scholarly journals Double Consciousness in the 21st Century: Du Boisian Theory and the Problem of Racialized Legal Status

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 345
Author(s):  
Tiffany Joseph ◽  
Tanya Golash-Boza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Du Bois

In W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, he argued that the problem of the 20th century in the United States was the problem of the color line. Given that de facto and explicit racial discrimination persist, anti-immigrant rhetoric is intensifying, and legal status has become more salient, we argue Du Boisian theory remains relevant for understanding social and political cleavages in the 21st century United States. The intersection of race, ethnicity, and legal status or “racialized legal status” represents a new variation of Du Bois’ “color line,” due to how these statuses generate cumulative disadvantages and exclusion for citizens and immigrants of color, particularly the undocumented. We begin with a review of Du Bois’ double consciousness theory, highlighting the marginalization of African Americans. Next, we apply double consciousness to the 21st century U.S. context to empirically demonstrate parallels between 20th century African Americans and the marginalization faced today by people of color. We close with a discussion about how double consciousness enhances our understanding of citizenship and has also generated agency for people of color fighting for socio-political inclusion in the contemporary United States.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Free People

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

The Great Migrations and Black Urban Life in the United States, 1914–1970

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyina Steptoe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Agricultural Areas

During the 20th century, the black population of the United States transitioned from largely rural to mostly urban. In the early 1900s the majority of African Americans lived in rural, agricultural areas. Depictions of black people in popular culture often focused on pastoral settings, like the cotton fields of the rural South. But a dramatic shift occurred during the Great Migrations (1914–1930 and 1941–1970) when millions of rural black southerners relocated to US cities. Motivated by economic opportunities in urban industrial areas during World Wars I and II, African Americans opted to move to southern cities as well as to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. New communities emerged that contained black social and cultural institutions, and musical and literary expressions flourished. Black migrants who left the South exercised voting rights, sending the first black representatives to Congress in the 20th century. Migrants often referred to themselves as “New Negroes,” pointing to their social, political, and cultural achievements, as well as their use of armed self-defense during violent racial confrontations, as evidence of their new stance on race.

Red Summer and Early 20th-Century Race Massacres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann V. Collins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Early 19Th Century

Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake. Yet, racial violence has had a long and painful history in the United States. From the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, whites strove cruelly and systematically to maintain power and control over their bodies and labor. Indeed, many interactions between ostensible racial groups have centered on white hostility. A type of brutality that proved especially vicious took the shape of white-on-black race massacres. First appearing in the early 19th century and fading by the end of World War II, whites used these types of disturbances to deny African Americans progress and freedom. Destruction of black communities, massive bloodshed, and lynchings characterized these occurrences. The early 20th century, and particularly the Red Summer, marked a critical moment in the history of race relations of the United States—one that proved deadly to African Americans.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Color Line ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Catholic History

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.

Stories of Servitude

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-124
Author(s):  
Cati Coe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
Place Of Origin

Most of the African research participants in northern New Jersey and the Washington DC metropolitan area told stories of deliberate humiliation or diminishment in which their place of origin or Blackness was used against them. Through these interactions and stories about these interactions, African care workers were becoming familiar with American racial categories, in which they were Black, mixed in with stereotypes about Africans as non-human and about immigrants stealing jobs from citizens. These insults incorporated them into American racial categories as “Blacks” and “people of color,” social categories of person that made little sense in their home countries. As a result, African care workers were becoming more sensitive to the experiences of African-Americans. Care workers take stories of racism to be paradigmatic of their experiences in the United States.

The World of Hosea Easton and David Walker

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
David Walker ◽  
The World ◽  
Free People

Hosea Easton and David Walker described and analyzed racism in New England during the late 1820s. New England had initially been more receptive to its black population than were other sections of the United States, but as their populations of free people of African descent dramatically increased, states began to reverse themselves. By the 1820s, laws forbade free people of African descent from marrying whites, employment was limited to the most menial jobs, and education—where available—was inadequate. African Americans could not serve on juries or hold public office. Their housing opportunities were restricted, and they were segregated in church seating. They were barred from theaters, hotels, hospitals, stagecoaches, and steamships. Worst of all, whites denied blacks their humanity. Their belief that people of color were inferior to themselves underlay slavery and racism.

Preservation and public housing in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-91
Author(s):  
Theodore Prudon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Property Management ◽  
Design Construction

Public housing is an important part of the heritage of the 20th century that deserves preservation, but is in danger of being demolished or unrecognizably altered. The United States, which saw the construction of such government sponsored projects, largely between 1930 and 1975, is no exception. In the last four decades government efforts have continued to shift towards financial incentives for private initiatives for design, construction and property management. This housing legacy, if being preserved, still needs to be improved so it can continue to serve as affordable housing in the 21st century.

Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers

2017 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 180-196
Author(s):  
Justin F. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Total War ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Great War

In 1915, as the Great War was consuming Europe and its colonial empires, W.E.B. Du Bois completedThe Negro, one of the first comprehensive histories of Africa and its diaspora ever published in the United States. Overshadowed today by his more well-known writings,The Negromeditated on how “the problem of the color line” was nothing if not the result of centuries of global capitalist development dependent upon coerced labor, especially African chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. For Du Bois, peering back in time through the smoking ruins of total war, slavery's postemancipation legacies of political disenfranchisement, landlessness, poverty, and segregation had birthed a global proletariat of color exploited by white Europeans and Americans in an international order divided more and more along imperial lines.

scholarly journals The New Demographic Transition: Most Gains in Life Expectancy Now Realized Late in Life

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen N Eggleston ◽  
Victor R Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Expectancy ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Labor Force Participation ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Demographic Transition ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Working Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Survival Effect

The share of increases in life expectancy realized after age 65 was only about 20 percent at the beginning of the 20th century for the United States and 16 other countries at comparable stages of development; but that share was close to 80 percent by the dawn of the 21st century, and is almost certainly approaching 100 percent asymptotically. This new demographic transition portends a diminished survival effect on working life. For high-income countries at the forefront of the longevity transition, expected lifetime labor force participation as a percent of life expectancy is declining. Innovative policies are needed if societies wish to preserve a positive relationship running from increasing longevity to greater prosperity.

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