scholarly journals Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512098104
Author(s):  
Apryl Williams
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Strategic Positioning ◽  
Black Bodies

“BBQ Becky” and “Karen” memes reference real-world incidents in which Black individuals were harassed by White women in public spaces. In what I term the BBQ Becky meme genre, Black meme creators use humor, satire, and strategic positioning to perform a set of interrelated social commentaries on the behavior of White women. By conducting a visual Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) of BBQ Becky memes, I argue that Becky and Karen memes are a cultural critique of White surveillance and White racial dominance. I find that memes in the BBQ Becky meme genre call attention to, and reject, White women’s surveillance and regulation of Black bodies in public spaces—making an important connection between racialized surveillance of the past and contemporary acts of “casual” racism. This meme genre also disrupts White supremacist logics and performative racial ignorance by framing Karens and Beckys as racist—not just disgruntled or entitled. Finally, in a subversion and reversal of power dynamics, Karen and BBQ Becky memes police White supremacy and explicitly call for consequences, providing Black communities with a form of agency. Hence, I conclude that Black memes matter in the struggle for racial equity.

“Why Me?”– Questions of Racial Equity and Institutional Racism in Academia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Anne Tate
Keyword(s):  
Black Studies ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Black Bodies

Beginning with the necessary question “Why me?,” I look at a system which bars BIPOC bodies and theory. In her open letter to the US Black Studies academic community, Sylvia Wynter (1994 ) spoke about the problem of “no human involved” (“NHI”) in the policing and incarceration of Black bodies as being pertinent for how Black studies was positioned institutionally. This same white supremacist governance and surveillance “NHI” exists in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. There is something very wrong with the system of which I am a part that persistently and consistently bars BIPOC bodies and theory and only avails our presence and thought a marginal position on the proviso that the status quo of whiteliness ( Yancy 2008 ) is not disturbed. Nothing really changes in terms of anti-BIPOC racism. Rather, it remains strangely the white supremacist (settler) colonial same within Canadian race-evasive multiculturalism and UK ‘post-race’ racism.

The Special Responsibility of Public Spaces to Dismantle White Supremacist Historical Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. B. Burgard ◽  
Michael L. Boucher
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Additive Models ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Special Responsibility

Public historical spaces hold a powerful role in the teaching of a regional and national heritage curriculum. Those public sites, markers, museums, and monuments provide the narrative from which citizens conceptualize the past and they comprise a curriculum of American history. However, the calculated and intentional omission of the histories and identities of marginalized and oppressed people creates an unequal, ahistorical void that is filled by the hegemonic normality of the White supremacist narrative, creating a curriculum of White supremacy. Using research of historical understanding, racialized historical understanding, historical understanding in museums and public spaces, and the concept of erasure in history, this chapter investigates the important role public spaces play in presenting a holistic and complete historical narrative that goes beyond the additive models of multiculturalism and preserves the culture and heritage of all peoples.

scholarly journals Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, Patriarchy, and Right-Wing Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy S. Love
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Media Images ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
Images Of Women

Although media images typically present the alt right as a “manosphere,” white women continue to participate actively in white supremacist movements. Alt right women's presence as “shield maidens,” “fashy femmes,” and “trad wives” serves to soften and normalize white supremacy, often in ironic and insidious ways. In this essay, I examine the continued investment of white women in these traditional sex/gender roles espoused by the alt right. While feminism has done much to liberate women, I conclude that the images of women as Moms circulating in mainstream politics today suggest that white supremacy and white women's complicity in it has yet to be overcome.

scholarly journals “I had Missionary Grandparents for Christ’s Sakes!”: White Women in Transracial/Cultural Families Bearing Witness to Whiteness

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Willow Samara Allen
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Black African ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Bear Witness

White women have occupied a distinct position in histories of White supremacy. With the rise of White supremacist discourses in this current epoch, I posit now is a critical time to examine how White women can bear witness to their Whiteness and to ask what role they want to play in creating a more equitable future. I take up these considerations by drawing on interview data from a qualitative study of ten White women in transracial/cultural families with Black African partners to analyze how the participants conceptualize their Whiteness and how they can make connections between their subjectivities and histories of colonialism. The women’s articulations reveal that through new relational and spatial experiences across multiple forms of difference, White women can develop a changing relationship to Whiteness and what it represents in neocolonial spaces on the African continent, the Canadian settler colonial context, and within their own familial histories and relationships. Findings suggest that for White women to witness the historical weight of their Whiteness, forming linkages between their lives and broader political, economic, and social conditions of inequity is necessary. I argue White women need to create spaces of critical engagement, such as the spaces created in the study, where they can begin to imagine themselves as different racialized subjects.

Citizenship Education for a Segregated Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
White Children ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
A Site

In the 1920s from Athens, Georgia, Mildred Lewis Rutherford called on white southerners to ensure that the public school maintained racial segregation and the curriculum provided a white supremacist citizenship education. She encouraged white women, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the United Confederate Veterans to monitor public education and to make public schools a site for the reproduction of white supremacy. If Jim Crow represented the wisdom of the age, then educators were the political nurturers of the system, and children were the repositories of their efforts. White women did their job. They censored textbooks, promoted Confederate-friendly interpretations of the Civil War, conducted essay contests, offered programs to public schoolteachers, and lobbied state textbook selection committees. They also joined Margaret Robinson and other anti-radical women across the nation to promote Americanization. White segregationist women guaranteed that white children learned the lessons of Jim Crow citizenship.

scholarly journals The Obligation of White Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 1006-1019
Author(s):  
Sara Plummer ◽  
Jandel Crutchfield ◽  
Desiree Stepteau-Watson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Bird Watching ◽  
Black Bodies

On Memorial Day 2020, a white woman, Amy Cooper, was walking her unleashed dog in New York City. After being apprised of the leash law in that state by a man bird watching, Ms. Cooper proceeded to call the police stating an “African American man” was “threatening her life and that of her dog” (Ransom, 2020). While this event may seem unconnected to the field of social work, it is a modern example of the way white women, including those in social work, use emotionality, bureaucracy, and the law to control Black bodies. Social work has been and continues to be, responsible for policies and practices that maintain white supremacy culture and criminalize Black people.

Unapologetic Educational Research: Addressing Anti-Blackness, Racism, and White Supremacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110604
Author(s):  
Penny A. Pasque ◽  
Lori D. Patton ◽  
Joy Gaston Gayles ◽  
Mark Anthony Gooden ◽  
Malik S. Henfield ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Educational Leaders ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
Women Educational Leaders

We explore “ Unapologetic Educational Research: Addressing Anti-Blackness, Racism, and White Supremacy” to engage scholars in thinking about and reflecting on what it means to conduct qualitative research from a standpoint that honors Black lives in the research process while also disrupting racism and white supremacy. First, we unapologetically take up topics including engaging “diversity” in qualitative research, interrogating the etic perspective in the “new” focus on race, using critical perspectives to inform research and practice, examining the racialization of positionality, focusing on Black women educational leaders, and engaging schools and communities. Next, we engage in dialogue with each other to push ourselves—and you/the reader—to think more deeply about the serious and potentially dangerous implications of our research decisions. Given the unprecedented historical present we are all experiencing in our lifetime, we are committed to shifting the landscape of qualitative research as well as using research to shift our sociopolitical context toward racial equity and justice.

Black Online Discourse, Part 1

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-170
Author(s):  
André Brock
Keyword(s):  
Technological Literacy ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Online Discourse ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Ritual Drama

Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.

Herbert Marcuse Today: On Ecological Destruction, Neofascism, White Supremacy, Hate Speech, Racist Police Killings, and the Radical Goals of Socialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110506
Author(s):  
Charles Reitz
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Global Alliance ◽  
Current Concerns ◽  
Strategic Perspective

Herbert Marcuse’s political-philosophical vision, cultural critique, and social activism continue to offer an intelligent strategic perspective on current concerns – especially issues of ecological destruction, neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes, and racist police violence. These can be countered through a recognition of the intersectionality of radical needs of diverse constituencies and radical collaboration, giving rise to system negation as a new general interest, and an ecosocialist strategy of revolutionary activism within a global alliance of transformational forces.

A Wide-Open Town?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
The Status ◽  
The City

This chapter interrogates San Francisco’s mythical reputation as a town where “anything goes.” Pairings of men of color with white women occurred in the city press without the violent rage that it provoked in nearly every other part of the United States at the time. Homoerotic imagery and writings also proliferated with little to no controversy. While the acceptance of these activities might signal an embrace of the diverse people and lifestyles, it in fact pointed to the opposite. Precisely because of overwhelming and unquestionable dominance of white supremacy and heterosexuality, narratives of interracial mingling and same-sex love that might otherwise challenge the status quo served merely as entertaining anecdotes without any threat to the existing social order.

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