Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Corporate Management ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Management Positions ◽  
Black Poverty ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Elected Office

This epilogue considers the developments in racial progress since the decades covered in this volume. It shows how millions of African Americans find themselves mired in poverty and trapped in a world shaped by post-industrial urban decline and the retrenchment of the welfare state, their chances for a better future severely constrained by the failure of public education and the persistence of discriminatory practices in employment, housing, credit and insurance markets, the criminal justice system, and a range of public institutions. Having more African Americans holding elected office, working in corporate management positions, owning their own businesses, or working and studying on college campuses over the past few decades has not substantially undermined structural inequality or cyclical black poverty.

scholarly journals ADAPTIVE GARDENING PRACTICES AMONG OLDER AFRICAN AMERICANS IN DETROIT

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S515-S515
Author(s):  
Jessica C Robbins ◽  
Kimberly Seibel
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Emotional Wellbeing ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Selective Optimization With Compensation ◽  
Older African Americans ◽  
Physical Abilities ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
Post Industrial

Abstract It is well established that gardening can promote physical, social, and emotional wellbeing for many older adults in varied circumstances (Milligan, Gatrell, and Bingley 2004; Nicklett, Anderson, and Yen 2016; Wang and MacMillan 2013). In post-industrial cities formed by historical and ongoing processes of structural inequality such as Detroit, Michigan, gardening is beneficial for residents in terms of health, economic activity, community-building, and city beautification (Lawson 2005; Pitt 2014; Pothukuchi 2015; White 2011). However, research has less frequently investigated how gardening can promote wellbeing for older adults living in contexts of urban structural inequality. This poster addresses this gap by exploring how older African American gardeners in Detroit adapt their gardening practices to changing physical abilities and capacities. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted during one gardening season (March-October 2017) with older African Americans in Detroit (n= 27), we employ a selective-optimization-with-compensation framework (Baltes and Baltes 1990) to understand the modifications that older Detroiters make in their gardening practices as they age. Findings demonstrate that older African Americans in Detroit engage in gardening in flexible, creative ways that accommodate new physical limitations, while also connecting to changes occurring in the city of Detroit. This study thus has implications for further understanding how gardening can benefit older adults, and how older adults can contribute vitality to contexts of structural inequality.

African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets.

ILR Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 714
Author(s):  
Jessica Gordon Nembhard ◽  
James B. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Industrial Labor ◽  
Post Industrial

scholarly journals Temporal aspects of wellbeing in later life: gardening among older African Americans in Detroit

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (12) ◽  
pp. 2614-2634
Author(s):  
Jessica C. Robbins ◽  
Kimberly A. Seibel
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
City Life ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Older African Americans ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

AbstractGardening has well-established physical, social and emotional benefits for older adults in varied circumstances. In Detroit, Michigan (United States of America), as in many cities, policy makers, funders, researchers, community organisations and residents regard gardening as a means of transforming bodies, persons, communities, cities and broader polities. We draw on ethnographic research conducted during one gardening season with 27 older African Americans in Detroit to foreground the social dimensions of wellbeing in later life and thus develop a more robust and nuanced understanding of gardening's benefits for older adults. Based on anthropological understandings of personhood and kinship, this article expands concepts of wellbeing to include social relations across multiple scales (individual, interpersonal, community, state) and temporalities (of the activity itself, experiences of ageing, city life). Even when performed alone, gardening fosters connections with the past, as gardeners are reminded of deceased loved ones through practices and the plants themselves, and with the future, through engagement with youth and community. Elucidating intimate connections and everyday activities of older African American long-term city residents counters anti-black discourses of ‘revitalisation’. An expansive concept of wellbeing has implications for understanding the generative potential of meaningful social relations in later life and the vitality contributed by older adults living in contexts of structural inequality.

Between Anger and Engagement: Donald Trump and Black America

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Towler ◽  
Christopher S. Parker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Black America ◽  
Movement Dynamics ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
The Right ◽  
Racial Progress

AbstractHistory suggests that social movements for change are often met with powerful counter-movements. Relying upon movement counter-movement dynamics, this paper examines whether or not contemporary reactionary conservatism—in this case Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016, offers an opportunity for African-American mobilization. Today, the reactionary right presents a threat to racial progress and the black community as it has grown from direct opposition to the election of President Obama, immigration reform, and gay and lesbian rights. With conditions ripe for a movement in response to the right, we examine the mobilizing effect on African-Americans of the threatening political context symbolized by Donald Trump. If African-Americans are to retain political relevance beyond the Obama era, then black turnout will need to reach rates similar to the historic 2008 election. Using the 2016 Black Voter Project (BVP) Pilot Study, we explore African-American political engagement in the 2016 election, a time void of President Obama as a mobilizing figure. We find that African-Americans who hold strong negative opinions of Trump in 2016 voted at rates similar to the historical turnout of 2008, offering a possible strategy to mobilize blacks beyond Obama's presidency. Moreover, the threat that Trump represents significantly drives blacks to engage in politics beyond voting even after accounting for alternative explanations. In the end, Trump and the reactionary movement behind him offers a powerful mobilizing force for an African-American population that can no longer look toward the top of the Presidential ticket for inspiration.

Black Infidels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sikiyu Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Secular Humanist ◽  
Economic Injustice

African Americans are among the most religious groups in the United States. Consequently, secular humanism and atheism are largely anathema to mainstream African Americans. Nonetheless, secular humanist and atheist traditions have coexisted with religious traditions in African American social thought and community as a progressive political and cultural counterweight to black religious orthodoxy. Radical or progressive humanism is specifically concerned with the liberation struggle of disenfranchised peoples. Organized religion is one of many powerful forces solidifying inequity based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism are amplified and reinforced by economic injustice institutionalized under global capitalism. Hence, humanism is especially relevant for people of color living in conditions of structural inequality in which the state serves only the human rights of the wealthy.

Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The North ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

Tourism aesthetics in ruinscapes: Bargaining cultural and monetary values of Detroit’s negative image

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina L Tegtmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Urban Tourism ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Shrinking City

Based on the premise that pictures are not only culturally but also economically meaningful in the context of tourism, this article proposes a rearrangement of MacCannell’s model “semiotics of attraction” to discuss current negotiations of meaning of sight/site marking with urban photography. In Detroit, the city’s negative image has changed from ill-reputed urban wasteland to picturesque ruinscape of “America’s Great Comeback City.” Turning the post-industrial shrinking city into a tourist attraction has not resolved socio-economic problems but instead commodified them. Carving out the underlying neoliberal ideology in cultural meaning of urban decline at the example of Detroit’s changed image, this article puts forth to debate in how far tourism shifts from being a leisure activity to being a marketing strategy and what that means for negotiations of cultural values through tourism semiotics, the significance of photography, and the visual in urban tourism, and eventually for the significance of tourism in urban development.

War Changes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Espionage Act ◽  
External Threat ◽  
The Face ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses how the U.S. entry into World War II marked a watershed for both the Negro press generally and the Associated Negro Press (ANP) specifically. The “Double V” campaign among African Americans targeting fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home was a simple continuation and escalation of ANP prewar policy. Despite the racial progress propelled by the antifascist war, there were contrary disquieting notes that did not escape the gaze of Claude Barnett. The Negro press could hardly ignore the ambivalence, if not outright support, within their constituency for Tokyo. This factor helped to further propel black militancy at a moment when Washington was demanding stolid acquiescence in the face of the external threat. This widespread sentiment had led FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover to demand Espionage Act indictments of certain Negro papers.

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