Racial Oppression Research Articles

Paper Trails: Exposing Racism in the History of School Finance

AbstractHow can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

Unseeing Racism: Naming Whiteness at the Intersections of Regimes of Data and Participation

Pairing data-driven and participatory processes is an alluring approach for contentious urban issues. However, within these processes, the ongoing role of whiteness – an unnamed norm that privileges White people – is understudied and undertheorized. I examine how data and participation were positioned within conversations of gentrification in Lexington, KY. Beyond considering who participates, I analyse how the expectations and burdens of engagement associated with these processes were racialized. I argue that surfacing and problematizing racialized expectations of engagement disrupts how whiteness produces a strategic recognizing and disavowing – an unseeing – of racial oppression and thus diagnoses the whiteness of urban planning.

The Anti-Nazi League, ‘Another White Organisation’? British Black Radicals against Racial Fascism

Abstract This article explores how Britain’s Black Power movement challenged the political outlook of the anti-fascist left in the 1960s–70s. While the established left interpreted the National Front (NF) as an aberrant threat to Britain’s social democracy, Black political groups foregrounded the systemic racial violence of the British state. By addressing intensifying racial oppression during a critical early phase in the transition to neoliberalism, they prefigured Stuart Hall’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’. The British Black Power movement especially criticised the high-profile Anti-Nazi League (ANL) for its singular focus on the NF, which was framed as a revived Hitlerite peril. For British Black radicals, the larger strategic problem was the populist racism, inflected by imperial nostalgia, which propelled Thatcher’s New Right to power. Instead of narrow Nazi analogies, they related the re-emergence of white nationalism to British social democracy’s racist treatment of Black immigrants, as well as its neocolonial role abroad.

Color-blind racial ideology and beliefs about environmental inequality among local US government officials

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship argues that racial oppression by the state is central to the formation of environmental inequalities, calling into question reliance on the state to achieve environmental justice. Others argue that the state is not monolithic and is the only institution capable of wielding sufficient power to address environmental inequalities. I engage with this discussion through a survey of US local government officials (N = 691). I find that officials tend to engage in color-blind environmental racism; that is, officials tend to understand issues of environmental inequality through the lens of color-blind racial ideology. Findings support the arguments of critical environmental justice scholars who question the state’s inherent capacity to respond to issues of environmental racism. However, variance in officials’ views also suggest that the state is a site of political contestation with many officials both recognizing the reality of environmental inequality and racism and supporting government intervention to address it.

Judicial Production of Racial Injustice in Taiwo v Olaigbe: Decolonising the Incomplete Story on Race and Contracting

In Taiwo, one of the most recent landmark cases on racial justice, the Supreme Court rejected race discrimination claims of two domestic migrant workers, ruling that discrimination on the basis of ‘immigration status’ should not be equated to discrimination on the basis of ‘race’. This article presents an argument for decolonising judicial decision-making, using Taiwo as an example to reimagine a much more favourable outcome for victims of racial injustice. This argument is explored through three propositions for decolonial judgment: (a) challenging racial bias in judicial reasoning and legal doctrine; (b) challenging legal frameworks as sites of racial oppression and inequality; and (c) accounting for contextual diversity of experiences of racialisation, avoiding essentialist arguments and categories of racial discrimination. Drawing on these, the article retells the stories in Taiwo to challenge the dominant, traditional race equality paradigm and expose the varied and multi-layered ways in which people are racialised differently across historical and socio-cultural contexts and communities. It also opens the potential for an epistemic shift away from the liberal paradigm of ‘freedom of contract’ and towards the analysis of racial contracting that is co-constituted by multi-layered and context-situated structures of oppression and domination.

UNESCO and the Drafting of the UDHR: Navigating Theories and Practices

Immediately after its creation in 1945, UNESCO concerned itself with the idea of a unified framework of rights that would give foundation to the new international order. The enterprise it undertook with a great sense of urgency in 1947 in relation with the drafting of the UDHR by the UN Commission on human rights reflected both the natural law philosophy inherited from the European 18th century, and the 20th century’s imperative call for the realization of the socioeconomic rights of all peoples, across the globe, including those still under political and racial oppression and colonial rule.

Finding Black Joy in a World Where We Are Not Safe

In this essay, I reflect on my lived experience as a Black, female scholar doing critical scholarship on racism in the vein of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I am particularly attentive to the ways that the current backlash against those who use critical perspectives that center the experience of marginalized persons to illuminate continuing racial oppression in society is meant to silence and frighten scholars through challenging our very livelihoods and even our sanity. Amid widespread legislative attacks in numerous states across the nation, I comment on both the emancipatory power of using the agency of Black joy to speak truth to power in a White supremacist world and the constancy of its companion-pain. I do this to better answer the question: in a place where race scholarship is under attack or heavy scrutiny, what are your experiences with leaving or staying and why?

Youth Lens methodology: Critical participatory action research with youth in Cleveland, Ohio

Research on youth well-being is often driven by adult researcher voices, while youth experiences are neglected. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a distinct and powerful approach to capture youth experiences unique to particular social settings and leverage these voices to produce action and change through research. YPAR can be used to challenge oppression, mitigate the researcher-participant hierarchy, and build a social justice-oriented methodology, particularly when it uses a critical and intersectionality lens, rooted in a wider understanding of racial oppression. This methodology paper analyzes our Youth Lens methodology, which uses Critical YPAR to explore African American youth perceptions of how the neighborhood environment shapes health and well-being in Cleveland, Ohio. We describe, in detail, our methodology which was used to examine the history of redlining and systemic racism in the city and how it has driven present-day health and socioeconomic disparities. Further, we reflect in this paper not only on the methodology, but on our own role in the research. We end with implications for collaborative research with youth.

Critical Race Theory and U.S. Community Colleges: Contending with Controversy

ABSTRACT Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be used as an analytical framework for understanding the propagation of systemic racism within societal structures and institutions, particularly in community colleges. CRT provides insights into the structural nature of racism as an issue of individual prejudice and one built into society’s fabric. However, many states are attempting to or have successfully banned CRT and its related concepts. Despite the chilling effect of these regulations, community colleges still have a role to play in integrating CRT and other culturally responsive pedagogies. Liberating the hidden curriculum refers to instructional methods and practices for challenging the implicit norms, values, structures, and practices in schools that perpetuate social norms and reproduce racial oppression. The principles of CRT can also help challenge microaggressions and encourage candid discussions of biases to reduce their impact and alter hidden curricula, thus engendering more equitable student experiences, opportunities, and outcomes. Implications for institutional and classroom practices include the importance of professional development and integrating culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy to provide more empowering educational experiences for all community college students.

Medea in the Courtroom: Foucault, Alice Diop, and Abolition

Abstract: Building on Angela Davis' and other Black feminists' critiques of Discipline and Punish , this article reconsiders the important legacy of this book and of the writings of the Prisons Information Group, recently published as Intolerable (1970–1980 ), through the analysis of Alice Diop's Saint Omer , a 2022 film that imagines an immigrant Medea facing an infanticide conviction in a French courtroom: the symbol of a surveillance system where law and justice participate in racialized or racist oppression. By exploring adjacencies between Discipline and Punish and the "early" Foucault, in particular the essay "The Thought from Outside" in its connections with recent theorizations of Black fugitivity, the article suggests that a re-engagement with Foucault might allow us to test readings that reach beyond the viewers' mere self-awareness of their inescapable collusion with the Prison Industrial Complex. In Saint Omer , Medea seems to embody the fugitivity of a chromatic and affective blueness that stretches the marine environment and aquatic maternal care into the corpus of the movie, the filmic texture, suffusing docu-images with liquid lyricism, which voids the judicial apparatus, reducing it to desolation, an empty signifier.

Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Professional Associations: Experiences from Security Studies

Abstract The International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association aims to promote the study of global, international, regional, and national security—broadly conceived. Over the past decade, ISSS has also sought to improve diversity and inclusion for its membership, culminating in its Taskforce on Diversity in Security Studies. In this forum, taskforce organizers, researchers, and participants examine the ways in which ISSS has collected data and then acted to improve both experiences and outcomes for historically excluded scholars, using an intersectional approach but with a specific focus on race. By critically reflecting on the role of professional associations in combatting racism in academia, using the case study of ISSS, the forum has two aims. First, we hope that by sharing ISSS experiences and processes, we may encourage other professional associations to self-reflect on how they may contribute to racial injustice, as well as how they can reveal and counteract racial oppression. Second, rather than solely focusing on goals and outcomes, the forum also gives voice to personal perspectives of researchers and participants to highlight how it is people who ultimately make up the heart of efforts to challenge racism and discrimination.

The women’s refuge as ‘homeplace’: Black and Asian women’s refuges in Britain as spaces of community and resistance (1980–2000)

ABSTRACT Black Feminist theorist bell hooks has written of the way in which Black women construct ‘homeplaces’ as ‘spaces of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression.’ But what happens when the home is not a place of safety for Black women? Beginning in the late 1970s, groups of Black women in Britain began to establish women’s refuges designed to meet the needs of Black and Asian women who were experiencing domestic abuse. In so doing, they were providing an alternative homeplace where women could be safe, not only from abusive partners, but also from racism they sometimes experienced in mainstream women’s refuges. This paper argues that specialist refuges were important spaces where Black women could heal from abuse, foster community, and find their political voices.

Playing with Origins: Racial Self‐Making and Embodying History in Togolese Capoeira

AbstractThis article discusses how contemporary expressive cultural projects in Lomé, Togo, highlight practices of racial self‐making emerging from urban African contexts through a martial art developed by enslaved Afro‐Brazilians in colonial Brazil. This specific case analyzes Nukunu, the country's first capoeira group, and their ideological constructions of self, people, and historical time. Through capoeira—as a practice that I suggest makes interventions into these three spheres—Togolese martial artists creatively leverage the historical ties across the Black Atlantic as ideological and embodied resources for facing the particular challenges of twenty‐first‐century neocolonial structures. By analyzing Nukunu's views on their own racial subjectivity as an extended history of racial oppression, as well as a reenactment of the Ewe ethnic group's origin story, I argue that Togolese martial artists radically reframe notions of self, peoplehood, and historical time through enacting and performing racialized diasporic forms.

Introducing “Trans~Resistance”: Translingual Literacies as Resistance to Epistemic Racism and Raciolinguistic Discourses in Schools

Translingual students’ identities transcend multiple languages and cultural allegiances. Sociolinguistics widely discusses the linguistic and racial oppressions these students face in schools due to epistemic racism, which is often observed in the tension between their multilingual and multimodal communicative styles and language perspectives rooted in monolingual and monocultural ideologies. This paper expands on the literature that denounces epistemic racism, uses Raciolinguistics and New Literacy Studies as theoretical frameworks, and reports on the following inquiries: What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization? Critical focus groups, semi-structured and arts-based interviews, and emplaced observations were used to collect data, centering the identities and voices of participants. Two key findings emerged. First, school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degree of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. Second, “Translinguals” resist through novel concepts for which I have coined the terms "Covert and Overt Transresistance,” enacted by the means of resisting transliteracies. The theoretical, research, and practical implications of these findings, along with recommendations for future research, are discussed.

MAY WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE? CLIMATE CHANGE IS URGENT AND CHANGE NEEDS TO HAPPEN NOW

May 25 2023 MAY WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE? CLIMATE CHANGE IS URGENT AND CHANGE NEEDS TO HAPPEN NOW Rachel Bowditch 0000-0002-0583-6961 , Rachel Bowditch Rachel Bowditch, School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, 1001 S Forest Mall, DGH 212, Tempe, AZ 85287-2602, U.S.A. Email: rachel.bowditch@asu.edu. Web: https://anthropoceneproject.com/. Rachel Bowditch (Project Director/Artistic Director of Vessel) has specialized in creating original devised, immersive, site-specific, and physical theater for over two decades that tackles challenging social issues from suicide, addiction, mental health, indigenous forced relocation, the death penalty, and now climate change and sustainability. Her artistic and scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally. She is a Professor of Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. For more about her work visit: https://vesselproject.org/ and https://rachelbowditch.com/ Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Karen Jean Martinson 0000-0001-8277-1615 Karen Jean Martinson Karen Jean Martinson, School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, 1001 S Forest Mall, DGH 212, Tempe, AZ 85287-2602, U.S.A. Email: karen.jean.martinson@asu.edu. Karen Jean Martinson (Project Dramaturg) has developed her robust dramaturgical approach over the past two decades, creating socially engaged theater that considers issues of race and racial oppression, the impacts of gun violence, intergenerational trauma, the Indian Industrial Boarding School System, issues of mobility in underprivileged communities, and now the impending climate crisis. She specializes in production dramaturgy, dramaturgy for devised theater, and new play dramaturgy, and her artistic and scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally. She is an Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Rachel Bowditch https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0583-6961 (director, theater professor) Rachel Bowditch (Project Director/Artistic Director of Vessel) has specialized in creating original devised, immersive, site-specific, and physical theater for over two decades that tackles challenging social issues from suicide, addiction, mental health, indigenous forced relocation, the death penalty, and now climate change and sustainability. Her artistic and scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally. She is a Professor of Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. For more about her work visit: https://vesselproject.org/ and https://rachelbowditch.com/ Rachel Bowditch, School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, 1001 S Forest Mall, DGH 212, Tempe, AZ 85287-2602, U.S.A. Email: rachel.bowditch@asu.edu. Web: https://anthropoceneproject.com/. Karen Jean Martinson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8277-1615 (dramaturge, theater professor) Karen Jean Martinson (Project Dramaturg) has developed her robust dramaturgical approach over the past two decades, creating socially engaged theater that considers issues of race and racial oppression, the impacts of gun violence, intergenerational trauma, the Indian Industrial Boarding School System, issues of mobility in underprivileged communities, and now the impending climate crisis. She specializes in production dramaturgy, dramaturgy for devised theater, and new play dramaturgy, and her artistic and scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally. She is an Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Karen Jean Martinson, School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, 1001 S Forest Mall, DGH 212, Tempe, AZ 85287-2602, U.S.A. Email: karen.jean.martinson@asu.edu. Received: October 17 2022 Online ISSN: 1530-9282 Print ISSN: 0024-094X © ISAST2023ISAST Leonardo 431–434. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02411 Article history Received: October 17 2022 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Rachel Bowditch, Karen Jean Martinson; MAY WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE? CLIMATE CHANGE IS URGENT AND CHANGE NEEDS TO HAPPEN NOW. Leonardo 2023; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02411 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © ISAST2023ISAST Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Use of Homeland Voice in Warsan Shire's "Home" Poem: Analytical Study

This study deals with the diasporic poet Warsan Shire from the point of view of her use of country voice in her poem "Home", to address the horrible situation of refugees. Diasporic literary writers' depictions of home and its complexities are influenced by Africa's painful historical experience with slavery and racial oppression. Despite the host nation's influences on African migrants, the sordid effects of ethnic conflicts lead to writers' disillusionment, which leads them to indulge in sentimental nostalgia for their home of origin. Through studying Shire’s "Home" poem, to examine the country voice in the feelings of refugees' poets, there is a hidden voice of home in the lines of Shire's poem. This study aims to argue for the voice of home through the analysis of Shire’s poem "Home". Also, it will focus on similar situations when home is also running with the people, as if he senses their problem and farewells them to a safer place. In addition, this study looked at how diasporic poets identify with the voice of their nation by using Foucauldian theory of power and the qualitative method of analysis to shed light on how diasporic immigrants behave. Warsan shire argues that nostalgia is an internal feeling of hearing the voice of home and yearning for the native place. The study concludes that there is some hidden relationship between the refugees and their native home, both as an internal relationship and as a feeling of belonging to their native country.

The Black Millenarian Jeremiads of William Monroe Trotter

Abstract William Monroe Trotter remains a fixture in historical memory because of his opposition to Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee normal school and the leading black figure of his generation. Trotter founded the Guardian in 1901 and served as editor of the newspaper for three decades. Numerous scholars and countless historians have detailed the confrontation between Washington and Trotter in the context of their disagreements over segregation, disfranchisement and racial violence. This essay examines the importance of religious ideas and Christian themes in the rhetoric of the Guardian and in the writings of Trotter. Trotter immersed himself in the literature of the antislavery movement and the history of abolitionism. Drawing on this tradition, Trotter employed the black millennial jeremiad discourse to deliver a message of racial reform to the American public. By explicating his pubic declarations, editorials, and orations, this paper analyzes Trotter’s usage of the black millennial jeremiad discourse to exhort the American public to oppose racial oppression.

Racial Oppression against African American woman in Selected Novels by Alice Walker

The contemporary feminist writer Alice Walker sheds an illumination on the existence of the Black American woman in the American society through some of her works, "The Color Purple", "Meridian" and "The Third Life of Grange Copeland". On one hand Alice Walker tries to make an original character, provide a sound to the black woman in American community during latest era and give them self-assurance spiritually socially and emotionally on the other hand she showed the horrible things in what waythat the African American woman has been endured and represent the pulp of walker's fiction, such as racial bias, patriarchal injustice, domestic brutality, the Civil Right Movement and bondage. Walker devised an expression of black feminism that is aggregation of culture, strength and flexibility in the woman called "Womanism". The author expresses her subjects through by her heroine character to give the person who reads an actual and aware description to send a message to the whole world about the mistreatment, disregarding and multi-faced abuse that the largest number of the Black American females have been undergone to decades. Finally in order to disclose the steady progress and public alterations in lifetime of her heroine's character from silence, self-denial and helpless to self-proof, confrontation and enablement.

At the intersection of the model minority myth and antiblackness: From Asian American triangulation to recommendations for solidarity.

Asian Americans are situated in a triangulated role in a black-white racial hierarchy designed to legitimize white supremacy (Kim, 1999). However, little is known about the lived experiences of Asian American triangulation and even less so in the context of anti-Asian racism. The present study was initially designed to examine anti-Asian racism at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, in a sociopolitical climate described as a "racial reckoning," our study evolved to capture the process of racial triangulation and the interplay of anti-Asian racism and antiblackness. Based on the online responses of 201 Asian Americans (from over 32 U.S. states), four themes emerged to showcase the ways in which Asian Americans suffered from and recapitulated racial oppression: (a) anti-Asian racism is overlooked in the black-white racial discourse, (b) anti-Asian racism is not taken seriously, (c) anti-Asian racism is also perpetrated by people of color (POC), and (d) anti-Asian racism is deprioritized in the presence of anti-Black racism. Regarding participant recommendations to combat anti-Asian racism, our second research question focused on areas of convergence with dismantling anti-Black racism. Two key themes emerged: (a) foster Asian American pan-ethnic solidarity and (b) build and strengthen cross-racial coalitions (POC solidarity and White allyship). Altogether, our study descriptively captured the process of racial triangulation to showcase the manifestation and recapitulation of anti-Asian racism and antiblackness. While Asian Americans suffered as victims and perpetrators of racial oppression, they also recognized the need to dismantle white supremacy with racial solidarity, coalition-building, and advocacy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A critical review of intersectionality, social work education and sex work: an Irish perspective

Social work programmes offer a professional qualification with a primary objective of addressing issues of oppression in society. This furnishes a curriculum that prioritises practice-based social work education, alongside the very structural components that create the oppression of race, gender, age and ethnicity of its citizens. Intersectionality is rarely considered mainstream, with a preference for linear, one-dimensional theory, rather than a multilevel theoretical framework towards anti-oppressive practice. Using an adapted voice-centred relational model, the study examines the intersecting experiences of sex workers in the Republic of Ireland. The findings indicate that sex workers primarily work indoors, hold precarious legal status and are situated in Ireland as a response to global migration and economic necessity. The research argues for a revised (intersecting) critical framework for social work education that challenges current sex-work narratives and policies that reinforce ‘helping relationships’ of surveillance, regulation and the exclusion of sex workers.