Racial Divisions Research Articles

Schuette and Antibalkanization

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Justice Kennedy’s controlling plurality revised the political process doctrine and ended the practice of affirmative action in Michigan. In this opinion, Kennedy followed in the Court’s tradition of invoking antibalkanization values in equal protection cases, making the empirical claims both that antibalkanization motivated the campaign to end affirmative action in Michigan and that the campaign itself would, absent judicial intervention, have antibalkanizing effects. Using sophisticated empirical methods, this Article is the first to examine whether the Court’s claims on antibalkanization are correct. We find they are not. Support for the Michigan ballot initiative banning affirmative action arose principally from feelings of racial resentment, not a desire for racial comity. The ballot initiative did not mitigate racial divisiveness but did just the opposite, exacerbating racial division in the state. We conclude by considering what Schuette and these empirical findings mean for affirmative action, for the political process doctrine, and for the antibalkanization principle.

Labor rights are civil rights: inter-racial unionism and the struggle to unionize Nissan in Canton, Mississippi

On 4 August 2017, workers at Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, voted 2244 to 1307 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The organizing campaign in Canton – which began shortly after the plant opened in 2003 – was one of the most important in recent labor history, and it attracted national and international media coverage. It also mobilized some high-profile supporters, including actor Danny Glover, musician Common, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, and presidential contender Bernie Sanders. This article uses interviews with Nissan workers and UAW staffers, together with the records of the long organizing drive, to provide the first detailed examination of this landmark campaign, revealing problems that press accounts did not cover. While the UAW and its supporters blamed Nissan’s fierce opposition for the outcome, this article reveals that the reasons for the loss were more complex. Apart from corporate opposition, community hostility, the increasing number of temporary workers – who were unable to vote in the election – and racial divisions were all important factors. Most of the UAW’s supporters were African-American, and they were mobilized by a campaign that declared that, ‘Labor Rights are Civil Rights.’ This slogan alienated many whites, however, weakening the union. While the UAW pledged to fight on, the defeat was another blow to its long campaign to organize foreign-owned automakers in the U.S., an increasingly important sector.

Can MOOCs reduce global inequality in education?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as means for unprecedented access to education, crossing divisions of race, class, age, gender, and geography. Yet empirical studies have demonstrated that students of MOOCs are primarily those already advantaged in terms of education and socioeconomic status. Drawing on recent academic literature and a theoretical understanding of the role of technology in education, this article examines whether MOOCs can indeed reduce global inequality in education. The paper concludes that while MOOCs can provide a novel form of learning through technology and remove a significant cost barrier to education, they will do little to reduce global educational gaps until they are able to reach and retain those most lacking education.

“The Index to a Man’s Principles”: Dawson and the Canadian Yukon Patriotic Fund, 1914–1920

The Northern Review 44 (2017): 51–78 The prevailing image of Dawson (and of the Yukon writ large) during the First World War is that of a community singularly united behind the war effort, with previous class and racial divisions bridged by the call of Empire and of nation. Using the records of the Canadian Yukon Patriotic Fund and the reports of the Dawson Daily News, this article complicates the glowing contemporary and historical assessments of the Yukon’s war effort by revealing the social divisions, frustrations, and disillusionment that also mark the community’s complex First World War experience. The war exacerbated racial and social fault lines, particularly the divide between the community and the large transient non-British workforce who found themselves under attack in Dawson’s discourse about belonging and patriotism. These dynamics do not discredit the dominant narrative of a loyal, patriotic, and generous Dawson-at-war, but they do challenge the idea that Dawson never wavered in its unity, sense of shared purpose, and enthusiasm for the war effort. A sense of disillusionment gripped the community as the war went on, and the situation only worsened when veterans returned home to find no jobs and no appropriate re-establishment plan in place. By 1919, Dawson’s pride in its patriotic contributions had been tempered by a sense of regret that it had mobilized so much of its resources to support the war effort—and received increasingly little in return. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.004

The Post-Apartheid Development Debacle in South Africa: How Mainstream Economics and the Vested Interests Preserved Apartheid Economic Structures

:Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were persuaded by mainstream economists and South African businesses to pursue neoliberal policies. The ANC implemented policies that made South Africa more open to international trade and financial flows along with privatization and austerity, other than a modest increase in social expenditures. After twenty-three years of such policies, we can judge their effectiveness. Unfortunately, neoliberalism worsened the inequality created under apartheid and failed to stimulate significant growth and development. This article documents the extent to which the maintenance of key apartheid-era institutions, under the guise of “market friendly policies,” undermined the prospects for long-term economic and human development in South Africa. This post-apartheid development debacle should go down in history as one of the great failures of mainstream economics and its neoliberal policy recommendations. Breaking the cycle of uneven development in South Africa will require fundamental changes in institutions, including changes in democracy, ownership structures, and the very nature of the economic system. This article offers some ideas for how an adjusted institutional structure might reconfigure the social provisioning process in South Africa to address racial divisions and lingering inequality.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Racial Divide

A review by Peter M. Newlove, and Shoshanna BitzUniversity of Colorado DenverC. Anderson . (2017). White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial D ivide. New Yorkm, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 287 pa...

Creating ‘international communities’ in southern Spain: Self-segregation and ‘institutional whiteness’ in Swedish lifestyle migration

This article examines intra-European relations in narratives of Swedish lifestyle migrants living permanently or part-time on the Spanish Sun Coast. It pays particular attention to the complexities of Swedish migrants’ cultural identities and patterns of self-segregation in the Spanish society by investigating the following questions: How do boundaries of social networks that Swedish lifestyle migrants participate in, or interrelate, with a sense of ‘likeness’? In what ways are the formation of these ‘international’ networks mediated through ideas of cultural similarity and parallel difference, and how do such notions both override and uphold boundaries tied to social, cultural and racial divisions? It is argued that the formation of so-called ‘international communities’ on the Spanish Sun Coast tend to cluster mainly north-western European lifestyle migrants, which calls for an analysis of ‘orientations’ towards a certain ‘likeness’, and the function of these spaces and communities as spaces of ‘institutional whiteness’ that work as a ‘meeting point’ where some bodies tend to feel comfortable as they already belong here. The social and cultural boundaries that surround these communities destabilises the idea of a common, culturally homogeneous European identity and display intra-European racial divisions mediated through discourses of cultural differences. What appears is a south–north divide built upon a deep Swedish postcolonial identification with Anglo Saxon and north-western European countries and cultures, and a parallel dis-identification with (the former colonial powers in) southern Europe.

Recentering U.S. Empire: A Structural Perspective on the Color Line

In the past 20 years, scholars of top sociology and race and ethnicity articles increasingly have mentioned the term “color line.” Prominent among them are sociologists concerned with how incoming waves of Latin American and Asian immigration, increasing rates of intermarriage, and a growing multiracial population will affect the U.S. racial order. While much of this work cites Du Bois, scholars stray from his definition of the color line in two ways. First, they characterize the color line as unidimensional and Black–white rather than as many divisions between non-white people and whites. Second, scholars portray the color line as the outcome of microlevel factors rather than the product of international geopolitical arrangements. I contend that in contrast to scholarship that portrays immigrants and intermarried and multiracial people as shifting the color line, international and imperial policies related to immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification are longstanding sites of the construction of the U.S. racial order. Scholars should conceptualize the United States as an empire state in order to analyze the international political history of multiple color lines. In doing so, they can distinguish between differences in kind and degree of racial divisions.

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the American Joke

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the American Joke

RETRACTED: LYNCHINGS, RACIAL THREAT, AND WHITES’ PUNITIVE VIEWS TOWARD BLACKS

AbstractDisparities in historical and contemporary punishment of Blacks have been well documented. Racial threat has been proffered as a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. In an effort to understand the factors that influence punishment and racial divides in America, we draw on racial threat theory and prior scholarship to test three hypotheses. First, Black punitive sentiment among Whites will be greater among those who reside in areas where lynching was more common. Second, heightened Black punitive sentiment among Whites in areas with more pronounced legacies of lynching will be partially mediated by Whites’ perceptions of Blacks’ criminality and of Black‐on‐White violence in these areas. Third, the impact of lynching on Black punitive sentiment will be amplified by Whites’ perceptions of Blacks as criminals and as threatening more generally. We find partial support for these hypotheses. The results indicate that lynchings are associated with punitive sentiment toward Black offenders, and these relationships are partially mediated by perceptions of Blacks as criminals and as threats to Whites. In addition, the effects of lynchings on Black punitiveness are amplified among White respondents who view Blacks as a threat to Whites. These results highlight the salience of historical context for understanding contemporary views about punishment.

*In the Heart of the Country* and Pain: Re-reading Space, Gender and Affect

This essay offers a new spatial reading of In the Heart of the Country. It explores J. M. Coetzee’s interest in grounding white female narrators in heterotopic spaces which, while marked by terror and racial divisions, simultaneously enforce proximity and intimacy across the racial bar. It shows that grounding Magda within the specific phenomenology of the farm enables Coetzee to explore a set of traumatic double-binds which are not only discursive but also sensorial, psychic as well as affective. It concludes by arguing that the strong self-referentiality of the novel can itself be read as an affective symptom, the trace of psychic parceling which happens at the intersection of space, symbol and traumatic power relations.

Exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage in barrel racing horses in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

BackgroundExercise‐induced pulmonary hemorrhage (EIPH) refers to bleeding from the lungs in association with strenuous exercise. It has been documented in race horses but little information exists on EIPH in barrel racing horses.Hypothesis/ObjectivesOur goals were to evaluate the presence of EIPH in barrel racing horses and estimate its prevalence in the Pacific Northwest.Animals149 barrel racing horses enrolled at events in WA (11), ID (3), and MT (33).MethodsObservational cross‐sectional study. Data collected included signalment, history of illness, respiratory disease, race division, and pre‐race medications. Endoscopy was performed and tracheobronchoscopic (TBE) EIPH score was assigned based on quantity of blood in the trachea (0 = no blood to 4 = abundance of blood within the trachea). After TBE, bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) was performed. Erythrocyte (red blood cell, RBC) counts were obtained from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF). Statistical analysis included linear and logistic regression, Fisher's exact t test, and calculation of correlation coefficient. Significance was set at P < .05.ResultsThe prevalence of EIPH based on TBE EIPH score was 54%. When based on BALF RBC count >1,000 cells, EIPH prevalence was 66%. Race time did not significantly affect the presence of EIPH. A significant (P < .0001) positive linear relationship between the TBE and BAL erythrocyte count was identified, but its strength was poor (r 2 = .15).Conclusions and Clinical ImportanceEIPH occurs in over 50% of barrel racing horses in the Pacific Northwest. Precise determination of the impact of EIPH on health of barrel racers requires further study.

Performing the Rainbow Nation: The Limitations of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

After the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa was charged with acknowledging the sufferings of its populace while democratizing and de-racializing state infrastructure. Instead of pursuing the politically expedient path of collective amnesia, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1995. It has since been heralded as the most ambitious and organized socio-political endeavour to confront a troubled and divisive history. The Commission attempted to initiate South African into a new future predicated upon the principles of social justice, the rule of law and reconciliation; however, this paper will argue that in practice, these ideals were not sufficient to combat extant political pressure and were not politically supported by any concrete mechanism capable of catalyzing social transformation. Through an analysis of the Commission’s provision of amnesty, dismissal of institutional responsibility for apartheid and crime and the reluctance to pursue reparative and developmental policies, this paper will suggest South Africa’s attempts to bridge its racial divides were chiefly symbolic and restricted. Finally, it will consider whether the TRC’s performance of “truth” occurred at the price of reconciliation and the ramifications for restorative justice as a tool of social healing.

“Passive Combatants”: Online Discourses of the “Tamil Woman” and the 2009 Gardiner Expressway Occupation

“Passive Combatants”Online Discourses of the “Tamil Woman” and the 2009 Gardiner Expressway Occupation Daphne Jeyapal (bio) Triggered by a particularly gory day in Sri Lanka’s conflict, around five thousand protesters in Toronto made their way onto the Gardiner Expressway and shut down six lanes of traffic for approximately six hours on Sunday, May 10, 2009—Mother’s Day.1 The Gardiner occupation was one part of the large-scale mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Tamils around the world in response to the culmination of decades of political repression, subjugation, and structural genocide. While some celebrated the Gardiner occupation as an innovative transnational protest practice, justified as an understandable response after months of protesters being ignored, most commentators condemned the act as “dangerous,” “unlawful,” and “the wrong way to protest.” Online discussions critiqued women’s presence at the protest’s frontlines as “human shields,” initiating debates on the agency of racialized women in activism. Within broader feminist debates about online communication’s potential to transform women’s social and cultural experiences, in this paper I explore how the virtual organizes, alters, confronts, and is shaped by gender and race relations. Discourses of the Gardiner protest that highlight the racial divide constructing women’s resistance in “real” space parallel representations of women’s resistance in virtual space. The sociopolitical space of activism within “real” and virtual realities are still grounded in race politics that are mediated by the nation-state. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s insightful definition of transnational feminism helps to highlight that it is through social practices of border crossing—in this case, through places, platforms, and realities—that power relations between and within feminisms are uncovered.2 Feminists who continue to struggle with issues of privilege and difference [End Page 152] in online spaces must emphasize a critique of the dominant “gaze” that has “whitened our technological stories.”3 With such a critique in mind, I examine a combination of online and offline discourse to explore what happens when an act of transnational protest by racialized women moves from offline-and-local to online-and-(trans) nationally networked. Information and communication technologies (ICT) were central in this social movement. Through ICTs the Tamil diaspora came to know, engage with, challenge, and organize against their oppression across borders. As media reports and key informants from my research echoed, the incredible global mobilization of 2009 would not have been possible without the digitization of the unfolding conflict in Sri Lanka, or the virtual connection of a transnational network of activists and community members. In Canada, Twitter and texts were used to organize impromptu protests, including the mass occupation on the Gardiner Expressway. Mainstream media reported police discomfort over the community’s use of ICTs to mobilize. Journalists spoke of needing to be engaged with Tamil online networks and news sources because they provided comprehensive reports from around the globe. These narratives suggest that as the movement unfolded in “real” space, it was simultaneously constructed and negotiated in cyberspace. However, the promise of technology resides within a paradox: technologies can enable marginalized groups, but they can also exacerbate marginalization. In the digital age, when racialized women digitize their resistance across borders of lived and virtual realities, examining the conditions underlying representations of their activism is critical: our revolutions are tweeted, battled on Facebook, and borne witness to on YouTube. The politics of gender and race underscore them all. Building upon growing scholarship on the agency and resistance of racialized women around the world,4 and drawing upon the contributions of critical race and postcolonial scholars,5 this essay highlights the representational politics of the racialized woman activist—the composite “Third World woman” in the West6—who engages in radical, transnational protest practices against national conflicts. Since “womanhood” is constructed through gender, ethnic, and racial divisions within the nation, protest provides a powerful site to unpack how the essentialized role of women frames them not only as a nation’s biological and symbolic reproducers but also as its ideological reproducers.7 Women’s function as an assemblage of ethnic and racial collectivities and difference is amplified through the antagonism of protest across “real” and cyber space. Online spaces...

In Dialogue: Response to Review

In DialogueResponse to Review Gerald Sim (bio) This is the first in an occasional series of reviews and author responses. Please see Jared Sexton, "For a Neo-Marxism without Guarantees: A Critique of Critical Criticism," Discourse 38.3 (2016): 445–55. Among the browser windows open underneath the e-mail where James Leo Cahill offered me this generous platform to record a response to Jared Sexton's review of my book were two items that modulated my reaction. The first contained a news report about Heath Mello, a pro-choice candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Mello's prospects in the deeply conservative region had risen on a tide of post-2016 fervor but were taking on water in the election's closing days due to erroneous reporting that in 2009 he had cosponsored a bill requiring abortion patients to look at their fetal ultrasounds. In truth, the legislation only required that patients be informed that the images were available. Still, national women's groups balked. Unsettled by the controversy, Mello's bid failed. In an adjacent tab I had clicked on an interview with Asad Haider, Pakistani American cofounder of the Marxist Viewpoint Magazine. His opposition to identity politics had elicited vocifer-ous criticism. Amid the incoming fire were befuddling accusations from some quarters that he is white. [End Page 263] Toggling through these pages, I was struck by how the confl icts intersected. Under normal circumstances I might have countered with an itemized riposte to the review, but the necessity of that now felt far less pressing. I am hence letting the book speak for itself. To abstain, however, is not to vacuously agree to disagree, because something is terribly wrong in these dangerous times, which a truce does nothing to solve. Plainly, I failed to persuade Sexton, and some of his critiques actually hardened my own convictions. Nevertheless, even if our minds remain unchanged, we must absolutely rethink what we do in the aftermath. In some measure, I wrote The Subject of Film and Race to provoke a dialogue and had similar designs in mind with the chapter about Edward Said's Orientalism that Discourse published in 2012. Those debates, I submitted, were restaging parallel disputes over long-standing rifts between humanism and poststructuralism and between class and identity politics. The book has incited a response that now makes even clearer that these conflicts, considered alongside recent events, remain not merely unresolved but also thoroughly relevant. The last eighteen months have only raised the stakes by revealing the limits of political movements organized around identity. And yet, after November 2016 the Left appears intent on avoiding substantive self-examination. It turned straightaway to writers such as Thomas Frank and J. D. Vance for help in deciphering the "white working class," thus retaining if not accepting a discursive framework based on racial divisions. Vance's Hill-billy Elegy has been a best seller for well over a year.1 It is of course important to better grasp what is happening in places such as rural Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but the process currently under way reinscribes racial particularism and sheds the aspiration to form a universal working class capable of finding and articulating common cause in a critique of capitalism. My book may not have adopted that position as stridently on every page, but readers could infer it. On that score, we can all be more careful and open, as I would be if I were to write the manuscript now. Proponents of class-based critique, Marxist humanists, Bernie Bros, and all the rest should consider what Haider proffers to Seattle Weekly about how we conduct the work of politics: Now in an organizing meeting, any discussion that takes place between a white person and a person of color will be tense and guarded, because at any time the white person may be accused of white privilege, and thus denounced for bringing irreconcilable political interests into the group. That is a very different kind of politics, and not one that tends to result in [End Page 264] open strategic discussions, building trust between activists, or effectively broadening towards a mass movement. But socialists have to understand...

"The Fabulous Irishman": Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America

"The Fabulous Irishman":Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America Rachel Gordan (bio) Little remembered today, but much discussed at the time was the visit of the Jewish Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe of Dublin to the United States in the spring of 1957. Stranger-than-fiction, but also typifying what Cold War Americans wanted to believe was possible among their own Jewish citizens, Mayor Briscoe embodied an unexpected combination of religious and national loyalties. "The Lord Mayor," explained typical American newspaper coverage of Briscoe's visit, "embodies the unusual combination of a devout orthodox Jew and a zealous Irish patriot."1 The irony was that Briscoe was not American, proving that the freedom of opportunity and religion that Cold War Americans viewed as fundamental to their own purported exceptionalism, actually occurred to varying degrees in other countries—although often without the fanfare typical in the US context. Still, Briscoe's six-week American visit, the media's attention to it, and the television drama that Briscoe inspired, provide a view into Cold War American fears and desires around Jews, religious fealty, citizenship, and the particular way in which midcentury American discourses around religious freedom found a primary example in Jews, such as Briscoe, and their religion. At a time when a tri-faith image of postwar America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was widely accepted, Briscoe's presence and popularity in the U.S. helped to affirm America's embrace of religious freedom—albeit a freedom constrained to just three religions, and even more crucially, although rarely made explicit, to those individuals understood as racially white. As Kevin Schultz's study of "tri-faith America" explains of the era's credo: "The ethnic, religious, and racial divisions that had been predominant in pre-World War II America no longer had a place in the defining traits of good Americanism. With enemies such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the ideal of tolerance was sacrosanct, and during the war years the kind of tolerance that was [End Page 401] lionized most was that between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews."2 This tri-faith ideal had practical results, Schultz points out, challenging the nation to rethink the distribution of power and who was deserving of social, political, and cultural recognition. In line with this rethinking of American society, Robert Briscoe prodded American observers to reconsider their stereotypes of clannish Jews, and he affirmed postwar Jewish allegiance to religion as an ideological core of their identity. Although Briscoe was an "Irish import," America's reception of him during his spring 1957 tour symbolized the unusual role that Jews played in serving as evidentiary proof of midcentury America's ideal of religious freedom.3 Briscoe would spend six weeks in North America. In that time, he became a celebrity, as newspapers around the country followed his tour and as a result of his television and radio appearances. In its coverage of Mayor Briscoe, the media all over the country broadcast an image of the Jewish mayor as embodying religious freedom—an American value freighted with political saliency during the Cold War, which according to President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was a battle between those who believed in the moral laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition and those who found value in materialist secularism. When quoted in the press, Briscoe's messages were about Ireland's religious freedom, but American embrace of Briscoe nonetheless symbolized America's attachment to these values. "Briscoe Says He's Live Evidence There 'Absolutely Is No Bigotry in Ireland'" ran one typical headline in the Los Angeles Times that connected Briscoe's celebrity with his embodiment of religious freedom.4 As Leo Braudy, a scholar of American culture notes, fame in Western society has long been associated with the ideal of freedom, because fame can be understood as the "social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness." With fame, the celebrity is granted recognition and permission to be himself. "To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation, means you have come into your rightful inheritance...

The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Nicholas Villanueva

Reviewed by: The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Nicholas Villanueva Elliott Young The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands. By Nicholas Villanueva Jr. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 219. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-6030-4; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8263-5838-7.) Nicholas Villanueva Jr.'s The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands examines the uptick in violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas in the 1910s. Villanueva shows how the combination of fears of the Mexican Revolution and persistent anti-Mexican racism contributed to a landscape where Texas Rangers and white lynch mobs could act with impunity. While the lynching of Mexicans is deserving of more scholarly attention, it is not clear what new insights are gained through this examination. The book focuses on a few well-publicized cases of lynching and unfair trials that resulted in execution. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb have documented 571 cases of Mexicans killed by mobs in the United States between [End Page 1033] 1848 and 1928, 20 percent of whom were killed in the 1910s. Other historians have suggested that the number of Mexicans killed during the 1910s alone runs well into the hundreds. This book does not attempt to clarify these wide-ranging estimates, but Villanueva argues for expanding the strict definition of lynching employed by the NAACP. In the first chapter the reader learns about anti-Mormonism, Juan Crow segregation, and the Mexican Revolution, and this background provides context for the cases of lynching discussed in subsequent chapters. The second chapter examines the brutal killings of Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas, in 1910 and Antonio Gómez in Thorndale, Texas, in 1911. Rodríguez, a twenty-year-old migrant worker, was dragged from a jail, "doused with oil and set ablaze" (p. 53). Seven months later, Gómez, a fourteen-year-old, was hanged from a telegraph pole by a mob incensed over the murder of a German American. In neither case was anyone found guilty of the murders. The story of these killings is based largely on English-language U.S. newspapers and Texas state archival documents. Although Villanueva refers to the protests that erupted throughout Mexico in response to Rodríguez's murder, we only see these protests through the eyes of English-language U.S. newspaper reporters. It would have been useful to see how Mexican newspapers and Spanish-language Texas newspapers reported on these murders, as well as a fuller analysis of the Mexican government's response. The lack of research in Mexican archives results in a U.S.-centric view of a transnational story. One of Villanueva's main contentions is that the legal system often achieved the same miscarriage of justice as the lynch mob. The chapter on the execution of fifteen-year-old Leon Martínez Jr. for the murder of a young Anglo-American woman, Emma Brown, shows how the legal system worked to condemn Martínez based on a confession coerced out of the teenager under threat of a lynch mob. Facing pressure from Anglo-Texans, Governor Oscar Colquitt refused to pardon Martínez. Villanueva convincingly argues that this execution was a "legal lynching," even though it might not count as a lynching by a strict definition (p. 101). Villanueva acknowledges class and racial divides within the Mexican community, but some of the complexities drop out in the analysis of particular incidents. For example, Villanueva focuses on José T. Canales's heroic efforts to restrain and reform the Texas Rangers following the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of Mexicans in the wake of the 1915 Plan de San Diego. What is missing from this account is the role Canales and other Texas Mexicans played in opposing the San Diego rebels. While the Anglo-Mexican divide helps explain a lot of the violence in south Texas in this period, some middle-class Texas Mexicans sided with the Rangers against the radicals who threatened their interests. Villanueva should be applauded for focusing our attention on the large number of ethnic Mexicans killed in Texas by lynch mobs and by a discriminatory judicial system. Other scholars will have to build...

Uncovering Reactions to the Racial Resentment Scale across the Racial Divide

Race remains at the forefront of the public agenda, and understanding how white and black Americans understand race relations and racial issues has become all the more critical. Amid the lively deb...

In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America by Rebecca K. Shrum

Reviewed by: In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America by Rebecca K. Shrum Christopher Allison In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America. By Rebecca K. Shrum. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 221. $54.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2312-8.) How do material objects intervene in our identity? This (good) question animates Rebecca K. Shrum's thorough study of mirrors in early America, or, as they were better known in the period, looking glasses. The story is remarkable, a moment in the history of the world in which many people, across boundaries and geographies, were suddenly able to see themselves with increasing clarity. But, as Shrum argues, people also began—in their individual acts of seeing with mirrors—to imagine how others saw them as well. In other words, they had the privilege of seeing themselves and also the burden of living more consciously within the gaze of others, as they imagined it. In concert with a growing trend in early American scholarship, Shrum approaches early America in a "vast" way, in recognition that the time and place were deeply interconnected with other parts of the world. This approach is evident in her use of sources: she considers the encounters of missionaries in the American West in the nineteenth century, BaKongo culture in West Africa, Venetian workshops of the sixteenth century, and the North American fur trade. In this respect, she demonstrates the promise of crossing borders to help us understand how mirrors and culture were formed in tandem in this period. Her source base is materially diverse, including museum objects, personal diaries, probate records, ethnographic writing, visual culture (especially photography), newspapers, and the Works Progress Administration ex-slave narratives, to name a few. The six chapters follow a roughly chronological trajectory from North American contact to the nineteenth century. The first chapter concerns the technology of the looking glass and its place in the trade of the Atlantic world. The second focuses on New England in the seventeenth century, and chapter 3 focuses specifically on ownership patterns among European, Indian, and African populations in North America. A standout of this section is Shrum's attention to the mirror in the dress of Indian peoples and how it functioned alongside the acquisition of other goods in trade networks (this theme is taken up again in the final chapter). The fifth chapter focuses on the constructions of whiteness that the mirror prompted, differentiated between men and women. Shrum makes clear that the construction of whiteness, with the aid of the mirror, had a role in the hardening racial divisions of American society. The argument of the book is that the looking glass was a means through which white men built a racial and gendered hierarchy across the vast Atlantic world, by demonstrating a certain mastery over the vision that inhered in the mirror and that marked the visions of others as inferior. But white men were unable to completely control the mirror, of course. So the meanings and uses of mirrors, while structured by this hierarchy, were never confined by it. In fact, Shrum demonstrates the remarkable creativity and abundant transcendent meaning that pooled around the uses of the mirror among women and men, of all races and positions. [End Page 959] There were a few divisions that I thought were a tad too rigid—white, black, red. This structure is an advantage in Shrum's analysis, in that it allows for a focused look at populations and sources—so I do not doubt her arguments. Yet I often wondered if the next step for upcoming scholars is to consider how objects like looking glasses had uses and meanings that bled from one people to another. New research on wampum, early photography, souvenir objects, and more has proved to offer fruitful directions going forward. Shrum's work is required reading for upcoming scholars who are attempting to trace the social life of things in the formation of American identities. Christopher Allison University of Chicago Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live By

Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live By Julie Reid (bio) Countermythologization and Collective Action This essay argues for a revision of both research and teaching practice within the fields of media studies and the communication sciences, and adopts Barthean semiotic myth theory as a means to demonstrate how such revision could be envisaged as countermythologization within the current climate of decolonization. First, a brief discussion broadly contextualizes the decolonization debate. This is followed by two examples of how [End Page 132] this overarching environment can be responded to, first, by rethinking media studies research practice, and second, by critically revising traditional teaching practices within media and communication studies. Roland Barthes constructed the semiotic formula for myth to illustrate how myth acts as a mode of (often political) speech, regularly utilized in visual and mediated cultural artifacts such as film and advertising, for the purposeful naturalization and justification of dominant modes of thought and power.1 Mythologization, which is the activity of mythic speech, differs from the concepts of, for example, discourse and/or narrative in that it declines the provision of detail, empties out its subject of history, and presents only a partial, simplified, and uncomplicated view of the world. Although mythic speech neither tolerates nor accommodates contradiction, it can be remarkably effective in persuading a lot of people that the ways things are, are the way they are meant to be. Since Barthes's original theorization of myth as the "top-down" exertion of communicated power by the dominant sections of society, countermyth theory has examined the conscious mythologization of voices of opposition and dissent.2 The contestation of dominant colonially inscribed power and its resultant myths, and the current oppositional movements fronting decolonization, can be understood within this theoretical frame. A key moment in the decolonization movement arose in 2015, when a collective of students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa called for the removal of a statue of the nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the university's campus. Demands to remove the statue were metonymic of a desire for the transformation of university curricula and culture, as many black students felt alienated within an institutionalized Eurocentric outlook. The #RhodesMustFall initiative provided impetus for the #FeesMustFall student movement, which blossomed on campuses shortly thereafter, sprouting a series of student-led protests in 2015 and 2016. The students' requests varied depending on the particular conditions at each campus, but in general two demands appeared as the main thrust. The first was the provision of access to quality higher education to all willing scholars, free of charge. The second was for a revision and transformation of university curricula, that is, for the decolonization of education.3 Subsequent to #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, collective mobilizations have initiated across the globe, emphasizing similar substantive points of critique and foci, such as the 2015 student protests in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and the 2017 social movements against Confederate monuments in the United States.4 [End Page 133] Responsive South African academics in tertiary communication and media studies schools are currently engaging in a significant process of overdue curriculum revision. The national conversation, which was initiated by the students and followed by the collaborative efforts of media studies and communication academics, partially facilitated by the South African Communications Association (SACOMM), to confront the necessary task of decolonization, provides a rich platform for debate, contestation, and transformation.5 Narratives of racial division have often directed the trajectory of this conversation about curriculum, which in the South African context is to be expected, given the country's recent apartheid history. Fissures of race differences that germinated during colonialism may have evolved in their form (if not their function), but they nonetheless persist in the present. A gruesome beast, this mythology shifts the balance of opportunity and power in favor of some peoples over others, and it crawls about within the socioeconomic structure of things in South Africa much as it does in many other societies. But an overemphasis on issues of race politics risks ignoring the fact that the project of decolonization is about more than balancing the scales of racial inequality. To be sure, the...