Post Civil Rights Era Research Articles

Insurgent Visions Of FREEDOM: Migrant Resistance Against The Settler Colonial Nation And Neoliberal Carceral State During The 1995 Esmor Immigration Prison Rebellion

The following paper provides a historical analysis of the 1995 New Jersey Esmor immigration prison rebellion and its aftermath, including two civil class actions, Jama v. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Jama v. Esmor Correctional Services Inc. The Esmor prison rebellion presents a rare example of migrant-led resistance efforts against the neoliberal Carceral State and settler colonial ideologies during the post-Civil Rights Era.

America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census by Joel Perlmann

Reviewed by: America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census by Joel Perlmann Libby Garland (bio) America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. By Joel Perlmann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. viii + 451 pp. In this lengthy study, Joel Perlmann reconstructs the bureaucratic decision-making, social scientific debates, and political wrangling that produced the categories into which the federal government has sorted immigrants—and the populace generally—according to "origins." He traces how those diverse "origins" have been understood, variously, as "race," "people," "nationality," and "ethnicity." These categories were constantly re-forged during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The granular history underlying this process of category-creation, Perlmann hopes, "may help dispel illusions about the nature and authority of the classifications and about the limits of their utility, while still leaving us"—both social scientists and, in the post-civil rights era, those fighting for racial justice—"able to appreciate and profit from that utility" (398). Perlmann explores questions that matter to historians of migration and race. In particular, he addresses an issue central to debates over whiteness in the United States: the relationship between "two different kind of race difference," meaning the differences among European newcomers, on the one hand, and, on the other, "between Europeans and others—that is, between whites and nonwhites" (6). It was not so much that Europeans became white, he suggests, as that intra-European racial differences ultimately became less salient. Perlmann also attends to the outsized role Jews played, both as objects of classification and as participants, in the debates over state efforts to define ethno-racial categories. Part I describes the complicated career of the "List of Races and Peoples." This classification scheme was introduced by New York-based immigration officials hoping to sort and track the increasingly broad array [End Page 650] of newcomers arriving in the late nineteenth century. The List was especially geared toward differentiating among European immigrants from multiethnic empires, who officials felt were getting jumbled together in government data. A few years later, the newly minted US Immigration Commission used the List as the basis for its multivolume report, and, shortly thereafter, proposed that the Census Bureau adopt the List as the framework for a new question on race. All the parties who engaged with the List grappled with conceptual confusion, but Jewish activists were particularly vocal critics, protesting the label of "Hebrew" in official data. Their objections threw a wrench in the government's data-gathering work, pushing officials to justify their schema and derailing the proposal to include the new "race" question on the 1910 census. Instead, the census continued to use "race" to signify differences along white/nonwhite lines, differentiating European peoples only by "mother tongue." Part II examines the "National Origins" immigration law of 1924. Perlmann argues that this law, which drastically reduced the migration of eastern and southern Europeans, represents an important instance of racial distinctions among whites having significant discriminatory impact. This was so even as the law also enshrined an even greater divide between whites and nonwhites, most forcefully in its commitment to near-total Asian exclusion. Perlmann also explores the immigration legislation in the context of other policy debates around racial differences, including Supreme Court decisions declaring Asians racially ineligible to naturalization and the move to reclassify Mexicans as racially distinct in the 1930 census. Part III explores the gradual embrace of the concept of "ethnicity" in the latter half of the twentieth century, both in social scientists' work and in government policy. Perlmann notes that "ethnicity" continued to reflect confusion around the significance of "origins." The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, for example, stipulated that visa applicants must state their "ethnic classification." This provision flummoxed government officials charged with implementing the law, however, and lengthy debates ensued. Meanwhile, Jewish lawmakers and advocates objected to categorizing "Jewish" as an ethnic classification, as their counterparts earlier had to including "Hebrew" as a category. Part IV discusses shifting meanings of "race" and "ethnicity" during the civil rights era and beyond. Perlmann describes the increasing significance of official ethno-racial classification practices to the quest for racial justice, as federal data on race and...

Ideological Legitimacy, Color-blindness, and Racially Conservative Organizations

AbstractAlthough scholars of racial inequality have investigated the transformation of racial ideologies in the post-Civil Rights Era, comparatively little research has been done on a corresponding transformation in racial advocacy organizing. Using an original dataset, I introduce racially conservative organizations, provide a history of their growth from 1960 to 2000, and estimate their formation in metropolitan areas over three decades to better specify the factors that led to their emergence. Measures of organizational strength, stability, and growth reveal that racially conservative organizations thrived relative to white extremist organizations in the second half of the 20th century, alongside the de-legitimation of explicit racism and rise of color-blind racism. The multivariate analysis indicates that metropolitan areas with increased political opportunities witnessed a greater likelihood of organizational formation among racial conservatives. In the 1970s, threats to dominant group interests emboldened racial conservatives and incited mobilization. However, in later decades, these conditions weakened dominant group interests in a way that deterred collective action. Racially conservative organizations are more likely to form in contexts that provide them with legitimacy to mobilize around racially sensitive issues. The findings challenge past research that conflates racial conservatism and white extremism and assumes that they share the same determinants.

Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation

AbstractThis essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of “reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth.

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

Scripted parallels: the paradoxical audacity of Scandal’s Papa Pope as the “Black fantastic”

ABSTRACTI theorize Rowan “Eli” Pope’s performance of Black masculinity on Scandal as a portrayal of what Iton terms the “black fantastic” (Iton, 2008. In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post civil-rights era. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 16). As a Black fantastic character, Rowan represents a material improvement in televised representations of Black masculinity; however, his character is theorized as paradoxical because he remains always already entrapped by the Black male as beast caricature. Although Rowan’s storylines and monologues do indeed refuse absolute foreclosure into the caricature—thereby signifying progressively deviant Black fantastic sensibilities (Iton, 2008)—ultimately his mitigated emancipation is dependent upon White male characters opposed to his own autonomy. As White male characters who lie, swindle, and murder, Fitzgerald Grant, Cyrus Beene, and Jake Ballard offer the primary assurance through scripted parallels that Rowan’s evil is not inherent to his Black masculinity. Ergo, I argue that Rowan simultaneously transforms and stagnates the television landscape by challenging and legitimizing the Black male as beast caricature. While the steadily increasing visibility of Black fantastic characters across multiple media genres is commendable, ideologically catering to Whiteness does not reflect innovative twenty-first-century television. Rather, such practices are tired and cliché—even in Shondaland.

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.

Black Girl Thought in the Work of Ntozake Shange

In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins’s work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.

Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

Marc Dollinger's well-written and provocative work provides an innovative interpretation of the mythic story of the alliance between Jews and blacks forged over the twentieth century and rent asunder in the post–civil rights era as a result of the rise of black power. Historians have long studied that alliance, and have generally agreed on its outlines. Jews, in becoming part of the white majority, imagined themselves to have a special relationship to African Americans based on their similar histories of victimization and Jewish support for civil rights causes. African Americans, meanwhile, saw Jewish support as inspiring but also patronizing. Dollinger does not challenge those ideas, but brings key insights that illuminate how Jews understood and benefited from the demise of the relationship when Jewish and black interests diverged publicly, primarily over Zionism and affirmative action in the late 1970s. He argues convincingly that the role of black power in this process has not been adequately examined by historians. Black power was a positive force, according to Dollinger, paving the way for Jews (and a wide variety of other identity groups) to assert their own values and self-determination in American society. Rather than heralding the end of the imagined black-Jewish alliance, black power created the opportunity for Jews to be part of a new pluralism that ushered in a rebirth of American Jewish life: the creation of Jewish studies in universities, havurot and new Jewish rituals, liberal day schools, social activism around Israel and Soviet Jewry, and Jewish feminism. As Dollinger persuasively argues, black power, rather than being “bad for the Jews” was “good for the Jews.”

Free and clear: national origins and progress toward unencumbered homeownership among post-civil rights era immigrants in the US

ABSTRACT Homeownership has been a central part of community and wealth building strategies in the US, and prior research demonstrates that Post-Civil Rights Era immigrants have employed these strategies with remarkable success. However, research on immigrant homeownership does not differentiate that which is encumbered by mortgage debt and that which is ‘free and clear’ or unencumbered. This is an important distinction since wealth held in the form of encumbered home equity can be fleeting. I use US Census and American Community Survey data to chart progress toward unencumbered homeownership among immigrants born in the 1950s who immigrated to the US in the 1970s. Observing this cohort across a 25 year period (1990–2015), I uncover a robust pattern of unencumbered home equity accumulation as they approach their retirement ages. By the end of the period, this small cohort had amassed more than 66 billion dollars in unencumbered home equity, and some immigrant groups exhibited higher rates of free and clear homeownership than their US-born White counterparts. Other immigrant groups lagged in ways that cannot be explained by compositional differences between groups. I address the theoretical implications of these findings and offer suggestions for a new research agenda on immigrant advancement toward free and clear homeownership.

Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey

Reviewed by: Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey Tasneem Siddiqui Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Edited by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 221. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1184-4.) 2018 The prescient release of Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is extremely important in the current historical moment. Dr. King the radical, the anti-imperialist, the antiracist, and the anticapitalist is a King that desperately needs closer study in contemporary U.S. society. As the legacy of King's praxis is reinvigorated through a revival of the Poor People's Campaign, organizers, intellectuals, policy makers, spiritual advisers, and everyday people are reengaging the map, the blueprint of the dialectic of struggle that their ancestors laid out for them. To be sure, if King were alive today, he would be at the forefront of the issues of racial justice, the war against and criminalization of the poor, environmental justice, sanctuary cities, reproductive justice, sexual violence, prison abolition, and antiwar movements. King understood that the multi-issue experience of people's lives, the quotidian acts of state violence they confront, and the social problems they navigate have deep historical roots that are intertwined. To map the shifts and transformations of King's revolutionary thought and praxis, as James L. Taylor reminds in his chapter, each iteration, each stage of growth and expansion for King, must be understood as "intensely different" and as a result of King's radical participation in black social movements (p. 154). [End Page 227] King transformed, evolved his praxis, and sharpened his modalities of analysis and resistance through this process of struggle. Editors Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey attend to King's trajectory in this "diverse and unique collection of multidisciplinary works by scholars from around the country that focus on contemporary social policy and issue areas in American society," applying the legacy and radical sociopolitical thought of King (p. 6). Dream and Legacy is organized in three parts covering politics and public policy, foreign affairs and Africa, and social developments. Part 1 focuses on voter suppression through the implementation of voter identification laws; criminality and social justice; affirmative action policies and the dearth of faculty of color in the academy; and health, health-care disparities, and access issues as policies that adversely affect African-descended communities in the United States. Part 2 addresses the potentialities of applying the internationalism of King's sociopolitical thought and practice to issues of foreign policy through developing a framework of "foreign policy justice" (p. 83). The second portion of Part 2 considers how King might have approached the limitations and challenges of foreign policy as it adversely affects Africa, paying particular attention to the historical legacies of black and Third World solidarity during decolonization and black liberation movements from the 1940s to the late twentieth century. King is the most known and yet the least understood radical political figure. Part 3 attempts to further parse a deeper understanding of King the revolutionary by examining the contemporary relevance of his sociopolitical thought in developing critiques of racism, voter suppression, economic violence, and cultural production and resistance while conceptualizing a critical consciousness to rights-bearing discourse. The chapters in this collective work emphasize King's trenchant critique of the governing logics of the United States as a modern Western racial capitalist settler colonial society and the ways it organizes to "legitimize and promote violence and war" (p. 202). King drew attention to the ways American institutions are maintained through this logic of (policy) violence. This dialectical relationship is expressed through the contemporary conditions of "ecological peril"; the condition of the global poor and the siphoning of global wealth and resources into the hands of a few; the expansion of paramilitary violence wielded by an ever-increasing militarized police; perpetual global warfare; the...

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David W. Blight and Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David W. Blight and Jim Downs Brian Kelly (bio) Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Edited by David W. Blight and Jim Downs. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Cloth $79.95; paper, $24.95.) The problem at the core of this collection—the contested and multiple meanings of freedom after the American Civil War—enters the [End Page 168] historiography of emancipation from two distinct vantage points. First, the differing perspectives of the main protagonists—planters, freedpeople, deliverers—figure prominently in a complicated historical narrative. They brought varying, often irreconcilable understandings of freedom to bear in the protracted confrontation opened up by emancipation. W. E. B. DuBois noted more than eighty years ago in Black Reconstruction in America that these "contending and antagonistic groups spoke different and unknown tongues," shouting past one another while attempting to advance their particular visions. There is a second path by which differing conceptions of freedom enter the literature: interpretive differences among historians aiming to reconstruct the past have shaped understanding no less than the documentary record itself. Malicious assumptions about black inferiority permeated scholarship associated with the Dunning school well into the twentieth century. Subjected to withering assault by DuBois in 1935, it was ultimately dislodged after a revisionist surge driven by the postwar black freedom struggle. This new framework found full expression in the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. Foner acknowledges his debt to DuBois, and like others attempting to bring the archive to bear on the interpretive framework animating Black Reconstruction in America, his work reflects not merely the rejection of Dunning's crude racism but a positive embrace of DuBois's attention to political economy. Much of the impressive scholarship generated in the immediate post–civil rights era attributes substantial responsibility for the gap between freedpeople's expansive vision and Redemption's dismal reality to the outworkings of Republican free labor ideology. Leading scholars focused closely on new challenges facing the "emancipated worker," locating freedom's shortcomings not only in the malevolence of the usual suspects—the Klan, embittered ex-Confederates, former masters—but in the cramped variant of freedom on offer from the slaves' ostensible liberators. This collection, drawing together eleven essays by leading historians of emancipation, aims to move beyond the "freedom paradigm"—a framework that, the editors suggest, meets with growing ambivalence (3). The volume includes thoughtful, impressive stand-alone essays that explore the dynamics shaping events between the antebellum period and the late nineteenth century. Yet read end to end, it is the book's gaps and omissions that are striking. Though the editors deny any intent "to advance an argument or to upset a particular way of thinking" (x), together with the absence of any but a fleeting mention of conflict over land or labor, the [End Page 169] volume's neglect of political economy marks a clear departure from the historiographical legacy outlined above. Beyond Freedom opens with four essays exploring emancipation's prehistory and concludes with a set of extended, sometimes intimate reflections on sources and methodology. In between are three essays grouped under "The Politics of Freedom," just one of which focuses on the poste-mancipation South. James Oakes's illumination of the Republicans' bedrock commitment to antislavery takes the reader into some familiar terrain, but neither of the others is especially concerned with politics, even in its broadest sense. The editors note at the outset that contributions are not intended as case studies grounded in archival research, though Justin Behrend's study of violence in Reconstruction Mississippi and Brenda E. Stevenson's essay on the ritualization of slave marriages come close. While Beyond Freedom's temporal and thematic breadth offers something for everyone, the same qualities render it difficult to identify common threads. Richard Newman begins the first section, "From Slavery to Freedom," with an essay on antiabolitionists' penchant for conjuring the alleged failures of Atlantic emancipation to deflect attacks on southern slavery. Susan O'Donovan challenges the depiction of slaves as inert and apolitical, suggesting instead that the roads and waterways traversing the Cotton South doubled as...

Introduction to Critical Forum: The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism

Introduction to Critical Forum:The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism Tyler Bradway The following critical forum, "The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism," takes as its point of departure Carter Mathes's Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights, published in 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press. Mathes's groundbreaking work demonstrates the exciting conceptual and political affordances of black experimental literature for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His book does not simply bring together the fields of black studies, sound studies, and literary studies—it profoundly reimagines their points of convergence. Focused primarily on African American experimental literature and music, Imagine the Sound argues that the sonic dimensions of black experimentalism open out onto histories of black radicalism that have been repressed, forgotten, or marginalized by predominant narratives about the Black Arts Movement and black postmodernism. Mathes advocates for close listening as a method to recover the inchoate potentialities and resistant auralities of postwar African American experimental literature. Through their sonic experimentations, these texts afford more capacious and radical notions about black freedom and sociality than those sanctioned within the post-Civil Rights Era. [End Page 257] Among its many contributions, Imagine the Sound makes a strong case for understanding sound as an experimental dimension of the aesthetic that outstrips restrictive boundaries of genre and other "simplified categories of interpretation" (18). Indeed, Mathes draws inspiration from Zora Neale Hurston's foundational identification of "an improvisational impulse within the sound that exceeds flattened constructions of race and culture." Hurston anticipates and makes possible Imagine the Sound's attunement to a "fusion of sonority, temporality, and narration that has political implications in signaling different orientations toward black historical consciousness" (17). Mathes discovers this fusion within an expansive archive of writers and musicians, including John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor. Listening for the sounds that reverberate out through their experimentations with form, Imagine the Sound beckons readers into new phenomenological and historical relations with the Civil Rights Era and its aftermath. In this regard, Mathes's title is an invitation to think and feel—to imagine, in the fullest sense of the verb—literary sound in all of its corporeal density and political vitality. Our contributors take up this invitation by recontextualizing Imagine the Sound within different fields of scholarship and cultural debate. As outlined in the introduction to this issue, each contributor was encouraged to reflect on how the experimental methods and archives of Imagine the Sound might be brought to bear on other areas of inquiry. As is clear from their responses, Mathes opens new horizons for thinking about the sonic politics of black experimentalism in many fields, including hip hop studies, time studies, new phenomenologies of reading, black feminism, queer of color critique, and black radical mysticism, among others. The conversation that unfolds within this forum testifies to multiple kinds of inquiry that experimental aesthetics engender. Far from seeing experimentalism as a step back from the social, each of these essays insists on its imbrication with the lived and historical experiences of people of color. Indeed, they draw inspiration from Mathes's understanding of experimentation as a means to break open the racist epistemologies that enclose black culture. Following Toni Cade Bambara, Mathes teaches us to understand "critical thought as phenomenological and experiential" (149). Collectively, the contributors take up this integration of affect and critique, and they stress that the politics of black experimentalism cannot be understood without an attunement to [End Page 258] its affective dimensions. In Mathes's words, the affective liveliness of black experimentalism engenders "radical openings onto new and evolving paradigms of African American aesthetic form and critical thought" (200). The following essays pursue such radical openings through their own experiments with form and thought. [End Page 259] Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University

Whores in the Religious Marketplace: Sex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures

Whores in the Religious MarketplaceSex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures Jayne Swift (bio) In late 1976 the Church of Venus opened its doors at 1414 First Avenue—"sandwiched" between adult bookstores and theaters on what, during the 1970s, was colloquially known as Seattle's "Flesh Avenue."1 Before it even opened its doors, a columnist for the Seattle Times, curious about the descriptor "Church" on a street known for sin, would begin chronicling the organization's purported mission.2 Founded by local adult business entrepreneur Ron Peterson (who was principal owner of the adjacent peep show, the Amusement Center), the Church of Venus distinguished itself from its neighbors through its professed spiritual commitment to sexuality as an arena of self-enrichment and a force for social good.3 Specifically, the Church sought to spread the word of "sex-positivity" to publics lacking a robust ethics from which to affirm the value of sexuality untethered from the family form, reproduction, or romantic love. The Church quickly achieved local notoriety for its ethics of sex-positivity and its mission to create both public and commercial spaces for the practice of sex-positivity. How did a small iconoclastic community come to disseminate a view of sexual commerce as a tool for facilitating spiritual growth and healing? And how was their sex-positive vision situated within a changing historical paradigm by which sexuality was increasingly seen as an aspect of selfhood that individuals should deliberately, conscientiously cultivate? In this article I argue that people in the sex trade were primary developers of sex-positivity and that sex-positivity was a political resource for challenging their criminalization and marginalization. For the purposes of this article, sex-positivity refers to an ethico-spiritual framework that critiqued the rigid regulation of sexual practice by dominant institutions and the state; affirmed sexual exploration as a site of personal and collective meaning making; argued that this exploration was often constrained by socially entrenched, dogmatic moralities; and promoted sexual freedom through the development of physical infrastructure [End Page 93] and alternative communities. Emboldened by the greater visibility of commercial sex economies in city centers during the 1970s, people in the sex trade deployed sex-positivity to redefine commercial sex, perhaps paradoxically, as a space for the production of caring sexual exchanges among strangers in a market-based society understood as simultaneously sexually and spiritually impoverished. Reconstructing the Church's history through legal records, press coverage, its presence in popular culture, and oral history interviews with those who offered legal testimony on the Church's behalf illustrates how people in the sex trade came to disseminate new ideas about the value of sexual labor and its place in US society, via sex-positive ethico-spiritualities. Unsurprisingly, the perspectives of male entrepreneurs, reporters, and court officials are most accessible, but women were also involved in the Church as crafters of its mission, performers interpreting and enacting its mission, patrons, and (real and fictionalized) advocates. These sources, reflecting the shifting but still potent terms of racial politics in post-Fordist cities, are also quiet on the subject of race. However, religion, and specifically Christianity as a national norm, is omnipresent in these sources. In the post-Civil Rights era, religious morality may have functioned as a seemingly race-neutral term for exerting racialized social control over the public sphere and workers in informal and illicit economies. Across these disparate sources and over a period of years, Church participants espoused an ethics of sex-positivity to audiences (such as the press, police, and judges) who were often baffled by and hostile to it. A historian can never truly know what was in the mind of their subjects, but what emerges from these sources and stakeholders is a clear and consistent defense of sexual labor on the basis that those performing it were non-traditional experts providing a sexual service that held spiritual and ethical value, and they thus had legal rights. The history of this specific counterinstitution evinces how people in the sex trades, in the face of public suspicion, sought to redefine the social value of sexual labor via a distinctive sex-positive worldview, which they assembled from new religious...

School Integration in the New Jim Crow: Opportunity or Oxymoron?

In this article, I consider the limitations of school integration research that overlooks Black research perspectives, White policy interests, and the paradox of race in the New Jim Crow—America’s system of racial caste in the post–Civil Rights Era. Applying critical race theory as critical policy analysis, I discuss the importance of theorizing race in school integration research and recentering Black citizenship and equality as fundamental goals of school desegregation. I conclude with a call to desegregate the research on school desegregation through critical policy analyses that deconstruct liberal education policy agendas, create new policy knowledge, and reject the institutionalization of Black educational inferiority.

African Americans: Colorism in Morrow v. IRS Litigation

Walker v. Secretary of Treasury, IRS (Internal Revenue Service) served as a landmark case in shaping the legal context of color-based discrimination in the workplace. As the first case of colorism between Black Americans heard at the federal level, the Walker decision broadened the scope of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, treating race and color as two distinctive categories and protected classes. Beyond the legal significance of the ruling, Walker v. IRS carried important social and cultural implications that exposed the continuing significance of colorism in the post–Civil Rights Era. This article deals with an overview of the Walker v. IRS lawsuit, including a discussion of the overall impact of the ruling on the interpretation of Title VII and the inclusion of color(ism) in the application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Subsequent cases of color bias in the workplace are explored, and the enduring impact of the Walker judgment is examined.

Contributors’ Notes

Other| September 03 2018 Contributors’ Notes Journal of Popular Music Studies (2018) 30 (3): 171–172. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2018.200012 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors’ Notes. Journal of Popular Music Studies 3 September 2018; 30 (3): 171–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2018.200012 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Regina N. Bradley is assistant professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. A former Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow (Harvard University, Spring 2016), she is working on a book project, Chronicling Stankonia: OutKast and the Rise of the Hip Hop South, which explores how the hip hop duo OutKast influences conversations about the Black American South in the post-Civil Rights era. William Cheng is associate professor of music at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, forthcoming), and the coeditor of A Cultural History of Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming) and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, forthcoming). He serves as the coeditor of the series Music &... You do not currently have access to this content.

Racism, African American Women, and Their Sexual and Reproductive Health: A Review of Historical and Contemporary Evidence and Implications for Health Equity.

Background: The sexual and reproductive health of African American women has been compromised due to multiple experiences of racism, including discriminatory healthcare practices from slavery through the post-Civil Rights era. However, studies rarely consider how the historical underpinnings of racism negatively influence the present-day health outcomes of African American women. Although some improvements to ensure equitable healthcare have been made, these historical influences provide an unexplored context for illuminating present-day epidemiology of sexual and reproductive health disparities among African American women.Methods: To account for the unique healthcare experiences influenced by racism, including healthcare provision, we searched online databases for peer-reviewed sources and books published in English only. We explored the link between historical and current experiences of racism and sexual and reproductive health outcomes.Results: The legacy of medical experimentation and inadequate healthcare coupled with social determinants has exacerbated African American women's complex relationship with healthcare systems. The social determinants of health associated with institutionalized and interpersonal racism, including poverty, unemployment, and residential segregation, may make African American women more vulnerable to disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes.Conclusions: The development of innovative models and strategies to improve the health of African American women may be informed by an understanding of the historical and enduring legacy of racism in the United States. Addressing sexual and reproductive health through a historical lens and ensuring the implementation of culturally appropriate programs, research, and treatment efforts will likely move public health toward achieving health equity. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop interventions that address the intersection of the social determinants of health that contribute to sexual and reproductive health inequities.

Bildungsroman Hermeneutics in the Post–Civil Rights Era

AbstractThis essay defines the problem of bildungsroman hermeneutics for literary criticism and social policy in the post–civil rights era. Examining critical responses to Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, it argues that the traditional bildungsroman exerts a powerful hold on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros’s text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects with neoconservative arguments that helped to roll back civil rights reforms and stymie government interventions. To address the inequalities enduring after civil rights we must circumvent an individual-centered template that has shaped plots of narrative and social change. Part of a broader effort to decenter the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros’s text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise.

American political development and black lives matter in the age of incarceration

ABSTRACTWhat is the use and purpose of American political development (APD) in the era of Black Lives Matter? This article clarifies the APD’s role in analyzing the institutions to which the Movement for Black Lives primarily responds – racialized surveillance, policing, and incarceration. In particular, I spotlight what the discipline can offer, given the challenges of the current Trump era. The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency and the concurrent popularization of white populist nationalism in mainstream American politics present unique challenges. I argue that today, as scholars strive to understand how we arrived, or arrived again, in an era of overt white supremacist rhetoric, American political development’s focus on historical institutional change offers necessary grounding. In an era of Charlottesville and chants of “Build the wall!”, our collective focus is easily drawn to the spectacular and away from the long-standing and institutional, but black and brown lives also depend on our collective attention to the quieter routines of institutionalized racial violence that developed in post-civil rights era – even, and perhaps especially, in the absence of overt racial demagoguery.