Issues Of Racial Justice Research Articles

Hard history in hard contexts: Teaching slavery and its legacy in a Neo-Confederate space

This study examined the experience of a first-year teacher's encounter with Confederate heritage while teaching about slavery and its legacy in a nearly all-white rural high school in a southern state. Data was collected in four interviews over the course of one academic year and through the participant's journaling of critical incidents in her classroom. Data was analyzed through a series of open and pattern coding. The teacher, identifying as a white suburban-raised Northern, adopted the framework of multiple perspectives to foster students' understandings about the harmfulness of Confederate symbols. Yet, the participant felt disillusioned and, at times, ineffective due to her limited experience in Neo-Confederate spaces, tensions between her white identity and teaching about race, her students' academic disinterest, and a lack of subject-specific mentoring. Findings demonstrate the presence of context-specific impediments, or hard contexts, that make the task of teaching hard history even more difficult in some settings and posit limitations of a multiple perspectives framework on issues of racial justice.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Community-Based Art Projects in San Francisco Chinatown: A Survival Strategy

While research about contemporary Asian arts exhibited in mega museums has attracted growing attention, there is little dialogue concerning community-based art practices in everyday Asian and Asian American neighborhoods. This interview article highlights community-based art projects led by a grassroots organization, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC), to help understand Chinatown’s stories as shared and lived by the community during a challenging time. Hoi Leung, CCC’s chief curator, explained how the organization mobilized art to share diverse local stories, celebrate a sense of belonging, and raise public awareness about racial justice issues within the communities it serves. To counter socially constructed assumptions about Chinatown and its residents, CCC actively develops cross-sector partnerships to centralize underrepresented voices through community-based arts and projects.

Chronicling the Journey of the Society for the Advancement in Biology Education Research (SABER) in its Effort to Become Antiracist: From Acknowledgement to Action

The tragic murder of Mr. George Floyd brought to the head long-standing issues of racial justice and equity in the United States and beyond. This prompted many institutions of higher education, including professional organizations and societies, to engage in long-overdue conversations about the role of scientific institutions in perpetuating racism. Similar to many professional societies and organizations, the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER), a leading international professional organization for discipline-based biology education researchers, has long struggled with a lack of representation of People of Color (POC) at all levels within the organization. The events surrounding Mr. Floyd’s death prompted the members of SABER to engage in conversations to promote self-reflection and discussion on how the society could become more antiracist and inclusive. These, in turn, resulted in several initiatives that led to concrete actions to support POC, increase their representation, and amplify their voices within SABER. These initiatives included: a self-study of SABER to determine challenges and identify ways to address them, a year-long seminar series focused on issues of social justice and inclusion, a special interest group to provide networking opportunities for POC and to center their voices, and an increase in the diversity of keynote speakers and seminar topics at SABER conferences. In this article, we chronicle the journey of SABER in its efforts to become more inclusive and antiracist. We are interested in increasing POC representation within our community and seek to bring our resources and scholarship to reimagine professional societies as catalyst agents towards an equitable antiracist experience. Specifically, we describe the 12 concrete actions that SABER enacted over a period of a year and the results from these actions so far. In addition, we discuss remaining challenges and future steps to continue to build a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable space for all biology education researchers, especially our POC members. Ultimately, we hope that the steps undertaken by SABER will enable many more professional societies to embark on their reflection journeys to further broaden scientific communities.

“Trump and racial equality in america? no pretense at all!”

ABSTRACT This article explores the effects of the Trump administration’s racist words, policies, and behaviours on the increased racial divisions in the United States and the erosion of faith in American institutions. Many Americans have come to recognize that racial injustice is an enduring feature of American society. Recent events, such as the murder of George Floyd, have led to calls for racial justice. What is the definition of racial justice and how is it related to the concepts of structural inequality, systemic racism, structural racism, and institutional racism? The questions arises: What does racial justice look like in the present atmosphere in the United States? Is racial justice possible in a society riven by racial inequality? What about the wounds and scars from four years of Trump and his administration? Using a practical and policy-oriented definition of racial justice shows that Trump and his administration were not merely unconcerned about racial justice issues, but that they actually appeared to set out to exacerbate and inflame racial issues in the United States. Moreover, the damage done to the progress of America’s communities of colour, especially Black Americans, continues to manifest itself, despite Trump no longer being in office.

Is it a rally or a riot? Racialized media framing of 2020 protests in the United States

This article draws on race relations arguments to explore the nexus between the media, race, and protest policing. The media’s coverage of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and protests opposing COVID-19 restrictions bring to light differences in police intervention at these events. How the media portrays this apparent imbalance is the focus of the current study. Using news reports from major U.S. outlets (e.g., New York Times, Washington Post), we find that protests anchored to racial justice issues are more often framed as a threat to the public interests. Our results highlight the media’s role in promoting notions of racial threat and exacerbating state repression. We discuss the implications of these findings for constitutional rights, social control, and journalism.

Facing social disparity and racial justice issues regarding Covid-19 and access to behavioral health care in the U.S.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed and amplified many problems in political and healthcare systems around the world, and the United States has been no exception. One such issue is racial injustice, including its impact as a social determinant of health and its manifestation in disparities in healthcare access - including behavioral healthcare. This paper examines this problem in detail and highlights the work of the Center for Practice Innovations. This intermediary organization provides training and implementation support to behavioral healthcare organizations across New York State. This work includes changes and awareness building related to racial injustice within its organization that will drive changes in training and supports provided to behavioral healthcare organizations across New York State.

Gardening for Food Well-Being in the COVID-19 Era

“Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness”, is what millions of Americans strive for. The onset of COVID-19 has highlighted the disparities that exist among Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, which are facing food access inequities. In this paper, we argue that engaging in growing food sustainably can improve food access, support food justice and enhance sense of purpose and well-being. We expand the notion of Food Well-Being (FWB) to include food producers—especially gardeners—and hypothesize that gardening has the potential to enhance FWB, regardless of the racial and socio-economic background. However, without policies tackling social and racial justice issues, structural barriers may hinder this potential. We use three studies to draw a rich profile of sustainable food gardeners in Arizona, USA and their well-being: (a) the children and teachers engaged in school gardens in the Phoenix metropolitan area; (b) sustainable gardeners and farmers in Phoenix and Tucson; (c) Arizona gardeners during the pandemic. The results show a connection between sustainable gardening and eudemonic well-being, and an impact on the five FWB dimensions (physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional and social). However, without appropriate policies, funding and infrastructure, the impact might remain minimal, volatile and subject to tokenism.

John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix

Reviewed by: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix Mark Massa S.J. John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith. By Patrick Lacroix. [Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law] (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback $34.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-3049-3.) Patrick Lacroix has written an important work of revisionist scholarship. Indeed, he argues—for the most part quite convincingly—that scholars of American religion (and of U.S. Catholicism in particular) have largely gotten the "secular sixties" completely wrong. As Lacroix argues the case, most previous scholars studying the contours of twentieth century American religious history have taken it as axiomatic that the famous "religious revival" of the 1950s ended with Dwight Eisenhower, and that the election of JFK in 1960 ushered in both the end of anti-Catholicism as a mainstream American pastime and the beginning of the era of waning religiosity during the 1960s and 1970s. But according to Lacroix, there was no "secular sixties." And Lacroix points to the person Kennedy himself and his presidency for understanding the quite important intersection of religion and politics at the beginning of the 1960s. He argues that scholars studying American [End Page 636] religion have tended to echo (far too uncritically) the Christian right's own assertion that the "secular sixties" were a decade of waning religiosity in which faith-based groups largely eschewed political engagement. In this quite mistaken periodization, the naked public square that Kennedy's presidency ostensibly ushered in itself helped the forces of conservative religion to build up steam to emerge in the 1980s as the "New Religious Right." But from Lacroix's vantage, "the Kennedy years represent an important moment in the arc of U.S. religious history, connecting the religious revival of the 1950s to the conservative religious activism of the last quarter of the twentieth century" (2). As Lacroix shapes the story, both Kennedy himself and his presidency were key factors in a decade when "progressive religion"—far from staging a retreat—played a key role in politics and the public square. Indeed, the author constructs a narrative that seeks to displace most previous histories of U.S. religion that have largely ignored Kennedy's impact on faith-based activism. The creation of the Peace Corps, as well as his growing appreciation for the social vision of Pope John XXIII (documented in papal encyclicals like Pacem in terris) illustrate Kennedy's growing commitment to utilizing inter-denominational faith-based groups in realizing his social vision in civil rights and economic aid initiatives, both in the United States and abroad. And the author is at pains to document how Kennedy's own commitment to the causes of civil rights and the work of young people in the Global South were rooted in his own "progressive" Catholic values and moral sense, values seemingly given official church approbation by the "other John." Lacroix argues that religion was "repurposed" during the Kennedy presidency: religion certainly had been instrumentalized at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 940s in the U.S. battle against "godless communism." But both the tone and location of that marshaled faith was relocated after 1960: the religious faith of the American mainstream was utilized under JFK to promote liberal reform both domestically and abroad, specifically around the issues of racial justice, arms control, and U.S. contributions to developing countries in organizations like the Peace Corps. And the author argues that it was Kennedy himself who functioned as the center of gravity for this new ("progressive") religious activism, all the while espousing a firm commitment to a high wall of separation between church and state, the latter rising more from Kennedy's own deeply-held understanding of constitutional principles and from his "realist" recognition of anti-Catholic impulses on the Protestant right, rather than from his ostensibly secular values. [End Page 637] Lacroix's study is rife with historical ironies, not the least of which was that it was the Catholic candidate in 1960 who played a key role in uncovering and deepening the rift between the "Seven Sister" mainstream Protestant groups affiliated with the National Council of...

Preparation of School Psychologists to Support Black Students Exposed to Police Violence: Insight and Guidance for Critical Training Areas

The extrajudicial killing of Black people, particularly unarmed Black boys and men, at the hands of police is one of the most pressing social and racial justice issues in the USA. The awareness of, and indirect exposure to, police killings of Black people has a detrimental impact on the academic achievement, school attendance, mental health, and social development of Black children and youth. Despite this, there has been silence from the school psychology profession regarding police violence against Black people and ways to provide school-based support to Black children and youth who are exposed to such violence. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore school psychology students’ and school psychologists’ knowledge about police violence against Black people, their experiences with graduate education preparation for providing professional support to Black students who are exposed to police violence against Black people, and their perceptions of training areas in which school psychology programs could improve. Findings indicated that participants gained knowledge about police violence against Black people from multiple sources, including personal and professional experiences; few discussed police violence or Black Lives Matter specifically in their programs; none had specific training to support Black students exposed to police violence against Black people; and most recommended programs improve multicultural training.

Race and Tort Law

Although Richard Delgado published the first critique of tort law from a critical race perspective in 1982, the role of race remains undertheorized in torts scholarship and torts theory, taking a back seat to the dominant approaches that rarely mention race or other social identities. This leave the misimpression that tort law is race-neutral and bears little connection to constitutional or civil rights law, where issues of racial justice are more frequently analyzed and debated. This chapter contests that conventional wisdom and demonstrates that the shape of contemporary tort law has been affected by the social identities of the parties and cultural views on race and ethnicity. The significance of race is not confined to a particular doctrinal area but crops up in intentional tort, negligence and strict liability cases and spills over into debates about the proper measure of damages. It enters tort law through a variety of pathways, sometimes explicitly, but more often the influence of race is beneath the surface and can be gleaned only by looking closely at judicial rhetoric or at implicitly biased assumptions relied on by judges and juries. This overview of the contemporary “race and torts” legal landscape borrows frames from critical race and interdisciplinary scholarship to organize the key cases, issues and debates into four, somewhat overlapping categories: (1) racial discrimination, harassment and insult; (2) stereotyping and racialized contexts; (3) racial devaluation; and (4) racially disparate effects. The portrait that emerges is of a flawed system that tends to reproduce rather than ameliorate racialized harms, while never quite losing its potential to change course and advance racial justice.

Opening Up to Hard History: Activating Anti-Racism in an Immersive Ed.D. Cohort Experience at Heritage Sites in Montgomery, Alabama

The Ed.D. program in Heritage Leadership for Sustainability, Social Justice, and Participatory Culture at the University of Missouri—St. Louis helps students cultivate the mindsets and skill sets required to sustain, pluralize, and enliven heritage in the public sphere. Although the program primarily meets synchronously online, the January 2020 “Wintercession” field trip to heritage sites in Montgomery, Alabama, provided an opportunity for face-to-face interactions, deep conversation, and reflection. Curricular, conversational, and collaborative inquiry deepened awareness and activated activism toward issues of racial justice. The use of high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008) allowed the cohort and faculty mentors to delve further into heritage leadership themes, including: confronting difficult emotions, recognizing sanctified space, facilitating group bonding and trust building, identifying models for activism, and moving forward in activism. We argue that the emergence of these themes demonstrates the value of immersing students and faculty in a shared, high-impact experience that focused on awareness, remembering, and wondering—the process of imagining the not yet (Keenan-Lechel et al., 2019)—as a means to “activate activism” in a cohort-based Ed.D. program.

Does Reconciliation and Racial Justice Necessitate a Struggle against White Supremacy?

Several literatures including those focusing on settler colonialism, critical antiracism as well as ethnic studies and sociology more broadly often position racial injustice and genocide as a struggle against whiteness and white supremacy. Here I use my own positionality to illustrate what might be unseen in the current thinking about the meaning of what whiteness entails. Then I propose the preliminary workings of a nonbinary approach to thinking about racial justice and reconciliation that still centers the specific experiences of oppression but that does not also entail blaming a particular group as oppressor. While I focus on Canada and responsibility for Indigenous genocide and, to some extent, anti-Black racism, my hope is that the theoretical logic will also be of utility for thinking about moving forward on issues of racial justice and genocide in other contexts.

Racism and Interculturalism: The Reality of Black Clergy in The United Church of Canada

ABSTRACTWhat has been the effect of The United Church of Canada’s vision of becoming an Intercultural church on the experience of racism within the church? This paper offers an answer to that question. The United Church of Canada in 2012 committed itself to a vision of becoming an intercultural church. This vision came after many years of work by the church to address the issues of racial diversity within Canada and within the church. Racial justice was at the heart of the movement to become an intercultural church, although interculturalism was expanded beyond the issues of racial justice alone. In this paper, the tool to evaluate the intercultural vision of the church is the experiences of Black clergy persons. I conclude that anti-racism awareness is needed, and should be done intentionally, and in tandem with movements to become an intercultural church.

Evaluating and dismantling an intervention aimed at increasing White people's knowledge and understanding of racial justice issues.

In this study, we built upon prejudice reduction interventions research (primarily in social psychology) and ally development investigations (primarily in applied psychology). We aimed to develop an intervention to foster knowledge and attitude change identified in both areas as central to reducing prejudice and increasing intentions to promote racial justice. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether online imaginal and psychoeducational interventions could contribute to White people's needed understandings to engage in racial justice work. Additionally, if some interventions were successful, we aimed to determine which components were most effective. We used three intervention components, two of which were created for this study: imaginal contact with a person of color, learning and reflecting about racism and its impact on people of color, and increasing awareness of White privilege and positionality. We randomized participants to different combinations of the intervention components and control components to not only evaluate combined components but also dismantle the intervention, determining whether specific aspects of the intervention were more effective. Participants completed outcome measures about their attitudes and understandings prior to the intervention, immediately postintervention, and 3 weeks after completing the intervention. Findings demonstrated that the intervention and its components positively impacted outcomes of interest, with increasingly complicated learning requiring more comprehensive intervention to change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring Whiteness: A Systematic Review of Instruments and Call to Action

The psychological study of Whiteness provides one avenue for researchers to help combat racial injustice in the United States. This article is a call to action for counseling psychologists to engage in much needed scholarship and critical examinations of Whiteness. In this systematic review and content analysis, we provide an overview of 18 quantitative measures focusing on various aspects of Whiteness published between 1967 and 2017. We summarize the constructs and psychometric properties of these measures. Our content analysis indicated that constructs assessed by Whiteness measures have shifted in focus over time across four themes: (a) Attitudes Toward Black People/Integration, (b) Modern Racism, (c) White Racial Identity, and (d) White Privilege and Antiracism. We conclude with suggestions on how advancement, development, and use of Whiteness measures could further our knowledge through research examining present-day racial justice issues. The issues highlighted include police brutality, xenophobia, immigration, White supremacy, activism, and training in the field.

Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey

Reviewed by: Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey Tasneem Siddiqui Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Edited by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 221. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1184-4.) 2018 The prescient release of Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is extremely important in the current historical moment. Dr. King the radical, the anti-imperialist, the antiracist, and the anticapitalist is a King that desperately needs closer study in contemporary U.S. society. As the legacy of King's praxis is reinvigorated through a revival of the Poor People's Campaign, organizers, intellectuals, policy makers, spiritual advisers, and everyday people are reengaging the map, the blueprint of the dialectic of struggle that their ancestors laid out for them. To be sure, if King were alive today, he would be at the forefront of the issues of racial justice, the war against and criminalization of the poor, environmental justice, sanctuary cities, reproductive justice, sexual violence, prison abolition, and antiwar movements. King understood that the multi-issue experience of people's lives, the quotidian acts of state violence they confront, and the social problems they navigate have deep historical roots that are intertwined. To map the shifts and transformations of King's revolutionary thought and praxis, as James L. Taylor reminds in his chapter, each iteration, each stage of growth and expansion for King, must be understood as "intensely different" and as a result of King's radical participation in black social movements (p. 154). [End Page 227] King transformed, evolved his praxis, and sharpened his modalities of analysis and resistance through this process of struggle. Editors Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey attend to King's trajectory in this "diverse and unique collection of multidisciplinary works by scholars from around the country that focus on contemporary social policy and issue areas in American society," applying the legacy and radical sociopolitical thought of King (p. 6). Dream and Legacy is organized in three parts covering politics and public policy, foreign affairs and Africa, and social developments. Part 1 focuses on voter suppression through the implementation of voter identification laws; criminality and social justice; affirmative action policies and the dearth of faculty of color in the academy; and health, health-care disparities, and access issues as policies that adversely affect African-descended communities in the United States. Part 2 addresses the potentialities of applying the internationalism of King's sociopolitical thought and practice to issues of foreign policy through developing a framework of "foreign policy justice" (p. 83). The second portion of Part 2 considers how King might have approached the limitations and challenges of foreign policy as it adversely affects Africa, paying particular attention to the historical legacies of black and Third World solidarity during decolonization and black liberation movements from the 1940s to the late twentieth century. King is the most known and yet the least understood radical political figure. Part 3 attempts to further parse a deeper understanding of King the revolutionary by examining the contemporary relevance of his sociopolitical thought in developing critiques of racism, voter suppression, economic violence, and cultural production and resistance while conceptualizing a critical consciousness to rights-bearing discourse. The chapters in this collective work emphasize King's trenchant critique of the governing logics of the United States as a modern Western racial capitalist settler colonial society and the ways it organizes to "legitimize and promote violence and war" (p. 202). King drew attention to the ways American institutions are maintained through this logic of (policy) violence. This dialectical relationship is expressed through the contemporary conditions of "ecological peril"; the condition of the global poor and the siphoning of global wealth and resources into the hands of a few; the expansion of paramilitary violence wielded by an ever-increasing militarized police; perpetual global warfare; the...

Where Do We Go from Here? Toward a Critical Race English Education

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

Ethnic and Racial Identity in Multiracial Sansei: Intergenerational Effects of the World War II Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans1

This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). I begin with a brief review of the literature related to the effects of the camps on Nisei, integrating psychological understandings of racial and ethnic identity development, contextual history, and research on the psychological effects; I focus here on effects for Nisei that have been connected to their intergenerational interactions: distancing from Japanese American heritage and identity, silence about the camp experience, and the negotiation of racism and discrimination. I turn then to the primary focus of the paper: Using a combination of autoethnographical reflection, examples from qualitative interviews, and literature review, I engage in reflective exploration of two ways in which intergenerational effects of the camp experience influenced Sansei racial and ethnic identities that vary among monoracial and multiracial Sansei: familial transmission of Japanese American culture by Nisei to Sansei, and the intergenerational effects and transmission of racial discrimination and racial acceptance. I conclude with reflections on intergenerational healing within Japanese American families and communities, and reflections on the relation of these dynamics to current issues of racial justice more generally.

#BlackLivesMatter: black celebrity hashtag activism and the discursive formation of a social movement

ABSTRACT The #BlackLivesMatter, or #BLM, movement was founded in 2012 by Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The hashtag was first used on the social media platform Twitter to call attention to the injustice of the situation. Many celebrities have taken up the hashtag and used their own social media accounts to draw attention to the movement. This is different from past forms of celebrity activism in that it seeks to change power structures within society. William Howell and Trevor Parry-Giles have demonstrated how celebrity activists have the power to destabilise police authority. Their power as celebrities translates to a perceived authority of their own with an ability to reach large audiences. In this article, we use qualitative textual analysis to identify dominant themes in black celebrity tweets about #BLM and racial justice issues. We analyse how black celebrities use Twitter to promote #BLM and what impact they have in promoting and defining the #BlackLivesMatter movement. By analysing the Twitter feeds of celebrities such as Jesse Williams, Spike Lee, Janelle Monáe, and others, this article attempts to distinguish the qualitative impact of celebrity involvement in #BlackLivesMatter.