Racial Caste Research Articles

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church

Caste and Black intergenerational racial trauma in the United States of America.

The United States (U.S.) racial caste system and White dominance began in slavery, culminating in Black intergenerational racial trauma. Until recently, Black intergenerational racial trauma largely was ignored by family scholars and therapists. Given that Black intergenerational racial trauma is inseparable from racial caste in the United States, it should be regarded as a wider, systemic problem, requiring intervention at the micro (e.g., family) and macro (e.g., society) levels. The U.S. dominant White society's investment in conserving racial caste furthers the ideological (e.g., political) and sentimental (e.g., democratic ideals) nullification of Black intergenerational racial trauma. Therefore, Black intergenerational racial trauma is often disenfranchised and can hamper Black people's experience of racial trauma as a collective. As passive bystanders, family scholars and therapists are co-conspirators in the long, enduring suffering of Black people. As advocates, family scholars and therapists are called upon to name the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system and to advance Black humanization. Specifically, Wilkerson's (Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House, 2020) notion of the U.S. racial hierarchy as a functioning caste system frames the discussion of Black intergenerational racial trauma and includes the following topics: Black racial trauma, disenfranchised Black intergenerational racial trauma, collective Black intergenerational racial trauma, Black intergenerational racial trauma and the U.S. academy (traditionally White institutions of higher learning), history and its impact on Black intergenerational racial trauma, the Black body and racial trauma, intersectionality and the U.S. caste system, and collective hope and resilience.

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie

Reviewed by: The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie Evan Faulkenbury The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. By Deanna M. Gillespie. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xviii, 260. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6694-3.) Across Savannah, Georgia, in 1963, Black women educated community members about taking collective action against Jim Crow. Cassie Pierce led discussions that tackled current issues, noting, “The project has . . . awakened the individuals that were asleep and caused interest and understanding” (p. 89). Another teacher, Daisy P. Jones, similarly observed in her students how the material covered “changed [a student’s] attitude toward voting and helping his people and himself instead of always kowtowing to someone” (p. 89). And another instructor, Dorothy Boles, found that after Black men and women took citizenship classes, “They walk, talk, and act like new people with determination and more courage to face the future” (p. 89). Stories like these populate historian Deanna M. Gillespie’s important book, The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. Gillespie focuses on the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), which originated in 1957 and ended in 1970. The CEP, Gillespie argues, was a vital, though underappreciated, component of the Black freedom movement [End Page 184] in the South. According to Gillespie, “Everyone and no one knew about CEP classes,” because they were such a regular part of Black community life across the American South (p. 3). As a result, the CEP has remained in the background of the historiography of the movement. In CEP classes, Black men and women learned how to read, write, advocate, vote, and participate in a democracy. In so doing, the CEP “contributed to the groundswell for social justice” (p. 2). The CEP first took shape in the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late 1950s. Teachers received training at the Highlander Folk School and brought their knowledge, handbooks, and course materials to local communities. They led classes in churches, community centers, and beauty salons, with a staggering amount of local interest. Students learned how government functioned, how they could get involved in political life, what they could do to maximize their citizenship capability, and how best to use their individual and collective voices to decry the racial caste system. In 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took over from Highlander to administer the CEP. Operating throughout the South, the CEP, its teachers, and its students laid the groundwork for local civil rights movements in many communities. “This was subversive work in the Jim Crow South,” as Gillespie writes, “because reading, writing, and calculating was empowering” (p. 2). Drawing on oral histories, administrative files, attendance records, narrative CEP meeting reports, and other primary sources, Gillespie reconstructs this behind-the-scenes history of the civil rights movement. She focuses on several case studies from the states where the CEP was most active, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The chapters trace the CEP’s growth, impact, and eventual decline during the late 1960s as monetary contributions dwindled and momentum shifted. But even though the program remained in the background and ended with little fanfare, Gillespie shows why we must take the CEP into account when we consider the sweep of the Black freedom struggle in the South. She quantifies the program’s impact: between 1961 and 1970, the CEP cultivated 2,349 teachers who taught 7,280 classes with an enrollment of 26,686 people. Women like Cassie Pierce, Daisy P. Jones, and Dorothy Boles were crucial to the success of not only the CEP but also the larger civil rights movement. By advertising their services, gathering around tables, teaching neighbors how to fill out forms, and informing them about their rights as citizens, these Black women sustained the movement. Gillespie’s book does their story justice. Evan Faulkenbury SUNY Cortland Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church by Paul William Harris (review)

A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church by Paul William Harris (review)

Contested Autonomy: Black Denominational Debates in the Early Jim Crow Era

AbstractAs Black church leaders decried the arrival of Jim Crow segregation, many also celebrated the racial independence of their churches. They touted advancements such as women's ordination as examples of what Black churches could do when freed from white control. Other Black ministers defended remaining in majority-white denominations as a way to abolish the color line. This article argues that scholars miss much about Black religious history if we assume that Black churches’ resistance to racial subjugation started with a settled and uncontested racial autonomy. On the contrary, Black churches throughout the nineteenth century kept open a lively forum about the virtues and vices of such autonomy. Interracial cooperation often undermined Black autonomy, and Black Christians debated which better countered racial caste. To track the heated debates over racial independence and interracial cooperation within and between Black churches, this article analyzes Black newspapers, sermons, church minutes, and letters, mostly among Black Methodists but also among Black Baptists and Presbyterians throughout the late nineteenth century. It focuses on particular debates surrounding women's ordination, attempts to unite Methodists, and conflicts over Baptist education.

“I Don’t Want to Be a Statistic”: Racial-Criminal Stigma, Redemption Bids, and Redemptive Generativity

Within the context of racial caste and the “stickiness” of criminal labels, men struggle to craft positive masculine identities. Contesting racial-criminal stigma requires men of color to challenge controlling images of violent Black men. Analyzing narratives of 45 millennial men in Philadelphia, we identify redemption bids and redemptive generativity as ways of defying social stigma. Redemption, which has been highlighted in the desistance literature, is a central concern of the men of color we studied, regardless of prior law-breaking or system involvement. Because a criminal history is presumed regardless of past behavior, many men of color engage in performances of “making good” similar to those who were actively engaged in the work of desistance.

Andre E. Johnson, No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner

<i>Andre E. Johnson</i>, No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner

Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst

Reviewed by: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst Matthew Calihman James Smethurst.Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. 227 pp. $26.95. Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. In 1965, Baraka left the racially and ethnically mixed bohemian arts milieu of lower Manhattan for a life in Black nationalist cultural and political work. He decamped to Harlem, and within the same year, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. For some observers, these changes were ruptures. But in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Charles Johnson argued that Baraka’s development was a single continuous struggle: “There is from the very beginning a tension in his thought [End Page 97] between modern leftist intellectualism and race politics, between international Marxism and black nationalism” (24). Although many critics have shown that Baraka engaged with Black nationalism in even his earliest writing, few have recognized how far back his engagement with Marxism went. As William J. Maxwell notes in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), the subject who first emerges in Baraka’s FBI file, opened in 1957, was at least “curious” about Marxist politics (117). But the crucial study here is James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), which transformed scholarship on Black Arts by surveying the movement’s various regional manifestations and by tracing its origins to midcentury intersections of Black nationalism, bohemianism, and Old Left working-class radicalism. The Black Arts Movement established Baraka’s personal and institutional connections to a Popular Front movement that survived up to his time. In Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Smethurst resumes his exploration of Baraka’s relationship to Marxism. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected. Smethurst considers Baraka’s historical materialist vision of the development of an African American culture, a Black nation, and a Black working class, the last of which, Baraka proposed, would play a vanguard role in an international communist movement. And in Brick City Vanguard as in The Black Arts Movement, place matters: It was in Newark, Smethurst argues, that Baraka learned to hear Black music as a kind of vernacular historiography of culture, nation, and class. Baraka’s Newark was a place where many thousands of Southern Black migrants, including his own parents, entered industrial modernity. Challenging most earlier accounts of Baraka’s family history (including many of Baraka’s own accounts), Smethurst writes that Baraka’s parents entered this world as working-class strivers and maintained a basically proletarian outlook even after they found their way to middle-class jobs. In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, among other social contexts, the Joneses and other Black Newarkers encountered European immigrant groups (most notably, Jews and Italians) in relationships that were determined by Northern Jim Crow but that involved cultural exchange. However, because the Great Migration continued through most of the twentieth century, the Black Newark culture in which Baraka grew up and to which he returned as an adult maintained a vital connection to its Southern Black roots; for example, the city’s Black musicians and audiences remained in touch with Southern blues styles.In some ways, the Newark in which this book places Baraka looks like the Northern metropolises in Richard Wright’s Marxist “folk history” of Black America, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). But whereas Wright’s narrative ends with a prophecy of Black people thronging hopefully into new interracial industrial labor unions, Baraka’s Newark story, as Smethurst recounts it, confronts a modern city in which racial caste persists and where the industrial...

In public administration and public policy, can theory capture caste?

June of 2020 brought about mass protests on behalf on the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests that caused many industries and institutions to reevaluate the role they have played in perpetuating institutional forms of racism. This article explores the current state of Public Administration and Public Policy theories and frameworks and evaluates the fields understanding of how racial caste and racial socialization impacts the administrative state. It argues that the only way for the field of Public Administration and Public Policy, through scholarship and teaching, to rise to the challenge of addressing systemic and institutionalized forms of racial discrimination that permeates society and the administrative state is for scholars to develop a deeper understanding of racism and its impact on individuals, organizations, and institutions.

Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations

This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Bringing Racial Justice to Immigration Law

This article is part of a collection of racial justice articles in national law reviews. From as far back as the anti-Chinese laws of the 1800s, immigration has been a place of racial contestation in the United States. Even though today’s immigration laws are color-blind, their enforcement have unmistakable adverse impacts on people of color from the developing world. The laws, as applied, limit the immigration of people of color to, and facilitates their removal from, the United States. Contemporary immigrant rights activism generated a powerful counter-response led by Donald J. Trump. His administration made aggressive enforcement a priority like no other in modern U.S. history. Exemplified by the administration’s heartless separation of Central American families, race has been central to the U.S. immigration policies and their enforcement. Immigrant demands for racial justice share important commonalities with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement. Both demand an end to racialized law enforcement and the removal of race from the criminal justice system. Part I of this article maps the discriminatory foundations of immigration law, the lack of constitutional review, and the enduring and impenetrable fortress built by the courts to shield discrimination. Part II considers the surprising emergence of a powerful immigrant rights movement – energized and organized yet handicapped by the fact that noncitizens cannot vote – fighting for racial justice. Part III summarizes the emergence of the Trump administration’s opposition to that movement, which ruthlessly sought to maintain and reinforce the racial caste quality of the immigration system. Part IV considers the uncertain future of the quest to bring racial justice to immigration law.

Plessy’s Tracks: African American students confronting academic placement in a racially diverse school and African American community

ABSTRACT Why are most African American students in lower-track classes in racially diverse schools? How does the nexus of home, school, and community impact African Americans’ academic placement in a racially and economically diverse school district? This research used ethnographic methods to explore 38 African American middle school students’ perceptions and experiences of academic placement in a racially diverse middle school and a segregated and disinvested African American neighborhood. This research introduces the term Plessy’s Tracks to acknowledge the sustained racial caste system that manifests through lower-track classes and devalued homes and communities. Findings suggest students face multiple challenges and systemic inequalities when self-selecting classes. Also, racially segregated homes and communities have shaped racialized tracking while producing Black placemaking in homes, classrooms, and communities.

Evolution of a sundown town and racial caste system: Norman, Oklahoma from 1889 to 1967

Sundown regions were post-Reconstruction localities that deliberately excluded African Americans, often well into the 20th century. While former states of the Confederacy instituted state-wide racial caste systems denying African Americans basic political and economic privileges and opportunities, what of localities outside the Deep South? This case study concludes that Norman, Oklahoma, located outside of the Deep South, was a sundown town from 1889 to 1967 or for 78 years. Sundown implementation practices resulting in ongoing racial cleansing and exclusion include a variety of extra-legal actions including violent racial expulsion in the beginning; Ku Klux Klan terror in the 1920s; ongoing freeze-out of local services such as hotel services; denial of home ownership; denial of employment; curtailment of political rights including voting and freedom of movement; an ominous reputation as a sundown town; continuing violence; and threats. The widespread act of systematically excluding African Americans after dark from Norman, in tandem with state legislation that outlawed interracial marriage and intimate relationships until 1967 and maintaining all white public colleges until 1948, contributed to a racial caste system based on unequal opportunities and privileges afforded to whites. Sundown practices were not only ongoing geographic and racist Jim Crow segregation issues as is sometimes stated, but also, a key approach to enforce a rigid racial caste system in the midst of a society with democratic ideals.

From Reciprocity to Interdependence: Mass Incarceration and Service-Learning

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression—a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I argue that we need to recognize that mass incarceration has created a new a racial caste system and is the root cause uniting many social problems. Mass incarceration and neoliberalism work together to exclude millions of people from economic and civic life, stain them with moral condemnation so that they remain invisible to the majority, and divert public attention from the flaws in our political and economic structures. I use examples from a local nonprofit to illustrate how this framework offers a new approach to servicelearning and public writing.

India, Racial Caste, and Abolition in Charles Sumner's Political Thought

In recent years, scholars across the humanities have argued that the nineteenth-century American abolitionists articulated important conceptual lessons about democracy. This essay contributes to this literature by newly interpreting the political thought of Charles Sumner. Regnant scholarly treatments of Sumner have been narrowly biographical. I shift focus by examining his use of the word “caste” as an analytic and political term. The article demonstrates that Sumner adopted the language of caste from missionary accounts of caste hierarchy in India; that he used this information to argue that there was an oppressive analogue at home: racial caste; and that, accordingly, Sumner's conception of abolition included the dismantling of racial caste and the cultivation of interracial republican association.

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case"

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case" Erika Renée Williams (bio) W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he defines as "a problem" in the Euro-American imaginary, has long been understood to denote an alienated black subjectivity and an American body politic divided by racial caste. The white gaze, Du Bois instructs, has the potential to restrict the parameters of black subjectivity by barring black subjects from fully accessing their citizenship and expressing their humanity. In the opening chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," he recounts the childhood memory that perhaps occasioned his divided consciousness: that of a young white female classmate refusing the affection he offered with the gift of a "gorgeous" calling card.1 The incident leads him to realize that his blackness signals not approbation but abjection to many of his white compatriots and thus to see that they deem him a problem and not fully a person. Because he likens this experience of failed interpersonal, interracial affection to that of being cast out from his native land, Du Bois arguably suggests a parallel failed "romance," understood in its most capacious sense as any heightened exchange of intersubjective affect, between himself and the American nation writ large. In rendering the young white girl a symbol of an ungenerous and withholding white nation, Du Bois implicitly ties the development of individual states of black consciousness to the promise and pathos of black assimilation into a Euro-centrist American body politic, foregrounding the way interpersonal dynamics of intimacy shape collective processes of nation-building and implicitly rendering double consciousness a matter of misbegotten love. [End Page 27] Moreover, Du Bois's recounting of a childhood story of foreclosed "puppy love" to set up his theory of double consciousness in Souls marks his deployment of a literary trope that I term the "cross-caste romance." Drawing on Lisa L. Moore's work regarding the role of intercultural love in imagining and shaping the fabric of a nation, I define the cross-caste romance as an intimate relation between persons separated by differences (e.g., race, class, and gender) that are purportedly immutable but are in fact constructed, a relation that foregrounds the fragility of intersubjective exchange and the tenuousness of nation formation.2 Simultaneously a remainder of transatlantic slavery, a harbinger of antiracist and decolonial critique, and an object of metaphysical inquiry, double consciousness cannot be understood solely by way of history, politics, or philosophy. Rather, I argue that it must be approached through the framework of the story with which he introduces it and through its trope of failed interpersonal intimacy, which symbolizes not just the psycho-social alienation of black subjects but the broader material and sociopolitical divisions fracturing the United States. Indeed, Du Bois's various narrative projects, both fictional and nonfictional, describe the urgency of America's revaluation and acceptance of its ethnic others by using the language of intersubjective and intrasubjective intimacy—whether figured as romantic courtship or as other forms of love or eros. For Du Bois, the solution to the conundrum of the black subject's compulsory, divided consciousness is twofold: first, a robust process of black recovery and reclamation, premised partly on the recovery and reclamation of African ancestry and African folkways, and second, an attempt at some form of black assimilation, through which the black subject might "consent," with Motenian echoes, not to being reduced to a "single being" but rather to being incorporated into the American body politic while still maintaining some measure of cultural distinction.3 Du Bois suggests that black American subjects, once having taken sustenance from the legacy of "wasted, dispersed, or forgotten" African "genius," might then be freer to offer up the gifts—however conditional—of their affective labor.4 Like his anecdote in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's forgotten 1907 detective story "The Case" frames double consciousness as a form of misbegotten love and in terms of the challenge of placing black self-love on a parallel track with black assimilation in the form of affective, intersubjective...