“For Interment of White People Only”: Cemetery Superintendents’ Authority and the Wealthy White Protestant Lawn-Park Cemetery, 1886–1920

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-208
Author(s):  
Kelly B. Arehart
Keyword(s):  
Social Pressure ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
Native White

This chapter explores how white Protestant cemetery superintendents developed cultural and physical boundaries in and around their cemeteries to keep immigrants, people of color, and the poor–dead or alive–outside the walls of lawn-park cemeteries. Cemetery superintendents separated native white Protestants from those they perceived as their social inferiors through pricing, locations, and social pressure. Superintendents did this with the intention of demonstrating authority to those who were welcome in the cemetery and those who were not, including undertakers and monument makers. This authority over the lawn-park cemeteries made it possible for cemetery superintendents to position themselves as arbiters of taste. This status meant that superintendents were able to shape how their clientele decorated the lots and appreciated these cemeteries. Ultimately, cemetery superintendents became gatekeepers who enforced economical and racial hierarchies with the blessings of the native-born white Protestants interred in their cemeteries.

Reflecting Diversity

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Lea Shaver
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
The People ◽  
Upper Middle Class

This chapter describes the book Underpants Dance, which only depicts four white people out of all the thirty characters. However, the book still shows quite a significant underrepresentation of America's diversity. In this story, none of the people of color are important enough to have names. They serve only as a sprinkling of color in the background. The book's settings and events also reflect a distinctly upper-middle-class lifestyle. The chapter further explains that there is nothing wrong with any single children's book being culturally specific to a white, upper-income, American experience. The problem is that this pattern is so strong that children's literature as a whole is systematically less attractive or even alienating to children who do not fit that mold.

“Vagrant Negroes”

2018 ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The South ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Upper South

Laws regulating the movement, residence, employment, and labor of the poor, and especially of poor African Americans in states with burgeoning free populations, demonstrate how mobility, when enacted by the poor and by non-whites, was classified as a criminal action in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. In the Upper South especially, these laws had the express goal of attaching to all people of color the potential consequences of enslavement. This essay will link these ideas by tracing mobility and its construction as a classed and raced activity, as threats to existing labor regimes and social systems. This was most commonly and notoriously done through the policing of vagrancy, which allowed authorities to punish the poor, most punitively, in the South, African Americans, for unemployment or a reluctance to enter into a particular labor contract. This essay argues that the power dynamics of the South can be read clearly in the classed and raced regulation of vagrancy and geographical mobility in the antebellum era.

Advocacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Linguistic Strategies ◽  
Natchez District ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter turns away from the linguistic strategies people of color mobilized in court to investigate white lawyers’ incentives to represent black litigants and white judges’ motivations when deciding cases involving African Americans’ claims. It assesses the role of white people in the story of black litigiousness. Of course, rhetoric remained important, but rhetoric rarely led to results without a particular institutional makeup. Understanding the institutional framework of the Natchez district bench and bar—in this case, the makeup of the legal professionals, the internal hierarchies and values, the incentive patterns, and the pressure points and tensions—provides insight into how and where marginalized peoples inserted themselves and under what circumstances.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known aspect of the legal history of the slave South. African Americans were not only observers of trials, informal participants, defendants, or objects of regulation: trial court records reveal them to be prolific litigators as well. They were parties to civil suits in their own interests and directly active in legal proceedings. They sued other black people, certainly, but they also sued white people. What is more, they often won. This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians. But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways we understand the operation of power, of law, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South. The black legal experience in America cannot be reduced to white regulation and black criminality. Examining African Americans’ involvement in private law reveals a different picture. Black people appealed to the courts to protect their interests. They exploited the language of rights and property, thus including themselves within an American narrative of citizenship and privilege in advance of formal emancipation. When black litigants made such claims at law, they expected the courts to validate and execute those claims. Indeed, they sought accountability. Thus, seemingly mundane civil actions like debt recovery suits complicate our notions about the sources of rights and their relationship to civic inclusion.

Nigger and Home

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
White Children ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Free People

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Seymour
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Future Thinking ◽  
Future Health ◽  
The Poor ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Ecological Values ◽  
Social Environmental

This concluding chapter maintains that queer ecological values are more aligned with futurity and future-thinking, particularly when it comes to combating corporate greed and social/environmental injustice, even as it highlights the fact that a lack of concern for the future more accurately characterizes regimes such as heteronormativity and global capitalism: while they may operate out of concern for the reproduction of the white, middle-class heterosexual family or for the accumulation of wealth, they also ignore their immediate and future costs to the poor, to people of color, to the environment, and even to themselves. The kind of queer ecological futurity thus posited here is, instead, ethically attuned to the present and future health and safety of the biosphere as it encompasses the human, the non-human, and everything in between.

Criminal Misdemeanor Theory and Practice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Natapoff
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
General Character ◽  
Criminal Convictions ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Theoretical Overview

The misdemeanor system is a powerful governance tool. Comprising the vast bulk of the U.S. criminal process, it exerts enormous influence over the disadvantaged populations that are its primary clientele, and profoundly shapes the general character of American criminal justice. Characterized largely by speed, informality, and law enforcement discretion, the petty offense process generates millions of criminal convictions and burdensome punishments in ways that depart significantly from the standard due process model of adversarial adjudication, with special implications for the poor and people of color. This article provides a theoretical overview of the petty offense process and its legal and institutional structures, and explains its sociolegal significance for the criminal system as a whole.

Fines and Monetary Sanctions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexes Harris ◽  
Frank Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
System Involvement ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems

Despite the central role that fines and other fiscal penalties play in systems of criminal justice, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. Court systems impose fines and other monetary sanctions in response to minor administrative and traffic offenses as well as for more serious criminal offenses. Monetary sanctions are intended to provide a deterrent punishment to reduce lawbreaking, to provide opportunities for accountability through financial restitution, to restore harm caused to victims of crime, and to fund the operation and administration of courts and criminal justice systems. Fines, fees, and other monetary sanctions are the most common form of punishment imposed by criminal justice systems. Most criminal sentences in the United States include financial penalties, and monetary sanctions are routinely imposed for less serious, and far more common, infractions such as traffic or parking violations. For many, paying a monetary sanction for a low-level violation is an annoyance. However, for the poor and people of color who are disproportionately likely to be subject to criminal justice system involvement, monetary sanctions can become a vehicle for expanded social inequality and increasingly severe criminal justice contact. Failure to pay legal financial obligations often results in court summons or license suspensions that may have attendant additional costs and may trigger incarceration. In the United States, the criminal justice system is heavily and routinely involved in the lives of low-income people of color. These already-existing biases, coupled with the deep poverty that is common in many communities, join to widen the net of criminal justice involvement by escalating low-level infractions to far more serious offenses when people are unable to pay. Despite the routine justification of monetary sanctions as less-severe penalties, if imposed without restriction on the poor, they are likely to magnify the inequality producing effects of criminal justice system involvement.

The Myth of the Chosen Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 32-59
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Native People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
White People ◽  
Negro Spirituals ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The One ◽  
Revolutionary Period

The American myth of the Chosen Nation has its deepest roots in the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the English Reformation, on the other. William Tyndale, through his 1534 translation of the New Testament, popularized the notion that England was a chosen nation. Convinced that England had broken its covenant with God, the New England Puritans applied that myth to themselves. In their hands, the chosen people myth became a tool that justified oppression of both native people and enslaved Africans. By the revolutionary period, this myth had become a staple of the American imagination, accepted and used even by America’s founders. The myth of the Chosen Nation assumed both the objective reality of “white people” and the superiority of “white people” over people of color. In the Negro spirituals, enslaved blacks turned the American myth of chosenness upside down, claiming that they were God’s chosen people, suffering in an American Egypt, and waiting for God to deliver them out of American bondage into a promised land, a story to which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed on the eve of his assassination in 1968. Other blacks developed countermyths such as “Yacub’s History,” related by Malcolm X.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Rob Waters
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Society ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
British Society ◽  
White People ◽  
Cultural Expression

Many people in Britain between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s—mostly people of color, but also white people—demanded that British society needed to start “thinking black.” In this demand, they indicated a practice of identifying, confronting, and overturning the racism that they saw not only structuring British society and politics from top to bottom but also upholding all manner of other inequalities. This chapter shows thinking black as a project that brought together a diverse constituency and that encompassed a range of practices from political organization to cultural expression. It proposes that we can read thinking black as an extensive and important project in the effort to decolonize Britain and build a fairer, more equal, and more democratic society out of Britain’s imperial past.

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