Protecting the Household

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Adam Malka
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Black Families ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Household ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Male Power ◽  
White Person ◽  
White Violence ◽  
Black Households

Antebellum racial policing also extended to the household, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Police reform was implemented in the name of property, and in a patriarchal world, households often counted as male property. Thus the new policemen were supposed to protect good householders. And they often did. But free black households fit into this system uncomfortably. Beliefs in black household disorder, and subsequent police regulations targeted at black families, combined with the prohibition of black testimony against white people both to undermine black men’s household autonomy and heighten white male power over black households. When a white person entered a black home, there was not much a policeman could do, even if he wanted to. As a result, free black Baltimoreans’ home lives were uniquely susceptible to white violence. Once again, policemen confirmed the disparity.

Securing the Workplace

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-122
Author(s):  
Adam Malka
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Institutional Discrimination ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The People ◽  
Violence In The Workplace ◽  
Treat All ◽  
Rail Yards ◽  
White Violence

This chapter, along with the next two, interrogates the ways that police reform amplified ordinary white men’s power to police free black Baltimoreans. One site of such racial policing was the workplace. By the late 1850s, Chapter 3 shows, white workingmen were commonly engaging in job busting – i.e. chasing skilled black workingmen from the docks and rail yards with the police’s complicity. This was because the law did not treat all workers equally, even in an industrializing city where employers held much of the leverage and the vast majority of the people of color were free. Black workers were prolific in Baltimore, and the wages black Baltimoreans earned were meaningful evidence of their freedom, but the legal and institutional discrimination they confronted put them at a severe disadvantage when facing white violence in the workplace. More times than not, professional policemen confirmed the disparity.

“In the Exercise of a Sound Discretion, Who, of This Class of Persons, Shall Have a Right to the License…”: Family, Race, and Firearms in Antebellum North Carolina

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 392-412
Author(s):  
Antwain K. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Black People ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Professional Networks ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Legal Fees ◽  
License Requirement ◽  
The Individual

In 1841, North Carolina passed a law requiring free black people to acquire firearm licenses from their county court. This essay argues that the license requirement forced free black people to rely on their families’ support to access firearms, which sits contrary to the “individual right” framework that firearms are often viewed through. Family members helped free black people to construct racial identities, highlight trustworthiness, connect individuals to patrons and professional networks, and manage legal fees, all in pursuit of firearm access. This essay contributes to our understanding of antebellum black families and their connections to their broader interracial communities.

scholarly journals Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 712
Author(s):  
Justin Michael Reed
Keyword(s):  
Skin Color ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Racial Perception ◽  
White Person ◽  
Hamitic Hypothesis

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.

scholarly journals Teaching Outside One’s Race: The Story of an Oakland Teacher

2014 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 112-121
Author(s):  
Bree Picower
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
African American ◽  
New Teacher ◽  
High Achievement ◽  
White People ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Teaching Position ◽  
Race And Education ◽  
White Person ◽  
American Children

“Oh, the District placed you at Prescott Elementary?  You better watch out ‒ they hate white people.  Especially that Carrie Secret ‒ she’s one of those black radicals, you know, the Ebonics people.”  This was the warning I was given multiple times in multiple ways when people found out that I had been assigned to Prescott Elementary School for my first teaching position, in Oakland, California in 1999.  The “warners” were other white folks who were trying to protect what they saw as a young, new teacher from what they perceived to be a hostile place.   However, I really didn’t fit the stereotype.  I had been involved with several organizations that explicitly addressed issues of race and education for several years, often as the only white person there.  I was thrilled to be placed at a school such as Prescott, whose reputation for high achievement for African American children and adoption of the “Ebonics” program had placed it at the forefront of national debate.

“MARKING WHITENESS” FOR CROSS-RACIAL SOLIDARITY

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-319
Author(s):  
Greta Fowler Snyder
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Dramatic Difference ◽  
Sketch Comedy ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Popular Texts

AbstractThe dramatic difference in typical Black and White lifeworlds—or sets of “cultural givens” assumed by Black and White Americans and used to interpret experience—impedes the development of a cross-racial solidarity oriented toward racial justice. If such a cross-racial solidarity is to be realized, actors must reorient the average White lifeworld in ways that make Whites more receptive to Black claims. I identify, theorize, and assess a particular strategy for transforming the dominant White lifeworld, and thus facilitating cross-racial solidarity, that directly confronts contemporary Whiteness: “marking Whiteness.” The idea of “marking Whiteness” is abstracted from three different texts—the blog-turned-book Stuff White People Like, a satiric essay entitled “I Am a Martyr (And So Can You!): A Guide to White Male Victimhood” published in Esquire magazine, and the sketch comedy phenomenon Chappelle’s Show. Interventions that “mark Whiteness” make Whiteness hyper-visible—as is characteristic of “marked” groups—and portray average White behavior and ideas as integral to the systemic reproduction of racial injustice. “Marking Whiteness” renders the racial polity visible, and makes contemporary Whites’ complicity in racial injustice undeniable. While there are good reasons to be skeptical of the progressive credentials of any mass cultural product and popular texts are often subject to misinterpretation, popular culture should be recognized as an important site in lifeworld and solidarity construction and reconstruction.

scholarly journals “We Chilluns, Long wid Her, Wuz Lak de Udder Slaves”: Free Black Families and Quasi-slavery in the Late Antebellum Era

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
EMILY WEST
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Financial Gain ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Free People

This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

scholarly journals The righteous outrage of post-truth anti-feminism: An analysis of TubeCrush and feminist research in and of public space

2020 ◽  
pp. 136754942095157
Author(s):  
Adrienne Evans ◽  
Sarah Riley
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Popular Feminism ◽  
Affective Dimensions ◽  
Made In

Contemporary gender relations occur in a polarised environment characterised by popular feminism and networked misogyny. This context structures feminist researchers’ public engagement and exposes them to online hostility. Addressing a paucity of work on the affective dimensions of digital hostility, this article analyses 2400 comments made in The Daily Mail Online in response to feminist research on TubeCrush, a website featuring unsolicited images of men on the London underground. Our analysis shows feminists constructed as powerful but hypocritical; as discredited post-truth experts and, along with gay men and women in general, as being less knowledgeable or valid than white men. These discourses were united by an affective texture of an outrage that positions itself as righteous, undoing feminist knowledge and recuperating (white) male power. Identifying this as ‘righteous outrage’ offers important insights into the workings of contemporary anti-feminist sentiment where visibility is permitted so long as credibility is undone.

Playing the “Lady Sambo”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-270
Author(s):  
Leigh-Anne Francis
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Male ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
White Racism ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Legal Strategies

Abstract In the post–Civil War South, black women litigants made conscious tactical appeals to white male judges’ racism, particularly the racist-sexist stereotypes at the heart of the white paternalism ethos, in order to win lawsuits against whites who defrauded them. African American women’s arsenal of legal strategies included the “Lady Sambo,” an intentional racialized gender performance of feigned ignorance. By performing the “Lady Sambo”—an ignorant, servile black woman in need of protection—some poor black women mobilized their expertise in white racism to defend their economic rights. In a white-dominated society predicated upon the denial of black rights, freedom, and dignity, poor black women seeking justice in civil court cases had to employ resistance strategies that did not openly challenge white authority. In white paternalism, a cultural mainstay of the postbellum South, poor black women discerned and wrested an opportunity to covertly resist economic racism. Unable to attenuate or eradicate structural racism, black women treated racism as a weakness that, at times, made whites vulnerable to manipulation. As long as judges’ legal decisions left the white male power structure intact, some black women were the potential beneficiaries of jurists’ racial paternalism ethos. While whites imagined themselves as controlling paternalistic exchanges with blacks, black people engaged whites as conscious actors drawing on a keen understanding of white people’s supremacist self-perceptions and projections onto blacks. When possible, black women exploited white racism to their advantage and white judges’ racial paternalism ethos occasioned such exploitation. In so doing, black women earned their legal victories by acting intentionally and with savvy.

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