Racism at the End of White Christian America

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Kristopher Norris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Womanist Theology ◽  
White People ◽  
The Many

Chapter 1 engages in social analysis to outline the current racial landscape in churches in the United States. Beginning with our current political and religious moment, it addresses and defines the many layers to the problem of whiteness. Drawing on the work of James Baldwin, womanist theology, and contemporary sociology, this chapter describes whiteness as a process of social and identity formation currently experiencing a crisis of legitimation. This current legitimation crisis has precipitated the phenomenon of colorblindness, which leads white people to see our interests and perspectives as universal, blinds us to our epistemological limitations, and leads to a posture of defensiveness and fragility. The chapter concludes by arguing that whiteness presents itself as a “wicked problem” with no identifiable solution.

scholarly journals Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 111-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahim Kurwa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
White People ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Residential Space

The neighborhood is a historic and contemporary site of the assertion of white racial and economic domination, particularly over Black people. Although there is strong evidence that whites continue to prefer racially segregated neighborhoods, fifty years of fair housing jurisprudence has made it more difficult to openly bar non-white residents. Among the many strategies used to protect white domination of residential space is the coordinated surveillance and policing of non-white people. In this paper, I show how Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, has become an important platform for the surveillance and policing of race in residential space, enabling the creation of what I call digitally gated communities. First, I describe the history of the platform and the forms of segregation and surveillance it has supplemented or replaced. Second, I situate the platform in a broader analysis of carcerality as a mode and logic of regulating race in the United States. Third, using examples drawn from public reports about the site, I illustrate how race is surveilled and policed in the context of gentrification and integration. Finally, I discuss implications, questions, and future issues that might arise on the platform.

scholarly journals Transhistorical and Transnational James Baldwin in “My Dungeon Shook” or “The Instructional Manual For Black People”

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
Author(s):  
Beugre Zouankouan Stéphane ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
White People ◽  
Instructional Manual

This review provides an analysis of the great social, cultural, political, intellectual and even anthropological contribution about race relations made by James Baldwin through the first essay of The Fire Next Time. Thanks to this valuable, thoughtful and meaningful contribution about race relations between the white people and the black people, James Baldwin can be characterized here as both a transhistorical and transnational writer, thinker and truthteller. Because his realistic good social, cultural, political, intellectual and even anthropological contribution about race relations in the United States goes beyond the developing issues at the time of writing (the historical context of the essay production, the period of the essay production and the borders of the United States) to become a real transhistorical contribution (meaning is out of historical context and historical period) and a real transnational contribution (meaning is out of the borders of the country mentioned). This retrospective on his essay and its re-evaluation shed light on the visionary quality of the writer and also explore the prophetical quality of his contribution. Due to its realistic message and its effectiveness and visionary qualities, the essay “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” may serve as a model-paradigm that can be utilized as an “Instructional Manual” by black people to deal with and to handle white people. And namely, it can serve as precisely “The Instructional Manual For Black People” to deal with and “to handle white people” in terms of useful instructions, guidelines and principles for the sake of the black race.

scholarly journals Diversity, Identity, Oppression: The Construction of “Blackness” in Dear White People

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-56
Author(s):  
Laura Schelenz ◽  
Marcel Vondermaßen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Student Life ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
White People ◽  
Theoretical Approaches

Abstract In the series Dear White People (DWP), students at the fictional University of Winchester struggle for racial justice. We analyze how the series treats “race” and racism and how this relates to contemporary debates in the United States. While the series presents an imaginary environment, we recognize strong similarities to actual student life and students grappling with various experiences of oppression including sexual violence. We draw on theories of identity formation (Margalit and Raz; Vondermaßen; Young) and intersectionality (Crenshaw; Collins) to uncover how the series portrays and complicates “Blackness” as an identity-forming experience and as an experience shaped by converging forms of structural discrimination. While we highlight the merit of combining two theoretical approaches (one of identity formation and one of oppression), we note that especially intersectionality helped uncover a major blind spot of the series. Although Black women are at the center of the series and the struggle for racial equality at Winchester, their particular experiences of violence are marginalized in seasons 1–3. This tendency to overlook the experiences of Black women reflects the larger debate around race, racism, and movements for social justice.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

scholarly journals Challenges in Bridge Health Monitoring: A Review

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4336
Author(s):  
Piervincenzo Rizzo ◽  
Alireza Enshaeian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Monitoring ◽  
Highway Bridges ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anomalous Behavior ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
Bridge Health Monitoring ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Many ◽  
Major Factors

Bridge health monitoring is increasingly relevant for the maintenance of existing structures or new structures with innovative concepts that require validation of design predictions. In the United States there are more than 600,000 highway bridges. Nearly half of them (46.4%) are rated as fair while about 1 out of 13 (7.6%) is rated in poor condition. As such, the United States is one of those countries in which bridge health monitoring systems are installed in order to complement conventional periodic nondestructive inspections. This paper reviews the challenges associated with bridge health monitoring related to the detection of specific bridge characteristics that may be indicators of anomalous behavior. The methods used to detect loss of stiffness, time-dependent and temperature-dependent deformations, fatigue, corrosion, and scour are discussed. Owing to the extent of the existing scientific literature, this review focuses on systems installed in U.S. bridges over the last 20 years. These are all major factors that contribute to long-term degradation of bridges. Issues related to wireless sensor drifts are discussed as well. The scope of the paper is to help newcomers, practitioners, and researchers at navigating the many methodologies that have been proposed and developed in order to identify damage using data collected from sensors installed in real structures.

John Leighton Stuart and U.S.-Chinese Communist Rapprochement in 1949: Was There Another “Lost Chance in China”?

1982 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-ming Shaw
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Working Relationship ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
June July ◽  
The Cold War

Reverend John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962) served as U.S. ambassador to China from July 1946 until August 1949. In the many discussions of his ambassadorship the one diplomatic mission that has aroused the most speculation and debate was his abortive trip to Beijing, contemplated in June–July 1949, to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Some students of Sino-American relations have claimed that had this trip been made the misunderstanding and subsequent hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the post-1949 period could have been avoided; therefore, the unmaking of this trip constituted another “lost chance in China” in establishing a working relationship between the two countries. But others have thought that given the realities of the Cold War in 1949 and the internal political constraints existing in each country, no substantial result could have been gained from such a trip. Therefore, the thesis of a “lost chance in China” was more an unfounded speculation than a credible affirmation.

Delegitimizing al-Qaida: Defeating an “Army Whose Men Love Death”

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Mark Long ◽  
Alex S. Wilner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recruitment Tool ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
New Social Order

Deterring terrorism is no longer a provocative idea, but missing from the contemporary theoretical investigation is a discussion of how delegitimization might be used to manipulate and shape militant behavior. Delegitimization suggests that states and substate actors can use the religious or ideological rationale that informs terrorist behavior to influence it. In the case of al-Qaida, the organization has carefully elaborated a robust metanarrative that has proved to be remarkably successful as a recruitment tool, in identity formation for adherents, as public apologia and hermeneutic, and as a weapon of war—the so-called media jihad. In the wake of the upheaval of the Arab Spring, al-Qaida and its adherents have redeployed the narrative, promising a new social order to replace the region's anciens régimes. Delegitimization would have the United States and its friends and allies use al-Qaida's own narrative against it by targeting and degrading the ideological motivation that guides support for and participation in terrorism.

Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s–1940s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Mendoza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Good Neighbor

Abstract This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.

The U.S. Health Delivery System: Inefficient and Unfair to Children

1997 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 319-337
Author(s):  
Loretta M. Kopelman ◽  
Michael G. Palumbo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Health Care Resources ◽  
Health Delivery ◽  
Hip Replacements ◽  
The Many ◽  
Older Citizens

What proportion of health care resources should go to programs likely to benefit older citizens, such as treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and hip replacements, and what share should be given to programs likely to benefit the young, such as prenatal and neonatal care? What portion should go to rare but severe diseases that plague the few, or to common, easily correctable illnesses that afflict the many? What percentage of funds should go to research, rehabilitation or to intensive care? Many nations have made such hard choices about how to use their limited funds for health care by explicitly setting priorities based on their social commitments. In the United States, however, allocation of health care resources has largely been left to personal choice and market forces. Although the United States spends around 14% of its gross national product (GNP) on health care, the United States and South Africa are the only two industrialized countries that fail to provide citizens with universal access.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document