examined the attitudes of white people and sexual orientation has rarely been a category of analysis. Thus, we know less about whether these theories are conditional on group position in racial and sexual hierarchies. This paper argues that processes of marginalization shape out-group hostility. Using comparative relational analysis, I examine support for pro-minority policies among white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people, straight people of color and whites. I find that ethnocentrism is not a general predictor of out-group hostility among the members of marginalized groups. Alternatively, group-targeted homophobia, racism, and nativism predict opposition to pro-minority policies, but the members of marginalized groups have more egalitarian attitudes overall. These findings challenge long-held conventional wisdoms about prejudice, underscoring the importance of centering on marginalized groups in public opinion.

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