Post Civil Rights Era Research Articles

Overcoming Far-Right Respectability: The Case for Systemic Approaches to Studying White Supremacy

ABSTRACT This contribution to the Forum collection traces the rhetorical strategies taken up by far-right actors to cast white supremacist ideas as “respectable” in the post-civil rights era, including the adoption of “colorblind” and “reverse racism” frameworks. Today’s reactionary figureheads have inherited these frameworks, while adapting them to the norms and affordances of the digital attention economy. Popular indicators of conservative respectability today include the adoption of “mitigating rhetorical strategies,” appeals to free speech, and performances of intellectual and journalistic rigor. The piece ultimately argues that these tactics of obfuscation and abstraction should not deter political communication researchers from identifying white supremacist ideology as such, even when it manifests in coded and “respectable” ways. Adopting a systemic rather than individualistic understanding of white supremacy can help us to undertake the critical analyses required in this moment.

역사, 인종, 젠더와 ‘쌍안경 비전’ - 데이비드 브래들리의 『체니스빌 사건』

David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident deals with how John Washington, a black male historian, excavates five generations of his family's history and restores the histories of his family and black Americans buried by dominant narratives. This paper first examines the resistance narratives of John's ancestors that he discovers through 'counter-memories' such as Old Jack's storytelling and the records kept by his father and great-grandfather. It then examines how John, frustrated by the limitations of Western historical methodology, uses historical imagination and African notions of death to uncover his father’s suicide as well as the deaths of his great-grandfather and fugitive slaves. Thus it is revealed that employing both oppositional epistemologies leads John to confront the truth of his family history. Furthermore, the paper explores how John's hatred of whites and women begins to unravel as he unearths his family history and begins to move away from fixed ideas about race and gender. Through John's transformation, Bradley suggests a shift in perception that does not favor either of the opposing perspectives, but rather connects the dots between them, as an attitude which American society should seek for in the post-civil rights era when racial tensions still persist.

Religious Organizations as Racialized Organizations: Loose Coupling and Symbolic Allyship Between Denominational Racial Justice Statements and Congregational Practice

In the post-Civil Rights era, many predominantly white religious denominations issued statements denouncing racism and challenging their congregations to take organizational action to undo racism, but do these statements translate into actions? New institutionalism theorizes that loose coupling between statements and actions is normative for organizations as they balance signaling support to their external environment while simultaneously maintaining the good faith of internal membership, but Ray contends that because organizations are racialized, this disconnect maintains racial inequality. Building on new institutionalism, I develop the concept of symbolic allyship: symbolic actions that mark the organization as an ally, but these symbolic actions vary in the degree to which they pose organizational risk in maintaining member confidence. Using a nationally representative sample of American congregations within predominantly white denominations that have implored their congregations to act to address racism, I employ latent class analysis to test the prevalence and shape of congregational loose coupling between symbolic statements and symbolic actions. Results suggest that loose coupling between statements and actions is the norm. Further, results provide some evidence that congregations trend toward engaging in symbolic actions that have lower potential costs to the good faith of members. Because these forms of symbolic allyship signal support to the outside world, they may also mask lower levels of organizational change and reinforce racial inequality. Finally, regression analysis illustrates that the ideological mismatch between more progressive denominational statements and more conservative local political and theological cultures helps in understanding this pervasive loose coupling.

My Debt to Slavery

Abstract This autobiographical essay sets up a white middle-class young woman’s emergence as a rights-bearing, choice-making exemplar of sexual freedom and as a holder of intimate racial capital in the 1970s. At the same time, elites and various professional authorities were re-stamping this young woman’s Black peers with slavery- and Jim Crow–era tropes, as sexual criminals, bad choice-makers, producers of worthless and expensive children, not citizens. The essay considers the roles played by Roe v. Wade, the availability of contraception, “modern” midwifery services, the “sexual revolution,” welfare policy, public rhetoric, and public policies in locking in new iterations of racism and racial difference in the post–civil rights era, and the importance of female sexuality, pregnancy, and maternity in constructing arenas for deploying these developments.

At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Jennifer Griffiths (review)

At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Jennifer Griffiths (review)

A Dystopian Post-Civil Rights Era: Black Lives Matter and the Rhetoric of Change 2023 PSA Presidential Address

Universities and colleges, K-12 schools, corporations, professional associations, and other social institutions advocate for change at the same time they are taking steps to prevent it from actually occurring. The result is an endless cycle of words of support followed by inaction, obfuscation, and outright lies. It is no wonder that burnout and frustration face those who would like to do some good but are experiencing gaslighting by those determined to set society back to what it has always been—one that excludes those who deign to speak truth to power. This presidential address sheds personal and professional insight into the difficulties that I have faced at my institution and within the Pacific Sociological Association as a Black woman. Having been witness and victim of those who are incapable or unwilling to see the inconsistency in what they are like and what they would actually like to be has shown me how difficult changing the status quo can be. Individual and institutional claims to “do better” in the future ignore the fact that one is likely part of the problem if they are just now realizing they need to do better. It is my sincerest hope that the increasing numbers of diverse voices that were present at the 2023 PSA conference can move the organization as well as their institutions forward to make them better places for all of us and not just some of us.

State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting

This article examines the claims to an Indigenous identity made by the four state-recognized Abenaki tribes in Vermont through an analysis of their petition for federal acknowledgement (1982–2005) and applications for state recognition (2010–2012). A detailed analysis of their claims demonstrates that the tribes are not Abenaki, but instead, represent the descendants of French Canadians who immigrated to the Champlain Valley of northwestern Vermont in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case study of what the anthropologist Circe Sturm has called “race shifting,” I demonstrate how the politics of recognition, which do not include the kin-making and relations of Indigenous nations, serve the interests of settler colonialism under the guise of decolonization. I attribute the emergence of race shifting along three vectors: the move away from white identity post-Civil Rights era; the lack of a tribal presence in Vermont; and the flaws in the state recognition process.

Dixiecratic Dreaming and Disavowal in Plaquemines Parish: Leander H. Perez Memorial Park

ABSTRACT This paper situates a park commemorating Plaquemines Parish segregationist “Judge” Leander Perez, whose political career spanned from 1919 until his death in 1969, in the changing landscape of post-Civil Rights era white supremacist ambitions. Opened by the parish in 1979, officially closed in 1984, and re-established by residents of a nearby majority-white neighborhood under another name in 2020, the site’s uses reflect shifting iterations of white spatial logics oriented toward maintaining power through racialized exclusion (Lipsitz 2007). As a ruin, Leander H. Perez Memorial Park’s trajectory contrasts those of nearby plantation manors that were similarly dedicated as heritage sites in the late 1970s. Park brochures, archival newspaper articles, and ethnographic interviews illuminate the ways in which the park’s representations of Perez made continuities of the Antebellum plantation racial order too legible for comfort for those who benefited from the political philosophy he represented. I elaborate “commemorative concealment” as a way of recognizing an assortment of practices through which dominant groups in a racial hegemony maintain power by hiding continuities of past exclusions in the heritage landscape.

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

The Privilege of Family History

Abstract This article situates the recent phenomenon of historians writing openly about their own familial and kin networks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of family history as a scholarly field, this article foregrounds the experiences and words of a number of African Americans who engaged in a diverse range of historical, genealogical, archival, and memorial “family history” work over the last two centuries. In the context of slavery, I approach family history as a form of enslaved resistance and anti-slavery argument. In the post-emancipation era, I consider African American family history within and beyond the nascent historical profession amid the racist national backlash to Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era. From the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the modern civil rights era, I explore the popularization of African American family history, the rise of the “new” social history, and the waves of men and women who entered the profession at the intersection of scholarship and social movement. In closing, I reflect upon African American family history in the post-civil rights era, from Roots to the rise of genetic genealogy, and the legacies of these transformations for the historical profession.

Prince and post-civil rights era Black music aesthetics

This article compares specific studio takes and live performances from the super deluxe Sign o’ the Times box set to argue that the ways Prince and his band integrate multiple styles and genres into their performances participate in the creation and development of a post-civil rights era Black popular music aesthetic. In particular, I demonstrate how the intellectual and physical labour of musical performance and sonic interaction found throughout the box set expands conceptions of what Black popular music should and could sound like. This article analyses four performances. It begins by examining two versions of ‘Witness 4 the Prosecution’. In version 1, Prince utilizes a more guitar-based rock sound, while the second presents a more synth-based approach that incorporates the new sound possibilities of music technologies. Through this comparison, I demonstrate how the way Prince works through these performances represents the kind of sonic freedom and flexibility that was a hallmark of his work. I then turn to a comparison between the original release of ‘Forever in My Life’ and the live performance in Utrecht. While the original release emphasizes Prince’s vocals and the drum part, the live performance becomes a vehicle for improvisation and interaction. By analysing the distinctions between the studio and the live performance, I argue that by incorporating elements like improvisation and call and response, Prince and his band situate their approach to post-civil rights era Black popular music aesthetics within the trajectory of Black music history.

Langston Hughes and Dream Deferral

ABSTRACT “Langston Hughes and Dream Deferral” examines the protests over George Floyd’s murder through the lens of Langston Hughes’s famous motif of dream deferral. Keith Gilyard argues that Hughes’s primary concern as a poet was illuminating the process by which black people’s dreams have been deferred throughout American history. However, much of the essay focuses on conflicting viewpoints on black resistance in the post-civil rights era. Gilyard shows how Hughes speaks to contemporary issues, interweaving between the poet’s commentaries on politics and the controversies over the use of violence during the protests.

Politics Based on Skin Color? The Case of U.S. Congressman Joseph Anh Cao (2009-2011)

This article focuses on the political dimension of U.S. elections and uses anthropological methods to analyze racial politics in New Orleans and Louisiana. Situating the research within the color-blindness ideology in the Post-civil Rights Era, the article discusses the continuity of racial inequality in the United States. By presenting the case of U.S. Congressman Joseph Anh Cao (2009-2011), the article argues that although the color-blindness ideology has been deployed since the 1960s, skin color continues to be a variable for redistricting practice in the United States. The successful U.S. Congress run of Mr. Cao in the 2008 election should not be considered that American society has become non-biased. Instead, his defeat in 2010 is an evidence that the United States has not yet been color-blind. Received 18th August 2021; Revised 12th February 2022; Accepted 26th March 2022

#1plus1plus1is3

#1plus1plus1is3

Understanding Black-White Differences in Support for the Racial Invariance Thesis: Lessons Learned From Philadelphia Area Residents

The racial invariance thesis contends causes of offending are similar across race/ethnicity. Black Criminology perceives some tension with this claim, suggesting instead that Black people share a unique worldview due to the racial oppression they face. This worldview may make Black people more receptive to criminological explanations identifying race-specific pathways to committing crime. In the post-Civil Rights era, many white people explain social phenomena like crime in colorblind ways. This study used a random sample of Philadelphia area residents to explore whether Black people were less likely than white people to support the racial invariance thesis. Logistic regression analyses revealed the odds of Black Philadelphians agreeing with the racial invariance thesis were 85% higher than the odds for white Philadelphians.

Undocumented Irish Need Apply

AbstractIn the late 1980s, amid immigration reform in the United States, legislators and lobbyists secured generous visa allotments for Irish immigrants, whose path to legal residency in the United States narrowed after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quota system. Claiming that the new law discriminated against Europeans, Irish advocates framed their campaign as an effort to diversify the post-1965 immigrant pool, which was predominantly Asian and Latin American. By examining the rhetoric deployed in congressional hearings and media appearances, this article considers how groups like the Irish negotiated the terms of their whiteness in the post–civil rights era. It also addresses the global dimensions of this case study, including Irish lobbyists’ coalition with other (nonwhite) immigrant groups, concurrent immigration reform in Australia and Canada, the effect of the Northern Irish civil war and US-Irish diplomatic relations, and its legacies in a newly multicultural contemporary Ireland.

Immigration and the Remaking of Black America

In Immigration and the Remaking of Black America, sociologist Tod G. Hamilton confronts the trope that black immigrants have always achieved social and economic outcomes superior to African Americans. While conventional narratives pathologize African Americans as being culturally deficient compared to immigrants, Hamilton challenges this interpretation and offers a new reading of how black immigration trends are shaping the United States by using original and innovative statistical analysis. In eight chapters, Hamilton attempts to provide a new framework to understand an array of socio-economic disparities among the black population of America.Weaving together history and sociology, Hamilton examines the outcomes of black immigrants from fourteen countries across Africa and the Caribbean. The early chapters provide a sweeping yet thoughtful synthesis of black immigration since the twentieth century, the extant literature on labor market disparities, and Hamilton's own theoretical considerations. Importantly, Hamilton documents how scholars have feuded over how to weigh assumptions of cultural inferiority against structural barriers when comparing African Americans to black immigrants. Though the former has often been presumed, Hamilton posits that empirical evidence does not lend support to cultural theories. Rather, prior comparisons have failed to fully account for variations within the black immigrant population, the changing racial contexts from pre- and post–civil rights eras, and the implications of selective migration.In the remaining chapters, Hamilton uses regressions and statistical modeling to explore historical and contemporary disparities in labor market outcomes, homeownership, health, and intermarriage. Though inequalities between whites and blacks are stark, Hamilton employs three methodological tools that prove instructive and reveal gaps between black immigrants and African Americans as well as within the African American population itself. First, when comparing black immigrants vis-à-vis African Americans, Hamilton disaggregates the latter into “movers” (those who internally migrated, traditionally from South to North) and “nonmovers,” in order to better reflect the positive effects of selective migration and hold any questions of cultural difference constant. This distinction proves pivotal in his investigation and helps to account for various unobserved factors. Second, Hamilton implements a cohort analysis that traces black immigrant populations over their tenure in the United States. Lastly, Hamilton provides a detailed gendered analysis that reveals how black immigrant women fair in relation to both their male counterparts as well as African American women. Hamilton adds further nuance by separating black immigrants by native country to uncover new regional disparities. While readers untrained in sociological statistics may find Hamilton's models complicated, his analysis and interpretation are clear and incisive.In almost all contemporary areas of analysis, black immigrants have similar or slightly better outcomes than African American movers, who in turn, consistently outperform nonmovers. In reviewing labor market disparities, Hamilton's findings challenge prior assumptions that black Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century held advantages over African Americans. While their outcomes did improve with their duration in the United States, contemporary data reveals that over time almost all black immigrant labor force participation rates converge or surpass those of black and white Americans. In regard to homeownership, newly landed black immigrants own homes at lower rates than African Americans. However, using cohort analysis, Hamilton determines that homeownership rates of all black immigrant arrival cohorts since 1970 have improved, converged, or surpassed those of African American movers. Moreover, while health statistics reveal some of the widest racial disparities, black immigrants report “fair” or “poor” health at the same rate as white Americans. Interestingly, Hamilton finds that immigrant health deteriorates over time, possibly due to exposure to the effects of racism and discrimination. Lastly, intermarriage is one of the best indicators of social acceptance. Since the civil rights movement, white intermarriage with Hispanics and Asians has increased considerably; intermarriage with blacks, however, accounts for only 12 percent of all interracial marriages. Hamilton's findings lead him to conclude that W.E.B. Du Bois's color line of the twentieth century has shifted from Black-White to one that is Black-Nonblack. Together these findings indicate that both selective migration and historical context—namely migration in the post–Civil Rights Era—play a pivotal role in shaping immigrant outcomes.While Black Immigration challenges long-held notions of cultural inferiority, uncovers new patterns of stratification, and encourages future researchers to disaggregate the black population, some may find that it does not appropriately grapple with the impact of mass incarceration. Though Hamilton notes incarceration as a methodological limitation, he only does so as a variable impacting African Americans. Mass incarceration is a defining structure of modern American racial politics and Hamilton emphasizes the role of historical context and the post–Civil Rights Era as important for shaping immigrant outcomes, yet the book does not consider how the carceral system impacts black immigrants. Nevertheless, Hamilton presents socio-economic data and comprehensive analysis that will prove useful to historians and sociologists alike.

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement Reynaldo Anderson (bio) There is an energy abroad in the world today that is influenced by financialization, digitalization, commodification and globalization that seeks to marginalize presence, erase our memories, and quiet our voices. Yet we persist, we refuse to die, and our persistence has yielded fruit. The Black Speculative Arts Movement is a product of memories that survive in our cultural DNA that remind us of the need for safe harbors to imagine Black utopias for the beautiful unborn and honor the best of our past. More specifically, the Black Speculative tradition gave birth to what we now refer to as Afrofuturism with its roots in 19th century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment. The cultural critic Greg Tate asserted that a people without visionaries is a people without an inspirational path to the future. Black speculative literatures genesis lies in the 19th century with the work of men and women like Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs and Pauline Hopkins. Their work grappled with the intersection of the oppression of African people, scientific racism, esotericism, and politics. Their work and other Black writers paralleled the emergence of the European science fiction tradition. The origins of the Black Speculative Arts Movement lie in the planning and execution of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination cocurated by John Jennings and I in a 2015 exhibition at the Schomburg library in Harlem, New York. The conceptual and speculative design for the exhibition were heavily influenced by the vision and scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and the ideas and material culture produced by artists and intellectuals that contribute to Black speculative culture. However, the social movement dynamism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement reflects historical processes, global in scope, that have historical currents in societal changes that have emerged the last 50 years. Although the movement is indebted to earlier Black diasporic art formations that date back to the early 20th century, it has been heavily influenced by the social changes described as Future Shock, Megatrends, and Acceleration. For example, what can be described as the Future Shock era of social change of the 60s and 70s aptly described by writer Alvin Toffler and singer Curtis Mayfield. Future Shock, or the social disorientation that accompanied rapid social change in technology and social values shaped the artistic work and production of creatives like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and other artists and [End Page 5] thinkers of the period producing work that was in conversation with the global Black liberation struggle and Black Arts movement of the period in question. Moreover, the work of these artists would sow the seeds of creative thought and praxis later generations of creatives would refer to as Afrofuturism. However, the work of these creatives was only the beginning of forecasting the currents of social change that would be referred to by some as the era of megatrends of the late 20th century. The megatrends of the late 20th century reflected changes in capitalism that were tied to the end of the Cold War and an intensification of the spread of neoliberalism and globalization whose ideas and conceptual origins were reflected in the policies and ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, during this period of the late 80s and early 90s scholars like Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and others would produce intellectual works that would increasingly reflect a post-civil rights era sentiment among Black scholars. Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian characterized the environment best when she wrote an essay “The Race for Theory” in 1987 that described the environment surrounding the attempt to frame the new environment. During the period in question, Black Studies scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and C.T. Keto at Temple University, wrote about the destiny of African people in relation to time and space, and the need to be futurologists, and comic creators like Dwane McDuffie illustrated futuristic Black sensibilities. During this social milieu cultural critic Mark Dery wrote an article “Black to the Future” that observed the nexus between black speculative...

“Stay Down”: Moonlight and Negative Affect as an Analytic

“Stay Down”: <i>Moonlight</i> and Negative Affect as an Analytic

“Save Auburn Avenue for Our Black Heritage”: Debating Development in Post–Civil Rights Atlanta

This article investigates debates concerning the redevelopment of Atlanta’s historic Black business district, “Sweet” Auburn Avenue, in the 1980s. It argues that the revitalization debates suggest two ways of conceptualizing the post–civil rights era; first, as an era of limits in which shifts in the global economy and the national political landscape narrowed the scope of what liberal Black politicians and civic activists believed what politically possible, and second, as an era of anxiety in which political and economic crises fostered nostalgia about the Black past and uncertainty about the future of Black Americans. Focusing on the divisions that emerged among Black Atlantans over the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Site and the construction of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the article analyzes how the political-economic constraints and anxieties of the period informed various visions of redevelopment. In doing so, it reveals how the conditions of the post–civil rights era, and the affect produced by them, structured urban Black politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century.