Agricultural Self-Determination on a Regional Scale

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
Monica M. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Cooperative Movement ◽  
Western Migration ◽  
Cooperative Purchasing ◽  
Economic Injustice

Drawing from the civil rights and Black Power movements, a cooperative movement swept the south in the late 1960s to address economic injustice and the lack of jobs. Rural African Americans organized cooperatives to resist the poverty and oppression that spurred northern and western migration, creating opportunities for community self-determination. Founded in 1967, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) helped former tenant farmers and sharecroppers develop autonomy. By 1974, the FSC encompassed 134 cooperatives in fourteen states. Motivated to promote and protect Black land ownership, by 1977 the cooperative controlled more than one million acres. The FSC’s agricultural programs trained farmers in areas such as conservation, management, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. The FSC provided technical and financial assistance to the member cooperatives, growing to include initiatives such as credit unions, manufacturing cooperatives, housing programs, and health care centers. The FSC developed mechanisms for multistate collective organizing, engaged in local politics, and lobbied for policies that benefit their member organizations. The FSC’s successes in collective action and collective responsibility threatened white power structures, and white elites responded with political and legal attacks. While harming the FSC, it continues to organize southern cooperatives today, remaining a model for self-determination and resistance.

The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malinda Maynor Lowery
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Native People ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
First Americans

The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, including approximately 55,000 enrolled members, is the largest Indian community east of the Mississippi River. Lumbee history serves as a window into the roles that Native people have played in the struggle to implement the founding principles of the United States, not just as “the First Americans,” but as members of their own nations, operating in their own communities’ interests. When we see US history through the perspectives of Native nations, we see that the United States is not only on a quest to expand rights for individuals. Surviving Native nations like the Lumbees, who have their own unique claims on this land and its ruling government, are forcing Americans to confront the ways in which their stories, their defining moments, and their founding principles are flawed and inadequate. We know the forced removals, the massacres, the protests that Native people have lodged against injustice, yet such knowledge is not sufficient to understand American history. Lumbee history provides a way to honor, and complicate, American history by focusing not just on the dispossession and injustice visited upon Native peoples, but on how and why Native survival matters. Native nations are doing the same work as the American nation—reconstituting communities, thriving, and finding a shared identity with which to achieve justice and self-determination. Since the late 19th century, Lumbee Indians have used segregation, war, and civil rights to maintain a distinct identity in the biracial South. The Lumbees’ survival as a people, a race, and a tribal nation shows that their struggle has revolved around autonomy, or the ability to govern their own affairs. They have sought local, state, and federal recognition to support that autonomy, but doing so has entangled the processes of survival with outsiders’ ideas about what constitutes a legitimate Lumbee identity. Lumbees continue to adapt to the constraints imposed on them by outsiders, strengthening their community ties through the process of adaptation itself. Lumbee people find their cohesion in the relentless fight for self-determination. Always, that struggle has mattered more than winning or losing a single battle.

Jim Crow Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Post War

Jim Crow Capital tells the story of how black women in Washington, D.C. transformed civil rights politics between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation’s capital could cast a ballot, women nonetheless proclaimed their first-class citizenship rights by working to influence congressional legislation, lobby politicians, shape policy, and secure freedom and justice for all African Americans, both in Washington, D.C. and across the country. During the course of their political campaigns, African American women’s relationship to federal and local politics underwent a fundamental transformation. During the 1920s, black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to intervene in federal matters, thereby working to improve conditions for disenfranchised African Americans who lacked a political voice on a national level. But by the early 1930s, black women turned their attention to focus more fully on local politics in Washington, D.C. by waging campaigns for economic justice, voting rights, and an end to racial segregation and interracial police brutality, making their freedom struggle an example for the nation. Black women in Washington, D.C. crafted a broad vision of citizenship by waging comprehensive and interconnected campaigns for legal equality, economic citizenship, public commemoration, and safety from violence. Women’s political activism in Washington, D.C. influenced the post-war black freedom struggle and still resonates today.

Frameworks of Critical Race Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee E. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Education History ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
American Society

Critical race theory (CRT) concerns the study and transformation of relationships among race, (ethnicity), racism, and power. For many scholars, CRT is a theoretical and interpretative lens that analyzes the appearance of race and racism within institutions and across literature, film, art, and other forms of social media. Unlike traditional civil rights approaches that embraced incrementalism and systematic progress, CRT questioned the very foundations of the legal order. Since the 1980s, various disciplines have relied on this theory—most notably the fields of education, history, legal studies, feminist studies, political science, psychology, sociology, and criminal justice—to address the dynamics and challenges of racism in American society. While earlier narratives may have exclusively characterized the plight of African Americans against institutional power structures, later research has advocated the importance of understanding and highlighting the narratives of all people of color. Moreover, the theoretical lenses of CRT have broadened its spectrum to include frameworks that capture the struggles and experiences of Latinx, Asian, and Native Americans as well. Taken collectively, these can be regarded as critical race studies. Each framework relies heavily on certain principles of CRT, exposing the easily obscured and often racialized power structures of American society. Included among these principles (and related tenets) is white supremacy, white privilege, interest convergence, legal indeterminacy, intersectionality, and storytelling, among others. An examination of each framework reveals its remarkable potential to inform and facilitate an understanding of racialized practices within and across American power structures and institutions, including education, employment, the legal system, housing, and health care.

Empathetic British feminists at the crossroads of colonialism and self-determination

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 84-97
Author(s):  
Rebecca Cardone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Race And Class

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore women’s resistance to the religion of civilising missions abroad through empathetic feminism. Design/methodology/approach Conceptually, this paper explores three thematic tools for transnational activism in the interwar period: empathy for silent history, intersectionality of race and class, and empowerment through advocacy within power structures. With the theoretical backdrop of Winifred Holtby’s activism inspired by the philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, this research compares the political involvement of Frances Emily Newton to Blanche Elizabeth Campbell Dugdale, and how their transnational activism contributed to post-colonial self-determination and the convolution of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in the rise of the twentieth century nation-state. Findings These three feminists provided alternative narratives of human rights activism during the first wave of British feminism that both enabled transnational activism and planted seeds for empowering self-determination amidst colonial mandates and rising nationalism. Practical implications These women worked at the dovetail of colonialism and self-determination towards the twentieth century nation-state, and as the twenty-first century evolves with greater global integration and interconnectivity, imaginative insight in the transnational context evokes greater opportunities for empathy and compassion across intersectional identities, which in effect enables the mobilisation of positionality to confront structural violence perpetuating silenced voices. Originality/value By contextually evaluating transnational activism in a narrative of nuanced complexities, this research exudes opportunities for propagating universal human rights while maintaining the sensitivity to post-colonial sentiment for empowerment with the support of transnational networks.

Gonzalez v. Douglas

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Christina Acosta
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Knowledge Networks ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Mexican American Studies ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Protections

The Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona, was eliminated in 2011. Shortly afterward, a group of teachers organized to challenge the ban on Ethnic Studies, claiming it was enacted with racial animus and violated constitutional protections. While much scholarship has been written analyzing the bill that contributed to the elimination of the program, a lacunae in the literature has been a focus on the litigation. This article utilizes twenty-one interviews with individuals who were involved in the Gonzalez v. Douglas litigation and successfully overturned the ban in the summer of 2017. Their narratives reveal the importance of what the author terms transformative historical capital, which refers to the transformation that occurs internally when one learns of the tools, knowledge, networks, and determination extant in the Chicana/o community (as well as other communities of color) due to a long history of social movements that sought civil rights and self-determination.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097620
Author(s):  
Herbert G Ruffin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Black People ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Revolutionary Period

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

scholarly journals Social Work and Social Policy Practice: Imperatives for Political Engagement

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manohar Pawar
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Policy Practice

This article discusses why and how social workers need to engage in social policy practice and how such engagement necessitates political action. The local conditions relating to health, education, housing, employment, gender equality and socioeconomic infrastructure in majority of communities in the Asia Pacific region are largely neglected by professional social workers. To make a difference in those communities and to do justice to their own professional values and principles, social workers need to engage in policy practice in several ways. They may also need to re-examine the profession’s non-political and non-religious neutral stand. It argues that to facilitate their necessary political engagement, social workers need to understand and work with local politics and power structures. Such a stand calls for new thinking and altering some aspects of the nature of social work education and practice in the region.

scholarly journals White Privilege and the Decolonization Work Needed in Evaluation to Support Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-Determination

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate McKegg
Keyword(s):  
White Privilege ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Keynote Paper ◽  
The Social ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Society Annual

This paper builds on a keynote paper presented at the 2018 Canadian Evaluation Society annual conference by Kate McKegg, a Pākehā, non-Indigenous evaluator from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Kate reflects on the concept and implications for Indigenous people of white privilege in colonized Western nations. She discusses some of the ways in which white privilege and its consequences play out in the field of evaluation, perpetuating colonial sentiments and practices that maintain and reinforce inequities and injustice and potentially threaten the social justice aspirations of the field. Kate argues that those with white privilege have much work to do, unpacking and understanding their privilege if they are to have any chance of playing a role in deconstructing and dismantling the power structures that hold colonizing systems in place. She suggests that for evaluators to be effective allies for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, they must undertake ideological, cultural, emotional, and constitutional work. This work will be tough and scary and is not for the faint hearted. But it is vital to unlocking the potential transformation that can come from just and peaceful relationships that affirm and validate Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing and being.

scholarly journals Practicing Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
Digital Sphere

Digital sovereignty has become a hotly debated concept. The current convergence of multiple crises adds fuel to this debate, as it contextualizes the concept in a foundational discussion of democratic principles, civil rights, and national identities: is (technological) self-determination an option for every individual to cope with the digital sphere effectively? Can disruptive events provide chances to rethink our ideas of society - including the design of the objects and processes which constitute our techno-social realities? The positions assembled in this volume analyze opportunities for participation and policy-making, and describe alternative technological practices before and after the pandemic.

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