When Fringe Hate Goes Mainstream: How White Nationalist Discourse Manifests in Online News Commenting

After protestors clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia over the planned removal of a statue of a Confederate general, President Trump refused to condemn white nationalists. Over the following days, numerous news stories were written about the protests, allowing the public to discuss white nationalism through online comments. Using theories on ideology, discourse, and framing, this study considers how white nationalist discourse emerged in those comments. The findings show broad support for white nationalism, including complaints about threats to white culture, reinterpretation of American history to support white nationalist ideas, and rejection of the idea that marginalized people face oppression. However, the study also shows a burgeoning force of critical commenters struggling to challenge white nationalism’s emergence in public spaces.

Black empowerment and Afro-American values in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye of Toni Morrison is extraordinarily significant, as it addresses the different sides of American literature, and the lives of the Afro-American people. Although the conventional theological aspects of white culture can negatively influence other characters of Morrison, it is Pecola whose life appears to be increasingly defenseless against the impulses of the individuals who have accepted the Western custom. In a democratic country, people generally have the same value, but there are still prejudices in the concepts of beauty and worthiness. The search for freedom, black identity, the nature of evil and the robust voices of African-Americans have become themes for African-American literature. Folklore covers the history of black and white interaction in the United States and also summarizes the feelings expressed in protest literature1. Morrison argues that the survival of the dark ladies in a white dominated society depends on loving their own way of life and dark race and rejecting the models of white culture or white excellence. This article attempts to examine The Bluest Eye from the perspective of empowerment of blacks and African American and their value system. IIUC Studies Vol.16, December 2019: 111-121

On unearned privilege in clinical practice

Objective: To explore what it might mean to be a white psychiatrist working in a white culture. Conclusions: Inequalities and power imbalances are maintained by person-blaming and the invisibility of structural inequality. Opportunities to recognise the effects of being privileged and working within a medical culture that compounds such inequality may be squandered without curiosity and action.

White Student Comfort and Conflict in Experiential Racial Dialogues

Background: White students are both curious and sometimes apprehensive about engaging in dialogues about race. Purpose: We investigate white university students’ experience of comfort and conflict in racial interaction in inter- and intragroup dialogues. Methodology/Approach: We analyzed student papers written at the beginning and end of the dialogue as well as their post-semester interviews, for their hopes/fears, classroom racial experiences, and learnings. Findings/Conclusions: White students in two types of semester-long dialogue courses reported issues of relative comfort and conflict as they explored their own and others’ racial histories and outlooks. They reported feeling safer in the white-only (intragroup) dialogues, as they learned about white culture and privilege; they also lamented not having racialized “others” to learn from. White students in the interracial (intergroup) dialogues often reported more discomfort, risk, and tension, as they learned about the impact of white culture and privilege on students of color, as well as about racism as a white problem. Implications: We draw implications for educational practice that include dissonance and conflict as stimuli for student learning and the use of experienced-based pedagogical techniques that encourage student sharing, critical reflection on narratives and encounters, and mutual participation.

Cultural Humility for People of Color: Critique of Current Theory and Practice

Cultural humility and the broader multicultural orientation approach (MCO) is important for clinicians of color as it is for White clinicians; however, the MCO framework does not address how experiences of racism and oppression impact how therapists of color think about and practice cultural humility. This article attempts to address important ways that the dialogue around cultural humility must be nuanced for therapists of color, and will provide examples of ways in which the framework for racial/ethnic minority community is fundamentally unique, both conceptually and in application: perspectives will be provided through responding to concepts within MCO framework such as “other-oriented” stance, leaning into cultural opportunities, and cultural comfort from a person-of-color lens. We contend that the traumatic effects of racism, microaggression, intergenerational trauma, and the pressures to assimilate to White culture make it difficult for therapists to practice cultural humility in the way that it is currently discussed in the literature. The authors provide potential resources for therapists of color, and explore how it is essential to have institutional and communal resources provided in White spaces.

Two Houses Windows on the Identity of Chief Richardville

This chapter examines the life of Jean Baptiste de Richardville, the last civil chief of the Miami tribe, as he navigated the pluralistic frontier society of the nineteenth-century Great Lakes region. Richardville drew upon elements of his Métis (mixed French-Miami) ancestry as well as his class to produce and enact various identities. His skilled negotiation of the divergent worlds he inhabited served to secure his role within the Miami tribe, as well as within the dominant white culture. In particular, this chapter looks at identity formation through Richardville’s two houses, an ornate Greek revival building (the Chief Richardville House) that served as his residence and a place for lavish entertainment, and the more modest Richardville/Lafontaine House that he used for the fur trade and treaty negotiations. These buildings, and archival evidence of Richardville’s life, shed light on how he constructed and maintained a fluid social identity to thrive in a potentially contentious and continually evolving setting.

Four Community Engagement Lessons from Detroit to Connecticut

I present four lessons for the field or for other community engaged scholars: Question assumptions with respect to the communities in which we are engaged (discussed and illustrated above). Conduct, support and publish more community-engagement research with students of color and communities of color at the center, and not in juxtaposition to normalized views of white culture. University or college funding opportunities to help support community-requested or negotiated engagement are a necessary and important investment. When engaging with communities outside of the classroom, you, your students, and your administration have to be willing to take measured risks.