Race History Research Articles

Volumes: Charles Chesnutt and the Racial History of the Stenographic Imagination

Volumes: Charles Chesnutt and the Racial History of the Stenographic Imagination

Frustration-Aggression: Revisited

The entire history of human race is full of worst record of violence and aggression. Aggression precisely is just violent physical or verbal behaviour intended to hurt someone physically, mentally or both. Freud (1930) and Konard Lorenz (1966) thought it to be innate and instinctive tendency forcing one to resort to violence and aggressions. Baron, 1977; Berkowitz, 1969; Buss, 1961; Zillman, 1979 conceived aggression as acquired behaviour. The entire history of human race is full of worst record of violence and aggression. Aggression precisely is just violent physical or verbal behaviour intended to hurt someone physically, mentally or both. Freud (1930) and Konard Lorenz (1966) thought it to be innate and instinctive tendency forcing one to resort to violence and aggressions. Baron, 1977; Berkowitz, 1969; Buss, 1961; Zillman, 1979 conceived aggression as acquired behaviour. Yet another view held that frustration is the sole cause of aggression (Neal Miller, 1941). To conclude the discussion, It is felt that frustration may be responsible for aggression yet it is not the sole determiner of verbal and physical aggression. It appears that aggression is the byproduct of social learning along with several other instigator such as group mind or deindividuation and a host of social, cognitive and environmental factors that predisposed and precipitate aggression. Further society and culture may also contribute as facilitator or inhibitors of aggressive behaviour.

Using Participatory Research Methods to Foster an Anti-Racist Graduate Learning Environment

Only within the last few years has the American Psychological Association (APA) acknowledged the impact that the racist history of psychology training, research, and practice has had on people of color (APA, October 2021). As the primary governing organization of psychology, the field looks to the APA to model the possibility of an anti-racist approach to psychology. Training competencies, such as “professionalism,” have persisted as a core foundational skill, yet there is no consensus regarding the definition or essential elements of the competency (Elman et al., 2005; Grus et al., 2018). The lack of clarity in definition and essential elements has left supervising health service psychologists to form more subjective assessments that may be rooted within the field’s racist history. It is therefore unsurprising that professionalism is a concept that has long been weaponized against Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color (BIPOC) in medical and educational settings (Marom, 2019). To address this problem in a School Psychology doctoral program, participatory action research (PAR) methods were utilized to take action towards the creation of an equitable, inclusive, experiential definition of professionalism to reduce opportunities for racist and other discriminatory evaluation. Students and faculty were involved in every phase of the project, from the inception through multiple rounds of analysis and member checking. The result was a programmatic Essence Statement of professionalism, core beliefs about professionalism, and a table of professionalism competencies with definitions and behavioral exemplars, all of which are now codified in the School Psychology Program Handbook and available to all current and prospective students and faculty. The outlined methods can be implemented by professionals across disciplines and systems to actively reduce inequalities in settings where individuals with diverse and intersection identities evaluated by these systems have traditionally been excluded from the processes that impact them.

Kontrapunkti teorijskih naučavanja o državi / Counterpoints of Theorethical Teachings About the State

The state is the organizational achievement of the development of human social and political consciousness. It is a mechanism of unifying power over people and territory, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, solving the historical issue of the right to power. The theoretical understanding of the state is observed from the theological, philosophical, evolutionist, rationalist, historical and functionalist points of view, from which its different conceptions arise. The actual existence of the state goes back to the deep history of the human race, while theories about its existence and development are ancient and modern creations. Depending on the time of looking at its content, the state was a monarchy, an oligarchy and a democracy. The first two types of rule are interpreted as personal, while the third type is described for general benefit, which in today’s sense of the word we understand as the state. In its development, the state went through a path from direct, personal-status, to delegated and representative rule. In the modern sense, the state is depersonalized, sovereign and democratic, the rule of law and institutions, over a clearly defined territory and population. The state unites the social totality on its territory, positioning itself as the unifier and arbiter of all particularities, from whose consent it derives its power. Today’s science often breaks down the concept of ancient government and modern state. The first one is deprived of its territoriality, legality and depersonalization, while the second one is associated with the renaming of man as a citizen, i.e. the victory of codified law over the arbitrary will of the ruler. No matter when and where they were created, all forms of government were a response to the historical situation faced by a certain human community. Therefore, the state is the result of the understanding of a historical moment by a given human community.

“This is what we wanted to learn”: Anti-racist and anti-colonial education with 1st gen Korean American seniors in a time of Asian hate and racialized dread

In this paper, I explore the challenge and promise of developing an anti-racist and anti-colonial curriculum and pedagogy in a time of racialized dread. Drawing on my experience teaching a 10-week course on racial justice, delivered in the Korean language, to 1st generation Korean American seniors in the Southern United States. I explore how the group channeled their frustration, tension, and anger in the face of Asian hate into hope and a passion to learn about the history of race in the United States and the Asian American community. Through weekly lectures, counter-storytelling, and in-depth discussions, I learned of their desire to name the racialized dread arising from everyday racism. By employing Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Theory, and centering the Ethnic Studies’ liberatory approach to education, I demonstrate that the community’s perceptions of race and racism are shaped at the intersection of U.S. imperialism, South Korea’s transnational ideology of meritocracy, and the legacy of the unending Cold War on the Korean Peninsula. This paper also reflects on how engaging an ethnic community through teaching transformed my pedagogy and perspectives to be more decolonial and inclusive. In light of the current war on Critical Race Theory, this paper contributes to expanding discussions focused on reimagining and revitalizing the liberatory pedagogy of community as a way to confront racialized dread.

“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

The White Fraud: White Elephants, Siam, and Comparative Racialization

In this paper I examine P. T. Barnum's attempt to bring the first “sacred white elephant” to America, and his subsequent “white elephant war” with rival showman Adam Forepaugh, through the lens of Afro-Asian comparative racialization. I look at several accounts of white elephants that describe their skin color in terms of the US's Black/white race dichotomy and ask why this animal was a popular figure for examining the US's shifting attitude toward race and transpacific imperialism in the late nineteenth century. By reading the “white elephant war” through a comparative framework, I argue that the heterogeneous histories of both African American and Asian racialization inhered and intersected in this specific instance of racial comparison, while tracking the overlaps and oversights that this analysis reveals.

For a Cultural History of Race: Urgent Reflections on Remote and Recent Times

For a Cultural History of Race: Urgent Reflections on Remote and Recent Times

Dead Ringers and the Horror of Childbirth on the Small Screen

The streaming series Dead Ringers (Amazon), loosely adapted from David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror film about twin male gynecologists, viscerally represents the too-often-violent act of childbirth in order to address the crisis of maternal health care in America. As a series for the small screen, it exploits television’s capacities to show and tell as a form of public education, directing our attention to social issues, including the maternal mortality crisis and the racist history of gynecology and obstetrics. FQ contributing editor Laurie Ouellette argues that the series is “uncomfortable television” by feminist design, in that it deploys corporeal aesthetics and social criticism to unsettle audiences.

Children’s Experiences of Bullying Victimization and the Influence on Their Subjective Well-Being: a Population-Based Study

Bullying is both a major public health concern and a violation of children’s right to safety from violence. Within the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the relation between bullying and children’s subjective well-being (SWB). Empirical research has unequivocally demonstrated the significant negative influence of bullying on children’s SWB. Within the South African context, violence and aggressive behaviour is widespread. The high prevalence of school bullying in South Africa is intricately related to the intergenerational experiences of violence, rooted in the history of racism, prejudice, oppression, exclusion, and the discriminatory practices of apartheid. However, there are limited large-scale studies that explores the relation between bullying victimization and children’s SWB. The current study, uses a population-based sample to explore the relation between bullying victimization and children’s SWB in South Africa, across provincial regions (nine provinces), age (10 - and 12-years), gender (boys and girls), geographical context (urban and rural), and socio-economic status (low, lower-middle, and middle socio-economic status). The study uses Subjective Well-Being Homeostasis Theory to frame and interpret the findings. We found a significant negative relationship between bullying victimization and children’s SWB. The combined influence of being hit, called unkind names and socially excluded explained 6 % of the variance in SWB for the overall sample, with some variation across provincial region, age groups, gender, geographical context, and socio-economic status. The study further found that increased incidences of bullying experiences were associated with lower mean scores of SWB. Finally, the study found that even though the different forms of bullying victimization have a significant negative influence on children’s SWB, the homeostatic mechanism is potentially mediating this influence and maintaining levels of SWB.

The Interplay of De-historicizing and Colored Narratives in 1970s America

This paper examines the intricate interplay between the processes of de-historicizing and the emergence of colored narratives during the 1970s in America. The decade witnessed a dynamic shift in the collective consciousness of the nation, as it grappled with its complex history of race, identity, and representation. De-historicizing refers to the deliberate distancing from historical contexts, often leading to the erasure of historical narratives and the subsequent silencing of marginalized voices. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the American society attempted to move forward without fully reconciling its past, leading to an inclination towards de-historicizing certain aspects of the nation’s history, particularly concerning race and discrimination. Conversely, the 1970s also witnessed the emergence of colored narratives, as minority communities sought to reclaim their historical identities and share their unique perspectives through literature, music, film, and other forms of artistic expression. These narratives served as powerful vehicles for voicing the struggles, triumphs, and aspirations of marginalized communities, challenging the de-historicizing trends prevalent in mainstream discourses. Through a comprehensive analysis of key cultural artifacts, literature, and historical events from the 1970s, this paper explores how de-historicizing and colored narratives intersected and collided. It delves into the ways in which colored narratives disrupted the dominant narratives constructed by the mainstream, challenging the established power structures and encouraging a more inclusive representation of American history.

Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice.

What is race? And how does it figure in different scientific practices? To answer these questions, I suggest that we need to know race differently. Rather than defining race or looking for one conclusive answer to what it is, I propose methods that are open-ended, that allow us to follow race around, while remaining curious as to what it is. I suggest that we pursue generous methods. Drawing on empirical examples of forensic identification technologies, I argue that the slipperiness of race-the way race and its politics inexorably shift and change-cannot be fully grasped as an 'object multiple'. Race, I show, is not race: The same word refers to different phenomena. To grasp this, I introduce the notion of the affinity concept. Drawing on the history of race, along with contemporary work in forensic genetics, the affinity concept helps us articulate how race indexes three different scientific realities: race as object, race as method, and race as theory. These three different, yet interconnected realities, contribute to race's slipperiness as well as its virulence.

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease

Teachers' bodies, (trans)national desires, and the phenomenology of gender

This essay urges transnational feminist scholarship and pedagogy to move beyond gender as a social, discursive construct and conceptualize it instead as lived temporality of the body. Through a phenomenological reading of the lives of three cis-gendered female teachers in future-oriented neoliberal school regimes in India and Turkey, it shows how normative ‘gender’ is the sedimentation of histories of race and nation and past traumas that is reproduced through bodies, while we remain oblivious to those histories. At the same time, bodies also occasionally rupture lived time or normative performances of gender by desiring love, beauty and reminiscing times past. A transnational analysis of gendered embodiment and temporality grounded in specific histories and the similarities between how bodies across nations break away from norms in their desires for love and life, reveal alternate transnational politics and possibilities around gender that center sensuality, unruliness and ambiguity.

Dripping in molasses: Black feminist nostalgia and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety

ABSTRACT Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouettes. Scholars such as Salamishah Tillet argue that Walker's art, along with art by some of her post-civil rights contemporaries, offers ‘aesthetic interventions’ to problematic racial histories as part of a larger project of memory reclamation and justice. Walker's A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant is another such interventionist project. Debuting in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York in May of 2014, A Subtlety explores how a figure like mammy ‘survives as a cultural force that influences and reflects a national conscience’ (Wallace Sanders [2008]. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 12). And yet, to say that the historical rootedness of the title, sugar sphinx sculpture, and molasses-covered walls and cherub-faced small figures throughout the installation were ambiguous to some spectators, is an understatement. Hundreds of photographs and videos were uploaded to social media sites with people making gestures towards the figure that some critics deemed highly inappropriate. This paper explores how A Subtlety both understands and undermines representations of Black women's bodies and how Black artists in the African diaspora contend with complex cultural signs of the past in the present. Utilizing studies of Black feminist theory and visual culture, I argue that Walker’s A Subtlety – and her art more broadly – offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as in the Black nostalgic imagination.

Differences in race history by distance of recreational endurance runners from The NURMI Study (Step 2)

Few studies were developed to understand the relationship between running characteristics and motivation. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between running event history, running experience, and best race performances in recreational distance runners. We used a web survey to obtain information regarding running experience, racing history, and periodization training routines/exercise habits, including weekly volumes and daily mileage and duration across periods and conditions. Associations between variables were conducted with the Chi-square test (χ2; nominal scale) and Wilcoxon test. Multiple linear regression analysis and multivariate linear regression were performed. Concerning the participants’ motive for exercising, a significant difference was identified between the race distance subgroups (p < 0.001), where 58% of M/UM runners exercised for performance (n = 38) and 64% of HM runners (n = 57) and 57% of 10 km runners (n = 52) exercised for recreational purposes. A significant difference was found in the number of years of running completed without taking a break (p = 0.004), with marathoners/ultramarathoners reporting the most years. Runners competing in different race distances such as 10 km, half-marathon, marathon, and ultra-marathon presented differences in training background and habits according to the distance of preference.

The Circle of Life: Rhetoric, Rectification, and Recreation at Steele Indian School Park

ABSTRACT Steele Indian School Park (2001), a city park in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as the memory site for the Phoenix Indian School (1891–1990), an off-reservation boarding school that was part of the federal program of forced assimilation. In this essay, we perform an analysis of the park’s 24 interpretive columns, which serve as an educational display. We argue that the park’s recreational use dominates its role as a historic site. To begin we consider how the history of place shapes memory. We argue that, like museums, parks have a colonial past by addressing their historic relationship to assimilation. Next, we establish that the school served as a recreational destination for Phoenicians. We theorize that both these general and specific histories of place influence the site’s public memory narrative by bifurcating the intended audience and privileging a recreational user. To theorize the relationship between recreation and memory, we build on geographer Kenneth Foote’s term “rectification,” which describes how signs of violent or tragic events are removed so that a site can be returned, in this case, to recreational use. To facilitate the process of rectification, we argue the interpretive columns use four interdependent rhetorical strategies—decontextualization, erasure, appropriation, and paternalism—to elide the racist history of forced assimilation. Our findings indicate the colonial history of place, if unexamined, may continue to influence public memory narratives.

Can U.S. planned communities become diverse? The case of industry-leading master-planned communities in five metro areas

ABSTRACT The history of master-planned community (MPC) development is inseparable from the history of race- and class-based discrimination and segregation in the United States. This paper investigates the place of exclusion and inclusion in planned community development practice. We undertook qualitative and quantitative analyses of the MPC development practice from the 1990s to the present. Through archival analysis and interviews, we demonstrate that, beginning in the early 2000s, MPC developers started to embrace diversity for financial success. We further confirm this trend by quantitatively analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data. We find that MPCs built since 2000 are racially and ethnically more diverse than their predecessors, with greater emphasis on middle-income households. Based on these findings, we carefully posit that American MPCs are moving toward greater diversity, a clear departure from their history of exclusion. We conclude with policy implications for various levels of the government to take advantage of this trend.

Austerity-driven policification: Neoliberalisation, schools and the police in Britain

This article argues that as a consequence of austerity, police in England and Wales have taken over important roles in welfare and social policy institutions. This renders those institutions more coercive, punitive and exclusionary, and normalises a police worldview in those institutions. This process of what I call austerity-driven policification can be observed specifically well in the increasing numbers of police officers integrated into schools most affected by austerity. Such ‘transinstitutional policing’ in Britain is triggered by contradictory post-global financial crisis austerity measures, but reliant upon a long, racialised history of authoritarian neoliberalisation. Cuts to public spending in the 2010s reduced state institutions’ capacities to provide for vulnerable people, who were further criminalised and whose rights to support and solidarity were further delegitimised by a radicalisation of the framing of welfare recipients as undeserving, social housing estates as drug-infested gang territories, and schools in deprived areas, and Black pupils in particular, as dangerous. Police, while subjected to austerity measures also, functioned as an institution of last resort, supplementing and replacing incapacitated state institutions, while also being presented as an appropriate institution to address problems increasingly understood to be of a criminal rather than educational nature. This article suggests that austerity-driven policification is an intensification of longer-term trends toward a larger role for police in the neoliberal era. It shows the racial and authoritarian nature of neoliberalisation, and its messy realisation.

Becoming Anorexia

Why is self-wounding in performance art so often understood as ‘self-harm’? In ‘Becoming Anorexia: The pathologization of ‘self-harm’ in performance’, Adriana Disman examines what is at stake in the ‘making sick’ of such artists and their art. Disman offers a detailed critique of pathologizing discourse to illuminate its operations and to denaturalize it as a common-sense (Himani Bannerji) response to acts that are deemed ‘self-harming’ in performance art. Taking duo L. A. Raeven as a case study, Disman attempts to articulate how typical readings of their work – as that which promotes or decries anorexia – are seeded in pathologisation as a tactic of critical literalisation (Jane Blocker and Jennifer Doyle). Illuminating the ableism underpinning the framing of the artist as a compulsive patient, these readings often imply that the author/critic inhabits a doctorly position, sometimes imbued with good-will. However, these humanitarian ‘do-gooder’ (Gada Mahrouse) intentions can be imbricated with colonial and racist histories of gendered, classed, and ableist white supremacy through their (medical) investments in self-possession (Aileen Moreton-Robinson) and self-mastery (Julietta Singh). Discourses that read self-wounding in performance art as expressions of sickness are thus caught within medicalised knowledge’s pathologising logics and their historical inheritances. This potentially forecloses perception of the true complexity of such works – a foreclosing most often enacted upon marked and marginalised bodies. For L.A. Raeven’s work, negotiation of its difficulty and defence of abnormalised ways of being is written out when pathologized. What are the beyond performance implications of this? Performance’s force is that which offers the perception of – and even the momentary or contingent emergence of – new ways of being together, especially for minoritized subjects (José Esteban Muñoz and Joshua Chambers-Letson), or what Disman calls worlding. And worlding is precisely that which is at stake when pathologizing performance: if the strange is continually made into the sick, what hope do we have of creating other ways of living together, which we so desperately need?