Legacy Of Racism Research Articles

Social Imaginaries, Sperm and Whiteness: Race and Reproduction in British Media

ABSTRACTThis article analyses narratives about so-called Viking babies and Viking sperm. Over the last few years an increasing number of British single women and lesbian couples have been creating families by becoming pregnant with Danish donor sperm, termed ‘Viking sperm’. Through analyses of British media coverage of these new families, this article explores contemporary constructions of race, especially whiteness, and gender, and shows how imaginaries of Vikings, genes and white superiority circulate in British media and among British mothers. The article illustrates how a racial discourse, which often is associated with nineteenth-century racial science, can surface in contemporary times. Yet the article also reveals how colonial and racial legacies of whiteness tend to be erased from narratives of fertility, as the (neoliberal) focus on the individual as consumer frames reproduction as individual (free) choices distant from a colonial past.

Supporting Irish traveller entrepreneurship

ABSTRACTIrish Travellers are a minority ethnic group, indigenous to the island of Ireland. Despite the recent historic ethnic recognition by our Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, Traveller participation in the labour market remains exceptionally low, with an overall unemployment rate of 84.3% reported in Census 2011. This article outlines some of the key barriers to Traveller labour market participation and argues that Traveller experiences of the labour market are rooted in and have been shaped by a legacy of racism and discrimination on individual, institutional and structural levels. It argues for a rapid policy response by the State and the development of long-term sustainable strategies to improve Traveller training and employment opportunities.

Concealed Motives: Rethinking Fourteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Challenges to Felon Disenfranchisement

Felon disenfranchisement provisions are justified by many Americans under the principle that voting is a privilege to be enjoyed only by upstanding citizens. The provisions are intimately tied, however, to the country’s legacy of racism and systemic disenfranchisement and are at odds with the values of American democracy. In virtually every state, felon disenfranchisement provisions affect the poor and communities of color on a grossly disproportionate scale. Yet to date, most challenges to the provisions under the Equal Protection Clause and Voting Rights Act have been unsuccessful, frustrating proponents of re-enfranchisement and the disenfranchised alike. In light of those failures, is felon disenfranchisement here to stay? This Note contemplates that question, beginning with a comprehensive analysis of the history of felon disenfranchisement provisions in America, tracing their roots to the largescale effort to disenfranchise African Americans during Reconstruction, and identifying ways in which the racism of the past reverberates through practices of disenfranchisement in the present day. Applying this knowledge to understandings of prior case law and recent voting rights litigation, a path forward begins to emerge.

Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Reviewed by: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Caroline A. Streeter WORDS OF WITNESS: BLACK WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE POST-BROWN ERA, by Angela A. Ards. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 230 pp. $26.95 paper; $26.95 ebook. BRIDGES TO MEMORY: POSTMEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHNIC AMERICAN WOMEN’S FICTION, by Maria Rice Bellamy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 190 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook. At first glance, a study of autobiographical works and an examination of literary fiction might appear to have little in common. However, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era and Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction resist polarizing classifications. Both Angela A. Ards and Maria Rice Bellamy deploy feminist theory and an intersectional methodology. Intersectionality, first articulated by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the template for comprehending subjectivity on the part of women of color, for whom identity is constituted through multiple registers of experience. In Words of Witness, Ards considers a selection of black women’s life stories to construct a chronological counternarrative to the modern civil rights movement. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy theorizes the way inflections of race and gender reconfigure the literature of postmemory. Bellamy’s reading of comparative ethnic literature captures how legacies of racism and imperialism engender repetitive cycles of traumatic memory among women of color. Ards and Bellamy incorporate textual indeterminacy in their analyses. Words of Witness addresses the increasingly ambiguous distinction between autobiography—fact-based documentation by historical actors—and the subjective recollection of memoir. Ards identifies the contested status of some works in her study. She also acknowledges potential influence on the part of publishers seeking to exploit the popularity of confessional writing. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy makes a risky move by historicizing postmemory literature in social movements: “the critical historical moments of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 147). The hazard here entails reifying ethnic fiction as a kind of sociology or exercise in identity politics. The manifestation of political tensions internal to the studies are signposts of intersectional methodology. Ultimately, Words of Witness and Bridges to Memory emphasize multivocal testimony and collective memory as critical agents of transformation. The power of the collective voice is embodied in the structural similarities that link these works, each of which consists of five chapters. Each chapter in Ards features one author and one text. In Bellamy, one among five chapters focuses on two authors [End Page 236] and texts. (Bridges to Memory also ends with a conclusion incorporating a brief discussion of a film.) The phenomenon of overlapping methodologies and concerns is accentuated by the presence of Edwidge Danticat in both books—her memoir in Ards and a short story cycle in Bellamy. Ards calls the production of countercultural memory in black women’s autobiographies “the ethics of self-fashioning” (p. 4). Countercultural memory is powered by the holistic articulation of personal narrative and political discourse. The challenge of balancing the inner life with political activism animates Words of Witness. Ards examines works published between 1994 and 2009—four memoirs and one theatrical production based on an unpublished screenplay. The texts, “in dialogue with particular [political] legacies,” adeptly demonstrate the elisions in the master narrative of the modern civil rights movement (p. 5). Warriors Don’t Cry (1994) is Melba Beals’s harrowing story of her time as one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the group of black teenagers at the center of the 1957 campaign to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock epitomized the intransigence of Jim Crow, demonstrating the unapologetic resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools. Warriors Don’t Cry is the counter history to the continual citation of Brown as the earliest signpost in the triumphant narrative of civil rights. Although Warriors Don’t Cry provides an able template...

Police Unions and Race

8 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES Police Unions and Race Over the past several years, public outrage over accounts of black men, women and children dying in encounters with police has increased. This mounting outrage has given rise to calls for reforms in policing and the criminal justice system as a whole. Community and street protesters call for ‘justice’, and few American institutions have been spared from at least condemning the deadly acts. Religious organisations, educational organisations as well as local, state and government bodies have entered the fray of discussion. These discussions invariably are forced to take into account the challenges of America’s race and racial disparities. On 14 August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, white police officer Darren Wilson fires 12 rounds and kills Michael Brown an unarmed 18-year old black man. This killing with its images and details widely carried in national media, sparked outrage that simply would not go away. The killing of Michael Brown came at a time when there was an uptick in the notoriety of such encounters since the highly publicised death of Trayvon Martin. Responding to public outcry from within its membership, in February of 2015, the AFL-CIO (the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), a federation of 55 national and international labour unions representing 12.5 million organised workers, launched its Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, stating: ‘America’s legacy of racism and racial injustice has been and continues to be a fundamental obstacle to workers’ efforts to act together to build better lives for all of us. Racism has always been a key tactic of employers seeking to divide us. But we also have an ugly history of racism in our own movement…. The demand for racial justice cannot be divorced from the fight for economic justice’1. Ensuing discussions witnessed some union members offering expressions of solidarity with Michael Brown’s grieving mother, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), while others called for equal or greater solidarity with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA). Some of these discussions have raised the question of whether police unions should exist and whether they should be in the AFL-CIO. To the extent that police officers organise themselves to fight for better wages, hours and working conditions, they should form unions and join with other workers who are fighting for similar advances in their employment situations. This is equally true for the millions of other workers who are employed in America’s correctional and security systems. From Overseers to Officers The current discussions about police, policing, police reform and criminal justice reform in general flow from the egregious and callous acts of brutality and life ending situations carried out by police and inflicted upon primarily people of colour and African Americans in particular. Such actions are increasingly captured on camera, challenging the viewer to authenticate what they saw. Given the racial character of such brutality, and where the perpetrators are often white and the sufferer is black, again calls into question the lingering racist practices to be found in United States society. Both racist practices and policies have their origins and continuance in slavery and have not been formally acknowledged as being wrong by government, or other major institutions. The union movement has not acknowledged or stated unequivocally that slavery was wrong! Such lack of acknowledgement lends itself to safe haven for those who do not fully accept the equality of all workers, and manifest it in their institutional structures and practices. To varying degrees, unions carry the ideological and practical weight of 246 years (1619–1865) of slavery’s history, when Africans in America were not seen as part of the human family in the body politic. An additional 77 years of Jim Crow [a body of segregationist law] did little to counter murderous ideas, nurtured in the American psych over decades. Thus it was easier to accept police as workers than it was to accept housekeepers and farm hands as workers, the majority of whom were people of colour. Police and police organisations are not creations of workers, brought about by workers’ struggles. They...

Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France by Crystal Marie Fleming

Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France by Crystal Marie Fleming

HAMILTON’S DERACIALIZATION

AbstractMany commentators have described Barack Obama as a ‘deracialized’ politician. In contrast to ‘racialized’ Black candidates, deracialized politicians are said to deemphasize their Black racial identity, downplay the racial legacies of American inequality, and favor race-neutral over racially targeted policies. Puzzlingly, this narrative of Obama’s racial politics sits incongruously with his politicalcurriculum vitae, spent largely in contexts which are difficult to describe as deracialized. This article holds that commentators have misjudged Barack Obama’s racial politics by conflating a contingent electoral strategy with a deeper expression of Obama’s racial philosophical commitments. In explaining these commitments, the article finds the deracialized/racialized framing inadequate. Instead, it favors the typology of racial policy alliances situating Obama within the “race-conscious” policy alliance rather than the “color-blind” alliance. By returning to the site of Obama’s political development, Hyde Park in Chicago, the paper uncovers a tradition of racial politics in which Blacks formed coalitions with progressive Whites but also embraced Black racial identity, acknowledged the enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and supported targeted policies to overturn these racial legacies. The article argues that Obama was an inheritor of this tradition.

Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and Self-Mapping

JOEL PACE Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and SelfMapping True navigation begins in the human heart. It’s the most important map of all. —Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey1 “Be a cartographer, a map maker, Be able to find Afro-American land, Search thoroughly, it may be close to black land. Be amended: j/jths . . —Lonnie Lynn2 They came with ships and guns Enlightenment That is why today Enlightenment They call us third world Enlightenment We are no third world Enlightenment We have always been first Enlightenment All I need to say is set your minds to Africa Check your world map and see Zero degrees down and across —Fela Kuti, “Africa Center of the World”3 1. Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, “Curating Humanity’s Heritage,” Ted Talk, 24 Feb­ ruary 2011, http://awakentopeaceandlove.blogspot.com/20i1/02/elizabeth-lindsey-curatinghumanitys .html, accessed 16 December 2016. 2. Lonnie Lynn AKA Pops (Common’s father), featured on Common’s “It’s Your World,” Be (Sony, 2005). 3. Fela Kuti and Roy Ayers, Music of Many Colors (M. I. L. Multimedia, 1996). SiR, 56 (Spring 2017) 113 114 JOEL PACE S AINT PAUL LIES COVERED IN BLANKETS OF WHITE. SO MUCH SNOW FALLS that rapper Slug of Atmosphere has referred to the state as “Minnesnowta,” and it remains on the ground so long that Prince’s title, “Sometimes It Snows in April,” is not hyperbole but a factual reflection on the weather in his beloved Twin Cities.4 Just two winters ago, Prince’s brief appearance on the Grammys reminded the world that, in his words, “like books and Black lives, albums still matter.”5 Spoken a year and a half before the fatal shooting of a black motorist in a suburb of St. Paul, these words continue to ring true in a state that will always remember both Prince and Philando Castile. In the wake of Castile’s death, the continually accruing layers of whiteness that city employees attempt to remove in or­ der to allow for free passage for all take on a symbolic meaning. Mapping a metaphorical connection between winter and slavery has precedent in Lauryn Hill’s lines: “After winter, must come spring / Change, it conies eventually,” as well as in Phillis Wheatley’s “The frozen deeps may break their iron bands.”6 Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Wheatley’s and Hill’s lines chart the changes of the seasons as linked to the inevitability of progress in civil liberties.7 Prince speaks about books, Black lives, and albums in the same breath. All three are also implicitly connected in the Fela Kuti lyrics, quoted above, which remap the racist legacy of the Enlightenment ideologically, underscoring and anticipating the Black Lives Matter Movement’s urgent call for “Curriculums That Critically Examine the Political, Economic, and Social Impacts of Colonialism and Slavery.”8 Kuti’s lyrics reclaim mapping from its colonialist past by charting the places that were left off the map and changing the orientation of the map to expose the lines the colonizers erased, distorted, or never delineated, and this coda suggests applying just such a strategy to Romantic studies to help answer some of the following questions and pose new ones, all provoked, in one way or another, by the preceding essays in this issue of Studies in Romanticism. In what ways does the present-day political climate—with unprece­ dented documentation and protest of police shootings of African Ameri­ cans, the US presidential election, and the Brexit vote—speak to Romanti­ cism and vice versa? What will the field look like if the map zooms out 4. Atmosphere, “Say Shh,” Seven's Travels (Rhymesayers, Epitaph, 2003). 5. Prince Rogers Nelson, Presentation of Album of the Year, 57th Grammy Awards, 8 February 2015; Prince, “Sometimes It Snows in April,” Under the Cherry Moon (Warner Brothers, 1986). 6. Lauryn Hill, “Everything is Everything,” The Miseducation ofLauryn Hill (Columbia and Ruffhouse Records, 1998); Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (line 25). 7. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (final line). 8. Movement for Black Lives, https://m4bl.net, accessed 16 December 2016. AFTERTHOUGHTS 115 from England until the Atlantic is at...

Ebola at a Distance: A Pathographic Account of Anthropology's Relevance

Drawing on a year of researching and writing about the West African Ebola epidemic from afar, I use the heuristic of virality to critically examine the collective US anthropology response to Ebola, a viral disease, and the anthropological knowledge networks formed to address the 2013–2015 outbreak. Specifically, I describe how digital media facilitated an entry point to build connections and knowledge around the epidemic in American anthropologists' quest to prove the discipline's relevance, the viral circulations of and replications of anthropological ideas in the Ebola response, and the attempts to shed pathogenic racial legacies of Africanist anthropology shaping US anthropology's official response.

Housing Choices as School Choices: Subsidized Renters’ Agency in an Uncertain Policy Context

Previous scholarship on the federal Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program has found that HCV renters are less likely than other households living below the poverty line to live in neighborhoods with high–performing schools. These findings are troubling because HCV renters have some choice about where they live, yet aggregate data linking HCV renters’ neighborhoods with school performance shows that renters tend to be concentrated in impoverished areas with poor schools. To better understand whether and how schools factor into HCV renters’ neighborhood preferences when searching for a home, semistructured interviews with 17 HCV heads–of–household in the St. Louis region were conducted. Findings from this project reveal that some HCV renters prioritize school choice when deciding to move, sending their children to schools that may or may not be located within their neighborhood. A minority of families in this study actually enrolled their children in the school district indicated by their address. Three families had intentionally moved to unaccredited districts to take advantage of a transfer law that allowed students in unaccredited school districts to attend an out–of–district school. Although not a direct counterpoint to previous scholarship, these findings lend some balance to the idea that HCV renters are compelled to live in districts with lower property values and thus lower performing schools than other households receiving government assistance. HCV renters encounter many constraints on their choice of housing and neighborhood, and legacies of racism, housing discrimination, and predatory landlords may indeed limit renters to poor neighborhoods with underperforming school districts, but as interviews with 17 participants with school–age children demonstrate, their children may not be attending their neighborhood schools after all. These findings help contextualize HCV renter concentration in low–income neighborhoods, while further research is needed to address the education and housing policy ramifications of this work on a national scale.

Allan Boesak: innocence and the struggle for humanity

As a Black theologian and political activist, deeply committed to the cause of freedom, reconciliation and justice in South Africa, Allan Boesak has embraced the philosophy of Black consciousness as a legitimate moral-political foundation for the development of national unity. Boesak is of the view that post-apartheid South Africa is still deeply plagued by a racist legacy of moral-political “innocence”. I explore the validity of Boesak’s position from the perspective of his fundamental claim that the philosophy of Black Consciousness represents a legitimate framework for addressing the legacy of “innocence”, construed by him as an epistemic condition that refuses to engage with the historical “truth” of race thinking.

“The Mellow Pot-Smoker”: White Individualism in Marijuana Legalization Campaigns

This Note suggests that has characterized many campaigns for the legalization of recreational marijuana, including in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. implicitly suggests that white, hard-working, middle-class, marijuana consumers are deserving beneficiaries of legalized marijuana. The white-washed framing of legal marijuana omits and implicitly reinforces marijuana prohibition’s racist legacy. Marijuana criminalization was originally justified through racist propaganda; the war on drugs has been enacted through coded racial appeals; and marijuana enforcement has disproportionately fallen upon black and brown people. White individualism in marijuana legalization campaigns has tended to correlate with policies that favor white entrepreneurs rather than policies that redress past harms of prohibition, such as the expungement of criminal records.

“A bad, bold, big-nosed, biblical brother”: refashioning the funny Jew in post-World War Two America

ABSTRACTFilm director Jonathan Kesselman’s 2003 comedy The Hebrew Hammer introduced a new Jewish superhero on cable television: a tough, hip, jive-talking “biblical brother” who battles anti-Semites on the streets of New York under the gaze of adoring children, desirous women, and admiring African-Americans. Although the Hebrew Hammer is a cool Jewish thug who transcends the exilic condition of the proverbially submissive diaspora Jew through his brawn and swagger, he is also funny; he is a gangster who exhibits the neuroses, complaints, and schlemiel-like stereotypes that lie at the heart of modern Jewish humour. The Hebrew Hammer represents the culmination of a trend in American popular culture that began in the 1950s with Lenny Bruce. An unapologetically proud Jew, Bruce deployed his comedy and his cool persona to demolish Gentile propriety. Proclaiming an affinity to other minorities who had also suffered at the hands of Anglo-Saxon Christendom, Bruce and his successors publicly mocked their history of exclusion and the legacy of racism. A narrative of shared affliction has allowed Jewish humourists to appropriate the stereotypes and cultural practices of African-Americans and other ethnic groups, and to embed them into their comedy, fusing them with familiar Jewish tropes. This is the foundation of a new Jewish humour, one that remains anchored in the past, even as it has been refashioned to suit a multi-cultural immigrant society.

Playing the Trump Card: The Enduring Legacy of Racism in Immigration Law

As this Article goes to press in spring of 2016, Donald Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. He has built his campaign on promises to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border to prevent illegal immigration; to deport all of the estimated twelve million Mexican immigrants who are not legally authorized to live in the United States; to prohibit Syrian refugees from entering the U.S.; and to exclude all Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the country. While many complain that these views violate our history of welcoming immigrants and visitors of all races, creeds, and colors, a historical examination reveals that from its beginnings, racism and xenophobia have been a driving force behind immigration law in the United States.To understand immigration law in the United States, one must thus examine the history of racial exclusion and inequality. From the formation of the Republic, our immigration laws have reflected racist policies toward various and changing racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. Today, anti-immigrant hysteria is directed largely at immigrants from Mexico and, increasingly, at Muslims or those associated (correctly or not) with Islam, especially immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia. One question that emerges is whether Mexican immigrants will follow the same patterns of assimilation or integration as past groups of immigrants, or whether they will join Black Americans as long-standing second-class citizens.

22. Canadian Residential Schools: A Legacy of Racism and Resistance

The following posters are a result of research done by the students in Dr. Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s Sociology 233: ‘Race’ and Racialization course.

Nice–Nastiness and Other Raced Social Interactions on Public Transport Systems

Research on public transportation systems has often focused on racialized and institutionalized dynamics that result in poor and ethno–racial minority neighborhoods being underserved. Few scholars have studied raced social interactions on the buses and trains themselves. In this article, I explore how legacies of racism are reproduced through raced social interactions on public buses and trains in Chicago. Drawing on over 3 years of ethnographic field work and interviews, this article demonstrates how ethno–racial minorities, particularly Blacks, experience racial hostilities that are often masked as nice–nastiness. Nice–nastiness is a type of individual expression that combines expressions of politeness with disdain and distancing. Nice–nastiness can be expressed as (1) pretending the “other” does not exist; (2) whispering and lowering one's voice; (3) standing instead of taking a seat; (4) letting others have space for auditory expression; and (5) pseudo–swagger. I locate nice–nastiness on the racial microaggressions and color–blindness continuum and show that this expressive tool is shaped, at least in part, by the closeness, confinement and mobility of public transportation, where escape is not possible, unlike in wide–open spaces. I use public transportation as a space to examine how raced behaviors are enacted in everyday life, and shaped by confinement and motion.

A Dark Secret Too Scandalous to Confront: Did the Moynihan Report Imply That Poor Black Caregivers' Parenting Styles and Childhood Cruelties Were Strongly Correlated With Self-Perpetuating Pathologies?

In this article, I attempt to mine what were the deeper implications of Moynihan's effort through his Report to identify the problems that were confronting the poor, black urban family, and using interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, and early childhood trauma theory, I interrogate the meaning of disorganized of the black family and the contributing factors of pathologies. by examining these critical concepts through the aforementioned theories, I hope to learn if Moynihan was directing our attention by implication at the parenting styles of poor, black urban families, and at the source, along with the legacies of racism, that contributed to why black children and adolescents were woefully lagging behind their peers and committing social dislocation issues like crime. By taking seriously the teachings of these theories, I believe that they would reveal a dark secret within poor, black urban families that few people, including Moynihan, wanted to confront directly. After controlling for the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, which had only legally died in 1964, and thus modern discrimination, that dark secret would be disruptions caused by childhood trauma early in the infant child's relationship with her black family caregivers. These disruptions and their negative, downstream effects would be correlated with the findings that Moynihan so clearly illustrated in his Report. By necessity, then, such disruptions would affected the black infants' right brain development, which would contribute to their inability to self-regulate and to adapt and thrive adequately not only at home but also at school and in their community. In short, white racism and its legacy don't account for the weak, disorganized structure of the poor black family and self-perpetuating pathologies more than the impact of the earliest disruption in the black infants and caregivers' relationship caused by early childhood cruelties and maltreatment.

The legacy of racism and Indigenous Australian identity within education

It may be argued that the emerging discourses focusing on the social, emotional, educational, and economic disadvantages identified for Australia’s First Peoples (when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts) are becoming increasingly dissociated with an understanding of the interplay between historical and current trends in racism. Additionally, and if not somewhat related to this critique, it can be suggested that the very construction of research from a Western perspective of Indigenous identity (as opposed to identities) and ways of being are deeply entwined within the undertones of epistemological racism still prevalent today. It is the purpose of this article to move beyond the overreliance of outside-based understanding Western epistemologies, and to explore not only the complex nature of both racism and identity from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, but to also explore the role of education and research in perpetuating varying levels of racism and resistance to Indigenous identity(ies) from a contemporary insider-based standpoint. It is hoped this article will shed some light on the pervasive nature of racism directed at Indigenous Australians, and highlight the need for the continual acceptance, respect, and promotion of Indigenous voices and identities within the educational environment and beyond.

Baptized in PCBs: race, pollution, and justice in an all-American town

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements. Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston-from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

“A Stake in the Story”: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help , Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby , and the Politics of Southern Storytelling

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In afterword to bestselling 2009 novel The Help, titled Little, Too Late, author Kathryn Stockett voices a certain trepidation about a terrible line, writing in voice of a black person and worries that she has told both too much and too little in her of African American domestics and white southern ladies they work for in 1960s Mississippi. She concludes her afterword, though, by suggesting benefits of crossing that line, benefits that included discovering commonality of black and white stories and ephemerality of racial difference. Above all, she asserts that novel enabled her to ask her real-life African American maid Demetrie, long since deceased, unspoken question of her childhood--what was it like working for Stockett's fragmented white family? I've spent years imagining what her answer would be, her afterword concludes. And that's why I wrote this book. (1) Those concluding words appear to resolve her initial doubts--and therein lies one of most disturbing aspects of The Help and its staggering success, especially when contrasted with another novel by a white writer about a white employer and her black maid in 1960s Mississippi, Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby. Published in 1988, Douglas's novel was greeted with respectful critical, sometimes conflicting, reviews but virtually none of popular acclaim that has made The Help such a striking cultural phenomenon. Stockett's wildly popular novel quite simply appropriates an African American and turns it into one of white guilt, redemption, reconciliation, and triumph, a transformation that is all too common in white southern storytelling and that is thrown into sharp relief by Douglas's highly self-conscious postmodern novel. Can't Quit You, Baby offers none of resolution and reassurance that The Help displays to a contemporary audience eager for confirmation that country's legacy of racism and injustice has been left safely in past. If anything, Douglas's novel, in words of critic Karen Jacobsen, to foreground what most of us would like to forget, ignore, or deny--the continued difficulty that black and white women have in forming friendships with each other. (2) Unlike Stockett, Douglas does so by consistently and uncomfortably questioning her own narrative authority to tell stories crossing racial lines and brings attention again and again to all those long-simmering tensions lying just beneath surface of her storytelling--silences, habits of willed deafness and amnesia, refusals, and outright disavowals, and she does so by asking again and again what her own in story is--and by implication, reader's stake in as well. (3) Josephine Haxton started raising uncomfortable questions for herself and her readers from outset of her career, when she made decision to publish under pseudonym of Ellen Douglas to avoid potentially embarrassing her conservative, devout family. (4) That decision may also have had a good deal to do with her response to Brown v. Board of Education, which, she notes in her 2004 essay collection Witnessing, had a lasting impact on all her reading and writing to follow, particularly her stunning 1963 short collection Black Cloud, White Cloud. (5) In that collection, after exposes hierarchical, volatile, and sometimes explosive relationship of white employers and African American employees in a segregated society--what she herself called later the world of black and white people together--the terrible world of masters and servants. (6) But it was in 1988 that Douglas published her experimental and self-interrogative novel Can't Quit You, Baby about that most traditional of relationships, that of a privileged white woman and her African American housekeeper. Douglas's novel, like The Help, is set in Mississippi in 1960s, albeit a few years after height of Civil Rights Movement, and like The Help again Can't Quit You, Baby focuses on layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee--but in ways that are far more unsettling than portrayed in The Help. …