A Different Kind of Welfare State

Author(s):  
Natalie M. Fousekis

This chapter looks at the new voices that began speaking for child care, both in California and across the nation: black mothers in the welfare rights movement and white middle-class women in the feminist movement. While black and white poor mothers organized in CPACC and around welfare rights, a more visible women's movement developed among predominantly the white middle class. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) emerged out of frustration over the government's unwillingness to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination by sex as well as by race illegal. With seasoned women's rights, labor feminists, and a few black women at its helm, NOW quickly moved to the forefront of the struggle for women's equality.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Patricia Hamilton

This chapter introduces the attachment parenting (AP) phenomenon from the perspectives of black mothers. It reviews insights that the narratives of black mothers offer about the contemporary and particular experience of motherhood. It also analyzes AP journeys from the extreme practice of privileged white hippies to an increasingly accepted and influential dogma in the policies of the state and medical professionals. The chapter talks about the disruption of dominant construction of good mothering as the province of only white, middle-class women through the engagements of black mothers. It documents the diverse ways black women use AP to assert themselves as good mothers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 14-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Flores ◽  
Ofelia García

ABSTRACTIn this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Q. Yang ◽  
Starlita Smith

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).


Author(s):  
Roy L. Brooks

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sundari Balan ◽  
Gregory Widner ◽  
Hsing-Jung Chen ◽  
Darrell Hudson ◽  
Sarah Gehlert ◽  
...  

Rates of alcohol use disorders (AUD) are generally low among women who have ever had children (mothers) compared to women who have never had children (nonmothers), presenting a motherhood advantage. It is unclear if this advantage accrues to “Black” and “White” women alike. Using National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) wave 2 cross-sectional data that is rich in alcohol use and psychological measures, we examined the following: (a) if motherhood is protective for past-year AUD among Black (N=4,133) and White women (N=11,017); (b) potential explanatory psychological mechanisms; and (c) the role of race. Prevalence of a past-year DSM-IV AUD was lower among White mothers compared to White nonmothers, but this same advantage was not observed for Black women. Perceived stress was a risk for all women, but race-ethnic segregated social networks and perceived discrimination predicted current AUD for Black mothers. Unlike White mothers, current psychological factors but not family history of alcohol problems predicted AUD for Black mothers. Future prospective studies should address the mechanisms by which race, motherhood, and psychological factors interactively affect AUD in women.


1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi E. Holobow ◽  
Fred Genesee ◽  
Wallace E. Lambert

ABSTRACTThis report presents the results of the second year of a 4-year longitudinal evaluation of a partial French immersion program in Cincinnati, Ohio. This program is of particular interest because it includes children from lower socioeconomic group and ethnic minority group (black) backgrounds in addition to majority group (white), middle-class students who have been the subject of virtually all evaluations of immersion to date. The native language development (English), academic achievement (math), and second language attainment (French) of pilot groups of middle- and working-class students and of black and white students who were in grade 1, as well as those of a follow-up cohort of kindergarten students, were assessed. The results showed that performance differences in English and mathematics between subgroups of students did not depend on the program of instruction they were receiving. Moreover, it was found that the working-class and black students scored as well as the middle-class and white students on the French language tests. The results are discussed further in terms of the immersion students’ level of proficiency in French.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICKY CASHMAN

Last night I dreamed of the dead slaves – all the murdered black and bloody men silently gathered at the foot-a my bed. Oh, that awful silence. I wish the dead could scream and fight back. What they do to us …Julia Augustine, Wedding BandHistorical and universal issues of love and hate, patriarchy and bigotry prevail in Alice Childress's tragic drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Originally written in the early 1960s, the play was not printed or performed professionally until 1966, despite some interest in producing the play on Broadway. Hence, due to its alleged controversial subject matter, the play remained largely unknown to mainstream audiences. Childress, it seems, unfashionably portrays a long-standing, committed interracial relationship set in 1918 South Carolina. This representation conflictingly juxtaposes with the well-documented fervent civil rights period of the mid-1960s. Additionally, with predominantly black and white male civil rights activists peacefully enforcing laws upholding desegregation in the South, Childress demonstrates segregation's insidious nature primarily through the insightfulness and experience of black women. This perceptiveness introduces what Childress herself penned as “anti-woman laws,” patriarchal norms that made living incredibly difficult for black and white women alike.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-108

The analogy Simone de Beauvoir draws between “les femmes” and “des Noirs d’Amérique” is a key part of the intersectional critique of The Second Sex. Intersectional critics persuasively argue that Beauvoir’s analogy reveals the white, middle-class identity of The Second Sex's ostensibly universal “woman”, emphasizing the fact that the text does not account for the experiences of black, Jewish, proletariat or indigenous women. In this essay, I point to multiple instances in The Second Sex in which Beauvoir endorses a coalition between workers black and white, male and female. When Beauvoir writes on economic injustice, she advocates for an inclusive workers party where racial and sexual differences become immaterial as workers come together in a collective struggle. I thus propose that Beauvoir’s Marxism is an overlooked, yet important, counterpoint to the intersectional critique of The Second Sex.


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