scholarly journals Re-Membering Catholicity: Higher Education, Racial Justice, and the Spirituality of the Posthuman University

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 645
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Mayer
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
The University ◽  
Common Action

In the reinscribing of white supremacy in the United States, the contemporary university as a place of exclusion presents a problem of religion. Approaching religion as “the search for depth” and addressing the “techno-myths” of betterment, longevity, and the rituals of enacting these myths that capture today’s social imaginaries, this paper proposes an alternative to religious faith in “rising” and the rhetoric of the contemporary American technocratic-meritrocratic paradigm. Adopting the posthumanist methodologies of reflexivity and diffraction, the author argues for an embodied catholicity of the university as a community, an open system rather than a pre-formed locus to which racially minoritized students are “added” or “included”. In advancing the co-creativity of a Catholic-pluriversal university via an ethic of love and care, the author presents a Christian spirituality that is itself a technology that offers the hope of enacting a more life-giving congruence between the sacred and the secular than the myth of Manifest Destiny and the racialized violence that is the continued manifestation of that mythos. Embodied in the posthuman mystic’s practices of “re-memory,” the author presents Christianity as a performative-pluralistic religion of evolution, one of common action with the potential to draw into something new the energies of creativity in today’s university.

Measuring Whiteness: A Systematic Review of Instruments and Call to Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 530-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Schooley ◽  
Debbiesiu L. Lee ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Modern Racism

The psychological study of Whiteness provides one avenue for researchers to help combat racial injustice in the United States. This article is a call to action for counseling psychologists to engage in much needed scholarship and critical examinations of Whiteness. In this systematic review and content analysis, we provide an overview of 18 quantitative measures focusing on various aspects of Whiteness published between 1967 and 2017. We summarize the constructs and psychometric properties of these measures. Our content analysis indicated that constructs assessed by Whiteness measures have shifted in focus over time across four themes: (a) Attitudes Toward Black People/Integration, (b) Modern Racism, (c) White Racial Identity, and (d) White Privilege and Antiracism. We conclude with suggestions on how advancement, development, and use of Whiteness measures could further our knowledge through research examining present-day racial justice issues. The issues highlighted include police brutality, xenophobia, immigration, White supremacy, activism, and training in the field.

States of Ethnography: Colonialism, Resistance, and Cultural Transcription in Malaya and the Philippines, 1890s–1930s

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P. S. Goh
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Graduate Degrees ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
The University ◽  
Indirect Rule

The metaphoric reading of native life as an unopened book by two ranking colonial administrators and authoritative ethnographers in Malaya and the Philippines cannot be a simple coincidence. Clifford and Barrows represent two empires, one conservative and peaking, the other liberal and ascendant, meeting in “the Malay Archipelago.” Clifford was a product of the rugged and cultured education demanded of British aristocratic scions, while Barrows exemplified the rising American professional classes, holding graduate degrees in education and anthropology. Both men served well the metropolitan ideologies that guided the imperial hand: British Providence to provide good government to the Malay states; American manifest destiny to replace Spain as the agent of civilization in the Philippines. Using their ethnographic readings, Clifford helped perfect the art of British “indirect rule” Malaya, while Barrows established the Philippine mass education system, the main thrust of the United States' “benevolent assimilation.” Both men retired as decorated officers and established literati, Barrows as the President of the University of California and Clifford a literary figure after Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

Racial Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 500-522
Author(s):  
Traci C. West
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
German Immigrant ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Probing Questions

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas invite us to confront problems of racial justice. Probing questions of method that consider whiteness and white supremacy in US-American life yields guidance for identifying how Christian ethics produces useful approaches to questions of racial justice. Examples from Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century Christian ethics commentaries on white dominance and his methodological assumptions spark an exploration of how related arguments in twenty-first century Christian ethics and theology analyses of white dominance can contribute. Besides method, concrete racist attitudes and practices in need of Christian ethics disruption are revealed in the politics of immigration seen in Niebuhr’s 1920s claims about German immigrant ethnic identity struggles and addressed by current Christian ethicists on twenty-first-century opposition to welcoming impoverished, migrant brown peoples into the United States.

A Study of Black Female Principals Leading through Twin Pandemics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Weiner ◽  
Daron Cyr ◽  
Laura Burton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Leadership Practice ◽  
Female Principals ◽  
Real Change ◽  
Black Female Principals

In 2020, the United States experienced twin pandemics disproportionately impacting BIPOC communities and their schools and school systems—one new, COVID-19, and one longstanding, that of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. This phenomenological study of 20 Black female principals in two states provides insights into how these leaders, who so often center racial justice and caring for BIPOC children and communities in their leadership practice, grappled with these pandemics and how doing so impacted their leadership and work. Findings suggest that leading through these twin pandemics further cemented these women’s commitments to engage in advocacy and justice work on behalf of their communities and students. They also reported, regarding racial inequity and white supremacy, feeling both a cautious optimism stemming from seeing the work they had long engaged in being taken up at scale, and by white colleagues in particular, and frustration, experiencing this engagement often as “performative” and thus unlikely to lead to real change. And yet they also spoke of their deep commitment to advocacy and social justice moving forward and their role in ensuring that all their students receive the education, opportunities, and outcomes they deserve.

The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter

2021 ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Dana Francisco Miranda
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Full Model ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Decentralized Leadership ◽  
Racialized Violence

Since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the United States has seen the coalescing of black protestors and activists along with their multiracial collaborators under the banner of Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This struggle against racialized violence, police brutality, and white supremacy has been witnessed in myriad ways, with two of its most prominent “reactions” occurring in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Within this struggle, the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) has chosen to follow a “leader-full” model that replaces traditional hierarchical forms of leadership for that of collaboration and decentralization. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the competing notions of centralized and decentralized leadership within black liberation movements to better understand this model. Using the works of Barbara Ransby, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Frantz Fanon, this work will explore forms of black leadership that articulate alternative modes of accountability, service, and well-being within the struggle for black livability.

Historicizing White Supremacist Terrorism with Ida B. Wells

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110213
Author(s):  
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
The One

In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse. Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history and distinctly U.S. American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand, and expanding the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of U.S. counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet neglected tradition in U.S. racial justice activism that uses the language of terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells’s analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative of white supremacist terrorism. I argue that the understanding of white supremacy as terrorism in her writings not only exposes the partisan use of these terms and their complicity in constructing a narrowly circumscribed and biased public knowledge about racial domination, but also reveals some mistaken assumptions of the current debate. This essay thus sheds new light on a neglected discourse of white supremacist terrorism and makes it relevant for contemporary purposes.

Undermining Racial Justice

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Court Case ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Campus Leaders ◽  
The People ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
The University

Over the last sixty years, administrators on college campuses nationwide have responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible. This bold argument is at the center of this book. Focusing on the University of Michigan, often a key talking point in national debates about racial justice thanks to the contentious Gratz v. Bollinger 2003 Supreme Court case, the book argues that UM leaders incorporated black student dissent selectively into the institution's policies, practices, and values. This strategy was used to prevent activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice. Despite knowing that racial disparities would likely continue, the book demonstrates that these administrators improbably saw themselves as champions of racial equity. What the book contends is not that good intentions resulted in unforeseen negative consequences, but that the people who created and maintained racial inequities at premier institutions of higher education across the United States firmly believed they had good intentions in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The case of the University of Michigan fits into a broader pattern at elite colleges and universities and is a cautionary tale for all in higher education. As the book illustrates, inclusion has always been a secondary priority, and, as a result, the policies of the late 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new and enduring era of racial retrenchment on campuses nationwide.

The Myth of the Millennial Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 130-164
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
To Come

The myth of the Millennial Nation held that the United States, grounded as it was in the natural order, would shine its example around the globe until all nations of earth had abandoned despotic rulers and claimed the natural order of freedom and democracy for themselves. White Americans in the early national period, therefore, stood with one foot in the mythic age of creation and the other in the mythic, golden age to come. History became irrelevant. Early in the nineteenth century, white Americans imagined that the millennial transformation of the globe could be wrought solely through America’s moral example. But moral example gave way to force and violence as the myth of the Millennial Nation gave way to the doctrine of manifest destiny. By the early twentieth century, manifest destiny morphed into the American Dream. If manifest destiny had turned the millennial vision outward, inspiring the acquisition of both land and opportunity for economic investment abroad, the American Dream turned the millennial vision inward, inspiring new visions of opportunity at home. As the nation transitioned from millennial vision to manifest destiny to American dream, the myth of White Supremacy was the constant connecting factor that underpinned all three.

Towards an interdisciplinary knowledge exchange model

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago DE FRANCISCO ◽  
Diego MAZO
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Design Environment ◽  
Interdisciplinary Knowledge ◽  
One Year ◽  
The University ◽  
Common Situation

Universities and corporates, in Europe and the United States, have come to a win-win relationship to accomplish goals that serve research and industry. However, this is not a common situation in Latin America. Knowledge exchange and the co-creation of new projects by applying academic research to solve company problems does not happen naturally.To bridge this gap, the Design School of Universidad de los Andes, together with Avianca, are exploring new formats to understand the knowledge transfer impact in an open innovation network aiming to create fluid channels between different stakeholders. The primary goal was to help Avianca to strengthen their innovation department by apply design methodologies. First, allowing design students to proposed novel solutions for the traveller experience. Then, engaging Avianca employees to learn the design process. These explorations gave the opportunity to the university to apply design research and academic findings in a professional and commercial environment.After one year of collaboration and ten prototypes tested at the airport, we can say that Avianca’s innovation mindset has evolved by implementing a user-centric perspective in the customer experience touch points, building prototypes and quickly iterate. Furthermore, this partnership helped Avianca’s employees to experience a design environment in which they were actively interacting in the innovation process.

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