Racial Oppression Research Articles

Effects of Instructor Accent on Undergraduate Evaluations and Learning at a Catholic College

Catholic institutions of higher education are called to form citizens who fight against injustice, including persistent racial oppression. To do this, Catholic, public, and other private institutions must provide students opportunities to learn about and confront racism (Johnston, 2014). It is important that these institutions confront these issues because they employ faculty and staff who may experience systemic racism and can provide cultural knowledge to aid deconstructing racist ideologies. Undergraduate student evaluations of instructors or faculty, however, indicate discrimination against those perceived as non-white and with non-native English accents. This study focuses on one form of racism at a Catholic liberal arts college: bias against instructors who speak with a non-native English accent. This between-groups experimental study was guided by critical sociolinguistic theory and sociocultural theory to examine patterns in undergraduate engagement with material that varied only by instructor accent. Participants (n=98) completed a pre-assessment, a microlecture (randomized by accent), a post-assessment, and a microlecture evaluation. The study’s theoretical frameworks suggest that students would demonstrate bias against non-white presenters, despite the Catholic context and having no visual cues about the race or ethnicity of the presenter. Pre-and post-assessment results indicated that the microlecture had some limited effects on student learning regardless of instructor accent; however, instructors that were perceived as white had significantly higher ratings in terms of the student belief that they “showed enthusiasm about the subject matter” and that “watching this microlecture improved [their] score on the quiz.” These findings suggest continued work is needed to understand and confront issues of systemic racism in higher education.

Understanding internalized racial oppression and second-generation Vietnamese.

Understanding internalized racial oppression and second-generation Vietnamese.

The Trajectory of Awareness: A Tool to Dismantle Anti-Black Racism in Social Work Education

ABSTRACT This article addresses the concerns brought forth in this special issue by offering a detailed and conceptually focused description and rationale for future plans of addressing anti-Black racism across the social work curriculum. We focus on a less-discussed experience of anti-Black racism – the experience of internalized racial oppression and how it might be integrated into the social work curriculum. Although internalized racial oppression has detrimental effects on mental health functioning, there is little research that examines how this phenomenon is understood by clinical social workers who might observe these effects in their clients. In this article, we introduce a theoretical framework for understanding internalized racial oppression that came out of a larger qualitative study which explored how Black women psychotherapists understand the phenomenon. The authors will explain the framework and use pedagogical examples to illustrate how the model taught social work students about internalized racial oppression. Emphasis is placed on how implementing this framework in direct practice courses facilitates integration throughout multiple other areas of social work education. The framework may provide social work educators and students with a means to conceptualize internalized racial oppression. This aspect of anti-Black racism has psychologically damaging consequences, persists within the Black community, and is currently under-researched.

Do black lives matter to employers? A combined field and natural experiment of racially disparate hiring practices in the wake of protests against police violence and racial oppression.

This study uses an experimental audit design, implemented both before and during the heightened unrest following the murder of George Floyd, to gauge the impact of Black Lives Matter and associated protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism on racially disparate hiring practices. We contrast treatment of fictitious Black and White job applicants in the labor market for service-related job openings, specifically applicants with prior experience as a police officer, firefighter, or code enforcement officer. Results reveal that the White advantage in employer call-backs and requests for an interview receded during the protests and unrest following the killing of George Floyd, even to the point of producing a Black advantage.

Language, Identity, and Racialization: A Trio-Ethnography of Spanish Linguists

Conversations on race and systemic racism have persisted since long before the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other murdered and missing Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. In an ever-enduring global pandemic and following a wave of resistance to racial oppression and violence, U.S. institutions are now facing a reckoning for the ways in which they maintain racialized power dynamics and exacerbate inequities across social sectors. Academic institutions are no exception. This trio-ethnography is simultaneously an interrogation of the current social, cultural, and political moment and an exploration of the many ways that our lived experiences with language, race, and identity intersect in the Academy. As professors of Spanish at a Historically Black University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and a Predominantly White Institution we turn to our own experiences, languages, and bodies for deeper study. In this trio-ethnography, we juxtapose the stories we tell and attempt to complicate understandings of the intersections of language, race, and identity in academia. We engage in critical conversations on our intersectional identities and experiences to problematize hegemonic whiteness and its persistent colonization of linguistic practices. We also explore the influence and impact of these forms of practice on our paths to becoming critical scholars of language and race. Our work seeks to engage faculty, administration, and students in dialogue on the ways that hegemonic language ideologies replicate problematic racial power dynamics and exacerbate inequities in the academy and beyond. With this conversation, we hope to facilitate a better understanding of how academic institutions must respond to the call to dismantle their own systems of oppression.

Review of Racism on Campus: A Visual History of Prominent Virginia Colleges and Howard University

Poulson’s book comes at a critical time, where countervailing forces have emerged regarding race, history, legacy, and reparations. While the text was born from the blackface scandal faced by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, its relevance touches on recent debates around critical race theory, book banning, the whitewashing of history, and more. While the murder of George Floyd and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 sparked a brief period of historical reckoning nationally, there has been a backlash in the years that followed. Books are being pulled from shelves, teachers are under attack, and states are passing laws to ban the teaching of controversial topics. Poulson’s work reminds us of the value of facing the ugly truth of past racial oppression, highlighting the ubiquity of racialized imagery and the stunning ways that higher education institutions maintain and reinforce racialized hierarchies. His methodological approach allows the reader to be...

“What is ours to do?” Connection during a pandemic’s time of shelter-in-place

ABSTRACT This paper describes a 2020 effort by the Cities Research Group of the University of Orange, United States, to create and pilot educational materials that could help organizations participate in collective recovery from the converging crises of the Covid-19 pandemic, racial oppression and climate change. Because of “shelter-in-place” strategies for reducing pandemic spread, the city as a site of human activity was fundamentally altered, undermining the “solid ground” the urban space had provided for collective life. Building on previous experience with mobilizing organizations for disaster recovery, the Cities Research Group launched, “What is ours to do?” an initiative centered on mobilizing organizations to stand in place of the public space and sphere and to enable recovery by serving as the “site of community and human connection” [Sorkin, Michael. (1992a). Introduction: Variations on a theme park. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a theme park: The New American city and the end of public space (pp. xi–xv). Hill & Wang]. “What is ours to do?” asks every organization to consider, in light of their original roles and obligations, how they might contribute to the people’s needs for resources, justice and a sense of “solid ground.” The assumption of organizational responsibility helps to provide these necessities for people in times when the ground has shifted, thereby lifting morale, saving lives and pointing the way to a just future.

The Graying of the Cool Pose: Examining Active Care Strategies Among Older African-American Men With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

The influence of masculinity norms on disparate health outcomes has been established in the literature. What is less understood are the specific ways in which African-American men "do health" by engaging in strategies promoting positive health outcomes. This article reframes what has been previously examined through a health deficit perspective by reporting the experiences and positive health maintenance strategies of older, African-American men with type 2 diabetes mellitus (diabetes). We employed an intersectional framework to thematically analyze qualitative interviews with African-American male participants (N = 15) in our National Institute on Aging-funded study of diabetes among older adults in Baltimore. Interviews consisted of a modified version of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview, which included discussions of diabetes experiences and self-management strategies. The majority of African-American men in our study link their successful diabetes management to purposeful self-care activities, despite structural and personal limitations. These activities include proactively seeking diabetes education, healthy eating, medication management, and engaging in supportive relationships. Active pursuit of a healthy lifestyle often requires redefining Black manhood, defying negative gender stereotypes of what it means to be a Black male. Results are described in the context of the "Cool Pose," a framework for understanding how African-American men and boys cope with systemic racial oppression and the unachievable dominant standards of masculinity in the United States. The results suggest that this framework may be less applicable for older African-American men who promote well-being in the wake of chronic disease as they age.

Understanding Black-White Differences in Support for the Racial Invariance Thesis: Lessons Learned From Philadelphia Area Residents

The racial invariance thesis contends causes of offending are similar across race/ethnicity. Black Criminology perceives some tension with this claim, suggesting instead that Black people share a unique worldview due to the racial oppression they face. This worldview may make Black people more receptive to criminological explanations identifying race-specific pathways to committing crime. In the post-Civil Rights era, many white people explain social phenomena like crime in colorblind ways. This study used a random sample of Philadelphia area residents to explore whether Black people were less likely than white people to support the racial invariance thesis. Logistic regression analyses revealed the odds of Black Philadelphians agreeing with the racial invariance thesis were 85% higher than the odds for white Philadelphians.

Confronting the Truth: The Necessity of Love for Justice

AbstractThis essay examines the interplay between law, Christianity, and oppression in the thought of James Baldwin. This essay begins its inquiry from Baldwin’s own essay, Equal in Paris, and expands out to his broader writing. The essay makes four contributions. First, it shows that Equal in Paris presents a view of law and Christianity as simultaneously serving as instruments and sources of hypocrisy and injustice while representing critically important, if difficult to achieve, standards of justice and love. Second, the essay shows that for Baldwin avoidance and denial of collective moral failure underlies the hypocritical use of law and Christianity to perpetrate injustice rather than justice. Third, the essay reveals that Baldwin would see current legislative bans of critical race theory as a means of avoidance and denial of collective moral failure. Moreover, from a Baldwinian perspective, the maintenance of innocence through bans on critical race theory is a “crime” that typifies the problem at the root of racial oppression in America, which is the refusal to come to terms with the reality of white supremacy. Fourth, while agreeing with scholars who find significant overlap between Baldwin’s approach to law and critical race theory, the essay concludes that Baldwin’s work suggests that critical race theory’s neglect of love constitutes a critical shortcoming for critical race theory’s anti-subordinationist agenda.

“Their husbands were sneaking around in the bushes”The need for anti-racist social work in Swedish activation programmes

ABSTRACT This paper aims to provide an analysis of a project-based activation programme, called the Vista project, under the authority of the social services and run in a local community in Sweden. Research has shown that people with a migrant background, in all age groups and especially women, are overrepresented in unemployment rates. The argument presented in the paper is that an anti-racist framework is of great relevance for these provisions and would provide a strong theoretical foundation with clear implications for practice. The Vista project’s main objective was to find new matching strategies to increase labour market integration and to increase the number of people engaged in a full-time activity, such as employment, education or field practices. The findings show that the flexibility that characterizes this kind of organization has a negative impact on clearly defining its identity and work processes, something that could undermine its legitimacy. This study exemplifies how the flexibility leads to ambiguity and struggles in mediating a clear picture of the purpose of the project. Some core values of anti-racist practice are included in the foundation of the Vista project, for example, the resources addressed to a so-called disadvantaged group. Projects such as the Vista contribute to racial oppression, just as other more traditional social work organizations do. However, the form of the post-bureaucracy may create possibilities to both make such structures visible and find ways to give the participants exposed to the program greater influence on its design and to define their own needs.

Round Table Conversations on Oppression, Racism, and Religious Oppression

This study empirically examines the experience of 196 undergraduate students from two universities, one a secular state institution and the other a Christian college, enrolled in courses on human diversity. The students engaged in structured conversations as a vehicle for increasing the students’ understanding of the lived experiences of others. Conversation topics included understandings of racial and religious oppression. The goal of the study was for students to intentionally engage in structured conversations about contentious topics (oppression, race, and religious oppression) to develop an understanding of the lived experiences of others. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed, and the findings are presented. The conversation experiences were universally found by students at both institutions of higher education to be overwhelmingly meaningful.

"So, like, it's all a mix of one": Intersecting contexts of adolescents' ethnic-racial socialization.

Cultural-ecological theories posit that ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development is shaped by transactions between contexts of ethnic-racial socialization, yet research considering intersections among multiple contexts is limited. In this study, Black, Latino, White, and Asian American adolescents (N=98; Mage =16.26, SD=1.09; 55.1% female identifying) participated in surveys and focus group discussions (2013-2014) to share insights into ERI development in context. Using consensual qualitative research, results indicated: (a) family ethnic-racial socialization intersects with community-based, peer, media, and school socialization; (b) ethnic-racial socialization occurs outside family through intersections between peer, school, community-based, and media settings; and (c) ethnic-racial socialization is embedded within systems of racial oppression across contexts. Discussion includes implications for future research and interventions supporting youth ERI.

\u201cI have to do twice as well\u201d \u2013 managing everyday racism in a Swedish medical school

BackgroundMounting evidence suggests that medical students from cultural/ethnic minority backgrounds face recurring and more or less subtle racist oppression, i.e., everyday racism. Insights into how they handle these inequalities, though, are scarce – especially in a Swedish context. In this interview study we therefore explored and analyzed the strategies used by racialized minority medical students to manage episodes of everyday racism – and their underlying motives and considerations.MethodsIndividual interviews were carried out with 15 medical students (8 women, 7 men) who self-identified as having ethnic- or cultural minority backgrounds. Inspired by constructivist grounded theory, data were collected and analyzed simultaneously.ResultsParticipants strove to retain their sense of self as active students and professional future physicians – as opposed to passive and problematic ‘Others’. Based on this endeavor, they tried to manage the threat of constraining stereotypes and exclusion. Due to the power relations in medical education and clinical placement settings as well as racialized students’ experience of lacking both credibility and support from bystanders, few dared to speak up or report negative treatment. Instead, they sought to avoid racism by withdrawing socially and seeking safe spaces. Or, they attempted to adopt a professional persona that was resistant to racial slights. Lastly, they tried to demonstrate their capability or conform to the majority culture, in attempts to refute stereotypes.ConclusionsRacism is not caused by the exposed individuals’ own ways of being or acting. Therefore, behavioral changes on the part of minority students will not relieve them from discrimination. Rather, strategies such as adaptation and avoidance run the risk of re-inscribing the white majority as the norm for a medical student. However, as long as racialized minority students stand alone it is difficult for them to act in any other way. To dismantle racism in medical education, this study indicates that anti-racist policies and routines for handling discrimination are insufficient. School management should also acknowledge racially minoritized students’ experiences and insights about racist practices, provide students and supervisors with a structural account of racism, as well as organize training in possible ways to act as a bystander to support victims of racism, and create a safer working environment for all.

Global Racism and International Publishing

Global Racism and International Publishing Kwok Pui-lan (bio) George Floyd’s murder sparked protests globally as protesters connected the Black Lives Matter movement to racial oppression in their own contexts. As I am writing this in the final days of US evacuation from Afghanistan, I am concerned that Islamophobia will rear its ugly head in the future fight against the Taliban and the resettlement of Afghan refugees in the world. I appreciate Judith Plaskow’s insightful, self-critical reflection on racism and Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) and her tenacity to stay in dialogue even when the conversation became personal and painful. But she has left out the dimension of global racism and feminist publishing. Even as she points out that the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) remains a largely white Christian enterprise, she fails to interrogate that it is a US-dominated white Christian enterprise. As a former coeditor of JFSR (2000–2005), I want to reflect on the challenges of global racism in knowledge production and publishing. It would be myopic to reflect on racism and JFSR only from the US context. JFSR was founded in 1985, at a time when feminist and womanist religious scholarship gathered momentum globally. Asian feminist theology began in the late 1970s and the journal In God’s Image launched in 1982. The Womanist Approach to Religion and Society group at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) was formed in 1985. The AAR’s Native Traditions in the Americas group was formed in 1987.1 In Africa and Latin America, feminist religious networks also began. For example, the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians was founded in 1989 and published numerous books. In Latin America, the ecofeminist theology and spirituality group Con-spirando was formed in 1991 and publishes a widely read journal. [End Page 19] JFSR supports and promotes international feminist religious scholarship. The editorial board has international scholars; an international board was formed to encourage foreign submissions and networking. As a premier feminist journal, JFSR appeals to international feminist scholars, some of whom would find it prestigious to publish in an American journal. So, why is it difficult to publish more articles by female scholars from the global South? This issue was discussed in some of our editorial board meetings. People said international authors did not know the logistics of writing for an American journal. Reviewers of international submissions said the authors did not reference representative or latest works on the topic (their libraries may not have had these books). Some remarked that these submissions seemed more fit for the Living It Out or Roundtable sections. Even as we encourage board members to solicit international submissions, it would take much time for them to “coach” the authors to make their pieces publishable. This is doubly taxing for board members of color, who are already overstretched. As a coeditor of the journal, I devoted much time to overseeing the editing and proofreading processes, as the journal did not have a paid staff. Instead, we relied on student help and volunteers. This was on top of my full-time job, with no course relief. The editorial team worked constantly under pressure. I worried about meeting the deadlines for each issue and did not have the luxury of thinking about long-term planning or expanding international networks. Thus, we cannot assume that if we have women of color as JFSR’s coeditors or serving on the editorial board, we will increase publications by women of color or women from the global South. The problems are more systemic. As a feminist peer-reviewed journal, are we subscribing to the academic and publishing standards defined largely by the white academy? Do we understand feminist work if it is not done according to the protocols of research methods conceived and developed largely by white scholars? What is allowed as data using these methods and what is concealed? Are we using the master’s tools, only adding a feminist twist? What new feminist research methods in religion have we developed? Can women in the global South be theorists, and not merely providers of data or stories to be incorporated into the theories originating in the...

Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era by Daniel R. Bare

Reviewed by: Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era Daniel R. Bare Curtis J. Evans Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Probably no religious groups in American history, with the exception of Puritans, have received as much attention and scholarship over the last decade or two as white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Beginning with George Marsden’s groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture, the scholarship has continued to flow. Two books serve as bookends of one era of this scholarship: Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997) and Matthew Sutton’s A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2017). Before Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism (2017) came out with its fuller treatment of black fundamentalism, Sutton’s book was the only synthetic account to take seriously the experience of African American fundamentalists. One of the most striking insights from Sutton’s book is how seemingly little shared theological positions between white and black fundamentalists mattered for white fundamentalists insofar as their political and civic responsibilities toward African Americans. White fundamentalists supported segregation, espoused and propounded racist and buffoonish caricatures of black religiosity, and almost universally rejected any attempt to reform American society according to a Social Gospel model that found a notable [End Page 128] and important following among black (liberal and conservative) and white (liberal) Protestants. Daniel R. Bare’s Black Fundamentalists stands squarely in the midst of this historiographical debate and argues that black Americans have been excluded from the scholarship on Protestant fundamentalism. He seeks to correct that lacuna by examining the ways in which some African Americans accepted self-identification as fundamentalists and adhered to a number of “fundamentalist” doctrines. Bare argues for the salience of theological doctrine as a marker of identity and as a “meaningful analytical category.” The latter argument is a driving force in his narrative, though its plausibility is less compelling as it lays out the details of what the fundamentalist label meant apart from opposition to certain modernist positions. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the details of the lives of these black fundamentalist leaders. They appear like spectral figures; we know almost nothing of their educational background and the kinds of church contexts in which they preached. Bare makes no significant mention of the Great Migration as a force in catalyzing these divisions within black Protestantism. Even when social context comes into play, Bare tends to misconstrue the power dynamics of racial oppression by insisting that “the different social and cultural circumstances facing black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines” (15). To speak of black confrontations with racism as merely “different social actions and applications” of theological doctrines indicates at best a serious misunderstanding of the harshness and circumscriptions of social existence for blacks, as though the two groups were equal in merely “applying” doctrines to the circumstances of their lives. Black Fundamentalists has five chapters and a helpful introduction that points out the ways in which race and African American fundamentalism have not been adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Bare makes a compelling case for the inclusion of African Americans in narratives of fundamentalism, but his specific doctrinal approach to black Protestants leaves a lot of missing parts. The first chapter uses African American weekly newspapers as a source for discussions about the prevalence of fundamentalism in black communities. Given the complicated, critical, and sometimes adversarial perspective that black newspapers took on black religious life, it seems doubtful that their claims about fundamentalism as a widespread phenomenon among black Protestants should be taken as the last word. Calling someone a fundamentalist was often a way to denigrate their entire religious perspective, and black newspapers and secular critics often resorted to this tactic (a point that Bare notes in respect to claims about what was best for black civic and political life). [End Page 129] Bare’s second chapter looks at the five fundamental doctrines across black Protestantism and compares black...

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison

Reviewed by: Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison Johanna I. Mueller Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) After reading over the manuscript of his 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass noted that he had “spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion.” In an elaborate appendix, Douglass clarified his position. His condemnation of religion and religious actors in the foregoing pages, he explained, applied strictly to the “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” which he perceived as entirely separate from the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”1 To Douglass, American Christianity had two distinct faces, which appeared to be irreconcilable. Throughout US history, different groups of Christians have used the Bible to make competing political claims. Whether Christianity has been a source of liberation and empowerment or a tool of continuous racial oppression in US [End Page 145] history has been debated by both historical actors like Douglass and subsequent historians. Elizabeth L. Jemison’s monograph Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South adds to this conversation. Examining the discourse on religion and citizenship among Black and white Protestant Christians in the lower Mississippi River Valley between 1863 and 1900, Jemison demonstrates that both groups believed that the Bible should govern society and politics during and after Reconstruction. “Religious arguments,” she explains, “laid the foundation for a new South” (2). But, as the book shows, with Black Christians demanding equal civil rights and white Christians calling for a continuation of a “biblical organic hierarchy” (10), these competing claims of Christian citizenship were ultimately “mutually exclusive” (79). Sticking strictly to the 1863–1920 time period in the main body of the text, Jemison relegates larger historiographical claims about the framing of American religious history to her introduction (“Afterlives of Proslavery Christianity”) and her conclusion (“Family Values and Racial Order”), in which she argues that the divergent concepts of Christian citizenship articulated by white and Black southerners in the post-emancipation period would shape debates about US politics and society in the twentieth century and indeed into the present day. Drawing on a wide array of archival and published materials such as sermons, religious newspapers, diaries, letters, and denominational meeting minutes, Jemison’s five chapters move chronologically with each representing a different phase in late nineteenth-century southern history (“Emancipation,” “Reconstruction,” “Redemption,” “Paternalism Reborn,” and “Segregation”). Tracing the evolution of religious claims about citizenship, she argues that proslavery theology, which Douglass and others had so forcefully rejected, “had a long afterlife to justify racial hierarchy and Jim Crow segregation” (11) and did not disappear with emancipation as other historians of religion in the Civil War period such as Mark Noll, Harry S. Stout, and George Rable have suggested. White southerners, Jemison proposes, merely transformed theological justifications for slavery into a benevolent and seemingly race-blind model of biblical paternalism. They appealed to an invented “version of antebellum history as a peaceful paternalistic order” (155) after emancipation to argue that a Christian society, just like a Christian marriage, necessitated a hierarchical organization with white men at the top. Both during slavery and after emancipation, white southern Christians legitimized racial violence as an indispensable tool to uphold this supposedly biblical social order. They positioned themselves as the true Bible-believing Christians while claiming that Black southerners and white northern Christian allies prioritized “fashionable extra-biblical notions of human rights and political activism over biblical truth” (162). [End Page 146] As they had done under slavery, Black southern Christians after the Civil War used the Bible to argue for autonomy, self-determination, and equal civil rights, stressing that racial prejudice and oppression were incompatible with Christianity’s liberating message. Positioning themselves as fellow pious Christians, Black southerners argued that they deserved equal citizenship, insisting that “both the law and true Christianity [were] on their side” (90). With increasing disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and escalating white...

Black Support of Neoliberal School Choice and the Politics of Black Democratic Empowerment

AbstractIn Market Movements, Tom Pedroni argues that educational progressives often analyze neoliberal school choice policies by highlighting the negative impact such policies have upon Blacks. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that all Blacks should oppose neoliberalism. This assumption prevents scholars from investigating why African Americans increasingly do support neoliberal choice policies. Deep disagreements exist within the African American community over why Blacks are oppressed and how to understand their oppression, the nature of their disadvantages, and the remedies to such problems. And these disagreements affect why Blacks might support neoliberal school choice policies. In this paper, Quentin Wheeler‐Bell goes beyond explaining why deep disagreements exist within the Black public sphere and develops a critical theory of Black democratic empowerment. First, he provides a brief sociohistorical analysis of racial oppression, highlighting how domination has distorted and repressed debates within the Black public sphere, thus lending support to neoliberal choice policies. Second, he recovers and reconstructs four Black philosophical perspectives — (1) disillusioned Black liberals, (2) modern Black nationalists, (3) Black Marxists, and (4) Black egalitarians — and explains if and how they might be pulled into an alliance with neoliberal policies. Finally, he develops a critical theory of Black democratic empowerment that captures the reasonable insights from the abovementioned perspectives while avoiding the perils of neoliberal school choice.

Let's talk: The impact of gendered racial socialization on Black adolescent girls' mental health.

For Black adolescent girls to develop a healthy sense of self, families must prepare them to cope with the realities of experiencing oppression at the nexus of racism and sexism. In this study, we examined the associations of positive and negative gendered racial socialization with mental health outcomes for Black adolescent girls. To test the hypothesis that socialization messages of gendered racial pride and empowerment (GRPE) moderate the relationship between messages of internalized gendered racial oppression (IGRO) and indicators of psychological well-being (i.e., depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms), a series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted based on the experiences of 282 Black adolescent girls (Mage = 15.40). Findings show that more frequent messages of IGRO were associated with more depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms in Black girls. Findings also suggest that more frequent messages of GRPE reduce the negative associations between messages of IGRO and Black adolescent girls' mental health symptoms to attenuation. Mental health symptoms in Black girls are able to be moderated by parents' intentional messaging of GRPE. These findings may provide a strategy to protect Black youth from the deleterious consequences of negative messages around race and gender. Future studies may wish to examine the impact of socialization messages of GRPE and IGRO on Black boys' mental health symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Showing Up: A Theoretical Model of Anti‐Racist Identity and Action for Latinx Youth

Historical and contemporary political events underscore that Latinx people do not necessarily view race and racism in the United States through a shared lens with other Latinx people and other communities of color. Thus, it is critical to understand how Latinx youth develop attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that challenge white supremacy-or anti-racist identities and behaviors-that actively disrupt racial oppression communities of color face as well as their own communities. In this paper, we review theoretical mechanisms by which Latinx youth may develop anti-racist identities and actions on behalf of their own ethnic/racial communities and other communities oppressed by white supremacy. We conclude by offering suggestions for how institutions may support Latinx youth's anti-racist identities and actions.