Racial Violence Research Articles

Climate Apartheid, Race, and the Future of Solidarity: Three Frameworks of Response (Anthropocene, Mestizaje, Cimarronaje)

ABSTRACTIn our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet analyses often fail to link climate apartheid to the existing systems mobilized to execute it—policing, prisons, borders—and so fail to connect climate politics to enduring racialized projects of carceral control, as well as to Black, Native, and Latinx struggles against them. A key task is to develop capacious conceptual frameworks for understanding how religious actors are addressing the deep entanglements of political ecology and racial violence. This paper pursues that task in four parts. Part 1 introduces climate apartheid and proposes “cross‐border solidarity” as an organizing concept for response, while underscoring that solidarity's chief virtue—its being already in use across diverse moral communities—is also what requires rigorous specification. What is the shape of “solidarity” amid climate futures? Parts 2 and 3 critique two frameworks ethicists might employ in facing that question: anthropocene discourse obscures race, while mestizaje discourse addresses race but risks reproducing its deepest logics. Part 4 proposes an alternative I will call cimarronaje. Of Taíno‐Arawak and Spanish origin, the word refers to the historical experience, across slaveholding societies of the Americas, whereby enslaved African people fled plantations, escaped to surrounding hills and swamps, and reimagined forms of life with Indigenous communities, forged new ecologies together and, in the shadows of colonial empire, prefigured the theory and practices of cross‐border solidarity we need today.

The Effect of Racial Violence: Collective Cultural Trauma

Trauma has mainly been viewed as an isolated experience, but upon further research, sociologists and researchers alike have come to realize that trauma can be shared as a collective. The coined term for this being cultural trauma, a trauma that is carried through generations due to the transfiguration of the collective psyche and identity in the wake of horrifying events. Using the African American community as the leading example of such trauma, due to their long history of responses to the lynchings of the 1950’s and the police brutality of the 2000’s, such as cases like Emmett Till’s and George Floyd. This article expands on the theory of cultural trauma by explaining the idea of the healing in this community to be nearly impossible if the routine of racial violence that changes the collective sense of self has been weaved into the systemic structures of the country, and presents itself in different forms throughout the decades.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Unveiling Color-Blind Racism: Racial Violence, Identity, and Resistance in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees

Racism is pervasive in society; its roots have been deeply ingrained into individuals’ lives, hindering African Americans' ability to achieve stability and peace. It is established in favor of societal convictions that primarily benefit whites to maintain their superiority and dominance over Blacks. Naturally, white people are the foundation of racial supremacy, pretending to treat Blacks equally through practices such as color-blind racism yet limiting Blacks in different fields. African Americans continue to be victims of the dominant ideology of color-blind racism, which produces significant racial tension and conflict in American culture. Correspondingly, they face racial inequities in their daily lives. This study's primary goal is to examine how racial violence still exists in the form of color-blind racism in one of Kidd's most famous novels, The Secret Life of Bees, in which Lily, the white protagonist, is prejudiced against African Americans. Eventually, Lily realizes her ingrained white racial guilt and strives to change it once she embraces the Black community by valuing their identity. In addition, the study also examines how Lily recognizes society's color-blind racist approach, which attempts to instill racism in order to impact and constrain Blacks as an inferior race. Finally, the findings of this study provide a clear picture of the hegemonic ideology known as color-blind racism and how its ideals in practice affect the lives of Black people while favoring the prejudice and discrimination of white characters in the novel.

A Sense of Place: African Americans, Ethnogenesis and the Search for a “Black Mecca”

Ethnogenesis is a powerful mechanism which outlines how ethnic groups are formed. It is a complex process which often involves factors such as migration, cultural exchanges, intermarriage as well as religion. Ethnogenesis is also described as the historical and contemporary emergence of a group of people who define themselves in relation to a common socio-cultural and historical heritage. Focusing on African American migration during the Great Migration and its subsequent reverse migration, this study uses the theme of ethnogenesis to describe how migration to northern cities were shaped by a desire for solidarity and opportunity in as much as an escape from racial violence in the South. In the current trend of reverse migration, this work contends that migration is built on a need for opportunity as well as a desire for connectedness to ancestral homelands in the South. Examining the emergence of the “New South” in the post Jim-Crow landscape, this work evaluates the cultural, social and economic appeal of current migration streams. Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files, significant population declines are reported in former destinations like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Data also show southern resurgences in destinations like Lafayette, Louisiana and Charlotte, North Carolina. Likewise, there are also marked increases in new destinations like Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, Arizona. Additionally, data show that the Black population is growing in its diversity as well as density. People who identify as single-race Black, Black Latinx, and Black multiracial are a large (and growing) part of the Black population.

Racial Disparities in Family Income, Assets, and Liabilities: A Century After the 1921 Tulsa Massacre

AbstractThis paper examines the financial health of racial-ethnic groups in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nearly a century after the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. We use data from the Tulsa National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey to assess the financial health of two demographic groups that were historically the victims of racial violence - Native Americans and Black Americans. Specifically, we investigate financial outcomes a century after these groups made significant economic gains during the Tulsa oil boom in the early 1900 s and were subsequently victimized by racial violence. We find that Black households have statistically significantly less wealth and income than Whites in Tulsa. Our decomposition analysis shows household demographic differences between Blacks and Whites largely do not explain these wealth and income gaps, suggestive of historical discrimination. While in the case of the Native American tribes and Whites, the findings generally show no statistical significance. Compared to other NASCC-surveyed cities that did not experience destruction to the level of the Tulsa Massacre, the Black-White wealth and income gaps and the unexplained portion of the decompositions are the largest in Tulsa. Our results provisionally suggest that past exposure to racial violence can have long-term effects on the economic outcomes of the affected groups decades later.

Sobreviviente: Examining the Effects of Spirit Murdering on the BODYMINDSPIRIT of Latinas Attending a Hispanic-Serving Institution

ABSTRACT This study sought to understand the educational experiences of three Latina doctoral students that led to spirit murdering, that is, the racial violence that sought to kill their humanity. They examined their experiences of spirit murdering while attending a Hispanic-Serving Institution in the southwest, reflecting on the impact this had on their bodymindspirit and the ways in which they responded. The number of Latinas pursuing a post-secondary degree is growing exponentially, and the difference between their enrollment and degree attainment numbers is staggering. Literature has revealed that instances of stress, gender bias and role conflict, marginalization, and isolation have affected Latina students in academia. By analyzing the experiences of the study’s participants, the authors offer their insight on how institutions (and in particular, HSIs) could better support Latina student populations.

The Immigrant Backstories of Asian American Surgeons.

The stories of Asian immigrants have both shared themes and ones that are unique to the histories of their homelands. Their labor was essential to the settlement and economic development of America, yet their presence incited riots and official restrictions to their rights to immigration and citizenship. Chinese laborers mined the Gold Country, built the transcontinental railroad, and reclaimed tillable land in the Central Valley. Yet they were denied the immense bounty they created, and their immigration was blocked by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.Japanese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos replaced them on farms as migrant laborers. As foreign nationals they were not allowed to own land, but they thrived as independent farmers on leased plots. Their success attracted discrimination and racist violence. They, too, were barred from immigration and citizenship (Johnson-Reed Act, 1924).World War II was a watershed event for Asians in America. Japanese Americans, ethnically identical to the enemy, were imprisoned in concentration camps in the American interior. China, the Philippines, and India, all allies of the US, were rewarded with naturalization rights for their nationals. In 1965 Congress liberalized immigration quotas and reversed the 1924 restrictions, with priority given to those with advanced technical ability in science, including medicine. Asians from Taiwan and India took advantage of the new regulations and predominated among the newcomers. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, America accommodated yet another Asian population in the country, the tens of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia.

Views From West Africa

In the 1950s, many Ghanaians identified with African Americans as they read about events involving American racial violence in Ghanaian newspapers. Yet the transnational connections appearing in those periodicals varied in depth, intensity, and sincerity depending on their political or commercial connections. This study analyzes the reactions in key Ghanaian newspapers, such as those affiliated with Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, the British-owned Daily Graphic, and the Ashanti Pioneer, to key moments in 1950s American race relations, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the events in Little Rock, and the infamous ‘Orange Juice’ incident involving discrimination against the Ghanaian minister of finance. By demonstrating that the Pioneer more often covered the personal angles of such events, while the tones of CPP-affiliated papers and even the Daily Graphic vacillated based on changing political needs, this study both shows the complicated nature of transnational racial identifications as they flowed west across the Atlantic and reveals the promises and limits of Ghanaian connections to members of the African diaspora during the decolonizing period in Ghana.

Absurd geographies of resilience and justice

ABSTRACT This paper problematizes how scholars understand the relation between resilience and justice. Critical and applied scholarship tends to dismiss resilience as a neoliberal barrier to justice, or assume it necessarily advances justice outcomes. Instead, drawing on collaborative fieldwork with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we explore how resilience is mobilized in contextually-specific struggles against racialized vulnerability and insecurity. Reading across literatures in political geography, cultural geography, and Black geographies, we highlight absurd and inconsistent expressions of resilience in our collaborators’ justice advocacy work. A focus on the absurd directs attention to the way diverse practices of resilience emerge from ‘spaces out of joint,’ where modernity’s universalizing promises of betterment run aground against long histories of racial violence that secure White futurity. Our community collaborators ironically mobilize and reject resilience in strategic ways that reflect their struggles to create and defend place against the racialized extraction of value, disinvestment, and displacement. This creates a variegated geography of resilience and justice that is irreducible to predetermined critical or applied analytical frameworks. Instead, we emphasize the need to embrace the absurd destabilization of conventional analytical categories, in order to open space for new problems and responses for collaborative research.

Understanding the Experiences of Rural School Counselors Implementing Trauma-Informed Practices

School counselors are trained to address a wide range of student needs, including academic progress, college and career readiness, and social emotional wellness. Recent public health issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis, and racial violence have created an increased need for and focus on the social emotional work of school counselors. Trauma-informed practices (TIP) have become key strategies for school counselors interested in addressing student trauma within a school context. Per the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), school counselors are ethically responsible for utilizing evidence-based methods to address the holistic needs of students, especially when implementing trauma-informed care. Previous research indicates that rural schools, and by extension the school counselors within, generally feel unprepared and under-resourced to address crises or trauma. However, little is known about the implementation of TIP within rural school settings or by rural school counselors. Given that approximately one-fifth of the United States’ child population occupies rural schools, and rural communities have been found to experience more intense, frequent and specialized forms of trauma, it is critical to understand the experiences of rural school counselors addressing trauma within their schools. Therefore, this phenomenological investigation focused on exploring the lived experience of implementing TIP for eight rural school counselors across the United States. Three themes emerged: emotional experience of implementing TIP, support for implementing TIP, and practical logistics for implementing TIP. Considerations for enhancing the supports and addressing the challenges of TIP implementation for rural school counselors are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Social Vulnerability, COVID-19, Racial Violence, and Depressive Symptoms: a Cross-sectional Study in the Southern United States.

In March 2020, the novel 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic. In May 2020, George Floyd was murdered, catalyzing a national racial reckoning. In the Southern United States, these events occurred in the context of a history of racism and high rates of poverty and discrimination, especially among racially and ethnically minoritized populations. In this study, we examine social vulnerabilities, the perceived impacts of COVID-19 and the national racial reckoning, and how these are associated with depression symptoms in the South. Data were collected from 961 adults between June and November 2020 as part of an online survey study on family well-being during COVID-19. The sample was majority female (87.2%) and consisted of 661 White participants, 143 Black participants, and 157 other racial and ethnic minoritized participants. Existing social vulnerability, perceived impact of COVID-19 and racial violence and protests on families, and depressive symptoms were assessed. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to predict variance in depressive symptoms. Half of the sample (52%) reported a negative impact of COVID-19, and 66% reported a negative impact of national racial violence/protests. Depressive symptoms were common with 49.8% meeting the cutoff for significant depressive symptoms; Black participants had lower levels of depressive symptoms. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis indicate social vulnerabilities and the perceived negative impact of COVID-19 and racial violence/protests each contribute to variance in depressive symptoms. Race-specific sensitivity analysis clarified distinct patterns in predictors of depressive symptoms. People in the South report being negatively impacted by the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of racial violence/protests in 2020, though patterns differ by racial group. These events, on top of pre-existing social vulnerabilities, help explain depressive symptoms in the South during 2020.

Holocaust refugees in the colonial world: an introduction

ABSTRACT In this article, Casteel and Mikel-Arieli introduce their special issue and outline its contribution to the literature on global refugee transit. By expanding the scholarly focus of discussions of global transit beyond well-documented western destinations, the special issue reveals entanglements between occupied Europe and the colonial world that significantly shaped the trajectories of Jewish refugees. Their experiences, often documented through personal writings and fiction, expose a complex interplay between European refugee history and colonial societies. The articles in this special issue unravel how Jewish refugees, initially victimized by European racial persecution, found themselves navigating colonial spaces structured by different forms of racial violence. They explore the refugees’ entanglement with colonial power dynamics, complicating conventional victim/perpetrator narratives. By weaving together historiography, literature and personal narratives, these articles emphasize the need for continued interdisciplinary investigation of the intricate histories of Holocaust refugees in colonial settings.

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

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

Sociocultural Framework for Psychiatric Case Formulation.

A Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) field trial in India, widely reported racist violence in the United States, and casteist and religious communal conflicts in India highlighted inattention to structural issues affecting mental health problems in the Outline for Cultural Formulation (OCF) and the CFI in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition). Consequently, we revised the OCF as a sociocultural formulation (SCF) to better consider structures of society and culture. We studied and compared clinicians' ratings of SCF case formulations from a constructed assessment instrument (SCF Interview [SCFI]) and the CFI. Socio-cultural formulations from SCFI interviews were rated higher for details of societal structural impact, and overall interrater agreement was better. CFI interviews were rated higher for clinical rapport. Revision of the CFI should enhance consideration of structural issues and incorporate them in SCFs that better integrate assessment process and case formulation content. The need to acknowledge structural sources of mental health problems is clear, and our study indicates how a sociocultural framework may be used for that.

Art and visual intervention strategies to resist racism and racial stereotypes

In our article, we share five teaching strategies to address and confront racism, racial bias, and stereotypes. Echoing contemporary artists who provide excellent visual interventions against racism and racial violence, we offer artistic and visual intervention strategies designed for art classrooms and community settings. Our strategies include visual intervention, anti-racist gaze, counter-narrative and storytelling, cultural and ethnic identity celebration, and coalition building. We believe that these strategies advance racial dialogues in schools, providing students of color with opportunities and tools for their stories to be heard. Facing unprecedented violence and multi-layered racial problems in our society, our strategies grounded in the power of artistic intervention and activism will offer a valuable tool to engage students with the practice of anti-racism.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;line-height:115%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-ansi-language:EN;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-ansi-language:EN;}.MsoPapDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;line-height:115%;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

While Paul Celan’s lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan’s advocacy for reading words “with the acute accent of the present” calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue durée of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on “Niedrigwasser,” a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.

Let’s face it, the racial politics are always there: A critical race approach to policy implementation in the wake of anti-CRT rhetoric

School communities across the United States are experiencing increasing calls to remove the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) from their curricula despite not actually doing so in practice. This anti-CRT push is part of a larger, conservative agenda to ban teaching “divisive” topics in public schools and exemplifies the underlying racial politics existent in educational policy implementation. In this article, we analyze the legal efforts to ban CRT and anti-racist teaching in one state through a framework that situates policy implementation within CRT, which seeks to advance how whiteness, interest convergence, racial realism, and the erasure of people of color are continual to policy implementation. Through a critical discourse analysis of anti-CRT rhetoric, we illustrate how predictable patterns such as white backlash, overt racism, racial violence, and racial trauma are brought to light in policy implementation. We then offer an example of CRT as critical race praxis (CRP) in another state that works to counter racism and create anti-racist change in policy design and implementation. CRP is perhaps one tool school leaders have at their disposal to subvert whiteness and white supremacy in policymaking, especially policy implementation.

Intergenerational Immobility: A Legacy of Racial Violence

What are the long-run consequences of racial violence on intergenerational mobility? Do its impacts extend to the broader community? Using newly available longitudinal data covering much of the US population from 1989–2015, this study documents two results. First, it establishes a statistical association between the severity of lynching of Black Americans and long-run economic outcomes across the Southern United States. Counties that experienced racial violence most intensely in the past have lower levels of Black upward mobility today. Second, although most lynch victims were Black males, their long-run consequences are equally observable for the current generation of both Black males and females. Living in counties that experienced lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries reduces Black upwardly mobile in the 21st century. These findings demonstrate that collective violence may hinder long-term intergenerational mobility for the broader affected community, irrespective of temporal proximity or sex.

Monuments and Memory: Civil War Statuary, Public-Facing Scholarship, and the Future of Memory Studies

Abstract: In the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder, there was renewed focus on Confederate monuments within ongoing debates and protests about racial justice and racist violence. Civil War historians are constantly asked about monuments, regardless of whether they study them. In part, this roundtable seeks to help all those scholars feel comfortable engaging with these questions while also considering where the field of Civil War memory studies is and where it goes next. Bringing together eight scholars and history practitioners, the roundtable covers a range of topics, including discussion about northern monuments, African American commemorations of the war, the impact of a commemorative landscape filled almost exclusively with statues of white men, whether protests have shaped historians' views of Confederate monuments, how to understand more recent Civil War memorials, the role of historians in public debate, the role of "presentism" in history, and the future of Civil War memory studies.