Ideas in Context: a Conversation with Frank Cunningham

Moderated by Elaine Coburn, Harry Glasbeek, Meg Holden, Charles Mills and Frank Cunningham presented a symposium on Frank's book Ideas in Context May 29, 2021 for the Society of Socialist Studies. Now shared here in written form, the symposium includes what may have been the last contribution of Charles Mills, a friend of half of a century to Frank, known for his generosity of spirit and his trenchant theorizing of racial justice (Mills 1997).

Incorporating Movements for Racial Justice into Planning and Management of U.S. National Parks

The National Park Service (NPS) is the federal land management agency responsible for 423 units across the United States. Many of these parks are considered iconic cultural and environmental landscapes. However, scholarship from a number of disciplinary approaches has positioned the national parks and their management as problematic, particularly from Indigenous and racial justice concerns. National parks, like many cultural landscapes in the U.S., are infused with racial relations, with unpleasant histories and contemporary experiences that have both subtle instances of marginalization and explicit episodes of material violence. Recent developments in racial justice movements raise fundamental questions for the social and political maintenance, stewardship, and sustainability of the NPS. In a critical approach that centers whiteness as a lens of institutional critique, we consider the ways that the NPS could more critically engage with racial justice approaches in its planning and management. After acknowledging that histories of U.S. national parks as spaces designed for White, upper class people led to the displacement and marginalization of Indigenous and people of color, we look to contemporary avenues for increased racial justice. Through both local, small-scale initiatives and agency-wide, national policies, we consider how racial justice movements are both expectant and galvanized in this moment, providing a setting for the NPS to redress and make amends for previous harms and missed opportunities. Specifically, we identify recent federal and institutional policy and legislation as promising mandates for progress. We identify specific place-based tactics used by individual NPS units, such as renaming parks and geographic features, or interpretation that is both more accurate and more inclusive of marginalized populations. Our research examines planning and management as potential strategic practices that can more fully highlight and progress racial justice. We offer a range of specific questions that might guide more inclusive planning and management work in the NPS. Finally, we encourage the NPS, as an institution, as well as individual park units, to support contemporary racial justice movements, while simultaneously adhering to the agency’s historical dual mandate.

Building Racial Justice Into a Master's Program

This chapter describes a five-year equity initiative to transform a language teacher education professional master's program into one that cultivates racial justice and equity-minded practices in graduates. This chapter will review program work over the last five years on two critical efforts involved in the ongoing five-year equity-minded initiatives. The program activities include data review and planning from 2017 to 2018 and equity curricular re-design from 2018 to 2020, where faculty revised program goals, curriculum, and syllabi. Critical race theory and equity-mindedness frameworks guided this equity initiative's process, goals, and content. The authors argue that building racial justice into a professional master's program requires applying a critical race analysis to the normative assumptions about academic program redesign. Individual and institutional challenges are discussed, and recommendations for building racial justice into the curriculum, instruction, and program policies are provided.

Intra-Church Property Disputes and the Failure of Neutral Principles: A Call for a Return to the Deference Standard

The issue of intra-church property disputes is one that is simultaneously quite old in American history and perhaps of greater relevance now than ever before. Given ever-increasing dissension within Christian church bodies over issues including homosexuality, women's ordination and racial justice, there are currently numerous church property disputes outstanding in the courts, and there are likely to be many more in the near future. From 1871 until 1979, the Supreme Court of the United States consistently took a deferential approach in property cases that involved church bodies with their own authorities and tribunals. When a dispute arose over church doctrine, polity or discipline and a hierarchical church reached its own decisions regarding proper ownership of the church's property, the Supreme Court determined that civil courts should defer to that church's internal decision-making process. The court first created this doctrine as a matter of ‘federal common law’ but in 1952 anchored it in the First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. During the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court consistently extended the deference standard against any state-level attempts to restrict or circumvent it. However, in the 1979 case of Jones v Wolf the court changed its standard significantly and adopted a ‘neutral principles’ approach, which weighs a church's internal documents and deliberations against property deeds, state property and trust statutes, and other sources, in an attempt to allow secular courts to rule on such cases while avoiding potential First Amendment concerns.

A Qualitative Examination of Dialogical Elements in Anti-Racist Deep Canvassing Conversations

This community-based action research study aimed to better understand the dialogical process underlying deep canvassing (Denizet-Lewis, 2016), a social justice intervention technique for engaging in nonconfrontational discussions designed to constructively challenge prejudicial attitudes. Previously, it has been suggested, but not demonstrated, that cognitive dissonance and perspective taking may serve as the mechanisms of change that facilitate shifts in the process of these dialogues. In the current study, 15 anti-racist deep canvassing conversations with White individuals were facilitated by White canvassers working with Showing Up for Racial Justice New York City. A dialogical approach was used to address the question of what intrapsychic and interpersonal processes occurred in these conversations on the topic of reparations. Themes included Interpersonal Agreement, Intervoice Dynamics, Authoring the Self and the Other, and Bringing in Personal Experience. We discuss the results and implications for future action research with prejudice reduction interventions.

My Fight or Yours: Stereotypes of Activists From Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups

In social movements, activists may belong to either the disadvantaged or the advantaged group (e.g., Black racial justice activists or White racial justice activists). Across three experimental survey studies, we examined the content of these stereotypes by asking participants to freely generate a list of characteristics to describe each target group—a classic paradigm in stereotype research. Specifically, we examined the stereotypes applied to Black and White activists within racial justice movements (Study 1, n = 154), female and male activists within feminist movements (Study 2, n =134), and LBGT and straight activists within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movements (Study 3, n =156). We found that the “activist” category was consistently differentiated into subcategories based on group status: Disadvantaged group activists were stereotyped as strong and aggressive, whereas advantaged group activists were stereotyped as altruistic and superficial. These findings underscore the importance of considering status differences to understand the social perception of activists.

A Study of Interracial Differences in Turnover Intentions: The Mitigating Role of Pro-Diversity and Justice-Oriented Management

Enhancing racial justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are the core values of public administration and critical to the functions of public-sector strategic human resources management. However, very limited empirical research has delved into the interracial differences in public sector employees’ turnover intentions and its mitigating factors. Using the 2006–2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data, the present study aims to contribute toward filling this gap in the literature. The theoretical arguments and empirical findings of this study show that when compared with White employees, Federal Black, Indigenous, and Employees of Color (BIEOC) are significantly more likely to intend to leave their current organizations. However, the likelihood of turnover intentions of Federal employees, particularly, BIEOC can be reduced through institutional interventions anchored in pro-diversity management (e.g., commitment to fostering a racially representative workforce), distributive justice in employment outcomes (e.g., in pay and promotions) and procedural justice in organizational processes (e.g., anti-discrimination practices).