Texas, monuments, toward a politics of self-reckoning

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1301-1313
Author(s):  
Katherine Hite
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
White People ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Williamson County

In this article, I examine the efforts of a group of anti-Confederate monument activists in Williamson County, Texas. The article begins with the history of the monument itself, 100 years before the activists initiated their efforts. The intransigence to removing the Confederate monument is symbolic of white resistance to struggles for racial equality more broadly. Second, I discuss how the local legal impasse has contributed to distinct anti-monument activist strategies that deploy counternarratives and memories, from performances, to challenging narrative claims regarding who is more patriotic. Finally, I explore the politics of self-reckoning—the process by which white people find that they have to answer for racism deep within themselves as well as in relation to violent white supremacy and the legal and institutional fortress that protects whiteness generally. Battling both racists and racist institutions is hard and lengthy, and monument activism persistently exposes what is at stake.

Scared Sheetless

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Newton ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The U.S

The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in the U.S. This paper argues that those attempting to understand how white supremacy works should delve into recent justifications of anti-black violence rather than simply waiting to spot the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Doing so requires scholars to disabuse themselves of taking for granted the descriptions of what may be characterized as a U.S. Christian-White imaginary and to observe the dynamic, discursive shifts that Jean-Franc̜ois Bayart calls “operational acts of identification.” Drawing on incidents from antebellum slavery to the Black Lives Matter era and beyond, it is argued that white people have long been able to justify anti-black violence by appealing to a biblicist “Negrophobia,” wherein black people are rendered as frightening, even demonic creatures that must be stopped for the good of God’s kingdom. This paper presents a critical history of violence in America that is representative of a devastatingly effective strategy that continues to fortify the functional primacy of whiteness despite popular rejections of racism.

scholarly journals "Only White People can be Racist: What does Power have to do with Prejudice?"

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-99
Author(s):  
Pooja Sawrikar ◽  
Ilan Barry Katz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Competency ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
White People ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Definition Of

Social researchers and activists who use the sociological definition of racism – that 'Racism = Prejudice + Power' – generally aim to attain racial equality by equalising differences in social power among racial groups. However, this definition can be taken to extreme when the role of social power is given disproportionately more weight than the role prejudice in explaining the occurrence and entrenchment of racism in society, such as assertions that racism is synonymous with White supremacy. Such a definition is logically flawed, demonstrates reverse racism, is disempowering for individuals from all racial groups who strive for racial equality, and absolves those who do not. We examine how the recent literature on cultural competency may provide a more effective strategic framework for reducing racism. Cultural competency is a move away from ethnocentrism and towards respect and value for cultural difference, with no racial group treated as a reference point around which the discourse on race relations revolves. In short, by properly acknowledging the role of prejudice, and not exclusively focusing on power, all racial groups can be better empowered to take responsibility for protecting the human right to racial equality.

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

2021 ◽  
pp. 030913252110303
Author(s):  
Bradley Hinger
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
White People ◽  
Inherent Characteristic ◽  
Black Geographies ◽  
Forced Movement

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

Amidst pandemic and racial upheaval: Where Asian Americans Fit

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Whitney Hua ◽  
Jane Junn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of

Abstract As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an overview of the unique racial history of Asians in the United States and analyzes the implications of dynamic racialization and status for Asian Americans. In particular, we examine the dynamism of Asian Americans' racial positionality relative to historical shifts in economic-based conceptions of their desirability as workers in American capitalism. Taking history, power, and institutions of white supremacy into account, we analyze where Asian Americans fit in contemporary U.S. politics, presenting a better understanding of the persistent structures underlying racial inequality and developing a foundation from which Asian Americans can work to enhance equality.

Temporal Emotions and Historical Vulnerability: Music as a Vehicle of Ideology in Cold War and Peste Noire

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Louise D’Arcens
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
First Century ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Metal ◽  
Ideological Differences ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This essay focuses on the Polish film Cold War and the oeuvre of the French nationalist black metal band Peste Noire, examining them as twenty-first-century texts that disclose music’s capacity to solicit emotion in the service of ideology. Despite their aesthetic and ideological differences, each text demonstrates the importance of temporal emotions – that is, emotions that register a heightened sense of the relationship between present, past and future. Each text portrays these emotions’ ideological significance when attached to ideas of a national past. Dwelling on Peste Noire’s racist-nationalist use of the medieval past, the essay explores music as a medium for emotional performances in which white people appear to convey vulnerability while actually reconfirming white supremacy. Peste Noire’s idiosyncratic performance of aggressive vulnerability is a temporal emotion that self-consciously lays claim to a long emotional tradition reaching back to the French Middle Ages.

scholarly journals A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Christian
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
State Economy ◽  
Global Linkages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Components

Twenty years after Bonilla-Silva developed the analytic components of a structural race perspective and called for “comparative work on racialization in various societies,” U.S.-centric race theory continues to be mostly rooted in a U.S. focus. What is missing is a framework that explores race and racism as a modern global project that takes shape differently in diverse structural and ideological forms across all geographies but is based in global white supremacy. Drawing from Bonilla-Silva’s national racialized social systems approach, global South scholars, and critical race scholars in the world-systems tradition, the author advances a global critical race and racism framework that highlights two main areas: (1) core components that include the “state,” “economy,” “institutions,” and “discourses” and “representations,” as divided by “racist structure” and “racist ideology” and shaped by the “history” of and current forms of transnational racialization and contemporary “global” linkages, and (2) the production of deep and malleable global whiteness. With this framework, both the permanence and flexibility of racism across the globe can be seen, in all its overt, invisible, and insidious forms, that ultimately sustains global white supremacy in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals White Fears of Dispossession: Dreyer's English, The Elements of Style, and the Racial Mapping of English Discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Laura Lisabeth
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Educational Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Elements Of Style ◽  
The Cost

Dreyer's English, by Benjamin Dreyer, the Senior Copy Editor for Random House, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style are two extraordinarily popular and commercially successful guides to English language usage that belong to a genre best described as discursive maps for language as racialized, classed and gendered territory. This review traces the history of these books to the nineteenth century "conversation handbooks" and etiquette guides that became popular in a time of shifting class boundaries Precise prescriptives for behavior and for polite conversation helped the aspirational middle-class groom themselves for genteel company. Many of these guides were published during the Reconstruction Era, and were filled with dispositions toward correct language that communicate a kind of outrage from fear of social, cultural and economic dispossession, a telltale mark of White Supremacy. These dispositions still exist in the rhetoric of both Dreyer and E.B. White and are carried through the structural racism of standardized English into educational spaces. Discourses of meritocracy are found in both the classroom and the global neoliberal workplace where "English has been turned into a product (in all senses of the word)..."Though the promotion of English is presented as a way of expanding one’s multilingual resources, it reduces one’s repertoire, as it is often learned/taught at the cost of local languages” (Canagarajah 13). As Canagarajah sees "multilingual communities [finding] spaces for voice, renegotiation, and resistance” (Translingual Practices 56), so can we make students aware of the gatekeeping and power of English by sharing its historical context.  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document