#yeeyeenation

Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as “country boys.” In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone “is not racist”—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith’s success, particularly since he is best known for his “redneck” alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

Du Bois and Brazil

In this article, I discuss Black transnational solidarity and liberation in the Americas by analyzing the historical relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and Brazil from 1900 to 1940. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois was studying, writing, and publishing about Brazil. He was interested in creating international solidarity and cooperation among Black people. However, Du Bois (as well as other African Americans) promoted the idea that Brazil was a place without racism, a racial paradise. This idea served as a basis for a theory that oppressed Afro-Brazilians—the myth of racial democracy. In this article, I explore Du Bois’s relationship with Brazil, highlighting possible reasons why Du Bois engaged with the myth of racial democracy. In addition, I argue that this historical event teaches us that an Afro-diasporic liberation project must seriously consider global and material inequalities among Black people.

Reconsidering Group Interests

This paper aims to explore attitudes toward immigration among two non-White groups, Asian Americans and Black Americans. For more than a decade, individuals from Asia have comprised the majority of immigrants entering the United States each year. Today, the majority of the Asian American U.S. population remains foreign-born. Yet using data collected from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the 2016 National Asian American Survey—a time period marked by high levels of saliency with regard to immigration issues—we find that Black Americans, the majority of whom are U.S.-born, exhibit even more progressive attitudes towards immigration, both legal and undocumented, than mostly foreign-born Asian Americans. Our research challenges economic and material theories related to immigration attitudes and suggests that political connections to and “linked fate” with other minorities better explain why Black Americans exhibit more progressive attitudes toward immigration than Asian Americans.

Lebensraum’s Tropical Turn

In 1981 the ATF, FBI, and U.S. Customs Service agents arrested a group of American and Canadian White nationalists as they were on their way to overthrow the government of Dominica. Although seemingly improbable, the event is important because it illustrates the hegemonic nature of the relationship between the United States and Caribbean countries and, also, the globalization of White nationalist violence. In this paper I show that extant theory on White nationalism can be used to explain the White nationalist plot. In particular, I invoke the concept of Lebensraum and the fact that White nationalists espouse multiple objectives—in addition to racism—to explain their intent to subvert a Black country and to live there.

The Civilizing Mission Persists

U.S. government leaders have long considered Latin America their proverbial backyard and have recurrently intervened in the region. In earlier periods of U.S. imperialism, U.S. government leaders justified such intervention with reference to allegedly scientific racial hierarchies, which placed White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) at the top of this artificial hierarchy. In more recent episodes of U.S. imperialism leading into the twenty-first century, however, U.S. leaders have publicly used the language of democracy and human rights to justify intervention. In the instance of contemporary Venezuela, while U.S leaders indeed use the language of human rights and democracy, they also draw on racist tropes of Latin Americans to justify their intervention. Through interviews with U.S. foreign policymakers and analysis of U.S. government documents, I find that U.S. leaders depict former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as an irrational, uncivilized, and beastly leader, who manipulates ideas of racial inequality to maintain power. In addition, U.S. leaders understand him as manipulating an uncritical mass of Venezuelans who cannot think for themselves. U.S. leaders believe it thus their duty to intervene in order to promote democracy and show Venezuelans their true political-economic interests. I connect these dynamics with a history of U.S. intervention into the region and a history of racist and imperial thinking that continues to shape the logic of U.S. foreign policymaking into the present.

Truth and Reparation for the U.S. Imprisonment and Policing Regime

In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing regime in terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing, pervasive structural inequality, and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition.

Foreshadowing the Civil Rights Counter-Revolution

After overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism.

Elitism in Democracy

The concept of the common good represents those resources that are good for an entire group as a whole, or what preserves what the people or inhabitants of the national community have in common. The “good” are those things that benefit the community as a whole; lead to the protection, sustainment, and improvement of the community. Theorists agree that it is the ultimate end of government; the good of all its citizens and void of special interests. Theories of the common good are discussed in this paper with implications regarding the shortcomings of democratic political institutions and structures. The theoretical framework provided by the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Friedrich Nietzsche are used to critically examine the idea of the common good in contemporary democratic societies. Du Bois sought an objective truth that could dispel once and for all the irrational prejudices and ignorances that stood in the way of a just social order for African Americans. Nietzsche’s political theory was primarily concerned with disdain for democracy and the need for Aristocratic forms and social ordering. He was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve an effective normative consensus in society at large which is needed to legitimize government authority. Both theorists agree that the exceptional and great individuals are few in society and should govern in favor of the masses. Based on their example, this paper argues that both authors are suggesting an Epistocratic form of government where those with political knowledge are privileged.

THE BLACK MODEL MINORITY

This paper interrogates the fundamental anti-Blackness of model minority discourses and how they are embedded in structures of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism through a genealogical examination of the contradictory history of the “Black model minority” within the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Indian Program. This program educated both Black and Indigenous students throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and purposefully made racialized comparisons between groups. I read this history through present day scholarship on the model minority myth in relation to anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. I argue that the “Black model minority” at Hampton was predicated on upholding slavery through defining it as an educational project and that slavery and settler colonialism are intimately linked through pedagogy. This narrative of the Black model minority demonstrates that slavery and land dispossession were framed as pedagogic by industrial education institutions. Ultimately, this work questions the idea of “valuing education,” which is present in model minority discourses across many contexts, and how it is complicated by this history.

FRIENDSHIP IS SKIN (COLOR) DEEP

Friendships between members of different ethnoracial groups can help to reduce prejudice and ease tensions across ethnoracial groups. A large body of literature has explored possible determinants for the formation of these friendships. One unexplored factor is the role of an individual’s skin color in influencing their opportunities to befriend members of other ethnoracial groups. This study seeks to answer two questions: For ethnoracial minorities, how is an individual’s skin color associated with the likelihood that they will engage in a cross-ethnoracial friendship? Does the role of skin color depend on the ethnoracial combination of the two groups that befriend one another? Using waves 1, 2, and 3 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and a series of multinomial logit models, the results suggest that the role of skin color is a function of the relative levels of social status of the two ethnoracial groups that befriend one another. I argue that lighter-skinned members of lower status ethnoracial groups have a greater likelihood of having close friendships with members of higher status ethnoracial groups. There is also limited evidence that darker-skinned members of a higher status group, specifically Asians, have a greater likelihood of having close friends from a lower status group.