scholarly journals Solidarity infrastructure : gender and race solidarity and cross-class coalitions in the Kansas City general strike of 1918

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jeff Stilley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
General Strike

This dissertation investigates alliances across gender, race, and class in the dynamics of working class solidarity. The analysis examines the geographically bounded organizational networks, community spatial organization, and political cultures in Kansas City that resulted in a general strike in 1918. The general strike is historically unexpected because it occurred in sympathy with low-wage white and Black women with the support of white union men and middle-class clubwomen. The research is motivated by the following research questions: How do we explain unexpected coalitions across class, gender, and race in Kansas City from 1910 to 1918? What collective action processes and unique historical conditions explain the militancy and solidarity exhibited during this time period? Drawing on theories from social movements and political sociology, I do a longitudinal historical analysis and process tracing to answer the research questions. The data suggest that a temporally and geographically based meso-level network, what I call a "solidarity infrastructure," helps explain unusual working class solidarity across gender, race, and class. A solidarity infrastructure is a set of formal and informal links with the support of Euro American men and middle-class women across movements, which articulate and coordinate a cross-class contentious front, mobilizing support of working class formation and solidarity. The concept speaks to why some locations in specific times exhibit inclusive collective action, a theoretical problem not adequately answered in the dynamics of solidarity literature.

Presumed Mexican Until Proven Otherwise: Identity Work and Intersectional Typicality among Middle-Class Dominican and Mexican Immigrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Browne ◽  
Katharine Tatum ◽  
Belisa Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Positive Traits ◽  
Negative Stereotyping ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract Non-Latino natives often conflate “Latino” with “Mexican,” treating Mexican as a stigmatized group. Latinos often engage in “identity work” to neutralize this stigmatized identity. We link these micro processes of identity work with macro structures of stratification through “intersectional typicality.” We argue that the selection of which positive traits immigrants highlight to avoid stigma is systematic and tied to intersecting dimensions of race and class stratification at the macro level. We argue that this process is context-specific. We use the case of middle-class Dominicans and Mexicans living in Atlanta. Our findings show that both groups perceive that the pervasive image of the typical Latino in Atlanta is that of a working-class Mexican. While both groups perceive this image to be low-status, they diverge in their strategies for countering this presumption. Mexicans emphasize their middle-class status and often try to change the typical image of Latinos. Dominicans emphasize that they are not Mexican and highlight their atypicality. Interview data show that Dominicans are concerned about the Mexican label because of embedded working-class assumptions. We argue that although many respondents successfully avoid negative stereotyping, their identity work actually reaffirms the low-status meaning of the typical Latino category.

scholarly journals På vej til at blive mor og far - køn, klasse, etnicitet og race i jordemoderkonsultationer

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bolette Frydendahl Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Heterosexual Couple ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Family ◽  
White Majority ◽  
Minority Ethnic ◽  
The Way ◽  
White Minority

On the way to parenthood - (re)productions of gender, ethnicity, race and class in midwife consultations.The premise of this article is that subject positions, which parents-to-be hold during pregnancy, influence their future parenthood. The article examines how such subject positions are produced in midwife consultations. It shows how the man in a heterosexual couple is positioned as peripheral while the woman is assigned the responsibility for the construction of the family by means of documents, architecture and midwife practices. At the same time, the article illustrates how midwife practices reproduce hierarchies of a superior white, majority ethnic, middle class norm which equals respectability, opposed to inferior non-white, minority ethnic, working class deviations.

Land, Capital, and Race

Inland Shift ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The City

This chapter uses the Skechers megawarehouse development project in Moreno Valley to examine how the public debate about whether to allow megawarehouse development evolved into a much more profound struggle over who had a right to shape the city. The Skechers warehouse became a proxy struggle between groups who represented different lifestyles and approaches to what constituted a valued way of life. More specifically, the warehouse debate pitted a working-class Latinx population against a mostly white suburban middle class. The chapter concludes by interrogating how global capital must sometimes negotiate locally embedded histories of race and class when establishing new territory for development.

Rethinking the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-133
Author(s):  
Bryn Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Detailed Data ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Class Participation ◽  
Electoral Cycle

This chapter raises micro-foundational questions about the expectation that a rising middle-class will lead a democratic civic revolution. It focuses on political behavior and examines observed patterns of mobilized contention during Russia's 2011–2012 electoral cycle by nesting a unique series of protest surveys within detailed data on the population from which protesters were recruited. It also shows how one enters the middle-class and what alternatives one possesses to affect participation in risky collective action. The chapter sheds light on why professionals in the state-sector were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud amid heightened middle-class participation in anti-regime protests. It emphasizes that middle-class protesters from the private sector were much more likely than the working class to join the protests' democratic coalition.

Get Up, Stand Up

2018 ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Standing Up

Focusing on Richardson’s childhood, this chapter details how Gloria’s family socialized her according to gender norms for middle-class black girls yet allowed her to be her own person. They supported her when she displayed strong personality traits, such as standing up for herself against perceived injustices. Richardson’s family taught her to respect the black working class, who were so important to her family’s financial success, and she was expected to carry on the tradition of race service. Richardson’s family also played an influential role in the development of her philosophies on race and class, her political leadership, and her secular humanism, all of which would play a part in her civil rights activism.

Neither Here nor There: Of the Female in American Legal Education

1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (02) ◽  
pp. 355-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Amede Obiora
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Working Class Women

In this Critical Review Essay, Professor Obiora brings together work from many traditions to address the issue of how differences among students beyond gender–and, in particular, differences in terms of race–might affect legal education. After situating the question in terms of the literature on legal education generally (including standard critiques), she delves into work on gender–in law generally, in kgal education, in moral development and learning, in language use, and in education generally–to elucidate hypothesized differences between men and women that might affect differential experience in law school. She then moves on to make the picture more complex by drawing on work that indicates cross-cultural and class-based variation around conceptions of gender. Using research by sociolinguists on educational processes and work by historians and feminists of color on the intersection of gender, race, and class, Professor Obiora suggests specific ways in which women of color and working-class women might diverge from middle-class white women in their approach to kgal education. In particular, she notes: (1) different speech patterns and linguistic socialization lend different meaning to “voice,”“silence,” and “interruption” in classroom interactions; (2) the historical distinction between public and private spheres has been much more sharply drawn for upper-middle-class white women than it has been for black and working-class women; (3) the exclusion of black women from male “chivalry” and feminine idealization necessitated the development of agency; black women could not afford to be passive. Given these points of divergence, but also given convergences among the experiences of women, Obiora suggests a complex and contextually sensitive approach to the issue of gender in legal education, one that takes seriously the differences that exist among women. Because of the richness of the literature reviewed here, we include a Bibliography at the end of the article.

Nostalgia for the 30-Year ‘Century of the Common Man’

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
Jack Metzgar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Common People ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The Common ◽  
Trente Glorieuses

Jack Metzgar grew up in a steelworking family during the best 30 years in U.S. history for common people, what the French call the Glorious 30 (trente glorieuses) from 1945 to 1975. It was a time of extraordinary economic prosperity that was widely shared. Average real incomes rose faster than ever before or since, with the  bottom income quintiles advancing faster and stronger than the middle or top. This unprecedented shared prosperity did not lead to complacency and mindlessconsumerism, as was feared at the time, but rather to a golden age of collective action and a string of liberatory movements beginning with the black civil rights struggle and followed by the beginnings of the women’s and gay liberation movements, among many others. The following is an excerpt from an auto-ethnography Jack is writing about his experience of working-class and professional middle-class cultures from those times to today.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

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