scholarly journals “Loving Couples and Families:” Assimilation as Honorary Whiteness and the Making of the Vietnamese Refugee Family

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 209
Author(s):  
Linh Thủy Nguyễn
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Vietnamese Refugees ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis ◽  
Great Odds

Integration studies of Vietnamese refugees and their children begin with the problem of assimilation based on cultural and racial difference and ultimately lead these groups to achieve upward mobility against great odds. While scholars have offered alternatives to linear models of assimilation which assume a prescribed path to determine when migrants become integrated, the ideologies and norms which underlie the so-called problem of assimilation remain largely unexamined. Building from a feminist and Foucauldian analysis of power, this article examines state-sponsored knowledge production, such as semi-annual government surveys of Vietnamese refugees as representations which reproduce and reinforce logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy. I contextualize the production of these social science surveys as legibility projects in the geopolitical context of international (Cold War) and domestic (state attempts to dismantle black power movements through civil rights) maintenance of white supremacy. By examining self-sufficiency surveys of Vietnamese refugees conducted upon arrival to the US from the 1970s–1980s and 1990s studies of the second generation, I argue that the family is an instrumental yet overlooked dimension of the racialization of Vietnamese as new immigrants which is rooted in heteronormative, Orientalist, and anti-black notions of family.

A Critical Transnational Perspective to Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Vietnamese Refugees ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Rights Discourse

Much of the early scholarship in Asian American studies sought to establish that Asian Americans have been crucial to the making of the US nation and thus deserve full inclusion into its polity. This emphasis on inclusion affirms the status of the United States as the ultimate protector and provider of human welfare, and narrates the Asian American subject by modern civil rights discourse. However, the comparative cases of Filipino immigrants and Vietnamese refugees show how Asian American racial formation has been determined not only by the social, economic, and political forces in the United States but also by US colonialism, imperialism, and wars in Asia.

Teaching Freedom Song as Antiracist Praxis

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-465
Author(s):  
Stephen Stacks
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Music Curriculum ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Freedom Movement

In the teaching of history, oversimplification is, perhaps, unavoidable. In certain cases, however, that oversimplification can be deadly. There are some lessons that are too complex, some stories that are too nuanced, to be reduced in such a way. By their contours and particularities, they resist easy digestion. In the spirit of this particularity, my contribution to the colloquy is specific, but hopefully applicable to contexts beyond its specificity: I argue that the US Black Freedom Movement (or civil rights movement) and its music is a story that must be taught in all its complexity, for oversimplifying it does concrete harm to the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the present. Teaching the US Black Freedom Movement and its music is also vital if we hope to enable our students to be forces of understanding, healing, and justice in the world, and should be an integral component of any undergraduate music curriculum that hopes to be antiracist.

scholarly journals "You know, I used to be a Jew"

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50
Author(s):  
Mark Reinhardt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

Beginning with the unlikely pairing of Max Reinhardt and Groucho Marx, this article unpacks an old, politically troubling Jewish joke as a way of tracing two trajectories that unfolded between Austria and the United States. The first follows the author's family, the second the interdisciplinary field of American studies. The joke's commentary on the dilemmas of assimilation, as played out in the family history, frames a more sustained examination of how national identity was understood by the American studies project consolidated in Salzburg and the US just after World War II. Focusing on how the new field's ways of engaging and occluding problems of race, subordination, exploitation, and land-theft shaped an interpretation of American democracy's history and prospects, the article puts these issues in the context of Donald Trump's election as president and the urgency of understanding not only the ruptures but also the historical continuities his presidency represents. Against the backdrop of those reflections, the article considers how contemporary American studies does and might engage the continuities. The field must help shape a national narrative both accessible in idiom and able to reckon with the ongoing history of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Doing that entails not only moving beyond but also borrowing anew from that early, Salzburg-style formation of American studies. It may also benefit from the Jewish joke: the conclusion and two postscripts read the joke's limitations in the light of recent social struggles yet also note its unnerving relevance to the Trump-era resurgence of antisemitism.

California

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Alvarez
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Social Cartography ◽  
Family Network ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Police Surveillance ◽  
Us Mexico Border

I utilize my situated position as anthropologist, academician, and citizen to argue not only that we should “think” California, but also that we should “rethink” our state—both its condition and its social cartography. To be clear, I see all my research and endeavors—my research on the US/Mexico border; my time among the markets and entrepreneurs I have worked and lived with; my focus on those places in which I was raised: Lemon Grove, Logan Heights; the family network and my community ethnographic work—as personal. I am in this academic game and the telling of our story because it is personal. When Lemon Grove was segregated, it was about my family; when Logan Heights was split by the construction of Interstate 5 and threatened by police surveillance, it was about our community; when the border was sanctioned and militarized it again was about the communities of which I am a part. A rethinking California is rooted in the experience of living California, of knowing and feeling the condition and the struggles we are experiencing and the crises we have gone through. We need to rethink California, especially the current failure of the state. This too is ultimately personal, because it affects each and every one of us, especially those historically unrepresented folks who have endured over the decades.

scholarly journals Measuring Historical Urban Neighborhood Sustainability: America’s Grand Avenues

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1358
Author(s):  
Michael R. Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Urban Neighborhood ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
The Us ◽  
Education Medical ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Us Cities

From 1850 through approximately 1920, wealthy entrepreneurs and elected officials created “grand avenues” lined by mansions in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and other developing US cities. This paper examines the birthplaces of grand avenues to determine whether they have remained sustainable as magnets for healthy and wealthy people. Using data from the US EPA’s EJSCREEN system and the CDC’s 500 cities study across 11 cities, the research finds that almost every place where a grand avenue began has healthier and wealthier people than their host cities. Ward Parkway in Kansas City and New York’s Fifth Avenue have continued to be grand. Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., Richmond’s Monument Avenue, St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard are national and regional symbols of political power, culture and entertainment, leading to sustainable urban grand avenues, albeit several are challenged by their identification with white supremacy. Among Midwest industrial cities, Chicago’s Prairie Avenue birthplace has been the most successful, whereas the grand avenues of St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo have struggled, trying to use higher education, medical care, and entertainment to try to rebirth their once pre-eminent roles in their cities.

Theorising anti-racism in health and social care

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esme Choonara
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Health And Social Care ◽  
The Us ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Different Levels

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 in the context of a COVID-19 pandemic that was already disproportionally impacting on the lives of people from black, Asian and other minority ethnicities in the UK and the US has provoked scrutiny of how racism impacts on all areas of our lives. This article will examine some competing theories of racism, and ask what theoretical tools we need to successfully confront racism in health and social care. In particular, it will scrutinise the different levels at which racism operates – individual, institutional and structural – and ask how these are related. Furthermore, it will argue against theories that see racism as a product of whiteness per se or ‘white supremacy’, insisting instead that racism should be understood as firmly bound to the functioning and perpetuation of capitalism.

Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen Mucher
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ruling Elites

Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.

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