Racial Debts, Individual Slights, and Sleights of Hand in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust

2019 ◽  
pp. 186-207
Author(s):  
Mary A. Knighton
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Clarence Brown ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
Do So

William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison's obsession with defining and ridding himself of a debt he owes Lucas Beauchamp, a black man. When a lynch mob threatens Lucas, it becomes Chick's responsibility to save his life. Guided by Lucas in how to do so, Chick learns about cross-racial family ties and the collective profits and debts of history. Contemporary civil rights and anti-lynching movements, the actual lynching of Ellwood Higginbotham, as well as the shooting of the film version of Intruder in Faulkner's own Oxford, Mississippi in 1949 amplify the novel's debt and reparations theme. Despite publisher and studio warnings, Faulkner and director Clarence Brown render lynching central to Intruder's story while Kauffer's cover art encodes artists' resistance to censorship and marketing demands.

Oregon’s K–12 Ethnic Studies Bill

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-195
Author(s):  
Shirley A. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Protected Group ◽  
Social Minorities ◽  
K 12 ◽  
Racial Ethnic ◽  
Do So

In 2017, Oregon passed House Bill 2845 requiring Ethnic Studies curriculum in grades K–12. It was the first state in the nation to do so. The bill passed almost fifty years after the founding of the country’s first Ethnic Studies department. The passage of an Ethnic Studies bill in a state that once banned African Americans and removed Indigenous peoples from their land requires further examination. In addition, the bill mandates that Ethnic Studies curriculum in Oregon's schools includes “social minorities,” such as Jewish and LGBTQ+ populations which makes the bill even more remarkable. As such, it is conceivable for some observers, a watered-down version of its perceived original intent—one that focuses on racial and ethnic minorities. Similarly, one can draw analogies to the revision of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 when it included women as a protected group. Grounded in a socio-political history that otherwise would not have been included, this essay examines the productive and challenging aspect of HB 2845. Framing the bill so it includes racial, ethnic, and social minorities solved the problem of a host of bills that may not have passed on their own merit while simultaneously and ironically making it easier to pass similar bills.

Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110420
Author(s):  
Jaime Amparo Alves
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Territorial Dispute ◽  
House Arrest ◽  
Black Subject ◽  
Black Man ◽  
The City ◽  
Do So

This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

scholarly journals Does Gender Top Family Ties? Within-Couple and between-Sibling Sharing of Elderly Care

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Luppi ◽  
Tiziana Nazio
Keyword(s):  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Elderly Care ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Sex Composition ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Female Partners ◽  
Share Data ◽  
Transfers Of Care ◽  
Lower Contribution ◽  
Do So

Abstract Most elderly care continues to be delivered informally within families. Yet we still lack a thorough understanding of how care responsibilities are shared across both family ties and generations. We explore the gender dimension of caregiving in the distribution of elderly care between couple members (care provided to parents and parents-in-law and to children or grandchildren) and its associations with siblings' sex composition in a range of European countries. Using SHARE data and multinomial multilevel models, we test how responsibility for elderly care is shared across children and mediated by their partners and their siblings' sex composition as well as how it is combined with other downward care responsibilities, towards children and grandchildren. Results confirm the very gendered nature of elderly care. But who do men shift elderly care responsibilities to? We find that elderly care is more likely shifted to sisters than brothers, especially when caregiving becomes intense. We also find that the lower contribution by sons does not seem to prompt transfers of care responsibilities to their female partners within couples. Finally, although upward and downward caring responsibilities might compete, we find that individuals who are more inclined to provide care tend to do so in both directions.

scholarly journals Access to Counsel

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl R. Kaiser ◽  
Victor D. Quintanilla
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
Organizational Diversity ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Psychological Barriers ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Do So

Employment discrimination claimants in general, and racial minority claimants in particular, disproportionately lack access to legal counsel. When employment discrimination claimants lack counsel, they typically abandon their claims, or if they pursue their claims, they do so pro se (without counsel), a strategy that is seldom successful in court. Access to counsel is, hence, a decisive component in whether employment discrimination victims realize the potential of civil rights enforcement. Psychological science analyzes access to counsel by identifying psychological barriers—such as threatened social identity, mistrust in legal authorities, and fear of repercussions—that prevent employment discrimination victims from pursuing counsel. The analysis also identifies how cultural beliefs and practices concerning justice—such as meritocracy beliefs, perceived post-racialism, and organizational diversity initiatives—shape how judges, jurors, and lay people think about discrimination. Furthermore, counsels’ perceptions of other’s beliefs about discrimination shape their assessed likelihood of prevailing. These psychological barriers intersect with structural barriers to shape counsels’ evaluation of each case’s likely financial viability, which can prevent counsel from accepting cases that they otherwise deem meritorious. Policy can help those who experience employment discrimination obtain legal representation and meaningful redress for civil rights violations.

scholarly journals Exploring racial politics, personal history and critical reception

2013 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Gwenda Young
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Personal History ◽  
University Of Tennessee ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Clarence Brown ◽  
White Press ◽  
The University

Using archival sources from the Clarence Brown Archive at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, newspaper clippings from a wide range of national and regional press, and unpublished interviews, this article explores how the complexities and contradictions that are central to Clarence Brown’s film version of Intruder in the Dust (1949)—complexities that, arguably, make this film the most ambiguous of all the “race issue” films released in 1949—are mirrored in the director’s own deeply divided attitude to race and to the South. These tensions also surface in the critical reception of the film in the white press, and perhaps more tellingly, in the black press of 1949. The notion that this was a film generally acclaimed in the black press can be challenged, or at the very least nuanced, through a closer examination of newspaper archives, which, in turn, reveals some of the divisions within black intellectual circles of the late 1940s.

Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Guion Bluford

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Cathleen Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
Black Man ◽  
The Cold War

Cathleen Lewis argues that throughout the Cold War, race played an important role in foreign policy with the United States painfully aware that its civil rights situation could have an adverse impact on foreign policy ambitions abroad. The USSR preyed on that U.S. sensitivity, calling the country out on its failures. In the early 1980s, almost a decade after U.S. foreign policy had all but abandoned race as a Cold War issue, the race issue reemerged, albeit briefly when the USSR launched the first black man into space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, beating NASA’s own Guion Bluford. This final battle over race in the Cold War ultimately revealed American domestic progress and the hollowness of Soviet space stunts.

Setting Up the Voter Education Project, 1959–1962

Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Education Project ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Willingness To Help ◽  
Do So

This chapter explains the origins of the VEP. Over four years, three very different sides came together to form the VEP: the Department of Justice, civil rights activists, and liberal philanthropists. After John F. Kennedy became President, the Department of Justice under his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, signalled a willingness to help African Americans vote. Civil rights activists worked with philanthropists like Stephen Currier to create a source of funds for widespread registration fieldwork. Working together, all parties sought tax-exemption for the project, and to do so, they kept the VEP idea discreet because they did not want to attract attention from segregationists in government.

The Great Divide

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Grassroots Groups ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Do So

This chapter recounts the radical change in communications technology that helped launch many organizations that abandoned the translocal organizing structure because the most modern means of communication available to them—the computerized mailing list—made it easy for them to do so. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement—which was built on networks of cells of grassroots groups spread out through the country and coordinated, loosely, by national organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the new movements, for the most part, utilized the ability to engage in mass mailing to create national organizations divorced from grassroots networks. Mass mailing would then shape social movements for two generations and the next forty years. This forty-year period also saw two different phenomenon unfold: one socioeconomic and one social. There was both a dramatic increase in economic inequality as well as a decrease in generalized trust.

A Moot Court for Constitutional Issues

1984 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 7-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Claude ◽  
Paul E. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
University Of Maryland ◽  
Analytical Skills ◽  
Active Pursuit ◽  
The University ◽  
Do So

According to the syllabus of “Civil Rights and the Constitution“—an undergraduate public law course at the University of Maryland—we study Supreme Court cases, and we “do constitutional law.” The phrase—“doing law“—is intended to capture Sheldon Wolin's notion of “doing political theory.” That is, public law, like political theory, should be an active pursuit, not a passive process of ingestion. Law and theory are rich in pedagogical opportunities to involve students with issues of recurrent public importance, and to do so in a creative manner that develops critical, principled, analytical skills. In public law, this can be done by reliance on structured role-playing, involving judicial problem solving, and focusing on a normatively exciting hypothetical issue over which participants might reasonably differ.

Speaking of Abjection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Film Version ◽  
White Backlash

The genre of the white liberal race novel was revived in 2009 by Stockett’s bestseller and its high-profile Hollywood film version. Much controversy broke out over the novel’s depiction of black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, which was a center of Civil Rights activism and white backlash. Were these characters stereotypes or deconstructions of the “mammy” figure? The chapter demonstrates that the narrative sections told by the maids contain much subversion, and that even the white protagonist exhibits resistance to orthodox female gender norms. Understanding the novel also requires attention to its specific historical setting amidst the Civil Rights tumult in Mississippi and Alabama during the years in which the novel is set, including the attempt to integrate the universities in those two states and the assassination of Medgar Evers. These events belong to the theme of the necessity for change reiterated throughout the novel.

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