scholarly journals Becoming a Yam: Healing Narratives as Political Resistance in the Time of COVID-19

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Latoya B. Brooks ◽  
Kareema J. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Healing Narratives

COVID-19 created a crisis that forced people to deal with the social, emotional, personal, and interpersonal impact of the virus in the United States. Simultaneously, Black people continued to be murdered and victimized by systemic racism and social injustice. Choosing wellness, self-recovery, and self-care during the global pandemonium surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an act of political resistance in the face of oppression and violence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the authors’ embodied uses of personal narratives centering the work sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, feminist theory, and African-centered social work paradigms as coping strategies and healing work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

scholarly journals Benefits of Understanding Systemic Racism in Forming Clinician-Patient Relationships to Reduce Black Infant Mortality

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Gotto ◽  
Laura Morello ◽  
Marsha Michie
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Infant Mortality ◽  
Ecological Model ◽  
The United States ◽  
Patient Communication ◽  
Infant Mortality Rate ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Doctor Patient Communication ◽  
Public Health Researcher ◽  
The Impact

Background: The United States lags far behind other developed nations in our overall infant mortality rate. Public health researcher Arline Geronimus has described a "weathering" effect of chronic racial stress among Black women that contributes to high rates of preterm birth, the leading cause of infant death. Trusting relationships between clinicians and patients may play a role in reducing infant mortality for Black mothers. Based on a social-ecological model of health care communication around infant mortality, we focus here on doctor-patient communication and correlations between clinicians' understandings of systemic racism and their communication with Black pregnant patients.Methods: This paper reports the findings from interviews with 5 maternal health clinicians (prior to recruitment being temporarily paused due to COVID-19) practicing at Cuyahoga County hospitals that serve large populations of Black women. Qualitative coding methods based in grounded theory were used to draw out themes from interview transcripts.Results: Doctor-patient communication was an emergent theme in these interviews. Results suggest an association between clinicians' understanding of the impact of systemic racism and their ability to communicate successfully and form positive bonds with pregnant mothers who are at higher risk of infant mortality.Conclusion: Acknowledging systemic racism as the cause of poor social determinants of health, which in turn contribute to higher rates of infant mortality, may provide clinicians a pathway to more positive communication and higher levels of trust with their patients, which in turn may play a role in reducing infant mortality in the Black community. Further research should investigate these associations.

scholarly journals The colonial matrix of power: Image ontology and the question of blackness

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itumeleng D. Mothoagae
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Black People ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global South ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.

scholarly journals Fighting for America’s Paradise—the Struggle against Structural Racism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel R. Hardeman ◽  
Simone L. Hardeman-Jones ◽  
Eduardo M. Medina
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Policy Suggestions ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Many

Abstract Structural racism is a fundamental cause of racial inequities in health in the United States. Structural racism is manifested in inequality in the criminal justice system; de facto segregation in education, health care, and housing; and ineffective and disproportionately violent policing and economic disenfranchisement in communities of color. The inequality that Black people and communities of color face is the direct result of centuries of public policy that made Black and Brown skin a liability. We are now in an unprecedented moment in our history as we usher in a new administration which explicitly states: “The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism. . .And to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation—to so many.” The opportunities to create innovative and bold policy must reflect the urgency of the moment and seek to dismantle the systems of oppression that have for far too long left the American promise unfulfilled. The policy suggestions we make in this commentary speak to the structural targets needed to dismantle some of the many manifestations of structural racism to achieve health equity.

In The Face of Financialization: Cities and the Human Right to Adequate Housing

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-130
Author(s):  
Kaara Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Social Good ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Full Sense ◽  
The Right

The right to housing is a human right with broad but frequently overlooked implications, particularly in the urban environment. This difficulty is heightened in the context of what is known as the “financialization of housing”. Financialization involves the interconnections between global financial markets and housing, and, at the extreme, has prompted a climate in which housing is conceived less as a social good and more as a commodity. The result of the financialization turn is cities with a severe lack of affordable housing, a reality that is now a global phenomenon. This naturally leads to economic exclusions and displacements from cities, but, on a deeper level, also entails major collective consequences for the social and cultural fabric. Financialization thus threatens the right to housing in cities, particularly when the right is examined and understood in its full sense. And yet, cities have a duty to ensure the right to housing even in the face of financialization. Drawing on the jurisprudence of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights through its individual communications procedure, the European Court of Human Rights, and domestic cases from South Africa and the United States, this paper aims to elucidate this duty of cities in the realm of housing. A substantive rather than purely procedural shape of protection for the right to housing is pushed, which deliberates the connections between housing and the wider societal context, and the implicated concerns of resources, property, and urban community. In present times, our appreciation of home as a necessary nexus of safety, comfort, and productivity has come to the fore, as have our fears around economic insecurity, forcing us to confront and closely interrogate the right to housing.

Disaster racism: using Black sociology, critical race theory and history to understand racial disparity to disaster in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Breen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Sociology Of Disaster ◽  
Black Sociology

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a call to action to use a new theoretical framework for disaster researchers that focuses on using a critical approach to understanding differential disaster impacts due to systemic racism.Design/methodology/approachUsing critical race theory (CRT) and Black Sociology, theoretical and disciplinary frameworks that center Black people and NBPOC as well as a focus in dismantling systemic racism and other oppressive systems, this article calls for a new approach – “disaster racism” – that builds on past discussions for a more nuanced theoretical approach to disaster studies.FindingsAlongside CRT and Black Sociology, this study identifies two examples of the oppressive systems that create disparate impacts to disaster including slavery and the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration.Originality/value“Disaster racism” – a critically focused approach – should be used in the future rather than social vulnerability to further dismantle oppressive systems and institutions, which not only provides strong theoretical backing to research but also creates an actively anti-racist research agenda in the discipline of sociology of disaster.

The Mythic Dimensions of American Capitalism

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Review ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
World Government ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Capitalism in the United States is unthinkable apart from the myth of White Supremacy, for capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen people. Further, white Americans imagined that capitalism was God-ordained, grounded in “Nature and Nature’s God,” and heralded a golden age of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Following the Civil War, the myth of the Chosen Nation morphed into the myth that God blessed the righteous with wealth and the wicked with poverty—the central assumption of the Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie appealed to all these myths in his 1889 essay, “Wealth,” in the North American Review. Likewise, many American industrialists invoked these myths to justify their goal: the economic conquest of the world. Government and industry, however, typically excluded blacks from this engine of economic prosperity, thereby contributing to realities already in place—systemic racism and white privilege. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire capitalism and the myths that sustained it came under withering assault from labor, the Social Gospel movement, and black social critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Langston Hughes, especially since the wealth of the Gilded Age contrasted with unprecedented numbers of lynchings of America’s blacks.

Exploring the Implications of Culturally Relevant Teaching: Toward a Pedagogy of Liberation

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-389
Author(s):  
Dari Green
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Freedom Schools ◽  
Common Trend ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Academic Enrichment ◽  
American Society

Schools in America may provide opportunities for upward mobility while also perpetuating social inequality. The inequities found in the US public school system probably result in such a highly stratified society. Conditions found in many schools and classrooms are often a microcosm of the same conditions and factors present in the broader American society. Scholars and education reform activists often use the term school-to-prison pipeline to describe what they view as a widespread pattern in the United States of pushing students, especially those who are already at a disadvantage, out of school, and into the criminal justice system. This research explored whether mentorship in the lives of these very students can affect the trajectory that these students take in life by moving toward a pedagogy of liberation that challenges the inequities and contradictions in the institution of education. Building from a model similar to CDF Freedom Schools, but targeting academic enrichment, Farrah and her colleague Hope developed the Sankofa Project at Yin Elementary School (YES). Embracing both the social-emotional and pedagogical aspects of CDF Freedom Schools, the Sankofa Project moved from a mission that sought to instill a love for reading to actually teaching children to read. This aspect was pivotally important to Farrah and Hope as they sought to dismantle the “cradle to prison pipeline,” the concept of funneling masses of people into marginalized lives, imprisonment, and often premature death. Farrah believed that all her predecessors had done “was spot on, but academic enrichment was a key to steering children away from the pipeline.” With the rebirth of a caste-like system in America, black and brown bodies are disproportionately locked behind bars, relegated permanent second-class status if declared a felon and an increasingly common trend toward annihilation at the hands of those of who are designated to serve and protect them.

Identity and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Herrigel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Functional Adaptation ◽  
Character Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Face

The aim of this research note is to begin to develop the idea that trade unions are historically constructed as much through considerations of social identity as they are through calculations of economic self-interest, market power, or functional adaptation in the face of changes in the division of labor. By social identity, I mean the desire for group distinction, dignity, and place within historically specific discourses (or frames of understanding) about the character, structure, and boundaries of the polity and the economy. Institutions such as trade unions, in other words, are constituted through and by particular understandings of the structure of the social and political worlds of which they are part. In making this argument, it should be immediately said that I in no way intend to claim that trade unions are only to be understood through the lens of identity or that they do not engage in strategic calculation either in labor markets or in the broader political economy. The point is that action along the latter lines presupposes some kind of commitment on, and even resolution of, issues concerning the former. The discussion below focuses on the emergence of trade union movements in the United States and Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It Attempts first to develope the two cases as constituting a paradox and then, second, explains the paradox with an argument about identity.

Racism: A Public Health Crisis

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-515
Author(s):  
Katie L. Acosta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
General Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Infected People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Racial Ethnic ◽  
Bear Witness

The impact of COVID–19 on racially minoritized communities in the United States has forced us all to look square in the face of the systemic racism that is embedded in every fabric of our society. As the number of infected people continues to rise, the racial disparities are glaringly obvious. Black and Latinx communities have been hit considerably harder by this pandemic. Both racial/ethnic groups have seen rates of infection well above their percentage in the general population and African Americans have seen rates of death from COVID–19 as high as twice their percentage in the general population. These numbers bear witness to the high cost of racism in the United States.

scholarly journals Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 Outcomes: Social Determination of Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (21) ◽  
pp. 8115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Raine ◽  
Amy Liu ◽  
Joel Mintz ◽  
Waseem Wahood ◽  
Kyle Huntley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
National Level ◽  
Ethnic Disparities ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Disparities ◽  
Incidence And Mortality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Determination Of Health

As of 18 October 2020, over 39.5 million cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 1.1 million associated deaths have been reported worldwide. It is crucial to understand the effect of social determination of health on novel COVID-19 outcomes in order to establish health justice. There is an imperative need, for policy makers at all levels, to consider socioeconomic and racial and ethnic disparities in pandemic planning. Cross-sectional analysis from COVID Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research COVID Racial Data Tracker was performed to evaluate the racial and ethnic distribution of COVID-19 outcomes relative to representation in the United States. Representation quotients (RQs) were calculated to assess for disparity using state-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS). We found that on a national level, Hispanic/Latinx, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, and Black people had RQs > 1, indicating that these groups are over-represented in COVID-19 incidence. Dramatic racial and ethnic variances in state-level incidence and mortality RQs were also observed. This study investigates pandemic disparities and examines some factors which inform the social determination of health. These findings are key for developing effective public policy and allocating resources to effectively decrease health disparities. Protective standards, stay-at-home orders, and essential worker guidelines must be tailored to address the social determination of health in order to mitigate health injustices, as identified by COVID-19 incidence and mortality RQs.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document