Post Civil Rights Era Research Articles

Race, crime, and Republican strength: Minority politics in the post-civil rights era

This investigation assesses the relationships between racial threat and partisan dominance in state legislatures with tests of interactive hypotheses. The findings show that historically contingent expectations derived from racial threat theory, Republican law and order campaign appeals, and fundamentalist strength account for Republican strength in the legislatures. Two-way fixed-effects estimates based on pooled time-series analyses of 799 state-years in the post-civil rights era show that the percentage of Republicans in the state legislatures grew after increases in African American presence and the violent crime rates. The combined effects of a growth in African American and fundamentalist populations also account for increased Republican seats in these bodies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain votes provide evidence about the intervening links between minority threat, the menace posed by high violent crime rates, and increased Republican strength in the state legislatures.

“Like an Old Soul Record”

Abstract Examinations of the relationship of queer sexuality and the hip-hop generation have recently emerged in academia. However, little or no work has been done that explores hip-hop's bisexual, independent poster child, Me'Shell Ndegeocello. Since her debut in 1993, Ndegeocello's relationship to hip-hop has been both a reflection of and influence upon understandings of race, gender, and sexuality for a generation of queer feminists of color. In this paper, I examine how her emergence and popularity mark an important political and ideological moment for queer Black women in the post-civil rights era. Grounded in the works of Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Jewelle Gomez, I examine how media representations of Ndegeocello coupled with her lyrics and music demonstrate the complexities and contradictions of “hip-hop feminism.” In particular, the 1990s represent a movement away from the Reagan/Bush era that characterized not only the teenage years of hip-hop culture, but important cultural and economic advances of the Black community. At the same time, this decade marks the shift to the more “liberal” Clinton administration, where the advances of previous generations began to decline. In this context I ask in what ways does Me'Shell Ndegeocello represent a generation of young queer women who were raised after (and sometimes on) early Black feminist critique? Further, how is her work emblematic of Black feminist understandings of gender and sexuality at the same time that she complicates this same discourse?

Shall We March On?

Using data from the 1996 National Black Election Study, this study examines the extent of non-electoral activism in the post—civil rights era. Specifically looking at attending a political rally, signing a petition, attending a protest, and participating in picketing and boycotting, the author finds that membership in organizations with an African American—focused agenda and membership in community-based organizations are important facilitators of non-electoral activism among Blacks. An important finding is that, in the modern context, religiosity in the African American community works to suppress non-electoral political involvement. These findings are important because they suggest that the historical image of the Black church as an incubator of an oppositional political culture is no longer accurate.

Men's Soaps

In this paper I argue that the Discovery Channel's reality-based automotive show American Chopper produces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy of the contemporary United States. In its on-screen presentation of blue-collar work, American Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the moment when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States. In its presentation of a world of masculine labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a nostalgic world of blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always understood to be male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suffered by hegemonic masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal consumer capital and the traditional consumption of the American dream as coterminous discourses of celebrity identity, the show elides the still vast gaps in opportunity and remuneration in the contemporary United States.

Soul covers: rhythm and blues remakes and the struggle for artistic identity (Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe Snow)

Acknowledgments ix Preface: How the Parts Relate to the Whole xiii Introduction: I Live in the Lyrics: On Truth, Intent, Image, Identity, and Song Covers 1 She's the Next One: Aretha Franklin's Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington and the Black Women's Vocal Legacy 25 Something like Wholeness: Al Green's Call Me and the Struggle for Thematic Integrity 81 Miss Snow, Are You Black?: Second Childhood and the Cultural Politics of Musical Style in the Post-Civil Rights Era 137 Coda: Going Home 201 Notes 213 Bibliography 225 Index 235

Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity by James Cobb Amanda Coleman Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. James Cobb. Oxford University Press, New York, 2005. 416pp. $30.00 hardcover. (ISBN 13 978-0-19-508959-2) In the introduction to Away Down South, James Cobb cautions that he has not attempted to write the history of the South, but rather, a history of the South, one that focuses on southern identity from colonial times to the present. Cobb’s history revolves around three questions: (1) how did the notion of a distinct southern identity come about? (2) how did southerners comprehend this identity? and (3) how have socioeconomic changes in the post-Civil Rights era impacted the essence and interpretation of southern identity? As Cobb notes, the scope of these questions represents quite an ambitious undertaking. By welding these broad themes together, Cobb has produced a work that can aid geographers and other scholars in explicating the persistence of a differentiated ‘southernness’ vis-à-vis the region’s increasing incorporation into American society since the Civil Rights movement. The twelve chapters of Away Down South can be roughly divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1–4) charts the evolution and propagation of ‘southern distinctiveness’ from the post-Revolutionary period through the early twentieth century. Integrating the voluminous scholarly literature on this topic, Cobb describes how reliance on plantation agriculture and slave labor became the distinguishing features of ‘the South’ within the new republic, and how, particularly after 1800, northern leaders came to equate ‘northern’ and ‘American’ values, thus marginalizing the South’s role in the nation. Despite this ‘othering’ process, Cobb [End Page 375] argues that southerners did not forge a cohesive identity until the mid-1800s, as northern attacks on slavery came to be viewed as attacks on southern society more generally. After the Civil War, southern identity building continued via the construction of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth and the ‘New South’ creed, until these orthodoxies came under fire from southern academics in the 1920s, instigating an identity crisis among the region’s intelligentsia. The second section of the book (chapters 5–7) explicates the conflicted nature of southern identity, in part through an analysis of southern literary works, with an emphasis on the novels of William Faulkner. Cobb also devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of W.J. Cash’s influential 1941 exposé, The Mind of the South, pointing out the importance of this work in debunking the myth of a vaunted southern past and in illustrating how reconciling that past with the present created conflict within the southern psyche. This discussion prefaces Cobb’s treatment of “South of Guilt and Shame,” the post-World War II South in which the Jim Crow system and the mythologies that sustained it, such as the sanctity of southern white womanhood, were increasingly assailed by critics within and outside the region. The final section of the book (chapters 8–12) concerns southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era, one in which the South experienced significant socioeconomic change and, seemingly, greater homogenization with mainstream American culture. This ‘Americanization of the South’ led observers to pen epitaphs for the ‘Old’ South when faced with the loss of cultural distinctiveness that seemed to accompany the emergence of what Cobb terms the ‘No’ South. One chapter in this section explores black southerners’ observations on the essence of ‘southernness’; this insightful discussion sets up the final two chapters, which concern contemporary debates over interpretation and commemoration of southern history and identity politics. Cobb, to his credit, is obviously dedicated to incorporating the experiences of black southerners into this work on southern identity, avoiding (and overtly criticizing) the traditional pitfall of equating ‘southern’ and ‘white.’ Cobb’s struggle to fashion a coherent story of southern identity from the disparate historical experiences and contemporary attitudes of the region’s black and white residents is admirable, but this focus on ‘race’ often leaves little room for discussions of class and gender, both inextricably bound to the South’s traditional social hierarchy. Cobb includes an interesting (and often amusing) discussion of class differences among southern whites that emerged in the post...

Gender and Ethnicity: Patterns of Electoral Success and Legislative Advocacy Among Latina and Latino State Officials in Four States

SUMMARY In this article we examine the patterns of gendered representation and related legislative advocacy within Latino delegations to four state legislatures in the Southwest. Most agree that one of the most significant changes in American politics in the post-civil rights era is the increasing election of women and people of color, but there is less agreement about the magnitude, consistency, and impact of this representation. Moreover, little is known about how these patterns vary by state. First, we examine the patterns of gendered and ethnic election in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas from 1990–2004. We find considerable variation across these states, relative to both women and Latinos, but the presence of Latinas within the Latino/a delegation has noticeably increased across all the states and at a rate that outpaces the increase in women in the legislatures overall. Second, using original survey data supplemented with elite interviews, we explore perceived differences in the representational priorities and related behaviors, issue agendas, and policy successes between Latinas and Latino men. We find a number of similarities but also find distinct differences that reveal Latinas place greater emphasis on representing the interests of multiple minority groups, promoting conflict resolution, and building consensus in both the legislature as a whole and within the Latino caucus. Latinas also are more likely than Latino men to introduce and successfully pass legislation that addresses the issue agenda held by both Latina and Latino legislators.

Still Killing Mockingbirds: Narratives of Race and Innocence in Hollywood’s Depiction of the White Messiah Lawyer

Through a narrative analysis of movies confronting issues of race and racism in the post-civil rights era, we suggest that the movie To Kill a Mockingbird ushered in a new genre for movies about race which presented an image of a white male hero, or perhaps savior, for the black community. We suggest that this genre outlasted the era of the Civil Rights Movement and continues to impact popular cultural discourses about race in post-civil rights America. Post-civil rights films share the central elements of the anti-racist white male hero genre, but they also provide a plot twist that simultaneously highlights the racial innocence of the central characters and reinforces the ideology of liberal individualism. Reading these films within their broader historical context, we show how the innocence of these characters reflects not only the recent neo-conservative emphasis on “color blindness,” but presents a cinematic analogue to the anti-affirmative action narrative of the innocent white victim.

FROM OLD SOUTH TO NEW SOUTH? BLACK-WHITE RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION IN MICROPOLITAN AREAS

This article examines black-white residential segregation in micropolitan areas across the South. Micropolitan areas are newly defined urban clusters with a core population that ranges from 10,000 to 50,000. By shifting the focus to the nonmetropolitan South, we take debates about the “American dilemma” back to a historically important terrain of black-white relations that few scholars have systematically examined in the post-Civil Rights era. Using the most recent census, we find that the dynamics of residential segregation in our sample of micropolitan areas reflect both important opportunities and constraints. In contrast to their counterparts in metropolitan areas, blacks in the nonmetropolitan South face “only” moderate levels of segregation. Surprisingly, southern micropolitan areas afford greater opportunities for spatial assimilation to the least economically advantaged blacks as well as those who are more advantaged. Perhaps most importantly, this finding holds for micropolitan areas located in the historic Black Belt as well as elsewhere; however, several patterns emerge that suggest a set of barriers to spatial assimilation similar to those facing African Americans in metropolitan areas. In sum, our analysis clarifies the complexities of black-white segregation in the “New South/Old South,” pushing scholars to more systematically map the distinct trajectories of “American Apartheid” across time and place in the United States.

Intersections of Inequality: Understanding Marginalization and Privilege in the Post-Civil Rights Era

The post-civil rights era has left an important dilemma in U.S. politics. Despite the fact that the United States has become more integrated across racial and gendered lines since the 1960s, inequality, particularly economic inequality, has grown. Although much of that inequality continues to fall along racial, gender, and class lines, the opportunities afforded by the “rights revolution” have also created an important heterogeneity of privilege within marginal groups. As social scientists, how best can we identify the sources and results of this inequality? More specifically, how can we better understand the crosscutting political effects of both marginalization and privilege within and among groups in U.S. society? I contend that intersections theory may be a useful place to begin, and that the idea of intersectionality could provide a fruitful framework with which to understand issues of inequality in the post-civil rights era. Such a framework would help address some of the theoretical problems that sometimes arise within empirical work on marginal groups in political science and, ideally, allow scholars to understand better how experiences of marginalization and privilege affect the shape and character of American political life.

Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other

We explore Halloween as a uniquely constructive space for engaging racial concepts and identities, particularly through ritual costuming. Data were collected using 663 participant observation journals from college students across the U.S. During Halloween, many individuals actively engage the racial other in costuming across racial/ethnic lines. Although some recognize the significance of racial stereotyping in costuming, it is often dismissed as being part of the holiday's social context. We explore the costumes worn, as well as responses to cross-racial costuming, analyzing how “playing” with racialized concepts and making light of them in the “safe” context of Halloween allows students to trivialize and reproduce racial stereotypes while supporting the racial hierarchy. We argue that unlike traditional “rituals of rebellion,” wherein subjugated groups temporarily assume powerful roles, whites contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of “ritual of rebellion” in response to the seemingly restrictive social context of the post-Civil Rights era, and in a way that ultimately reinforces white dominance.

The Politics of Resentment in the Post–Civil Rights Era: Minority Threat, Homicide, and Ideological Voting in Congress

This study assesses whether racial and ethnic resentments still influence U.S. politics. Tests of hypotheses derived from minority threat theory and minority voting power stipulating quadratic relationships between minority presence and roll call votes for liberal legislation in the House of Representatives are conducted. In addition to these nonlinear associations, the political influence of the most menacing crime the public blames on underclass minorities is assessed as well. Fixed‐effects estimates based on analyses of 1,152 state‐years in the post–civil rights era indicate that the expected $$\textsf{U}$$ ‐shaped relationships are present between minority population size and roll call votes for liberal legislation. Additional findings suggest that expansions in the murder rates produced decreased support for liberal policies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain normally Democratic votes provide evidence about the intervening connections between the threat to white dominance posed by larger minority populations and reduced support for liberal legislation.

MTV's Jackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity

In the post-civil rights era, it is argued that some white men have adopted a marginalized positionality. This ‘white male backlash’ is often described as a distorted attempt to wrest social privilege from civil rights, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. Through ‘reflexive sadomasochism’ the white male subject is able to simultaneously express an aggressive and receptive identity. While this overt narrative of white male victimhood is a recurring theme in popular film it has only been discussed within the action-drama genre. In response, I rely on a textual analysis of the popular film and television series Jackass to explain an alternative version of white male victimhood, one that loosely resembles Bakhtin's carnivalesque. Jackass complicates an already complex discourse of white male disadvantage by portraying an abject white masculinity through parody and humour. Heteronormative white masculinity is reframed as antiheroic and marginalized, but it is also exposed to relentless mockery. Several sketches of Jackass are loaded with homoerotic inflections that potentially trouble a rigid heteronormative masculinity. As an ambiguous text devoted to grotesque realism and the ‘low other’, Jackass might signify a contemporary form of burlesque. In this light, the film appears to reaffirm dominant assumptions of white masculinity even as it lampoons the values of bourgeois society.

"The South Got Something to Say": Atlanta's Dirty South and the Southernization of Hip-Hop America

By summer of 1995, Atlanta-based rap group OutKast had watched their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, achieve platinum sales of over million. This feat earned them an award for Best New Group from The Source magazine and an invitation to attend publication's second annual awards in New York City. Goodie Mob, another Atlanta group, joined them on trip up north. As Big Gipp, a member of Goodie Mob, remembered, their reception from New York audience was less than favorable: When Big Boi and Dre [of OutKast] got out there at those Source Awards, everybody was like, 'boooo, boooo, boooo.' I remember it was just OutKast and four Goodie Mob members and I was like, man.... Don't nobody even give a fuck about us folk. Leaving Source Awards that night, OutKast and Goodie Mob swore to each other to show all them motherfuckers that one day they're gonna have to fuck with us. (1) Over next decade, OutKast, Goodie Mob, and other southern rappers followed through on their intentions, moving to forefront of America's culture industry. In 2004 OutKast won six Grammys, including an Album of Year award, for their multi-platinum fifth effort, Speakerboxxx/The Lave Below. On that night, no in star-studded Los Angeles audience doubted that, as OutKast had yelled back at booing crowd nine years before, the got something to say. (2) What had to say reveals much about making and marketing of regional and racial identity in modern Most explicitly, rise of Atlanta's South rap music industry shows readiness of some African Americans in post-civil rights era not only to embrace their southernness but to sell it as well. Throughout 1990s, industry leaders and southern tappers promoted Dirty as a new type of rap music. A blending of older rap styles with southern music, accents, and themes, Dirty rap was also a bold statement from rappers who felt estranged from Atlanta's economic and social progress and excluded by their southernness from competing in a rap-music market dominated by New York and Los Angeles. By end of 1990s, however, their unique coupling of regional and racial identity had earned them increased attention from listeners and critics alike and a reputation as innovators of a fresh, new sound and style in culture. The next wave of southern rappers built on this emergent appeal but in process changed meaning of Dirty South. Leaving behind more troubling aspects of their regional identity, southern rappers after 2000 preferred to promote Dirty as a loosely defined, inclusive concept and a lucrative set of attractive commodities. Thus, by time OutKast accepted their Grammys in 2004, Dirty was not only a banner under which a wide variety of southern rappers now congregated. It was also a culture industry that had southernized what cultural critic Nelson George has termed multibillion dollar business of hip-hop America. (3) The importance of Atlanta's Dirty industry can only be understood by placing it in wider context of rap music in During 1970s and 1980s, everyday problems of life in urban black ghettos contributed to subject matter and complex politics of American rap. Though some critics dismissed rap's portrayals of racial identity as juvenile laudations of violence, sexism, and greed, cultural message of East Coast New York rappers and West Coast California rappers registered with young blacks and voyeuristic whites across America, creating for first time a profitable mass market for rap. During 1980s and early 1990s, record sales by New York rappers Run-DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and Los Angeles-Bay Area gangsta rappers N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur went into millions. Political conservatives, family groups, minority-rights groups, and older African Americans reacted strongly against raw sexuality and violence depicted in urban rap lyrics. …

Black/White Interracial Marriage Trends, 1850–2000

This article traces the trend in black/white interracial marriage between 1850-2000, using microlevel Census samples. The results show that the frequency of interracial marriage has been highly responsive to the dynamic nature of broader race relations. The growth of the Jim Crow racial state in the South and segregation in the North led to a drastic decline in the frequency of interracial marriage from 1880 to 1930. The frequency of interracial marriage increased with the waning of this system between 1930 and 1940, but only began to increase at a steady and rapid rate in the post-civil rights era. When disaggregated by region, the results suggest a process of “latent” racism in the non-South, and one of unequal gender suppression in the South. Results by nativity and education are also discussed.

Pure Black: Class, Color, and Intraracial Politics in Toni Morrison's Paradise

This essay explores black class privilege and associated questions of skin color and racial authenticity in Toni Morrison's 1997 novel, Paradise, written during a period fraught with intraracial ambivalence and confusion about what it means to be "black" in the post-Civil Rights era. In their obsession with biological racial purity, Morrison's "8-rock" characters corporealize racial authenticity, a concept that usually exists for African Americans as a cultural ideal. Paradise ultimately critiques the black nationalist desire for a "pure," and purely "authentic," form of African American identity, in the process highlighting the frequent suppression of the multiracial in authenticity discourse.

Academic Citizenship and Public Service for Modern Higher Learning in a Post-Civil Rights Era

Through student codes of conduct, service-learning and volunteerism, one university is pursuing its mission to develop civic-minded leaders and civil servants with core values. Activities that merge inside and outside classroom xperiences nurture these fundamental values and foster the foundation for leadership development.

Review of Tim Brooks. 2004. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press

The post-civil rights era gave rise to a surge in revisionist scholarship devoted to African American music, much of it inspired by Eileen Southern’s seminal Music of Black Americans ([1971] 1997). Southern and the scholars who followed in her wake restored lost musicians, lost images, lost words, lost scores, and lost experiences to the historical record, which radically changed how we study, perceive, and teach American music. Tim Brooks’s magnificent new book on America’s earliest black recording artists, Lost Sounds, is a treasure chest of new information that reminds us, should we feel complacent, that there is still much work to be done in recovering and understanding America’s musical past.

Housing, Urban Development, and the Persistance of Racial Inequality in the Post-Civil Rights Era South

This article locates the well-known dramatic events of the 1957 Little Rock school crisis within the longer-term postwar racial struggles in that city, and in particular the ongoing battles over race, housing and urban redevelopment that continue today.

“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife” Interrogating Race and Self-Identity in Loving v. Virginia

The article reexamines the Loving V. Virginia case by focusing on their tri-racial community of Central Point, Virginia and Mildred Loving's self identity as an Indian woman. Loving's self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving's marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of Black/white intermarriage, but rather adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy which continues in the post-Civil Rights era.