Racial Privilege Research Articles

‘Redneck Customs’: race and class at the demolition derby

Using data collected from ethnographic research at demolition derbies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, this article focuses on the language used by drivers for car-naming practices in response to epithets routinely associated with rural, working-class whites. Briefly cast into mass consciousness by media coverage of the racialised 2008 US Presidential contest through a focus on the ‘Appalachian Belt’, the day-to-day experiences of rural working-class whites tend to stay below the news radar. This population, often publicly referred to by terms like ‘white trash’ or ‘rednecks’, has also received relatively little scholarly attention. That such language is used unproblematically in the public arena underscores the construction of the working-class white as embodying a complex mixture of racial privilege and class disadvantage. And while emerging studies of whiteness do address ‘redneck’ as a racialised class category, and research on poor rural Americans is attracting more researchers, studies on leisure activity associated with rural whites is very scarce. But over a million fans attend more than 2000 demolition derby events every year, and as a site where values centred on nationalism, citizenship and class are practiced and critiqued; I use the metaphor of creative destruction to explore the derby as a remarkable model of expressive culture and site of active resistance.

The role of theatre and embodied knowledge in addressing race in South African higher education

This article examines the role of theatrical performance as a means of addressing the embodied and spatio-temporal manifestations of race and racism within South African higher education. As part of Jansen's proposal for a post-conflict pedagogy in South Africa, the article argues for the development and inclusion of embodied knowledges as an appropriate means of addressing issues of diversity and social transformation on South African campuses. Through a case study of one theatrical production aimed at tackling issues of diversity with incoming first year students at Rhodes University, it is argued that it was the embodied processes that the student performers in the production did that enabled them to interrogate the complexities of power and identity. The article suggests a move from intellectualised and abstracted engagements with race towards pedagogical methods that involve embodiment that, in this case, facilitated significant shifts in thinking about race and racial privilege amongst white students.

(Homo)normativity's romance: happiness and indigestion in Andrew Haigh's Weekend

Homonormativity has become a key concern in contemporary queer studies. The term refers to how LGBT politics have turned away from critiquing the values and institutions of heteronormativity towards seeking inclusion within these values and institutions. Through the analysis of Andrew Haigh's 2011 film, Weekend, this paper argues that queer studies needs to consider not simply the politics of homonormativity, but also the affective and emotional attachments to it. We cannot imagine viable alternatives to homonormativity otherwise. I contend that homonormativity takes its hold through ‘romance’, which I define as a set of affects and emotions that construct couple-hood and marriage as the good life. Still more, I show how the rejection of homonormativity is not necessarily politically progressive, as it can depend upon the assertion of individual autonomy in its entanglement with class, race and gender privilege. Ultimately, this paper complicates debates about homonormativity by considering its affective and emotional allure.

Gender and the Chief Justice: Principle or Pretext?

The post-apartheid South African Constitution requires that the judiciary be transformed ‘to reflect broadly the racial and gender composition of South Africa’. Because the legal system and the judiciary are the least ‘transformed’ organs of government and because of their social and political significance, the appointment of judges has become an important avenue for South Africans to continue to contest issues of race and power, usually using codes such as ‘merit’ or ‘transformation’ but sometimes descending into more open racial hostility. This article examines the debate around the appointment in 2011 of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng in which his views and judgments on gender and sexual orientation have been widely used to bolster the argument that he was not fit to be appointed. While gender and sexual orientation was raised almost universally, certain of these criticisms used gender in ways which echoed and amplified historical stereotypes of black men in general, and African male sexuality in particular. In these debates gender became a proxy for race because of the way in which discourses around gender echoed racial themes and stereotypes which have predominated in popular debates around the judiciary. In addition, ‘gender arguments’ were used to strengthen claims that professional seniority should be the main criterion in judicial appointments – a factor which would clearly favour white men in a profession in which black people and women remain a minority This placed feminists in an invidious position by using feminist arguments to justify racial privilege while subverting or ignoring more systemic gender and racial inequalities within the largely untransformed legal profession.

Colonizing intersectionality: replicating racial hierarchy in feminist academic arguments

In this article I use tools of critical and poststructural discourse analysis to examine a particular rhetorical frame adopted by some European social scientists and philosophers dealing with the feminist concept of intersectionality. These scholars must negotiate a complex discursive terrain framed by what David Theo Goldberg calls ‘racial Europeanization,’ a metadiscursive regime that denies the continuing existence of European race and racisms. The result is to suppress the availability of conceptual tools that will allow people to recognize, analyze, and debate what might count as structural racisms and how racial differences can be negotiated effectively. Acceding to this suppression restricts the tools available when critics must engage with racial arguments in criticizing US intersectionality. I examine here three cases in which critics fail to give due attention to the imbrication of race, nation, and power in their arguments, the women they target, and the forms of intersectionality they wish to critique. The critics utilize structures of argument that evoke histories of racial hierarchy and colonialism, treating the intersectionality of US women of color as a site to colonize and control. They deploy rhetorics that map closely to structures of thinking described by Albert Memmi in his description of colonial racism. I demonstrate how the critiques of intersectionality frame US feminist scholars of color and their constituencies by ‘depersonalizing’ and ‘collectivizing’ them through what Memmi calls ‘the mark of the plural,’ through binary and hierarchical rhetorics, and through ‘fixing’ the nature of the black feminists who introduced the concept of intersectionality as a theoretical tool. The unacknowledged expressions of racial privilege that characterize these critiques demonstrate that feminists need to transform the terms of reading and writing to take responsibility for the ways feminist discourses function as technologies of power.

PUBLIC TALES WAG THE DOG

AbstractThis essay examines the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar—an African American single mother from Akron, Ohio—who in 2011 was arrested, charged with a felony, and jailed for sending her two daughters to a predominantly White suburban public school in Copley Township without meeting the township's residency requirements. This essay closely examines the case with particular attention paid to the important but often unacknowledged intersections of race, gender, economic privilege, spatial containment, and racialized criminalization that shaped the case. The Williams-Bolar case became a public site of contesting narratives, some obscuring these intersections, others acknowledging them. Those who supported Copley Township's prosecution of Williams-Bolar relied on a law and order mandate and fiscal responsibility that supported the dominant racial narrative while appearing to be race, gender, and class neutral. But many were critical of Williams-Bolar's arrest and the story used to justify it. Their response was a massive and heated online challenge that inspired existing and newly outraged parents and educational activists from a wide range of backgrounds, triggering petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people requesting that the Governor of Ohio pardon Williams-Bolar.This essay places the case in the context of what I call the “invisible intersections of colorblind racism,” the racial privileges of housing and educational resource hoarding via private property taxes for suburban upper-middle-class Whites and the expanded application of the criminalization of the Black poor to Black mothers who receive state assistance by the judicial system, in political discourse and mass media narrative. Williams-Bolar's supporters used the power of social media to build community activism and to generate alternative narratives that countered the discursive and structural forces that were at work. Finally, this article considers the value and impact of alternative narratives about Williams-Bolar and her actions as generated by supporters.

The Law and Black Folk

The Law and Black Folk Katy L. Chiles (bio) Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery by Bryan Wagner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 307. $37.00 cloth. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, scholars have deliberated over what it means to have a soul, to be black, or to be part of the folk. In Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Bryan Wagner gives us a new way to consider these issues that is provocative and, indeed, disturbing. Blackness, Wagner claims, is not something passed down through bloodlines or as a cultural inheritance; rather, it is a certain type of statelessness produced when one is allowed to exist—but only without standing—in the eyes of the state. Furthermore, it is this understanding of blackness (one of statelessness, not of soulfulness) that grounds what we commonly call the black vernacular tradition. Indeed, this version of the black tradition predicates its own emergence on its engagement with the law that would construct the existence of its practitioners only as one of criminality. For Wagner, if we miss understanding this aspect of blackness, we miss the violence recorded in these cultural expressions. Wagner proposes this alternative history of the black vernacular tradition by debunking some of what he calls the central myths of its accepted history and by detailing the ethnographic procedure that made certain kinds of music into folk music (253). He begins by showing the way in which the laws arising out of a natural law tradition [End Page 339] produced a particular notion of blackness. For him, the term police power refers not just to the formalized institution of law enforcement (although it certainly includes that) but also more broadly to the power of the state to produce certain types of subjectivities through the writing and enforcing of law. Indeed, the state's sovereignty relates to its police power, and, in the particular case of blackness, the state's police power sees blackness only "for the presumed danger it poses to public welfare" (6-7). Furthermore, this power was not only consolidated in the state itself, as it was extended as a "racial privilege of all whites over all blacks, slave or free" (7). Because this police power conceptualized blackness only as a threat, it legitimated any effort to eliminate that potential threat preemptively before it could culminate in action. For Wagner, the black vernacular tradition arises out of its interaction with this kind of legal thinking, and we'd be better served by understanding how black culture responded to police power rather than by misunderstanding "the voice's insistence for a positive property such as soulfulness" (21). Indeed, as Wagner states, [M]y aim is to specify the historical statement against which the black tradition has dramatized its own emergence. Whether it is abstracted in codes or embedded in cases, the law leaves a paper trail that can be used to reconstruct the historical coordinates that are invoked in the tradition's representative structures of self-address. (21) One of Wagner's most powerful examples is the history of Uncle Remus, the African American character created by Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta at the close of the nineteenth century. Probably many Americans think of Uncle Remus either as the storyteller featured in Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) or as the demeaning narrator featured in Disney's 1946 film, Song of the South. What Wagner reminds us of, however, is the seriousness with which folklorists took the Uncle Remus stories for their "scientific worth" (116). As Wagner details, Remus became structurally important both to the study of black folk culture and to the professionalization of that type of study. Remus, then, influenced folklorists' "theories of black tradition, in particular those theories that would describe the tradition as a cultural inheritance from Africa;" indeed, he "structured the archive through which the tradition has been imagined" (122). By reading through issues of the Atlanta Constitution, the newspaper that initially published Harris's Remus pieces, Wagner links the production of this character with the debate simultaneously...

“Too Little to Count as Looking”: Blackness and the Formation of the White Feminine in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples

LAURA J. SCHROCK University of Mississippi “Too Little to Count as Looking”: Blackness and the Formation of the White Feminine in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION, EUDORA WELTY’S NOVELS AND SHORT stories focus on the struggles of white characters, typically female, in search of selfhood. For this reason, critics tend to explore the appearance of black characters in the fiction, if at all, as instances of Welty’s penchant for “doubling,” an emphasis which often comes at the expense of the significance of the role of a specifically black double.1 Perhaps this tendency helps account for the absence of any sustained treatment of the appearances of black characters in the story cycle The Golden Apples and the fact that crucial black actors and witnesses in these narratives easily escape notice.2 But if these stories dramatize white self-formation, the manifestations of black presences, however marginal in their articulation, must be anything but marginal in import. Mistaking the representation of black characters as extraneous, we fall into a common trap Toni Morrison has cautioned against, the assumption that “the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular ‘Americanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence” (5). Moving beyond the treatment of black characters in Welty’s work 1 For example, even in an article entitled “Recovering Otherness in The Golden Apples.,” Susan V. Donaldson almost entirely confines her study of pairings to the white characters; although she mentions Virgie Rainey’s “unspoken bond” (506) with the black beggar woman at the conclusion of The Golden Apples collection, she does not elaborate on the particularity of this pairing. 2 Suzanne Marrs provides a partial analysis of black characters in The Golden Apples, but largely confines her study to Delta Wedding, explaining that “Black characters . . . are not so prominent [in The Golden Apples] as they are in Delta Wedding, but they are essential to the book’s thematic development” (702). 96 Laura J. Schrock as merely atmospheric or “decorative”3 allows for an explanation of their active role in constituting her depictions of American selfhood, a process revealed intimately in much of her fiction. In “Sir Rabbit” and “Moon Lake,” which figure early in The Golden Apples, Welty probes the formation of a specifically white feminine consciousness as it works out its identity in the context of racial and sexual stratifications of the American South and thereby highlights the pivotal role blackness plays in the definition of white sexual normativity. In both stories the representative white females participate in the construction and valorization of a specifically American mythic masculinity, that of the aloof and violent white Western expansionist, in order to maintain racial privilege even at the expense of sexual subjugation. The perpetual reification of this white masculine ideal benefits the white female to the extent that it reinstates her privileged status as sexual conquest and, inversely, as potential seducer and conqueror of the dominant figure on the mythic American landscape. The white woman enjoys the cultural capital of proximity to the one who is “both white and male,” and thus finds herself potentially in conflict with the black man who, though black, might take advantage of the cultural capital of maleness.4 Because the black man’s potential for sexual dominance threatens to uproot the lynchpin of the entire system of white privilege, namely the preeminence of race as cultural marker, his masculinity necessitates emphatic suppression. “Sir Rabbit” and “Moon Lake” depict these crucial categories of racial and sexual privilege to be always already trembling on the verge of collapse, as the white feminine consciousness must call forth and encounter the threatening figure of the black male in order to ensure its repression. 3 Morrison remarks on her initial naivete about the presence of African Americans in traditional American literature: “As a reader my assumption had always been that . . . Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, theyweredecorative—displaysoftheagilewriter’stechnical expertise” (16). 4 Robyn Wiegman explores how early pseudo-scientific studies contributed to the construction of an anatomical analogy between the black male and white female brains, a comparison which “simultaneously differentiated and...

Matthew W. Hughey, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race.

Matthew W. Hughey, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 286 pp., $24.95 paper (9780804776950) Whiteness studies have emphasized the importance of recognizing the heterogeneity of racial categories. this is certainly an important lesson, it is at the same time crucial to remember that (p. 13) are linked by transposable social norms that to some extent cut across heterogeneous differences. This is central to the argument of White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race by Matthew W. Hughey, a book which compares two seemingly conflicting all-white activist groups in the United States and finds surprising similarities in the thinking of their members. More specifically, Hughey's book is a comparison between the Whites for Racial Justice (WRJ), an organization built to challenge racial inequality and white privilege, and National Equality for All (NEA), a white nationalist association which challenges society's disregard for rights and argues in favour of racial segregation. This comparison is based on ethnographic research conducted over a year in which Hughey spent at least one day a week with members of both organizations. his analysis does highlight the diversity of opinions held by members of the WRJ and NEA, especially concerning issues like racial segregation, the majority of the book's nine chapters are spent investigating the strong resemblance in the racial thinking of members of both organizations. Hughey argues that these resemblances demonstrate the centrality of hegemonic for the thinking and behaviour of white Americans, even those on seemingly opposite ends of a political spectrum. As Hughey puts it, While there is no question about the political differences and individual heterogeneity of white actors in an array of settings, it is important to recognize that certain forms of whiteness can become dominant and pursued as the ideal (p. 13). Hughey supports his argument by unpacking several similarities underlying the claims of members of both the WRJ and NEA including the propensity to claim victimhood (chapter 5), to take a paternalistic attitude towards racial minorities (chapter 6), to cite a desire to appropriate nonwhiteness (chapter 7) and, finally, to trivialize know ledge that is coded as and deemed confusing or inaccessible to whites (chapter 8). The book makes several contributions to the study of racialization and whiteness, two of which will be outlined in this review. First, the book offers readers a way of conceptualizing the binding nature of whiteness while simultaneously paying respect to the heterogeneity of political opinions held by white actors. The book finds that white actors do indeed hold a diversity of political opinions, but at the same times notes that whiteness governs how they, irrespective of differences in opinion, perceive identity and a number of political issues. it would be problematic to claim that American is a homogeneous identity category, it is sensible to claim that white Americans likely share a number of ideological positions, especially concerning racial privilege and inequality. Hughey points to a variety of examples of these shared ideological positions including the belief that racial minorities do not face significant disadvantages because of systemic discrimination. Of particular interest is the tendency among white Americans to dismiss nonwhite disadvantage by claiming victimhood via or demotion discourses (Chapter 5). In Hughey's research, sympathy narratives were most commonly used by members of the NEA; they argued that affirmative action policies had granted people of colour unfair socioeconomic advantages. …

Lost and othered children in contemporary cinema

Introduction by Debbie Olson & Andrew Scahill Chapter 1. See Dead People: Ghost-Seeing Children as Mediums and Mediators of Communication in Contemporary Horror Cinema. by Sage Leslie-McCarthy Chapter 2. Can't Go On, I Must Go On: How Jeliza Rose Meets Alice and the Dark Side of Childhood in Terry Gilliam's Tideland by Jayne Steel Chapter 3. Wednesday's Child: Adolescent Outsiders in Contemporary British Cinema by Stella M. Hockenhull Chapter 4. Wonka, Freud, and the Child Within: (Re)constructing lost childhood in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Adrian Schober Chapter 5. Representations of Childhood and Conflict in African Fiction Film by Christine Singer & Lindiwe Dovey Chapter 6. Pity the Child: Exploring Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Gummo (1997) by Sarah E. S. Sinwell Chapter 7. The Ideal Immigrant is a Child: Michou d'Auber and the Politics of Immigration in France by Nicole Beth Wallenbrock Chapter 8. It's All For You, Damien!: Oedipal Horror and Racial Privilege in The Omen Series by Andrew Scahill Chapter 9. Little Rebels in Mao's Era: Representing Children of the Past in Zhang Yuan's Little Red Flowers (Yuan Zhang, 2006) by Kiu-wai Chu Chapter 10. Batteries Have Run Out: Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen by Gilles Chamerois Chapter 11. A Krank's Dream: Conflicts Between Form and Narrative in City of Lost Children by Carolyn Salvi Chapter 12. Childhood, Ghost Images, and the Heterotopian Spaces of Cinema: The Child as Medium in The Others by Christian Stewen Chapter 13. The Hitchcock Imp: Children and the Hyperreal in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) by Debbie Olson Chapter 14. Experiencing Huzun Through the Loss of Life, Limbs, and Love in Turtles Can Fly by Fran Hassencahl

Courageous Learning About Race, Self, Community, and Social Action

Exploring Racism in the Classroom Three of the most emotionally charged terms in this era are race, racism, and White privilege. Definitions for these terms vary by individual experiences, beliefs, opinions, and perceptions. K-20 students are rarely exposed to a detailed coverage and critical analysis of the part of U.S. history that includes displacement of Native Americans; differing immigration policies and quotas by ethnicity; and involuntary enslavement of and brutality toward Africans. It is not enough for curriculum content to address one or more of these issues. The cultural heritage not consistent with the majority cultural lens is essential in the understanding of the multidimensional aspects of cultural groups. It is an even less frequent occurrence that these, and other oppressed groups, are presented as viable and valuable and their strategies of survival and unwillingness to be subjugated are addressed. Among these historical facts are the following: * Native Americans who refused to relocate, eluded efforts to be involuntarily enslaved, and preserved their cultural heritage against all odds; * immigrant contributions to the economic development of this country; * the skills and professions of Africans extricated from their homeland; the first Africans in the Americas were not enslaved nor indentured servants; and * the population of individuals of African ancestry who were college educated and professionals, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Adult Education and Racism in the 21st Century As we project the future of our andragogical practices in adult education, we continue our focus from the past on emancipatory acquisition of new knowledge and practical application for social action and change. Our adult learners are less representative of the Eurocentric male model that continues to pervade the adult education profession and research. The faithful minority of scholars has continued to research and publish on the necessity of dismantling the hegemonic systems and policies of structural racism and White privilege in the academic, business, and community arenas of adult education. Many of these scholars are authors of chapters in The Handbook of Race and Adult Education, edited by Sheared et al. (2010). Metelsky and Easley (2012) reviewed the book and identified the wealth of tools for the formal and nonformal adult educator in facilitating knowledge awareness, critical reflection/ analysis, guiding curricula redesign, recommending supplemental resources, developing research topics, and so forth. The dialogical model of the textbook is a sharp contrast from theoretically focused textbooks. It invites the reader into a pseudo-relationship with the author(s). The handbook provides the blending of strategies from Freire's dialogical model of engagement and Critical Race Theory's principles of racism as normalized and the quantification of racism via the lived experiences of the marginalized cultural groups. An emerging trend is the utilization of intragroup dialogues, in addition to intergroup dialogues on issues of race, power, and racism. Two undergraduate courses by an Intergroup Relations Program were evaluated for the impact of the intragroup and intergroup dialogues (Ford & Malaney, 2012). The findings included positive perceptions from students of the creation of safe places for intragroup dialogue and development of alliances for social action and change from intergroup dialogue. Racial Landscape We want to believe racial discrimination is behind us, and we are now a postracial society. Yet asking what appears as an innocuous question--Does racism still exist in your community?--elicits a wide spectrum of emotions and responses. Adult educators encourage classroom discourse that includes current events such as * the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home; * stand your ground laws and the murder of Trayvon Martin; * the handcuffing of Jackson, Mississippi public school students to poles and railings for hours for the perceived noncriminal violations of school rules (i. …

Exposing whiteness in higher education: white male college students minimizing racism, claiming victimization, and recreating white supremacy

This research critically examines racial views and experiences of 12 white men in a single higher education institution via semi-structured interviews. Participants tended to utilize individualized definitions of racism and experience high levels of racial segregation in both their pre-college and college environments. This corresponded to participants seeing little evidence of racism, minimizing the power of contemporary racism, and framing whites as the true victims of multiculturalism (i.e. ‘reverse racism’). This sense of racial victimization corresponded to the participants blaming racial minorities for racial antagonism (both on campus and society as a whole), which cyclically served to rationalize the persistence of segregated, white campus subenvironments. Within these ethnic enclaves, the participants reported minimal changes in their racial views since entering college with the exception of an enhanced sense of ‘reverse racism,’ and this cycle of racial privilege begetting racial privilege was especially pronounced within the fraternity system.

Philology, Education, Democracy

Abstract This essay examines recent arguments for a return to philology as the basis of humanistic inquiry and liberal-arts education. It considers how philology’s disciplinary heritage is inflected by economic and racial privileges and explores avenues for the liberation of philology from these legacies. The past and present entanglements of philology and elite knowledge are traced through Richard Wright’s initiation into the world of learning, the author’s experience teaching a literature-humanities core curriculum, and theorizations of the discipline from Gramsci to Auerbach to Harold Bloom.

Book Review: Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

Book Review: Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

The slums of Aspen: immigrants vs. the environment in America's Eden

Environmentalism usually calls to mind images of peace and serenity, a oneness with nature, and a shared sense of responsibility. But one town in Colorado, under the guise of protection, passed a resolution limiting immigration, bolstering the of the wealthy and scapegoating Latin American newcomers for the area's current and future ecological problems. This might have escaped attention, save for the fact that this wasn't some rinky-dink backwater. It was Aspen, Colorado, playground of the rich and famous and the West's most elite ski town. Tracking the lives of immigrant laborers through several years of exhaustive fieldwork and archival digging, The Slums of Aspen tells a story that brings together some of the most pressing social problems of the day: crises, immigration, and social inequality. Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow demonstrate how these issues are intertwined in the everyday experiences of people who work and live in this wealthy tourist community. Developing the idea of environmental privilege - the economic, political, and cultural power that some groups enjoy, which enables them exclusive access to coveted amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods - they argue that this odd marriage of and nativist groups occurs because of population fears - both want fewer people, especially if they are the brown sort. They situate Aspen, along with all of Colorado's Roaring Fork Valley, as a microcosm of a toxic convergence of immigration and politics in the American West. Offering a new understanding of a little known class of the superelite, of low-wage immigrants (mostly from Latin America) who have become the foundation for service and leisure work in this famous resort, and of the recent history of the ski industry, Park and Pellow expose the ways in which Colorado boosters have reshaped the landscape and altered ecosystems in the pursuit of profit and pleasure. Of even greater urgency, they frame how degradation and immigration reform have become inextricably linked in many regions of the American West, a dynamic that interferes with the efforts of valorous causes, often turning away from conservation and towards insidious racial privilege.

Survival Strategies of Poor White Women in Savannah, 1800–1860

Poor white women had a particularly challenging experience in antebellum Savannah since they were female in a patriarchal society and poor members of the ‘superior race’ that had numerous legal and social advantages. This articles explores the multiple ingenious survival strategies adopted by poor white women in Savannah, including marriage, employment, crime and charity. It ultimately argues that poor white women exploited their racial privileges to the full by taking advantage of legal loopholes and lax law enforcement to earn money, while at the same time earning the sympathy and financial support of elite white men and women via benevolent organisations. Poor white women were able to survive in slave societies because they had significant racial privileges that could not be denied.

Working Class Self-Fashioning in Swing Time (1936)

This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s critique of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality.

Michelle Obama’s Arms: Race, Respectability, and Class Privilege

The debate on Michelle Obama’s ‘right to bare arms’ illustrates that American cultural politics is far from ‘post-racial’. Through reading ‘Michelle O’ as a body out of place, at once exoticized, fetishized, and affective, this article shows the continuing location of the First Lady as white as well as exploring how stylization revisions the raced, gendered, and classed space of the First Lady’s body. It argues that, as a corporeal negation of the norms of both white upper/middle-class respectability and ‘the Black Venus’, Obama creates a space of resistance that enables a black First Lady to emerge through performativity.

North to Alaska and Other Bad Trips in T. C. Boyle's Drop City

Set in 1970, T. C. Boyle's Drop City (2003) follows a group of commune dwellers who abandon the Golden State in search of a new Eden in the “last frontier.” For Boyle's characters, California is no longer a haven once their commune is condemned as a health hazard and bulldozed by the county inspector after a nasty problem emerges concerning human waste management. Alaska thus becomes a refuge for the characters, who occupy themselves by making love and getting high while trying to live off the land with the little knowledge they have. In chronicling the contradictions of the modern ecology movement, Boyle is not interested in contributing to a neoconservative backlash against the counterculture; his critique instead involves recognizing how race, gender, and class privilege operate as important factors in environmentalism and how authoritarian structures often shape understandings of nature, problems that continue to plague environmentalism today. While the characters often make poor choices and find themselves in challenging circumstances, the novel ends on a cautiously optimistic note. The possibility of achieving a satisfying life in the Far North, however, comes only after the characters have reevaluated their social hierarchies and divested themselves of Edenic notions of Alaska.

Examining Race Privilege in America: The Preservation of Whiteness through the Systematic Oppression of African-Americans

The prevailing assumption that race-relations have equalized in America is largely based on an incorrect and misinformed understanding of current socio-economic policies and public behaviors. The continued racialization and discrimination towards African-Americans may be linked to strategic efforts that seek to preserve the dominance and authority of whiteness. This paper examines such claims within the context of the post civil rights movement, with specific attention given to the media, education system, and implementations of social justice.