Social, Racial, and Economic Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-153
Author(s):  
Sandro Galea
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Economic Injustice

This chapter assesses social, racial, and economic injustice. The marginalization of communities of color in the United States is of unique concern, particularly the marginalization of Black Americans. While it is true that many communities of color have suffered from deep-seated structural injustice, it is Black Americans who have, since before the country's founding, been the group most vulnerable to racial injustice. The emergence of some excellent scholarship in the past few years that has highlighted the place of anti-Blackness specifically as a detrimental force that influences health cannot, and should not, be swept up into broader generalizations around the pernicious influence of racial injustice overall. COVID-19 revealed how the institution of slavery has, over hundreds of years, continued to shape racial injustice and consequent poor health for Black Americans. Before changes to this status quo can be achieved, movements must change public opinion around issues of injustice. Once we understand injustice, we have a responsibility to not look away, to fix the racial, social, and economic inequities which generate poor health. But the path to justice does not end with changes in public attitudes and the passage of civil rights legislation. Achieving this goal takes pursuing not just social, but economic justice.

The challenges of cross‑racial coalition building

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Strategic Plan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the possibilities of building cross-racial coalitions between the white working class and communities of color as the United States transitions from majority white to a minority white country. Fifty years after the campaign for civil rights and the passage of landmark legislation during the 1960s, there is little evidence of formal and sustainable cross-racial coalition building at the grassroots or grasstops level between the white working class and communities of color. White working-class communities wanted to engage with communities of color but did not have the means of engaging across racial boundaries beyond a superficial everyday level. Discussions between different communities were “soft-wired” and based on fleeting exchanges in informal spaces rather than becoming “hard-wired” in a strategic plan that can create a framework for coalition building. Stakeholders were largely ambivalent and occasionally hostile toward engaging with white working-class communities to build effective cross-racial alliances. Similar to white working-class communities in relation to communities of color, stakeholders found it challenging to engage with these groups.

Rich Thanks to Racism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Freeman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Bill Gates

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement, there are still glaring racial inequities all across the United States. This book explains why this is so, as it reveals the hidden strategy behind systemic racism. The book details how the driving force behind the public policies that continue to devastate communities of color across the United States is a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals who profit mightily from racial inequality. The book carefully dissects the cruel and deeply harmful policies within the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems to discover their origins and why they persist. It uncovers billions of dollars in aligned investments by Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of other billionaires that are dismantling public school systems across the United States. The book exposes how the greed of prominent US corporations and Wall Street banks was instrumental in creating the world's largest prison population and extreme anti-immigrant policies. It also demonstrates how these “racism profiteers” prevent flagrant injustices from being addressed by pitting white communities against communities of color, obscuring the fact that the struggles faced by white people are deeply connected with those faced by people of color. The book is an invaluable road map for all those who recognize that the key to unlocking the United States' full potential is for more people of all races and ethnicities to prioritize racial justice.

Notes from the Editors, September 2015

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Back Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Monthly Review

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, September 2015 (Volume 67, Number 3)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/back-issues/mr-067-04-2015-08/">buy this issue</a></div> In the U.S. case, imperialism has always been closely tied to a system of racial domination at home. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote some sixty years ago in "<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.14452/MR-004-12-1953-04_4" target="_blank">Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States</a>" (<em>Monthly Review</em>, April 1953; reprinted in <a href="http://archive.monthlyreview.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-054-11-2003-04_3" target="_blank">April 2003</a>),<div class="blockquote">The United States, with its existing social structure, cannot abolish the color line despite its promises. It cannot stop injustice in the courts based on color and race. Above all, it cannot stop the exploitation of black workers by white capital, especially in the newest South. White North America beyond the urge of sound economics is persistently driving black folk toward socialism. It is the United States which is straining every effort to enslave Asia and Africa, and educated and well-to-do black Americans are coming to know this just as well as anybody. They may delay their reaction; they may hold ominous silence. But in the end, if this pressure keeps up, they will join the march to economic emancipation [the struggle against capitalism], because otherwise they cannot themselves be free.</div>Despite the gains of the civil rights era, the reemergence of what is now called the "New Jim Crow," based on the mass incarceration and repeated police killings of unarmed black men, shows that the old systems of racial control have been "modernized" in the present, maintaining the color line, if in modified fashion: not only in relation to black Americans&mdash;though they have a special position emerging out of the whole legacy of slavery&hellip;&mdash;but also with respect to all other people of color as well.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-4" title="Vol. 67, No. 4: September 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Emigrant Psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI Archives

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Nation

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

Lawyers as Activists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dorf ◽  
Michael S. Chu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Court Action ◽  
The Government ◽  
Trump Administration

Lawyers played a key role in challenging the Trump administration’s Travel Ban on entry into the United States of nationals from various majority-Muslim nations. Responding to calls from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which were amplified by social media, lawyers responded to the Travel Ban’s chaotic rollout by providing assistance to foreign travelers at airports. Their efforts led to initial court victories, which in turn led the government to soften the Ban somewhat in two superseding executive actions. The lawyers’ work also contributed to the broader resistance to the Trump administration by dramatizing its bigotry, callousness, cruelty, and lawlessness. The efficacy of the lawyers’ resistance to the Travel Ban shows that, contrary to strong claims about the limits of court action, litigation can promote social change. General lessons about lawyer activism in ordinary times are difficult to draw, however, because of the extraordinary threat Trump poses to civil rights and the rule of law.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Americans Misperceive Racial Disparities in Economic Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110241
Author(s):  
Shai Davidai ◽  
Jesse Walker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Mobility ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Economic Disparities ◽  
Lay Beliefs ◽  
Socioeconomic System

What do people know about racial disparities in “The American Dream”? Across six studies ( N = 1,761), we find that American participants consistently underestimate the Black–White disparity in economic mobility, believing that poor Black Americans are significantly more likely to move up the economic ladder than they actually are. We find that misperceptions about economic mobility are common among both White and Black respondents, and that this undue optimism about the prospect of mobility for Black Americans results from a narrow focus on the progress toward equality that has already been made. Consequently, making economic racial disparities salient, or merely reflecting on the unique hardships that Black Americans face in the United States, calibrates beliefs about economic mobility. We discuss the importance of these findings for understanding lay beliefs about the socioeconomic system, the denial of systemic racism in society, and support for policies aimed at reducing racial economic disparities.

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