scholarly journals The Souls of White Folk: W.E.B. DuBois's Critique of White Supremacy and the Contributions to Critical White Studies

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiland Rabaka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Traditionally White ◽  
White Race ◽  
White Studies ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Moment

Traditionally “white supremacy” has been treated in race and racism discourse as white domination of and white discrimination against non-whites, and especially blacks. It is a term that often carries a primarily legal and political connotation, which has been claimed time and time again to be best exemplified by the historic events and contemporary effects of: African holocaust, enslavement and colonization; the “failure” of reconstruction, the ritual of lynching and the rise of Jim Crow segregation in the United States; and, white colonial and racial rule throughout Africa, and especially apartheid in South Africa (Cell, 1982; Fredrickson, 1981; Marx, 1998; Shapiro, 1988). Considering the fact that state-sanctioned segregation and black political disenfranchisement have seemed to come to an end, “white supremacy” is now seen as classical nomenclature which no longer refers to contemporary racial and social conditions. However, instead of being a relic of the past that refers to an odd or embarrassing moment in the United States and South Africa's (among many other racist nations and empires') march toward multicultural democracy, it remains one of the most appropriate ways to characterize current racial national and international conditions. Which, in other words, is to say that white supremacy has been and remains central to modernity (and “postmodernity”) because “modernity” (especially in the sense that this term is being used in European and American academic and aesthetic discourse) reeks of racial domination and discrimination (Goldberg, 1990, 1993; Mills, 1998, 2003; Outlaw, 1996, 2005). It is an epoch (or aggregate of eras) which symbolizes not simply the invention of race, but the perfection of a particular species of global racism: white supremacy. Hence, modernity is not merely the moment of the invention of race, but more, as Theodore Allen (1994, 1997) argues in The Invention of the White Race, it served as an incubator for the invention of the white race and a peculiar pan-Europeanism predicated on the racial ruling, cultural degradation and, at times, physical decimation of the life-worlds of people of color.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

Historically White Colleges and Universities: The Unbearable Whiteness of (Most) Colleges and Universities in America

2022 ◽  
pp. 000276422110660
Author(s):  
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva ◽  
Crystal E. Peoples
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Dual Relationship

In this paper, we examine the academy as a specific case of the racialization of space, arguing that most colleges and universities in the United States are in fact historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). To uncover this reality, we first describe the dual relationship between space and race and racism. Using this theoretical framing, we demonstrate how seemingly “race neutral” components of most American universities (i.e., the history, demography, curriculum, climate, and sets of symbols and traditions) embody, signify, and reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. After examining the racial reality of HWCUs, we offer several suggestions for making HWCUs into truly universalistic, multicultural spaces.

"Consider that it is a Raid on the Path of God": The Spiritual Manual of the Attackers of 9/11

Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kippenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Political Center ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThe document found with three of the four cells responsible for the crimes of 9/11 is unique in providing specific information about how the Muslim suicide terrorists conceived of their action. The document shows that they found justification for violence by emulating the moment in early Islamic history when Muhammad cancelled contracts with non-Muslims and organized raids (ghazwa) against the Meccans in order to establish Islam as a political order. No statement in the Manual explicitly identifies the United States as the financial, military, and political center of today's paganism; rather, such identification is tacitly assumed, as was shown by the action itself. Instead, the Manual prescribes recitations, prayers and rituals by which each member of the four cells should prepare for the ghazwa, purify his intention and anticipate in his mind the successive stages of the struggle to come. Not the objective aim but the subjective intention is at the center of the Manual. The article places this type of justification of violence in the history of Islamic activism since the 1980s.

scholarly journals ESSAY ON HUMAN (RACE RELATIONS) IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Frederick D. Bedell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voter Suppression

This essay speaks to the context of domination and subordination in particular as it pertains to White Supremacy/White Privilege as manifested in the history of slavery and “Jim Crow” in the United States. It is within this historical context one can discern the present status of race relations in the United States that continues to foster race discrimination through the policies of the ethnic majority (white) power structure, e.g.-institutional racism, voter suppression laws, gerrymandering of voter districts and banking policies to name a few areas. The research of books, papers, television interviews and personal experiences provides a testament to present government policies that endeavor to maintain a social construct of dominance and subordination by the white power structure in the United States.

ACHIEVING THE AMERICAN SOUL

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 619-629
Author(s):  
HOWARD BRICK
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Norman Mailer ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

In 1963—as good a date as any to serve as a pivot between “fifties” and “sixties” America—James Baldwin remarked, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” It was a bracing declaration, a bit gentler than Malcolm X's designation of Negroes as “victims of Americanism” and perhaps by now, as historians focus ever greater attention on the nationally constitutive role of slavery and white supremacy, almost a commonplace. Yet Baldwin's idea remains challenging to plumb and to fully inhabit. For at that moment, which both Kevin Schultz and Andrew Hartman suggest was preoccupied with “the very question of America and its meaning,” Baldwin's little book, The Fire Next Time, upended the whole debate. He was no black nationalist and, notwithstanding his expatriate life in France, no “emigrationist,” for he believed that blacks in the United States were, socially and culturally, wholly of, if not in, this country; and yet, given the deep corruption in the national past, there was no “meaning” to return to, reclaim, realize, or vindicate as a promise of black freedom. The verb Baldwin chose, in a determinedly existentialist vein, was to “achieve our country”—to create a viable moral meaning for national identity where none as yet existed. If Schultz's subjects, William F. Buckley Jr, and Norman Mailer, were “vying for the soul of the nation” and Hartman's warriors fighting “for the soul of America,” they were—in Baldwin's perspective—chasing a chimera. Such a thing wasn't there; it was yet to come, if at all.

scholarly journals The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past

2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Weyeneth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial System ◽  
Alternative Spaces

The article examines racial segregation as a spatial system and proposes a conceptual framework for assessing its significance. It analyzes how the ideology of white supremacy influenced design form in the United States and how Jim Crow architecture appeared on the landscape. For African Americans, the settings for everyday life were not simply the confines of this imposed architecture; the article analyzes responses such as the construction of alternative spaces. The discussion concludes by considering the architecture of segregation from the perspective of historic preservation.

Complexity and Transformative Learning: A Review of the Principal and Teacher Preparation Literature on Race

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (8) ◽  
pp. 202-247
Author(s):  
Rachel Roegman ◽  
Joni Kolman ◽  
A. Lin Goodwin ◽  
Brooke Soles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Teacher Preparation ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Principal Preparation ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Clinical Experiences ◽  
Preparation Programs ◽  
To Come ◽  
K 12

Background: Racial inequities are a persistent reality in K–12 schools in the United States. There is a need for consensus and coordination between principals and teachers if they are to address the harm of racial inequities in education. Yet, despite this need and the interdependence of teachers and principals in schools, their preparation is profoundly distinct. Purpose: Although teacher and principal preparation practice and research are distinct, addressing racial inequities in K–12 students’ schooling experiences is central to the work within both professional arenas. In this literature review, we bring together these bodies of literature as we think about ways that preparation supports principals and teachers in developing skills, knowledge, and dispositions to counter racial inequities in their schools. We focus our review around one central question: In what ways does the teacher and principal preparation literature address candidates’ transformative learning around race? Research Design: This review focuses on peer-reviewed literature on race within teacher and principal preparation published between 2001 and 2018. We reviewed studies here that are: (1) empirical, (2) focused on principal or teacher preparation, (3) focused on preparing candidates around issues related to race or racial inequity, (4) published between 2001 and 2018, and (5) based in the United States. We ultimately identified 79 articles, 24 related to principal preparation and 55 related to teacher preparation. We drew on critical transformative learning theory to guide our analyses. Findings: Overall, we identified more commonalities between the two literatures than differences. Our review suggests that race is understood in three main ways: in terms of “difference,” “power,” and “racism.” Race-as-difference focuses on differences between individuals related to race or culture. Race-as-power emphasizes that these differences result from systemic oppressions. Race-as-racism centers racism and/or white supremacy. This review reveals complexities of transformative learning across three areas: how candidates’ backgrounds inform their learning; how clinical experiences present opportunities and constraints for learning; and how emotions influence learning. Recommendations: Preparation programs must educate teachers and principals about race-as-racism. Candidates need to come to understand the role of systemic racism in society and in schooling, beyond understanding individual differences. Critically, teacher and principal preparation faculties must work together across courses and experiences. Finally, there is a need for those who educate educators to receive preparation for this role.

Looking Out for Something Better to Come: Interview with Director Hanna Polak

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
Masha Shpolberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hair Color ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Garbage Dump ◽  
To Come

Hanna Polak was in the United States in December 2015 for a screening of Something Better to Come (2014) and The Children of Leningradsky (2004) at Yale University, where the interview was conducted. Polak's devastating documentary Something Better to Come swept through the festival circuit with force, winning a Special Jury Award at IDFA along with awards at over twenty other festivals. Shot illegally on a garbage dump just outside Moscow over the course of fourteen years, the film follows a girl named Yula from age 10 to 24, as she grows up doing the things that teenagers everywhere do—experimenting with her hair color and makeup, with cigarettes and alcohol—all while living in the most difficult of conditions.

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