The Audacity of Hope Jones

Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of Obama as a post-racial figure or “unhyphenated man”—meaning that he is not burdened by double consciousness—embraces his election as a moment of transformative change. Randall’s novel utilizes Obama as an almost mythological character—he is, in fact, never named in the novel—to imagine a racial self-consciousness detached from structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and absent, as well, from the proscriptive burdens of both the Civil Rights and post-civil rights eras. The chapter shows how Randall’s refusal of a racialized present echoes concepts such as post-Blackness and post-soul aesthetics.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Afifah Indriani ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Maryann Erigha

Jim Crow Hollywood describes how Hollywood insiders consider race when making decisions about moviemaking. Movies by and about white Americans are said to be worthy investments, while movies by and about Black Americans are said to be risky investments. This way of thinking has profound effects on the way movies and people move through the Hollywood system—shaping their production budgets, determining who directs lucrative tent pole blockbuster franchise movies, and creating stigma around race and moviemaking. This chapter gives an overview of the book’s approach, a summary of prior research on race in culture industries, and a preview of the book’s chapters. Quotes from film directors, statistics on over a thousand movies, and emails between Hollywood insiders reveal that race is back in the forefront regarding how decision-makers in American culture institutions rationalize inequality. Except now understandings about race are mixed with talk about economic investments and cultural preferences, making racial inequality more palatable to the everyday observer and further entrenching racial divisions that counteract post-Civil rights narratives of racial progress.


Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric J. Sundquist

In Spring 2010, a manuscript version of Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting, was finally published. Written over the course of more than forty years and running to 1,100 pages, the novel not only has a great deal to tell us about Ellison's craft and his approach to the civil rights movement; it also speaks eloquently to traditions of leadership on American race relations stretching from the days of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass through the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., and, ultimately, Barack Obama.


Author(s):  
Matthew Barry Johnson

This chapter examines the current disproportion of Black defendants wrongly convicted of sexual assault through a historical lens. It notes the US history of statutorily separate sexual assault penalties based on race of the defendant and victim. Throughout US history the legal definition and societal response to rape (and rape allegations) have been influenced by considerations of race. These considerations were consistently made to the detriment of Black defendants charged with rape. The chapter reviews how race, rape law, and prosecution have been manifested in different historical eras (the period of race-based enslavement, the period of Jim Crow segregation, and the current post–civil rights period) and the mechanisms of racial bias against Black defendants in the post–civil rights era.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-898
Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryant Simon

AbstractThis enthographically-based essay uses the case of Starbucks and the company's diversity policies and relationship with Magic Johnson to explore the desire for postracialism in post Civil Rights—post Martin Luther King, Jr. and post protest—mainstream America. Where did this desire come from and how did corporate America package this desire? What is the relationship between the selling of postracialism and voting for Barack Obama? What are the implications of these marketing moves? What do they tell us about business and about ourselves?


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