Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney E. Hero ◽  
Morris Levy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
State Of The Union ◽  
Economic Individualism ◽  
And Gender

AbstractWe analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 229-232
Author(s):  
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Interactive Engagement ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Post Civil Rights

The Coda reiterates that the post-civil rights era in the United States–with the coalescence of rebellion against historic modes of thought, heightened awareness of the politics of race and gender, and challenges to the artificiality of disciplinary silos –gave rise to a period of intense innovation in autobiographical expression in text and image. During this same period, profoundly new possibilities for image-text self-expression arose as the internet was developed, digital tools were generated, and social media sites were launched. Like the interart autobiographies discussed in Picturing Identity, digital media demands interactive engagement. The conclusion discusses e-poetry as a digital descendant of the forms discussed in the book. Finally, the chapter suggests that scholarly claims that digital technology itself decenters the subject must be reconsidered. It is not technology alone that determines subjectivity. All the writers-artists discussed thematize a split subject that seeks, usually futilely, wholeness.

scholarly journals In self defense : black female journalists' advocacy in the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel (Rachel Lindsey) Grant
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Female Journalists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War

"Mary Church Terrell, Black female journalist and civil rights activist, stood in front of the United Nations board in Lake Success, New York, on Sept. 21, 1949, to present a brief on Rosa Lee Ingram. Ingram and her two sons had been sentenced in 1948 to life in prison after they were accused of murdering John Stratford, their white neighbor who attacked Ingram after her livestock ventured onto his Georgia property. As a mother of 14 children, Ingram believed she acted in self-defense, but the Southern justice of an all-white jury convicted her. In front of an audience of 75 people, Terrell stated: "Under similar circumstances it is inconceivable that such an unjust sentence would have been imposed upon a white woman and her sons." She went further in noting the role that both race and gender played in the Ingram case." -- Introduction

American Dream Deferred

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-260
Author(s):  
P. James Paligutan
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Migratory Movement ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

This article examines a unique migratory movement of Filipinos to America: Filipino nationals recruited by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard between 1952 and 1970. Such recruits were seen as a solution to a mounting labor problem stemming from the Navy’s traditional use of minorities to fulfill duties as servants for naval officers. With African Americans' demands for equal opportunity reaching a crescendo during the Civil Rights era, the U.S. Navy looked to its former colony to replenish its supply of dark-skinned servants. Despite expectations of docility, however, such Filipino sailors were able to forge a culture of resistance manifested through non-confrontational acts of defiance, protest through official channels, and labor stoppage. Such actions ultimately resulted in the reversal of naval policy that relegated Filipinos to servile labor.

Ideological Legitimacy, Color-blindness, and Racially Conservative Organizations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Ebert
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Group Interests

Abstract Although scholars of racial inequality have investigated the transformation of racial ideologies in the post-Civil Rights Era, comparatively little research has been done on a corresponding transformation in racial advocacy organizing. Using an original dataset, I introduce racially conservative organizations, provide a history of their growth from 1960 to 2000, and estimate their formation in metropolitan areas over three decades to better specify the factors that led to their emergence. Measures of organizational strength, stability, and growth reveal that racially conservative organizations thrived relative to white extremist organizations in the second half of the 20th century, alongside the de-legitimation of explicit racism and rise of color-blind racism. The multivariate analysis indicates that metropolitan areas with increased political opportunities witnessed a greater likelihood of organizational formation among racial conservatives. In the 1970s, threats to dominant group interests emboldened racial conservatives and incited mobilization. However, in later decades, these conditions weakened dominant group interests in a way that deterred collective action. Racially conservative organizations are more likely to form in contexts that provide them with legitimacy to mobilize around racially sensitive issues. The findings challenge past research that conflates racial conservatism and white extremism and assumes that they share the same determinants.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Military Nursing ◽  
And Gender

This book examines the battles over race and gender discrimination and social justice by linking the civil rights story of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. Using the microcosm of military nursing, it considers how agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when some of the same women who challenged their exclusion from the military or civilian nursing profession, or those who had gained considerable status within the profession, were unwilling to extend the opportunities to men who sought out military nursing careers. The book also explores the connection between the campaigns to integrate the ANC and the domestic and international anxieties during the Cold War by suggesting that anticommunism both hindered and supported the prospect for gender and race equality within the ANC and, by extension, civilian society.

Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Black Art ◽  
And Gender

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

Labor Pains

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christin Marie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Black Radicalism ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Imagined Lives ◽  
And Gender

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
American Model ◽  
National Economic

This concluding chapter considers early twenty-first-century immigration controls as furthering national economic advantage. The immigrant I.M. Pei, with his imported talent and skills, illustrates the diminishing of racial inequality through his exceptional accomplishments and success even as he reflects the hollowness of such civil rights victories. The quantified overattainment by the Asian American model minority emanates in large measure from immigration preferences that privilege those most likely to succeed educationally, economically, and now entrepreneurially. Model minority successes have served as rebukes to less well performing minority populations by implying that their failure to attain equal standing does not result from past and ongoing discrimination but is somehow attributable to a lack of the kind of cultural values that would produce upward mobility in the land of equal opportunity.

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