The Great American Football Ritual: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Inequality

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Foley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
American Football ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
High School Football ◽  
Community Sport ◽  
And Gender

An ethnographic study of one football season in a small South Texas town is presented to explore the extent that community sport is, as various critical theorists have suggested, a potential site for counterhegemonic cultural practices. Football is conceptualized as a major community ritual that socializes future generations of youth. This broad, holistic description of socialization also notes various moments of ethnic resistance engendered by the Chicano civil rights movement. Other moments of class and gender resistance to the football ritual are also noted. Finally, the way players generally resisted attempts to thoroughly rationalize their sport is also described. In spite of these moments of resistance, this study ultimately shows how deeply implicated community sport—in this case high school football—is in the reproduction of class, gender, and racial inequality. The white ruling class and the town’s patriarchal system of gender relations are preserved in spite of concessions to the new ethnic challenges. When seen from a historical community perspective, sport may be less a site for progressive, counterhegemonic practices than critical sport theorists hope.

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney E. Hero ◽  
Morris Levy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
State Of The Union ◽  
Economic Individualism ◽  
And Gender

AbstractWe analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

The Newest South

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-108
Author(s):  
Brenda Plummer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
New South ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Brenda Plummer examines the effect of the U.S. space program on race relations in key areas of the South, and the impact of that connection on popular culture. She also explores the intersection of the struggle for racial equality and aerospace exploration, as both constituted potent narratives of freedom in the American imaginary. Plummer disputes the assumption that NASA as an instrument of modernization and partner in the creation of the New South was implicitly allied with the civil rights movement. While the transformation of parts of the Deep South undeniably broke up earlier political, economic, and cultural patterns, aerospace research and development helped inaugurate a successor regime that neither challenged the structural foundations of racial inequality nor guarded against the production of new disparities.

The Changing Demographics of the South and Its Impact on National Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Susan A. MacManus ◽  
Jeremy D. Mayer ◽  
Mark J. Rozell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
High Growth ◽  
The South ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Economic Diversification ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Changing Demographics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Racial Ethnic

The South has grown more in the past fifty years than any other region, leading to major changes in its economy and the racial/ethnic, gender, generational, socioeconomic, and political composition of its electorate. In the fifty years since the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the South’s politics have become more polarized, with sharp differences by race, place of birth, age, education, income, and gender. Most of the changes occurred during a period of realignment, during which Republicans expanded their regional dominance. But continued in-migration, accompanied by economic diversification and racial/ethnic and generational shifts, is beginning to push the political pendulum in the opposite direction. This “redirection” is most noticeable in the region’s high growth states, particularly in their fast-growing metropolitan areas characterized by larger concentrations of young, minority (and more Democratic-leaning) voters. Overall, this chapter lends credibility to the “demographics is destiny” thesis.

Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Black Art ◽  
And Gender

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

scholarly journals Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Kruse
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Dna Evidence ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Point Of Departure

Based on an ethnographic study of fingerprint and DNA evidence practices in the Swedish judicial system, this article analyses the materialization of forensic evidence. It argues that forensic evidence, while popularly understood as firmly rooted in materiality, is inseparably technoscientific and cultural. Its roots in the material world are entangled threads of matter, technoscience and culture that produce particular bodily constellations within and together with a particular sociocultural context. Forensic evidence, it argues further, is co-materialized with crimes as well as with particular bodily and social constellations. Consequently, the article suggests that an analysis of how forensic evidence is produced can contribute to feminist understandings of the inseparability of sex and gender: understanding bodies as ongoing technoscientific-material-cultural practices of materialization may be a fruitful approach to analysing their complexity, and the relationships in which they are placed, without surrendering to either cultural or biological determinism. Taking a theoretical point of departure not only in an STS-informed approach, but also in material feminist theorizations, the article also underlines that the suggested theoretical conversations across borders of feminist theory and STS should be understood as a two-way-communication where the two fields contribute mutually to each other.

Washington Is a Giant Awakened

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Survival ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
War Effort

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.

Feminist Psychology in North America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Sheese
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Feminist Psychology ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender

Feminist psychology as an institutionalized field in North America has a relatively recent history. Its formalization remains geographically uneven and its institutionalization remains a contested endeavor. Women’s liberation movements, anticolonial struggles, and the civil rights movement acted as galvanizing forces in bringing feminism formally into psychology, transforming not only its sexist institutional practices but also its theories, and radically challenging its epistemological and methodological commitments and constraints. Since the late 1960s, feminists in psychology have produced radically new understandings of sex and gender, have recovered women’s history in psychology, have developed new historiographical methods, have engaged with and developed innovative approaches to theory and research, and have rendered previously invisibilized issues and experiences central to women’s lives intelligible and worthy of scholarly inquiry. Heated debates about the potential of feminist psychology to bring about radical social and political change are ongoing as feminists in the discipline negotiate threats and dilemmas related to collusion, colonialism, and co-optation in the face of ongoing commitments to positivism and individualism in psychology and as the theory and practice of psychology remains embedded within broader structures of neoliberalism and global capitalism.

Before Busing

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zebulon Vance Miletsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Educational Equality ◽  
Court Order ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The North ◽  
Unique Nature

Boston’s long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston’s busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city’s history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenth-century origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a “southern space” ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).1The issues engaged by Boston’s freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing.

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.

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