American Dream Deferred

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-260
Author(s):  
P. James Paligutan
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Migratory Movement ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

This article examines a unique migratory movement of Filipinos to America: Filipino nationals recruited by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard between 1952 and 1970. Such recruits were seen as a solution to a mounting labor problem stemming from the Navy’s traditional use of minorities to fulfill duties as servants for naval officers. With African Americans' demands for equal opportunity reaching a crescendo during the Civil Rights era, the U.S. Navy looked to its former colony to replenish its supply of dark-skinned servants. Despite expectations of docility, however, such Filipino sailors were able to forge a culture of resistance manifested through non-confrontational acts of defiance, protest through official channels, and labor stoppage. Such actions ultimately resulted in the reversal of naval policy that relegated Filipinos to servile labor.

scholarly journals Possessing History and American Innocence: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the 1965 Cambridge Debate

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Daniel Robert McClure
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
The U.S

The 1965 debate at Cambridge University between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., posed the question: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” Within the contours of the debate, Baldwin and Buckley wrestled with the ghosts of settler colonialism and slavery in a nation founded on freedom and equality. Framing the debate within the longue durée, this essay examines the deep cultural currents related to the American racial paradox at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Underscoring the changing language of white resistance against black civil rights, the essay argues that the Baldwin and Buckley debate anticipated the ways the U.S. would address racial inequality in the aftermath of the civil rights era and the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney E. Hero ◽  
Morris Levy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
State Of The Union ◽  
Economic Individualism ◽  
And Gender

AbstractWe analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

A Changing Workforce

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-236
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Delton
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
National Association ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Workplace Rights ◽  
National Association Of Manufacturers

This chapter examines the overlap between African Americans' demands for jobs and conservatives' push for “right to work” laws. While compulsory union dues were very different from unions' exclusion of blacks, both movements targeted historically white unions and shared a language of workplace “rights.” Conservative “right to work” activists adopted the tactics of the civil rights movement and aligned themselves with blacks against exclusionary unions. Although this strategy failed to attract African Americans, it called attention to unions' historic and ongoing racism in a way that eventually divided the labor–liberal coalition. This dynamic is key to understanding the National Association of Manufacturers' complicated support for civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

Manning the Barricade

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Mellinger
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Initial Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

This chapter opens the ASNE story in the mid-1950s, when ASNE members began registering the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling and the specter of more sweeping civil rights reforms. During the 1950s, the ASNE leadership was dominated by Southern editors and much of the organization's tension over civil rights was inflected with regionalism. Key moments in the decade examined by this chapter include the ASNE board's initial resistance to integrating the organization and the membership's discourteous reception of prominent civil rights leaders—the first African Americans invited to address the ASNE—at the 1964 convention.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Stith
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter presents former ambassador Charles Stith's reflections on the impact of African Americans on U.S. foreign policy during particular historical periods. He identifies four eras of impact that reflect an African American imprint on U.S. foreign policy. Those are the slavery era, the Reconstruction era, the civil rights era, and the post-civil rights era. Each era is noteworthy for its changes in status and power of African Americans and thus has implications relative to the question of impact. Each era also had its distinct foreign policy issues and challenges. Among his observations are that the foreign policy concerns of African Americans were both major and mainstream from era to era, whether the issue was the slave trade or the war against terrorism; that the unique contribution of African Americans to the foreign policy mix is to see America's geopolitical interests through the lens of human rights; and that the breadth of foreign policy interests by African Americans has reflected their position and power within the American body politic.

Understanding White Nationalism in American Politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Robert C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Science ◽  
American Politics ◽  
White Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
White Nationalism ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
The Relationship

This article analyzes the contribution of Ronald Walters to the development of white nationalism as a theory of white subjugation and domination of African Americans in the post–civil rights era. It also discusses why his work has been ignored by political science scholarship on the subject, and the relationship between white nationalism and white racism.

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