Economic Injustice Research Articles

The Racial and Economic Theories of James Cone and Martin Luther King Jr., Illuminated by "The Sermon on the Mount"

Civil rights leaders James Cone and Martin Luther King Jr. stand out for their articulation on the injury that has been done to their "race" by White people, in the form of discrimination and poverty. These two issues of racial and economic justice were chief among the concerns for the equality of all humans. This article will trace the struggle for human rights through the rise of Black theology. The response of the White racists to this uprising was one of meager offerings, if not outright refusal: gradual integration and tokenism. The concept of struggle against these evil forces rises to prominence, as the civil rights movement seeks to integrate sympathetic Whites into their plight. This leads to a union of races, especially as those in the lower class—both Black and White—mobilized their numbers to protest against the prevalent unemployment and the source of the economic injustice—namely, discrimination. Finally, the solutions of both Cone and King will be put forth.

On the Front Lines of Childhood Obesity

The authors discuss obesity in the U.S. and disparities in its incidence as a result of social and economic injustice. Behavioral choices are related to the environments in which people live. Factors of concern include the availability or lack thereof of fresh vegetables, safe parks where children can play and get exercise, and advertisements for fast foods.

Disrupting the Official Curriculum: Cultural Biography and the Curriculum Decision Making of Latino Preservice Teachers

This multiple case study traces the influence of cultural biographies on the curriculum decision making of two Latino preservice teachers who student taught in standards-based schools. These participants drew on their personal and cultural experiences to disrupt the “official” curriculum, which they believed failed to address fundamental issues of race and inequity. Findings suggest that personal encounters with discrimination and economic injustice informed the curricular decisions of participants. In addition, participants held a constructivist view of the social studies, allowing them to teach using multiple perspectives that challenged dominant narratives in the social studies.

Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished , and: Cornelius Cardew: A Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished, and: Cornelius Cardew: A Reader Tom Bickley Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished. By John Tilbury. Harlow, Essex, UK: Copula, 2008. [xxiv, 1070 p. ISBN 9780952549246. £30.] Illustrations, appendices, bibliograpy, works list, index. Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. Edited by Edwin Prévost. Harlow, Essex, UK: Copula, 2006. [xviii, 390 p. ISBN 9780952549222. £22.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. "I have an insane desire to be an unsolved mystery" (A Life Unfinished, p. 1019), wrote Cornelius Cardew in his journal at age seventeen or eighteen. Given his remarkable life, with its dramatic changes in course, passionate engagement, and the distressing circumstances of his untimely death, that statement strikes the reader as eerily prophetic. Copula Press, an imprint of Matchless Recordings (noted for consistently excellent recordings of experimental improvisatory music), provides rich material for readers interested in the intersection of experimental music and Marxist-Leninist activism as manifest in Cardew's life and work. Cardew grew up in a middle-class family involved in the arts; his father, Michael Cardew, was a noted potter. His early education included choral training at the Canterbury Cathedral School (relocated to a village in Cornwall during World War II). He chafed at the authoritarian structure, and, coming from an atheist family, was not at all at home in the ecclesiastical environment. He entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in 1953, further developing his performance skills as a pianist and embracing serialism as a composer. He found serialism easy to embrace, enjoying the exploration of conceptual links between serial composition and Wittgenstein's philosophy (especially the Tractatus logico-philosophicus), in which he had already immersed himself. From 1957 to 1961 he studied and worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the electronic music studios in Cologne. His close association with Stockhausen ensured connections with the European avant-garde. Cardew's journal entries show his ambivalence in the competitive atmosphere and orthodoxy of integral serial practice. Encounters with John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman opened a pathway of freedom from the integral serialists. Cardew returned to London, trained in graphic design, worked in the book design industry, and established himself in the forefront of the musical avant-garde in the United Kingdom. Further study in Italy linked him to musical and political developments there, and in Buffalo, New York, he grew closer yet to American Experimental lineages. He brought his passion for experimentation and empowerment of performers to creation in his masterful graphic score Treatise (1963–67) and involvement with the seminal free improvisation ensemble AMM. Developing from his composition teaching at the RAM and Morley College, he cofounded (with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton and others) the Scratch Orchestra. That ensemble combined democratic organizational principles with various modes of experimental music making. Cardew's expansive setting of the Confucian text The Great Learning stands out from that period for that ensemble. Keith Rowe, of AMM and the Scratch Orchestra, led initiatives for study of the works of Mao Zedong. In a fairly short time, the formerly relatively apolitical Cardew embraced Maoism with exceptional vigor, reminiscent of religious conversion. The Maoist activists transformed the Scratch Orchestra into an ensemble directly supporting the work of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist). That Maoist faction denounced the revisions of Khrushchev and, influenced by Canadian Maoist Hardial Bains, hewed to Stalinism in the Sino-Soviet split. Friendships and musical associations ruptured in this turmoil, as the charismatic Cardew denounced his former experimental/avant-garde music as counter-revolutionary. [End Page 766] Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974) contains essays on these topics and is reprinted in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. The last decade of Cardew's life was spent in the service of Marxism-Leninism. The energy and passion he brought to serialism, and then to experimental music, he also brought to fighting racism and economic injustice. Following Mao's death in 1976, and the realization that the atrocities of his regime were undeniable, Cardew and others denounced the Chinese leader, and the anti-revisionist CPE (ML) reformed as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). He was a member of the Central Committee and submitted virtually...

Perceptions of Economic Distributive Injustice: The Influence of Economic Powerlessness and Causal Attributions for Unemployment in Lesotho

The purpose of the current study was to examine the influence of the feelings of economic powerlessness and causal attributions for unemployment on the perceptions of economic distributive injustice of young people, controlling for gender and level of education. The study was based on a survey of 523 undergraduate students, and the data was analysed by means of descriptive, correlation, hierarchical regression and factor analyses. The results indicated that both the feelings of economic powerlessness and external attribution for unemployment were positively and significantly associated with the perceptions of economic distributive injustice. These results are discussed in light of the pressing socio-economic problems in Lesotho.

Reclaiming the Nation through Public Murals

In a nation that often silences them, Maya in Guatemala are increasingly expressing themselves through public murals. When teachers, artists, students, and other residents of San Juan Comalapa painted the history of their nation, town, and people, they portrayed resistance, accommodation, and collaboration. The persistence of Mayan markers throughout the images stands as a reminder that Maya-Kaqchikel are not simply reinventing a sense of nation with murals; rather, they have been reclaiming the nation at every step in its long, often harsh history. For the recent past, the images depict Guatemala's civil war (1960-96), the poverty and racism that were among its causes, and Kaqchikel responses to violence and economic injustice. Based on local Kaqchikel interpretations of history, the murals serve multiple purposes for Comalapenses: local historical representations of the past, critiques of the government and of themselves, expressions of community creativity, mobilizations of development aid funds, and a source of civic pride. This essay considers these multiple purposes: first, by culturally and historically contextualizing the murals as a distinct Comalapa tradition; and second, by placing the murals in dialogue with the state and with Comalapenses who think about the past and critique the murals themselves.

Early Childhood Service Delivery for Families Living with Childhood Disability: Disabling Families through Problematic Implicit Ideology

THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to unpack the implicit ideology underpinning early childhood service delivery for families living with childhood disability. The family as the unit of care is central to the philosophy and practice of early childhood services. However, the practice of family-centred care can be problematic; it is based upon neo-liberal assumptions of ‘idealised’ families, underestimates the profound impact of childhood disability on the family, and encourages service providers to conflate parents' involvement in care with responsibility for it. Further, the notion of chronic sorrow is often applied in order to describe parents and/or families as either ‘in denial’ or too aggrieved to enact their therapeutic imperative, and individualised and psychologised interpretations are made. Service delivery in early childhood settings often reinforces - rather than acts to reduce-social, cultural and economic injustices. Clearly then, childhood disability remains institutionalised, but just within the institution of the family. Attention to the largely silenced, yet multiple, shifting, and complex issues faced by families living with childhood disability is required and will likely have implications for early childhood service delivery.

Fixing the Mideast's Economies

Petroleum revenues, which theoretically should have supported economic prosperity, have in practice fueled regional conflicts, supported corruption, [and] created economic injustice. …

Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel: A Hopeful Theology for the Twenty‐First Century Economy

Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel: A Hopeful Theology for the Twenty‐First Century Economy Janet R. Nelson If production could be organized on a basis of cooperative fraternity; if distribution could at least approximately be determined by justice; if all men could be conscious that their labor contributed to the welfare of all and that their personal well‐being was dependent on the prosperity of the Commonwealth; if predatory business and parasitic wealth ceased and all men lived only by their labor; if the luxury of unearned wealth no longer made us feverish with covetousness and a simpler life became the fashion; if our time and strength were not used up either in getting a bare living or in amassing unusable wealth and we had more leisure for the higher pursuits of the mind and the soul—then there might be a chance to live such a life of gentleness and brotherly kindness and tranquility of heart as Jesus desired for men.1—Rauschenbusch, Walter, Christianity and the Social Crisis The book by Walter Rauschenbusch which shook the religious world of our nation, Christianity and the Social Crisis, appeared just a half‐century ago. So much has happened in that half‐century both to the world and to us as a nation, that it is not altogether surprising that a book which meant so much to American religious life and to the older among us personally should be so obviously dated.2—Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Walter Rauschenbusch in Historical Perspective” When Walter Rauschenbusch presented his path‐breaking vision of a Christianized economic order in Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, the book galvanized the reading public, going through thirteen printings in seven years and selling more than 50,000 copies.3 Writing in 1957, Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned mid‐twentieth‐century Christian theologian, in effect dismissed the message of Rauschenbusch’s work as dated. Rauschenbusch’s views were certainly bound by the cultural, political, religious, and economic context of the early years of the twentieth century, but contrary to Niebuhr’s contention, the timeliness of Rauschenbusch’s insights are undeniably striking today, one hundred years after their publication. His outrage at the social and economic injustices of his day, his unrelenting critique of the capitalistic economic system that had produced so much human suffering and his urgent call for the democratization of that system could not be more relevant to our own times at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. There is some irony here for Reinhold Niebuhr himself is currently attracting considerable attention after having been in eclipse for several decades. Much of this attention is due to President Barack Obama’s professed admiration for Niebuhr. In an interview with David Brooks, Obama responded enthusiastically to Brooks’ question regarding the work of Niebuhr, stating “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Brooks quoted Obama that he took away from Niebuhr “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away…the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”4 Niebuhr’s worldview is a much‐needed and bracing corrective to the eight years of Bush administration hubris that their policies at home and abroad were unquestionable reflections of the goodness of the American way of life. Niebuhr argued in his many works, including his best known, Moral Man and Immoral Society,5 that humans are inherently self‐interested and that power, even when used to advance the good, is inevitably corrupted by self‐interest. Politics is always about power and the best we can strive for is a tenuous and imperfect balance of powers. In reaction to what he perceived to be the idealism of the Social Gospel movement of which Rauschenbusch was a leading proponent, Niebuhr developed the theological position of Christian realism—realism because it was grounded in Niebuhr’s appreciation of the limits of the goodness of human nature and even...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Cultural Approaches to Understanding School Violence

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Cultural Approaches to Understanding School Violence

This Land Was Made for You and Me: Teaching for Economic Justice in Upper Elementary and Middle School Grades

ABSTRACT Teaching for economic justice can be challenging for upper elementary and middle school teachers. Many teachers may feel uncomfortable with the subject matter and thus avoid addressing sensitive social issues related to economic/financial inequities. This article describes how selected songs and works of visual art, expressions of social protest and social commentary from past and present, can be used appropriately as starting points for introducing the concept of economic justice. By using principles and strategies of Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE) and employing works of art as organizing centers for instruction, potentially sensitive social issues are simultaneously personalized and depersonalized. Music and art provide a relatively safe and comfortable means for teachers to promote student awareness and sensitivity towards economic injustices. Two sample lesson plans, the first for upper elementary students and the second for middle school students, are provided and discussed.

The historical context of the Accra Confession

This article places the Accra Confession, accepted at the 24th General Assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) (2004), within the historical context of the WARC’s struggle for economic justice in the face of globalisation. It moves beyond addressing such issues merely as ethical issues to rather viewing them as confessional issues of faith. It highlights the difficulties of the WARC to reach consensus on issues concerning economic justice. It also shows how the WARC has taken the lead in the ecumenical movement by engaging a broad spectrum of people – professionals and non-professionals, from the North and the South, rich and poor – to ensure that such a confession is a true reflection of the experiences of people at grass-roots level and that it speaks from the heart. The Accra Confession challenges Christians to take a faith stance on economic injustice.

“A breast for all … and milk for all”: Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl and the 1930s CPUSA

The context in which fragments of Meridel Le Sueur's novel The Girl first appeared in the New Masses helped to deflect and diffuse her feminist message. The articles, poems, and illustrations surrounding her work in this publication promoted Popular Front goals such as defeating fascism through alliances with other progressive groups, and endorsed conservative roles for women as part of this program. An analysis of these materials in conjunction with contemporary Communist party responses to Le Sueur's work reveals critical differences between her political agenda and that of the 1930s CPUSA. At a time when the Party was courting middle-class members and promoting traditional notions of virtue and motherhood, Le Sueur wrote about prostitutes and sterilization policies. Instead of adhering to New Masses editor Mike Gold's proletarian aesthetic, she offered solidarity between women as a solution to social and economic injustice.

Essay: South Africa's Use of Constitutional Rights Adjudication to Remedy Persistent Economic Inequality

Advocates and scholars have long queried whether or not express constitutional rights protection could advance the cause of socio-economic equality in the manner that it has advanced the related goal of civil and political equality. In this regard, the first decade of adjudication of socio-economic rights by the Constitutional Court of South Africa has been a rare and notable experiment into the capacity of courts to advance social justice. South Africa's post-apartheid Constitution included among its enumerated rights a host of protections intended to remedy the economic injustices of the past. The Court has dealt effectively with claims of the non-justiciability of social rights (though a process of differentiated incorporation, adaptable to other nations) and has addressed specific social rights-most notably, housing and healthcare-in multiple cases. Unquestionably, South Africa's affirmative jurisprudence of socio-economic rights enforceability is a novel and potentially fruitful contribution to the struggle against poverty. But even if the South African court has demonstrated that social rights adjudication is possible, has it demonstrated that adjudication can remedy economic inequality? The Court's success has been uneven; enforcing socio-economic rights infrequently and in a less expansive manner that civil and political rights. There are reasonable justifications for this and historical analogies caution against immodest expectations, but there are similarly genuine reasons for disappointment. Moreover, what does the slow pace of economic advancement in South Africa tell us about the value of constitutional protection of such rights? This brief essay reviews the South African experience to evaluate the capacity of socio-economic constitutional rights to advance substantive equality.

Ressourcenpolitik und Geschlechtergerechtigkeit

Resource politics means the access to resources, the use of resources and the governance of resources. The current debate on climate change contributes to the ongoing social and economic injustice within gender relations. The article asks for non-hegemonic approaches to resource politics striving for gender equity and suggests a feminist understanding of sustainable livelihood as an adequate concept.

Integrated human rights and poverty eradication strategy: the case of civil registration rights in Zimbabwe

High poverty levels characterise sub-Saharan Africa, Zimbabwe included. Over 80 per cent of Zimbabwe's population lived below the total consumption poverty line and 70 per cent below the food poverty line in 2003. This plummeting of social indicators resulted from the freefall suffered by the country's economy from the 1990s, after unsuccessful attempts to implement structural adjustment programmes prescribed by international financial institutions. The ensuing socioeconomic decay, political crisis and international isolation of the country from the late 1990s reversed gains made in social indicators during the 1980s. Development theories attribute poverty to unchecked population growth, political, economic and environmental mismanagement, while developing countries' leaders attribute it to historical imbalances and global political and economic injustices. Despite this debate, poverty continues to evolve, expand and deepen and the need to eradicate it has become urgent. The complex question of what causes and what drives poverty is perpetually addressed and new ideas are emerging to answer the question. One recent view is that failure to centre development on people and to declare poverty a violation of human rights has allowed poverty to grow the world over. This study uses a hypothesised cause of poverty - civil registration - to exemplify the human right nature of poverty, and how a human rights' policy can be used as an instrument to eradicate poverty. The study demonstrates that civil registration is a right of instrumental relevance to poverty; and achieving civil registration grants people access to numerous other rights, some of which will lift them out of poverty, while the failure of civil registration deprives people of access to livelihoods, thereby entrenching them in poverty.

Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days (review)

Reviewed by: Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days Kirk Curnutt Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days. By Scott Donaldson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 520 pp. Cloth $32.50. Works and Days is Scott Donaldson's summa literaria of the two most famous American masters he has been writing about since he left journalism for academia nearly forty-five years ago. Thick as a phonebook but ten times as informative, it collects essays that (except for two instances) informed yet somehow escaped his well-known trio of biographies on their subjects, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999). The earliest among the collected essays, "Hemingway's Morality of Compensation," was first published in 1971 in American Literature; the most recent, "The Last Great Cause" (also on Hemingway), was written especially for this volume and previewed at the Ronda, Spain Hemingway conference in 2006. In between are titles that will ring familiar to attendees of various Hemingway and/or Fitzgerald Society conferences since the two organizations were conceived in 1980 and 1992 respectively. Other entries will send the memory back to photocopies made in the shush of university libraries, perhaps while in graduate school or in the early days of one's own career, mined from journals such as Twentieth Century Literature, The Iowa Review, or Prospects, their passages highlighted in different colors as these articles were returned to over the years. Still other essays will recall important collections edited by Susan F. Beegel, Jackson R. Bryer, Don Noble, and H. L. Weatherby. Reading the two dozen selections in sequence, one experiences both the reassurance of the familiar and the jolt of the new. Topics include such representative subjects as money, fame, craft, and the morality of character, while addressing broader "political" ramifications of narrative style such as "gaze," passivity, and ideological conservatism. Simply stated, it is good to have these observations together, finally, in one convenient source. In his amiable introduction, Donaldson writes that the decade he worked in newspapers before pursing his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota gave him a leg up on many of his colleagues: ". . . I was equipped to write about the authors whose work interested me in language most readers [End Page 147] could understand and [I was] accustomed as a professional to getting those words down on paper" (4). Undoubtedly, that "real world" experience gave him insight into Hemingway's journalistic roots as well, for the subject frames the portion of the book covering the former Kansas City Star cub. "Hemingway of The Star" explores the author's somewhat shady habit of supplementing his income from the Toronto paper in 1922–23 by writing dispatches simultaneously for both the International News Service and the United News Service. What comes through in Donaldson's analysis of Hemingway's contentious exchanges with his editors is how much of his later rabidity was already a coping mechanism in his apprenticeship: whenever caught kiting the trade, he would bluster, flinching at editorial restrictions and claiming economic injustice (241). Fifteen years later, that bark was such a publicly accepted facet of the Hemingway persona that when the author set off to cover the Spanish Civil War he roared indignantly whenever the North American Newspaper Alliance (which had commissioned him for a staggering $500–$1,000 per submission) hinted that he might be padding his reporting to take financial advantage of the arrangement (432). Reading Donaldson's account, it becomes clear that Hemingway did indeed believe in a morality of compensation: its golden rule boiled down to "nearly a dollar a word" (380). That flippancy is mine, not Donaldson's. One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading "The Last Great Cause" is its untendentious account of Hemingway's four trips to Spain in 1937–38. Like a good newspaper man, Donaldson presents the story and lets the reader decide just where on the scale of ethics his subject might have scored. In this way, the essay offers a corrective to Stephen Koch's grossly cartoonish account in The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and...

Theory versus reality: Commentary on four articles about trafficking for prostitution

In this issue of Women's Studies International Forum it's refreshing to read Limoncelli's observation there are points of agreement between abolitionists and non-abolitionists regard- ing trafficking. There is agreement that trafficking is harmful and that it is a gendered component of economic globaliza- tion (Limoncelli, p 16⁎). There is no argument about how to prevent trafficking for prostitution. All agree that sex discrimi- nation, race discrimination, and economic injustice are at the root of women's inability to avoid prostitution. A solution to the problem of trafficking arising out of this consensus would be to implement programs that promote sex, race, and economic equality, offering women alternatives to prostitution. There is also agreement that women in prostitution should not be criminalized. An abolitionist feminist approach to trafficking from the political left differs in important ways from an abolitionist approach from the political right. A critical difference is the evidence-based approach of feminists based on a broad understanding of the realities of sex, race, and economic inequality. Feminist abolitionists advocate the criminalization of buyers yet also insist on the decriminalization of women in prostitution. Abolitionists from the political right emphasize the immorality of trafficking for prostitution from a religious perspective and some would pragmatically accept arrests of women in prostitution for their own protection or in order to compel their testimony against traffickers. Language: en

Queer Family Romance

This essay examines the often overlooked role that the idea of gay rights played in producing the new imaginary of the postapartheid “rainbow nation”—and its neoliberal economic order. I suggest that the figure of the gay person became an embodiment of political change, symbolically mediating conflicts within multiracial modernity in South Africa's emergent public culture, and I analyze the work done by queer “minor characters” in novels by Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), and Disgrace (1999) all tell the story of white, middle-class Anglo-South Africans whose struggle to adjust to the new era includes dealing with the revelation that their children are not straight. These novels dramatize how the narrative of the nation as a raced, heterosexual family romance was in crisis after apartheid, and reconstitute their families in queer new configurations—raising questions about the flexibility and persistence of the trope of reproductivity. These texts ask how whites are to “come out” as national subjects and indicate that sexuality alone cannot be the grounds for reinventing race and nation without an attention to systemic economic injustice.

Global Governance in the Making: Prospects for a New World Order in Tackling Economic Injustice

One of the proposed solutions to economic justice is the concept of global governance, a world order wherein nations, formerly self-seeking and sovereign, would unselfishly cooperate towards solving problems with worldwide repercussions. Is this a utopian ideal or is this an immediate reality? To what extent is this possible, much less achievable?