Policing Raceriotland

Author(s):  
Max Felker-Kantor

Intensified policing and punitive crime policies in Los Angeles emerged from the response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Despite the belief among mostly white conservative politicians and police officials that Los Angeles was immune from urban unrest, this chapter foregrounds the racist police practices and violence of the LAPD targeting residents of color as the root and fundamental meaning of the Watts uprising. As such, the uprising was an antipolice protest and demand for an end to police practices that reproduced and upheld white supremacy, segregation, and inequality. Department officials and conservative policymakers, however, used the crisis for the police created by the uprising to target African Americans and expand police power. Watts, in short, became a police riot and excuse to arrest, criminalize, and contain African American residents.

Author(s):  
Max Felker-Kantor

Between the 1960s and 1990s, the police power in Los Angeles intensified. Police power was not incidental or supplemental, but constitutive of postwar city politics and authority. The introduction outlines the central question of the book: how and why this could happen after the Watts uprising of 1965 exposed the racism at the heart of the police power, decades of pressure from an active anti–police abuse movement, and under the twenty-year rule of a liberal administration that sought to control and regulate police behavior. Tracing the racism at the heart of the police power reveals the historical consequences of expanded police authority. Relying on the police to manage social problems of crime, violence, and drugs led to disciplinary practices of surveillance, harassment, and arrest that criminalized and excluded African American and Latino/a residents. In the process, as antipolice activists pointed out and struggled against, the police often deemed residents of color as not only potential threats to the public welfare but also unfit for full benefits of social membership in American society. Police practices thereby produced racialized definitions of criminality and enforced the city’s hierarchical racial order. As a result, the struggle over policing structured and exacerbated deep cleavages in American cities over race, citizenship, politics, and state power.


Author(s):  
Mark Newman

Recollections from former students often present a positive appreciation of black Catholic schools primarily for their educational quality but also, in many cases, for their emphasis on self-worth and also, occasionally, on black culture and heritage. African American Catholics valued black schools and churches as religious and community institutions. Prelates generally sought to achieve desegregation by closing or downgrading black Catholic institutions. African American Catholics differed in their response. While some black Catholics reluctantly accepted such action as a necessary price for desegregation, others opposed these measures, upset by the one-sided nature of Catholic desegregation and inspired by the rise of black con consciousness in the second half of the 1960s. Some disillusioned African Americans, especially younger Catholics, left the church.


2016 ◽  
pp. 159-188
Author(s):  
Greg Robinson

This chapter offers a more complex and multiracial view of history by revisiting the narrative of the Japanese American redress movement and discovers a paradox at its core: while the campaign by Japanese Americans for reparations for their wartime confinement started at the end of the 1960s as part of a wider antiracist coalition, and received key support in its early stages from African American political leaders, Japanese Americans increasingly distanced themselves from their black allies as the goal of redress grew nearer, even as African Americans became increasingly public in their opposition. The chapter also shows how the victory of the redress movement in 1988 offered a major precedent, and a model, for reparations efforts by blacks.


English Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Walt Wolfram ◽  
Kellynoel Waldorf

African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic profiling in the 2000s (Baugh, 2003, 2018). Further, the adoption of performance genres from AAL into languages other than English, such as hip-hop and rap, has given the speech of African Americans even wider international recognition and global status (Omoniyi, 2006). The curiosities and controversies about African American speech symbolically reveal (1) the depth of people's beliefs and opinions about language differences; (2) the widespread level of public misinformation about language diversity; and (3) the need for informed knowledge about language variation in public life and in education.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shervin Assari ◽  
James L. Smith ◽  
Mohammed Saqib ◽  
Mohsen Bazargan

Purpose. This study investigated the effect of demographic, socioeconomic, and psychological factors as well as the role of health determinants on alcohol consumption and binge drinking among economically disadvantaged African American older adults with type 2 diabetes mellites (T2DM). Methods. This survey recruited 231 African Americans who were older adults (age 65+ years) and had T2DM. Participants were selected from economically disadvantaged areas of South Los Angeles. A structured face-to-face interview was conducted to collect data on demographic factors, objective and subjective socioeconomic status (SES) including education and financial difficulty, living arrangement, marital status, health, and drinking behaviors (drinking and binge drinking). Results. Age, gender, living alone, pain, comorbid conditions, and smoking were associated with drinking/binge drinking. Male gender, pain, and being a smoker were associated with higher odds of drinking/binge drinking, while individuals with more comorbid medical conditions had lower odds of binge drinking. Conclusion. In economically constrained urban environments, gender, pain, and smoking but not age, SES, depression, and health may predict binge drinking for African American older adults with T2DM. African Americans older adult men with T2DM with comorbid pain should be screened for binge drinking.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110450
Author(s):  
J. Mark Souther

This article examines the largely neglected history of African American struggles to obtain housing in Cleveland Heights, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, between 1900 and 1960, prior to the fair housing and managed integration campaigns that emerged thereafter. The article explores the experiences of black live-in servants, resident apartment building janitors, independent renters, and homeowners. It offers a rare look at the ways that domestic and custodial arrangements opened opportunities in housing and education, as well as the methods, calculations, risks, and rewards of working through white intermediaries to secure homeownership. It argues that the continued black presence laid a foundation for later advances beginning in the 1960s that made Cleveland Heights, like better-known Shaker Heights, a national model for suburban racial integration.


Hurtin' Words ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 132-160
Author(s):  
Ted Ownby

This chapter describes activists who rejected the idea of a crisis in African American family life. In response to the Moynihan Report of 1965, many African Americans rejected claims about the weakness of family life, offering the strength and creativity embodied in adaptable family definitions. At the same time, many African Americans began using the terms “brother” and “sister” not as arguments about racial integration but to refer to the shared experiences of African American men and women.


Author(s):  
Monika Gosin

Chapter 3 analyzes African-American responses to the Mariel boatlift in the Miami Times, a local black newspaper. The boatlift immediately followed the McDuffie Riot, an African-American uprising against the latest incident of police brutality. As the local government turned their attention to the large Cuban influx, some African-Americans feared Miami’s white dominant infrastructure would continue to ignore their concerns. The chapter reveals that the Times endorsed the idea that blacks and white Anglo were the “real Americans” and that Cubans, constructed as white, were receiving preferential treatment over black Haitian migrants. The chapter argues that the seeming disdain for Cuban immigration was a symptom of a pressing desire to challenge white supremacy and promote greater equality for all blacks in U.S. culture. However, the larger presence of Afro-Cubans among the new Cuban refugees forced African-Americans to reexamine modes of solidarity that decide group membership according to a black/white racial frame.


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