Nobody's free until everybody's free: how feminist identification influences white Americans' willingness to recognize and respond to racial discrimination

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Purpose: Racism is an essential factor to understand racial health disparities in infection and mortality due to COVID-19 and must be thoroughly integrated into any successful public health response. But highlighting the effect of racism generally does not go far enough toward understanding racial/ethnic health disparities or advocating for change; we must interrogate the various forms of racism in the United States, including behaviors and practices that are not recognized by many as racism.Methods: In this article, we explore the prevalence and demographic distribution of various forms of racism in the United States and how these diverse racial ideologies are potentially associated with racialized responses to the COVID-19 crisis.Results: We find that among white Americans, more than a quarter express traditional racist attitudes, whereas more than half endorse more contemporary and implicit forms of racist ideology. Each of these types of racism helps us explain profound disparities related to COVID-19.Conclusions: Despite a robust literature documenting persistent patterns of racial disparities in the United States, a focus on the role that various forms of racism play in perpetuating these disparities is absent. These distinctions are essential to realizing health equity and countering disparities in COVID-19 and other health outcomes among people of color in the United States.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

The Majority of Black Orthopaedic Surgeons Report Experiencing Racial Microaggressions During Their Residency Training.

Problem with Loving Whiteness: A Response to S. Sullivan's Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-RacismShannon Sullivan's work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, has been important to my philosophical work on race, racism, habits, and much more. Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism has, in quite a short time, been extensively engaged and taken up as a useful and important intervention in thinking about whiteness in the U.S. American context. I attempt here to offer some constructive disagreement on matters of mutual care and concern: in general, the abolition of white supremacy and, in particular, white people's potential contribution for racial justice movements. I focus on the key question of whether it is appropriate to love whiteness. Along the way I express worry about Good White People's orientation toward middle-class liberals, its approach to history, its politics of citation, and its focus on a Black/white binary in the continental United States.Sullivan begins the book by quoting a critic I hadn't heard of before reading this book, Lerone Bennett, who wrote The white liberal and the white supremacist share the same root postulates. They are different in degree, not kind (Sullivan 2014: 1). Sullivan says that she is addressing the bulk of white people in the post-Jim Crow United States and other similar white-dominated nations who consider themselves to be non- or anti-racist. These are the white liberals of which Lerone Bennett speaks, the'good' white people whose goodness is marked by their difference from the 'bad' white people who are considered responsible for any lingering racism in a progressive, liberal society (3). I agree absolutely with the view that white liberals are not going to bring about revolutionary transformation in the racial order of this world. But precisely for this reason, I am not sure that the white liberal is the correct subject through which we should to organize our thinking about race. I also do not think that white liberals are the main engine of racial oppression.Further, I am curious about the category of similar white-dominated nations; although I have only deeply engaged racial politics in two nation-states, Canada and the US, it is clear to me that while there are certain commonalities in the way race is lived and governed, there are also vital differences. Perhaps the most striking is the difference between an assumed Black/white binary grounded in historical chattel slavery as the central logic for thinking about race, common in US race thinking, versus an overt formation in Canada (and other places) that centers far more on indigeneity, borders, migration, and the management of multiple racialized others. Working through these differences has convinced me of the necessity of understanding and thinking about whiteness as operative outside the US American context, beyond a Black/white binary, and in a way that accounts for the founding and ongoing violences of capitalism and colonialism. While chattel slavery has informed many parts of the world, and while anti-Black racism has been necessary to the ways slavery was organized and manifests itself in contemporary racism, I question this book's tight focus on the US and on Black/ white racial dynamics.Whiteness, in my view, operates in complex and shifting ways anywhere racialization is happening, and so perhaps it's a good place to start in thinking about the question of whether we ought to love whiteness. In this book, Sullivan does not spend a lot of time defining whiteness. When she does, it is in expansive ways that raise the question of what it means to love whiteness so defined. She argues that there is to being white that being Irish or Italian alone does not capture, and that something is a pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression (Sullivan 2014: 16). This understanding of whiteness as collective-as constituted by domination, exploitation, and oppression-reminds us that whiteness is not something, on Sullivan's view, that we individually control the effects or the meaning of. …

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Reports an error in "Racial Bias in Mock Juror Decision-Making: A Meta-Analytic Review of Defendant Treatment" by Tara L. Mitchell, Ryann M. Haw, Jeffrey E. Pfeifer and Christian A. Meissner (Law and Human Behavior, 2005[Dec], Vol 29[6], 621-637). In the article, all of the numbers in Appendix A were correct, but the signs were reversed for z' in a number of studies, which are listed. Also, in Appendix B, some values were incorrect, some signs were reversed, and some values were missing. The corrected appendix is included. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2006-00971-001.) Common wisdom seems to suggest that racial bias, defined as disparate treatment of minority defendants, exists in jury decision-making, with Black defendants being treated more harshly by jurors than White defendants. The empirical research, however, is inconsistent--some studies show racial bias while others do not. Two previous meta-analyses have found conflicting results regarding the existence of racial bias in juror decision-making (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 1315-1344; Sweeney & Haney, 1992, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 10, 179-195). This research takes a meta-analytic approach to further investigate the inconsistencies within the empirical literature on racial bias in juror decision-making by defining racial bias as disparate treatment of racial out-groups (rather than focusing upon the minority group alone). Our results suggest that a small, yet significant, effect of racial bias in decision-making is present across studies, but that the effect becomes more pronounced when certain moderators are considered. The state of the research will be discussed in light of these findings. (PsycINFO Database Record

Do appeals that subtly invoke negative racial stereotypes shift whites’ political attitudes by harnessing their racial prejudice? Though widely cited in academic and popular discourse, prior work finds conflicting evidence for this “dog-whistle hypothesis.” Here we test the hypothesis in two experiments (total N = 1,797) in which white Americans’ racial attitudes were measured two weeks before they read political messages in which references to racial stereotypes were implicit, explicit, or not present at all. Our findings suggest that implicit racial appeals can harness racial resentment to influence policy views, though specifically among racially resentful white liberals. That dog-whistle effects would be concentrated among liberals was not predicted in advance, but this finding appears across two experiments testing effects of racial appeals in policy domains—welfare and gun control—that differ in the extent and ways they have been previously racialized. We also find evidence that the same group occasionally responded to explicit racial appeals even though these appeals were recognized as racially insensitive. We conclude by discussing implications for contemporary American politics, presenting representative survey data showing that racially resentful, white liberals were particularly likely to switch from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016.

ABSTRACTIn recent years, celebrity and popular culture have figured as key sites in the mediated resurgence of feminism, producing competing and contested articulations of feminism as a ‘popular’ phenomenon [Banet-Weiser, S. and Portwood-Stacer, L., 2017. The traffic in feminism: an introduction to the commentary and criticism on popular feminism. Feminist media studies, 17, 884–888]. Drawing on interviews with self-identifying feminists who primarily learn about and engage with feminism through digital culture, this article aims to connect and extend debates over the aims, logics and limits of popular feminism by foregrounding the affective, lived negotiations of feminist identity at this moment. This pilot project research suggests that the very logics of individuality and authenticity underpinning celebrity shape personal understandings and negotiations of feminism. I discuss two significant dynamics in these negotiations. First, celebrity becomes an accessible means of both understanding and classifying ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feminism, organized under the poles of ‘white feminism’ and ‘intersectional feminism’ [Crenshaw, P. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago legal forum, 140, 139–167]. Second, in the context of the surveillance politics of social media, and broader neoliberal governmental injunctions to continually work on one’s ‘character’ [Bull, A. and Allen, K. 2018. Introduction: Sociological Interrogations of the Turn to Character. Sociological research online, 23(2), 392–398], authentic feminist identity becomes entangled with practices of perfecting and disciplining the self. The self is re-conceptualized as a ‘platform’ through which marginalized others are included. Via these celebrity logics, the pursuit of an intersectional feminist identity paradoxically obscures the reinvigoration of practices of middle-class whiteness centred on self-monitoring, self-actualization and the disavowal of complicity.

Reviewed by: Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics by Anthony J. Badger Daniel K. Williams Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics. By Anthony J. Badger. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 242. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-24234-0.) For much of the mid-twentieth century, white liberal politicians in the South appeared to have a chance. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee won U.S. Senate races in the 1950s with campaigns that advocated strongly for social welfare spending, and Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas won gubernatorial elections in the 1970s thanks to a biracial coalition that favored increased aid to education. But today there are almost no white southern liberals in Congress or statehouses. States such as Tennessee that were once represented in the Senate by moderate liberals now have all-Republican Senate delegations that are strongly supportive of Donald Trump’s brand of politics. What happened to white southern liberalism? Why did white southern liberals fail to change the political culture of their region—and ultimately fail to [End Page 393] win elections? One might think that the answer is race—and Anthony J. Badger agrees. But it is not merely the case, he argues, that white voters rejected liberal politicians because the liberal politicians were too racially progressive for regional norms. Rather, he says, white liberals were too moderate on race to offer a convincing alternative to conservatism in the South. In the 1930s and 1940s, all white southern liberals—even the most ardent supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal—were segregationists. Some wanted to increase economic aid to the African American community, but none wanted the federal government to intervene on matters of race relations. But southern white liberals’ hopes of transforming their region economically without addressing racial discrimination were dashed when the U.S. Supreme Court made desegregation a national issue with Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—a move that prompted a southern backlash that endangered southern white liberalism. The African American civil rights movement also caught white southern liberals off guard, and they gave it almost no support. Despite this failure of the first generation of postwar southern white liberals, a new generation of moderately progressive southern Democrats, including Carter and Clinton, were elected in the 1970s on the promise of economic uplift through education spending and partnerships with business. Yet even though these new southern moderates were more supportive of civil rights, they made the same mistake as their predecessors, believing that they could promote economic uplift without challenging structural racism. For a while, white southerners who enjoyed the benefits of postwar federal and corporate economic investment in their region were sympathetic to this vision, but in the mid-1990s, as globalization and deindustrialization left the rural South impoverished, white southerners turned against these moderate liberals. Their opposition to liberalism has only increased in the intervening decades. White southern liberals staked their political future on the premise that liberal economic policies could deliver economic uplift to their region without challenging the white racist power structure. When that promise failed, white voters turned against them, and Black voters (who had never appreciated white liberals’ refusal to confront the problem of systemic racism) decided that they could find better advocates elsewhere. But Badger is not optimistic that today’s Black liberals can win many statewide elections in the South either; white opposition is too strong. Badger does not offer much political advice for the future, and he does not suggest that a different strategy could have necessarily led to a better outcome. He is critical of white southern liberals’ attempts to avoid addressing racial issues, but he is also mindful of the challenging situation they faced. Perhaps this book’s refusal to settle for easy answers is one of its key strengths. Badger’s analysis, which he supports with numerous historical examples drawn from his half-century of studying twentieth-century southern politics, is nuanced and thoughtful. Readers will probably find the book’s conclusions compelling, albeit unsettling. [End Page 394] Daniel K. Williams University of West Georgia Copyright © 2023 Southern...

Common wisdom seems to suggest that racial bias, defined as disparate treatment of minority defendants, exists in jury decision-making, with Black defendants being treated more harshly by jurors than White defendants. The empirical research, however, is inconsistent--some studies show racial bias while others do not. Two previous meta-analyses have found conflicting results regarding the existence of racial bias in juror decision-making (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 1315-1344; Sweeney & Haney, 1992, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 10, 179-195). This research takes a meta-analytic approach to further investigate the inconsistencies within the empirical literature on racial bias in juror decision-making by defining racial bias as disparate treatment of racial out-groups (rather than focusing upon the minority group alone). Our results suggest that a small, yet significant, effect of racial bias in decision-making is present across studies, but that the effect becomes more pronounced when certain moderators are considered. The state of the research will be discussed in light of these findings.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

In criminal cases involving minority defendants, some minority legal scholars argue that despite the overwhelming evidence of guilt, racial minority jurors should possess the moral obligation to acquit ‘'guilty'’ defendants as a protest against racial discrimination in the criminal justice and court systems. While the rate of racial acquittals is on the rise in criminal courts in large metropolitan jurisdictions, the present analysis shows that in the O.J Simpson trial involving a number of racial and ethnic minorities, minority jurors are more likely to adhere to the strict application of criminal legal standards —presumed innocence, burden of proof, and reasonable doubt — in their deliberative process. Our empirical analysis reveals that while the presence of biases in law enforcement raised the ‘'reasonable doubt'’ and ‘'proof beyond a reasonable doubt'’ standards among white jurors, none of the three legal standards had statistically significant relations with their determination of the trial outcome. For racial minorities, however, all three legal concepts and racial biases in the criminal justice system show statistically significant impacts on their determination of the Simpson verdict. While there is the greater scrutiny of both presumed innocence and reasonable doubt among racial minority jurors, the concept of the government's burden of proof negatively affected minorities’ views in the Simpson acquittal. This suggests that the government's superior positions and prosecutorial resources may be too much to overcome in order to win an acquittal. Thus the burden of proof standard may measure racial minorities’ sense of powerlessness in obtaining a fair trial and securing an acquittal. Similarly our findings show that racial minorities who believe there are racial biases and prejudices held and used by law enforcement authorities also feel that O.J. Simpson would be adjudicated guilty of murder, suggesting that the government which relies on evidence collected by discriminatory law enforcement agencies might still be too powerful to enable Simpson to win an acquittal verdict. While advocates for racially based jury nullification reinforce the image of lawlessness of minority jurors in America's criminal courts, the present analysis show that, at least in a highly publicized criminal trial involving a prominent minority defendant, minority jurors show the opposite, suggesting that racial minority jurors are indeed law abiding participants in the administration of justice.

“White feminism” circulates as a colloquialism within digital cultures to indicate a feminism that centers whiteness, though the phrase captures a greater formation of feminist discourse and action that reify systems of oppression. While feminist critics such as bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw have theorized white women’s tendency to universalize whiteness, there has been very little work in feminist rhetorical studies that defines the rhetorical characteristics of white feminist discourses that advocate against sexual and gendered oppression while also reaffirming white supremacy. Generic Forms of White Feminism: A Study on the Circulation of White Feminism in Digital Cultures addresses the formal rhetorical and symbolic characteristics of white feminist discourses and argues that white feminism circulates as a rhetorical genre. Specifically, by drawing on rhetorical genre studies, feminist criticism, and digital media studies, Generic Forms of White Feminism situates white feminism as an evolving genre that involves recurring generic forms while producing social action that undermines the possibility for radical feminist intervention. Each chapter utilizes a case study to illustrate a specific generic form of white feminism--reprimanding, forgetting, gatekeeping, or co-opting-- within digital cultures. Chapter III: “White Feminists and the Policing of Public Mourning in Response to the Death of Kobe Bryant” examines how white women mobilized the generic form of the emotional reprimand against those who mourned Bryant’s death on Twitter, which policed public mourning and centered white women’s feelings in the larger conversation about Bryant’s memory. Chapter IV: “The Digital Archivization of Margaret Sanger: Public Forgetting, Trauma, and the White Feminist Movement” questions how aspects of Sanger’s biography have been publicly forgotten in service of advancing a (white) feminist agenda. Chapter V: “Confrontations of Feminist and Feminine Belonging: Border Rhetorics, Feminist Gatekeeping, and Epideictic Assemblages” argues that epideictic assemblages allow trans exclusionary radical feminists to gatekeep womanhood and feminism itself, resulting in a feminism that reasserts whiteness and patriarchal dominance. Chapter VI: “Co-Opting Emancipatory Rhetoric and The Beguiled” outlines how Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled co-opts emancipatory rhetorics to evade an acknowledgement of white women’s complicity in systems of oppression.

Reviewed by: The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson Michael Lackey Lawrence P. Jackson . The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 579 pp. $35.00. Dauntingly ambitious and brilliantly executed, Lawrence Jackson's The Indignant Generation deftly charts the ideological twists and narrative turns of African American literature and criticism from the hopeful days of New Deal economics to the tense days of pre-Black Power racial nationalism. In a surprising but effective move, Jackson uses the tortuous career of the now somewhat obscure scholar-novelist J. Saunders Redding to define the dilemmas facing black writers during this relatively neglected period. Considered one of the deans of African American scholarship from the 1950s through the 1970s, Redding was the author of To Make a Poet Black (1939), a sweeping study of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. Yet he also made a name as a serious novelist, whose Stranger and Alone (1950) anticipated Ellison's soon-to-be-published Invisible Man (1952). What interests Jackson most in Redding are the conflicts he encountered as he navigated his way through his age's political, aesthetic and social minefields. As both a critic and imaginative writer, Redding found himself caught between racially charged protest literature and politically disengaged modernist aesthetics, between racist American democracy and race-uplift communist movements, and between black assimilationists and black nationalists. The Indignant Generation pivots on these dilemmas, which, according to Jackson, injured Redding's writing life and significantly damaged his later reputation. What is more important, however, is that Jackson uses these dilemmas to illuminate the lives and works of numerous writers from the mid-twentieth century. Jackson's ability to provide a multilayered context in which great works emerged is inestimably valuable. For instance, in the lead-up to his discussion of the momentous publication of Wright's Native Son in 1940, Jackson skillfully examines the influence of Sterling Brown's searing analysis of stereotypes of blacks in U. S. literature, the degree to which "communism was helping blacks to become twentieth-century Americans" (57), the repudiation of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, the positive [End Page 256] impact of the Julius Rosenwald Fund ("the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s" [97]), and African American intellectuals' knotty but escalating critique of white liberals. Taken alone, each of these examinations is stimulating and insightful. But when one realizes how they work together to set the stage for Jackson's chapter "Bigger Thomas among the Liberals," the cumulative effect is intellectually staggering. This is not to say that Jackson shapes all this material to offer a new interpretation of Wright's novel. Rather, his focus is on the "Native Son effect—really the Bigger Thomas effect," which "stimulated an enormous growth in consciousness in American audiences and publishers" (125). Bigger replaced "the stereotype of Uncle Tom" in the minds of blacks and whites (125). His challenging character forced writers to do more "dense psychological realist exploration" (130), and established Wright as "the point man for black defiance in the 1940s" (138). Put simply, Jackson persuasively demonstrates just why black writers felt compelled to take their aesthetic and political cues from Wright after 1940. Native Son put white liberals, in particular, in an uncomfortable position. After Wright's searching depiction of the Dalton family (the Daltons' financially support the NAACP but get rich from slum tenements), these liberals began to take a more serious approach to the issue of race. For instance, the editor Thomas Sancton produced "a cutting edge kind of literary criticism" imagining "a world uninflected by race bias" (155). In 1943, Bucklin Moon published The Darker Brother, which established his "credentials as the most liberal white American novelist" (153). A year after its appearance, Jackson claims, "white writers no longer delved into extended caricature with the presumption that it might stand in for serious literature" (156). By the mid-forties, however, black writers began to refine techniques for picturing "the unconscious of white America," the dark realm where writers such...