Racial Divisions Research Articles

Joseph V. Simone: In Memoriam (1935–2021)

![][1] He was a poet. A prodigious writer. A giant in the world of pediatric oncology. Those of us in the field of cancer research, as well as patients around the globe, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Joseph “Joe” Simone. A first-generation American who was born amid the

Palestine along the colour line: race, colonialism, and construction labour, 1918–1948

ABSTRACT This article examines how racialized concepts of the labouring body shaped the division of labour in British-ruled Palestine’s construction industry between 1918–1948. In contending with Palestine’s “labour question”, Zionist Jews, British authorities and Palestinian Arabs engaged in competing and overlapping racial and anti-racist projects embedded in global and imperial racial thought and politics. Israel/Palestine’s racial division of labour and the land’s twentieth-century social structures were an expression of the continuous evolution of the encounter between such racial projects and between changing material, political and social conditions. Narrating this encounter allows us to move beyond treatments of race and racial politics as abstractions, demonstrating how they marked and classified bodies, and shaped experiences, lives and landscapes.

The Workplace Comedy and Pandemic Politics in Greg Daniels’ Upload

This paper examines the critical potential and pedagogic possibilities of the workplace television comedy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is particularly interested in Greg Daniels’ Upload, a series that debuted during the first wave of infections in North America. Although it was produced before the current health crisis, Upload offers a prescient social commentary on the depravities of late capitalism, one that speaks to present concerns over access to vital health resources and the importance of “essential” workers, specifically in the service industry. However, Upload is driven by a liberal version of multiculturalism that emphasizes racial equality and ostensibly recognizes “difference” but downplays economic disparities and racial divisions of labor even as it draws on them repeatedly in its critique of inequality. Whereas the series effectively challenges the monetization of everyday life and death, a point of praise for many critics, it fails to disrupt or even call attention to how low-wage and purportedly low-skilled work is currently and historically racialized in the US. As a result, Upload’s efficacy as a social commentary and indictment of late capitalism is more interested in the unequal distribution of essential resources and services than the political economy of their provision, that is, the social relations of their production.

Experiences of Hispanic Families with Social Services in the Racially Segregated Southeast: Views from Administrators and Workers in North Carolina.

North Carolina—as a state in the racially segregated Southeast—offers a unique context to understand access to social services for Hispanic families and children. Theories of administrative burden posit that Hispanic families likely face high learning, compliance, and psychological costs. Hispanic families face challenges that compound these costs: limited English language and literacy proficiency, complex household composition, and citizenship status of family members and other household members. With new survey results and qualitative data on social service administrators and front-line workers, we examine how these costs may affect access to programs for Hispanic families who reside in a state with a history of racial divisions that have shaped local policy implementation. Some workers noted transportation barriers and complex application processes as limiting access. While we expected to find that Hispanic families may be disadvantaged by decentralized service delivery in a manner that is similar to the experiences of African American families, workers instead note significant resources that help facilitate Hispanic families’ access to programs. Workers view national anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, rather than state and local policy rules or resource constraints, as limiting their capacity to serve Hispanic families.

Donald Trump’s Incendiary Rhetoric and Hate Speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma Rally on June 20, 2020 Put the United States on the Verge of Racial and Cultural Division

Anti-racial vilification legislations exist on a wide range and are supported by civil organizations as well as the two major political parties in the United States. As Public concerns about expressions of racial hatred exacerbated lately, racial derogatory comments and racial violence were evident in several areas in the U.S and became part of daily rhetoric. It seems that these legislations consolidated counterproductive effects and gave rise to racial differences rather than encrypting them. Furthermore, hate discourse was encumbered by the residue of long history of slavery and racial segregation. The American president who is supposed to be the role model for the common American man and woman failed to take the lead and proved to lack commands of leadership as well as initiatives of healing the nation in the midst of the present state of unrest and confusion. He has been abusive and having no commands of domestic policy. His discourse failed to live up to the expectations of the American people in suppressing racial and discriminatory remarks. On the contrary, he brags of being racist and bluntly uses hate expressions. In addition, he tries to systematize and institutionalize racism and discrimination. By using racist hate speech utterances as well as hate-speech acts, the president appears as a person with modest linguistic commands as his poor knowledge of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of his utterances is prevalent. The analysis of Donald Trump’s hate-speech-acts can be identified as raising validity claims which enact discrimination and support inequality in society.

Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing by Sarah Robertson

Reviewed by: Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing by Sarah Robertson Martyn Bone Sarah Robertson. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing. UP of Mississippi, 2019. vii + 188 pp. Despite two decades of the New Southern Studies, with its transnational turns and critiques of southern exceptionalism, southern literary studies still retains some regionalist assumptions about its object of study and who is doing the studying. Even the ostensibly polemical “Blast South” manifestos published in 2015 by the Emerging Scholars Organization (an affiliate of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature) include nativist pronouns (we southerners, our South); indeed, nine of the ten emerging scholars featured are from the region, and eight teach at southern institutions. It is striking, then, that this second book by Sarah Robertson—an American literature specialist trained and based in England—is “less concerned with . . . the US South than . . . the region’s place within global financial markets” (xii-xiii). Poverty Politics not only “embraces the aim of new southern studies” (xiii) but also pitches the struggles and representation of poor southern whites as a “case study” (xxii) for “the exploitation of workers under neoliberalism . . . across the globe” (xii). While “the writers in this study might not always be those the reader expects” (xiii)—Harry Crews, Chris Offutt, and Tom Franklin appear only fleetingly—Robertson’s five chapters encompass an eclectic range of authors and genres. This ensures that even experts on so-called Grit Lit or Rough South writing (terms Robertson repudiates as reductive) will likely encounter new texts and fresh analyses. The opening chapter attends to poor whites in contemporary travel narratives, beginning with British authors but concentrating mostly on Douglas Kennedy’s In God’s Country (1989), which Robertson scores for scapegoating poor whites as the wellspring of southern racism. If travel narratives by V. S. Naipaul and others reproduce similarly hoary ideas of poor white southerners as “authentic” (11), Robertson is more interested in how, when seeking to excavate a “real” South “untouched by neoliberalism,” these authors “displace class and economic issues.” Chapter 2 turns to photo-narratives and considers whether or not they “offer counternarratives, or countervisualities” (28) to well-worn images of white southern poverty (often established by Farm Security Administration photographers during the Depression). Robertson is sympathetic to the Appalshop projects of the 1970s and 1980s but charges Sally Mann, Tim Barnwell, and Susan Lipper with romanticizing the rural South while eliding “the actualities of poverty” (48). Perhaps inevitably, Shelby Adams, a controversial figure [End Page 590] for three decades, receives the most sustained attention; Robertson notes that Adams’s recent projects seem to respond to criticism leveled at earlier works such as Appalachian Portraits (1993). Chapter 3 considers “poor white life-writing” (Robertson prefers this more expansive nomenclature to David A. Davis’s designation, “white trash autobiographies” [63]). The chapter includes a compelling critique of J. D. Vance’s notorious Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a memoir that adheres to neoliberalism’s rhetoric of “choice and economic freedom” without “any consideration of socioeconomic policies” (84–85) that compound working-class suffering, such as access to healthcare. Poverty Politics also draws lightly here (as it does elsewhere) on postcolonial theory, arguing that Rick Bragg and Janisse Ray write back against dominant stereotypes about hicks, hillbillies, and trash; Robertson qualifies, however, that Bragg and Ray register their ancestors’ role in Native removal. Furthermore, for all that Ray occasionally appears like a “wistful neo-agrarian” and Bragg sometimes indulges in what Robertson deliciously skewers as “foodways frivolity,” neither author “sugarcoat[s] the ecological destruction wrought by settlers and their descendants” (72–73). Rather less convincing is Robertson’s attempt to locate Bragg and Ray within her larger project of linking the poor southern white experience to a “national and sometimes global community” (70) defined by class solidarity rather than racial division. Too much here hangs on Bragg’s brief gesture to the “global economy” (86), while Robertson herself observes that Ray “focuses at the micro level, on an uber-local notion of community . . . political action at the granular level” (88). Ray’s “localism” may evade ossified “categories of southern, regional writing,” but I wanted more evidence of how exactly she...

Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Reviewed by: Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Lisa Lindquist-Dorr Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. By Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019). Pp. xii, 690. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-393-35856-8; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-393-04799-8.) A preeminent scholar of southern women’s history, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is the author of foundational studies such as Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 1979) and Like a Family: The Making of Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987) that explore the intersection of gender, race, and class in southern history. As a teacher, scholar, mentor, and advisor to countless scholars and graduate students, she has defined and expanded southern history and women’s history in numerous ways. Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America, a blended biography of Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin, represents yet [End Page 143] another significant scholarly contribution and the culmination of a career of considerable significance. Sisters and Rebels explores the intellectual evolution of a remarkable set of sisters: Grace Lumpkin, a socialist activist and author of To Make My Bread (1932), one of the most significant examples of socially conscious literature in the twentieth century; Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, best known for her memoir The Making of a Southerner (1947) but also the author of four other scholarly books; and Elizabeth Lumpkin Glenn, a well-known orator for the Lost Cause. They each took their origins in a prominent southern family in astonishingly different directions. Elizabeth’s intellectual trajectory was the most opaque of the three. She embraced the past and became a noticeable speaker at Confederate reunions. After her spectacle of a wedding, she withdrew into a more traditional domestic life. Grace and Katharine blazed more notorious trails. Grace moved north and embraced a socialist worldview, and until a midlife about-face, she was entrenched in leftist circles. Her novels used the “‘non-epic everyday,’” or a focus on family and domestic life, to bring the lives of the southern poor into view and to expand awareness of the problems of the working class, and especially of women (p. 146). Katharine followed a more academic route, beginning in college to question the racial mores and the class stratifications of her birthplace. She, too, left the South for a life of ideas and scholarship with a female companion at her side. Katharine’s and Grace’s lives were almost breathtaking in their scope. Unlike Elizabeth, who receded into a more traditional role, Grace and Katharine embarked on lives of almost unimaginable consequence, vitally engaged with the many social questions of race, class, government, and justice that consumed the 1920s and 1930s. Katharine especially, haunted by the South’s racial division and the poverty she witnessed among tenant farmers, sought throughout her career to get “‘the world’s work done,’” believing that study and reflection could lead southerners, and all Americans, to rid themselves of their biases and change the world (p. 182). Though operating in distinct circles, each sister was profoundly concerned with questions of gender, familial structure, and inequality, well before the development of feminist language to frame these issues. Those passions brought Grace to work in left-wing causes, including the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys, and to write a steady stream of articles in leftist and progressive journals. Katharine, along with her partner Dorothy Douglas, were entrenched in women’s progressive networks and engaged in New Deal policy debates. Both sisters moved in circles filled with intellectuals, politicians, academics, and others. Their status as highly intellectual and educated white women, and their freedom from the traditional encumbrances of family, allowed them the privilege and independence in the 1920s and 1930s to devote their lives to ideas in action. Their enthusiastic participation in socialist circles in the 1930s reverberated through their lives to profound effect in the 1950s. Katharine’s partner Dorothy was accused of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era, upending their academic lives and ultimately pushing them apart...

Law and Anti-Blackness

This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and hate, creating race and otherness through legislating reproduction— literal and figurative. Part II turns to the Thirteenth Amendment. It argues that the preservation of slavery endured through its transformation. That the amendment makes no room for equality further establishes the racial caste system. Part III then examines the making of racial division and caste through state legislation and local ordinances, exposing the sophistry of separate but equal. Part IV turns to the effects of these laws and how they shaped cultural norms. As demonstrated in Parts I-IV, the racial divide and caste system traumatizes its victims, while also undermining the promise of constitutional equality, civil liberties, and civil rights.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

The Church and the Racial Divide: Reflections of an African American Bishop by Bishop Edward K. Braxton

The Church and the Racial Divide: Reflections of an African American Bishop by Bishop Edward K. Braxton

Comparative History of a Very High Standard, But It Is Still Tough to Make It Work

AbstractBarry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin argues that the divergence resulted from different ruling party responses to working class upsurge in both countries during the Great Depression and World War II. In Canada, an initially more hostile state response ended up embedding “the class idea”—the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category—more deeply in policies, policies, and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced to “special interests.” In this symposium, three noted labor scholars engage critically with the book. Cedric de Leon interrogates Eidlin’s account of the role of racial divisions in explaining divergence, noting “more persistence and convergence than there is rupture and divergence” between these two countries on this issue. Nelson Lichtenstein’s critique focuses on the exceptionally vociferous character of US employer hostility, which he argues that Eidlin downplays. And Judith Stepan-Norris notes the surprising lack of actual class actors in a book about class organization, while raising interpretive questions about the relation between labor and the Communist Party in both countries. Eidlin concludes the symposium with a response to the critics.

Symposium on Barry Eidlin’s Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

AbstractBarry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin argues that the divergence resulted from different ruling party responses to working class upsurge in both countries during the Great Depression and World War II. In Canada, an initially more hostile state response ended up embedding “the class idea”—the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category—more deeply in policies, policies, and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced to “special interests.” In this symposium, three noted labor scholars engage critically with the book. Cedric de Leon interrogates Eidlin’s account of the role of racial divisions in explaining divergence, noting “more persistence and convergence than there is rupture and divergence” between these two countries on this issue. Nelson Lichtenstein’s critique focuses on the exceptionally vociferous character of US employer hostility, which he argues that Eidlin downplays. And Judith Stepan-Norris notes the surprising lack of actual class actors in a book about class organization, while raising interpretive questions about the relation between labor and the Communist Party in both countries. Eidlin concludes the symposium with a response to the critics.

Multilingualism as racialization

South African today remains a nation torn by violence and racial inequity. One of major challenges for its people is to create new futures across historically constituted racial divides, by finding ways to engage with each other across difference. In this regard, multilingualism holds out the promise of offering a way of bridging difference and opening spaces for engagement and empathy with Others. Today contemporary constructs of multilingualism, both in policy and everyday practice, continue to reinforce racialized divisions inherited from historical uses of language as a tool of colonialism, and a mechanism of governmentality in apartheid, the system of exploitation and state sanctioned institutional racism. In this paper we seek to demonstrate how multilingualism has always been, and remains today, an ‘epistemic’ site for managing constructed racialized diversity. In order to do so we trace periods of South Africa’s history. By way of conclusion, we suggest that alternative linguistic orders require a decolonial rethinking of the role of language(s) in epistemic, social and political life.

Supplemental Material for Patriotism and Perceptions of Police: Examining the Racial Divide Between Black and White Americans

Supplemental Material for Patriotism and Perceptions of Police: Examining the Racial Divide Between Black and White Americans

Um alerta feminista para a educação das crianças pequenas: contra os “rachismos” na infância

O livro organizado por Adriana Alves Silva, Ana Lúcia Goulart de Faria e Daniela Finco, reúne pesquisas que dão visibilidade à luta feminista e ao processo de descolonização na primeira etapa da educação básica, fazendo a interlocução dos Estudos de Gênero e dos Feminismos interseccionados com as questões da Educação Infantil. A obra, dividida em duas partes, apresenta pesquisas com crianças realizadas em creches, pré-escolas e brinquedotecas, bem como traz abordagens sobre desigualdades sociais, racismo, divisão sexual e racial do trabalho, formação de professoras/es, entre outros assuntos que levam à reflexão sobre os feminismos, as masculinidades e a construção da docência na Educação Infantil.

The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife

In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. I argue that the transformation of the city was predicated on an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that required the enclosure of wet, amphibious space to make dry land. The process of urban transformation proceeded not only through a racial division of space, but through a racial division of nature.

Seeing Blue in Black and White: Race and Perceptions of Officer-Involved Shootings

Following racially charged events, individuals often diverge in perceptions of what happened and how justice should be served. Examining data gathered shortly after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri alongside reactions to a novel officer-involved shooting, we unpack the processes by which racial divisions emerge. Even in a controlled information environment, white Americans preferred information that supported claims of a justified shooting. Conversely, Black Americans preferred information that implied that the officer behaved inappropriately. These differences stemmed from two distinct processes: we find some evidence for a form of race-based motivated reasoning and strong evidence for belief updating based on racially distinct priors. Differences in summary judgments were larger when individuals identified strongly with their racial group or when expectations about the typical behaviors of Black Americans and police diverged. The findings elucidate processes whereby individuals in different social groups come to accept differing narratives about contentious events.

Relationship Resonances in the Learning Process as Found in Stevenson’s Kidnapped and the Cherokee Story, The Gambler

In a time of racial division, this critical study explores both the history and possibility of reconciliation of, not only the complicated relationship between the Scottish and Cherokee peoples, but also within an analysis of, two stories: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and the traditional Cherokee story, The Gambler. Using Object Relations Theory, along with the concept of Resonance, readers will find connections between the main characters, David Balfour and Cooch, as well as implications further analysis and the relationships teachers may establish in the classroom.

Japhetic Languages

This text is an excerpt from the definition of “Japhetic languages” provided by Marr in 1931. Its first appearance as an entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia reflects the extent of Marr’s influence within the Soviet Academy at the culmination of his career. The text is representative of the later iterations of “Japhetidology” or the “Japhetic theory”, concepts which Marr never ceased to modify. The entry contains a brief overview of the scope of languages that fall under the purview of the “Japhetic”. Marr insists on treating them as a system rather than as a linguistic family. He stresses the dependence of languages on societal change, as well as the man-made nature of language more broadly. Much space is devoted to wresting the term “Japhetic” from its initial association with the biblical account of the origin of nations, justifying its continued use in a manner drained of these earlier associations. This is achieved partly through the claim that the initially genetic “Japhetic theory” has been transcended by the “New Teaching on language”. Following this theoretical shift, languages may henceforth be considered as “Japhetic” based on shared formal or “systemic” properties, rather than on account of common descent. One of the admissible uses of “Japhetic” is to describe Marr’s school of linguistics in opposition to Indo-European scholarship, which continues to map divisions of language onto divisions of race.

Introduction to Special Issue: Whiteness in the Age of White Rage

This Special Issue—“Whiteness in the Age of White Rage”—names and interrogates what is implicit in anti-racist, Indigenous, and whiteness studies: white rage. Drawing on Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017), we invited scholars to explore empirical and theoretical inquiry of how rage is a defining characteristic of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy in Canada. In this Introduction we elaborate how contemporaneously, historically, and theoretically a vital dimension of the configuration of whiteness in Canada is the normalization of rage as a property right of whiteness. Presently, as fascism is once again a global phenomenon, there is an opportunity for critical scholarship on whiteness in Canada to name and explicate the social effects and quotidian mobilization of rage in conservative and liberal articulations of white supremacy. We offer a general outline to the theme of whiteness in the age of white rage to introduce nascent scholarship that builds on the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and critical whiteness scholars.