Death and Dying in the Working Class

Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow

In the broader field of thanatology, scholars investigate rituals of dying, attitudes toward death, evolving trajectories of life expectancy, and more. Applying a lens of social class means studying similar themes but focusing on the men, women, and children who worked for wages in the United States. Working people were more likely to die from workplace accidents, occupational diseases, or episodes of work-related violence. In most periods of American history, it was more dangerous to be a wage worker than it was to be a soldier. Battlegrounds were not just the shop floor but also the terrain of labor relations. American labor history has been filled with violent encounters between workers asserting their views of economic justice and employers defending their private property rights. These clashes frequently turned deadly. Labor unions and working-class communities extended an ethos of mutualism and solidarity from the union halls and picket lines to memorial services and gravesites. They lauded martyrs to movements for human dignity and erected monuments to honor the fallen. Aspects of ethnicity, race, and gender added layers of meaning that intersected with and refracted through individuals’ economic positions. Workers’ encounters with death and the way they made sense of loss and sacrifice in some ways overlapped with Americans from other social classes in terms of religious custom, ritual practice, and material consumption. Their experiences were not entirely unique but diverged in significant ways.

Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow

The post-Civil War Industrial Age brought fundamental changes to the economy and its workers, forcing Americans to reassess the meaning of life and death. This illuminating study of working-class rituals of dying and the politics of death explores how Americans struggled to understand the broader forces transforming their worlds. The book investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of death and dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, the book portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.


Author(s):  
Sören Frölich

Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet, novelist, essayist, activist, and editor. He is best known for his involvement in the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century (also known as the Harlem Renaissance). He helped introduce radical politics and a sophisticated use of Primitivism into African-American literature and wrote important political poems like ‘If We Must Die’. Today McKay is best known for his 1928 novel Home to Harlem. A lifelong traveller, he provided crucial connections between US racism and international struggles. He also was an avid Marxist and associated with the Communist Party until late in life, when he converted to Catholicism. He angered and alienated writers, critics, and even friends with his aversion to the black elites and genteel literary critics. Long valued as an exponent of Primitivism in the Harlem Renaissance, in recent scholarship he has been recognized for his radical poetry, his writings in Jamaican Patois, his international efforts, and his theoretical considerations of race and gender to political struggles of black working people across and beyond the United States.


Author(s):  
Timnit Gebru

This chapter discusses the role of race and gender in artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid permeation of AI into society has not been accompanied by a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical issues that cause certain groups of people to be harmed rather than advantaged by it. For instance, recent studies have shown that commercial automated facial analysis systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women, while having minimal errors on light-skinned men. Moreover, a 2016 ProPublica investigation uncovered that machine learning–based tools that assess crime recidivism rates in the United States are biased against African Americans. Other studies show that natural language–processing tools trained on news articles exhibit societal biases. While many technical solutions have been proposed to alleviate bias in machine learning systems, a holistic and multifaceted approach must be taken. This includes standardization bodies determining what types of systems can be used in which scenarios, making sure that automated decision tools are created by people from diverse backgrounds, and understanding the historical and political factors that disadvantage certain groups who are subjected to these tools.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Papanikolaou

The paper examines tax progressivity and income inequality using Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS) personal income data. The Kakwani index is used to derive tax progressivity for All, Male, Female, White and African American personal wage income of CPS respondents, respectively. The tax progressivity results show a tax system that is partly progressive and mostly regressive. Due to its regressive nature, the tax system did not display tax progressivity for the entire period under analysis for personal wage income respondents as well as when broken-down by race and gender in the United States for years 1996 to 2011.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
April L. Peters ◽  
Angel Miles Nash

The rallying, clarion call to #SayHerName has prompted the United States to intentionally include the lives, voices, struggles, and contributions of Black women and countless others of her ilk who have suffered and strived in the midst of anti-Black racism. To advance a leadership framework that is rooted in the historicity of brilliance embodied in Black women’s educational leadership, and their proclivity for resisting oppression, we expand on intersectional leadership. We develop this expansion along three dimensions of research centering Black women’s leadership: the historical foundation of Black women’s leadership in schools and communities, the epistemological basis of Black women’s racialized and gendered experiences, and the ontological characterization of Black women’s expertise in resisting anti-Black racism in educational settings. We conclude with a four tenet articulation detailing how intersectional leadership: (a) is explicitly anti-racist; (b) is explicitly anti-sexist; (c) explicitly acknowledges the multiplicative influences of marginalization centering race and gender, and across planes of identity; and (d) explicitly leverages authority to serve and protect historically underserved communities.


Author(s):  
Natasha N Johnson

This article focuses on equitable leadership and its intersection with related yet distinct concepts salient to social justice pertinent to women and minorities in educational leadership. This piece is rooted and framed within the context of the United States of America, and the major concepts include identity, equity, and intersectionality—specific to the race-gender dyad—manifested within the realm of educational leadership. The objective is to examine theory and research in this area and to discuss the role they played in this study of the cultures of four Black women, all senior-level leaders within the realm of K-20 education in the United States. This work employed the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology, focusing on the intersecting factors—race and gender, specifically—that impact these women’s ability and capability to perform within the educational sector. The utilization of in-depth, timed, semi-structured interviews allowed participants to reflect upon their experiences and perceptions as Black women who have navigated and continue to successfully navigate the highest levels of the educational leadership sphere. Contributors’ recounted stories of navigation within spaces in which they are underrepresented revealed the need for more research specific to the intricacies of Black women’s leadership journeys in the context of the United States.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1172-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis E. Phills ◽  
Amanda Williams ◽  
Jennifer M. Wolff ◽  
Ashley Smith ◽  
Rachel Arnold ◽  
...  

Two studies examined the relationship between explicit stereotyping and prejudice by investigating how stereotyping of minority men and women may be differentially related to prejudice. Based on research and theory related to the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), we hypothesized that stereotyping of minority men would be more strongly related to prejudice than stereotyping of minority women. Supporting our hypothesis, in both the United Kingdom (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2), when stereotyping of Black men and women were entered into the same regression model, only stereotyping of Black men predicted prejudice. Results were inconsistent in regard to South Asians and East Asians. Results are discussed in terms of the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) and the gendered nature of the relationship between stereotyping and attitudes.


ILR Review ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maury B. Gittleman ◽  
David R. Howell

Using 17 measures of job quality from the 1980 Census, the Current Population Survey, and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, the authors perform a cluster analysis that groups 621 jobs covering 94% of the work force into six job categories (termed “contours”), a job classification closely resembling those suggested by labor market segmentation theory. The distribution of employment over the period 1973–90 shifted sharply away from the two middle-quality contours toward the two highest-quality contours. The two lowest-quality contours show no decline in employment share in the 1980s. The declining relative position of employed black and Hispanic men stems from both a worsening job mix relative to white men and a sharp drop in the quality of low-skill jobs. Female workers experienced both a greater shift away from jobs in the lower-quality contours and higher real earnings growth within each job contour than male workers.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lei ◽  
Rachel Leshin ◽  
Kelsey Moty ◽  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children’s prototypes of various social categories. Children (N=543; Mage=5.81, range=2.75 - 10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men—a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children tended to choose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and identity-based processes interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood.


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