scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

The Twentieth-Century Black Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-240
Author(s):  
David D. Daniels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Church ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Dissent

Religious dissent within the Black Church focuses on defending the Christian gospel against the alliance of Christianity and the race order of white supremacy marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the dominant racial order. While the White Church in the United States has historically replicated the dominant racial order of African American subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church has resisted and subverted the dominant racial order in a way in which grace pre-empts race in the functional ecclesiology of the Black Church with Christian egalitarianism affirming the equality of the races, envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.

Redrawing the Color Line?

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lee ◽  
Frank D. Bean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Du Bois

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied that the “problem of the twentieth–century is the problem of the color line,” by which he meant the tenacious black–white divide that has long characterized the nature of race relations in the United States ([1903] 1997: 45). Nearly a century later, Herbert J. Gans speculated the traditional black–white fault line may soon be replaced by a black–nonblack divide that may be qualitatively different from the black–white divide, but is hardly new for blacks, who are likely to remain at the bottom of America's racial hierarchy. Taking into account the new racial and ethnic diversity of the United States brought about by contemporary immigration, we examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification to assess where color lines are fading most rapidly and where they continue to endure. We adjudicate whether a black–white divide remains the most salient, whether a Hispanic–Anglo divide is imminent, or whether a black–nonblack fault line is emerging, as Gans forecasts.

Federalism and the Demise of Prescriptive Racism in the United States

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Young ◽  
Jerome S. Burstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
The South ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Do So

Not so long ago, nearly all African-Americans living in the United States were subject to a multitude of racial restrictions officially prescribed and enforced by state governments and their local subsidiaries. Most of the Jim Crow system dated from 1890–1910. By the middle of the twentieth century, this system was well established, so much so that many people assumed that it had always existed and that it expressed the timeless folkways of the South. However, in what strikes the historian as an astonishingly brief period during the 1950s and 1960s, the edifice was largely torn down. The puzzle is this: How could any institutional apparatus so deeply embedded, long-standing, and apparently strong be toppled so quickly? Although many scholars have discussed aspects of the puzzle, no one has offered a simple, clear, and compelling explanation. We aim to do so in this essay.

scholarly journals ESSAY ON HUMAN (RACE RELATIONS) IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Frederick D. Bedell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voter Suppression

This essay speaks to the context of domination and subordination in particular as it pertains to White Supremacy/White Privilege as manifested in the history of slavery and “Jim Crow” in the United States. It is within this historical context one can discern the present status of race relations in the United States that continues to foster race discrimination through the policies of the ethnic majority (white) power structure, e.g.-institutional racism, voter suppression laws, gerrymandering of voter districts and banking policies to name a few areas. The research of books, papers, television interviews and personal experiences provides a testament to present government policies that endeavor to maintain a social construct of dominance and subordination by the white power structure in the United States.

Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Feagin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy began in ancient Greece as a type of drama and has become an important part of the literary and critical tradition in Europe and the United States. Nondramatic poetry (‘lyric tragedy’) and some novels (for example, Moby Dick) have laid claim to being tragedies, or at least to being tragic, explicated as a type of plot or as a way of seeing the world. In general, concepts of tragedy reflect the ways humans think about and try to manage some of the most important features of human life – family, moral duty, suffering, and the noble heights and barbaric depths of human experience – in an unpredictable or intractable world. Greek and Shakespearean tragedy provide two different exemplars of tragedy as a dramatic genre. The tradition inspired by the former typically emphasizes more formal constraints; French neoclassic tragedy is part of this tradition. Shakespearean tragedy, in contrast, is written partly in prose and includes comic scenes and characters who are not nobly born. Lessing and Ibsen also favoured drama that was more realistic and relevant to a bourgeois audience. Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ has been the centre of much debate in the twentieth-century over the viability of the genre for modern times. The philosophy of tragedy also has two exemplars: Aristotle and G. W. F. Hegel. In the Aristotelian tradition, protagonists bring suffering as an unforeseen consequence of their actions. Hegel proposes that tragic plots essentially involve a protagonist’s struggle with conflicting duties rather than with unintended or unforeseen consequences. A persistent though not universal feature is a protagonist who comes to a catastrophic end, bringing others down in the process. In general, philosophies of tragedy have attempted to define the genre and elucidate how it depicts human action in relation to reason, morality and emotion. In what follows, I provide a glimpse of the state of the genre for a particular time or place, and then describe the main theories about its potential and purposes.

Redefining the Immigrant South

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uzma Quraishi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Migration Stream ◽  
University Of Houston ◽  
Politics Of Race

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston’s South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Expanded Access ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Technologies

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.

Southern Blues

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
United States Army ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
World War ◽  
Arkansas River ◽  
Over Time

Born at the turn of the twentieth century in Jim Crow Arkansas, Lee Bradley experienced the hardships of growing up black in the Mississippi and Arkansas River deltas. Introduced to music at a young age, Bradley developed an unusual talent as a country fiddler. Over time, he gained enough renown that his musicianship offered opportunities for work outside of his poor, sharecropping community. Just as he began cultivating his own sense of local music celebrity, he was pulled into the United States Army as a member of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. His experiences abroad as a solider had an enormous impact on his understanding of the South, Jim Crow, and his own plight upon his return.

scholarly journals The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past

2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Weyeneth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial System ◽  
Alternative Spaces

The article examines racial segregation as a spatial system and proposes a conceptual framework for assessing its significance. It analyzes how the ideology of white supremacy influenced design form in the United States and how Jim Crow architecture appeared on the landscape. For African Americans, the settings for everyday life were not simply the confines of this imposed architecture; the article analyzes responses such as the construction of alternative spaces. The discussion concludes by considering the architecture of segregation from the perspective of historic preservation.

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