Segregation In The United States Research Articles

Ethnic neighborhoods, social networks, and inter-household carpooling: A comparison across ethnic minority groups

The implications of racial residential segregation on travel behavior have remained understudied, despite the persistent existence of segregation. Using the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, I investigate whether residence in a co-ethnic neighborhood affects the likelihood that ethnic minorities will form inter-household carpools, and if so, how such effects differ across race or ethnic groups. Inter-household carpooling requires arrangements and interactions between people living in geographical proximity, so it will likely reflect the social networks of a neighborhood. The results show that Hispanics and Asians who reside in their co-ethnic neighborhoods, regardless of immigrant status, are more likely to use inter-household carpools for non-work purposes than their counterparts living outside co-ethnic neighborhoods. In contrast, black neighborhood residency is not associated with the likelihood that African Americans will do inter-household carpooling, regardless of trip purpose. These differences across racial/ethnic groups suggest that the role of neighborhoods in promoting social ties as reflected by activities such as external carpooling is complex. Residence in a black neighborhood may be less of a choice than residence in a Hispanic or Asian neighborhood due to the long history of black segregation in the US. With less residential choice, the propensity to develop local social ties may be weaker.

Temporal dynamics of racial segregation in the United States: An analysis of household residential mobility

ABSTRACTThis is the first study of temporal segregation dynamics based on the full analysis of household residential mobility, including non-moves and intra- and inter-neighborhood moves in the United States over the last four decades (1971–2009). Analysis results demonstrate the decreases in both white flight and white avoidance over time. Whites stayed shorter in black-white neighborhoods than in predominantly white neighborhoods until 1990, but this has been no longer significant during the past two decades. The tendency that whites are less likely to move to racially homogeneous neighborhoods than moving within or across racially mixed neighborhoods was significant only after 1990. These two results explain the aggregate-level segregation trend that black-white neighborhoods have experienced the most significant drop in the probability of transitioning into racially homogeneous neighborhoods and that the share of racially mixed neighborhoods has significantly increased over time. Analysis results further suggest that increasing racial diversity and the reduction in racial segregation in metropolitan areas have likely contributed to changes in whites’ residential mobility.

Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits by Ansley T. Erickson

Reviewed by: Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limitsby Ansley T. Erickson Matthew Delmont Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. By Ansley T. Erickson. Historical Studies of Urban America. ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 390. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-226-02525-4.) Ansley T. Erickson's Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limitsexamines the history of segregation, desegregation, and educational inequality in Nashville, Tennessee, from the 1950s through the 1990s. Erickson weaves together metropolitan history, educational history, and policy history to show how "inequality shifted form in American education" (p. 4). Erickson concludes, "Nashville navigated desegregation with relative statistical success while remaining unable or unwilling to value all of the district's students, their communities, and their places in the metropolis" (p. 11). Drawing on extensive archival research and over fifty original oral histories, Making the Unequal Metropolisis a deeply researched and analytically sophisticated book that builds on the work of historians of education, politics, and civil rights like Jack Dougherty, Matthew D. Lassiter, and Jeanne Theoharis. Similar to these scholars, Erickson shows how schools play an integral role in the making of cities and suburbs. "[SJchool policy became an actor in [Nashville], embedded in and contributing to the basic structures of metropolitan inequality," Erickson argues (p. 9). She concludes, "As Nashville schools went from formal segregation to statistical desegregation, they demonstrated how deeply education is tied to, and helps construct, the political economy of metropolitan space" (p. 313). Among the many impressive aspects of this book is how Erickson navigates different scales of analysis. She deftly shows how struggles over educational inequality stretched across local, metropolitan, state, and federal levels and how policy choices at each of these levels shaped school segregation and desegregation. In chapter 4, for example, Erickson analyzes how school site selection guidelines prepared by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare revealed "official federal assumptions that quality education should be found in suburban settings," while also setting the "ideological and practical direction for school construction" in Nashville (pp. 123, 128). By repeatedly making these connections among the local, metropolitan, state, and national levels, Making the Unequal Metropolisis both a nuanced case study of educational history and civil rights in Nashville and a nationally relevant study of how "school policy choices continued to distribute resources—material, human, and social—unequally even within policy interventions ostensibly targeting equality" (p. 21). Making the Unequal Metropolisalso covers a longer chronological period than many other histories of postwar urban/suburban development. By tracing this story through the 1980s and 1990s, Erickson is able to show how different people and organizations attempted to articulate and enact visions of [End Page 475]educational equality and how these visions transformed over time. "Black community leaders, from school board members to ministers to parent advocates, struggled to reconcile for themselves how much statistical desegregation was worth: in closures of cherished institutions, in time and distance on the bus, in feelings of alienation at new schools in unfamiliar and sometimes inaccessible areas," Erickson writes (p. 276). While the players in these later chapters are not well known nationally, the social, political, and legal issues Erickson analyzes will resonate for scholars working on metropolitan development and education in other locales. Making the Unequal Metropolisis an important and timely book. Over six decades after Brown v. Board of Education(1954), Erickson's study provides new ways of thinking, talking, and teaching about the history and legacies of school segregation in the United States. Matthew Delmont Arizona State University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Sins of the Founding Fathers

In this paper, I offer substantial philosophical and pragmatic analyses of slavery, apprenticeships, and segregation in the United States and British West Indies. I do so to illustrate the extent to which American and British philosophy, politics, law, and economics were entwined with the oppression of African-Americans and African-Caribbeans. I argue that, as the institution of slavery collapsed and abolitionists began calling for reparations, judges and politicians ignored the claims of abolitionists and thereby perverted justice. As a result, we now have the debts of slavery, apprenticeships, and segregation to settle. I conclude that as long as we fail to settle these debts we are complicit in allowing their perversions of justice to continue. For this reason, I argue in favor of granting reparations to African-Americans and African-Caribbeans.

American Apartheid

In his compelling new book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein (a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute) argues that inequality stems from deliberate housing policies on the part of the federal government, and that these policies thus constitute a violation of Constitutional rights. Segregation by race is an extension of slavery and a betrayal of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. Rothstein is not content to provide a detailed examination of the ways public entities have colluded with private interests to keep black people out 135 REVIEWS of white neighborhoods. He argues this is a Constitutional issue and the appropriate remedy is political and judicial action to right past and present wrongs perpetrated by all levels of government.

Does Segregation Lead to Lower Birth Weight?: An Instrumental Variable Approach.

Racial residential segregation in the United States has been linked to racial differences in birth outcomes, with studies reporting associations between segregation and birth weight. However, this relationship is likely confounded, and many individual and neighborhood-level covariates included in previous models are likely mediators, potentially obscuring any causal impact of segregation on birth weight. We compiled a record of non-Hispanic black and white singleton births to US-born/resident mothers in 2000, linked to segregation indices at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level in the non-Southern US. Segregation was measured via the dissimilarity index. The outcomes were individual-level birth weight and the metropolitan statistical area-level black/white gap in birth weight. We instrumented for segregation using the railroad division index. We compared race-stratified ordinary least squares models to two-stage least squares models, with cluster robust standard errors. We estimated a 1.2 g decrease in black birth weight for every one-percentage point increase in segregation (95% confidence interval [CI]: -1.9, -0.50) via ordinary least squares but a 2.8 g decrease (95% CI: -6.0, 0.48) using two-stage least squares. For white infants, our ordinary least squares estimate was 0.53 (95% CI: -0.23, 1.3), and our two-stage least squares estimate was in the opposite direction (-0.68, 95% CI: -3.5, 2.1). Ordinary least squares estimates may understate the effect of segregation on birth weight in blacks. Evidence from instrumental variable models was consistent with a causal impact of segregation on black birth outcomes, but estimates were imprecise and may be affected by weak instrument bias.

Francisco Maestas et al. v. George H. Shone et al.: Mexican American Resistance to School Segregation in the Hispano Homeland, 1912–1914

ABSTRACTThe authors in this article argue that the Francisco Maestas et al vs. George H. Shone et al (1914) case is one of the earliest Mexican American challenges to school segregation in the United States. Unidentified for over a century, the lawsuit took place in southern Colorado, a region of the nation where Mexican Americans have deep historical roots. This case was unique because the racial background and linguistic needs of Mexican American children were contested. First, plaintiffs (Mexican Americans) argued their children were racially distinct as Mexicans and used the Colorado Constitution to challenge segregation because the state prohibited public schools from classifying and distinguishing children based on color and race. Defendants (school board members and the superintendent) countered that Mexican American children were Caucasian and claimed they were no different from other White children in the school district. Second, school district officials maintained that non-English speaking Mexican American children were placed in a separate school in order to serve their linguistic needs. The district court judge discovered that school officials had created a policy that sent all Mexican American children to the separate school. To the extent that many Mexican American children were English speaking, the district court judge ruled in favor of Francisco Maestas on the grounds that school officials could not prevent English-speaking Mexican American children from attending schools of their choice in general and schools that were closer to their homes in particular.

Marvel Cinematic Universality

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo US 2014). Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2014. Region 1. 2.40:1 widescreen. US$14.99.In the opening scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter CA: TWS), genetically enhanced Ubermensch Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) opens his notebook to a page filled with cultural references from the years since he was frozen in ice in 1945. The list is categorically random, throwing yuppie fetish objects ('Thai Food') and 1990s alt-rock ('Nirvana') in with the more expected triumphs of the free world ('The Moon Landing', 'Berlin Wall up+down'). As discussed in a DVD featurette as well as numerous interviews, the list was fan-selected and customised for different regional audiences - slightly different lists were seen in the UK, France, South Korea, Mexico and other countries. History is represented here as the result of targeted marketing. CA: TWS has been lauded by many popular critics for its progressivism, mainly expressed via nods to 1970s left-wing conspiracy thrillers and an implicit critique of the American security state. However, the politics of the film are more clearly understood through an analysis of how it integrates its ostensibly US-centric, 'critical' premise into the ever-expanding global entertainment franchise that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).Captain America is a problematic figure in the MCU for two main reasons. His status as an obvious anachronism keeps the films' setting from being wholly reduced to the nonspecific yet obliquely topical present that characterises the rest of the shared universe. Secondly, for a global franchise, a character as overtly tied to American nationalism as Captain America presents challenges to mass appeal and relatability. In Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston US 2011, crucially marketed as simply The First Avenger in some countries), both problems are solved through the treatment of the series' main antagonists. Though the Nazis reprise their traditional role in American film as avatars of transcendent evil, the singularity of that evil is undercut at every turn. Not only is the Holocaust never mentioned - Cap is put on ice mere months before the Allied liberation of Dachau - neither is anti-Semitism. The closest we get is the character of Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), exiled German scientist and inventor of the super soldier serum that gives Rogers his powers. Identified as Jewish in the comic What If? Vol. 2 #29 (1991), he is ambiguously played by Tucci, a (non-Jewish) character actor whose past roles include a Woody Allen double (Deconstructing Harry (Allen US 1997)) and Eichmann himself (Conspiracy (Pierson UK/USA 2001)). Just as racial segregation in the US is ignored and the civil rights struggle skipped over in the transition to the sequel, these Nazis have a concept of superiority that seems to lack a racial component. An idealised America is set off against a sanitised Nazi party; American exceptionalism is asserted without ever being explicitly justified in historical terms. This has the effect of making the greatness of American culture a matter of common sense while leaving the door open for CA: TWS's ambivalent treatment of the American state.Like all Marvel movies, the plot of CA: TWS is both extremely complicated and childishly simple. It begins with Cap and Black Widow (an affectless Scarlett Johansson) on a mission to rescue hostages from a French kickboxer (UFC champ Georges St-Pierre). This somehow leads to the revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D., the top-secret international agency headed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and manager of super-team the Avengers, is about to launch a global surveillance operation called Project Insight, which aims to compile data on millions of potential security threats and aim remote-controlled warheads at them. The project is headed by former US Secretary of Defense Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford, in a nice bit of legacy casting), who also happens to be a member of the Illuminati-like World Security Council, a shadowy cabal with ultimate oversight over S. …

The University of South Africa (Unisa) 1918–1948: the first transition, from colonial to segregationist institution

ABSTRACTThis article traces the first of what would become several significant transitions in the evolution of the University of South Africa (Unisa); that from University of the Cape of Good Hope (UCGH), an institution with a distinct English tradition loosely based on the ‘liberal’ constitution of the Cape Colony, to a more segregationist Afrikaner-dominated university by 1946. This was largely shaped by national politics, in particular the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, in the 1920s and 30s. Not only did Unisa become captive to Afrikaner forces, it also was strongly infiltrated by the Broederbond, which had as one of its objectives the holding of key positions in higher education in South Africa. In addition, issues of race now became a growing ‘problem’ as Unisa sought to fulfil its mandate to provide higher education for ‘non-Europeans’ in an era of segregation. However, it would be a distortion to portray this transition fom a simple binary perspective. There was ambivalence about the ‘liberalism’ of the UCGH that reflected the pressures for a new racial order at the Cape. Similarly, the extent of Broederbond influence at Unisa (and over national politics) should not be over-emphasised. Somewhat paradoxically, Unisa continued to accommodate nodes of liberal thinking within the institution, and in the 1960s resisted state attempts to be drawn into a scheme to construct an Afrikaans-only university in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the essential conservatism and political acquiescence of the university to apartheid meant that the requirement to transform Unisa in the democratic era was all the more painful and complex.

Reflections on the Black ASL Project

IN THIS PIECE are the reflections of Dr. Carolyn McCaskill and Dr. Joseph Hill as black Deaf university professors on their journey with the Black ASL project. They collaborated with two other researchers, Dr. Ceil Lucas of Gallaudet University and Dr. Robert Bayley of the University of California at Davis, from 2007 to 2011 in the publication of Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (with accompanying DVD). In fact, Hidden Treasure is the first sociohistorical and linguistic study of the African American variety of ASL, a variety that was developed as a result of the widespread racial segregation in the South. Dr. McCaskill offers her perspective as a former black Deaf student who attended both segregated and integrated residential schools in the South during and after the segregation era, and Dr. Hill offers his as a black Deaf person who began his education in the mainstream educational setting in the Midwest three decades after the landmark civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. McCaskill and Hill close the article with their thoughts on the future of research on the black Deaf community.Origin of the Black ASL ProjectMcCaskill: In 2005 I became involved with the Black ASL project when Dr. Ceil Lucas and I met one day after I had successfully defended my dissertation, The Education of Black Deaf Americans in the 20th Century: Policies and Implications for Administrators in Deaf Schools. dissertation covered the experiences of former students, faculty, and staff at a few of the eighteen segregated schools for deaf students in the South. Dr. Lucas was present at my dissertation defense and proposed that we do a joint research project on a sign language variety used at the segregated schools. It took three tries before we succeeded in obtaining the necessary funding from the National Science Foundation to do the research. As the old adage says, If at first you do not succeed, try, try again.Hill: In 2007 I was a doctoral student with limited means when Dr. Ceil Lucas offered me an opportunity to be involved as a research assistant in the Black ASL project. I knew I had to take it because this was a major opportunity, which was hard to come by, and it was rare to see a large sociohistorical and linguistic study like this that focused on a specific U.S. population: African American Deaf signers. When I joined the research team for the Black ASL project, I had been involved in several research projects. I enjoyed doing them and learned a lot, but they did not quite capture my passion. I was hoping to be involved in something that would take me out of the lab, allow me to be in contact with people, and tell their stories. And then the Black ASL project fell from the sky and into my hands. My life had just changed in a way that I had not expected. I was able to travel to different states where the former schools for deaf students were founded. I visited the sites where black Deaf children had received their education during the segregation era and met the actual participants, who were full of stories. This experience gave me a greater appreciation for those people who lived through the segregation era in the South and especially for black Deaf people, whose experiences were rarely documented and researched. This gave Carolyn and me an idea for the book title: Hidden Treasure of Black ASL. stories and the language of black Deaf people were truly treasures that had been hidden for many years and were rarely discussed in the fields of ASL and Deaf studies, linguistics, and education.Defining Moments of the Black ASL ProjectMcCaskill: We traveled to six states to interview participants for our project. It was a surreal experience because I had attended both the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega, so I could identify with the participants' stories. I thought about the time when I was a student, when I struggled to obtain a better education and to understand why I was not grasping the ASL that was used by my white peers at the white Deaf school. …

How International Human Rights Transformed the US Constitution

Adoption of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights created a new international norm prohibiting racial discrimination. That anti-discrimination norm had been a part of the paper Constitution in the United States since adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, it did not become a part of the living Constitution until the Fourteenth Amendment was subjected to the magnetic pull of international human rights law. Adoption of the Charter sparked a chain of events culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which heralded the end of apartheid in the United States. Many Americans think that modern anti-discrimination law was a U.S. invention that we exported to the rest of the world. In fact, U.S. anti-discrimination law is properly understood as an outgrowth of the creation of modern international human rights law.

The Citizens’ Council and Africa: White Supremacy in Global Perspective

When the Citizens' Council's chief administrator, William J. Simmons, returned to Mississippi after several weeks of traveling through southern Africa in 1966, he confidently reported that he had found evidence of racial tension, despite widespread reports of armed whites and unsettled conditions in the region. During his remarks on the Citizens' Council weekly program, Forum, he explained that whites in southern Africa struck him as very much like ... white people in the South ... prior to ... the civil rights revolution. The relationship between white and black was of acceptance, with no hint of theoretical preconceptions about how things ought to be or how some sociologist thinks they ought to be. In a word, they're just natural. (1) Simmons's nostalgia notwithstanding, his appearance in southern Africa in 1966 signified more than a wistful glance. The eleven Forum programs that the Citizens' Council recorded in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South-West Africa (Namibia) were only one piece of a broad investment that the Council made in the post-civil rights movement years to preserve what was left of the system of segregation and state-sanctioned white supremacy recently lost in the American South. Close examination reveals that the decolonization process in Africa was a consistent concern for the Citizens' Council. That consistency and the partnerships between the organization and various benefactors suggest that scholars need to develop a deeper understanding of global networks of white supremacy and their reinvigoration in the midst of challenges and institutional defeats. Scholars of the civil rights movement have correctly situated the contours of the black freedom struggle in the United States within a global context of black liberation movements and decolonization abroad. In similar fashion, historians of American foreign policy have linked administrative priorities to both decolonization events and civil rights campaigns at home. (2) In each of these approaches, scholars have uncovered communities of activism and power, contextualizing local movements within broader and more complex environments of politics, economy, and national identity. This essay suggests a similar treatment of white supremacy within the segregationist movement. It does so through an examination of the Citizens' Council's engagement with decolonization processes in Africa. The Council's interest in Africa escalated dramatically after Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965, so much so that the Forum program organizers recorded interviews from various locations in southern Africa over the course of several weeks. A closer examination of the Citizens' Council's relationship to Africa from the organization's beginnings in 1954 to the Rhodesian independence crisis in 1965-1966 contextualizes American iterations of white resistance within a global ecosystem of white supremacy that sustained the Council after its campaign to preserve segregation in the United States failed. The relationship between the Citizens' Council and white minority regimes in southern Africa is not a new area of scholarly interest. The working framework among scholars who have written about these connections recognizes the Council's interest but lacks consensus about its motivation. Thomas Noer describes the Council's interest in global networks of white supremacy as mostly pragmatic, an investment that, he argues, increased after 1964 in an attempt to secure financial support from organizations with deeper pockets as support in Mississippi was disintegrating. (3) Zoe L. Hyman's work on the intersections of American segregationist ideology and movements to secure white power in South Africa challenges this perspective. Her research identifies a much earlier transatlantic exchange of literature, evidenced through the partnership of the Citizen, the monthly journal published by the Citizens' Council, and the South African Observer, a parallel publication from Cape Town committed to maintaining white supremacy in southern Africa. …

To Kill or Not to Kill a Mockingbird: Rethinking Harper Lee’s Question

This paper discusses Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mocking Bird within the context of one of its essential artistic functions, which is—as D. H. Lawrence would point out for art in general—an implicit and not didactic morality. Through an analysis of Lee’s literary expression and her poetic sensibility of the world she lived in, this paper will focus on her perspectives on racial issues, discrimination and segregation in the United States in the 20th century in order to discuss her universal depiction of life and its moral dilemmas.

Art Matters: Howard University's Department of Art from 1921 to 1971

Art MattersHoward University's Department of Art from 1921 to 1971 Rebecca VanDiver (bio) Since its 1867 establishment, Howard University has been an epicenter of Black intellectualism frequently hailed as the "capstone of Negro education." Historian Zachery R. Williams notes that "from 1926 to 1970 [Howard] represented the center of Black intellectual life, and its scholars were heirs to the legacy of W. E. B. DuBois' 'talented tenth'" (Williams 1). The Howard Department of Art is a central yet understudied component of this intellectual nexus. Founded in 1921 by James V. Herring (1887–1969), the Department of Art at Howard University was the first stand-alone studio art department at a historically Black college or university (HBCU). During the 1930s, the department became the center for both the production and study of African American art, combining studio practice with the study of art history (Driskell, African American Visual Aesthetics 5). During the era of segregation, from which not even the nation's capital was immune, Howard University offered Black Washingtonians access to a host of intellectual and cultural offerings that were otherwise unavailable to them. Howard's Department of Art played a key role in promoting the fine arts to the Howard student body and to the larger Washington, DC, community. In what follows, I survey the department's history during its first fifty years, from its foundation in 1921 through 1971, the year after the untimely death of then-chair James Porter (1905–1970) and the subsequent arrival on campus of artist/art historian Jeff R. Donaldson (1932–2004). Donaldson's entrance marked a substantial and politically charged "period of redefinition" for the department (Morrison, Art in Washington 12). I consider the various human, spatial, and ideological components that coalesced during this fifty-year period, which enabled the idea of African American art history to germinate within the Department of Art. Through this historiography, I seek not only to excavate the central role of Howard's Department of Art in the formations of Black art histories (here African and African American) but also to ponder how one writes about an academic department (here a fine arts department) as a holistic entity responsible for both knowledge and cultural production. In 1945, a new class titled "Art 133: Negro Art" appeared in the Howard University course catalogue. James A. Porter was listed as the instructor of record for this class, which was billed as "a study of the creative forces of the Negro in the Americas" (Howard University Bulletin, 1945–1947). With its initial offering, Porter's course institutionalized the study of African American art history and foregrounded the Howard University Department of Art as a critical center in the nascent field. "Art 133" was a natural outgrowth of Porter's research. Two years prior, he had published the ten-chapter Modern Negro Art, which, with its coverage of African American visual production from slavery up until the contemporary moment, was the first comprehensive survey of the subject. In the preface to Modern Negro Art, Porter tells readers that "the activity of locating and collecting the facts" for the book had actually begun [End Page 1199] Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of James A. Porter's 1943 Modern Negro Art [End Page 1200] ten years earlier, when he was both teaching painting at Howard University and pursuing a master's degree in art history at New York University. Porter would become one of the pioneering historians of African American art. Like his colleagues in the Department of Art, Loïs Mailou Jones and James L. Wells, Porter had diverse, concurrent research and pedagogical commitments. He was a studio art teacher, a budding art historian, and a practicing artist in his own right. In fact, as he began research for Modern Negro Art, Porter was also making art history: in 1933, he won the Harmon Foundation's Schomburg Portrait Prize for his 1932 painting Woman Holding a Jug (see pg. 1114 in this issue). Such varied and simultaneous intellectual and artistic trajectories force us to consider the Howard University Department of Art as staffed with more than just art instructors, but also picture-makers and theorists who influenced...

A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Linguistic Exclusion, Racial Segregation and Status of African-American Vernacular English

The African-Americans have time and again suffered a state of denial from the dominant class. The hegemonic mindset of the Whites had pushed the African-Americans on the periphery and given them a substandard status. Winant (2001). The world is a ghetto: Race and democracy since World War II. New York: Basic Books) says that to be ‘white conferred a deserved advantage on those so identified while a dark skin properly signified inferiority’ This racial discrimination and ‘white supremacy’ have suppressed the voices of the margins for a long time. Not only the African-Americans but their language was also tagged as being substandard by the White Americans. Where on one hand, it is considered to be language marred in its grammar by the non-speakers, on the other, is termed the ‘Language of the Soul’ by the native speakers, Claude Brown being one of them. It was a language that brought the African-Americans together. After the Great Migration, the African-Americans faced segregation at all fronts which included housing as well. This segregation brought severe economic, social and political hardships upon them and resulted in the emergence of ghettos. However, this Ghettoisation had a positive effect as it ‘gave rise to vibrant culture, symbolized by Harlem Renaissance and it also gave rise to language and cultural segregation’ (Massey DS and Denton NA, 1993. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). The blacks intentionally developed a language which was distinct from the Standard American English and followed a set grammatical pattern. This paper studies the plight of the African-Americans during slavery; racial segregation post Civil War; the fight for respectable status for themselves and their language; and the problems they are still facing to gain that status. The paper shows that how even after facing constant rejections and marginalisation, the African–Americans take pride in their culture and language.

The New Career of Jim Crow

The New Career of Jim Crow Stephen Robinson (bio) Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, eds. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. xi + 216 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. Robert Cassanello. To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xv + 188 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Stephen A. Berrey. The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 331 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (paper); $28.99 (e-book). Audrey Thomas McCluskey. A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. x +181 pp. Notes, chronology, bibliography, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $39.99 (e-book). William E. O’Brien. Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. xv + 191 pp. Notes and index. $39.95. Ruth Thompson-Miller, Joe R. Feagin and Leslie H. Picca. Jim Crow’s Legacy: The Lasting Impact of Segregation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. xvi + 262 pp. Notes and index. $85.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper); $27.99 (e-book). The scholarship on the Jim Crow South has had a long career. Dating back to C. Vann Woodward’s path breaking book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), historians have sought to understand when and why de jure segregation was rolled out across the South. Woodward argued that it was the loss of restraining forces by the 1890s—Southern liberalism, radicalism, and Northern intervention—that enabled white Southern lawmakers to find a new way of enforcing strict racial hierarchies. The flexibility and experimentation in race [End Page 457] relations evident in the 1880s gave way to a more rigid system in the 1890s. Path breaking though this book was, it did not take into account earlier forms of segregation, nor did it contain any serious analysis of African Americans’ agency—a lacuna that was filled in part by Howard Rabinowitz’s insightful Race Relations in the Urban South (1978). Over the last fifteen years or so, scholars have sought to extend the contours of the debate. The essays collected in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000), edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, fundamentally reshaped our approach to the Jim Crow South. Rather than interpreting this period from the 1870s to the 1970s through a white lens—and thereby implying that the maintenance of white supremacy was the fixed component—these scholars instead argued that it was black resistance to Jim Crow that was continuous. It was white resistance to black political activism (and, later, to desegregation) that was in a constant state of flux. The books under review in this essay build on the work of Dailey et al. Each explores the fruitful scholarly path of black resistance, and a white counter-resistance that was ever changing. Jim Crow, it seems, had many careers, and was forced to change as a result of the persistence of African Americans’ resistance to it. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2010 conference on the segregation era. This collection reveals that Jim Crow from the very beginning was not a fixed entity. As a result, the contributors argue that the old debate over timing is ultimately a folly. Indeed, the essays in The Folly of Jim Crow expand on this essential point. A particular strength of this work—and one that informs to some extent the scholarship that follows—is that it takes the long perspective on Jim Crow. As with scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement or, more recently, the Reconstruction era, the chapters in this collection do not simply focus on the early years of Jim Crow, or the period of legal desegregation. Instead, they reframe the story: back into Reconstruction and forward into the post–1960s era. As a result...

Crime, punishment and segregation in the United States: The paradox of local democracy

Patterns of crime and punishment in the USA greatly magnify corresponding developments in other liberal market economies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – faced with similar broad macro-technological transformations, namely the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of knowledge economies in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we set out the case for seeing these differences as largely the product of dynamics shaped by the institutional structure of the US political system. We focus on the exceptional direct and indirect role of local democracy in key policy areas including law and order and beyond that in residential zoning, in public education and in incorporation of suburbs, which has no parallel in the other Anglo-Saxon polities, and which magnifies through residential and educational segregation and concentrated poverty the social problems caused by socio-economic developments.

The law of the land: a grand tour of our constitutional republic

The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic Akhil Reed Amar New York: Basic Books, 2015, 376 pp. Akhil Reed Amar's The Laic of The Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic seeks to take the reader on a grand of the various regions of the American Republic and define their contribution to constitutionalism in general. The object was to explicate the differance, as Derrida might say, between Amar's identified 12 distinct cultural regions and to tie that uniqueness into the present tapestry of our constitutional fabric. This book is a bit of a mixture. On the one hand, it does a fine job exploring constitutional history of various clauses (such as the Second Amendment qua Wisconsin constitutionalism) and individuals (for example, Justice Robert Jackson). Yet, on the other, it doesn't really provide a regionalized tour of the constitutional republic. Instead, it attempts to shoehorn a book on significant moments and aspects of constitutional history into a book on regional constitutionalism. The author somewhat readily admits this flaw in the conclusion, giving a mea culpa for focusing on 12 constitutional instances rather than performing a 50-state survey. But the flaw is a bit deeper. Consider the chapter on Justice Hugo Black. Amar's premise is that certain constitutional figures or moments are emblematic of a region's contribution to our constitutional fabric. But his discussion of Hugo Back is almost entirely divorced from Alabama and the larger region of the Deep South. Aside from some references to Justice Black's being from Alabama and ruling on cases that came out of Alabama, there is nothing to tie the Deep South to Justice Black's legacy of textual originalism and total incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states. Indeed, the chapter--while a fascinating discussion of Justice Black's legacy--does not illustrate anything in particular about Deep South constitutionalism. Amar's discussion of Kansas's contribution to American constitutionalism through the lens of Brown v. Board of Education suffers from the same flaw. While Amar stresses the town of several times in the chapter, he does not at any point describe how Topeka is unique in its contribution to the legacy of American apartheid--and Amar readily admits that segregation is not unique to Kansas or even the Outer Southern Region (how Amar describes the belt around the Deep South that contains Kansas). serves as more of a talismanic incantation than a fixed point in analyzing regional constitutionalism. Thus, the reader is left thinking little about Kansas or the Outer South as a unique region. The most unique part of the chapter is when Amar gives his personal justification of Brown as an originalist case based on some interpretative gymnastics around the Titles of Nobility Clause. …

Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Politics of Memory

Over at least the past quarter century, observers, historians, and journalists have painted a damning picture of the treatment that African Americans have received from their government and fellow citizens, not only during slavery and the era of segregation but far into the twentieth century. Yet many of these observations and reports have simply been ignored and, although others received some attention for a time, none has become part of the country’s standard public history. My premise is that the continued failure in the United States to incorporate these observations and reports into its standard history has a profound effect on its political culture. I therefore begin by briefly recalling some aspects of post-Civil War African American history and consider the American antipathy to confronting this history by looking at Charles Mills’s account of “white ignorance.” While some theorists have tried to supplement Mills’s realist framework with a more sophisticated one indebted to Critical Theory, I move in a different direction, drawing out some of the implications of the distinctive approach known as philosophical hermeneutics. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate how a hermeneutic perspective can contribute to serious discussion among U.S. political scientists and political educators about the links between racial inequality and historical understanding and its absence.

Realizing Racial and Ethnic Neighborhood Preferences? Exploring the Mismatches Between What People Want, Where They Search, and Where They Live.

The housing search process is an overlooked mechanism in the scholarly research that seeks to understand the causes of persistent racial residential segregation in the United States. Past research has explored in detail the preferences people hold in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of their neighborhoods, and more recently some have also examined the correspondence between racial and ethnic neighborhood preferences and current neighborhood racial/ethnic composition. But an intermediate stage—the racial/ethnic composition of where people search—has not been investigated. We analyze a subsample (n = 382) from the 2004–2005 Chicago Area Study to demonstrate the value of systematically studying the matches—or mismatches—between preferences, search locations, and neighborhood outcomes. We find that for whites, not only their current neighborhoods but also the neighborhoods in which they search for housing have larger percentages of whites than they say they prefer. In contrast, blacks—and to a lesser extent Latinos—search in neighborhoods that correspond to their preferences, but reside in neighborhoods with a larger percentage own group. Logistic regression analyses reveal that mismatches are associated with both a lack of information and inadequate finances, but also may be due to socially desirable responding for whites in particular. Our results provide suggestive evidence of the importance of unpacking the search process more generally and draw attention to what are likely to be productive new future data collection efforts as well as an area potentially ripe for policy interventions.