Post-civil Rights Research Articles

Old Riot, New Ranger: Captain Jack Dean, Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal by Bob Alexander

Reviewed by: Old Riot, New Ranger: Captain Jack Dean, Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal by Bob Alexander Jody Edward Ginn Old Riot, New Ranger: Captain Jack Dean, Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal. By Bob Alexander. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 522. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Texas Rangers history enthusiast Bob Alexander recounts, in folksy style, Jack Dean’s impressive forty-three-year law enforcement career as a highway patrolman, Texas Ranger, and United States Marshal for the Western District of Texas. As Alexander notes, Dean is one of only five men to have served both as a Texas Ranger captain and as presidentially appointed U.S. marshal. After a chapter-long foray into Dean’s early life and numerous crime and law enforcement anecdotes, Alexander chronicles Dean’s lengthy career, which began with his application to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in December 1960. As was typical (and now required), Dean served ten years as a highway patrol trooper before being promoted to the Rangers in July 1970. He entered service during one of the many moments of significant generational change in Ranger history. Dean’s first assignment was in the Rio Grande Valley in the wake of a federal lawsuit over the 1966–67 farm workers’ strike, which Alexander recounts at length. However, Dean was not involved in the events surrounding the strike and only served under the Ranger captain associated with them for a month; thereafter he worked under the comparatively progressive new captain, John Mansel Wood, who had been tasked with rebuilding relations with local people in the region and training a new generation of Rangers how to enforce the law in the post-Civil Rights movement era. Alexander goes on to explore Dean’s twenty-three-year Ranger career, during which he worked a number of notable cases. The best known of these was the assassination of Federal Judge John H. Wood by notorious hit man Charles Voyde Harrelson, a story previously chronicled in Robert M. Utley’s Lone Star Lawmen (Oxford University Press, 2007). The stellar reputation that Dean developed throughout his Ranger career, working with prominent people in all levels of government, led to his appointment as United States Marshal for the Western District of Texas by President Bill Clinton and reappointment to that post by President George W. Bush. Alexander’s account of these years is fairly perfunctory in comparison to the exploration of Dean’s Ranger career; for example, the author omits any discussion of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the resulting emphasis on terrorism and homeland security in federal law enforcement, which would have been a historically significant addition. Ranger scholars will note some distractions, such as the misunderstanding of the Rangers’ system of rank and title; unlike traditional military organizations, the Rangers do not have “enlisted” or “non-com” officers or [End Page 130] an “Officer’s Corps of the Rangers,” terms which Alexander uses. But on the whole, casual readers should find One Riot, New Ranger to be an engaging and accessible read, and scholars may look to it as a starting point for studies on late twentieth-century Texas law enforcement topics. Jody Edward Ginn Austin Community College Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

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.

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

Macías-Rojas, Patrisia, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America.

Macías-Rojas, Patrisia, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America.

Trans Riot: Transmasculine of Colour Expressions and Embodiments in the Films of Christopher Lee

This article focuses on transmasculine mixed-race Asian American filmmaker Christopher Lee’s documentaries and pornography of the 1990s. At a moment before today’s reduction of transgender experiences to spectacles of transitional assimilation, bio-social disorder, and death by dominant—or even authoritarian—white cis-heteropatriarchal culture, Lee’s films gave expression to the gender subversions of trans people of colour and their co-conspirators. In solidarity with Lee’s work, I produce critical creative language about racial transgender social identities. At a current moment offering more abundant critical resources and intersectional transgender movement-building, I also seek to re-harness Lee’s transmasculine imagery towards the trans of colour feminist work of transforming the white Western cis-binary gender/sex system and its perceptual structures. I view the communities represented in Lee’s filmmaking as confronting the contradictions of a post-Civil Rights neoliberal multiculturalism that promises minimal access while institutionalizing white cis-binary formations of gender/sex fundamental to the US nation-state.

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.

Counterfactual Narratives of the Civil War and Slavery

This essay examines an overlooked dimension of the American literary preoccupation with slavery since the 1970s – the mass-market genre of alternate histories of the Civil War that began to proliferate after the end of the civil rights movement. Focussing on the genre's unique blend of historical realism and counterfactual speculation, the essay argues that these novels turn to the Civil War in order to reevaluate the trajectory of US racial history and to reckon with the dramatic racial realignments of the post-civil rights period.

The Black Ecstatic

Building on Jose Esteban Munoz's theorization of ecstasy as a site of queer of color desire, relational practice, and utopic possibility, this essay conceptualizes what I call the black ecstatic as a hermeneutic for analyzing post–civil rights black queer poetics. My theorization of the black ecstatic attends specifically to the interrelation of political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction in contemporary black queer cultural production. As an affective and aesthetic practice, the black ecstatic eschews both the heroism of black pasts and the promise of liberated black futures in order to proffer new relational and representational modes in the ongoing catastrophe that constitutes black life in modernity. Against the backdrop of civil rights retrenchment, the War on Drugs, the AIDS crisis, and the US carceral state, this essay analyzes the recent film Moonlight and the poetry of Essex Hemphill, a black gay writer and AIDS activist. In so doing, it shows how, across literary genres and media platforms, the black ecstatic instantiates formal innovations to black queer expressive forms and encourages willful exuberance as an affective disposition and relational ethic that enables black life and liberation in the catastrophic present.

How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation. Aida Levy-Hussen

How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation. Aida Levy-Hussen

African-American and Romani Filmic Representation and the ‘Posts’ of Post-Civil Rights and Post-EU Expansion

In this article I explore linkages between the evolution of African-American filmic representation and the patterns of Romani representation in films from Central and Southeast Europe (CSEE). More specifically, I use the 1970s Blaxploitation movement and subsequent shift of African-American representation into films reliant on a realist aesthetic to contextualize analysis of the shortcomings of the Civil Rights Movement to provide broad integration for African-Americans. Given other similarities between the racialized positionalities of African-Americans and Roma, I argue that Blaxploitation can illuminate trends in the cinematic depictions of CSEE Roma, since the Roma Rights movement has had to contend with similar shortcomings in achieving political, social, and economic inclusion. The films I analyze in this piece include Roming (2007), Just the Wind (2012), Episode of an Iron Picker (2013), and Bravo! (2015).

African and American Selves: « Contact Zones » in All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

Ethiopian American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s third novel All Our Names (2014) is a double narrative that alternates between post-independence Uganda and post-Civil Rights America, thus offering a critique on both postcolonial Africa and multiracial America. It gives voice to both an African student who seeks refuge in the U.S. and to an American social worker, a white Midwesterner deep-rooted in her hometown. This essay examines how Mengestu constructs his two characters and weaves together their painful singular stories as parallel subjective first-person narratives that offer two different perspectives on Africanness and Blackness. It further analyzes how he uses their encounter (a secret interracial love affair) to point to the contrasts and similarities of their two separate worlds and thus expose the instability of identity and the sense of self that go beyond their differences and affect both characters.

From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Book Review| April 01 2018 From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. By Patrisia Macías-Rojas. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 233 pp. Notes, references, and index. $89 (cloth); $28 (paper). Daniel E. Martínez Daniel E. Martínez University of Arizona Daniel E. Martínez is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. His interests include unauthorized migration and immigrant criminalization. Martínez is a co-principal investigator of the Migrant Border Crossing Study, which examines deportees’ experiences crossing the United States-Mexico border and residing in the United States. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2018) 37 (3): 138–139. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0138 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel E. Martínez; From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2018; 37 (3): 138–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0138 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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.

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

Color, Caste and the Public Sphere

Broadcast network newsrooms are powerful gatekeepers, setting cultural standards and attitudes for America at large via the stories they tell and the images they project. In 1968, the federal Kerner Commission chastised American news media for ignoring race, and seeing through the “white man’s eyes” and speaking from “the white perspective.” Grounded in critical and cultural studies and organizational theory, this study analyzes the experiences of 23 post-Civil Rights generation black journalists working in broadcast newsrooms who continue to struggle against anti-black cultural norms and attitudes at great physical, psychological and financial cost.

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.