RACIAL CHANGE AND BLACK MOVEMENT EMERGENCE: A CASE FROM THE BLACK LIVES MOVEMENT

This article contributes to sociological understandings of race and social movements by reassessing the phenomenon of social movement emergence for Black social movements. Broadly, it addresses the possibility of organizational support for Black social movements. More narrowly, it seeks to understand the emergence of Black movements and racial change as outcomes of organizational transformation, specifically using the case of how the mixed-race prison reform organization Action for Police Reform (APR) joined the Black Lives movement. By providing a case of racial transformation and the spanning of tactical boundaries, I present two central arguments. First, it is necessary to look within organizational forms and at organizational dynamics to see how activists modify their organizations to support Black movements. Second, tailored more directly to the case of APR, sustained support for Black movements depends on organizational transformation, such as when activists repurpose an organization’s form and resources to maintain racially delimited tactics.

Race and School Rezoning Criteria

This article shines a light on the dialogue around how redrawing school attendance boundaries has played out during an era of rapid racial change and growing inequality in Richmond, VA.

Crime and Neighborhood Change in the Nation’s Capital: From Disinvestment to Gentrification

Research on crime and neighborhood racial composition establishes that Black neighborhoods with high levels of violent crime will experience an increase in Black residents and concentrated disadvantage—due to the constrained housing choices Black people face. Some studies on the relationship between gentrification and crime, however, show that high-crime neighborhoods can experience reinvestment as well as displacement of Black residents. In Washington, DC, we have seen both trends—concentration of poverty and segregation as well as racial turnover and reinvestment. We employ a spatial analysis using a merged data set including crime data, Census data, and American Community Survey (ACS) data to analyze the relationship between crime and neighborhood change at the Census tract level. Our findings demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between periods of neighborhood decline and ascent, between the effects of property and violent crime, and between racial change and socioeconomic change.

George Floyd Jr as a Philosophical Problem

The trial of Derek Chauvin, the man who murdered Mr. George Floyd Jr on May 25, 2020, has become a national spectacle. For many Black Americans, it is merely another rehearsal of the injustice that befalls Black men in the United States when they are targeted by police violence. Mr. Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by Chauvin, yet it is Mr. Floyd’s character and temperament that is being depicted as threatening to Chauvin and the reason for his murder. Throughout the discipline of philosophy, the murder of Black men and boys is a topic most philosophy departments avoid and the American Philosophy Association neglects. This lecture argues that philosophy must abandon the martyrdom of the Black male body as the symbolic catalyst of racial change. Philosophy must not only accept that racism is a permanent feature of American society, but that this racism is misandric in that racist violence disproportionately targets Black males for death and dehumanization at levels not seen within other groups.

Racial composition and trajectories of gentrification in the United States

Prior studies suggest that middle-income Americans are more likely to move to predominately white, low-income neighbourhoods than predominately black or Latino neighbourhoods. Given that black and Latino neighbourhoods are, on average, lower income and higher in poverty than low-income, white neighbourhoods, it may be that gentrification in these neighbourhoods is a different kind of change than that occurring in predominately white neighbourhoods. Using Census data from 1970 to 2010 for 275 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, I find that racial composition influences not only whether gentrification occurs, but how it occurs and whether it influences racial demographics. Majority white gentrifying tracts were more likely to experience an increase in higher-income residents and white residents, while majority non-white gentrifying tracts experienced an increase in higher-educated but not higher-income residents, and an increase in white residents and decrease in black and Latino residents. Racial composition thus contributed to the kind of gentrification that a tract experienced and the extent to which gentrification produced racial change. These findings suggest that race affects not only where gentrification occurs, as previously established, but also the kind of class and racial changes a neighbourhood experiences. Ultimately, this article suggests that gentrification neither unfolds in one way nor affects all neighbourhoods the same way.

Rebels with a Conscience

The membership growth of the NAIA and growing prominence of its basketball tournament gave it greater exposure, but this cut both ways when it was revealed in 1948 that the tournament excluded black players. The NAIA’s racial ban was only one of many discriminatory practices aimed at blacks in mid-century American college athletics, including the Big Ten’s unwritten prohibition of black players. Forced now to address the matter, Emil Liston and Al Duer worked to overturn the rule and make use of the NAIA as a vehicle to force racial change in Kansas City. Duer worked tirelessly to ensure that black players enjoyed the same privileges as white players and also to challenge segregation in the Kansas City hospitality industry. More than simply welcome black players, Duer also helped restructure the NAIA to welcome historically black colleges as full members while also scrupulously avoiding giving offense to existing Southern segregationist member schools. The affirmative efforts of the NAIA to confront the very real problems of scheduling, lodging, and access for black players and historically black colleges did much to win the support of those schools. It also, however, put in stark contrast the relative indifference of the NCAA to the same issues.

A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918): A Case Study in Racebending

With hundreds of Sherlock Holmes screen adaptations, the silent all-Black-cast A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918) remains an under-researched anomaly. The essay provides an overview of colourblind and colour conscious casting practices, ultimately advocating for adopting fan studies approaches to ‘racebending’. Racebending involves alternately ‘racing’ canonical characters from white to Black Minority Ethnic. After briefly reviewing representations of African Americans in blackface minstrelsy and early twentieth-century race films, the essay argues that A Black Sherlock Holmes highlights the ways in which race filmmakers were trying to reimagine new ways for African Americans to become part of dominant literary culture. In reimagining Sherlock Holmes as an African American, the film (re)inscribes Black people into prominent literary and cultural history. Because Knick Garter is doubly descended from two notable fictional detectives, America’s Nick Carter of dime novel fame as well as Britain’s legendary Sherlock Holmes, his very existence posits a new world where famous Black characters are as much a part of the American literary landscape as canonical characters from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain. Viewing A Black Sherlock Holmes in light of the possibilities the film offers, rather than its limitations, allows viewers today to see the ways literary history, film, and race coalesced to highlight the possibilities of radical racial change in the post-Reconstruction era at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Fall from Grace

This chapter describes changes in the postwar era to the Kansas City, Missouri, public schools, which went from being considered the very best such local institutions to perhaps the worst. In the 1950s the Kansas City high schools were widely considered to be superior to their suburban counterparts, which were much smaller and offered fewer curricular and extramural options for students. As suburban districts expanded, however, these distinctions began to fade. At the same time, the arrival of large numbers of poor African Americans, most from the rural South, contributed to racial change in the schools. Thousands of white families moved to suburban districts, especially with the advent of desegregation plans in the 1970s. Research on school transfers revealed that most such “flight” headed to the south, remaining largely within the city's municipal boundaries. By 1980, the Kansas City school district's population had fallen dramatically, and only a tiny minority was white, making meaningful desegregation within the system impossible. Meanwhile, neighboring districts had grown enormously, serving an almost entirely white population. A new educational order had emerged.