Rights, Dignity, and Public Accommodations

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-619
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt

In this essay I consider why debates over applying anti-discrimination norms to public accommodations have long been, and remain today, such a resilient presence in the history of the United States. I use as my starting point the most famous iteration of this phenomenon, the national debate sparked by the 1960 sit-in movement and culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation. The battle over racial discrimination and public accommodations in the early 1960s illuminates the moral issue at the heart of the issue, the lines of argument that characterize the debate over how to define legal rights in this area, and the ways in which different legal institutions have resolved, or failed to resolve, the issue. I then move backward time, highlighting the continuities between this episode and the struggle over race and public accommodations during Reconstruction. The history of the civil rights era provides a useful framework to analyze the terms of debate from a century earlier, and it provides particular insights into the significance of the concept of public rights that Rebecca Scott has so effectively brought to our attention.

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097592
Author(s):  
Sarah J Jackson

Herein, I share a conversation with Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, as context to detail the collective visionary leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After highlighting how Garza enacts this tradition in the contemporary era, I revisit Ella Baker’s foundational model of collective visionary leadership from the civil rights era. Collective visionary leadership, embodied across these generations, is local and community-based, centers the power and knowledge of ordinary people, and prioritizes transformative accountability and liberatory visions of the future. Such leadership has been central to a range of transformational movements, and especially those anchored by Black women and Black queer folk. I also consider what critiques of traditional models of leadership collective visionary leadership levies both past and present. I call on all those concerned with the act of leading justly to take up this model.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Skop ◽  
Wei Li

AbstractIn recent years, the migration rates from both China and India to the U.S. have accelerated. Since 2000 more than a third of foreign-born Chinese and 40% of foreign-born Indians have arrived in that country. This paper will document the evolving patterns of immigration from China and India to the U.S. by tracing the history of immigration and racial discrimination, the dramatic transitions that have occurred since the mid-20th century, and the current demographic and socioeconomic profiles of these two migrant groups.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Drucilla Cornell ◽  
Karin Van Marle

The starting-point for the article is to provide a brief background on the Ubuntu Project that Prof. Drucilla Cornell convened in 2003; most notably the interviews conducted in Khayamandi, the support of a sewing collective, and the continued search to launch an Ubuntu Women�s Centre. The article will reflect on some of the philosophical underpinnings of ubuntu, whereafter debates in Western feminism will be revisited. Ubuntu feminism is suggested as a possible response to these types of feminisms. The authors support an understanding of ubuntu as critique and ubuntu feminism accordingly as a critical intervention that recalls a politics of refusal. The article ends by raising the importance of thinking about spatiality through ubuntu, and vice versa. It may seem strange to title an article Ubuntu feminism when feminism itself has often been identified as a European or Western idea. But, this article will argue that ubuntu offers conceptions of transindividuality and ways of social belonging that could respond in a meaningful way to some of European feminism�s own dilemmas and contradictions. Famously, one of the most intense debates in feminism was between those who defended an ethic of care in a relational view of the self, on one side, and those feminists who held on to more traditional conceptions of justice, placing an emphasis on individuality and autonomy, on the other side. The authors will suggest that ubuntu could address this tension in feminism. Thus, in this article the focus will not simply be on ubuntu, in order to recognise that there are other intellectual heritages worthy of consideration, other than those in Europe and the United States. It will also take a next step in arguing that ubuntu may be a better standpoint entirely from which to continue thinking about what it means to be a human being, as well as how to conceive of the integral interconnection human beings all have with one another. This connection through ubuntu is always sought ethically, and for the authors it underscores what we have both endorsed as ethical feminism. In this essay it is considered how ubuntu feminism could refuse the demands of patriarchy, as well as the confines of liberal feminism. The authors are interested in thinking about ubuntu in general as critique, as a critical response to the pervasiveness of a liberal legal order. Their aim is also to explore tentatively ubuntu and spatiality � how could one understand ubuntu in spatial terms, and more pertinently, how could ubuntu and ubuntu feminism relate to spatial justice? Before turning to the theoretical discussion, some of the on-the-ground history of the Ubuntu Project will be reviewed, including the Project�s attempt to build an Ubuntu Women�s Centre in Khayamandi in the Western Cape, South Africa.


2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 348-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Teitelbaum ◽  
Lara Cartwright-Smith ◽  
Sara Rosenbaum

More than twenty-four million people in the United States are considered limited English proficient (LEP), and numerous studies have documented the consequences of communication barriers in healthcare. These consequences include: patients’ inability to become engaged and involved in their care; the absence of crucial information—including cultural information—essential to healthcare quality; risks to patient safety arising from the misunderstanding of physician instructions; and ethical and legal lapses stemming from the absence of informed consent. Addressing healthcare rights necessarily entails coming to grips with how to facilitate communication and the exchange of information between the healthcare system and an increasingly diverse patient population.The history of language access services in healthcare is grounded in two distinct bodies of law: the law of informed consent and civil rights law. Modern notions of informed consent law—which have their roots in the Nuremberg trials of the late 1940s—would recognize a cause of action in tort where a lack of adequate communication creates a barrier to an LEP patient's ability to consent to care. In modern healthcare law, the ability of patients to affirmatively give informed consent to treatment is considered a fundamental element of healthcare quality.


Author(s):  
J.C. Blokhuis ◽  
Randall Curren

Judicialization is the term most commonly used to describe the supervening authority of the courts in virtually every sphere of public life in liberal democratic states. In the United States, where judicialization is most advanced, political and administrative decisions by agencies and officials at every level of government are subject to constitutional scrutiny, and thus to the oversight and substituted decision-making authority of unelected members of the federal judiciary. The judicialization of American education is associated with the judicial review of administrative decisions by public school officials in lawsuits filed in the federal courts by or on behalf of students alleging due process and other Constitutional rights violations. So defined, the judicialization of American education has been facilitated by a number of legal and social developments in the Civil Rights Era, including the ascription of limited Constitutional rights to minors in public schools, the expansion of government agency liability, and the ensuing proliferation of lawsuits under Section 1983. Judicialization has been criticized for subjecting routine administrative decisions to complex and costly procedural regimentation, for distorting social relations by subjecting them to legal oversight, and for flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits. The causes and outcomes of the judicialization of American education present a complex and mixed picture, however. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity’s Legal Services Program has played a central role in judicialization by providing legal resources to confront racial injustice in the punishment of students and in school funding.


Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.


Author(s):  
Andrew Denson

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.


Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.


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