Racial Lines Research Articles

The C2DREAM framework: Investigating the structural mechanisms undergirding racial health inequities.

Racism shapes the distribution of the social determinants of health (SDoH) along racial lines. Racism determines the environments in which people live, the quality of housing, and access to healthcare. Extensive research shows racism in its various forms negatively impacts health status, yet few studies and interventions seriously interrogate the role of racism in impacting health. The C2DREAM framework illuminates how exposure to racism, in multiple forms, connects to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and obesity. The goal of the C2DREAM framework is to guide researchers to critically think about and measure the role of racism across its many levels of influence to better elucidate the ways it contributes to persistent health inequities. The conceptual framework highlights the interconnectedness between forms of racism, SDoH, and the lifecourse to provide a greater context to individual health outcomes. Utilizing this framework and critically contending with the effects of racism in its multiple and cumulative forms will lead to better research and interventions.

The Bewildering Affect of Representative Democracy: Sheppard Lee's "Confusion of Characters, Propensities, and Associations"

Abstract: This essay examines how Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee (1836) uses the political affect of "democratic confusion" to detail the potentials and pitfalls of representation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Bird's novel describes the journeys of Sheppard Lee, a man who discovers he can move his consciousness into corpses and reanimate them. Instead of focusing solely on Lee, the novel uses the conceit of metempsychosis to depict Lee's transformation into six other characters, adapting Ancient Greek definitions of "character" that stressed the concept's exemplifying power. Yet with each transformation, Lee experiences bafflement, and these states of confusion provide an analogy to the political representation of a variegated constituency by an official. For Bird, representation depends on what Alexis de Tocqueville called a "confused clamour"; indeed, personifying voters could not occur without it. At the same time, this article charts out Bird's limitations for this vision of a prolific, if complicated, democracy. The novel ultimately contends that representatives could not comprehend voters without this affective state, even as Bird curtails its productive nature along racial lines. By the ending of the novel, private bewilderment moves into the public domain in a scene of mass racial violence that clarifies the tension Bird identifies in democratic confusion.

Rural livelihoods and land reform in South Africa: An intersectional perspective on women's lived experiences

Through racialised discrimination under colonialism and apartheid, black people in South Africa were dispossessed of their land. They were often forced into cheap labour for the new mining economic complex and industrial sector. Land dispossession was thus about economic deprivation, eradication of subsistence agriculture, and degradation of the black communities. This resulted in a racialised unequal land distribution, culminating in historical inequalities and poverty along race lines. The 1994 democratic government introduced the land reform programme. The land reform process took the form of restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform. Women were also earmarked for prioritisation and seeking to redress racial inequalities in land access and ownership. The paper utilises an intersectionality approach to explore women farmers' lived experiences of the land reform programme. The paper argues that intersectionality is suitable for exploring gender, class, and age dynamics necessary for understanding women's lived experiences. Particular attention is paid to how the women gained access to and ownership of land and the unique challenges and constraints they experienced as women of a specific class. The paper further aims to examine whether the amendment of the constitution of South Africa with the inclusion of Land Expropriation Without Compensation will help address gender, class, and age differences in land ownership. The paper draws from existing literature and secondary data on women's involvement in farming and the implementation of the land reform programme in Limpopo Province. This article contributes to the body of knowledge that explores the relationship between gender, land reform, Land Expropriation Without Compensation, and land ownership.

Life and love under criminalization: The experiences of people living with HIV in Canada.

Based upon qualitative interviews with 54 women and men living with HIV across Ontario, Canada, this paper examines the impact of HIV criminalization on the sexual and romantic relationships of people living with HIV. This research highlights the navigation strategies people living with HIV create and employ to both navigate and protect themselves from the law. Through a thematic and intersectional analysis, this study shows how adoption of these strategies is unequal, with access to navigation strategies varying along lines of gender, race, and sexual orientation. As a result, women and racialized people living with HIV face more difficulties navigating the impact of the law. HIV criminalization in Canada fuels and validates HIV stigma and produces vulnerability both within and outside of the relationships of people living with HIV. This paper seeks to understand HIV criminalization from the perspective of those governed by the law, in hopes of producing knowledge which will contribute to legal reform, inform policy, and support the development of efficacious secondary prevention initiatives.

Introduction: Medieval Cultural Heritage, Then and Now

Abstract: This volume of collected essays contains scholarship on the handling of medieval cultural heritage, broadly conceived. Societies around the world look to the Middle Ages for identity and inspiration, defining the past in light of modern concerns about cultural belonging, claims to political legitimacy, and conceptions of community. The essays in this volume explore such questions as: Who has the authority to decide on cultural heritage matters, and what happens when the heritage of one group is preferred to that of another? What happens to local communities when a site becomes a popular tourist destination or a place for memorializing the past in a way that erases the voices of a particular group of people? What are the lived consequences when claims to cultural heritage define communities along racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional, or historical lines? In bringing together a broad range of global and disciplinary perspectives, this volume aims to extend the conversation about the definition and deployment of the medieval past.

The Visibility of Racism: A Critical Exploration of Marginalization and Identity in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’

Ralph Ellison’s highly acclaimed novel, ‘Invisible Man’, is a compelling narrative that explores the themes of identity and marginalisation within a deeply polarised society. This literary research paper delves into the intricacies of identity development using postcolonial theory and examines the socio-political consequences of invisibility by conducting a thorough analysis of the protagonist’s journey. Through an analysis of the novel’s socio-cultural perspectives, I explore the process of identity formation as the protagonist, known as the ‘Invisible Man,’ navigates a society that is divided along racial and political lines. The Protagonist’s encounters with deceitful figures of authority, along with his disillusionment within the Brotherhood, expose the manipulation and exploitation that marginalised individuals endure in power structures. This study investigates the mechanisms through which African-Americans experience the dehumanisation of Negroes, which is perpetuated by stereotypes, structural racism, and segregation. Ultimately, this study affirms the significance of ‘Invisible Man’ in ongoing conversations regarding race, identity, and marginalisation.

Where Are the English Learners and Students With Disabilities in Gifted Education?

Prior research documented disproportional representation across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines within the population of students identified as gifted and talented (GT). Less research has focused on what predicts improved representation for English learners (ELs) or students with disabilities (SwDs), or how state GT policies facilitate such representation. This paper attempted to fill that void by analyzing data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and Stanford Education Data Archive along with original coding of state GT policies. We found that while ELs and SwDs are disproportionately underrepresented within the population of students identified as gifted, state mandates for schools to offer GT, requirements for formal gifted education plans, and regular audits for compliance were correlated with higher rates of GT service availability and greater representation among ELs and SwDs. We further describe the characteristics of the top 5% of schools with the highest GT representation for ELs and SwDs.

From Disease Incubation to Disease Receipt: Representing Epidemics and Race in Pre- and Post-Second World War American Cinema (1931–1939 and 1950–1962)

This article analyses continuities and changes in how disease has been instrumentalised in cinema as a way of conceptualizing race—comparing five films depicting epidemics produced before the Second World War and five after. In the 1930s films, non-white populations often passively accept assistance in dealing with epidemic disease—a paternalistic white savior narrative—but not always with “gratitude”, and sometimes direct resistance. Here, epidemics take root in physical sites of economic “underdevelopment”, perpetuated further by perceived “premodern” cultural practices demarcated down the lines of race or ethnicity, and intersect with other gendered and socio-economic categories. After the war, while some cinematic tropes such as the “white knight” continue, other narratives emerge including a shift in emphasis away from the Othered environment as the nexus of disease (the disease’s “incubation”), and towards greater alarm about the appearance of disease within recipient, frequently white, communities.

Transformative Praxis

Drawing on transformative, critical, and culturally responsive and sustaining traditions of pedagogy and instructional design, we present a technology-focused framework for decentering normative forces along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, language, religion, ability, sex, and gender in online higher education learning spaces that honors each participant for who they are with respect to their identity markers and their intersectional community memberships to promote inclusion and belonging. These normative forces—which simultaneously crowd out and make hypervisible diverse identities—predispose the ends and processes of teaching and learning and structure the nature of academic disciplines. This is particularly apparent online where engagement is decoupled from traditional anchors of relationships and influenced by difference-blind neoliberal perspectives. In response, we provide a framework for inclusion and belonging along two vectors. The first vector is a critical design process inspired by backward design principles: inquiring, translating, activating, and reflecting. The second is a set of inclusive considerations grounded in culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy and the Universal Design for Learning framework: asset-based frames, authentic multiple modes, and mixed mirrors and windows. This process includes an opportunity to interrogate the role of technology as a mediator of learning and teaching for belonging. We further assert that the instructor also needs to engage in identity work to interrogate their positionality in online environments with respect to not only observable and cultural identity markers but also academic disciplinary identity. To illustrate our framework, we provide reflections on the design and enactment of online and technology-rich activity structures that promote inclusion and belonging.

Consent searches: Evaluating the usefulness of a common and highly discretionary police practice

AbstractWe analyze the consequences of using driver consent as a basis for initializing a traffic stop‐and‐search compared to those searches based on probable cause. We find that consent searches are less likely to result in contraband recovery than are probable cause searches. Moreover, police agencies with a relatively higher reliance on consent searches find similar amounts of contraband and make a similar number of arrests as agencies doing much less searching but with a greater reliance on probable cause. These patterns are amplified along racial lines, and there is no discernible relationship between the use of consent searches and crime. We also provide causal evidence that corroborate these observational findings by examining the consequences of a Texas Highway Patrol policy, which suddenly increased the consent search rate in two South Texas counties. We show the contraband recovery rate discontinuously decreases when the consent search rate discontinuously increases.

Billie Eilish and the Feminist Aesthetics of Depression: White Femininity, Generation Z, and Whisper Singing

Abstract This article analyzes the representation of depression in Billie Eilish’s music and reception as reflective of its complex status in the West as a clinical diagnosis and lived experience, and considers the prominence of depression in contemporary pop as an aesthetic category dividing along generational, gendered, and racial lines. By claiming and musicalizing depression amid a polarizing reception, Eilish builds on a musical legacy of feminine psychological disturbance, challenging the stigmatization of “madness” in women and cultural panic over the prevalence of depression among Generation Z. Her music demystifies an invisible inner turmoil that her fans identify as “depression,” just as they frame her signature whisper singing as a coherent marker of and antidote for depression. Links between Eilish’s voice and the feminized auditory triggers of ASMR (a homemade sound-effects-based genre of audio-visual performance on YouTube) and the immersive, solitary listening characteristic of headphone and earbud use strengthen her music’s appeal as a form of “mood regulation.” Ultimately, Eilish’s voice and body are the locus onto which fans and detractors project fantasies and anxieties about the generational, gendered, and racial dynamics of depression that often exceed the singer’s stated aims as well as psychiatric definitions of clinical depression. Drawing on work in disability studies, Mad studies, and feminist media studies, I stake out new theoretical ground for analyzing depression in pop as distinct from the lived experiences and discursive logics of disability and madness, while positioning pop music as a creative site of public mental health discourse.

Rural, Regional, Racial Disparities in Telemedicine Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among US Adults: 2021 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS).

The primary objective of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of telemedicine utilization patterns among adult populations residing in both rural and urban areas and evaluate the probability of telemedicine adoption among adults dwelling in both rural and urban areas amid the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study has attained sample populations (n = 279,260, National Weighted Estimates = 2,391,188,373) through the secondary analysis of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the year 2021. We examined the relationship between the rural, regional, and racial variables using chi-square tests and binary logistic regression associated with telemedicine use in our multivariable analysis. Telemedicine use by population decreased with decreasing urbanization level, from 40.2% among adults living in large central metropolitan to 29.7% among adults living in rural area (p<0.0001). Regarding household income, adults with 400% or more of the federal poverty level (FPL) were significantly more likely to use telemedicine than adults with less than 100% of the FPL. Females were more likely than males to utilize telemedicine. In terms of region, adults living in the West were 1.25 times more likely to use telemedicine than adults living in the Northeast, and minority race/ethnicity groups (eg, Non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and other) are less likely to use the telemedicine rather than Non-Hispanic White. Health equity is attained when all demographic groups enjoy uniform access to healthcare services, but disparities emerge when there are discernible variations in access to treatment. Considering this study's findings, it becomes evident that the distinctions in poverty rates, median income levels, and healthcare utilization patterns across racial and regional lines may serve as indicators of potential health equity concerns.

Epistemic injustice: complicity and promise in education

Abstract The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker’s celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book’s arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic goods and the role of power in curriculum development. Since that time, the rich scholarship on epistemic injustice in philosophy of education examines a variety of topics, including the impact of epistemic injustice on the experiences of teachers and learners more broadly (focussing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, amongst others) and the implications of epistemic injustice for educational research, policy, and practice. This special issue extends this line of work by compiling a set of articles that address a broad range of topics, some of which are well established in the literature and some of which open new lines of inquiry in the field. In doing so, the issue aims to establish the intersection of epistemic injustice and education as a distinct area of study that holds great significance and potential. In this paper, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson introduce the issue by discussing these contributions, explaining why education is central to the study of epistemic injustice (and vice versa), and exploring the complex nature of epistemic injustice and education as revealed in the articles that comprise this collection—namely, education’s simultaneous complicity as a perpetrator and promise as a disruptor of epistemic injustice.

Rooted resistance: The struggle for Black liberation through food cultivation

ABSTRACT In U.S. cities, distinct regions of wealth and poverty structure the distribution of political power and public resources along racial lines. Black-led urban farms resist these inequitable conditions by using food cultivation as a tool of community resilience building and power shifting. In this study, I propose a framework to describe the roles of Black-led urban farms within low-income Black communities. I assess this framework using a comparative case study and semi-structured interviews with Black urban farmers in Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; and Portland, Oregon. Findings suggest that Black-led urban farms advance Black community survival and wellbeing by instilling local Black placemaking, fostering personal and racial healing, and resisting racial capitalism. I conclude that Black-led urban farms function as “compass institutions” and generate social value that benefits their respective cities. I provide policy recommendations for local governments and prospective funders seeking to advance the social impact of these farms.

Unequal trust: Bottled water consumption, distrust in tap water, and economic and racial inequality in the United States

AbstractReviewing public health, nutrition, and social science literature, this article examines how bottled water consumption and spending in the United States differ along lines of race, ethnicity, and income, how these consumption patterns have changed in recent years, and how those shifts map onto perceptions of the safety and trustworthiness of tap water supplies, both before and since the Flint water disaster. It also addresses the differential impact of bottled water spending on household income. The findings challenge the truism that bottled water consumption is positively correlated with income, instead showing a bimodal racial and class consumption pattern that reflects widely divergent perceptions—and the uneven distribution—of threats to tap water safety. Bottled water consumption and spending, as well as distrust of tap water, are highest among low‐income, Black, and Latino/a households, exacerbating social inequality. The article also addresses how the bottled water industry is responding to these dynamics, and considers potential routes to restoring both public water infrastructure and trust in tap water supplies. This contribution links several current and salient topics: the relationship between bottled water's growth and tap water consumption; the dynamics of growing racial and income inequality; historical legacies of systemic racism and economic marginalization; and the uneven effects of disinvestment in US water infrastructure on tap water safety, access, and affordability.This article is categorized under: Human Water &gt; Human Water Human Water &gt; Water Governance Human Water &gt; Rights to Water Engineering Water &gt; Water, Health, and Sanitation

Multilevel Barriers to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptive Uptake: A Narrative Review.

Unintended pregnancies, which occur in almost half (45%) of all pregnancies in the United States, are associated with adverse health and social outcomes for the infant and the mother. The risk of unintended pregnancies is significantly reduced when women use long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), namely intrauterine devices and implants. Although LARCs are highly acceptable to women at risk of unintended pregnancies, barriers to accessing LARCs hinder its uptake. These barriers are greater among racial and socioeconomic lines and persist within and across the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and policy levels. A synthesis of these barriers is unavailable in the current literature but would be beneficial to health care providers of reproductive-aged women, clinical managers, and policymakers seeking to provide equitable reproductive health care services. The aim of this narrative review was to aggregate these complex and overlapping barriers into a concise document that examines: (a) patient, provider, clinic, and policy factors associated with LARC access among populations at risk of unintended pregnancy and (b) the clinical implications of mitigating these barriers to provide equitable reproductive health care services. This review outlines numerous barriers to LARC uptake across multiple levels and demonstrates that LARC uptake is possible when the woman is informed of her contraceptive choices and when financial and clinical barriers are minimized. Equitable reproductive health care services entail unbiased counseling, a full range of contraceptive options, and patient autonomy in contraceptive choice.

Race, Religion, and American Support for Humanitarian Intervention

Does public support for armed humanitarian intervention depend on the race and religion of those it seeks to save? Social identity theory predicts that people prefer helping strangers with whom they share an identity, but norms of paternalism and cosmopolitanism could moderate such favoritism. We test these propositions via survey experiments administered to a nationally representative sample of Americans that randomized the racial and religious characteristics of foreigners in a hypothetical civil war. The data reveal that Americans, especially Christians, prefer to intervene on behalf of Christians over Muslims. Ingroup affinity rather than outgroup Islamophobia explains this effect. Meanwhile, Americans exhibit less consistent prejudice along racial lines. Finally, while scholars find paternalist norms affect attitudes toward economic assistance, we find no similar effect for military intervention. Cosmopolitan Americans, however, express less identity-based bias. We conclude that people act on their basic socio-psychological instincts, but norms could attenuate these biases.

What Makes Politicians “Religious”? How Identity Congruence Shapes Religious Evaluations

AbstractHow do Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity? We theorize extra‐religious “identity congruence,” the perceived correspondence between others’ group identities and our own, will powerfully shape evaluations. We test this expectation using data from two large, nationally representative surveys that ask Americans to rate the religiosity of prominent politicians. Consistent with our theory, the strongest predictors of how Americans rate politicians’ religiosity are their congruence on party identification and ideological identity as well as expected alignments with racial identity and Christian nationalism. Respondents’ religious characteristics are relatively weak predictors. And these trends hold regardless of Americans’ knowledge of leaders’ professed religious identity. Patterns are consistent with our theory even when we split samples by party. When we compare ratings between politicians who are widely regarded as irreligious to those who are regarded as conventionally religious, partisan congruence and racial identity largely mitigate the religious advantage of the latter. Racial identity also moderates congruence on key factors. Finally, identity congruence on party, ideology, and Christian nationalism follows expected patterns even among secular Americans for whom “religious” less intuitively implies “my group.” In a time of growing identity‐alignment along partisan, ideological, racial, and religious lines, extra‐religious “identity congruence” powerfully shapes how Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity.

The Roots of Inequality: Texas School Politics and the Leadup to Rodriguez

AbstractContrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s majority opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), Texas’s school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this article demonstrates, during the century leading up to the Rodriguez decision, Texas political leaders developed a public school funding system reliant on the highly unequal spatial distribution of property wealth across rural/urban, class, and racial lines. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, the history of Texas’s system reveals four pivotal eras when the state’s White leaders created and maintained a school finance system reliant on local property taxes and defined by rural/urban and racial differences that cemented deep inequalities. This case study traces those changes over time and brings part of the story to life through the example of Kirbyville, Texas, and its struggle to finance a new White high school. Returning to the historical roots of school financing in Texas reveals how rural/urban, racial, and wealth inequalities have been foundational to Texas’s public school finance system.

The improvements to the minimum curvature race line optimization

Motorsports is gaining increasingly large and broad attention and simulations using modern information technology on race performance are in demand. This paper focuses on the improvements of the minimum curvature method on optimal racing lines for a race car. The key contribution of the improvements is to generate a more realistic optimal racing line, therefore getting a better description of the car and driver performance. The improvements contain the introduction of the kerb of the track and the late apex technique applied by drivers during the race. The effect of two improvements is verified in the simulation racing software Assetto Corsa and the result shows that the introduction of the kerb raises the lap time accuracy by 90% and the late apex trajectory is matched with the actual path.