scholarly journals Transhistorical and Transnational James Baldwin in “My Dungeon Shook” or “The Instructional Manual For Black People”

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
Author(s):  
Beugre Zouankouan Stéphane ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
White People ◽  
Instructional Manual

This review provides an analysis of the great social, cultural, political, intellectual and even anthropological contribution about race relations made by James Baldwin through the first essay of The Fire Next Time. Thanks to this valuable, thoughtful and meaningful contribution about race relations between the white people and the black people, James Baldwin can be characterized here as both a transhistorical and transnational writer, thinker and truthteller. Because his realistic good social, cultural, political, intellectual and even anthropological contribution about race relations in the United States goes beyond the developing issues at the time of writing (the historical context of the essay production, the period of the essay production and the borders of the United States) to become a real transhistorical contribution (meaning is out of historical context and historical period) and a real transnational contribution (meaning is out of the borders of the country mentioned). This retrospective on his essay and its re-evaluation shed light on the visionary quality of the writer and also explore the prophetical quality of his contribution. Due to its realistic message and its effectiveness and visionary qualities, the essay “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” may serve as a model-paradigm that can be utilized as an “Instructional Manual” by black people to deal with and to handle white people. And namely, it can serve as precisely “The Instructional Manual For Black People” to deal with and “to handle white people” in terms of useful instructions, guidelines and principles for the sake of the black race.

Racism at the End of White Christian America

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Kristopher Norris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Womanist Theology ◽  
White People ◽  
The Many

Chapter 1 engages in social analysis to outline the current racial landscape in churches in the United States. Beginning with our current political and religious moment, it addresses and defines the many layers to the problem of whiteness. Drawing on the work of James Baldwin, womanist theology, and contemporary sociology, this chapter describes whiteness as a process of social and identity formation currently experiencing a crisis of legitimation. This current legitimation crisis has precipitated the phenomenon of colorblindness, which leads white people to see our interests and perspectives as universal, blinds us to our epistemological limitations, and leads to a posture of defensiveness and fragility. The chapter concludes by arguing that whiteness presents itself as a “wicked problem” with no identifiable solution.

scholarly journals Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 111-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahim Kurwa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
White People ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Residential Space

The neighborhood is a historic and contemporary site of the assertion of white racial and economic domination, particularly over Black people. Although there is strong evidence that whites continue to prefer racially segregated neighborhoods, fifty years of fair housing jurisprudence has made it more difficult to openly bar non-white residents. Among the many strategies used to protect white domination of residential space is the coordinated surveillance and policing of non-white people. In this paper, I show how Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, has become an important platform for the surveillance and policing of race in residential space, enabling the creation of what I call digitally gated communities. First, I describe the history of the platform and the forms of segregation and surveillance it has supplemented or replaced. Second, I situate the platform in a broader analysis of carcerality as a mode and logic of regulating race in the United States. Third, using examples drawn from public reports about the site, I illustrate how race is surveilled and policed in the context of gentrification and integration. Finally, I discuss implications, questions, and future issues that might arise on the platform.

Where the Blame Lies: Unpacking Groups Into Their Constituent Subgroups Shifts Judgments of Blame in Intergroup Conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 095679762110269
Author(s):  
Nir Halevy ◽  
Ifat Maoz ◽  
Preeti Vani ◽  
Emily S. Reit
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Intergroup Relations ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Perceived Support ◽  
Intergroup Conflict ◽  
White People ◽  
Intergroup Conflicts

Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and decision-making, we propose that unpacking a group by explicitly describing it in terms of its constituent subgroups increases perceived support for the view that the unpacked group shoulders more of the blame for intergroup conflict. Five preregistered experiments ( N = 3,335 adults) found support for this novel hypothesis across three distinct intergroup conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, current racial tensions between White people and Black people in the United States, and the gender gap in wages in the United States. Our findings (a) highlight the independent roles that entrenched social identities and cognitive, presentation-based processes play in shaping blame judgments, (b) demonstrate that the effect of unpacking groups generalizes across partisans and nonpartisans, and (c) illustrate how constructing packed versus unpacked sets of potential perpetrators can critically shape where the blame lies.

scholarly journals #DiminishingDiscrimination: The symbolic annihilation of race and racism in news hashtags of ‘calling 911 on Black people’

Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492091927
Author(s):  
Robert E Gutsche ◽  
Xinhe Cong ◽  
Feihong Pan ◽  
Yiyi Sun ◽  
LaTasha DeLoach
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Black People ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
White People ◽  
Symbolic Annihilation ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
Social Policing

This critical textual analysis examines the symbolic annihilation of race and racisms by the use of hashtags, such as #BBQBecky and #CornerstoreCaroline, in news coverage of White people in the United States who called or threatened to call 911 to report everyday behavior of Black individuals in 2018. This study argues that the use of humorous and virtual hashtags to represent the callers contributed to overall coverage of racially charged incidents in ways that reduced the events’ seriousness in terms of social policing of Black individuals. Collectively, this coverage formed a type of symbolic annihilation of racist interpretations of callers’ acts and Black resistance and meanings embedded within the hashtags themselves.

scholarly journals ESSAY ON HUMAN (RACE RELATIONS) IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Frederick D. Bedell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voter Suppression

This essay speaks to the context of domination and subordination in particular as it pertains to White Supremacy/White Privilege as manifested in the history of slavery and “Jim Crow” in the United States. It is within this historical context one can discern the present status of race relations in the United States that continues to foster race discrimination through the policies of the ethnic majority (white) power structure, e.g.-institutional racism, voter suppression laws, gerrymandering of voter districts and banking policies to name a few areas. The research of books, papers, television interviews and personal experiences provides a testament to present government policies that endeavor to maintain a social construct of dominance and subordination by the white power structure in the United States.

A House Divided Now on Fire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caron E. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Law

The violence against black people in the United States, as witnessed particularly in the shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of John Crawford III in Ohio, indicates the anxiety over the changing social order from white patriarchal to a more diversified locus of power. Therefore, it conducts a discourse analysis of texts, such as the Blue Lives Matter website, that reactively and defensively support the law enforcement community and refute the Black Lives Matter narrative. The discourse analysis reveals a level of anxiety that allows those within the police community to scapegoat the Black Lives Matter movement, further revealing the need of this particular community to maintain hegemonic race relations: thereby failing to recognize the vulnerability of black people in the United States.

“I Can't Breathe”: Connecting COVID-19, Protests, and Global Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 373-377
Author(s):  
Matiangai Sirleaf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
White People ◽  
Racial Hierarchy

COVID-19 has exposed the underlying racial hierarchy in the United States and elsewhere. Tragically, one study indicates that Black and Latinx people have COVID-19 mortality rates as much as nine times higher than White people in the United States when age is taken into account. Several commentators have attempted to account for these glaring health disparities by pointing to preexisting health conditions like hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and the higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease among Black people, which can make for greater and more severe and deadly complications with COVID-19. Yet, structural factors ensure that Black people are “more likely to encounter those things that we know compromise health–like inaccessible or biased health care providers, inadequate schools and education systems, unemployment, hazardous jobs, unsafe housing, and violent, polluted communities.”

scholarly journals White Identity Politics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Jardina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Black People ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Identity ◽  
White People

The attitudes that whites have about race have been a defining component of their political views since at least the American Civil War. Most of the social science research to date, however, has not focused on the attitudes white people have about their own group. Instead, it has examined almost exclusively the attitudes that white people have toward racial and ethnic minority groups, and especially toward black people. Indeed, the study of attitudes that white people have toward “out-groups” in the form of racial prejudice, racial stereotypes, and racial resentment has been an important and growing component of political science research. Less research, however, has attended to the attitudes that white people have toward their own group and the political consequences of these beliefs. On the one hand, this lacuna is somewhat surprising, especially given the extent to which work in political science has otherwise noted the important role of group identities—or the psychological attachments individuals have toward relevant social groups—in driving political preferences and behavior. On the other hand, a focus on related concepts like whiteness, white identity, or white consciousness has been limited because researchers have assumed that whites’ dominant status in Western societies means that they are less conscious of their race. In other words, because white people have historically composed the numerical majority of the population in the United States and in Western European countries, and because they have possessed the lion’s share of social, political, and economic power in the United States and Western Europe, whites have been able to take their race for granted in a way that racial and ethnic minorities have not. To the extent that previous scholarship has considered whiteness, it largely focused on whiteness as an ideology of oppression or whiteness as an invisible group identity. More recently, however, renewed attention has been paid to whiteness as a visible social identity, with scholars arguing that the growing demographic diversity, increases in immigration, globalization, perceptions of anti-white discrimination, and status threat make it more likely today that whites will see their racial group as a salient one with shared political interests. As a result, white identity is politically consequential for a range of political attitudes and behaviors, including opinion on immigration policy, contemporary political candidate and partisan preferences, attitudes about diversity and globalization, preferences for certain social welfare policies, opinion toward far-right parties, and more. It is also important to note that most of the research in this domain has been US-centric, but a growing body of work has attended to whiteness and white identity in Western Europe.

Having Their Say, Leaving Their Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Independent Organization

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.

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