Legacy Of White Supremacy Research Articles

‘How do we name the air that we breathe?’ – The haunting presence of white supremacy and settler colonialism at UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT Social-justice-oriented student activists at UC Berkeley are concerned with structural inequalities and their connection to past unacknowledged atrocities associated with the campus. Through different activist endeavours, students seek to raise awareness of UC Berkeley’s settler colonial past and legacy of white supremacy. They unearth, reactivate, and relocate past atrocities in the present. The students call forth and are called upon by the past to dismantle structures of inequality on campus and beyond and encourage each other to be attentive to these structures. Building on five months of in-person fieldwork among student activists and online fieldwork from 2020 to 2022, I explore how rumours and narratives of the past, in resonance with broader translocal calls for justice, becomes a way for activist students to deal with the unaddressed settler colonial past of the university. . Inspired by a theoretical framework of hauntology, I show how (past) injustices haunt the campus and demand a reckoning with the past and present. I argue that activist students understand current inequalities as directly connected to past atrocities and that this understanding of history positions the students as implicated. Being implicated entails discomfort but also opens possibilities for action.

Unveiling whiteness: an approach to expand equity and deepen Public Administration’s racial analysis

Public Administration’s attempts to understand race and racism insufficiently engage with the historical processes and legacies of White Supremacy. This paper problematizes whiteness and proposes an approach to expand social equity and deepen the field’s racial analysis. Drawing on institutional logics perspective, we identify and describe logics of whiteness, an analytic approach that reveals whiteness through the logics of racial capitalism and whiteness as property and provides entry for historical, systems-connected, multi-level analyses of race, racism, racial categorization, and racialized power. We locate whiteness in the institution of citizenship to engage these logics and interrogate how citizens and citizenship are defined by and served in the bureaucracy. Neoliberalism has allowed the administrative state to assign differential citizenship identities across groups according to the logics of whiteness, with both symbolic and material implications for individual lives and for Public Administration theory and praxis.

Leaders Fit for the Masses

AbstractIn this article, I argue that Du Bois’s Japan—despite displaying his myopic failure to critique non-Western imperialism—served as a potential model for his reimagining transnational democratic leadership beyond Western-centric models and their legacies of White supremacy and democratic despotism. Du Bois’s reflections from the 1890s to the 1960s generally demonstrate a sustained, seven decade-long fluid commitment to realizing a vision of transnational leadership that was accountable to the democratic masses, whether in Asia, Africa, the United States, or elsewhere. Such reflections hold importance now (even as they did in Du Bois’s time) as we continue to grapple with the legacies of Western “democratic” dominance, especially in international institutions designed to facilitate global governance.

Black Identity and Resistance Revisited through Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us

Abstract: This article focuses on Black male and Black female ways of seeing and being seen in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us . Drawing on the theoretical ideas of cinema and Black representation introduced by Manthia Diawara and bell hooks nearly three decades ago, Get Out and Us stage Black male and female orientations challenging established scholarship on Black representation in contemporary movies. Diawara and hooks discuss how Black identity is formed by White Hollywood and Black American Auteurs. Their analysis focuses on who gets to look and who gets looked at from Black male (Chris in Get Out ) and Black female (Adelaide/Red in Us ) perspectives. The article concludes that Jordan Peele contributes to established discussion on Black identity in American film while providing important new critical insights into contemporary Black experiences and legacies of white supremacy in American culture.

Practice-Based Pedagogies for Counter-Memorial Performance: Teaching to Address and Shift “Plantation Energy”

This article discusses History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories, a practice-based course I developed and taught in spring 2020 and spring 2021 at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC, established in 1837 by white slave owners. Drawing together dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies, the class centred the body through both practice-based research and critical engagements with power, history, and legacies of white supremacy on campus. Coalescing these three fields amplifies multifaceted practice-based research approaches to antiracist reflective and body-based engagements with history, place, and self. In the class, I brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. I facilitated student development of practice-based research projects invested in building new and ongoing relationships to Davidson College’s violent history and its pervasive continuities felt by members of the community in the present. This article considers how practice-based research can be integrated into critical performance pedagogies to contribute to campus historical reckoning projects. Outlining the course methods and integrating student reflections and projects, the article discusses how a process-oriented conception of performance, combined with a “counter-memorial” approach to pedagogy and practice, can underscore ongoing embodied work required to address what one student defined as “plantation energy” on campus.

Intergenerational differences on anti-blackness in the Indo-Caribbean community in New York City

ABSTRACT This study examines how anti-Black ideologies emerging from the Caribbean impact negotiations of race amongst Indo-Caribbeans in New York City by using thirty qualitative interviews with first-generation and second-generation Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians. First, it highlights that global systems of anti-Blackness influence how Indo-Caribbeans experienced racialized violence in their home countries and navigate their racial identities in the US. It then reveals how the second generation negotiates anti-Blackness in divergent ways. Some second-generation Indo-Caribbeans uphold their families’ anti-Black sentiments by grappling with dating norms and maintaining racialized attitudes framed under colour-evasive racism. However, those in the second generation who have significant interactions in white spaces negotiate their attitudes about racism and Black people by seeking solidarity. Overall, this study finds that anti-Blackness can be rooted in legacies of white supremacy within immigrants’ home countries, but these sentiments can shift among the second generation as they navigate their processes of racialization.

On Making Us Whole Again.

On Making Us Whole Again Adam Biggs (bio) As a historian of race and medicine, my first visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture was a peculiar experience. I had been meaning to go since it opened in 2016 but only managed to arrange a trip this past summer as pandemic restrictions began to wane. By all accounts, it was extraordinary. World class in every way, the museum contained an abundance of richly informative and engaging pathways, beautiful exhibits adorned with artifacts, photographs, videos, artwork, descriptive narratives, holographic images, interactive features, and meditative spaces, each and all offering a vibrant account of African American lives and experiences. The building itself was also impressive. Distinct on the National Mall, its architectural styling signaled a decidedly modern enterprise, a statement about African American communities and the contemporary relevance of their history and culture. But, while compelling, something felt off to me. Only a few weeks prior, the House Select Committee had begun its televised public hearings investigating the January 6th insurrection and, before then, the Supreme Court inadvertently signaled its intention to overturn Roe v. Wade. Radical conservative activists had also been waging a vitriolic campaign against teaching African American history and sought to ban books that examined the nation's legacy of white supremacy. Each of these occurrences was amplified by or directly influenced by the fascist-aspiring, white nationalist Trump administration elected only weeks after the museum had opened. Indeed, if America was committed to celebrating the lives, contributions, and history of its Black citizens, it had a peculiar way of showing its enthusiasm. Strange though it may seem, as I toured the museum, my thoughts turned to Henry Adams, the American historian of the late-nineteenth century whose reflections on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair have always resonated with me. After visiting the exposition, Adams sensed a peculiar disjunction with history, wondering if the image of modernity projected at the fair was "real or only apparent." Indeed, if "the new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals," Adams pined [End Page 478] sardonically, "one's personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great American chariot-race for fame."1 I suspect Adams and I would have different views about which of our "personal friends" should be victorious, but, having recently completed a dissertation on Black doctors and civil rights advocacy, I had a few people in mind. Ben Carson was not one of them. Known as a pathbreaking neurosurgeon, Carson had an installation at the museum dedicated to his achievements. According to the display, he had overcome poverty and failing grades in his youth to attend college at Yale University and, later, obtain a medical degree. After serving as a resident at Johns Hopkins, Carson became the first Black practitioner to head its Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and, later, gained international notoriety for performing multiple "unprecedented" operations to separate conjoined twins. In 2006, Carson received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and, in 2008, a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Through his "Think Big" project, the exhibit explained, Carson offered himself as a role model promoting the benefits of education as a pathway to success for disadvantaged youth. Carson's exhibit seemed designed to affirm the potential for marginalized Black communities to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve in the face of America's oppressive racial order. However, doing so required a very selective accounting. Nothing was said about Carson's failed attempt to secure the 2016 Republican presidential nomination or his subsequent support of the Trump administration and appointment as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The narrative was silent about his efforts to dismantle policies designed to prevent discrimination in housing and homeownership implemented during the Obama administration and made no mention of his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, where he sought to undermine the very medical institutions he relied on throughout his career by promoting speculative remedies and sewing doubt about FDA approved vaccines.2 As a student of Susan Reverby and familiar with the trappings of the "Great Doctor" narrative, I found this portrait of Carson discouraging, to [End Page 479...

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

The South's Legacy of White Supremacy

The South's Legacy of White Supremacy

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho

Reviewed by: Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho Sunhay You (bio) Tastes Like War, by Grace M. Cho. New York: Feminist Press, 2021, 296 pp. ISBN: 9781952177941. An “unintended sequel” to Haunting the Korean Diaspora, Grace Cho’s memoir, Tastes Like War, engages in a sociological mode of storytelling (6). Her voice is familiar, evoking the autoethnographic portions of her first book: an “experimental writing voice . . . intended to show the mixing up of fact and fiction, of self and other, so neither a discreet narrator nor a clear storyline is always [End Page 143] present” (203). True to her commitments to unraveling the limits of a discreet authorial subject, Cho weaves together Korean recipes, psychological texts, history, personal anecdotes, and dreams to uncover the tacit knowledge that lies in the wake of her mother’s schizophrenia. The memoir peels away at the insights of her first book, revealing another US imperial structure of shame and secrecy besides the military bride: mental disability. In the opening prologue, Cho claims that she was raised by at least three different mothers. The mother of her early childhood is a charismatic entrepreneur who sells foraged wild blackberries while supporting other racial minorities. Cho’s teenage years mark the onset of her mother’s schizophrenia, when she becomes a “prisoner to the voices that told her to stop doing the things she used to do” (3). In her thirties, Cho begins to observe her mother's vivacious qualities return while teaching Cho how to cook Korean food. The breaks in these three mothers organize the breaks between parts 2 to 4 of the memoir, the prologue and part 1 offering the sociological framework to her storytelling. As Cho cites throughout the first section, theories on the relationship between mental disability and structures of racial-sexual violence are relatively new. While research on schizophrenia from the 1970s and 80s explains the condition as “the result of a bad gene,” more recent studies suggest that schizophrenia is symptomatic of a social disease as much as a biological anomaly (4). Referring to T. M. Lurhmann’s 2016 study Our Most Troubling Madness: Studies in Schizophrenia, Cho explains that five of the six risk factors associated with schizophrenia apply to her mother: low socioeconomic status, childhood adversity, physical or sexual trauma, immigration, and “being a person of color in a white neighborhood” (56). Indeed, besides narratives of her mother’s passage to the United States as a military bride, many of Cho’s early recollections of her mother take place in Chehalis, Washington. She notes that the city is known for having hosted a regional meeting of approximately seventy thousand members of the KKK in 1924, a legacy of white supremacy that continues today. Cho’s mother grows especially paranoid about being a target of “the John Birch Society, a radical right-wing organization founded in 1958 and named after an American who had been killed by the Chinese at the end of World War II” (136). Through these details,Cho demonstrates how her mother’s experiences of racial-sexual violence undergird developments in her schizophrenic paranoia, which would later confine her to the home, the curtains drawn and cabinets closed on a dwindling supply of food. In part 3, Cho delves into the structural obstacles she faced as a teenager trying to help her mother in the absence of such a nuanced understanding of schizophrenia. A doctor at the local mental health center told her that if her mother was in danger of hurting someone, the police could force her mother [End Page 144] to seek treatment. Given her age and inability to convince her mother of her schizophrenia, Cho resorts to calling the police after aggravating one of her mother’s schizophrenic episodes. This event plants a seed of mistrust that casts a shadow over Cho’s future attempts to care for her mother. These careful and honest observations present a wide-spanning cognitive map of institutional structures, histories, and cultural forces that have impacted her mother's mental health as a military bride. Anecdotes about the healing power of food interrupt the more daunting stories of racial-sexual violence that give shape to her mother...

Emotions and Ambient Racism in America’s Whitest Big City

Abstract This article explores the ways communities of color experience racism in Portland, Oregon—the whitest big city in the Unites States. Drawing from 40 in-depth interviews with an ethnically diverse sample of Portlanders of color, the study’s findings demonstrate how emotions are constitutive of racialized lived experiences. Participants’ emotions were deeply intertwined with Portland’s demographics and historical legacies of white supremacy in the city, highlighting the importance of place in structuring racialized emotions. Participants also describe emotional and impression management strategies they used to navigate predominantly white spaces. As a conceptual link between racial structures and racialized emotions, I introduce the concept of ambient racism, which describes how legacies of racism are “baked into” the social environment that racialized people navigate and emotionally contend with daily. Ambient racism bridges structural and emotional dimensions of racism by illustrating how racial structures are felt by racially subordinated groups.

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

The Harms of Structural Whiteness on Weapon Carrying, Policing, and Child Health.

The Harms of Structural Whiteness on Weapon Carrying, Policing, and Child Health.

Preaching by the Rivers of Babylon: How an Exile from Pulpit and Pew Can Change White Preaching On the Other Side of Pandemic

Preaching platforms have always influenced the message preachers prepare and the message people receive, for good and for ill. The shift from the pulpit platform to social media platforms during stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals a legacy of White supremacy haunting the sanctuary. This essay explores this legacy, its relationship with technoculture, and its impact on the practice of White preaching.

Are There Stories Prosecutors Shouldn't Tell?" The Duty to Avoid Racialized Trial Narratives

The purportedly race-neutral actions of courts and prosecutors protect and perpetuate the myth of colorblindness and the legacy of white supremacy that define the American criminal system. This insulates the criminal system’s racially disparate outcomes from scrutiny, thereby precluding reform. Yet prosecutors remain accountable to the electorate. In recent years, activists and community organizers have mobilized communities to support and elect prosecutors who have pledged to address the racial inequities of the criminal system. After a summer of pro-tests for racial justice and growing acceptance for the demands of the Movement for Black Lives, we find ourselves in a moment that demands and necessitates transformative proposals that call on prosecutors to reject the myth of colorblindness and adopt a race-conscious approach to criminal prosecution. This creates an opportunity—and need—to generate and articulate specific and innovative frameworks to change the culture of prosecution. This Article seeks to provide one such framework by examining the ethical duties of American prosecutors in the underexplored area of prosecutorial storytelling. This Article focuses on trial narratives as a lens through which to view the ethical duties of the prosecutor writ large, arguing that trial narratives that advance or invoke a racialized stereotype or stock story violate the prosecutor’s duty to justice. A race-neutral or “colorblind” approach to prosecution ignores the ethical violations inherent in racialized prosecutorial storytelling. By contrast, a color-conscious approach offers prosecutors a path to address the systemic racism that pervades every aspect of the American criminal system—including the stories that prosecutors tell.

Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

Robert P. Jones, <i>White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity</i>

Staring at the Sun: Tragedy, trauma, and ecological harmony

AbstractRecently it has become increasingly evident that current theories of civilization are unsustainable. Within this essay I critique three alternative theories: bioregionalism, sustainable development, and The Universe Story. I argue that although these theories address ecological devastation, they fail to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy. Evoking Richard Wright's poem Between the World and Me, I argue that for minorities the landscape is often inscribed with trauma. Consequently, any theory of ecological harmony must take this into account. I refer to the task of contending with the legacy of slavery, colonization, and genocide as Staring at the Sun.

Racial burdens, translations, and chance

Racial burdens, translations, and chance

Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence

Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

The Last Stand of Robert E. Lee

The Last Stand of Robert E. Lee Jamelle Bouie (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution There are many ways in which Charlottesville, Virginia, is still reeling from the Unite the Right rally in 2017 that claimed one life and made the city synonymous with the resurgent white nationalism of the Trump era. A makeshift memorial still marks the spot where Heather Heyer was killed and dozens of others injured. Politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens are still grappling with what the rally revealed about the city's legacy of white supremacy. And the focal point of the protest—the Robert E. Lee statue—still stands. That might change soon. Under Governor Ralph Northam, the new Democratic majority in the Virginia General Assembly may amend the law that forbids cities and localities from removing their Confederate monuments. Charlottesville may finally remove the most visible markers of its racist past. In the meantime, residents have started to use the statue—as well as a similar equestrian sculpture of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson—as a canvas of sorts. Every few months, someone paints a new message or does a little damage. If the city can't remove the statues, then at least its residents can work to undermine their message. The most recent attempt was in September, when an unknown artist spray-painted both statues with "1619," a reference to the New York Times Magazine's "1619 Project" on the legacy of American slavery. The meaning is straightforward. These statues and the Lost Cause ideology they represent are direct legacies of slavery. And as long as they're a part of the landscape, that cannot be forgotten. [End Page 172] Jamelle Bouie Jamelle Bouie is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Copyright © 2020 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI)