The New National Face of Segregation

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

The conclusion addresses the urban North, exposing the political similarities between the most committed segregationists and those white women who protested busing in the 1970s. It argues that anti-busing activists should be considered segregationists and that massive resistance should be extended into anti-busing protests. Most Americans, including supporters of Brown, resisted this government intrusion into parental authority, property values, and school choice. As southern segregationists had predicted, when racial integration threatened to reorder the daily lives of northern white communities, they would react much like the South’s segregationists. Women’s organizations in Boston looked south for models of resistance and worked for various iterations of racially separated schools. Boston’s Louise Day Hicks and ROAR reacted much like white mothers in the South. Across the nation, law made busing a reality, while white women’s opposition on the ground eroded the power of its implementation and solidified the rise of the New Right.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, this book argues that white segregationist women constituted the grassroots workforce for racial segregation. For decades, they censored textbooks, campaigned against the United Nations, denied marriage certificates, celebrated school choice, and lobbied elected officials. They trained generations, built national networks, collapsed their duties as white mothers with those of citizenship, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Their work beyond legislative halls empowered the Jim Crow order with a flexibility and a kind of staying power. With white women at the center of the story, massive resistance and the rise of postwar conservatism rises out of white women’s grassroots work in homes, schools, political parties, and culture. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown Decision and persisted past the removal of “white only” signs in 1964 and through the anti-busing protests. White women’s segregationist politics involved foreign affairs, economic policy, family values, strict constitutionalism, states’ rights, and white supremacy. It stretched across the nation and overlapped with and helped shape the rise of the New Right. In the end, this history compels us to confront the reign of racial segregation as a national story. It asks us to reconsider who sustained the Jim Crow order, who bears responsibility for the persistence of the nation’s inequities, and what it will take to make good on the nation’s promise of equality.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

White segregationist women nationwide believed that the Brown decision threatened their private, public, and political authority. Long committed to the Jim Crow order, they emerged as the mass in massive resistance. They painted the family as the center of political life, with parental authority eroded by a federal government. Because school integration eroded their ability to secure the benefits of white supremacy for their children, it compromised their ability to be good mothers. They called for school choice, lobbied for local choice plans, and worked for the white Citizens’ Councils. At times their political language minimized racial identity and replaced it with a particular gender identity, prioritizing motherhood and burying whiteness and offering a color-blind discourse for a national audience. But Brown also put black children at the forefront of the movement, forcing white segregationist women to cast aside a language of maternal concern for one that degraded black schoolchildren.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

After Brown, white segregationist women build national organizations and were devoted to making white youth political activists and future purveyors of white supremacy. As the legal support for segregation diminished, the Jim Crow order remade itself. While moderates directed the implementation of integration, southern segregationist women continued to work in various ways and with national political constituencies to secure resistance to racial equality and to meaningful integration. They continued their efforts for racial segregation after the forced federal integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and of Ole Miss. As white segregationists focused on training white youth for the next iteration of white supremacist politics, they gradually amplified their color-blind political rhetoric. They built organizations like the Women for Constitutional Government and Patriotic American Youth that emphasized limited government, anti-communism, and school choice and opposition to decolonization, joining conservatives and segregationists nationwide to shape the New Right.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172098670
Author(s):  
Stephen Farrall ◽  
Emily Gray ◽  
Phil Mike Jones ◽  
Colin Hay

In what ways, if at all, do past ideologies shape the values of subsequent generations of citizens? Are public attitudes in one period shaped by the discourses and constructions of an earlier generation of political leaders? Using Thatcherism – one variant of the political New Right of the 1980s – as the object of our enquiries, this article explores the extent to which an attitudinal legacy is detectable among the citizens of the UK some 40 years after Margaret Thatcher first became Prime Minister. Our article, drawing on survey data collected in early 2019 (n = 5781), finds that younger generations express and seemingly embrace key tenets of her and her governments’ philosophies. Yet at the same time, they are keen to describe her government’s policies as having ‘gone too far’. Our contribution throws further light on the complex and often covert character of attitudinal legacies. One reading of the data suggests that younger generations do not attribute the broadly Thatcherite values that they hold to Thatcher or Thatcherism since they were socialised politically after such values had become normalised.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (20) ◽  
pp. 202127
Author(s):  
Chirles da Silva Monteiro ◽  
Gutemberg Armando Diniz Guerra

EDUCATION AND PEASANT RESISTANCE IN THE PARAENSE AMAZONIAEDUCACIÓN Y RESISTENCIA CAMPESINA EN LA AMAZONIA PARAENSERESUMOEste artigo é fruto dos apontamentos da pesquisa de mestrado desenvolvida no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Agriculturas Amazônicas (PPGAA) da Universidade Federal do Pará – UFPA. Aborda os desafios da luta pela terra no Sudeste Paraense, refletindo sobre o papel da educação nesse processo. Ele aponta a educação que permeia o cotidiano das pessoas, como elemento que fortalece a resistência política dos camponeses, por isso, não está apenas relacionada à conquista da terra, mas também, à permanência na mesma e à mudança da qualidade de vida nos acampamentos e assentamentos. O artigo é resultado de um estudo de caso, desenvolvido no Acampamento Sem Terra, denominado de Dalcídio Jurandir, localizado no Sudeste Paraense e encaminhado por uma abordagem qualitativa. Entende-se que o movimento social busca uma educação que dê conta de compreender as circunstâncias vividas a partir de suas contradições sociais, tendo a mesma lógica de resistência do campesinato, porque é nele que ela tem sua raiz histórica. Trata-se de uma educação que antecede à escola e vai muito além dela.Palavras-chave: Educação; Luta pela Terra; Resistência Camponesa.ABSTRACTThis article is the result of the master's research notes developed in the Postgraduate Program in Amazon Agriculture (PPGAA) of the Federal University of Pará – UFPA. It addresses the challenges of the struggle for land in Southeast Pará, reflecting on the role of education in this process. This paper points out the education that permeates people's daily lives, as an element that strengthens the political resistance of the peasants, therefore, it is not only related to the conquest of the land, but also to the permanence in it and to the change in the quality of life in the encampments and settlements. The article is the result of a case study, developed at the agrarian reform camp, called Dalcídio Jurandir, located in Southeast Pará and guided by a qualitative approach. It is understood that the social movement seeks an education that is able to understand the circumstances experienced from its social contradictions, having the same logic of resistance as the peasantry, because it has its historical roots in it. It is an education that precedes school and goes far beyond it.Keywords: Education; Struggle for Land; Peasant Resistance.RESUMENEste artículo es el resultado de las notas de investigación de maestría desarrolladas en el Programa de Posgrado en Agricultura Amazónica (PPGAA) de la Universidad Federal de Pará – UFPA. Aborda los desafíos de la lucha por la tierra en el sureste de Pará, reflexionando sobre el papel de la educación en este proceso. Señala la educación que permea la vida cotidiana de las personas, como un elemento que fortalece la resistencia política de los campesinos, por lo tanto, no solo se relaciona con la conquista de la tierra, sino también con la permanencia en ella y con el cambio de la tierra. Calidad de vida en los campamentos y asentamientos. El artículo es el resultado de un estudio de caso, desarrollado en el Campamento Sem Terra, llamado Dalcídio Jurandir, ubicado en el sureste de Pará y guiado por un enfoque cualitativo. Se entiende que el movimiento social busca una educación que sea capaz de comprender las circunstancias vividas desde sus contradicciones sociales, teniendo la misma lógica de resistencia que el campesinado, porque tiene en ella sus raíces históricas. Es una educación que precede a la escuela y la va mucho más allá.Palabras clave: Educación; Lucha por la Tierra; Resistencia Campesina.


2020 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jacques Boulet

This chapter assesses the resurfacing of populism and its much-discussed and documented adoption and enactment by leaders and citizens. More specifically, it discusses reasons for this (re-)emergence and its effects on people's daily lives and their participation in community life against the wider political-economic background, two areas central to much community development theory and practice. The first question posed is: what is going on with and around people — especially their modalities of 'being' and 'relating' — rendering them more 'prone' to being influenced by populisms and become populisms' 'accomplices'? Second, what role does social media play in this imposition/complicity dialectic? Indeed, social media powerfully invades and interpenetrates all levels and processes of the political economy, of people's everyday experiences and their subjective-affective lives, and they infest the mediating institutions operating 'between' the virtual global and the imperceptible here and now. Finally, a third question is posed: what is the effect of such socially mediated populism on communities and on efforts to (re)develop and maintain them? The chapter concludes with some ideas about ways to resist the (combined) assault of populism and social media and restart the project of democracy.


Author(s):  
Beth Reingold

Descriptive representation, or the presence of women and minorities in public office, is the central focus of Chapter 2. Why are some legislatures more diverse than others? Why are some constituencies more likely to elect women and minorities? Chapter 2 addresses these questions about the political geography of race, gender, and representation with an intersectional lens. It re-evaluates existing theories about the electoral barriers and disadvantages facing women and minorities and tests an alternative theory that women of color, through intersectional resistance and resilience, can overcome such obstacles. Based on an analysis of descriptive representation in all state houses and house seats in 2005, the findings suggest the electoral fortunes of women of color are no less constrained than those of men of color or White women. Rather, women of color face a variety of structural challenges—and opportunities—that are similar to and different from those faced by others.


2017 ◽  
pp. 263-280
Author(s):  
Edward E. Curtis

Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black Christianity and the liberal dream of racial integration, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) was a prime target of US governmental surveillance and repression. Its very presence was perceived as a threat to the ideological foundations of 1960s US liberalism, which rested on anti-communism and the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, on the rhetoric of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and on federal welfare programs. At the same time, the Nation of Islam’s leadership appropriated and furthered what were at the time several other modes of liberalism: it policed its members’ middle-class, straight sexuality; it embraced the dream of black capitalism and encouraged entrepreneurship; it used the US courts to argue for freedom of religion and framed its activities as such; and it forbade its members from engaging in violent revolution or even nonviolent political resistance against many of the very liberal institutions that it identified as a religious evil.


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