Heritage Not Hate? Confederate Flag Supporters Less Likely to Perceive Criminal Injustice, More Likely to View Police as Friends

2021 ◽  
pp. 215336872110235
Author(s):  
Alexander H. Updegrove ◽  
Maisha N. Cooper ◽  
Jared R. Dmello
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
National Poll ◽  
Black Police ◽  
Proxy Measure

Although the post-civil rights era has motivated many people to avoid appearing racist, they may still be unwilling to relinquish privileges derived from the U.S. racial hierarchy. Because the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery, which upheld this hierarchy, support for the Confederate flag may serve as a proxy measure for individuals’ commitment to maintaining privileges stemming from structural racism. Moreover, given that the modern legal system upholds this same racial hierarchy through anti-Black discrimination, individuals who prioritize protecting their privilege may soothe the guilt they feel for benefiting from structural racism by convincing themselves the legal system treats everyone equally. Similarly, because flag supporters identify with the symbol of a failed nation that considered northern states to have insufficiently policed Black people, they may view police as protectors of the racial hierarchy. Hypotheses were tested using randomly sampled CBS News national poll data. As anticipated, flag supporters were 66% less likely to perceive anti-Black criminal justice system bias, 60% less likely to perceive anti-Black police bias, 34% less likely to consider racial profiling widespread, and 55% more likely to view police as friends.

Introduction and Overview

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Classification Scheme ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Definition Of

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

Movin’ on Up—and Out

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-118
Author(s):  
Courtney R. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black America ◽  
Visual Politics ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter discusses the visual culture of 1970s Black America, focusing especially on popular culture artifacts such as film, television, and comics, to make sense of the idea of movement in the postsegregationist United States. It attends to the representation of black people in various locations—from the inner city to the suburbs to a historical memory of the plantation slavery, the middle passage, and an African motherland—in visual forms, including Afrocentrist iconography, photography, and fine art. By attending to popular images, an important if not fuller picture of Black visual politics during the post-civil rights era becomes apparent.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

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.

Dancing in New York

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Halifu Osumare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Black Dance ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Second Tier ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Dance Companies

This chapter describes the author’s return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe and continues to explore her blackness in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 70s (first in Boston and then in New York). Joining the Rod Rodgers Dance Company (RRDC) in NYC allows the author to become a part of developing concert dance among the major black dance companies who were second tier to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The author explores the vitality of professional NY dance and the experiences that dancing with RRDC provided, such as the Dancemobile in the 5 boroughs, the cultural integration of the Lincoln Center, and the opening of the dance season on Broadway. Additionally, she explores NY’s African dance companies and the growing need to make black dance relevant to black people in these shifting political times.

scholarly journals Racism, Chronic Disease, and Mental Health: Time to Change our Racialized System of Second-Class Care

Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 1276
Author(s):  
Judith L. Albert ◽  
Claire M. Cohen ◽  
Thomas F. Brockmeyer ◽  
Ana M. Malinow
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Chronic Disease ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Mental Health Disorders ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Eligibility Criteria ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The Us ◽  
Health Disorders

In this article, we describe how the “weathering hypothesis” and Adverse Childhood Experiences set the stage for higher rates of chronic disease, mental health disorders and maternal mortality seen in African American adults. We illustrate the toll that untreated and overtreated mental health disorders have on Black individuals, who have similar rates of mental health disorders as their white counterparts but have fewer outpatient mental health services and higher rates of hospitalizations. We discuss the history of Medicaid, which, while passed alongside Medicare during the Civil Rights era, was Congress’s concession to Southern states unwilling to concede federal oversight and funds to the provision of equal healthcare for poor and Black people. Medicaid, which covers 33% of all Blacks in the US and suffers from chronic underfunding and state efforts to weaken it through demonstration waivers, is a second-class system of healthcare with eligibility criteria that vary by state and year. We propose the adoption of a national, single payer Medicare for All system to cover everyone equally, from conception to death. While this will not erase all structural racism, it will go a long way towards leveling the playing field and achieving greater equity in the US.

Moving out of the Margins and into the Mainstream

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Sakamoto ◽  
ChangHwan Kim ◽  
Isao Takei
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
New South ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Demographic Growth

This chapter explores the beginning of a new stage of Asian American history that is characterized by improved socioeconomic opportunities and a move away from the Asian American strongholds of Hawaii and California. The high levels of Asian American demographic growth and migration to the New South are facilitated by a less discriminatory labor market than was characteristic of the pre-Civil Rights era. Many Asian Americans are flocking to the New South to take advantage of its improved socioeconomic opportunities. Whereas the better-paying and more desirable jobs were reserved for whites in the Old South, Asian Americans in the New South no longer appear to be automatically excluded from the top of the “racial hierarchy.”

RACIAL APATHY AND HURRICANE KATRINA: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyrone A. Forman ◽  
Amanda E. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Ignorance ◽  
Post Civil Rights

During the crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina, many Americans expressed surprise at the dramatic levels of racial inequality captured in the images of large numbers of poor Black people left behind in devastated New Orleans. In this article we argue that, to better understand both the parameters of contemporary racial inequality reflected in the hurricane's aftermath and why so many were surprised about the social realities of racial inequality that social scientists have known about for decades, it is essential to recognize the shifting nature of Whites' racial attitudes and understandings. There is widespread evidence that in the post-civil rights era the expression of White racial prejudice has changed. In fact, during the post-civil rights era subtle and indirect forms of prejudice have become more central to the sustenance and perpetuation of racial inequality than are overt forms of prejudice. We draw on both survey and qualitative data to investigate current manifestations of White racial attitudes and prejudices. Our results indicate that racial apathy, indifference towards racial and ethnic inequality, is a relatively new but expanding form of racial prejudice. We further show that Whites' systematic “not knowing” about racial inequality (White ignorance), which was manifest in the reaction to the crises after Hurricane Katrina, is related to this racial indifference. Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race). These phenomena serve as pillars of contemporary racial inequality that have until now received little attention. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and the practical implications of our results for understanding racial dynamics in the post-Katrina United States.

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