Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Maryann Erigha
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Jim Crow Hollywood describes how Hollywood insiders consider race when making decisions about moviemaking. Movies by and about white Americans are said to be worthy investments, while movies by and about Black Americans are said to be risky investments. This way of thinking has profound effects on the way movies and people move through the Hollywood system—shaping their production budgets, determining who directs lucrative tent pole blockbuster franchise movies, and creating stigma around race and moviemaking. This chapter gives an overview of the book’s approach, a summary of prior research on race in culture industries, and a preview of the book’s chapters. Quotes from film directors, statistics on over a thousand movies, and emails between Hollywood insiders reveal that race is back in the forefront regarding how decision-makers in American culture institutions rationalize inequality. Except now understandings about race are mixed with talk about economic investments and cultural preferences, making racial inequality more palatable to the everyday observer and further entrenching racial divisions that counteract post-Civil rights narratives of racial progress.

The Hollywood Jim Crow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryann Erigha
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
American Film Industry

The Jim Crow era of outright racism seemingly ended decades ago, yet the major American film industry—Hollywood—is waist deep in racial politics. Jim Crow Hollywood shows how Hollywood insiders consider race when making decisions about moviemaking. Movies by and about white Americans are said to be worthy investments, while movies by and about Black Americans are said to be risky investments. This way of thinking has profound effects on the way movies and people move through the Hollywood system—shaping their production budgets, determining who directs lucrative tent pole blockbuster franchise movies, and creating stigma around race and moviemaking. Quotes from film directors, statistics on over a thousand movies, and emails between Hollywood insiders reveal that race is back in the forefront regarding how decision-makers in American culture institutions rationalize inequality. Except now understandings about race are mixed with talk about economic investments and cultural preferences, making racial inequality more palatable to the everyday observer and further entrenching racial divisions that counteract post-Civil rights narratives of racial progress.

A New Understanding of Racial Subordination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy L. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Glass Ceiling ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
External Source ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
Race Problem

This chapter introduces three main themes presented in the book. First, racism is not coterminous with racial inequality. The term “racial subordination” is used in a new and more useful way to refer to a non-nefarious external source of racial inequality. This discussion revolves around an illustration that clearly demonstrates the difference between racism and racial subordination. Second, though motivated by a non-nefarious reason, racial subordination is not racial innocence. Allowing racial subordination to persist effectively creates a racial glass ceiling. For that reason, it is bad social policy. Third, even well-to-do blacks are vulnerable to racial subordination. This means that the race problem is not simply a socioeconomic problem requiring a socioeconomic solution. The race problem in post-civil rights America is, in fact, not one but three interrelated problems (a three-headed hydra)—socioeconomic, socio-legal, and socio-cultural with the latter two manifested mainly as racial subordination. This book focuses on the subordination side of the race problem.

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.

Washington Is a Giant Awakened

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Survival ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
War Effort

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.

Race and Rape Prosecution in US History

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-104
Author(s):  
Matthew Barry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Us History ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Defendants ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter examines the current disproportion of Black defendants wrongly convicted of sexual assault through a historical lens. It notes the US history of statutorily separate sexual assault penalties based on race of the defendant and victim. Throughout US history the legal definition and societal response to rape (and rape allegations) have been influenced by considerations of race. These considerations were consistently made to the detriment of Black defendants charged with rape. The chapter reviews how race, rape law, and prosecution have been manifested in different historical eras (the period of race-based enslavement, the period of Jim Crow segregation, and the current post–civil rights period) and the mechanisms of racial bias against Black defendants in the post–civil rights era.

Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion. By Melanye T. Price

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-898
Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black President ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.

scholarly journals Forceful Federalism against American Racial Inequality

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond King
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Building Material ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
The Us ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Elected Office

Why, many Americans rightly ask, can material racial inequality and widespread segregation still persist 50 years after the enactment of key civil rights legislation and eight years after the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office? Many from outside the US pose similar questions about modern America. The explanation, I argue, lies with inconsistent and fluctuating levels of federal engagement to building material racial equality. National engagement fluctuates because it is energetically resisted and challenged by opponents of racial progress. This vulnerability to disruption is exposed by varying strategies of resistance, some fiscal, some violent, some judicial, some desultory and some combining violent protest against change with local electoral triumphs for anti-reformers. Public resistance to employing national resources to reduce inequality encouraged a de-racialization strategy amongst many African American candidates for elected office who opt to de-emphasize issues of racial inequality in campaigns and in office. Whatever the means, the effect is uniform: the slowing down or outright death of federal civil rights activism.

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