The unremarked optimum: whiteness, optimization, and control in the database revolution

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.

PurposeIt is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).Design/methodology/approachThe author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.FindingsTo support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.Research limitations/implicationsIn the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).Originality/valueEnsuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

National Conference of Black Political Scientists Presidential Address

Whiteness is prevalent in higher education and therefore permeates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. While research shows STEM’s long history of exclusion and marginalization in higher education (Ong et al., 2011), there has been limited research on the ways students with minoritized identities of sexuality and/or gender (MIOSG) in STEM interact with systems of dominance, such as whiteness. Using white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021; Okun Jones, 2001) and the white racial frame (Feagin, 2010) as sensitizing concepts, this paper explores how students with MIoSG are situated in relation to systems of whiteness and white racial dominance in STEM learning spaces. Our findings included three emergent categories: color-evasiveness, desiring diversity in STEM, and the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in STEM. Findings illuminated the complex ways BIPOC and white students with MIoSG experienced and thought about whiteness and white supremacy in STEM. Data point to the need for intentional anti-racist research, policy, and practice in STEM learning spaces.

Just as Haitian-born Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable’s proactive career as explorer, trader, city founder, and finally wealthy entrepreneur concluded a successful linear journey during the later 18th century, the saga of Chicago’s African American population followed an amazingly similar route. Testing the adage of “If you can’t make it in Chicago, you can’t make it anywhere,” the epic of the African Americans of Chicago since the early 19th century and through three centuries can comparably be likened to the parable of the immovable object of systemic racism, as represented by white racism in all of its nefarious forms, encountering an irresistible force, characterized by the agency and resilience found in the thinking and various actions of African Americans throughout Chicago’s history. The former manifested itself as traditional prejudice and institutionalized discrimination in employment, housing, politics, business, and recreation. The latter was to be found in the attempted and attained aspirations, along with the stubborn persistence, and when necessary, physical resistance exerted through both the Black elites and masses. One force or the other had to yield, and over time many Black aspirations have been realized, if only incrementally. Three major transformations in thinking and behavior over the span of three centuries would have to be experienced and adjusted to before accommodation to urbanized, northern life could be completed. The first required breaking beyond the bounds of total subjection of mind and body by the former slaves, along with the restrictions applied to the purportedly free people of color, who now entered the Emancipation era. Upon experiencing the earliest stages of freedom, absorption into the urban milieu as liberated citizens and workers presented unforeseen challenges. They either embraced competition with whites or found themselves acquiescing retrogressively to their previous social status. What the 20th century presented was the opportunity to progress to a stage of civic-mindedness and participation as true urbanites and even cosmopolites. By midcentury, with the end of the century-long migratory surge of 1840 through the 1960s, a newer phase of a New Negro mentality became apparent. The election of Harold Washington as the city’s first African American mayor introduced them to the totality of life as citizens. Followed by the Obama presidency in the 21st century, Black life could never be expected to resume a static acceptance of life in terms of self-assessment and future outlooks. While existence in Chicago was “no crystal stair,” as Langston Hughes described the torturous climb of life for African Americans in America, it was still, as James M. Grossman has written, a land of hope.

In the paper we present a general solution for handling the large matrices. This solution is general because of the wide use of the matrix based approach in problems concerning numerical methods, experimental mechanics, computational mechanics, CFD, computer aided design, economical problems, etc. Some of the major advantages of this solution are: 1. lack of requirements regarding the use of some high-performance computers, the constraints being connected to the size of the hard-disk (at present increasing and being cheaper); 2. Windows operating system may be used but it is not absolutely necessary; 3. it represents an interface between the programming languages; 4. it can easily be used for development of multi-language software applications; 5. applicability in all the domains which use, at the logical level, ‘matrices’ (mathematics, engineering, economics); 6. there are no constraints regarding the use of ‘classic’ solutions techniques; 7. it is easy to implement in software applications already written; 8. data type used as interface may easily be modified in order to be adapted in an optimum way to the current application to be developed. By the use of this solution we solved a series of computer problems and ‘dedicated’ applications in some areas like: Mathematics, Experimental Mechanics, Computational Mechanics, Physics, etc.

College-educated white women across social classes support and uphold racism. Using narrative methods in a secondary analysis, we, as two white women, explored how white non-trans women make meaning of social class using the revised model of multiple dimensions of identity (RMMDI; Abes et al., 2007) as positioned within the context of white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy (hooks, 1994) and higher education. Findings were framed by white ignorance (Mills, 2007) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). We found that white women used class to distance themselves from whiteness and white supremacy in two ways. First, they projected race and class onto elite spaces that they simultaneously desired entry to and distance from. Second, they avoided critical reflection on their racial positioning and identity by constructing a pliable class identity. Both distancing strategies demonstrate "moves to innocence" (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012) away from white complicity, a process that the institutional environment largely facilitated and supported. Such an approach advances understandings of intrapersonal student development by examining how white women use social class to avoid addressing their racial domination and maintain false innocence (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012). We discuss research and practice implications.

White supremacy is a racial order that relies on a presumed “natural” superiority of whiteness and assigns to all groups racialized as non-white biological or cultural characteristics of inferiority. Despite decades of scientific studies refuting these claims, beliefs in racial difference continue to rely on ideas of innate or genetic differences between groups. Scholars now widely agree that race is a social, cultural, and political distinction that was and continues to be forged through relations of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. A focus on white supremacy does not limit scholars to the study of white supremacists, that is, those individuals and groups that outwardly espouse a racial order that privileges whiteness and white people and frequently endorse physical violence to maintain this order. Under white supremacy, societies privilege whiteness even in the absence of explicit laws and sometimes while promoting ideologies of racial inclusion and equality. Contexts of white supremacy feature the consolidation of white power and wealth at the expense of people of color—an arrangement that is maintained through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, anti-blackness, imperial conquest, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism, and xenophobic or anti-immigrant sentiment. Widespread awareness of linguistic difference can be mobilized to support these pillars of white supremacy through a range of official language policies and overt acts of linguistic suppression, as well as more covert or subtle language practices and ideologies. While the term “white supremacy” has gained broader circulation in the 21st century, these topics have been studied by linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists for decades under the more familiar headings of “race and language,” “racism and language,” and “raciolinguistics.” This scholarship examines how racial domination is consolidated, maintained, and justified through attention paid to language, but also the ways that marginalized speakers take up a broad range of linguistic practices to challenge assumptions about the superiority of whiteness and emphasize non-white racial pride, community ties, and cultural and linguistic heritage and traditions. Racial and linguistic hierarchies work together to falsely connect whiteness and the use of “standard” (officially sanctioned) language with rationality, intelligence, education, wealth, and higher status. Under these racial logics, speakers of languages associated with non-whiteness are readily linked to danger, criminality, a lack of intelligence or ability, primitivism, and foreignness. Together these ideologies naturalize connections between languages or specific linguistic practices and types of people, producing the conditions under which racialized speakers experience discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, oppression, and violence. At the same time, speakers challenge these power dynamics through linguistic practices that range from codeswitching, bilingualism and multilingualism, and language revitalization efforts, to verbal traditions both old and new, including social media genres. Though racial hierarchy continues to be bolstered by a linguistic hierarchy that assigns higher value to English as well as other European or colonial languages, linguistic variation persists, as speakers proudly embrace linguistic practices that defy the push to assimilate or submit to language loss. Beliefs in the superiority of whiteness have global resonance, but local specificities are important, and a majority of research has thus far been conducted within the context of the United States. Scholars who study language, racial inequality, and oppression continue to weigh in on public policies and debates in an attempt to raise awareness on these issues and advocate for racial and social justice.

This chapter takes a different approach toward the study of whiteness. It argues that a critical look at white privilege, or the analysis of white racial hegemony, must be complemented by an equally rigorous examination of white supremacy, or the analysis of white racial domination. As such, a critical pedagogy of white racial supremacy revolves less around the issue of unearned advantages, or the state of being dominant, and more around direct processes that secure domination and the privileges associated with it. To the extent that domination represents a process that establishes the supremacy of a racial group, its resulting everyday politics is understood as “dominance.” Articulating the possibility of “universal” white supremacy necessitates strategies that unpack discourses in particular school places. One of its features that critical educators confront is the notion of investment. Discourses of supremacy acknowledge white privileges, but only as a function of whites’ actions toward minority subjects.

We used an African-centered model of male-female equality, Black feminist theory, racial identity theory, and findings from the rape myth acceptance literature to explore male dominant and White racial dominant attitudes among antirape activists and a comparison group of nonactivists. As predicted, activists and sexually nonaggressive men rejected rape myths and possessed more egalitarian attitudes toward women than did nonactivists and sexually aggressive men. Activists also rejected White racial dominance more than nonactivists at the internalization-stage leveL Attitudes related to White racial dominance did not predict rape myth acceptance. However, preencounter racial attitudes and internalization of racial attitudes are significantly associated with rape myth acceptance and attitudes toward women. Implications are discussed and recommendations put forward to include educational materials in manhood training programs that counter White supremacist and male supremacist ideologies.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

Objectives A method of pain assessment is the drawing of pain on a specially designed manikin where the patients color the area representing their pain distribution. In recent years, software applications have been developed for the purpose of digital pain drawing data acquisition and processing. Although such specific software applications have already been released, they have been built with obsolete programming tools. The purpose of the study was to investigate the test – retest reliability of a new pain drawing analysis software, in a sample of patients with shoulder pain. Methods Data collected from 31 subjects with shoulder pain. Participants were asked twice to color their pain distribution in the painting environment of a tablet software application called ‘Pain Distribution.’ Results The reliability of pain extent was found to be good (ICC = 0.80). The Jaccard index for the reliability of pain location was found to be moderate, equal to 42.02 ± 19.13%. Conclusion The results demonstrated good reliability of pain extent and moderate reliability of pain location using the new pain distribution analysis application ’Pain Distribution.’ This pain drawing software application could be a reliable, inexpensive, and clinically usable solution for assessing the distribution of pain in patients with shoulder pain.

Introduction

When George M. Fredrickson published White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, he met universal acclaim. David Brion Davis, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “one of the most brilliant and successful studies in comparative history ever written.” The book was honored with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and a jury nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Now comes the sequel to that acclaimed work. In Black Liberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks in the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. He reveals a rich history--not merely of parallel developments, but of an intricate, transatlantic web of influences and cross-fertilization. He begins with early moments of hope in both countries--Reconstruction in the United States, and the liberal colonialism of British Cape Colony--when the promise of suffrage led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality. A rising tide of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century, however, blunted their hopes and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. Fredrickson teases out the connections between movements and nations, examining the transatlantic appeal of black religious nationalism (known as Ethio pianism), and the pan-Africanism of Du Bois and Garvey. He brings to vivid life the decades of struggle, organizing, and debate, as blacks in the United States looked to Africa for identity and South Africans looked to America for new ideas and hope. The book traces the rise of Communist influence in black movements in the two nations in the 1920s and ‘30s, and the adoption of Gandhian nonviolent protest after World War II. The story of India’s struggle, however, was not to be repeated in either America or South Africa: in one nation, nonviolence revealed its limitations, encouraging splits in the civil rights movement; in the other, it failed, fostering an armed struggle against white supremacy. Fredrickson brings the story up through the present, exploring the divergence between African-American identity politics and the nonracialism that has triumphed in South Africa. In a career spanning thirty years, George Fredrickson has won recognition as the leading scholar of the struggle over racial domination in the United States and South Africa. In Black Liberation, he provides the essential companion volume to his award-winning White Supremacy, telling the story of how blacks fought back on both sides of the Atlantic.