Garveyism, Communism, and Gender Trouble

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-202
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Trouble

In Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog, Vic Mason seeks a better life for his family in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His son, Les, looks for answers in the interracial Communist movement. Both men and movements come undone for they rely on gender hierarchies which sustain racial capitalism in the United States. This chapter explores the controversy that began when Ward read a draft of his play before a South Side audience in January 1938 and continued through the Negro Playwrights Company’s staging of the play in Harlem in October 1940. Drawing on variant manuscripts, this chapter documents the role of the Black performance community in shaping the version of the play first staged by the Chicago Negro Unit at the Great Northern Theatre in April 1938. The responses of the local community make clear it was the staging of gender and racial divisions within Black families and political movements, rather than Communism, which made Big White Fog a provocative play in 1938. The sympathetic portrayal of the Garvey movement reminds us that communism was not the only radical path for African Americans in the 1930s, even if the legacy of anti-Communism has disproportionately shaped knowledge production about Black theatre.

Queer of Color Critique

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Gender Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
And Gender

Queer of color critique is a critical discourse that began within the U.S. academy in response to the social processes of migration, neoliberal state and economic formations, and the developments of racial knowledges and subjectivities about sexual and gender minorities within the United States. It was an attempt to maneuver analyses of sexuality toward critiques of race and political economy. As such, the formation was an address to Marxism, ethnic studies, queer studies, postcolonial and feminist studies. Queer of color critique also provided a method for analyzing cultural formations as registries of the intersections of race, political economy, gender, and sexuality. In this way, queer of color critique attempted to wrest cultural and aesthetic formations away from interpretations that neglected to situate those formations within analyses of racial capitalism and the racial state.

scholarly journals ‘Lower types of cranks, crooks and racial bigots’? The Universal Negro Improvement Association and black political violence in the United States, 1918–1930

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Lennon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Grassroots Level ◽  
And Gender ◽  
White Press ◽  
Black Activist

This article examines the involvement of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in black political violence in the early-interwar period in the United States. Evidence suggests that the UNIA was the organisation most often involved in black political confrontations, and the article discusses how the state, the black and white press and other black activist organisations may have both benefitted from and perpetuated the UNIA’s reputation for political violence. The essay argues that the UNIA’s involvement in violence against other black organisations and groups can be explained partly by the intensity of the ‘war of words’ among prominent black leaders in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Furthermore, the article suggests that ethnic and gender differences within the American UNIA itself could exacerbate pre-existing tensions between different groups of Garveyites. Contextualising black political violence in these ways allows us to move beyond a reductionist view of grassroots Garveyites as prone to violence. Instead, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between the famous ‘war of words’ and the kinds of tensions, confrontations and violence that sometimes occurred at grassroots level between supporters of different black organisations and groups. The article contributes not only to the growing historiography about the UNIA at grassroots level, but also to discussions about the militarisation of black protest during World War I and in the 1920s, including the use of self-defence and paramilitary-style tactics by people of African descent in the United States.

Mainstreaming Black Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
State And Local ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
And Gender

This book upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States—and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles—this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. The book shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The book emphasizes that Black Power's reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
African American Artists

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated “Negro Units” set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged Black versions of “white” classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the Black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade Black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of Black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider Black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of Black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Suburban Islam

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Howe
Keyword(s):  
Leisure Activities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
American Islam ◽  
And Gender

Suburban Islam explores how American Muslims have created new kinds of religious communities, known as third spaces, to navigate political and social pressures after 9/11. This book examines how one Chicago community, the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation (Webb), has responded to the demands of proving Islam’s compatibility with liberal democracy and embracing the commonalities of their Abrahamic faith. Through dynamic forms of ritual practice, such as leisure activities, devotional practices such as the mawlid, and communal reading of sacred texts, the Webb community offers an alternative vision of American Islam. Appealing to an overarching American culture, the Webb community celebrates religious pluralism and middle-class consumerism, opens up leadership roles for women, and reimagines the United States as an ideal location for the practice of “authentic” Islam. In the process, they also seek to rehabilitate the public image of Islam. Suburban Islam analyzes these efforts as one slice of American Muslims’ heterogeneous and contingent institutionalizing practices in the twenty-first century. Suburban Islam examines how some American Muslims have intentionally set out to enact an Islam recognizable to others as American. Even as Webb intends to build a more inclusive and welcoming space, it also produces its own exclusions, elisions of extant racial and gender hierarchies, and unresolved tensions over the contours of American Muslim citizenship. As a case study, the Webb community demonstrates the multiple possibilities of American Islam. Through evolving practices and overlapping sets of relationships, this group continues to work out what American Islam means to them during a time in which Muslim and American are repeatedly cast as incompatible categories.

Confronting the Problems of Professional Sports: A Public Policy Response to Franchise Relocation and Stadium Subsidization

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor F Brinkman
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
The United States ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Sports Organizations ◽  
Sports Leagues ◽  
Sports Finance ◽  
Sports Venues ◽  
Benefits And Costs

During the past decade, forty-six professional sports venues were constructed in the United States, while only 16 expansion teams were created by the major sports leagues. Nearly two thirds of these newly built stadiums and arenas were funded with public tax revenues, despite substantial evidence showing no positive economic impact of new sports stadium construction on local communities. In reviewing the economic literature, this article investigates the role of professional sports organizations in the construction and public subsidization of new sports venues. Franchise relocation and public stadium subsidization is a direct result of the monopoly power of professional sports leagues, whose franchise owners extract large subsidies from their host communities by threatening to relocate to viable alternative locations. After explaining how the most common methods of stadium subsidization project a disproportionate allocation of the benefits and costs of hosting a professional team to local community interests, this article outlines several considerations for local policymakers who seek to reinvigorate public discussion of equity concerns in professional sports finance.

Race and Gender

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timnit Gebru
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Recidivism Rates ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Decision Tools ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Technical Solutions

This chapter discusses the role of race and gender in artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid permeation of AI into society has not been accompanied by a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical issues that cause certain groups of people to be harmed rather than advantaged by it. For instance, recent studies have shown that commercial automated facial analysis systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women, while having minimal errors on light-skinned men. Moreover, a 2016 ProPublica investigation uncovered that machine learning–based tools that assess crime recidivism rates in the United States are biased against African Americans. Other studies show that natural language–processing tools trained on news articles exhibit societal biases. While many technical solutions have been proposed to alleviate bias in machine learning systems, a holistic and multifaceted approach must be taken. This includes standardization bodies determining what types of systems can be used in which scenarios, making sure that automated decision tools are created by people from diverse backgrounds, and understanding the historical and political factors that disadvantage certain groups who are subjected to these tools.

The Interplay of Developing Morality and Gender Attitudes

2020 ◽  
pp. 724-745
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Bigler ◽  
Lynn S. Liben
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
Gender Attitudes ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Ethical Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Behavior

Morality and gender are intersecting realms of human thought and behavior. Reasoning and action at their intersection (e.g., views of women’s rights legislation) carry important consequences for societies, communities, and individual lives. In this chapter, the authors argue that children’s developing views of morality and gender reciprocally shape one another in important and underexplored ways. The chapter begins with a brief history of psychological theory and research at the intersection of morality and gender and suggests reasons for the historical failure to view gender attitudes through moral lenses. The authors then describe reasons for expecting morality to play an important role in shaping children’s developing gender attitudes and, reciprocally, for gender attitudes to play an important role in shaping children’s developing moral values. The authors next illustrate the importance and relevance of these ideas by discussing two topics at the center of contentious debate in the United States concerning ethical policy and practice: treatment of gender nonconformity and gender-segregated schooling. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

Military Subsidization of Human Capital and Gender Stratification in the US Economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 048661342098262
Author(s):  
Tyler Saxon
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jel Classification ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Gender Stratification ◽  
Us Economy ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Capital Development ◽  
The Military

In the United States, the military is the primary channel through which many are able to obtain supports traditionally provided by the welfare state, such as access to higher education, job training, employment, health care, and so on. However, due to the nature of the military as a highly gendered institution, these social welfare functions are not as accessible for women as they are for men. This amounts to a highly gender-biased state spending pattern that subsidizes substantially more human capital development for men than for women, effectively reinforcing women’s subordinate status in the US economy. JEL classification: B54, B52, Z13

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