Racial Genocide Research Articles

Review: Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History, by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida

Review: <i>Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History</i>, by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida

Decolonising Affirmative Action in 21st Century Africa: Reparatory alternatives for affirming South Africa

Decolonisation of knowledge enhances Africa’s contribution to the global knowledge commons, augmenting both theory from the global South and its universal value. In this paper, I apply this insight to affirmative action policies. Affirmative action claims to facilitate socio-economic mobility and that this avoids the most extremely perverse inequalities. owever, the gross brutalities of conquest, dispossession, racial genocide, slavery, slave trading, colonialism and apartheid demand a decolonial critique of affirmative action. This applies not merely to affirmative action as policy, but perhaps much more significantly, as practice. Indeed, I reject affirmative action for South Africa, if not for the entire globe (the latter position would raise an argument that is beyond immediate focus). This personal ‘decolonial turn’ from affirmative action foreshadows my advocacy of such concepts as ‘wholeness’ and ‘reparation’, which I conceptualise as a return of something to its original condition plus satisfaction for the interim rupture. Wholeness and reparation in this particular setting require replacement, atonement, restoration and restitution to remedy the sense and reality of injury flowing from the gross brutalities listed earlier. I argue that such concepts are the ideal remedy for the South African condition and need that my analysis details. This move from affirmative action to reparation affirms the inside-out posture of decoloniality, insistent as it is on African agency, on ‘centring’ Africa and on ‘provincialising’ the exogenous.

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Critique of Glenn on Settler Colonialism and Bonilla-Silva on Critical Race Analysis from Indigenous Perspectives

I critique Glenn’s article on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva’s article on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives, including racial genocide and world-systems analysis, to cover five centuries of global systemic racism during the conquest of the Americas, by Spanish and English colonizers and United States imperialism. I also propose macro-structural, comparative-historical analysis of racism including the destruction, resistance, and revitalization of Native Nations and American Indians.

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest Jodi Kim (bio) Life an’ debt freedom not yet —Mutabaruka, “Life and Debt” What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. —David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years In the first epigraph above, Jamaican artist Mutabaruka’s pithy lyric captures freedom’s antinomies by questioning freedom’s content and temporality. To live a life excruciatingly tethered to debt is to live a conjunctional “life an’ debt.”1 In Mutabaruka’s formulation, life and debt are one and the same; debt owns your life, and in doing so, it owns your freedom. By taking residence as the content of formal freedom, debt works in this instance to vacate or evict the substantive meaning of freedom and to forestall the event and temporality of freedom as a “not yet.” In this sense, we can speak of debt as a “shifting grammar of life” (Rajan 2006, 14) that perpetually recedes before our horizon into a future tense, a vanishing point through which a “not yet” freedom is perhaps glimpsed but always foreclosed. Haunting this vanishing point is the term that Mutabaruka self-consciously substitutes debt for: death. A life of debt forecloses an intimacy with freedom, which is to say that it forces an intimacy with forms of social and physical death. Debt, in other words, can be a death sentence, and while some might be able to have their sentences commuted and still live a social death, others experience a literal physical death flashing blindingly [End Page 215] forward, a fatal present tense. If, as David Graeber suggests, a debt is “just the perversion of a promise,” a promise “corrupted by both math and violence,” then who can have their debt/death sentences commuted, who can have their debts forgiven altogether, and who must fully repay their debts with interest (Graeber 2011, 391)? Within this economy, who must keep their promises? Mutabaruka, and his Jamaican nation, must do so; they must pay their promissory notes. The reason lies in the “math and violence” to which they have been subjected, a history of colonialism and racial chattel slavery succeeded by more recent forms of neocolonial domination and an international uneven division and proliferation not only of gendered racial labor but also of debt. This continued corruption of the promise by math and violence perpetually keeps Mutabaruka’s longing for freedom, the promise of freedom, in the future tense. His future tense grammar, as at once a specific temporality of freedom as well as a broader system of signification, calls to mind other similar grammars, such as that of Hortense Spillers. Tracing the total objectification of the captive body as flesh within the U.S. context of chattel slavery, she calls, and theorizes the symbolic order instantiated by the African slave trade as, an “American grammar.” One of the distinctive features of this grammar is that it “remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again” (Spillers 2003, 208). This, as Saidiya Hartman writes, is the afterlife of slavery, an afterlife not only symbolic but also crushingly material (Hartman 2008). That is, formal emancipation for the enslaved in the United States represented not a radical rupture but rather a “nonevent.” The whip of chattel slavery was replaced with the “burdened individuality of freedom,” constituted by the tethers of liberalism: a guilty conscience, notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation, calculated reciprocity, and most importantly, indebtedness, since “debt played a central role in the creation of the servile, blameworthy, and guilty individual and in the reproduction and transformation of involuntary servitude” (Hartman 1997, 9). The longue durée of the “nonevent” of emancipation from a range of distinct yet related forms of unfreedom throughout the globe—whether racial chattel slavery, colonial subjugation, racial genocide, debt peonage, contract labor, apartheid, or incarceration—has produced and continues to produce increased levels of privation and debt, as well as greater vulnerability to...

“Good For You and Good To You": The Importance of Emphasizing Race when Radicalizing Students around the Food Movement

While there is great radical and anti-capitalist potential within the “Food Movement,” it can often be undermined by foodie culture’s attachment to a problematic racial politics in which white, urban and middle/upper classed subject positions are articulated through romanticized attachments to local and organic foodways, attachments that at times unconsciously echo nativist and settle colonial sentiments. These problematic racial logics limit the food movement’s ability to fully address the ways by which the corporate domination of the food system disproportionally impacts low-income communities and communities of color. This article contends that food educators must fundamentally rewrite and reshape the very foundations of our food pedagogy to forefront the ways by which the food system is and always has been driven by the exploitation of bodies of color, the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and the ways by which food access continues to be predicated on systems of power that perpetuate racial genocide. Drawing upon the experiences from a unit taught on “soul food” in an undergraduate course on the U.S. Food System, this article offers pedagogical strategies and innovative interdisciplinary methodological approaches to teaching the race based apartheid within the American food system and role of race within contemporary food justice movements. As such, this article will contend that conversations with students on soul food, and a race-centered analysis of the food system, ultimately result in a more radical food consciousness, one that is not just located in food related issues, but also grounded in a foundational critique of the complex hierarchal systems of power and oppression that drive American society.

Images of Interracialism in Contemporary American Crime Fiction

Images of Interracialism in Contemporary American Crime Fiction Tarik Abdel-Monem (bio) Racial clues have always been written into crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes was as much an anthropologist as he was a detective. The venerable investigator of Britain’s imperial empire could as easily differentiate between the footprints of a Hindu or Muslim as he could identify the Chinese origins of a tattoo by its color.1 Although these types of racialized—and often racist—depictions are no longer mainstays of the genre, race still plays a central role in many contemporary works of crime fiction. Modern writers have brought new perspectives on race, justice, and social inequalities to contemporary crime stories, infusing the crime narrative with critical race, feminist, post-colonial, gay/lesbian, and other perspectives. Today’s authors are just as likely to find evil in individual villains as they are in racism, sexism, corporate greed, or political institutions. Crime fiction has thus become more and more a platform for social commentary as well as entertainment. But if race still has meaning and relevance to the detective story, it begs the question of what the significance is of interracialism in the criminal worlds of our collective imaginations. As America continues its Quixotic quest for a post-racial new world, an examination of our interracial imaginings poses important questions. In popular thought, miscegenation serves as an ideological symbol representing everything from racial genocide to racial harmony, from social destruction to social progress (Olumide 2002, 1–2). This article provides an overview of how ideologies of interracialism inhabit contemporary works of crime fiction. My argument is that [End Page 131] certain themes prevalent in earlier American literature have transferred quite comfortably into the modern crime genre, attesting to the longevity and persistence with which particular tropes of interracialism resound within the popular culture generally. Over 150 years after the flourishing of the tragic mulatto archetype, this recurring trope has found a welcome home in many of today’s crime novels. If one reads the crime story as a narrative about social morality, then the persistence of abject depictions of interracialism seem to affirm a continuing reluctance to perceive race-mixing favorably. Yet we also see in modern crime novels continual reference to a competing stereotype, that of the exceptional, multiracial super-being. Here, authors employ interracialism as a remedy or apology to the legacy of racism and racial division. The multiracial person is depicted as an exceptional being with physical and mental traits superior to monoracial persons. This trope also derives some of its content from the tragic mulatto tradition, but is informed more by a willingness to depict miscegenation as a socially beneficial development. In the structured and conservative crime fiction milieu, miscegenation can thus be employed to de-center traditional conventions and make bold—or naive—statements about modern American society and the role of race or interracialism in the development of a future ethos. The scope and depth of contemporary American crime fiction is vast and diverse. Like all forms of popular fiction, the crime story and its many sub-genres continue the process of evolution and reinvention. My exploration is a modest attempt at outlining basic contours of the more apparent—and, as I argue, the more troubling—trends relevant to depictions of interracialism in the genre. This article proceeds first by briefly outlining the tragic mulatto trope in earlier American literature, but will then concentrate on providing an overview of several contemporary works of crime fiction. All contemporary novels examined were chosen as examples of works which both feature prominent depictions of inter-racialism, and exist within modern times. Novels either written during or set in pre-Loving v. Virginia (1967) America are not examined in this article because they depict an earlier ethos about race and interracialism which departs from our contemporary zeitgeist. Four works will be examined specifically. Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (1992), Lea Waits’ Shadows of the Spring Show (2005), and Richard Lupoff’s The Silver Chariot Killer (1996) are all works which prominently feature either or both of the interracial tropes noted above, and more importantly, deploy them to further their respective stories. I also examine Gary Hardwick’s Color...

Mental health care and resistance to fascism

Mental health nurses have a critical stake in resisting the right-wing ideology of British fascism. Particularly concerning is the contemporary effort of the British National Party (BNP) to gain credibility and electoral support by the strategic re-packaging of a racist and divisive political manifesto. Evidence that some public sector workers are affiliated with the BNP has relevance for nursing at a series of levels, not least the incompatibility of party membership with a requirement of the Professional Code to avoid discrimination. Progressive advances, though, need to account for deep rooted institutionalized racism in the discourse and practice of healthcare services. The anomalous treatment of black people within mental health services, alongside racial abuse experienced by ethnic minority staff, is discussed in relation to the concept of race as a powerful social category and construction. The murder of the mentally ill and learning disabled in Nazi Germany, as an adjunct of racial genocide, is presented as an extreme example where professional ethics was undermined by dominant political ideology. Finally, the complicity of medical and nursing staff in the state sanctioned, bureaucratic, killing that characterized the Holocaust is revisited in the context of ethical repositioning for contemporary practice and praxis.

What We Tell Our Daughters and Ourselves About &lt;ssshhh!!!!&gt; Hysterectomy

On December 18, 2006, I became one of hundreds of thousands of women who undergo hysterectomies annually in the United States—the highest number of any industrialized nation—second only to C-sections as the most commonly performed surgery. Studies have found that at least 90% of these costly procedures are deemed unnecessary, performed for other than lifesaving purposes, i.e. sterilization. As a form of gender violence, all women have been victimized by hysterectomy. Not surprisingly however, African-American women have historically, disproportionately been targets of sterilization by hysterectomy, oftentimes state sponsored and funded, despite still unknown longterm physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual consequences beyond the permanent elimination of the means for propagating the species, leading some to charge racial genocide. This autoethnographic text, produced during my recovery, represents an attempt to rupture silences that hide the historic and contemporary abuse of Black women’s reproductive autonomy. Simultaneously, this intervention seeks restore to Black women the sanctity of their bodies.

Not Avoiding a "Sensitive Topic": Strategies to Teach about Women's Reproductive Rights

In this article we share teaching strategies that feminist teachers can use to respond to anti-abortion and anti-choice arguments. We also provide teaching techniques that feminist instructors can adopt in their classroom to teach about abortion and reproductive health. The paper identifies common students' arguments and enumerates possible responses. We address religious arguments against abortion (for example, legal abortions increase sexual promiscuity, abortion is morally wrong) and students' view of abortion as racial genocide.

Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (review)

Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, February 2004. Modernity is a notoriously plastic concept, susceptible to multiple definitions, a number of them seemingly perfectly valid. For Matti Bunzl, appears to be a relatively late phenomenon, and it is identified primarily with the bureaucratic regimes of moral and bodily control that accompanied the fashioning of the liberal European nation-state. Bunzl sees, and argues rigorously for, striking if not perfect parallels between the production, abjection and celebration of Jewish and queer minorities in the twentieth-century Austrian state, and the city of Vienna in particular. The perspective carries into the realm of ethnography a vital and tormented debate about the modernity of the Holocaust. Bunzl tells us in his Preface: Following Zygmunt Bauman, I read the Holocaust... as a quintessentially modern event, taking the exclusionary principles of German nation-building to its catastrophic conclusion. The nation had been imagined in constitutive opposition to Jews and queers; the Holocaust was designed to effect their complete eradication from the German (and Austrian) public sphere. For both Jews and queers, according to Bunzl, the dominant Austrian national narrative after World War II, which cast all Austria as a victim of Nazi aggression, fostered repression-effective privatization and silencing of the Jewish community, pathologization and criminalization of homosexuality-fundamentally continuous with the pre-World War II decades. However, in recent decades the situation of both these symptomatic Viennese minorities has changed considerably. Bunzl attributes the positive changes in part to an assumption of collective agency on the part of the Jewish community (strengthened by recent Soviet immigrants, and spearheaded by a generation born and raised after World War II), and to a newfound queer assertiveness modeled on the Gay Pride movement of the United States and other liberal democracies. At the same time, he stresses that these efforts from within the two respective minority communities coincided with a newly available public symbolic space, and with new reasons of for Austria to recast itself as a tolerant and diverse nation, fully ready and able to adjust its national identity in order to participate in the expanded and invigorated broader European community. Accordingly, Bunzl's ethnography stands, at least implicitly, within a long tradition of meditations on the tension between agency and structure, between conjuncture and function, in social analysis. Bunzl's ethnography comprises three parts, leading the reader to suggest at least a hint of a Hegelian sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Each part contains two chapters, one focusing on Jews and one on queers. In Part 1, Subordination, Bunzl effectively and sensitively portrays the quandaries of these two communities of difference in the postwar years. He notes, for example, that any possibility of an autonomous and collective Jewish voice was precluded by the way Austria's victim narrative equated the Jewish experience of racial genocide with the state's political disenfranchisement (38) while at the same time specifically Jewish commemorations were seen as interference with national identification. Here as well, Bunzl lucidly maps, and describes the workings of, various spheres of authority that constituted and reinforced the postwar Austrian body politic, including the church, the learned professions (especially medicine and law), public opinion, and the machinery of the state itself (61). In Part II, Resistance, Bunzl documents the coming out of Jews and queers into fin-de-twentieth-siecle Vienna. …

From the footnotes to the headlines: Sterilization apologies and their lessons

Between 1929 and 1975, North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program authorized more than 7,600 sterilizations. A 2003 newspaper series in the Winston Salem Journal about this history led North Carolina governor Mike Easley to apologize for the program. Recently, the North Carolina legislature considered a restitution bill for sterilization victims, making North Carolina the first state in the nation to consider any kind of restitution for victims of state eugenic sterilization programs. Media characterization of eugenic sterilization programs as racial genocide added a political salience to the story that contributed to the potential for restitution but also distorted a program less concerned with improving racial quality than with controlling the reproduction of welfare recipients. While considerations of restitution to welfare recipients who suffered sterilization as a result of having children outside marriage might be politically unpalatable, restitution to victims of racial genocide seemed politically much more acceptable.

Political Rap: The Music of Oppositional Resistance

Music is a medium of popular culture wherein group identities are explored and linked to larger social forces. Previous research portrays political rap music as an oppositional African-American cultural form that critiques and encourages resistance to cultural and socio-economic domination. Political rap lyrics haue expressed themes associated with a re-conceptualized Black family as a racial community, lost economic opportunities, educational bias, health care inequality, criminal justice discrimination, police brutality, mass media misrepresentations, and the existence of a racial genocide conspiracy. Using ethnographic content analysis, we empirically detail the nature and frequency of the expression of oppositional resistance and related themes in a representative selection of political rap music lyrics from the twenty albums released by the six most prominent political rap artistes between the years of 1988-1992.

Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (review)

Reviewed by: Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life Kathleen Pfeiffer Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life. William L. Van Deburg. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 283. $29.00 (cloth). In a previous work, Black Camelot: African American Culture Heroes in their Times 1960–1980 (1999), William L. Van Deburg presented the African American hero as an icon who shaped social values in the late twentieth century by providing black America prideful role models, helping to build bridges between the races. Now, in Hoodlums, the professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison turns his attention to the black villain, interrogating that icon's history of reflecting and influencing American cultural values. The full significance of African American villains across history has yet to be fully examined or understood, Van Deburg asserts, in much the same way that many of us "still do not have enough accurate information about the nation's racial past to make historically informed decisions on present-day issues" (xii). Hoodlums argues that a clear consideration of these anti-heroes in their various guises—villains, social bandits, and hoodlums—will contribute to a more truthful, if complicated, understanding of American racial history. "Just as villainy of any sort gives definition to heroism, black evildoers help define honor and virtue for whites" (217). For students, scholars, and teachers of modernism, this book provides a range of information to bracket the early twentieth century's insistence on newness, though it offers little consideration of the modernist era itself. Van Deburg seeks to identify the intersection of race and villainy, and as his first chapter offers a wide-ranging examination of binary divisions between good and evil, the evocation of binary racial divisions necessarily follows. Satan was colored as black early in history, Van Deburg notes, and the association of blackness with evil unfolded from there. "Is there cultural significance," he asks rhetorically, "in our blackening of prominent villains and in the manner in which they have been linked to the Great Deceiver, fount of natural evil?" (11) Hoodlums traces the cultural and social history through which black skin became inextricably associated with wickedness, sexual depravity, physical disfigurement, immorality, ignorance, laziness, dirtiness, and on and on. Much of Van Deburg's delineation underscores the racially self-serving nature of this projection: "Dazzled by their own brilliance," he notes, "whites easily confused essentialism with empiricism as they placed science in the service of racial subordination" (49). Van Deburg [End Page 945] establishes the connection between evil and blackness in a convincing and wide-ranging fashion, though this is not, one notes, a particularly novel observation. Van Deburg proposes that we distinguish between villainous types: for example, he suggests that "black social bandits" of various kinds address racial injustice through multifaceted strategies of activism designed to challenge white racial supremacy. As opposed to those villains whose selfish evildoing serves the individual, social bandits saw themselves as "agents of change . . . in order to improve the lives of beleaguered kinsmen" (68). Problematically, the individualistic black villainy—personified in, for example, the antebellum black slave owner who engages in all of the most reprehensible behavior of the white slave owner—challenges the community-oriented social bandit in continual intra-racial struggle. It is precisely this challenge, Van Deburg asserts, that defines the difference between what he calls "bad blacks"—those whose villainy undermines the community through its selfishness and sheer evil—and "baadd blacks"—those trickster figures whose primary function is to stick it to the Man. Hoodlums jumps rather quickly among historical periods, and these leaps create some curious assertions about late twentieth-century African-American culture, the period in which the book is most interested. For example, Van Deburg asserts that postbellum America's legacy of slavery, racial violence, and racial injustice (in the proliferation of turn of the century lynching bees, for instance) led to "the African American world view (that) privileged suspicion over fear" (107) evident in recent urban myths and conspiracy theories about government sponsored racial genocide. In Van Deburg's view, the important point here is that this suspicion testifies to the prevalence of white...

Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties

The 1960s heralded the birth of a number of forces that threatened to permanently change the face of the existing post-Freudian, Cold War social order; not the least of these forces was the Second Wave of the women's movement. Many feminists were attracted to the ranks of the burgeoning New Left and counterculture movements because of their emphasis on dismantling the nuclear family, promoting a greater sense of community, and rediscovering a back-to-basics natural lifestyle. However, according to Umansky, the New Left and counterculture movements (spearheaded mainly by white middle-class men) failed to adequately consider gender issues in their critique and participating women soon became disillusioned with the results. other words, women on communes were still having babies (because birth control was considered unnatural) but they now found themselves with very little, if any, male support (because the young men had been liberated from the responsibilities of sexual fidelity and fatherhood). However, a much more positive attitude towards motherhood emerged from the counterculture experiments. Unashamed of her body, with milk flowing from her breasts and long hair flowing down her back, both nurturant and sexual, the hippie mother represented the quintessence of the counterculture. to Umansky, these women began to shed the sexual inhibitions of the previous generation and developed pride in their natural bodies and procreative abilities. Particularly in rural areas, hippie women began to court local midwives, and began also to train women in their own communities to assist in childbirth. Many counterculturalists also became avid breastfeeders and advocates of a 'natural' approach to childrearing. This tendency to reject the mainstream medical establishment and create a women's health communitywas similarly echoed by women in the free clinic movement. Among the revolutionary advances made during this time were the creation of women's health clinics and the re-claiming of women's health issues from the predominantly male medical profession. The feminist imperative to use biology as a force of strength resulted in significant inroads in gaining control over the politics of medicine. According to feminist theorists, the rationalization and medicalization of birth netted the same results that capitalism and patriarchy effected in society at large, here writ indelibly on the bodies and minds of women. Childbirth, as currently practiced, was dehumanizing. the meantime, feminists were trying to respond to criticism that the movement did not adequately address issues of race and class. AfricanAmerican women felt unconnected to the predominantly white, middleclass feminist movement and were therefore torn between loyalty to the civil rights movement and fighting their own particular feminist battles. The Black Power movement, the Nation ofIslam, and the Black Unity Party (among others) were warning of the possible racial genocide of the African-American people and black women were called on to supply children as future soldiers for the struggle. If blacks were to constitute a nation, they would need first to secure their ranks. However, as a few black women within the movement pointed out by the late 1960s, black nationalist pronatalism contained within it a starkly sexist and traditionalist message about black h i l y and sexual politics. Within the black feminist movement, therefore, was a growing movement towards the reclaiming of motherhood in a positive, feminist light. With both black and white feminists moving towards developing a positive, woman-centred approach to motherhood, it was hoped that this issue could be a uniting force among women. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many feminists had already invested motherhood with the power to bring women closer to some of those countercultural ideals; mothers, they claimed, were closer to nature, more likely to endorse peace and ecology, and inclined towards acts of protective love for their own, or the human, race. The feminist imperative had led to maternal political activism and ecofeminism. other words, feminists had given birth to eco-mothering. Motherhood Reconceivtd is an excellent guide to the Second Wave of the feminist movement as it relates to motherhood issues. Although it is clear in 1998 that motherhood has not overcome race and class issues within the feminist movement, nor has it resolved our ecological crisis, Umansky's work provides clear insights into how mother-centred arguments have helped bring these issues to the fore. Her work not only covers all the major milestones during several turbulent decades in the United States, it is also structured in a logical, clear, and concise manner with extensive explanatory notes and references.

Success Against the Odds: Effective Education of Inner-City Youth in a New York City Public High School

Emerging statistics on Black Americans, over the last decade, indicate that the economic and social progress of the race, on the whole, is travelling down a negative road of racial genocide and that steps must be taken now to stop this encroaching tragedy. Almost 30 percent of all Black-American families are now living below the federal poverty guideline, compared with 8 percent of white families. The national infant mortality rate is 50 percent higher among Blacks than among whites, and in New York City, with the advent of the drug crack, infant deaths have increased by 20 percent. One third of Black New Yorkers between the ages of 5 and 19 years are victims of homicide; nationally, the leading cause of death for Black men between the ages of 16 and 34 is murder. Nationally, Blacks account for 24 percent of all AIDS cases. Half the female AIDS victims are Black; two of three infants born with AIDS are Black. Of the fifty thousand women in New York City who are infected with the AIDS virus, 80 percent are Black or Hispanic. More Blacks than whites are afflicted with heart disease, cancer, and cirrhosis. Blacks have hypertension and strokes at twice the rate of whites. Approximately 70 percent of poor Black families are headed by women. Over 57 percent of Black births are out of wedlock. Since 1981, unwed motherhood has replaced marital breakup as the leading cause for welfare eligibility.'

Race and abortion: disconfirmation of the genocide hypothesis in a clinical analogue.

This study examined the validity of the proposition that a latent function of liberalized abortion is racial genocide. Using an abortion counseling analogue, forty-two white abortion counselors rendered clinical reactions, including the relative desirability of abortion, to a bogus female patient described as ambivalent about her pregnancy and designated as black or white within a case report. A stronger preference for abortion when the patient was black-identified was not found either among the sample as a whole or among socially traditional and untraditional subgroups.

Opposition to family planning in Latin America: conservative nationalism

While opposition to family planning in Latin America stems primarily from the Church Marxists and Nationalists this paper focuses on the published views of 3 outspoken Nationalists. Felix Cruzat Alegre a Lima lawyer states that Latin American poverty is caused by archaic socioeconomic structures rather than a lack of natural resources or land. The North Americans in his view wish to keep the underdeveloped nations weak and underdeveloped via lagging population growth and eventually export people to the less developed and less populous nations. Dr. Herman Vergara a psychiatrist and professor of psychology in Colombia fears that supporters of family planning within the nation are politically opportunistic economically opportunistic or anti-Catholic and that the basic motivation and strategy for the movement is alien. Napoleon Viera Altamirano the El Salvadoran journalist considered by the articles writer to be Latin Americas most articulate pro-natalist charges family planners with attempts at racial genocide. The author concludes that North Americans should listen carefully to the arguments since beneath what appear to be illogical arguments and irrational fears lie the deeper perhaps more justified sentiments of national pride and resentment over a sad history of relations with powerful nations.