Racism, Colorism, and Language within Their Macro Contexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Arthur K. Spears
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Socioeconomic Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Economic Stratification ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

This chapter contends that scholars of language and race have insufficiently attended to the constraints imposed by a pentad of forces that (re)produce racialized hierarchies. These macro-forces include the global capitalist system, the nation-state, political economic stratification, and other forms of socioeconomic inequality. It argues that racism in the United States emerges from the social inequality imposed by global capitalism and the hegemonic influence of institutionalized racism rationalized by ideologies of white supremacy. This emphasis on disclosing the basis for racialization and the deliberate construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies is a critical step in revealing and undermining the historical arc of racist thinking. The terror, violence, and brutality of these systems are not only the macro-contexts within which race and language are produced, but white supremacy comes to depend on the idea of race, and therefore, processes of racialization for its continued propagation.

scholarly journals Transformative Action: A Theoretical Framework for Breaking New Ground

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Transformative Action

Developed by Paulo Freire, critical consciousness (CrC) is a philosophical, theoretical, and practice-based framework encompassing an individual’s understanding of and action against the structural roots of inequity and violence. This article explores divergent CrC scholarship regarding CrC theory and practice; provides an in-depth review of inconsistencies within the CrC “action” domain; and, in an effort to resolve discrepancies within the existing CrC literature, presents a new construct—transformative action (TA)—and details the process of TA development. Comprising three hierarchical levels of action (critical, avoidant, and destructive) for each level of the socio-ecosystem, TA serves as a model for community-based practitioners, such as those working in the fields of social work and public affairs. The authors argue that transformation is necessary to deconstruct the social institutions in the United States that maintain and perpetuate systemic inequity, creating dehumanizing consequences. Through critical TA, community workers can make visible hidden socio-structural factors, such as institutionalized racism and White privilege, countering the historic trend of community workers acting as tools of social control—that is, socializing individuals to adapt to marginalized roles and accept inferior treatment; maintaining and enforcing the status quo; and facilitating conformity with inequitable societal norms and practices. The authors also discuss the implications of community-based TA practice.

The Mythic Dimensions of American Capitalism

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Review ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
World Government ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Capitalism in the United States is unthinkable apart from the myth of White Supremacy, for capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen people. Further, white Americans imagined that capitalism was God-ordained, grounded in “Nature and Nature’s God,” and heralded a golden age of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Following the Civil War, the myth of the Chosen Nation morphed into the myth that God blessed the righteous with wealth and the wicked with poverty—the central assumption of the Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie appealed to all these myths in his 1889 essay, “Wealth,” in the North American Review. Likewise, many American industrialists invoked these myths to justify their goal: the economic conquest of the world. Government and industry, however, typically excluded blacks from this engine of economic prosperity, thereby contributing to realities already in place—systemic racism and white privilege. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire capitalism and the myths that sustained it came under withering assault from labor, the Social Gospel movement, and black social critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Langston Hughes, especially since the wealth of the Gilded Age contrasted with unprecedented numbers of lynchings of America’s blacks.

Migrant Detention and Incarceration

Criminology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Alvear ◽  
Patrisia Macías-Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Private Business ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
The Social ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender

Over the last 30 years, the detention of irregular immigrants, undocumented workers, and the incarceration of immigration “offenders” has been on the rise. After 9/11, the social construction of immigrants as a source of “danger” reached a new scale, and the mechanisms through which immigration enforcement reproduces the criminal justice system became even more sophisticated. This article discusses the expansion of migrant detention in the overall “punitive turn” of immigration enforcement, the frequent tension between the state’s practices of power and detainees’ human rights, and the ways through which the securitization of migration replicates the commonsense link among immigration, crime, and national (in)security. This article starts with the complex distinction between migrant detention and incarceration as two different but related state enforcement apparatuses. While detention is a form of “administrative confinement” characterized by a deprivation of liberty for immigration-related civil offenses, incarceration refers to a deprivation of liberty for violations of criminal statutes. Based on detainees’ experiences, this article further examines whether migrant detention should (or not) be conceptualized as punishment, its importation of carceral tactics, and the increasing punitiveness of detention in the 21st century. Global capitalism has made the expansion of migrant detention possible. The privatization of detention has not only brought an extension of institutions, means, agents, and enforcement facilities, but it has also produced enormous profits for corporations, transforming detention into a profitable private business. At the micro level, the privatization also creates a complex geography of detention, a set of politics of carceral time and space, and a tension between mobility and immobility. Overall, the article reviews the most prominent trends in migrant detention in the northwestern hemisphere and in jurisdictions usually neglected by the mainstream literature. The article pays attention to global trends in detention across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and northwestern Europe and also reviews understudied regions such as Australia, Indonesia, Greece, Sweden, Malta, and Norway, among others. The explicit effort to expand the mainstream literature’s Euro-American bias is here developed to problematize and expand the naturalized boundaries of immigration enforcement scholarship. At the same time, this bibliography emphasizes the need for developing more intersectional approaches on migrant detention particularly attentive to factors such as race/ethnicity, class, and gender. The authors would like to thank Mary Bosworth, Cesar Hernandez, David Hernandez, Nicholas de Genova, Amanda McDonald, and the reviewer for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Any mistakes and shortcomings are our own.

The White Working Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Gest
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Political Economic

In recent years, the world has been re-introduced to the constituency of “white working class” people. In a wave of revolutionary populism, far right parties have scored victories across the transatlantic political world: Britain voted to leave the European Union, the United States elected President Donald Trump to enact an “America First” agenda, and Radical Right movements are threatening European centrists in elections across the Continent. In each case, white working class people are driving a broad reaction to the inequities and social change brought by globalization, and its cosmopolitan champions. In the midst of this rebellion, a new group consciousness has emerged among the very people who not so long ago could take their political, economic, and cultural primacy for granted. Who are white working class people? What do they believe? Are white working class people an “interest group”? What has driven them to break so sharply with the world’s trajectory toward a more borderless, interconnected meritocracy? How can a group with such enduring power feel marginalized? This perplexing constituency must be understood if the world is to address and respond to the social and political backlash they are driving. The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides the context for understanding the politics of this large, perplexing group of people. The book begins by explaining what “white working class” means in terms of demographics, history, and geography, as well as the ways in which this group defines itself and has been defined by others. It will address whether white identity is on the rise, why white people perceive themselves as marginalized, and the roles of racism and xenophobia in white consciousness. It will also look at whether the white working class has distinct political attitudes, their voting behavior, and their prospects for the future. This accessible book provides a nuanced view into the forces driving one of the most complicated and consequential political constituencies today.

scholarly journals The utopian challenge to global capitalism by Walter van den Broeck in Terug naar Walden

Literator ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andries Visagie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The People ◽  
Country Road ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Antonio Negri

The socialist sympathies that inform the writing of Flemish author Walter van den Broeck align him with a well-established tradition of socially engaged writing in Flanders. In his novel Terug naar Walden (Back to Walden), published in 2009, he revisits the Walden project of the Dutch reformer and writer Frederik van Eeden (1860−1932). Van den Broeck suggests that a reconsideration of the socialist ideals that inspired Van Eeden to establish settlements in the Netherlands and the United States is warranted in the light of the economic crisis triggered by unchecked capitalist practices in 2008. In Terug naar Walden Ruler Marsh, the richest man in the world, unleashes a global financial crisis as a form of retaliation against the capitalist system that ruined his parents. Marsh returns to the Kempen in Flanders where his family originated. In a Heideggerean affirmation of the local as exemplified by the country road, Van den Broeck articulates his vision of the common, that theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire trilogy have attempted to salvage from communist thinking, with a utopian notion that a stronger connection with the land and the people within one’s immediate environment may provide a useful premise for the development of viable alternatives to capitalism.

scholarly journals The birth of the blues and the birth of biblical law in parallel: A dialogue with James Cone’s theology of the cross

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-127
Author(s):  
Mark R. Glanville
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Social Law ◽  
Redemptive Suffering ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Cross Of Christ ◽  
The Cross

This article seeks to learn from James Cone’s theology of the cross as articulated in his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by bringing Cone’s theology into conversation with the theology and ethics of the book of Deuteronomy. It proceeds by first discerning the ways in which the birth of the blues may in some ways parallel the birth of biblical law. Blues and jazz music were birthed in the agonizing suffering of the black community during the era of lynching, expressing both the grief and the resilience and hope of African Americans. Perhaps with some similarity, biblical law is a divine–human response to ancient Israel’s experience of enslavement and genocide in Egypt. This law is an ancient invitation into authentic community. Next, the article discerns core themes in Cone’s theology of the cross, namely solidarity with the oppressed, redemptive suffering, and victory over oppression. Cone unfolds these themes by seeking to understand the cross through the experience of the torturous suffering of blacks in the South. The article then finds these same themes in the theology and ethics of Deuteronomy through an examination of the social law, feasting texts, covenant texts, and laws concerning slavery in this book. We learn from Cone that the horrific barbarity of white supremacy in a culture of lynching is a vital corrective lens through which to see and understand the cross of Christ for US Christians. Indeed, Deuteronomy forces us to conclude that a theology of the cross that ignores dynamics of oppression and liberation is theologically myopic. The argument, by extension, is that the suffering of blacks in the United States is also a fresh and vital lens through which to view and understand biblical law.

Post-Postracial America

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Landsberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
White House ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
A Site

A seismic shift in the racial landscape of the United States occurred in 2016. The prevailing discourse about a “postracial America,” though always, in the words of Catherine Squires a “mystique,” was firmly and finally extinguished with the election of Donald J. Trump. Race, in the form of racial prejudice, erupted in Trump’s political rhetoric and in the rhetoric of his supporters. At the same time, the continued significance and consequences of racial division in America were also being asserted for politically progressive ends by the increasingly prominent #blacklivesmatter movement and by the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC, not far from the White House. This article tracks the resurgence of race in the US cultural landscape against the racially depoliticized myth of the “postracial” by focusing first on the HBO television series Westworld, which epitomizes that logic. The museum, which opened its doors against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, lodges a scathing critique of the very notion of the postracial; in fact, it signals the return of race as an urgent topic of national discussion. Part of the work of the museum is to materialize race, to move race and white supremacy to the center of the American national narrative. This article points to the way the museum creates what Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus,” and thus becomes a site of possibility for politics. The museum, in its very presence on the Mall, its provocative display strategies, and its narrative that highlights profound contradictions in the very meaning of America, intervenes in what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible” and thus creates the conditions for reconfiguring the social order. In part, it achieves this by racializing white visitors, forcing them to feel their own race in uncomfortable ways. The article suggests that this museum, and the broader emerging discourse about race in both film and television, offers new ways to think about the political work of culture.

Africa from Post-Colonialism to Multilateralism

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 98-110
Author(s):  
Marek Hrubec
Keyword(s):  
Potential Model ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Colonialism ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Political Economic

Abstract This article deals with a differentiation of the historical phases of African trajectories in the global context from independence to the present day in order to overcome colonialism and global capitalism. It explains how to understand the historical trajectories from post-colonialism to unilateralism, multilateralism, and finally, the potential of polylateralism. It focuses on the problems and tendencies of advancement in Africa, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, in order to indicate a potential model for the social, political, economic, and cultural arrangement of relations for the recognition of people in Africa in global interactions.

scholarly journals The Differing Revolutionary Positions of Gramsci and Trotsky in Relation to Classical Marxism, the Peasantry, and the Majority World

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brittain
Keyword(s):  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Majority World ◽  
Permanent Revolution ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Mode Of Production

<p>While differing arguments are found within the discipline, the principal denominator uniting theories of Marxist revolution is that organized class-based struggle can consequentially result in a more equitable society, one which surpasses a capitalist mode of production. Augmenting Marx's work on the growing realities of the competitive capitalist system, Lenin highlighted that as capitalism expands it increasingly becomes a model not of competing capitalist producers but one of centralized economic monopolies within global society. With this political economic shift in global capitalism, Gramsci and Trotsky penned differing theoretical responses toward the importance of revolutionary tactics in an age of imperialism. It is in this vein that this article delves into the varied responses of permanent revolution and war of position/manoeuvre, while illustrating which theory most effectively demonstrates the capacity and emancipatory efforts of peoples located in countries outside of the imperial nations (i.e. the majority world).</p>

Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 245-292
Author(s):  
Scott C. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Construction Of Whiteness

This essay applies an intersectional approach to the analysis of the history of anti-Catholicism and Islamophobia in the United States as manifestations of White supremacy. It offers a comparative analysis of these two phenomena in an attempt to suggest that a certain intersection exists between each and the social construction of Whiteness and the maintenance of White power and privilege in US American history. It concludes with observations on progress in the development of Catholic–Muslim relations through concerted efforts by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and various US Muslim organizations, noting that the majority of Catholics in the United States have benefited from White privilege.

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