Racial Past Research Articles

Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude

Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude

After #Charlottesville: Interrogating our Racist Past in the Trump Era

In wake of the violent and deadly events in Charlottesville and President Donald Trump’s response in which he effectively defended the Neo-Nazis and Confederate monuments, it’s important that college students understand the Lost Cause movement, the building of Confederate monuments and how college campuses are affected. In preparation for the fall 2017 semester, I revised my AFS 310 African Americans and U.S. Education syllabus in which I devoted the first five weeks of the semester to interrogating the aftermath of Charlottesville and this nation’s Confederate legacies on college campuses. Centering the unit’s theme on “The Lost Cause and the Collegiate Idea,” this article will discuss in depth the unit I taught as well as student assessment and outcomes upon completion of the unit.

Interpreting violence: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and its legacy

Abstract The article analyses aspects of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riot and War. In the first part, it presents a brief history of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the reasons that triggered the clash that devastated Greenwood, the black part of Tulsa. The next section focuses on the role of the Red Cross in the relief project for the support of thousands of homeless African Americans, and deals with the long legal struggle for reparations and the role of the legal system in the failure to punish the guilty for the devastation of Greenwood. The last part of the article presents the controversy generated by the renaming of one of Tulsa’s main streets and the direct connection to the city’s violent and racial past. The legacy of segregation is deeply rooted in the American past; the use of the Tulsa Riot and War as a case study demonstrates the impact of racial conflicts on society and the necessity to identify and resolve relevant problems.

The End of Reconstruction, Again: Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling

The End of Reconstruction, Again:Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling Gordon Fraser (bio) On the night of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed an understandable hopefulness about the future of race relations. "Breaking with our racial past," he predicted, would be the "least" of our problems. Friedman closed his column with words that bridged the troubled past and the hopeful future. "The Civil War is over," he wrote. "Let reconstruction begin."1 Yet by invoking the Civil War and Reconstruction, [End Page 174] Friedman identified a more complicated history than he may have intended. Reconstruction had been a political experiment, conducted between 1865 and 1877, in which the Congress of the United States attempted to enforce legal and civic equality across race in the former Confederate states. For a brief moment, it seemed to work. By 1887, for instance, seventeen African Americans had been elected or appointed to Congress.2 But according to observers as diverse as William Dunning and W. E. B. Du Bois, the experiment failed.3 Thousands were lynched as multi-racial city, county, and state governments were overthrown in white supremacist coups d'état.4 The United States would witness a century of de jure racial apartheid, followed by the lingering de facto segregation of today. Like the civil rights era (1948–1970), Reconstruction constituted what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called a "great [moment] of … mainstream political upsurge." Backlash followed both periods.5 We are witnessing a similar backlash today: an energized racism overlapping with and subsequent to the administration of the first black president and the renewal of emancipatory movements for justice. The emergence of white supremacist militias in city centers has forced all but the most craven to acknowledge that racism is resurgent in US political life. To push Friedman's metaphor just a bit further: If Obama's election ushered in a "reconstruction," then we in the aftermath of the Obama administration should be extraordinarily cautious about what came after the first Reconstruction: Plessy v. Ferguson, the Wilmington political coup, and Jim Crow. I raise the specter of Reconstruction's long aftermath not to conflate its historical particularity with that of the present but rather to suggest that historical parallels might enable us to think about the structural operations of racism. We need to understand, I think, not simply how US society enables racial despotism but how the experience of that despotism by its ostensible beneficiaries enables its reinvigoration. We need a scholarship not simply of race but of racism. Such a scholarship might begin, I think, by reading newly resurgent racisms as structures of feeling. As formulated by Raymond Williams half a century ago, structures of feeling offer an analytic for explaining messy, even incoherent, systems of belief. As lived and expressed, such structures appear more often as "a latency" across and between formal ideologies.6 Williams explains: "The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, … yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its [End Page 175] creative response into a new structure of feeling."7 While social, legal, and political structures might pass from generation to generation relatively intact, structures of feeling, partly articulated and even internally contradictory, are invented anew. I suggest that understanding racism as such a structure would enable us to confront its four primary vectors—racial terrorism, state violence, reactionary politics, and exclusionary laws—not as a coherent project to be contested ideologically but a cluster of latent, even contradictory, potentials. We might begin exploring such structures of racist feeling in Shelby, North Carolina. Dylann Roof, who would be convicted of murdering nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, was arrested in Shelby. When Roof was captured in June 2015, a news report described his appearance in the small community as "unlikely."8 Perhaps it was. But the town, like the AME Church of Charleston itself, offers kinetic depth to an observer with a sense of history. Shelby was also the childhood home of the...

Racial remembering in urban politics

Sociologists typically understand the way actors remember and invoke historical events in political debate to be primarily strategic, demonstrating that the past is used to make a case for policy in the present. Yet how actors remember the past also shapes their worldviews and approaches to policy in the first place. While some scholars acknowledge the more foundational role remembering plays in politics, this approach remains underdeveloped at the local level. In this article I examine the role memories of Boston’s school desegregation crisis of the 1970s have played in contemporary school reform processes, specifically in efforts to revise how students are assigned to schools at the city and neighborhood levels. Through interviews with policy-making participants and community advocates, I find that while actors on different sides of the debate draw on common narratives of Boston’s school desegregation crisis, they dispute the relevance of these events to the present. I find that some actors draw on memories of the crisis to assert a mnemonic closure from a racist past, while others, advocating distinct approaches to student assignment, argue for mnemonic bridging of institutional racism from the past to the present. This analysis demonstrates that social remembering is a central component of urban cultural politics, with racial discourses structuring how policy actors understand relationships between the past and the present to arrive at distinct policy conclusions. To suggest these processes are purely strategic masks the discursive power of racial ideologies which inform participants’ understandings of the past and their approach to the distribution of urban resources.

Depicting the racist past in a "postracial" age

This article examines the ways in which depictions of race and racism in some prime-time historical dramas promote contemporary postracial ideologies. Focusing on the portrayals of overt racism and interracial relationships in Hell on Wheels (2011–2016) and The Knick (2014–2015), the author argues that the use of morally ambiguous white, male protagonists in contexts associated with morally unambiguous racism allows these shows to acknowledge the centrality of racism in American history while simultaneously presenting racism in interpersonal rather than systemic terms. This representational strategy differs from the politically correct depictions of race and racism in historical dramas like Mad Men (2007–2015). As such, Hell on Wheels and The Knick reflect the paradox of postracial popular culture whereby depictions of racial animus and violence support viewers’ desires to forget about both race and racism. In contrast, the racial caste system in Deadwood (2004–2006) presents white supremacy and American history as inseparable. This article concludes by discussing some of the connections between these representational strategies and the shifting economic landscape of the post-network-era television.

Civil Rights Gone Wrong

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s desegregation busing plan reflect and respond to the ongoing battle over the history and memory of Boston’s civil rights movement and its enduring racial legacy: Busing Brewster, an illustrated children’s book for young readers, written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth; and Gold Dust, a middle-grade novel for adolescents by Chris Lynch. Both works offer representations of an overtly racist past, produced in a historical moment when prevailing ideologies of color blindness and postracialism suggest not only that racism is passé, but that any attempt to redress past racism that takes race into account is itself racist and unjust. Busing Brewster and Gold Dust offer equivocal reflections on urban decline and racial transformations at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both works have as much to tell us about the historical memory of Boston’s desegregation efforts as they do about contemporary understandings of race and social justice.

RACING THROUGH THE HALLS OF CONGRESS

AbstractAlthough there is an impressive body of research on the U.S. Congress, there has been limited discussion about the central role race plays in the organization of this political institution. While some scholars have documented Congress’ racist past, less is known about the present significance of race in the federal legislature. Throughout the day, African Americans routinelynodto one another in the halls of the Capitol, and consider the Black nod as a common cultural gesture. However, data from over sixty in-depth interviews suggest there is an additional layer of meaning to the Black nod in Congress. From the microlevel encounters, I observed and examined, I interpret the nod as more than a gesture that occurs in a matter of seconds between colleagues or even among perfect strangers in the halls of Congress. The Black nod encompasses and is shaped by labor organized along racial lines, a history of racial subordination, and powerful perceptions of race in the post-Civil-Rights era on the meso-, and macrolevels. Using this interpretive foundation, this article will show how the nod is an adaptive strategy of Black staffers that renders them visible in an environment where they feel socially invisible. The nod becomes an external expression of their racialized professional identity. I argue that the congressional workplace is a raced political institution and that the microlevel encounters I observed delineate and reproduce its racial boundaries. This article represents perhaps the first sociological study of Congress and provides an unprecedented view into its inner workings and the social dimensions that organize workplace relationships.

UNDER SIEGE IN ANY ERA

AbstractWhites’ sense of their racial vulnerability has been established as a key facet of U.S. post-civil rights racial ideology. This paper analyzes Whites’ victim claims attached to a historical era, via recent in-depth interviews with elder White Southerners, and argues that, through invoking civil rights-era racial vulnerabilities—mistreatment from social changes and African Americans—White Southerners downplay institutional racism, delegitimize the Civil Rights Movement, and construct White innocence and Black pathology. In contrast, younger Whites’ victim claims assert Whites as racially innocent and equitably vulnerable to racism, but these narratives of the racial past achieve similar ends. By constructing the civil rights era as dangerous and unjust, elder White Southerners lay claim to a lifelong nonracist identity and deny systemic racism. This analysis suggests that White threat and victim narratives are not products of a post-civil rights milieu, but rather are generated by Whites’ use of racial framing to construct a sense of self, other, and society.

‘You who are an immigrant – why are you in the Sweden Democrats?’

Individuals with an immigrant or other ethnic minority background have begun to find their political home in the populist radical right and anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats. This study delves into this paradoxical matter by exploring how these politicians discursively account for their ethnic minority belonging in relation to their anti-immigration political affiliation. The critical discursive psychological analysis of blog entries by populist radical right politicians with an immigrant or other ethnic minority background shows that their ethnic identity negotiations were highly complex and multifaceted. Typically, an ethnic minority identity was accepted at a superficial, assigned level, whereas a Swedish identity was actively claimed at a level of personal assertion. This article analyses the discursive resources that the bloggers drew upon in order to construct and negotiate their ethnic identities and motivate their political choices. Finally, it elaborates on the discursive functions of the subject positions that these negotiations accomplished: dividing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants, denying the existence of structural discrimination, reversing the racist label and attaching it to the political opponents of the Sweden Democrats and providing ‘proof’ of the party having rid itself of its racist past.

Kohut Memorial Lecture: Race, Place, and Selfie

We live in a “selfie” culture. We are now able, by the merest touch, to put ourselves into a picture. Kohut understood that in order to be mirrored or empathically responded to in any way we needed to be seen. I reflect on how Kohut’s work of selfobject longings is strangely true in today’s world, even though he could not have anticipated to what degree technology would bear it out. His theory is a nuanced, multi-layered exegesis on this theme. This article is about Kohut viewed through the lens of current times. As it is a subjective view, along the way you will hear how Kohut’s theories impacted my own analysis and hear how and why Russell Meares was instrumental in bringing Kohut’s ideas to Australia. My South African racial past was not discussed in my 14-year analysis. I note and speculate on the absence of race in Kohut’s theorizing and show how the Internet influenced my need to examine my racial past after apartheid ended and how valuable Kohut’s theories were in that regard. I conclude by reflecting on Kohut’s contribution by relating it to the significance of social media, then and now.

Conservatives in the Everglades: Sun Belt Environmentalism and the Creation of Everglades National Park

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, SEVERAL SOUTHERN STATES SOUGHT to sustain the economic growth they had experienced during the war. Many focused on building up their manufacturing, high-tech, and resource extraction industries. At the same time, tourism was poised to become an industry in the postwar South, especially in coastal states that could take advantage of the South's climate, natural beauty, and undeveloped natural areas. These two economic forces seemed destined to clash: many of the South's heavy and extractive industries defiled the environment, while tourism was often dependent on pristine environments. (1) The South's postwar economic development also entailed changes in the identity, or at least the public image, of the South. The region's racist past, its backward reputation, its past hostility to the values of middle-class capitalism, and its legacy of secession were not generally compatible with the desires of business investors. This conflict was even more pronounced in the case of tourism, an economic activity that relied on the public's perceptions of place. (2) Although the region's wartime economic growth was subsidized by the federal government, the rise of the Sun Belt South was inextricably and perhaps ironically linked to the emergence of modern conservatism. (3) This political movement, devoted to tradition, the free market, and individual rights, was particularly attractive to many white southerners who confronted diverse economic, social, and cultural changes during and after World War II. In Florida, a third emergent force shaped the state's economic growth and political climate after the war: modern environmentalism. (4) Environmentalism and ecological ideas about nature, along with conservative ideas about individual property rights and the role of the state, proved to be central to the state's development. (5) The creation of Everglades National Park (ENP) in 1947 was deeply influenced by both environmentalism and conservatism and illustrates the diversity of conservative attitudes in the South toward nature. (6) Florida politicians saw the park as a centerpiece of the postwar tourism industry. This industry was predicated on the state's natural values: its climate, its beauty, its beaches, and its diverse and exotic flora and fauna. The key political figure in the fight for the park was Spessard L. Holland, a titan of Florida politics who parlayed his successful gubernatorial term during World War II into a twenty-five-year career in the U.S. Senate. In many ways, Holland was a typical mid-twentieth-century southern politician: he was pro-business and pro-segregation, and he supported states' rights. Holland typically sought to limit the power of the federal government, yet he vigorously supported the creation of an enormous national park in his state. Holland's enlightened utilitarianism toward the preservation of the Everglades was composed of three ideas. The first was that economic benefits could be extracted from the Everglades. Second, Holland understood that environmental ideas, specifically an appreciation of diverse and exotic flora and fauna, were becoming increasingly important to Americans. Holland thought that the creation of the ENP would reorient the state's economy around tourism and advertise Florida tourism more broadly. Finally, and perhaps most important, the park would aid in the transformation of Florida's identity. The creation of a wilderness park dedicated to protecting biology would signal that Florida was at the forefront of environmental and scientific thinking. The park would demonstrate that Florida was no longer a backwater state from a backward region tainted by the legacy of slavery and secession. Rather, Florida was a modern, scientific state, eager to cater to the desires of American tourists. The belief that the ENP could facilitate the construction of a new identity for Florida was a crucial facet of Holland's Sun Belt environmentalism and illustrates the dynamic and forward-thinking aspects of southern identity after World War II. …

Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South by Andrew Maraniss

STRONG INSIDE: Perry Wallace and Collision of Race and Sports in South. By Andrew Maraniss. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 2015.In February 2015, Serena Williams surprised world when she announced that she would return to Indian Wells; a tournament she had boycotted permanently. In 2001, a predominately white crowd booed and harangued then-nineteen-year-old entire match because they believed that her sister, Venus, had pulled out of a match at last minute to avoid playing Serena in semifinals. Distraught and traumatized, Serena, then 19-years-old, wept in locker room for several hours and vowed never to return. For years Indian Wells officials begged her to return. For thirteen years she declined, but in February of 2015 she had a change of heart after reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. She learned that victims are expected to extend sentiment and gesture of reconciliation.Andrew Maraniss's Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and Collision of Race and Sports in South seems to follow a similar pattern as it outlines traumatic journey of first African American to play in South Eastern Conference (SEC). In this narrative, Wallace resolves that bitterness would only earn him scorn. The contemporary reader who annually watches University of Kentucky trot out five blue-chip African-American freshman basketball players in hopes of capturing a national title may be astonished to discover what Kentucky used to be and Wallace's pioneering efforts. The Kentucky of Perry's era would never have considered starting five freshmen-and certainly not a single African-American player. Few contemporary players realize that they have Perry Wallace to thank. Wallace's inner strength and resolve to withstand unimaginable strife, vitriol, and abuse to break racial barriers deserves more notice.In Strong Inside, Maraniss, a former member of Vanderbilt University athletic department, tells story of Perry Wallace's historic effort to successfully break SEC color line. Maraniss is perhaps best person to write about Wallace's historic trials and tribulations and his journey to desegregate SEC basketball because he wrote about Wallace while he an undergraduate at Vanderbilt. He interviewed Wallace, and, at one time, he director of media relations for Vanderbilt Athletic Department. Thus his knowledge of institution and its culture, along with his access to key archival material, prepared him to tell as whole of a story as possible. The book falls within trajectory of recent books about race and sports like Kenneth L. Shropshire's Sports Matters: Leadership, Power, and Quest for Respect in Sports, Jennifer H. Lansbury's A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth Century America, and James Conyers, Jr. edited book Race in American Sports, among others.A strength of Maraniss's Strong Inside is that it is several connected stories. Not only is it about Wallace, but also about his teammate Dillard, South, Vanderbilt University's racist past, civil rights struggle in South led by James Lawson, and Chancellor Heard's struggle to uphold his belief in universities as spaces where one's plea for fuller freedom can be calmly debated and heard.The narrative gets especially interesting once Wallace's black teammate, proud Godfrey Dillard appears. Maraniss is to be commended for making Dillard such a significant part of Wallace's narrative. Dillard, who signed with Vanderbilt seven days after Wallace, is often a forgotten figure. A native of Detroit, Dillard not your typical African-American recruit of 1960s. He attended an integrated Catholic school in Detroit, and unlike Wallace he wanted to go to South. His reverse migration about becoming the SEC's first black ballplayer and it was only reason [he] wanted to head south (107). …

“The City Too Busy to Care”: The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Southern Past, 1979–81

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Atlanta: Long seen as the robustly optimistic capital of the New South. Throughout its regions racial troubles, Atlanta always seemed a healthy, bustling citadel of good sense and goodwill, offering its own unique prospect for racial reconciliation in the South. But now, this brave center of the Sunbelt has been touched by a shadow--a mindless evil loose in its midst, executing its children with a cruel and systematic regularity. What does it mean a like Atlanta when it finds something like this happening it? --Marshall Frady, ABC World News Tonight, February 27, 1981 (1) On May 25, 1981, an estimated three thousand people convened at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., protest the slayings of black Atlanta youths. Rally organizers framed the demonstration as part of the March on Washington tradition. Promotional materials urged attendees to help pave the way living A reality that once was A dream, evoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s canonical 1963 speech. Therein King had shared his vision for a society in which his and other children could transcend the racial prejudice that negated the American precepts of freedom and equity. Eighteen years later, speakers at the Atlanta rally seemed less hopeful and more fearful for their children. Across this country our children are being killed in many ways, Camille Bell, a victim's mother, lamented. And our future is being wiped out. (2) From 1979 1981, the of Atlanta reeled as nearly thirty of its young, black, and poor residents were abducted and murdered. These slayings aggravated long-held black anxieties about racial violence, white hegemony, and the African American future. They also undermined Atlanta's image as a space of racial moderation and economic progress in an otherwise retrograde region. For nearly two years, the death toll mounted as the struggled determine who was preying on its black children, adolescents, and young adults. (3) Just as racial unrest seemed destined erupt in the spring of 1981, Atlanta investigators apprehended a twenty-three year old African American man named Wayne B. Williams in connection with two of the murders. The following year, Williams was convicted of the two killings, and officials implicated him in nearly all of the others. In effect, the case had been closed, and Atlanta had been vindicated. This article argues that the southern past shaped public perceptions of and community responses the Atlanta youth murders, which in turn dented Atlanta's reputation as a New South, postracial, and post-civil city. Poor black Atlantans and those within the city's biracial power structure developed fundamentally different approaches addressing the killings. Many African Americans conceived of the slayings as an attempt unmake the Civil Rights Movement. As black Atlantans mobilized against the forces of racism and indifference the crisis, they built on well-worn southern movement strategies that stressed consciousness raising, community protection, civic engagement, and a populist posture against both black and white elites. The city's biracial political and economic establishment took a different tack--downplaying the racial dimensions of the killings, drafting contingency plans prevent any potential civil unrest related the murders, securing the assistance of the private sector in alleviating local anxieties, and striving preserve Atlanta's image as the city too busy hate. (4) Observers outside of Atlanta generally understood the slayings as inconsonant with the city's moderate reputation yet consistent with the South's troubled racial past. These divergent yet imbricated reactions revealed inter- and intraracial contestations over Atlanta's meanings in regional, national, and global contexts. For many, the killings called into question the very gains of the classical civil rights struggle, demonstrated the endurance of Jim Crow violence, and challenged the city's position as an exceptional southern space. …

Remembering Slavery, Again

IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race in America, it would be a shame to miss the equally public memories of race-slavery in Britain. Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, a twopart BBC documentary,1 publicised the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS), a University College of London database of all the slave owners in Britain who were awarded compensation when slavery was abolished on 1 August 1834. A Broadway musical, Grace, dramatised the story of the British slave-ship captain, John Newton, who wrote the hymn that would become associated with African-American culture and civil rights struggles - and which President Obama sang at the eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist who shot six other members of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the literary sphere, British novelist Caryl Phillips published The Lost Child, partly a prequel to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in which he draws on the long critical speculation that Heathcliff, brought from the slave port of Liverpool to the Yorkshire moors, is black.2 It appears that both the US and the UK are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison says of Beloved (1987),3 something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.4Aside from the fact that these are actually two cases of national amnesia, what is striking is how much people keep remembering, and, more, how often it is the same icon remembered repeatedly as though with all the power of the first time. The hymn Amazing Grace plays as the signature music in both the BBC's Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners and an earlier documentary, the 2009 independent film A Regular Black: The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights,5 which speculates on Heathcliff's racial identity in the context of Yorkshire's historical connections with slavery, and Amazing Grace is the title of both the aforementioned musical about the moral awakening of Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, and a 2006 film about William Wilberforce, who led the successful fight in Parliament in 1807 to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire (but not slavery itself, which happened much later, in 1833). Yet, despite the circulation of these four productions across the Atlantic, it is safe to say that most Americans would not recognise the British roots of this black spiritual - and that few readers anywhere would recognise a 'black' Wuthering Heights. Looking at 2015, a year of transatlantic memories of the New World racial past and its legacy in the present, may therefore give us insight into national amnesias, plural - how two nations continue to grapple differently with their intertwined histories, the global institution of nineteenth-century slavery.The history of slavery is of course neither new nor unknown, yet its afterlives seem to be repeatedly rediscovered at particular moments in time. Some of these coincide with obvious anniversaries, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (when the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was, symptomatically, the Wilberforce biopic Grace). And vice versa, as the voluminous work in the field of memory studies shows, the legacy of slavery is subject to periodic erasure of different kinds in public space and public memory as well as in popular literary and academic discourse.6 In the US, seeking roots can be tantamount to rejecting them: Henry Louis Gates Jr, host and executive producer of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, has been embroiled in controversy over its capitulation to actor Ben Affleck's request that the programme not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in a 2014 episode. (PBS put the series on hold after determining that the episode violated its editorial standards. …

“The Duality of the Southern Thing”: A Snapshot of Southern Politics in the Twenty-First Century

“The Duality of the Southern Thing”A Snapshot of Southern Politics in the Twenty-First Century Angie Maxwell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution In 2001 the talented up-and-coming rock band Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera. Track number eight, a spoken-word confessional narrative, casts judgment on, as the title reveals, “The Three Great Alabama Icons”: Ronnie Van Zant, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace. The former are recognized with influencing writer and frontman Patterson Hood. The bulk of lyrical analysis, however, is saved for Wallace, whose segregationist record is juxtaposed with his outreach to African Americans in later life. George Wallace with Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, by James Hatcher, December 1974, courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama. [End Page 89] In 2001 the talented up-and-coming rock band Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a critically acclaimed album that was produced only with the financial help of friends and fans. The two-disc Southern Rock Opera was the group’s attempt to explain their South to the world and to make sense of the myths and legends that cast long shadows in Alabama. Track number eight, a spoken-word confessional narrative, casts judgment on, as the title reveals, “The Three Great Alabama Icons”: Ronnie Van Zant, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace. The former are recognized with influencing writer and frontman Patterson Hood. Van Zant, although born in Jacksonville, Florida, is credited with creating an anthem of Alabama and southern pride and Bryant for making football the sacred cow that inevitably drove the un-athletic teenage Hood straight to a guitar. The bulk of lyrical analysis, however, is saved for Wallace, whose segregationist record is juxtaposed with his outreach to African Americans in later life. “And Wallace spent the rest of his life trying to explain away his racist past, and in 1982 won his last term in office with over 90 percent of the black vote,” writes Hood; “Such is the Duality of the Southern Thing.”1 The Drive- By Truckers have left open the full scope of this duality and returned to reflect on it years later, all of which merely hints at the profundity of that statement. Dan Carter’s The Politics of Rage comes as close as any work to understanding the intent behind Wallace’s transformation. And Paul Stekler’s “American Experience” documentary, Settin’ the Woods on Fire, leaves audiences wondering if Wallace’s motive even matters in the first place. In the final verse, the Truckers themselves consign Wallace to hell for his “blind ambition” and insatiable “hunger for votes.” But this “duality” is about much more than Wallace’s rage and violence. It is about much more than Wallace himself. For Wallace, like the demagogues who preceded him and who will follow in his wake, remains a constant subject of scrutiny because he exposed something significant about the regional force that is the American South. Just as Wallace is a generous muse for the Drive-By Truckers, his political career remains a useful source for questions about the modern South. Three questions are particularly poignant regarding this central concept of regional duality and its existence in the contemporary southern political landscape. First, Wallace’s ability to capture the national spotlight pushed Republican attention southward. “Recognizing the seriousness of Wallace’s threat,” notes journalist and author John Egerton, Richard Nixon co-opted his message and made the region a distinct and critical geographic piece of the electoral puzzle for the modern gop. Is this assumption of a distinct or aberrant South still valid? Second, the success of Wallace’s campaign outside of the South, in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, revealed that southern identity was not limited to a geographic boundary; rather, it reflected a state of mind and a worldview that proved palatable to many. What does southern identity look like now?2 [End Page 90] Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is another lesson of George Wallace that is not about the “sinner,” but about the African Americans in Alabama who eventually—whether strategically or sincerely—lent him their support. Indeed, in his critical assessment of Wallace’s 1982...

Pitch Dark Anarchy by Randall Horton (review)

Reviewed by: Pitch Dark Anarchy by Randall Horton David Mills (bio) Randall Horton. Pitch Dark Anarchy. Northwestern UP. Randall Horton’s innovative third poetry collection, Pitch Dark Anarchy, both engages with and departs from his earlier works’ concerns. He revisits themes (such as the inner city’s harsh realities and the South’s complicated racial past), and he situates the poems in comparable milieus (such as urban America and Birmingham, Alabama). He also evinces this engagement with his keen attention to detail and his frequently plangent tone. But he departs from his previous volumes’ aesthetics with Pitch’s pronounced theoretical musings, fragmented syntax, and distinctive punctuation. Horton intermittently uses typographical innovations for both visual effect and signification. He inserts colons between letters of words such as f:l:a:s:h:i:n:g l:i:g:h:t:s and f:i:el:d h:o:l:l:a. This sui generis, ideogrammatic device amplifies the sense of a flashing light’s brightness and a field holla’s loudness. [End Page 174] He also uses typographical innovations for polysemous effect. In the poem “Dear Reader (1),” Horton writes “before that final echo dimming the sun display(ed) for the (dis)placed.” The line could be read in the present or past tense; it could be read as “display(ed) for the displaced” or the “placed.” Horton’s parentheticals create multivalent ambiguities. Occasionally, he places lowercase words between two periods, such as “.or.,” and then suspends the word in the middle of a line. The suspension and framing periods create a syntactical rupture and syncopation. The suspended “.or.” also makes it seem as if Horton wants the reader to “hear” him thinking, as if he wants readers to occasionally experience process and not just polish. In the essay “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” writer Erica Hunt avers: “Languages contain us, and we are simultaneously bearers of the codes of containment.” Horton uses Hunt’s statement as an epigraph. Then, interspersed throughout Pitch, Horton places parentheses and brackets around personal pronouns. In the poem “The District’s Park,” he writes, “the lake holds (us).” This nifty typographical device simultaneously shows humans trapped in or by language and serves as a visual metaphor for Hunt’s contention. Horton does not limit his poetic departures to typography and syntax, however. He also innovatively writes about subjects he has previously explored. In his first book, The Definition of Place, Horton titled the third section—which is about 1963 Birmingham—“Colored Water.” One poem in that section, “Barriers in the Magic City,” describes segregation as: a city of two worlds divided bysocial mores; one fountain oldand decrepit with rust stains, openwounds that do not cauterize; theother smooth white porcelain, clearand postcard ready. Pitch Dark Anarchy, however, frequently skirts such directness. In poems such as “Home Sweet Home,” Horton “remembers” yet “reworks” his hometown with elliptical, sportive, and figurative language; he describes Birmingham, Alabama, with phrasing such as “say then red clay marks the proverbial X.” Horton also employs a more theoretical approach when writing about Birmingham and the South in general. One of his poems alludes to a lynching in both its title, “‘Pictured’ Remembrance: Limp at the Neck,” and in three lines of this same poem’s final stanza: running inside the eyes of the world a witness, “pictured”hanging right-side up from a cedar. the constructinverts the default He weds the clear image of “hanging . . . from a cedar” with a conceptual musing. Horton’s theoretical turn creates a dialectic with the poem’s epigraph, for which [End Page 175] Horton quotes deceased poet Reginald Shepherd: “blackness as an identity, assumed or imposed, is a social construct just as whiteness is. But blackness is the marked construct, while whiteness is the default: it fades into a privileged invisibility.” Horton’s line—“the construct/inverts the default”—suggests that “blackness” takes on a “privileged invisibility” after a person of color has been lynched. I can only assume Horton is being ironic about the “privilege.” Horton uses words such as “(in)visible,” “echo” (ten times), “erase” (five), and “zero,” “shadow,” and “void,” throughout Pitch Dark Anarchy in what might...

SOX and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy: South African Auditing Developments through the Lens of Modernity Theory

This paper uses South Africa as an example to explore how crises of trust – stemming from the legacy of Apartheid, local and international corporate failures and the changing regulatory framework in the United States – have contributed to shaping aspects of South African corporate governance. Using Giddens' theory of modernity, the research considers how the country's racist past and recent corporate scandals have converged to shape South Africa's corporate governance landscape. In turn, mechanisms of modernity explain why South Africa has developed a highly sophisticated system of corporate governance.

Black Women’s Memories and The Help

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The past several decades have seen an outpouring of literary and cinematic texts that take what is commonly known as the modern Civil Right Movement or the southern freedom struggle as their subject. The recent resurgence of interest in the Civil Rights era among writers, musicians, and performance and visual artists acknowledges the transformative impact of the activism, rhetoric, theology, and iconography of the period. Not only did the Civil Rights Movement substantially alter the socio-political (and spatial) configuration of relations within the United States, but it also exerted a profound influence on other political movements for equality around the world. Mainstream representations frequently confirm popular constructions of the Movement as a primarily southern phenomenon that occurred from the mid 1950s through the late 1960s. In this view, the Movement is a chapter in a progressive, ameliorative vision of United States history where southern extremists were pitted against cross-racial coalitions led by morally courageous and spiritually inspired individuals. Through shared sacrifice and exemplary action, activists triumphed over white supremacy, delivering the nation from its past injustices into a bright future of freedom, equality, and opportunity. This interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement, common to Hollywood films such as Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning (1988), Martin Davidson's Heart of Dixie (1989), Richard Pearce's The Long Walk Home (1990), Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), or made-for-television films such as Robert Dornhelm's Sins of the Father (2002) (to name only a few) has maintained some measure of currency because it encourages viewer complacency and self-satisfaction. It allows Americans to identify post-Emancipation racism with its most obvious symbols and perpetrators, confine it to the Jim Crow South, sentimentalize its spiritual discourse and sainted martyrs, and convince ourselves that those days are over. It allows us to believe that with legalized segregation behind us, the doors of American opportunity are now open to all. Numerous scholars have sought to understand this fascination with the Civil Rights era in the United States. Herman Gray, Jennifer Fuller, and others contend that cultural products--literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc.--that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and transcended its racial past. (1) Both versions of The Help--Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel and the eponymous film directed by Tate Taylor--generated considerable controversy upon their release. Their popularity testifies to the hold the Movement era retains upon the American cultural imaginary: the novel spent 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and the screen adaptation was the thirteenth top-grossing film of 2011. The film and novel both recall several of the tropes that recur through out many popular representations of the genre: they center on white characters; they locate racist behavior in the most ignoble characters; and they sentimentalize relationships between black workers and their white employers. Yet even as these works invoke the American cultural memory of an earlier period, they also challenge the conventions of representing that period by foregrounding black women's memories. While the texts depend upon the exploitation of black women's experiences, black women's acts of remembrance constitute sites of resistance within the dominant narrative. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BLACK WOMEN'S MEMORIES Black women's memories play a central role in both the novel and the film. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan, the principal white character, yearns for more than marriage, children, and a cozy life in Jackson, Mississippi, her hometown, the conventional path that middle-class white women like her mother and girlhood friends followed during the 1950s and '60s. …

Racial subordination in Latin America: the role of the state, customary law, and the new civil rights response

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America yet Afro-descendants have been consistently marginalized as undesirable elements of the society. Latin America has nevertheless long prided itself on its absence of US-styled state-mandated Jim Crow racial segregation laws. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of Latin America's legally benign racial past by comprehensively examining the existence of customary laws of racial regulation and the historic complicity of Latin American states in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies. Tanya Kateri Hernandez is the first author to consider the salience of the customary law of race regulation for the contemporary development of racial equality laws across the region. Therefore, the book has a particular relevance for the contemporary US racial context in which Jim Crow laws have long been abolished and a 'post-racial' rhetoric undermines the commitment to racial equality laws and policies amidst a backdrop of continued inequality.