REVISITING THE BIRTH OF A NATION AT 100 YEARS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 596-598
Author(s):  
Elaine Frantz Parsons
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Technical Innovation ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
The Past ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The One

D. W. Griffith's seminal 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often approached as a paradox in that it embodies both an extreme commitment to white supremacy, on the one hand, and technical innovation and artistic vision, on the other. While its technique and aesthetics reached to the modern, revealing the promise of the still-new media of film, its celebration of racial oppression reached to the past, justifying and expressing nostalgia for a world in which white people wielded complete control over black people through a tight combination of natural superiority and unapologetic violence. As the essays in this forum underline, the film's modernism and its celebration of white supremacy not only happily cohabited, but reinforced one another. The film revived elements of nineteenth-century racism, and dressed them in the clothes of the modern.

Free but fragile: Human relations amidst poverty and HIV in democratic South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Christina Landman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black People ◽  
Hiv Treatment ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Township

Dullstroom-Emnotweni is the highest town in South Africa. Cold and misty, it is situated in the eastern Highveld, halfway between the capital Pretoria/Tswane and the Mozambique border. Alongside the main road of the white town, 27 restaurants provide entertainment to tourists on their way to Mozambique or the Kruger National Park. The inhabitants of the black township, Sakhelwe, are remnants of the Southern Ndebele who have lost their land a century ago in wars against the whites. They are mainly dependent on employment as cleaners and waitresses in the still predominantly white town. Three white people from the white town and three black people from the township have been interviewed on their views whether democracy has brought changes to this society during the past 20 years. Answers cover a wide range of views. Gratitude is expressed that women are now safer and HIV treatment available. However, unemployment and poverty persist in a community that nevertheless shows resilience and feeds on hope. While the first part of this article relates the interviews, the final part identifies from them the discourses that keep the black and white communities from forming a group identity that is based on equality and human dignity as the values of democracy.

scholarly journals Construction of American Hunger in Richard Wright's Novel "Black Boy"

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Febrian Ramadhani Setiaji ◽  
Mohamad Ikhwan Rosyidi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Binary Operation ◽  
Black People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Black Boy

This study aims at explaining the construction of American hunger in Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy. This study is a qualitative analysis that relies on the power of word or explanatory reasoning. The data were collected by reading, identifying, classifying and analyzed using the structualism theories which used in this study by relating to binary operation to see the gap between black and white society. The results of this study were the segregation between black and white people in terms of the treatment, power, and superiority that in the end, it  resulted that the black people are being treated different and has no right for freedom. The American Hunger is described in the novel through some events that go in the opposite between black and white people. The tention between them revealed from the different treatment, oppression, discrimination, superiority, and hunger that the black and white people or society experienced. The dominance and the power of the white people had harm the black people in some aspects in their life. Second, American Hunger that was described in the novel was regarded as the desire of the black people when they were living side by side with the white people in America. When the discrimination, segregation, and oppression occurs toward the black people, they satisfied their American hunger by standing agaisnt racial oppression, strengthen the superiority, and against the hunger.   Keywords: American hunger; construction; discrimination; structuralism

Gentrification and the Making of Craft Beer White Spaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-154
Author(s):  
Nathaniel G. Chapman ◽  
David L. Brunsma
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
White People ◽  
Craft Beer ◽  
White Spaces ◽  
The Creation

This chapter evaluates the ways in which craft beer has reshaped spaces, places, and cultures in the image of white people, whiteness, and white supremacy. Craft beer spaces and places are typically located in gentrified areas, which have become signifiers of gentrification and middle-class consumption. The chapter then argues that craft breweries socially and culturally construct authentic identities that reflect middle-class values. It also explores the ways in which gentrification and craft beer are entangled, and the processes whereby such beer gentrification leads to the creation of 'white spaces.' Using interview data, the chapter examines how these spaces discourage and exclude black people and other minorities from participating in craft beer cultures, and therefore its consumption.

Social Media and Elections in Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iginio Gagliardone
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The analysis of the diffusion of social media in Africa and its relevance for politics has been caught in a paradox. On the one hand, social media have been saluted for their newness and for their ability, especially in connection with increasingly accessible portable tools such as mobile phones, to offer a level playing field for individuals to participate in politics and speak to power. On the other hand, this very enthusiasm has evoked relatively tired tropes used to frame the advent of other “new” technologies in the past, stressing what they could do to Africa, rather than exploring what they are doing in Africa. Early research on the relationship between social media and elections in Africa has tended to adopt normative frameworks adapted from the analysis of electoral contests in the Global North, presupposing unfettered citizens using social media to root for their leaders or demand accountability. A more recent wave of empirically grounded studies has embraced a greater conceptual and methodological pluralism, offering more space to analyze the contradictions in how social media are used and abused: how humor can be turned into a powerful tool to contest a type of power that appears overwhelming; or how armies of professional users have exploited people’s credulity of new media as “freer” from power to actually support partisan agenda. Interestingly, this latter approach has brought to light phenomena that have only recently caught global attention, such as the role of “fake news” and misinformation in electoral contests, but have played a determinant role in African politics for at least a decade.

Scared Sheetless

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Newton ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The U.S

The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in the U.S. This paper argues that those attempting to understand how white supremacy works should delve into recent justifications of anti-black violence rather than simply waiting to spot the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Doing so requires scholars to disabuse themselves of taking for granted the descriptions of what may be characterized as a U.S. Christian-White imaginary and to observe the dynamic, discursive shifts that Jean-Franc̜ois Bayart calls “operational acts of identification.” Drawing on incidents from antebellum slavery to the Black Lives Matter era and beyond, it is argued that white people have long been able to justify anti-black violence by appealing to a biblicist “Negrophobia,” wherein black people are rendered as frightening, even demonic creatures that must be stopped for the good of God’s kingdom. This paper presents a critical history of violence in America that is representative of a devastatingly effective strategy that continues to fortify the functional primacy of whiteness despite popular rejections of racism.

scholarly journals Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindiwe Maqutu ◽  
Adrian Bellengere
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
South African School ◽  
The Way

A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.

Do White People See Variation in Black Skin Tones? Reexamining a Purported Outgroup Homogeneity Effect

2020 ◽  
pp. 019027252096140
Author(s):  
Lance Hannon ◽  
Verna M. Keith ◽  
Robert DeFina ◽  
Mary E. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Significant Heterogeneity ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
White People ◽  
Classification Schemes ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Homogeneity Effect ◽  
The One ◽  
Outgroup Homogeneity

Previous research has reported that white survey interviewers remember black respondents’ skin tones in a much narrower range than recollections by black interviewers. This finding has been used to suggest that, in line with the one-drop rule, whites do not perceive meaningful differences between light- and dark-skinned black people. The authors reanalyze evidence thought to demonstrate relative homogeneity in white interviewers’ evaluation of black skin tones. In contrast to previous studies, this examination of several data sources reveals significant heterogeneity in the ratings assigned by white interviewers when taking into account the ordinal nature of the skin tone measures. The results are consistent with theories of social cognition that emphasize that beyond formal racial classification schemes, skin tone is used to implicitly categorize others along a continuum of “blackness.” The findings also align with research suggesting that rather than nullifying within-race skin tone, increases in white racism intensify white colorism.

Francis Cress Welsing’s Contributions to Africana Studies Epistemology

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
Sureshi M. Jayawardene ◽  
Serie McDougal
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African Descent ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
White People ◽  
Africana Studies ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior

Francis Cress Welsing, a Black psychiatrist and medical school professor, advanced one of the most notable and controversial theories about the perpetuation of global White supremacy. The cress theory of color confrontation (CTCC) seeks to etiologically explain the varying degrees of White supremacist patterns of behavior that shape White interaction with Black people in particular and “non-White” people in general. White supremacy has been under-theorized in Africana Studies save for a few key scholars. The present investigation seeks to locate the CTCC within Africana Studies in terms of Christian’s, McDougal’s, Karenga’s, and Banks’s epistemological models, and to estimate the analytical value it adds to knowledge production in the discipline. This analysis concludes that CTCC both enhances and challenges Africana Studies. It offers a systematic scientific examination of White supremacist behaviors and psychology to equip Africana communities for the continuing needs of the freedom struggle. CTCC also challenges Africana Studies in that in order to move beyond a reactive posture toward racism, it is necessary to direct systematic attention, resources, and research toward studying White thought, in order to understand, anticipate, and defeat its efforts to oppress people of African descent.

scholarly journals Black’s Survival Strategy: Tricksterism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Meiling Fu
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Survival Strategy ◽  
White People ◽  
Invisible Man

This paper is intended to investigate tricksterism in Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man. Through analyzing the successful tricksters and the unsuccessful tricksters, this research concludes that tricksterism is a survival strategy in the society of white supremacy, and black people have to wear the mask and trick the white people for the cause of eliminating racial discrimination.Keywords: tricksterism; Invisible Man; survival strategy; equality 

scholarly journals INHERITING DU BOIS

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrie Balfour
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Latino Politics ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Thinker

What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a “living political thinker,” Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, engaging Du Bois as a political theorist enables contemporary scholars to reflect on the political challenges of our own time, even when Du Bois offers answers we would not own for ourselves. Perhaps most crucially, taking Du Bois's work seriously requires a rigorous engagement with the past and an active refutation of declarations of a “postracial” age that belie yawning racial inequalities, the continuing devaluation of non-White lives, and the unredressed injuries—to American citizens, to the polity itself, and to women and men well beyond U.S. borders—of White supremacy. All of the participants in this symposium would, I think, endorse this view in its broadest strokes. But to inherit Du Bois as a political thinker is also to participate in an ongoing and often contentious conversation about race, democracy, and Du Bois himself. Accordingly, my comments will focus on two clusters of issues. The first is raised by Rogers Smith's and Tommie Shelby's vigorous disagreement with the idea of Black reparations that I explore in the second chapter of Democracy's Reconstruction. The second involves a set of unresolved tensions bequeathed by Du Bois and addressed in Gooding-Williams' extraordinary book and Cristina Beltrán's meditations on the Afro-modern political tradition and Latino politics today.

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