Struggle For Racial Justice Research Articles

Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College

Abstract From early in his career, J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) brought the civil rights movement to bear on architecture, insisting that modernism live up to its promise to build a better world. Exemplary of this effort was the first completed work of Bond Ryder Associates, the Neigh Dormitory (1968–70) at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. This article offers a close reading of this overlooked project in the context of Bond’s own encounters with modern architecture as an African American, the realities of Mississippi in the 1960s, and the experiences of the students who made this dorm their home. It contends that Bond Ryder shaped a liberatory modernism here especially focused on the freedom and self-determination of the dorm’s Black residents amid ongoing racial violence. In doing so, the article provides a novel perspective on the role that architecture played as a force for racial equality and that, in turn, the long civil rights movement played in shaping architectural modernism. While modern architecture had caused much harm by midcentury, this dorm’s history reveals an unexpected source for the rejuvenation of modernism’s social promise: the long struggle for racial justice.

Detroit under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era

Detroit under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era

The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph (review)

The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph (review)

In Defense of Interiority: Melvin Edwards’ Early Work

Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position in contemporary art. Edwards offered nuanced relationships between interior and exterior at a moment when concepts of “interiority” and “self” were under the most strain in contemporary art practice. If we consider this turn away from interiority—and toward surface, emptiness, system, and dematerialization—to be, in part, a symptom of the pressure exerted by the commodity form on art viewers’ sensibilities after 1955, then the stakes of Edwards’ choice not only to use found metal objects, but to compose them around an active rather than empty center, feel higher. By comparing the sculpture Mojo for 1404 (1964) with the Bichos (1960–1965) of Lygia Clark, the distinctiveness of Edwards’ project emerges even more strongly. Clark responded to the crisis of interiority with shiny metal sculptures whose interiors were constantly being flipped inside-out. By contrast, Edwards’ art was motivated by the struggle for racial justice, and it persistently spoke its desire for grounded, scarred personhood in an aesthetic language that required viewers to recall their own interiority.

The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

Being fractal: Embodying antiracism values in course-based participatory action research.

In the winter and spring of 2021, I-a White, female, graduate student-taught a six-month course surrounding the theme: Disrupting Systemic Racism at our University Through Action Research. I was challenged to lead a meaningful course in a two-dimensional virtual space, amidst rising death tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rhythmic beat of calls for racial justice pulsing through our Zoom class periods. This experience opened my eyes as an educator, budding community psychologist, and an antiracist White accomplice. In this critical autoethnographic case study, I recount my experience adapting the community organizing principle of fractalsinto a pedagogical framework that guided my instructional practices in a community psychology course. In doing so, I echo the call for community psychologists to connect our work more tightly to Black, Indigenous, and people of Color social justice organizers and movements to fortify the field's relevance in the struggle for racial justice.

Schooling as a White Good

AbstractSchooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to place, the knowledge that schools impart, and the hobbling of brown and Black children. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

What should allies do? Identifying activist perspectives on the role of white allies in the struggle for racial justice in the United States

AbstractThe present research examined the perspectives of both White and Black racial justice activists on the roles of White allies in the struggle for justice for Black people in the United States. Study 1 used Q methodology, a mixed‐methods approach, which identified four distinct perspectives about the role of White allies from a sample of activists (33 White and 22 Black Americans): (1) mobilize to support Black leadership, (2) interpersonal activism, (3) avoid dominating Black people's efforts, and (4) lifelong learning. In Study 2, we interviewed activists (22 White and 12 Black Americans) to understand their evaluation of, and preference for, each of perspective identified in Study 1. Thematic analyses showed that each perspective had its pros and cons regarding considerations of how to best use ingroup advantages without dominating the movement. Our findings contribute to our understanding of potential tensions in solidarity‐based social movements.

Strategic Mindsets and Support for Social Change: Impact Mindset Explains Support for Black Lives Matter Across Racial Groups.

How does the self-relevance of a social movement shape individuals' engagement with it? We examined the decision-making processes that underlie support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White Americans. We find significant between-group differences in levels of support for BLM, both in terms of past behavior (Study 1) and in terms of future intentions to support the movement (Study 2). These differences notwithstanding, thinking about how one's decisions impact others - which we label impact mindset - explains support for BLM across racial groups, cross-sectionally as well as longitudinally (over 8 months later). Our findings underscore the equivalence of the impact mindset construct across racial groups and its predictive power in the context of BLM. We conclude that, although the struggle for racial justice has different meanings for different racial groups, the same mindset underlies both in-group advocacy and allyship in the context of BLM.

The Intimacy of Occupation

In March 2019, a group of Black and POC students at Goldsmiths College, University of London, occupied a key administrative and historically symbolic building on campus to protest institutional racism. Calling themselves Goldsmiths Anti-racism Action (GARA), the occupiers wrote a 12-point manifesto that detailed what the institution had to do to change its exclusionary white institutional culture, labor practices, curriculum, and pedagogy. This photo essay, collaboratively produced by two students and two faculty members involved with GARA, documents care and intimacy as the praxis of the antiracist occupation. Through the images we share, we point to the intimacy of occupation and to the politicality of intimacy as care, particularly in struggles for racial justice.

Crisis Consciousness, Utopian Consciousness, and the Struggle for Racial Justice

The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon what I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice.

The Children's Mental Health Crisis and Pediatric Mental Health Care Programs: An option for expanded treatment options

Over the past 18 months, children's mental health professionals have warned of the building level of crisis among our nations' youth. Recently, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Children's Hospital Association (CHA) declared a national emergency in children's mental health, citing the serious toll of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the struggle for racial justice (AAP news, 2021). In the first half of this year, children's hospitals reported a 45% spike in reported cases of self‐injury and suicide among children 5–17 years compared to 2019, per the CHA. An estimated 140,000 children lost a caregiver to the virus as of this summer, per the National Institutes of Health, which translates to one in 500 children. During a recent grand rounds held in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, the speaker noted that the crisis is not limited to the United States, global estimates are that pediatric anxiety and depression have doubled during the past year (Dwyer, 2021). These estimates are not likely to be a surprise to those working with children and adolescents during this particularly challenging time. We have watched with dismay as the level of need has steadily increased to crisis proportions, after months of concern about the effect of isolation, loss, and stress on a nation of children.

Race on the brain: What implicit bias gets wrong about the struggle for racial justice

Race on the brain: What implicit bias gets wrong about the struggle for racial justice

Narrative inquiry and anti-racist teaching: Considering foundational questions about (re)storying in struggles for racial justice

The strength of narrative inquiry research on teaching (NI) is that it amplifies the voice of practitioners, supports listening carefully to those who work most closely with children, and resists the way many other research paradigms function in practice as elaborate preemptory rationalizations for dismissing teachers' insights as myopic and biased. One of its limitations lies in the uncontestable fact that teachers—like everyone—are not perfect, that the demography of the teaching profession over-represents the majority population in most nations, that all teachers work in contexts shaped by a continuing history of racism, and therefore teachers' reports on their experiences are often compromised by the institutionalized racism and settler colonialism in which they are embedded. Like other research methods, NI is vulnerable to the influence of neoliberal discourses that locate the cause of racism in individual attitudes and neglect the need for teachers to find ways to address the systemic and institutionalized forms of racism affecting children's lives. This essay examines the way NI scholars can reduce the chances of complicity with systemic racism while maintaining their core commitment to respecting teachers' experience as an important source of educational insight.

Religion, Segregation, and Voting Rights: Unforgetting the Legacies of Bishops George Foster Pierce and Lucius Henry Holsey in Hancock County, Georgia, USA

In this essay, I explore the history and public memory of two important bishops in the Methodist churches in Georgia. Through an examination of the lives of my ancestor, Bishop George Foster Pierce, and his Black contemporary, Bishop Lucius Holsey, I seek to illustrate how the forces of settler colonialism, White supremacy, and emergent American capitalism converged with religious paternalism to shape their material lives and moral perspectives. Through family documents, letters, sermons, memorials, newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews, I situate their histories in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in Hancock County.

II. The Question of God in the Struggle for Racial Justice

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?

What Makes Systemic RacismSystemic?

In this article, I clarify some components and expand a few underdeveloped ideas of theracialized social systemapproach to racial stratification. I divide the paper into three parts. In the first section, I explore the limitations of the figure of “the racist.” In the second part, I examine the problem of change. In the third part, which is the core of the paper, I discuss what makes “systemic racism” systemic. My main contention in this article is that the “systemic” in “systemic racism” means that we all participate in the reproduction of the racialized order. Furthermore, this reproduction depends fundamentally on behavior and actions that are normative, habituated, and often unconscious. Hence, systemic racism is the product of the behavior and practices of regular White folks rather than the “racists.” In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of my claims for further theory‐building, research, and the struggle for racial justice.

Digitality, Diversity, and the Future of Rhetoric and Public Address

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

An Art School Schizologue [George Floyd, Rest in Power

This critical cartography surveys seven moments in critical practice/art pedagogy, which oscillate around the protests of 1968 and diffract the contemporary possibilitiesof art education in association with Halberstam’s (2019) notions of evacuation and wildness. The article reads across Deleuzoguattarian (1994 and 2007) schizoanalysis and Baradian (2007) intra-action to articulate struggles for racial justice as instances of Harney and Moten’s (2013) undercommons, operating as alternate sites of knowledge production and collective self-experimentation outside the neoliberal university. These moments of practice—Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol, the UK, the writings of Aimé Césaire, Audre Lorde, Mohamed Melehi, Benjamin Patterson, and Howardena Pindell, as well as a student occupation of Central Saint Martins, also in the UK—are aligned in series allowing the reader to appropriate each one in resonance with each other as a proposal for an art-pedagogy-to-come.

Dalit/black solidarity: Comrades in the struggle for racial/caste justice

ABSTRACT India’s struggle for caste justice has been likened by many to the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Small wonder then, that the activists who spearheaded the movement for caste justice were inspired by the most famous of the activists in the United States, the Black Panthers of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. One of my most memorable encounters from my newsroom days in India in the early 1990s was with Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit activists who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement. This essay draws on that experience, as also some others with the Dalit movement and Dalit leaders in India and links their struggle for social justice with that of African Americans, from the Harlem Renaissance era to the present.