Joe Biden Just Made History and Picked Kamala Harris as His VP Candidate

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Women on 2020-08-11 20:38Z by Steven

Joe Biden Just Made History and Picked Kamala Harris as His VP Candidate

Mother Jones
2020-08-11

Jamilah King, Reporter


Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden has officially selected Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate, and in doing so has made history, as Harris will be the first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket. Harris was long rumored to be a top choice for the slot, and now she’s tasked with energizing a Democratic electorate that’s torn between a moderate forebearer at the top and an increasingly large proportion of voters who want to see dramatic change during a summer marked by a broad uprising over deep-seated racial injustice and a pandemic that’s killed more than 160,000 Americans.

In Harris, Biden has chosen a Democratic favorite who toiled long and hard in California politics before breaking through on the national stage in the Senate and in running for president last year. She’s also a plainly strategic pick for the moment; Biden clearly thinks that choosing a Black woman—and this Black woman specifically—will help him overcome the lukewarm response he’s gotten from more liberal voters and criminal justice activists who still cite his baggage, like the 1994 crime bill and his praise of segregationist senators. Just this summer, prison abolitionist and academic Angela Davis said she was voting for Biden but admitted, “Biden is very problematic in many ways, not only in terms of his past and the role that he played in pushing toward mass incarceration, but he has indicated that he is opposed to disbanding the police, and this is definitely what we need.” She added later on Democracy Now, “The election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA’s Symposium

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Justice on 2018-08-04 00:59Z by Steven

Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA’s Symposium

Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
2018-07-18

Charlotte Sefton, Ph.D., Arab and Islamic Studies
University of Exeter

At the close of her paper, entitled ‘Navigating Power with Poetry on the Hazardous Drive toward Decolonisation’, Carolyn D’Cruz posed the vital question of whether, or not, the work of decolonisation can be pursued through engagement with nation-state level Politics. Her question recalled my recent viewing of Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak in conversation at the Akademie der Künste on a panel entitled ‘Planetary Utopias – Hope, Desire Imaginaries in a Postcolonial World’. Aside from my general sense of wonder at seeing Davis and Spivak in conversation, one particular topic of their discussion had stuck with me; they too had disagreed on the place of the State in the futurity of justice. Whilst Davis had underscored that ‘the bourgeois nation-state, ensconced as it is in capitalism, would never be able to do the work of ensuring justice’; Spivak, in response, had questioned the real-world utility of refusing to engage it; asserting that our work is, instead, to ‘insert the subaltern into the circuit of citizenship’, that is into a structure that they could ‘work within’ as opposed to no structure at all. Whilst Davis conceded that we are tied to engaging the State for now; she maintained that a world free of violence and domination would not be able to retain ‘any aspect’ of the State as she understood it; Spivak maintained that the State must be seen through a more complexed lens, as both ‘poison and medicine’. AWCRAWSA’s latest symposium, ‘Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia’ provided important interventions to these broader debates in decolonial thought and practice…

…Opening the symposium, Irene Watson made central to her keynote ‘Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia’ this linkage between the State and survival. The survival of the Australian State requires that Indigenous people do not survive; thus it has always required genocide; it has always demanded the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies, voices and experiences. The non-survival (the genocide) of Indigenous people is the only way the State survives. As Nikki Moodie would later assert in her paper ‘Decolonizing Race Theory: Place, Survivance & Sovereignity’, echoing Patrick Wolfe, the Settler-Colonial State as such can only function through a logic of elimination. The State’s white, colonial-modern and neoliberal logic of capital, property, individualism and ownership cannot make space for Indigenous peoples nor Indigenous ways of being; neither in the sense of relation to land nor of relation to each-other. As Irene Watson reminded us, despite the State’s professions to the contrary, there has been no decolonisation of Australia; not least because the ‘hierarchy of voice’ established by colonialism remains; thus the violent silencing and erasure of Indigenous peoples – and their calls for self-determination – also remains. Indeed, both the idea and formation of ‘the State’ is founded upon the structure of hierarchical leadership and, thus, the principle of the differentiated right to voice. For Angela Davis too (in the aforementioned panel discussion with Gayatri Spivak) the masculinist and individualist nature of leadership as epitomised in the workings of the State is a central obstacle to a politics of collectively, relationality and justice…

Read the entire article here.

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Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Posted in Anthologies, Asian Diaspora, Books, Census/Demographics, Economics, Gay & Lesbian, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Latino Studies, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Slavery, Social Science, United States, Women on 2015-10-24 18:38Z by Steven

Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Macmillan
Ninth Edition
2014
732 pages
Paper Text ISBN-10: 1-4292-4217-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-4217-2

Paula S. Rothenberg, Senior Fellow; The Murphy Institute, City University of New York
Professor Emerita; William Patterson University of New Jersey

Like no other text, this best-selling anthology effectively introduces students to the complexity of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States and illustrates how these categories operate and interact in society. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization make Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Ninth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

In addition to including scholarly selections from authors like Beverly Tatum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annette Lareau, and Jonathan Kozol, Rothenberg includes historical documents like the Three-Fifths Compromise, firsthand narrative accounts of how these issues have affected the lives of individuals, and popular press pieces reporting on discrimination in everyday life.

This edition includes 28 new selections considering such relevant topics as the citizenship and immigration, transgender identity, the 2010 census, multiracial identity, the 99% and the occupy movement, the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, South Asian Identity post 9/11, multiracial identity, disability, sexual harassment in the teenage years, and much more.

Table of Contents *Articles new or revised for this edition

  • Part I THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
    • 1 Racial Formations / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • 2 The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright
    • 3 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege / Pem Davidson Buck
    • 4 How Jews Became White Folks / Karen Brodkin
    • 5 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender / Judith Lorber
    • 6 The Social Construction of Sexuality / Ruth Hubbard
    • 7 The Invention of Heterosexuality / Jonathan Ned Katz
    • 8 Masculinity as Homophobia / Michael S. Kimmel
    • 9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History / Douglas C. Baynton
    • 10 Deconstructing the Underclass / Herbert Gans
    • 11 Domination and Subordination / Jean Baker Miller
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part II UNDERSTANDING RACISM, SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND CLASS PRIVILEGE
    • 1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” / Beverly Daniel Tatum
    • 2 Color-Blind Racism / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    • 3 Smells Like Racism / Rita Chaudhry Sethi
    • 4 Oppression / Marilyn Frye
    • 5 Patriarchy / Allan G. Johnson
    • 6 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism / Suzanne Pharr
    • *7 The 10 Percent Problem / Kate Clinton
    • 8 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack / Peggy McIntosh
    • *9 Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life / Annette Lareau
    • *10 Class in America—2012 / Gregory Mantsios
  • Part III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
    • 1 A Nation of None and All of the Above / Sam Roberts
    • 2 A New Century: Immigration and the US / MPI Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan
    • *3 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America / Mae Ngai
    • 4 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves / Evelyn Alsultany
    • *5 For many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color / Mireya Navarro
    • *6 Testimony / Sonny Singh
    • 7 Asian American? / Sonia Shah
    • 8 The Myth of the Model Minority / Noy Thrupkaew
    • 9 Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race / Carrie Ching
    • Suggestions for Further Readings
  • Part IV DISCRIMINATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
    • 1 The Problem: Discrimination / U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
    • 2 Abercrombie Settles Class-Action Suit
    • 3 Apparel Factory Workers Were Cheated, State Says / Steven Greenhouse
    • 4 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks / Jonathan Schuppe
    • *5 Why Transgender Identification Matters / Rebecca Juro
    • 6 Where “English Only” Falls Short / Stacy A. Teicher
    • 7 Blacks vs. Latinos at Work / Miriam Jordan
    • 8 Manhattan Store Owner Accused of Underpaying and Sexually Harassing Workers / Steven Greenhouse
    • 9 Muslim-American Running Back off the Team at New Mexico State / Matthew Rothschild
    • 10 Tennessee Judge Tells Immigrant Mothers: Learn English or Else / Ellen Barry
    • *11 Tucson’s Ousted Mexican-American Studies Director Speaks: The Fight’s Not Over / Julianne Hing
    • 12 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish / Mana Lumumba-Kasongo
    • 13 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School / Jeffrey Gettleman
    • 14 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselors’ Advice, Study Finds / Eric Hoover
    • 15 College Choices Are Limited for Students from Needy Families, Report Says / Stephen Burd
    • 16 Wealthy Often Win the Race for Merit-Based College Aid / Jay Mathews
    • 17 On L.I., Raid Stirs Dispute over Influx of Immigrants / Bruce Lambert
    • 18 More Blacks Live with Pollution / Associated Press
    • *19 National Study Finds Widespread Sexual Harassment of Students in Grades 7-12 / Jenny Anderson
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part V THE ECONOMICS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
    • *1 Imagine a Country—2012 / Holly Sklar
    • *2 Dr King Weeps from His Grave / Cornel West
    • *3 Rich People Create Jobs! And Five Other Myths That Must Die for our Economy to Live / Kevin Drum
    • *4 It’s Official: The Rich Got Richer: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds / Robert Pear
    • *5 Study Finds Big Spike in the Poorest in the U.S. / Sabrina Tavernise
    • *6 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class / Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
    • *7 Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Twenty-to-One: Executive Summary / Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor
    • 8 The Economic Reality of Being Asian American / Meizhu Lui and others
    • 9 The Economic Reality of Being Latino/a in the U.S. / Meizhu Lui and others
    • *10 Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites / Sabrina Tavernise
    • *11 Gender Gap on Wages is Slow to Close / Motoko Rich
    • 12 Women Losing Ground / Ruth Conniff
    • 13 Lilly’s Big Day / Gail Collins
    • 14 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited / Bob Feldman
    • 15 Cause of Death: Inequality / Alejandro Reuss
    • *16 Undocumented Immigrants Find Paths to College, Careers / Gosnia Wozniacka
    • 17 Immigration’s Aftermath / Alejandro Portes
    • *18 Inequality Undermines Democracy / Eduardo Porter
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VI MANY VOICES, MANY LIVES: SOME CONSEQUENCES OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY
    • 1 Civilize Them with a Stick / Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes
    • 2 Then Came the War / Yuri Kochiyama
    • 3 Yellow / Frank Wu
    • 4 The Arab Woman and I / Mona Fayad
    • 5 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past / Oscar Casares
    • 6 The Event of Becoming / Jewelle L. Gomez
    • 7 This Person Doesn’t Sound White / Ziba Kashef
    • *8 In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger / Susan Saulny
    • 9 Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste / Joseph Berger
    • 10 Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain / Don Sabo
    • 11 The Slave Side of Sunday / Dave Zirin
    • 12 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy / Tommi Avicolli
    • 13 Requiem for the Champ / June Jordan
    • *14 Against Bullying or On Loving Queer Kids / Richard Kim
    • 15 Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge / Alex Williams
    • 16 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism / Joan L. Griscom
    • *17 Misconceptions Regarding the Body / Jennifer Bartlett
    • 18 C. P. Ellis / Studs Terkel
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VII HOW IT HAPPENED: RACE AND GENDER ISSUES IN U.S. LAW
    • 1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival /U.S. Commission on Human Rights
    • 2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712
    • 3 The “Three-Fifths Compromise”: The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2
    • 4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read
    • 5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
    • 6 The Antisuffragists: Selected Papers, 1852–1887
    • 7 People v. Hall, 1854
    • 8 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
    • 9 The Emancipation Proclamation / Abraham Lincoln
    • 10 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments
    • 11 The Black Codes / W. E. B. Du Bois
    • 12 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873
    • 13 Minor v. Happersett, 1875
    • 14 California Constitution, 1876
    • 15 Elk v. Wilkins, November 3, 1884
    • 16 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
    • 17 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
    • 18 Korematsu v. United States, 1944
    • 19 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
    • 20 Roe v. Wade, 1973
    • 21 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated)
    • 22 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003
    • *23 Equal Protection Indeed / The Economist
    • *24 Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution / Linda Hirshman
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VIII MAINTAINING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER HIERARCHIES: REPRODUCING “REALITY”
    • 1 Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes / Mark Snyder
    • 2 Anti-Gay Stereotype / Richard D. Mohr
    • 3 White Lies / Maurice Berger
    • 4 Am I Thin Enough Yet? / Sharlene Hesse-Biber
    • 5 Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse / Sut Jhally
    • 6 The Plutocratic Culture: Institutions, Values, and Ideologies / Michael Parenti
    • 7 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible / Gregory Mantsios
    • 8 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid / Jonathan Kozol
    • 9 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Davis
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part IX SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISIONING THE FUTURE AND MAKING A DIFFERENCE
    • 1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference / Audre Lorde
    • 2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic / bell hooks
    • 3 A New Vision of Masculinity / Cooper Thompson
    • 4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change / Andrea Ayvazian
    • 5 Rethinking Volunteerism in America / Gavin Leonard
    • *6 The Most Important Thing in the World / Naomi Klein
    • *7 Beyond Elections: People Power / Mark Bittman
    • *8 Demand the Impossible / Matthew Rothschild
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Index
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Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Philosophy, Social Science on 2013-09-21 21:18Z by Steven

Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Wiley-Blackwell
June 1999
454 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-631-21021-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-631-21022-1

Edited by

Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Louis F. Mirón
University of California, Irvine

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Étienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

Table of Contents

  • List of Contributors
  • Acknowledgments/Copyright Information
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Mapping The Languages of Racism
    • 1. Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations” Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres
    • 2. “I Know it’s Not Nice, But. . . ” The Changing Face of “Race” Colette Guillaumin
    • 3. The Contours of Racialization: Structures, Representations and Resistance in the United States Stephen Small
    • 4. Marxism, Racism, and Ethnicity John Solomos and Les Back
    • 5. Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities Louis F. Mirón
  • Part II: Critical Multiracial Feminism
    • 6. Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
    • 7. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism Nira Yuval-Davis
    • 8. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond Patricia Hill Collins
  • Part III: Fashioning Mixed Race
    • 9. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered john a. powell
    • 10. Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity Maria P. P. Root
    • 11. Cipherspace: Latino Identity Past and Present J. Jorge Klor de Alva
  • Part IV: The Color(s) of Whiteness
    • 12. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness John Hartigan, Jr.
    • 13. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism Alastair Bonnett
    • 14 The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing Michael Eric Dyson
    • 15. The Trickster’s Play: Whiteness in the Subordination and Liberation Process Aida Hurtado
  • Part V: Cultural Citizenship, Multiculturalism, And The State
    • 16. Citizenship Richard Delgado
    • 17. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism Renato Rosaldo
    • 18. Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States Aihwa Ong
  • Part VI: Locating Class
    • 19. The Site of Class Edna Bonacich
    • 20. Between Nationality and Class Stanley Aronowitz
    • 21. Class Racism Étienne Balibar
  • Part VII: Globalized Futures And Racialized Identities
    • 22. Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism Richard P. Appelbaum
    • 23. Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City Saskia Sassen
    • 24. Globalization, the Racial Divide, and a New Citizenship Michael C. Dawson
  • Part VIII: Critical Engagements
    • 25. Interview with Stuart Hall: Culture and Power Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
    • 26. Angela Y. Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA Lisa Lowe
  • Index
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SOCI 395-005: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics

Posted in Course Offerings, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-07-25 17:13Z by Steven

SOCI 395-005: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics

George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
Fall 2013

Rutledge M. Dennis, Professor of Sociology

This course examines the issues, individuals, and groups central to the intersectionality of race, culture, and politics in American life. We will begin with the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case which solidified and legitimized the nation’s “separate and equal” racial policy until Brown v. Board of Education. A critique of this case allows us to understand the intricate relations between the nation’s racial theories and policies and its public politics and culture. These racial, political, and cultural issues will provide the background from which we analyze the individuals and groups whose actions and positions presented challenges and counter-challenges to America’s image of itself as a free and democratic society. As a consequence, we will examine how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia, Angela Davis in California, O. J. Simpson in California, Rodney King in California, and currently, Trayvon Martin in Florida. The central questions in the cases presented above focus on why, and in what ways, did racial feelings, fears, and animosities surface as they did, how were intragroup and intergroup relations affected by such attitudes and behavior, and what were the short and long-term societal consequences of these attitudes and behavior.

For more information, click here.

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Leo Branton Jr., Activists’ Lawyer, Dies at 91

Posted in Articles, Biography, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2013-05-01 04:56Z by Steven

Leo Branton Jr., Activists’ Lawyer, Dies at 91

The New York Times
2013-04-27

William Yardley


Associated Press
Leo Branton Jr. with Angela Davis during her 1972 trial on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. She was acquitted.

Leo Branton Jr., a California lawyer whose moving closing argument in a racially and politically charged murder trial in 1972 helped persuade an all-white jury to acquit a black communist, the activist and academic Angela Davis, died on April 19 in Los Angeles. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Howard Moore Jr., another lawyer who represented Ms. Davis.

Mr. Branton, a black veteran of World War II who served in a segregated Army unit, represented prominent black performers, including Nat King Cole and Dorothy Dandridge, argued cases on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, and filed numerous cases alleging police abuse. But the case with which he was most closely associated was that of Ms. Davis…

Read the entire obituary here.

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PHIL 539: Critical Philosophy of Race

Posted in Course Offerings, Media Archive, Philosophy on 2013-04-02 17:30Z by Steven

PHIL 539: Critical Philosophy of Race

Pennsylvania State University
Summer 2012

The study of philosophical issues raised by racism and by the concept of race and other related concepts.

This course provides an intensive examination of a major area of philosophical research: the philosophical examination of racism and of our thinking about race. It will investigate philosophical debates about such topics as mixed-race identity, going beyond the Black-White binary, the distinction between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between race and ethnicity, the debate about the reality of race, as well as questions about the nature and genealogy of racism. The course will have a historical component that will show how thinking in terms of the concept of race first developed and was transformed across time as well as addressing contemporary issues that includes an examination both of the dominant theories and definitions or racial identity and of ethical and political questions raised by the persistence of the notion of race. The course will also examine debates about the complicity of certain canonical figures in the history of philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the conceptualization of race and the spread of philosophical racism. In addition to these two philosophers the following authors will be among those studied: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Frederick Douglass, Anténor Firmin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alain Locke, Paulette Nardal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bernard Boxill, and Angela Davis. Race will be examined in its relation to other ways of thinking about human difference, including class, gender, nationality, religion, and sexuality. Attention will be given to diverse experiences in the US context, such as those of African Americans, Latina/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Irish Americans, and so on. In addition to examining the role race has played and continues to play in the United States of America, the ways in which race is approached in other parts of the world, for example in China, will also be the subject of investigation. The course content will vary, dependent upon the instructor.

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The Commoditization of Hybridity in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising: Who Is cK one?

Posted in Books, Chapter, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2012-05-27 20:10Z by Steven

The Commoditization of Hybridity in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising: Who Is cK one?

in Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation
Palgrave MacMillan
September 2005
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6533-2, ISBN10: 1-4039-6533-1

Edited by

Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College, Columbia University

Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita
University of California, Santa Cruz

pages 31-47

Laura J. Kuo

…an important caveat follows for postcolonial practices,namely the risk that hybridity might be re-colonised by the apparatus of power as either compensation for our losses,or as the velvet glove of enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the iron fist of exclusion. —Kobena Mercer

How does a concept like hybridity travel within different economies—between the academy, activist arenas, and the media, for example—and what forms does it take on within these smart mutations? Is the adoption of a complex concept like hybridity by the media the simple appropriation of culture by capital? The usages, travels, and permutations of hybridity are more complex and elaborate than a blanket confiscation of its political value. After all, capital is culture (among other things) and hybridity is another sign within postmodern commodity systems. By engaging the structure of these systems we can begin to identify the ways in which hybridity operates within—and in the service of—the dominant logic of postmodern capitalist neoliberalism, and its massive contradictions. In this essay I investigate hybridity as a site of possible transgressions of fixed identities, and as a potentially productive space that has been recolonized by market multiculturalism—a space that views everyone as mixed and thus elides structural differences and persistent hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Specifically within the context of advertising, hybridity becomes, atone level, a strategy that stabilizes discursive power relations within transnational capital. For example, there are complex relations between multinational corporations in the United States and U.S./Third World and gendered immigrant labor practices on the one hand, and the cooptation of political coalitional work on the other. At another level, images of hybridity in advertising generate value in a global world where these commodities circulate. Certainly, a racialized economic hegemony is stabilized through appropriations of racial diversity discourses within market multiculturalism. Yet it is too easy to declare that global capital exploits the labor of women of color in the Third World and in the United States, that advertising hides this exploitative relationship, and that the images therefore should be criticized and dismissed. Instead, I am interested in the way in which this practice of “hiding” constitutes a necessary vector of postmodern diference that enables the dominant logic of late capitalism, which inturn depends upon exploitation, appropriation, and difference. Advertising hybridity becomes complicitous with the act of hiding, yet at the same time images of hybridity open up new communities of possibilities for people who take up the ads within their specifics of home and place, looking toward new forms of identifications and affective communities withinc apitalism’s cultural logic.

The observations in this essay are based on the principal photograph of the cK one advertising campaign, which has been displayed prolifically on billboards and in magazines. This photo (see figure 2.1), which served as the prototype on which other early cK one ads were based, is called “Jenny, Kate & Company” in the Calvin Klein Cosmetics press packet. Using this ad as a sort of case study, I investigate how images of hybridity and multiculturalism in advertising serve to conflate race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and culture within a totalizing logic of neoliberalism. I call the discursive practice of homogenizing race, class, nation, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, andculture—and the elision of the specificities of their individual locations and their intersections—commoditized hybridity. Commoditized hybridity is a manifestation of a particular practice of the relentless marketing of race. It is informed by processes of consumption of race within postmodern capitalism. Commoditized hybridity also can be represented under the guise of “multiculturalism.”…

…The cK one photos establish hybrid racial relations through biologistic portrayals of appearance. The staging of the models constructs whiteness as a racial essence cosmetically arranged with “other” racialessences in order to convey an impression of harmony/unity/solidarity. In this respect, cK one potentially closes off a space to discuss the different positions whites and people of color occupy in relation to practice,history, and social formations, and structures and relations of power.Through juxtapositions of differently racialized bodies in its ads—which are staged against a homologous black and white backdrop—cK one constructs a notion of multiraciality that postures as social diversity. The hybrid figures of 1990s fashion are bodies on which a racialized seamlessness/sameness is inscribed. The models in cK one photos are racially diverse, and when they are staged together they signify the currency of a multicultural decade. Their bodies are arranged together and “equalized” in a contrived dynamic through photographic distortion and a deliberate homogeneity of height, weight, pose, style, and expression that invokes a sense of cultural similarity, of oneness. The images are presented in black and white, creating a ground tone of similarity against which difference, as separation, is muted, and heterogeneity is emphasized. The models are always already in contact, integrated, and hybrid. They are aesthetically seductive—extremely cool, hip, and sexy—and they become part of the lure to cK one-ness. The models of color appear to be “one” with the white models, creating an illusion of common social and economic positions and cultural identifications. The commoditization of hybridity takes rich heterogeneous spaces of racial and cultural diversity and turns these spaces of promise against their potential, effectively disrupting their ability to spawn real social change. It recolonizes desirable and hopeful formulations of cultural hybridity and transforms them into weapons against the spectator. In short, these ads erase historical memory and social analysis, offering fragrance in return…

Read the entire chapter here.

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Reflections: An Anthology of African-American Philosophy, 1st Edition

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Law, Media Archive, Philosophy, Politics/Public Policy, Religion, Social Science, United States, Women on 2012-02-06 05:26Z by Steven

Reflections: An Anthology of African-American Philosophy, 1st Edition

Cengage Learning
2000
464 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0534573932  ISBN-13: 9780534573935

Edited by:

James Montmarquet, Professor of Philosophy
Tennessee State University

William Hardy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Tennessee State University

This anthology provides the instructor with a sufficient quantity, breadth, and diversity of materials to be the sole text for a course on African-American philosophy. It includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes which instructors can effectively employ to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the “nationalist” focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

Table of Contents

  • Preface.
  • Introduction.
  • PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS-RACE AND RACISM.
    • 1. W.E.B. DuBois: From The Souls of Black Folk.
    • 2. Molefi K. Asante: Racism, Consciousness, and Afrocentricity.
    • 3. Kwame Anthony Appiah: Racisms.
    • 4. J. L. A. Garcia: The Heart of Racisms. Contemporary Issue: Views on “Mixed Race”.
    • 5. Naomi Zack: Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy.
    • 6. Lewis R. Gordon: Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race-In Theory.
  • PART TWO: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-NATIONALISM, SEPARATISM, AND ASSIMILATION.
    • 7. Martin R. Delaney: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Peoples of the United States.
    • 8. Frederick Douglass: The Future of the Negro, The Future of the Colored Race, The Nation’s Problem, and On Colonization.
    • 9. Marcus Garvey: From Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
    • 10. Maulana Karenga: The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and Message.
    • 11. Molefi K. Asante: The Afrocentric Idea in Education.
    • 12. Cornel West: The Four Traditions of Response. Contemporary Issue: “Ebonics”.
    • 13. Geneva Smitherman: Black English/Ebonics: What it Be Like?
    • 14. Milton Baxter: Educating Teachers about Educating the Oppressed. Feminism, Womanism, and Gender Relations.
    • 15. Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?
    • 16. Patricia Hill Collins: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.
    • 17. bell hooks: Reflections on Race and Sex.
    • 18. Angela P. Harris: Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.
    • 19. Charles W. Mills: Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women? Contemporary Issue: Women’s Rights and Black Nationalism.
    • 20. E. Francis White: Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism.
    • 21. Amiri Baraka: Black Woman. Violence, Liberation, and Social Justice.
    • 22. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
    • 23. Malcolm X: Message to the Grass Roots.
    • 24. Howard McGary: Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression.
    • 25. Laurence M. Thomas: Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity. Contemporary Issue: Affirmative Action.
    • 26. Bernard Boxill: Affirmative Action.
    • 27. Shelby Steele: Affirmative Action. Ethics and Value Theory.
    • 28. Alain Locke: Values and Imperatives.
    • 29. Michele M. Moody-Adams: Race, Class, and the Social Construction of Self-Respect.
    • 30. Laurence M. Thomas: Friendship.
    • 31. Cornel West: Nihilism in Black America.
    • 32. Katie G. Cannon: Unctuousness as a Virtue: According to the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary Issue: A Classic Question of Values, Rights, and Education.
    • 33. Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address.
    • 34. W.E.B. DuBois: The Talented Tenth.
  • PART THREE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELATED DISCIPLINES.
    • 35. Patricia J. Williams: Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.
    • 36. Regina Austin: Sapphire Bound!
    • 37. Derrick Bell: Racial Realism-After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch.
    • 38. John Arthur: Critical Race Theory: A Critique. Contemporary Issue: Racist Hate Speech.
    • 39. Charles Lawrence and Gerald Gunther: Prohibiting Racist Speech: A Debate. Aesthetics.
    • 40. James Baldwin: Everybody’s Protest Novel.
    • 41. Larry Neal: The Black Arts Movement.
    • 42. Angela Y. Davis: Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: Music and Social Consciousness.
    • 43. Ralph Ellison: Blues People. Contemporary Issue: Rap Music.
    • 44. Crispin Sartwell: Rap Music and the Uses of Stereotype.
    • 45. Kimberle Crenshaw: Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew. Philosophy and Theology.
    • 46. David Walker: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United stated.
    • 47. James H. Cone: God and Black Theology.
    • 48. Victor Anderso: Ontological Blackness in Theology.
    • 49. Anthony Pinn: Alternative Perspectives and Critiques. Contemporary Issue: Womanist Theology and the Traditionalist Black Church.
    • 50. Cheryl J. Sanders: Christian Ethics and Theology in a Womanist Perspective.
    • 51. Delores Williams: Womanist Reflections on “the Black Church,” the African-American Denominational Churches and the Universal Hagar’s Spiritual Church.
  • SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.
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