Narratives Of Race Research Articles

Examining the Narrative: An Analysis of the Racial Discourse Embedded in State Takeover

ABSTRACTA growing number of states are using state-run school districts to take over and improve persistently under-performing schools. There is a need for research on the policy discourse used by educational stakeholders to support or oppose school takeover. This study uses Georgia’s Opportunity School District to analyze the role of racist narratives in the policy discourse on state takeover. We find that the discourse supporting state takeover utilized common racist predispositions. In this article, we highlight the nuanced dynamics of the politics of state takeover as opponents of state takeover straddle both conservative and liberal principles to garner support, whereas supporters appeal to conservatives through coded language and racialized discourse.

Skin Castles

This is a critical response to ‘Skin Castles’, a spoken-word performance based on a rasanblaj (an assembly or regrouping, of ideas, people, things) of colonial racial classifications, postcolonial literatures, personal narrative and chants. To offer brief, nuanced analyses on the significance of incorporating the affective and the embodied as intervention in museums, I draw upon sociologist Robyn Autry’s concept of the ‘museumification of memory’ (Desegregating the Past, Columbia University Press, 2015) to mark the entangled historical foundation of museums and unsettle the complex role they play – as public institutions and seats of empire – in the re-production of collective memories. Using performative writing as articulated by Ronald J Pelias (Performance, Routledge 2014) that stems from a feminist standpoint grounded in interdisciplinary and intersectional methodologies, my aim is to illuminate the various ways my approach to the performance allows us to both confront and re-configure perspectives on coloniality in exhibitions as a prelude to ‘Remixed Ode to Rebel’s Spirit’, a commissioned response to the British Museum’s ‘Haiti and Toussaint LOuverture’ exhibition; for we are in the midst of the day of reckoning, and must inevitably contemplate where we go from here.

Island Nation, US Territory and Contested Space: Territorial Status As a Social Determinant of Indigenous Health in Guam

The United Nations and International Federation of Social Work affirm the right of all people to determine their political status, preserve their environments and pursue endeavours for well-being. This article focuses on CHamoru, Guam's Indigenous people, and examines distal social determinants of health (SDOH) in the contested spaces of US territorial status and non-self-determining Indigenous nationhood. Published multi-disciplinary literature identified ways in which territorial status functions as an SDOH unique to non-self-determining Pacific Island nations. Indicated is the use of structural approaches that address mechanisms of US power and control, including economic policies that 'defacto' promote coca-colonisation and non-communicable diseases risk. Critical race theory centres race, colonisation and subversive narratives. In line with fourth-generation SDOH action-oriented research, we posit a CHamoru critical race theory model that weaves Indigenous, social work and public health perspectives. Lack of community input is a limitation of the current research. To assure relevance, the model will be vetted through community discussions. Our discussion guide may be tailored for other Indigenous communities. Social workers may play a meaningful role in promoting health equity through participatory action-oriented, cultural-political social work that upholds Indigenous self-determination and survivance in contested spaces.

Racially Ambiguous Babies and Racial Narratives in the United States: A Growing Contradiction for Health Disparities Research.

Researchers attempting to identify and track health disparities and inequities generally use five racial or ethnic (R/E) categories-four racial groups (white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian) and one ethnic group (Hispanic)-to analyze and predict variations in health outcomes in the overall U.S. population. These categories are used as if they were permanent, naturally occurring, internally homogeneous, and discrete. However, the United States is becoming increasingly racially ambiguous because of (1) the growth of the Latino population, nearly half of whom do not identify with one of the four racial groups; and (2) the growing population of racially ambiguous babies, whose mothers and fathers are of different R/E groups. In California, an average annual 52.6% of the babies born between 2011 and 2015 were racially ambiguous (i.e., their parents were from different R/E groups or at least one parent was something other than a single race).We describe the social-legal construction of hard-edged, binary racial categories in the United States from 1790 to the present (and the subsequent racial structuring of U.S. society along those categories). Researchers should shift the conceptualization of race from that of an innate, individual trait to that of a narrative, and should consider the impact that racial narratives can have on the life courses of individuals categorized as nonwhite. In light of the increasing racial ambiguity in the United States, the Latino fuzzy-edged, multivalent racial narrative that embraces racial mixing may be one alternative to the United States' hard-edged, binary one.

Unmasking Racism: Students of Color and Expressions of Racism in Online Spaces

AbstractExpressions of racism in the post-Civil Rights Era are expected to be more covert than overt and more unconscious than conscious. But some internet-based communication takes place in technological contexts that are not bound by the same norms as face-to-face interactions, and can structure more explicit presentations of racist ideologies. I explore the changing expressions of racism in online spaces and their effects on students of color using in-depth interviews with 27 undergraduate students of color and their reactions to and interpretations of an online, anonymous student forum. I argue that covert racism is unmasked in online environments, and that exposure to unmasked racial ideologies can challenge students’ racial worldviews, adaptive coping responses to racism, relationships to White students and institutions, and dominant racial narratives.

‘From objects to subjects: the museumification of Blackness in Mexico’

ABSTRACTThe performative role of the museum as a ‘historical map’ has long served to construct strategic cartographies of identity and community. In addition, the nature of the relational experiences within museum spaces, places these histories and cartographies in a contact zone, in which structures of power and agency influence the locus of enunciation through which subjecthood and objecthood are derived. This essay examines the influential role of museums in Mexico in imaging, framing, and performing strategic configurations of mexicanidad. Particularly, I interrogate how museums have historically muted and made invisible the representation of Mexicans of African descent.Then, I analyze two important regional museums and theorize how they present a transition from objecthood to subjecthood, in which Afro-Mexican knowledge and consciousness is reified to configure an alternative mapping of African heritage within the space of museums and within constructions of racial formations and narratives of being and belonging in Mexico.

Haunted Trauma Narratives of Inclusion, Race, and Disability in a School Community

By typical definitions in the special education world, inclusion would not be recognizable as it exists at Memorial Elementary. Memorial is responding to a widely documented trend in public schools: over-representation of students of color, particularly Black and Brown students, in high-incidence special education categories, including emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). I conceptualize EBD as unacknowledged suppression of hauntings from transgenerational trauma—legacies of institutional racism, poverty, and attempts at dehumanization. My primary hypothesis is that Memorial’s practice and ethic of unconditional belonging has been a transformation afforded by being haunted. I argue that haunted trauma narratives affirm and reconstruct the personhood of students of color with ghosts of trauma. Through narrativizing, students of color and educators rebuild inclusion from difference-as-allowed toward Martin Luther King Jr.’s (2001) “beloved community” (p. 458). That is, Memorial has redesigned school structures, educators’ beliefs and practices, interactions with children and their families, and other aspects of everyday systems to be organized around the intersections of race, trauma, identity, and community. Though dreaming is undeniably difficult, Memorial also illustrates the transformative power of affective forces from ghosts that demand hope, justice, and healing.

Waste to energy:

ABSTRACTIf it had been built, the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project would have been the largest trash incinerator in the United States, burning 4,000 tons of waste each day in late‐industrial Baltimore. When it was first proposed, two discourses of renewal coalesced around the project. One was propagated by technocrats who argued incineration should be regulated as a renewable technology. Another emerged among working‐class whites who hoped the plant would reinvigorate their ailing economy. Both discourses hinged on comparisons with the past and maneuvers between futures near and far, gaining ground through subjunctive politics. Recast in this light, both technocratic dreams and local narratives of waste, race, and decline betray a deep ambivalence about the sorts of futures that seem plausible within a geography of “undesirables.” [subjunctive politics, waste, race, renewal, future, uncertainty, environment, Baltimore, United States]

Narratives of Race, Gender, and Power in Family Literacy Classrooms for Refugee Women With Interrupted Formal Schooling

Narratives of Race, Gender, and Power in Family Literacy Classrooms for Refugee Women With Interrupted Formal Schooling

Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education: An Introduction

Indigenous Latinx children and youth are a growing population that has been largely invisible in U.S. society and in the scholarly literature (Barillas-Chón, 2010; Machado-Casas, 2009). Indigenous Latinx youth are often assumed to be part of a larger homogenous grouping, usually Hispanic or Latinx, and yet their cultural and linguistic backgrounds do not always converge with dominant racial narratives about what it means to be “Mexican” or “Latinx.” Bonfil Batalla (1987) argued that Indigenous Mexicans are a población negada—or negated population—whose existence has been systematically denied as part of a centuries-long colonial project of indigenismo (indigenism) in Mexico and other Latin American countries. This systematic denial in countries of origin often continues once Indigenous people migrate to the U.S., as they are actively rendered invisible in U.S. schools through the semiotic process of erasure (Alberto, 2017; Urrieta, 2017). Indigenous Latinx families are often also overlooked as they are grouped into general categories such as Mexican, Guatemalan, Latinx, and/or immigrants. In this issue, we seek to examine the intersections of Latinx Indigeneities and education to better understand how Indigenous Latinx communities define and constitute Indigeneity across multiple and overlapping colonialities and racial geographies, and, especially, how these experiences overlap with, and shape their educational experiences.

Uncommitted Crimes: The Defiance of the Artistic Imagi/nation by Tara Atluri.

Tara Atluri’s book, Uncommitted Crimes: The Defiance of the Artistic Imagi/nation, is a celebration of those who are reimagining Canadian narratives of multiculturalism, diversity, and equity. Colonial, cisgendered, heteronormative, and racist narratives that may yet be invisible to the inhabitants of Turtle Island are revealed through Atluri’s depiction of a diverse selection of artists and art.

Reproducing Whiteness: How White Students Justify the Campus Racial Status Quo

The purpose of this article was to examine how Whiteness functions to underwrite and maintain racially hostile campus climates. Utilizing narrative inquiry, results illuminate two rhetorical devices that White students utilized to rationalize and justify the racial status quo: Narratives of Campus Racial Harmony and Narratives of Imposition. Results highlight how well-intentioned, educated White students contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of Whiteness.

Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries

Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries

White therapists addressing racism in psychotherapy: an ethical and clinical model for practice

Although racism has always been present in the therapy room, the recent political climate and flood of news stories highlighting racist narratives and behaviors have made race and racism more salient in our society. For white therapists who align with antiracism in their self-identity and practice, this may present a difficult ethical dilemma when race and racism enter the therapy office. Therapists have a duty to protect client autonomy and self-determination as much as possible. However, therapists also have a responsibility to the communities in which they work and to not willingly condone activities of others that hold prejudice, both of which are threatened with unacknowledged racism. This article addresses the issue of whether to work with racism as a clinical and ethical concern with white clients who hold racist ideas and narratives, and then offers a concise clinical model for therapists to help guide their practice.

“Have You to This Point Assumed That I Am White?”: Narrative Withholding sincePlaying in the Dark

This article traces a lineage of narrative experiments from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and “Recitatif” (1983) through recent texts by Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett. In her critical work, Morrison identifies a “sinister” tradition in which “the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white.” From that perspective, she argues, the characters in fiction can safely be presumed white, unless the narrative explicitly indicates otherwise; unless race is specifically addressed, the texts operate under a universal white default. Her short story challenges that default, in noteworthy and widely discussed fashion. This article attends to the strategy of narrative withholding in “Recitatif”—a strategy that illuminates and informs the brands of withholding at work in more recent works by Whitehead and Everett. Zone One (2014) and Glyph (1999) complicate Morrison’s model, continuing her interrogation into narratives of race and the ways we narrate race. Where “Recitatif” foregrounds the role of race, though, the narrators of these two novels minimize it and purport to disregard it. The result is a brand of text that makes conspicuous the lack of narration of race, then the narration of race, and then the un-narration of race, utilizing a subversive set of strategies that may defamiliarize and refresh Morrison’s critique for a new era.

“Why Do We Have Different Skins Anyway?”: Exploring Race in Literature with Preschool Children

In this article, the author argues that young children are capable of and competent in discussing topics of race. Sharing picture books with racial narratives with young children is a way to help them reflect, value, and empathize with the diverse nature of society. A picture book by Jacqueline Woodson, The Other Side, is explored more deeply with a small group of preschool children. The analysis of the small-group discussion suggests that engaging in multiple interactive and open-ended read-alouds of the same text, alongside reflective teaching, can encourage the validation and valuation of People of Color as well as children’s own racial identities; critical questions and active engagement in topics of race, skin color, and tone; and engaged citizens who can ask questions and participate in dialog about social and cultural differences.

Civic Knowledge, Engagement, and Participation Narratives of Youth of Color in Urban Schools

The issues associated with students’ civic knowledge, engagement, and participation have been heightened in intellectual debates and public discussions. However, these discussions have not focused heavily on urban youths’ civic identities or the locations of these identities within the youths’ personal narratives of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. This article presents the narratives of four urban high school youths of color, selected from a larger study about youths’ experiences in school and society and the ways in which classroom learning encouraged their inquiry, assessment of their social worlds and personal goals, and emerging personal and civic identities. Our purpose was to gain insights regarding the youths’ sociopolitical perspectives on local educational and social issues affecting them and to understand their multiple literacies in the context of their civic engagement, increasing youth advocacy, and larger political tensions. The theoretical framing of this investigation is grounded in democratic education and sociopolitical consciousness and draws upon research that focuses on civic participation and democratic society. Four dominant themes emerged from the analysis: educational inequality, social media, schooling, and race and mass incarceration. This article contributes to an expansive framing for civic education by examining the civic knowledge of urban youths of color and offers implications for research, practice, and policy.

Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Reviewed by: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae Lisa Lindquist Dorr Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. By Elizabeth Gillespie McRae. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 352. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-027171-8.) Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy does more than merely argue that "[w]hite women were the mass in massive resistance" (p. 4). Instead, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae demonstrates that white women's efforts to protect and promote white supremacy through segregation existed long before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and lasted long after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This "long era" of massive resistance began with the efforts of white women to counter the seeming apathy toward racial regulations among white southerners in the interwar years, eventually providing rationales and strategies to white people across the country to promote a conservative political program that maintained a largely segregated nation well into the 1970s (p. 10). In McRae's view, white supremacists in the South participated in the creation of a conservative ideology that expressed support for segregation through color-blind arguments for small government, the sanctity of family, opposition to internationalism and human rights, and parental control over education. Documenting both ideological and personal connections among southern segregationists and conservatives across the country, she pointedly labels conservatives as segregationists at heart and links white southern efforts to limit the integration of southern schools—the usual understanding of massive resistance—to a wider effort to promote what she calls a "Jim Crow nation" (p. 5). McRae separates white women's efforts to protect white supremacy into four broad areas that she traces through the book: work with social welfare institutions, debates about public education, participation in electoral politics, and popular culture. Before World War II, white women worked to police racial [End Page 503] identity in Virginia, to promote appropriate curricula in Georgia, to organize politically in Mississippi and South Carolina, and to publicize narratives of race in a North Carolina newspaper. After the war, segregationist white women perceived more dire threats to white supremacy from national and international sources. In response, they sought to challenge faltering institutions, including the Democratic Party, and to counter the development of new international institutions such as the United Nations, which, in their eyes, favored the "developing, left-leaning, non-white world" (p. 13). They argued more forcefully for the ability of parents to control public schools as an extension of maternal values of the home. Their arguments about the family, schools, patriotism, and the dangers of globalization were later adopted by the opponents of busing in Boston and Detroit and shaped a grassroots conservative politics developing nationwide. Mothers of Massive Resistance thus places white women at the center of a national segregationist movement that extended from the 1920s to the 1970s and provided the racist core of conservative ideology. While McRae's overall argument is persuasive, in the early chapters she focuses on fairly limited case studies of specific white women engaged in localized efforts to maintain white supremacy. These chapters are less satisfying, raising the obvious question whether the activities McRae discusses were representative across the South and common among white women. For example, white women took an active role in using Virginia's Racial Integrity Act to police who could and could not be considered white. Virginia's law, however, was unusual. Were there similar kinds of activities occurring in other southern states? Widening her focus to show that what she documents in particular locales or with particular women was echoed elsewhere would help strengthen her argument and pull individual chapters into a more unified whole. This point, however, is an obvious and easy criticism. On the whole, Mothers of Massive Resistance effectively ties segregationists to the development of conservatism nationally and shows that massive resistance was not a sudden and short-lived response to the Brown decision. Lisa Lindquist Dorr University of Alabama Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association

Introduction: In Speaking About the Body and Adoption

Adoption & Culture Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2019) Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University Introduction: In Speaking About the Body and Adoption EMILY HIPCHEN YOU ARE HOLDING in your hands the fruit of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture’s Seventh Biennial Conference on Adoption and Culture, convened in October, 2018, in Oakland, California. Its theme, “formations,” is not coincidentally the amalgamating principle of the new book series at The Ohio State University Press, where the journal is also housed. This issue bedrocks itself in the content of the conference and represents some of its key nodes of approach to the cultural production and practices of adoption writ large; the issue shows our continued commitment to the humanities, to film and literature studies, and to humanistic and humanitarian approaches to nonheterocoital family-making in the context of discourses that normalize biogenesis as the sole “real” basis of family creation.1 This issue acknowledges the force of the biogenetic narrative—that so-called real family is heterocoitally kinned—in an environment of challenges to its reality as natural. As it has in the past and as a feature of the conference itself, the issue also folds in disciplines outside the traditional humanities, reaching out to scholars, for instance, in the sciences whose work is central to conversations in critical adoption studies particularly where it intersects the role of the body in kinning; to those working for justice particularly in the context of rising nativist and nationalist pressures to delimit kinship to blood and soil; to those whose commitment to histories and the material subjectivities they create underpins any longitudinal study of familymaking . The issue contains three book reviews of four monographs on Korean adoption practice and history, on the place of the resisting/resistant adoptee, on Native American adoption history and trauma in two forms, the research-based 160 ADOPTION & CULTURE 7.2 and the experiential. I am delighted to be able to expand the audiences for all this work out of the productive, but limited, spaces of our suites of rooms in Oakland and to readers more far-flung or less able to travel to our events. It’s my hope that an issue like this one will be in process every conference season and will clock the changes in our thinking over the coming years. To call this a proceedings issue, however, is wildly inaccurate. The essays you will read are largely developments of presentations given at the conference; they are lengthier, more complicated, responsive to the audience to which they were addressed initially, and contain (as a presentation never can really do) the overt traces of their connections to ongoing conversations-in-print in the form of citations and bibliographies that contextualize these essays’ perspectives and voices. As such, this issue represents not what happened at the conference but the building out and reaching out from that single geography, that moment, and those initial ideas, to wider, later, and more fully developed ones. The title of the conference—Formations: Thinking Kinship Through Adoption —pointed conference presenters at addressing the formative pressures of nonheterocoital family structures on, of course, the most proximal parties to these processes, but also at examining, revealing, and interrogating the systems that intersect kinning practices and the cultural productions that represent these. How are we, who are we, in and as a family? What is a family if it isn’t biogenetically sticky? What does the our in our child indicate? What is that child’s relationship to its body, to the family body, to the world that shapes it through its continuity or discontinuity, especially when framed as resemblance? To whom does the family belong, to whom do its members belong, and what does belonging confer? What does expulsion, actual or metaphorical, signify for the institutions that comprise, delimit, surveille, and sort the family, including the family and its members themselves , interested corporations, racial narratives of difference, political parties and their legislation, regions, nations, national conglomerates and their stand-ins? What these essays do as engagements of critical adoption studies in the context of cultural representations of nonheterocoital family-making is demonstrate extendable methods of self- and cultural examination and critique...

Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South by Sarah H. Case

Reviewed by: Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South by Sarah H. Case Charles A. Israel Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South. By Sarah H. Case. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 219. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08279-5; $95.00, ISBN 978-0-25204123-5.) Does a new South require a new approach to education for women? Sarah H. Case's compact volume sets out to answer this question by focusing on two Georgia women's schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spelman Seminary continues today as a liberal arts college but began in an Atlanta church basement in 1881 teaching basic literacy skills to its earliest African American students. The Lucy Cobb Institute was founded in Athens in 1859 to train white young ladies of privilege in both academics and social graces. The two schools served students divided by race, but Case largely delivers on her promise that examining them together "provides a way to explore beliefs about women's roles and duties, racial and class divisions between women, and changes in expectations of women's citizenship rights and duties" (p. 2). Appropriate to the era she is considering, Case devotes considerable attention to the concept of respectability, the racial differences in how it worked, and some of the historiographical disagreements about the concept. For the white "Lucies," training in proper manners, posture, and sexual purity helped ease their transition into a New South middle class that saw women increasingly likely to be working outside the home for wages, at least until marriage, and engaging in women' s clubs and social activism. For the black women of Spelman, protecting and projecting respectability was an essential part of counteracting the vicious racial narratives of the South, becoming ever more important in the era of disenfranchisement, as black women were not just working outside the home but also increasingly serving as ambassadors of the race. Spelman Seminary and the Lucy Cobb Institute had different students and different missions, but both had white leaders. Case suggests that leadership was an important component of Spelman's success at courting substantial support from white northerners such as philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and Henry Morehouse, the executive secretary of the American Baptist Education Society and, for a time, president of the Spelman board of trustees. Case explores how the Spelman curricula interpreted the language of industrial education that was key to northern support while blending it with religious and academic instruction. Mildred Lewis Rutherford, 1867 graduate and longtime leader of the Lucy Cobb Institute, had a significant influence beyond the school in her role as historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and founder of the Athens chapter of the organization. An antisuffragist who worried that white women's public and political participation would undermine [End Page 204] their moral standing, Rutherford nonetheless taught not only the descendants of planter families but also the daughters of the emerging middle class. While a more comprehensive approach to identifying and categorizing the schools' graduates might have been more revealing, Case provides short biographies of a number of graduates of each school, suggesting how the language of the school catalogs and the speeches of their leaders produced diverse outcomes. Many Spelman graduates became heavily involved in the Neighborhood Union and other social welfare organizations that sought to extend the focus on respectability beyond the seminary. Lucy Cobb Institute graduate Caroline Love Goodwin O'Day married a northern industrialist, became active in New York state suffrage campaigns, and in 1934 was elected to the first of four terms in Congress as a New Deal Democrat. The halting emergence of public and college-level educational institutions forced some evolution of both schools in the twentieth century. Case makes productive comparisons between Spelman and other black educational institutions but is less successful situating the Lucy Cobb Institute in the landscape of white women's schools. She also explores the religious roots and influences of Spelman Seminary, opening questions about the continuation of religious training at the Lucy Cobb...