Unsettled intimacies: revisiting Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country through Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Scholars have highlighted Nella Larsen’s textual interventions into aspects of Edith Wharton’s major works. The interventions, they claim, not only unmask Wharton’s pointed operations of erasure against people of color but, in some cases, showcase her racism. None of these works, however, devote critical analysis to the interventions staged on Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), the novel that, I argue, is her most definitive statement on the role of market-based capitalism on the fate of Western civilization. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) shares many of Custom’s thematic concerns. Though writing from different class and racial perspectives, both writers must account for the social developments that spilled over from the previous century to articulate their implications for their heroines in terms of marriage, family, work, divorce, sex, and race relations on a trans-Atlantic scale. However, given that Custom almost entirely elides the presence of people of color, assessing it alongside Quicksand animates the spectre of colonialism that haunts the text, inviting us to remember why not all bodies, as M. Jacqui Alexander argues in “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen,” can be imagined as naturalized citizen subjects within the rubric of modern capitalism.

Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems: Making Sense of Racial Discipline Disparities in a Large Diversifying Suburban High School

Purpose: This article explores the effects of sensemaking interventions on a group of educators’ race-conscious problem analysis of racial discipline disparities. Research Method: I conducted this research in a predominantly White diversifying suburban high school that served roughly1,600 students. To understand how sensemaking interventions shaped teachers’ racial ways of knowing, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis of 14 transcribed teacher focus group and data retreat exchanges to identify conversational patterns related to their problem framings. Findings: I found that providing diverse data types reflecting a range of racial perspectives offered cues that enabled organizational members to notice and (partially) disrupt the personal and organizational racism and race-evasive tendencies that drive the reproduction of racial inequities in school discipline. Implications for Research and Practice: Offering teachers sensemaking opportunities that prompt collective racial awareness and critical self-reflection can instigate shifts in racial ways of knowing that are critical to understanding and addressing discipline culture and climate problems in racially diversifying schools.

White Shame/Black Agency

This chapter examines the role of race in the transformation of the former German enemy into an American friend that took place in the Rhineland occupation zone between 1918 and 1923. It proposes that in the crucible of the occupation zone, dissimilar and heightened American and German understandings and practices of race converged with usual postwar indignities of brutality, revenge, and survival. What emerged was a transformed global pattern of racial perspectives and reconciled alliances. W. E. B. Du Bois named this reorganization of racial discourse “the discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples.” The chapter proposes that another stream of interactions bound Germans and Americans together: they grappled with their perceptions of interior “racialized” enemies, deepened their crafting of white supremacy, and expressed similar interior visions while at work on their world visions.

Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality

In this interview chapter, Sandra Hines, President of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, discusses the origins of the Coalition, the role that it has played in reducing police brutality and violence in Detroit and areas in which the Coalition is active within the city. Hines also critically discusses the injustices of the city’s current renaissance, framing it within racial perspectives and in the form of a ‘white takeover.’