Activism, Disasters, Elections

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-203
Author(s):  
Micaela di Leonardo
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Environmental Reporting ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Voter Suppression ◽  
Economic Boycotts ◽  
Political Reporting

This chapter narrates in detail both TJMS philanthropy for and activism with African Americans—from HBCU scholarships, to working for black 9/11 survivors, to engaging in extensive and long-lasting charity for Hurricane Katrina victims—and their serious electoral activism over the decades. It details as well TJMS environmental reporting and their early civic activism with regard to economic boycotts. It provides a full accounting of TJMS coverage of and involvement in the 2000 and 2004, and especially their near-hysterical involvement in the 2008 and 2012, presidential elections, and their responses to the Obama presidency, as well as their political reporting and activism, especially on Republican voter suppression tactics, during each term.

scholarly journals African Americans’ Decisions Not to Evacuate New Orleans Before Hurricane Katrina: A Qualitative Study

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S124-S129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Elder ◽  
Sudha Xirasagar ◽  
Nancy Miller ◽  
Shelly Ann Bowen ◽  
Saundra Glover ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans

scholarly journals Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
National Space ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Communal Healing

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national space— following Winthrop’s foundational ideology. As I will argue, the novel contends that the revamped concept of communal home and familial bonds —echoing Winthrop’s emblem of national belonging— recasts the trope of biblical refuge as a potential tenet to foster selfassertion and to rethink the limits of belonging and acceptance.

The Changing Politics of Race in the South and Its Impact on National Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Susan A. MacManus ◽  
Jeremy D. Mayer ◽  
Mark J. Rozell
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The South ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Voter Suppression ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Party Dominance

The long era of racial segregation and black voter suppression coincided with the old “Solid South” of Democratic dominance of the region. Among African Americans who could vote, they were loyal to the GOP, the party of Lincoln. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the civil rights movement more generally moved Southern blacks to the Democratic Party. The emergence of African American voters’ rights and their realigning to the Democratic Party have had the most profound impact on the politics of the region of the past half century. Today, Southern African Americans vote at about the same rate as whites and in some recent presidential elections have exceeded white participation. As whites realigned to the GOP, African Americans became a key component of the Democratic Party dominance of the South, with substantial influence on legislative priorities.

scholarly journals Differences in post-disaster mental health among Vietnamese and African Americans living in adjacent urban communities flooded by Katrina

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255303
Author(s):  
Mengxi Zhang ◽  
Mark VanLandingham ◽  
Yoon Soo Park ◽  
Philip Anglewicz ◽  
David M. Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Housing Stock ◽  
Short Form ◽  
Vietnamese Americans ◽  
Disaster Mental Health ◽  
Post Disaster

Some communities recover more quickly after a disaster than others. Some differentials in recovery are explained by variation in the level of disaster-related community damage and differences in pre-disaster community characteristics, e.g., the quality of housing stock. But distinct communities that are similar on the above characteristics may experience different recovery trajectories, and, if so, these different trajectories must be due to more subtle differences among them. Our principal objective is to assess short-term and long-term post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese and African Americans living in two adjacent communities in eastern New Orleans that were similarly flooded by Hurricane Katrina. We employ data from two population-based cohort studies that include a sample of African American adults (the Gulf Coast Child and Family Health [GCAFH study]) and a sample of Vietnamese American adults (Katrina Impacts on Vietnamese Americans [KATIVA NOLA study]) living in adjacent neighborhoods in eastern New Orleans who were assessed near the second and thirteenth anniversaries of the disaster. Using the 12-Item Short Form Survey (SF-12) as the basis of our outcome measure, we find in multivariate analysis a significant advantage in post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese Americans over their African American counterparts at the two-year mark, but that this advantage had disappeared by the thirteenth anniversary of the Katrina disaster.

Voting Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-218
Author(s):  
J. Morgan Kousser
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
White Male ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
White Males ◽  
Early National ◽  
Voter Suppression

The development of the voting rights of three American groups—white males, women, and African Americans—is described in this essay in order to account for differences in the patterns of enfranchisement, disfranchisement, and, in the case of African Americans, reenfranchisement. Despite property qualifications, white male suffrage was much broader during the colonial and early national period than is often realized. Black suffrage has always been inextricably intertwined with partisan advantage. Women’s suffrage took so long to attain and the movement had to narrow its goals so much to win that female votes made little impact on politics until many years after 1920. The Voting Rights Act, which reenfranchised many African Americans after 1965, has always depended for its impact on Supreme Court decisions, which have passed through repeated cycles of support and restriction and have recently severely undermined protections, leaving minority voting rights at the mercy of “voter suppression” laws passed by their partisan enemies.

“This Thing We Have Done Together”

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-180
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Reluctant Readers

This chapter analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) alongside Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to investigate how contemporary African American literature witnesses the aftermath of slavery alongside the intersecting jeopardies of blackness, womanhood, and poverty. Both authors’ novels prompt readers to engage the trauma of American slavery. Ward’s books also treat other racially-charged traumas, such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the incarceration of African Americans as a contemporary form of slavery. Both authors’ novels employ ghosts to symbolize the need for American trauma to be witnessed. In contrast to Morrison’s Beloved, however, Ward’s ghosts do not need to be exorcized in order for communities to heal. Instead, Ward’s ghosts resurrect to witness testimonies cut short and to impel even reluctant readers to confront, through fiction, America’s painful histories.

The “Obama Effect” Revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-130
Author(s):  
Ray Block ◽  
Angela K. Lewis-Maddox
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Research Design ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Party Identification ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Racial Polarization

In this chapter, we examine the influence of Obama’s presence on racial divisions in partisanship. We interpret these divisions as evidence of racial polarization. Since Obama is a Democrat and because African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in presidential elections, we define polarization as a gap in the extent to which African and Anglo Americans identify with the Democratic Party. Our focus on polarization stems from the fact that partisanship has always been a racialized concept in American politics. We ask the following questions: Was there a race gap in party identification during the Obama presidency? If so, did the former president’s media activities influence the width of this race gap? How did Obama’s media presence affect the party gap? Did the former president push Whites away from the Democratic Party (while pulling African Americans into it)? Or did Obama make racial differences in partisanship disappear? We conclude this chapter by discussing the substantive implications of our evidence and the limitations of our research design. When discussing potential avenues for research, we focus on the fact that Obama’s presidency gave race scholars the opportunity to study descriptive representation in the nation’s highest political office.

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