scholarly journals In Passing: Arab American Poetry and the Politics of Race

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Katherine Wardi-Zonna ◽  
Anissa Janine Wardi
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Racial Passing ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Politics Of Race

Racial passing has a long history in America. In fact, there are manifold reasons for passing, not the least of which is to reap benefits-social, economic and legal-routinely denied to people of color. Passing is conventionally understood to be a volitional act that either situationally or permanently allows members of marginalized groups to assimilate into a privileged culture. While it could be argued that those who choose to pass are, in a sense, race traitors, betraying familial, historical and cultural ties to personhood,1 Wald provides another way of reading passing, or “crossing the line,” as a “practice that emerges from subjects' desires to control the terms of their racial definition, rather than be subject to the definitions of white supremacy” (6). She further contends that racial distinction, itself, “is a basis of racial oppression and exploitation” (6).

Postcarbon Amnesia: Toward a Recognition of Racial Grief in Renewable Energy Futures

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 934-962 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myles Lennon
Keyword(s):  
Renewable Energy ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Energy Futures ◽  
Energy Transitions ◽  
Energy Infrastructures

Climate justice activists envision a “postcarbon” future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy’s long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the “zero emissions” telos does not tend to the racial grief that’s foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a “just transition” to a “postcarbon” moment? In response, I connect today’s postcarbon imaginary with yesterday’s postcolonial imaginary. Drawing from research on US-based climate activism, I explore how the utopic rhetoric of a “just transition” is instantiated in practice. I argue that the racialized absences constitutive of what scholars call “postcolonial amnesia” are operative in the anti-racist move to a postcarbon moment. This postcarbon imaginary formulates the vulnerability of people of color to biophysical disasters as the raison d’être for infrastructural transformation. This, I argue, has the effect of overlooking the ways in which racial grief inheres in such vulnerability and the capacity of energy infrastructures to uphold racist hierarchies. I situate this “postcarbon amnesia” in Anne Cheng’s framework for differentiating “grief” from “grievance,” calling for renewable energy transitions that move away from enumerative grievances and toward a sobering recognition of racial grief.

A Precarious Confluence: Neoliberalism, Race, and Water Insecurity

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mascarenhas
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Water Insecurity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Cities

Three very different field sites—First Nations communities in Canada, water charities in the Global South, and the US cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan—point to the increasing precariousness of water access for historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and people of color around the globe. This multi-sited ethnography underscores a common theme: power and racism lie deep in the core of today’s global water crisis. These cases reveal the concrete mechanisms, strategies, and interconnections that are galvanized by the economic, political, and racial projects of neoliberalism. In this sense neoliberalism is not only downsizing democracy but also creating both the material and ideological forces for a new form of discrimination in the provision of drinking water around the globe. These cases suggest that contemporary notions of environmental and social justice will largely hinge on how we come to think about water in the twenty-first century.

“Over-zealous Parents, Over-programmed Families”: Asian Americans, Academic Achievement, and White Supremacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 233264922110184
Author(s):  
Pawan Dhingra
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White Educators ◽  
Asian American Students ◽  
American Students ◽  
High Achieving ◽  
K 12

Discussions of white supremacy focus on patterns of whites’ stature over people of color across institutions. When a minority group achieves more than whites, it is not studied through the lens of white supremacy. For example, arguments of white supremacy in K-12 schools focus on the disfranchisement of African Americans and Latinxs. Discussions of high-achieving Asian American students have not been framed as such and, in fact, can be used to argue against the existence of white privilege. This article explains why this conception is false. White supremacy can be active even when people of color achieve more than whites. Drawing from interviews and observations of mostly white educators in Boston suburbs that have a significant presence of Asian American students, I demonstrate that even when Asian Americans outcompete whites in schools, white supremacy is active through two means. First, Asian Americans are applauded in ways that fit a model minority stereotype and frame other groups as not working hard enough. Second and more significantly, Asian Americans encounter anti-Asian stereotypes and are told to assimilate into the model of white educators. This treatment is institutionalized within the school system through educators’ practices and attitudes. These findings somewhat support but mostly contrast the notion of “honorary whiteness,” for they show that high-achieving minorities are not just tools of white supremacy toward other people of color but also targets of it themselves. Understanding how high-achieving minorities experience institutionalized racism demonstrates the far reach of white supremacy.

Confidence Culture

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shani Orgad ◽  
Rosalind Gill
Keyword(s):  
Body Image ◽  
International Development ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Workplace Relationships ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Systemic Oppression

In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.

scholarly journals The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS GRANT
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Global Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Second World

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.

Public Hostility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keesha M. Middlemass
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Social System ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Negative Externalities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Felony Conviction ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
Historical Practices

The concluding chapter makes clear that despite the negative outcomes for felons reentering society, a felony conviction has many “useful” purposes rooted in historical practices and politics. A felony conviction is a powerful tool that is integral to maintaining a discourse about “us” versus “them” that fuses distinct social-economic institutions, such as housing, education, and employment, to the criminal justice system. This chapter describes how the term “felon” defines an individual’s worth in such a way as to become a simple short-cut that widens the net of policies, maintains the broader social system of white supremacy, supports legal and political structures and tough-on-crime initiatives, and extends the original punishment to socially disable men and women convicted of a felony. This chapter argues that the negative externalities that restrict felons from accessing critical public assistance engender failure in the returning population, resulting in recidivism, and reinforce the concept of retribution.

“Army 45 Will Stop All Jive”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean L. Malloy
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
Che Guevara

This chapter argues that the key to the theory and practice of the Black Panther Party (BPP) during its early years was an understanding of urban black neighborhoods as colonized spaces that needed to be liberated before African Americans could truly be free. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and pioneering black internationalists such as Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, the Panthers embraced a form of revolutionary nationalism that posited the dire conditions facing black Oaklanders as part of a worldwide system of oppression linked to capitalism and white supremacy. In doing so, the BPP's founders built directly on their experiences with other organizations, particularly the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), as well as lessons drawn from the daily lives of people of color in the Bay Area.

The “New Crowd” Goes Global

Race News ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
The World ◽  
White Press

The United States' entry into World War II led the federal government to renew its surveillance and censorship of black journalists who struck at segregation in wartime. Simultaneously, the white press dismissed black reporters for failing to uphold the doctrine of objectivity. National black newspapers reconciled black protest and white scrutiny by forsaking explicit textual radicalism for a more coded militancy, as illustrated by the “Double V” campaign. Black war correspondents – including Edgar Rouzeau, Deton "Jack" Brooks, Roi Ottley, and George Padmore – praised black troops for their patriotism and sacrifice but also explained how white supremacy structured the lives of people of color elsewhere in the world. By the war's end, black journalists had achieved an uneasy détente with federal officials and white journalists.

Victimization, Cultural Imperatives, and Empowerment of People of Color in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-190
Author(s):  
Tamanna M. Shah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
High Incidence ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Crimes Against Women

The high incidence of violent crimes in the United States of America, which include mass shootings, hate crimes, Islam bashing, murders, extortion, crimes against women and children, and white supremacist crimes, witnessed in last few years is a cause for great concern. The land of liberty is lately seeing increasing victimization of deprived or socially unempowered groups. This chapter looks at such victimization and the cultural supremacy that is giving rise to ethnic strife among people. It is argued that robust and well-evolved policies will reduce crime and empower marginalized groups, a majority of whom are women and children. The empowerment—social, cultural, economic, and political—and recognition of the challenge of victimization is the only solution. There is a need to recognize the egalitarian impulses for a better policy formulation devoid of prejudice to craft a secure future for the victims.

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