White Activity Research Articles

Linguistic Bias in Collaboratively Produced Biographies: Crowdsourcing Social Stereotypes?

Language is the primary medium through which stereotypes are conveyed. Even when we avoid using derogatory language, there are many subtle ways in which stereotypes are created and reinforced, and they often go unnoticed. Linguistic bias, the systematic asymmetry in language patterns as a function of the social group of the persons described, may play a key role. We ground our study in the social psychology literature on linguistic biases, and consider two ways in which biases might manifest: through the use of more abstract versus concrete language, and subjective words. We analyze biographies of African American and Caucasian actors at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), hypothesizing that language patterns vary as a function of race and gender. We find that both attributes are correlated to the use of abstract, subjective language. Theory predicts that we describe people and scenes that are expected, as well as positive aspects of our in-group members, with more abstract language. Indeed, white actors are described with more abstract, subjective language at IMDb, as compared to other social groups. Abstract language is powerful because it implies stability over time; studies have shown that people have better impressions of others described in abstract terms. Therefore, the widespread prevalence of linguistic biases in social media stands to reinforce social stereotypes. Further work should consider the technical and social characteristics of the collaborative writing process that lead to an increase or decrease in linguistic biases.

The new identity theft: Perceptions of cultural appropriation in intergroup contexts.

Cultural appropriation has been described and discussed within academic and everyday discourse, but little research has examined its role in the psychological context of intergroup relations. We sought to examine whether minority and majority group members (i.e., Black and White Americans) would differentially judge instances of cultural exchange as cultural appropriation. Five experiments (3 were preregistered on OSF) using a variety of potential cases of cultural appropriation demonstrated that Black participants were more likely than White participants to view these incidents as appropriation when they involved White perpetrators appropriating Black culture (vs. scenarios of Black perpetrators appropriating White culture), an effect mediated by distinctiveness threat. Black (vs. White) participants were also more likely to perceive White actors who appropriate Black culture as harmful and as intentional. In Study 4, explicit manipulation of distinctiveness threat eliminated the participant race effect: Perceivers viewed White perpetrators as more appropriative than Black perpetrators. When actors were portrayed as using either an ingroup or outgroup cultural product (Study 5), participants perceived use of an outgroup cultural product as more appropriative. Studies 3-5 were preregistered on OSF. This research illuminates how group-based status interacts with and adds to perpetrator prototypically to influence perceptions of cultural appropriation, distinguishes perception of appropriation from perception of racism, and points to the importance of distinctiveness threat as a contributor to differential race-based perceptions. Implications of perceiving cultural appropriation for intergroup relations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Social Work’s Feminist Façade: Descriptive Manifestations of White Supremacy

Abstract Inspired by Queen Elizabeth I’s Poor Laws, Jane Addams espoused the rhetoric of social justice. Addams is an example of social reform between 1890 and 1930s as tied to eugenics, which is also evident in disagreements between Addams and Ida B. Wells. Despite the contributions of white women to social work, their subtle transgressions exist behind the veil of a feminist façade. It operates as a culture of ideas, and ultimately a prescribed assortment of race-based behaviours. Leading white women such as Addams dedicated their careers aloof to the subjugation of non-white issues that Ida B. Wells challenged via lynching. After constant prodding from Wells, Addams emerged from her silence to oppose lynching. Wells responded to Addams’ discourse that she viewed as passive white rhetoric. According to contemporary descriptive data, white women/students are similarly aloof to non-white issues provoking womanism in response to feminism’s Women’s Ku Klux Klan. Ultimately, in the rescue of social justice, white women activists, including Social Work students, must denounce the feminist façade that social justice rhetoric and social justice activism coalesce for all oppressed populations.

White, Green futures

ABSTRACT Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritized communities of color are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of environmental crises and the solutions proposed to remedy them. The participation and subsequent erasure of non-White youth activists and organizers within environmental sustainability struggles, and their subsequent erasure in global media coverage on climate activism has complicated any neat hierarchy of single concerns facing humanity. How is it that White and Western climate activists come to be the faces of the global youth climate movement? This essay examines the salience of race to the education and framing of environmental and sustainability efforts. It suggests that the separation of environmental concerns from the socio-political (and thus racial) contexts that produce them not only further marginalizes the contributions of non-White activists and the communities that they represent, but also engenders a violently White, and thus narrow, vision of a global, Green future.

The straight labor of playing gay

ABSTRACT This essay examines the celebrity interview as a significant promotional paratext because it is through these that white, cisgender, heterosexual actors are asked to comment upon playing gay. We focus on paratexts around Scandal, Modern Family, Behind the Candelabra and Call Me By Your Name because they are important sources for shaping the ways audiences respond to media and are often re-circulated beyond their original context through social media. We highlight how white, heterosexual actors emphasize labor in order to insist on the paratextual distance between his veridical self and the role he has been employed to play. As a discursive strategy, this is accomplished by a recognized, seamlessly performed and strikingly blatant routine. Collectively, audiences, interviewers, and the actors themselves work to consistently demonstrate social, cultural, and industrial commitments to what we are calling a possessive investment in straightness, which we define, building on George Lipsitz’s (2006) work, as concerned with not only the resources, power and opportunity white heterosexual actors have in taking on gay roles, but the social, cultural and industrial willingness to help these actors re-assert their claims to heterosexuality and normativity.

Urban Renewal in the “Human Renaissance”

ABSTRACT In the post–World War II era, state and federal legislators introduced a legal rhetoric of the environment and urban renewal that reshaped discourse and decision-making by municipal leaders and African American activists in Pittsburgh. This study presents a fuller historical analysis of the regulatory framework and sociopolitical context of Pittsburgh's postwar urban renewal by examining the environment, renewal, race, and the law as interrelated and inextricable concepts. It argues that both white political leaders and Black activists navigated a shifting regulatory framework and legal environmental rhetoric to craft divergent narratives of urban renewal. By examining municipal, state, and federal laws, urban planning documents, court decisions, and newspaper articles, this analysis demonstrates the evolution of environmental arguments with changing social, legal, and political contexts from the postwar years to the 1970s. Conclusions reveal a fluid definition of “environment” and demonstrate the ongoing struggle for power over decision-making spaces.

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill Crystal Webster (bio) The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. By Robert H. Churchill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $99.99; paper, $24.99.) Scholars have increasingly centered violence as a category of analysis in order to provide nuance to historical events and periods. This trend in the historiography is reflected in the groundbreaking scholarship of Joanne Freeman, Stanley Harrold, and Kellie Carter Jackson, each of whom have focused on physical violence in historical periods and political movements that earlier had been represented as refined, passive, and respectable. Robert Churchill contributes to this historiography with The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. In Churchill’s telling of the story of fugitive slavery, violence was ubiquitous on the route to freedom. Those involved in violence ranged from enslavers and slave catchers to antislavery activists. This violence and conflict along the Underground Railroad, argues Churchill, led to the radicalization of antislavery activism, violent expressions of mastery, and the development of regional identity, which in turn aggravated the sectional divisions and conflict leading up to the Civil War. Robert Churchill’s history challenges the ways in which popular representations of the Underground Railroad perpetuate it as a mythic, elusive element of American history. Scholarship on the Underground Railroad began with William Still’s Underground Railroad Records (1872) and other primary-source collections of first-person accounts of those who aided fugitive slaves. More recently, scholars have breathed new life into the significance of fugitive slavery, including Richard Blackett, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Fergus Bordewich. In particular, Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) makes clear that the scope and scale of the fugitive slave experience was crucial to the events that led to the Civil War. By centering the role of violence, Robert Churchill upends romanticized and static histories of the Underground Railroad, thus complicating its history and providing fresh insight into this increasingly popular topic. A clear strength of the book is its conceptualization and explanation of the sociospatial geography of the Underground Railroad. The book is organized around both chronological and regional distinctions, which consist of [End Page 272] the Borderland, the Contested Region, and the Free Soil Region. Churchill excels in his in-depth geographic descriptions of the physical and social landscape for each region and analyzes the ways in which these contexts shaped the function of violence in the movement. Through descriptive and visual explanation, Churchill reveals how political and spatial geography are key to understanding how violence was wielded. In the Borderland, slave catchers were aggressively violent in ways that extended the reach of slave mastery. Here, slave catchers and enslavers dominated the fugitive experience and prevailed even against whites who may have been sympathetic to the antislavery cause. While some locals of the Contested Region provided shelter and aid to African American fugitives, white residents were less likely to defend escaped enslaved people against violent slave catchers, particularly when legal mores were appropriately followed. Locals nonetheless rejected the violence exhibited by slaveholders and slave catchers as violating ideas of dignity and restraint. In the Free Soil region, local whites reacted aggressively to slave catching and kidnapping and defended fugitives to the death. These distinctions give a greater sense of depth to the Underground Railroad at a community and regional level, appropriately portraying the movement as a “living organism responding to local stimuli” (17). Churchill’s Underground Railroad is therefore not only one of fugitive slaves, slave catchers, and white abolitionists, but also one of space and culture. The movement, in turn, shaped the regions through which fugitives fled. Many of Churchill’s sources that reveal these differing regional cultures will not be unfamiliar to scholars of the period, and those sources rely on reflections on the movement by predominantly white activists, which can lean heroic. However, Churchill complicates the sources with in-depth analysis and explanation of the local and regional history. A strong intervention of the book is that violence in the Underground Railroad led to the type of sectional conflict...

Race, Colonialism, Resistance and Denial

The death of George Floyd in July 2020 shook the world. It brought many people to face to face with the reality of the institutional state violence that is an integral part of the racism that Black communities face in the Western world and sparked Black Lives Matter movements around the world. In the UK, George Floyd’s death sparked demonstrations involving young Black and white activists resulting in direct action that challenged the national historical narrative about Britain’s involvement in slavery and the nature of the British Empire. During a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in June 2021, the protesters toppled a statue of Edward Colston, a figure presented as a philanthropist and municipal benefactor in Bristol’s history and sank it in the harbour. The reaction from the State was one of fury. The Prime Ministers Officer issued a statement saying that the tearing down of a Bristol statue was a ‘criminal act’ and the people responsible should be ‘held to account’. The Home Secretary responded to a question about the incident in the Parliament stated, ‘What we witnessed yesterday was mob rule, which is completely out of kilter with the rule of law and unacceptable’. There was no acknowledgement in the Government response that the toppling of Colston’s statue was influenced by the fact that from 1669 – 1692, Colston was the Deputy Governor of the Royal Africa Company. During his tenure as deputy governor, he effectively ran the company; an estimated 84,000 African people were transported to the Caribbean and Americas, with an estimated 20,000 deaths during transportations. No echoes of the sentiments expressed by Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, who said, ‘I can not pretend that the statue is anything but an affront to me. Not just as a Jamaican heritage man but as a human being’. The government response reflected a wellestablished white-washing of British history. A narrative that says that even though Britain was involved in the slave trade, the British were the good guys because they were the first to abolish it. A narrative that barely mentions the period of colonialism and Empire other than promoting the racist view that Britain brought civilisation and values to the world. The desire to ignore the realities of past the has not only emerged in the context of a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Black lives matter protest but in a more sustained attempt by leading British politicians to rehabilitate the Empire over the past two decades. In 2002, former Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated that Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history. He also stated I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it, that we should talk, rightly so, about British values, and called for the ‘great British values’ - freedom, tolerance, civic duty to be admired as some of our most successful exports. Similarly, in 2013 former Prime Minister David Cameron, when visiting the memorial in India to the 1919 Amritsar Massacre where hundreds of Sikh protesters were gunned down by troops under British command, declared, ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did and was responsible for – but, of course, there were bad events as well as good. ‘The bad events we should learn from – and the good events we should celebrate’. The State reaction resulting from the toppling of the Colston statue typified this. A feeling of national panic was engendered by the claim that Black Lives matters protesters were likely to topple a statue of Winston Churchill as part of a protest in London. A narrative was constructed that extremists had taken over the Black Lives Matter protests. In a series of tweets in the run-up to the BLM London protest, Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted ‘We cannot now try to edit or censor our past’, ‘We cannot pretend to have a different history’, ‘Those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history and impoverish the education of...

Authenticity, Mimicry, and Early African American Entertainment

Authenticity, Mimicry, and Early African American Entertainment Josephine Lee (bio) In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, African Americans had reason to be wary of the term authenticity as applied to theatrical performance. White performers in blackface had long saturated the popular imagination with exaggerated and demeaning racial stereotypes. That the theater could make these seem like “authentic” versions of African Americans is evident in an 1840 description in the Knickerbocker praising Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice’s blackface enactment of Jim Crow at New York’s Bowery Theatre: Entering the theatre, we found it crammed from pit to dome, and the best representative of our American negro that we ever saw was stretching every mouth in the house to its utmost tension. Such a natural gait!—such a laugh!—and such a twitching-up of the arm and shoulder! It was the negro, par excellence. Long live JAMES CROW, Esquire!1 Minstrelsy, James Weldon Johnson wrote, “fixed the tradition of the Negro as only an irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide grinning, loud laughing, shuffling, banjo playing, singing, dancing sort of being” into an enduring stage tradition. At the same time, Johnson continued, minstrel companies provided “an essential training and theatrical experience which, at the time, could not have been acquired from any other source” and which paved the way for another phase of African American performance in the Harlem Renaissance and later.2 As African Americans increasingly appeared in minstrelsy, vaudeville, and musical theater, they strategically negotiated the terms by which these “authentic” black types dominated the popular stage. Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin describes how the “Old Plantation,” a live display at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in which African Americans reenacted scenes of slavery, shifted from the comic ridicule of minstrelsy toward a “conflation of black authenticity and white theatrical construction” that became the “basis for a curriculum on how to be black.”3 Similarly, Daphne Brooks comments on how early in their careers, Bert Williams and George Walker were hired [End Page 151] to impersonate Africans from Dahomey at the 1893 Midwinter Fair in San Francisco, the first of many such performances in which they attempted “to straddle the boundaries between an ‘authentic’ and a fanciful ‘blackness.’”4 Williams and Walker billed themselves in later vaudeville acts as the “Two Real Coons,” highlighting both their artistic ability and their racial authority to enact these comic types. It was not only through reappropriating black characterizations that African Americans negotiated the typecasting typical of commercial entertainments of the time. Cross-racial impersonations by African American actors also complicated the terms of theatrical authenticity. Chinese immigrant characters, for instance, were regularly played by African American vaudeville and musical theater performers in individual specialty numbers and duos titled “The Chinaman and the Coon.” Particularly popular was the “Fun in a Chinese Laundry” sketch, in which a Chinese character used an unintelligible laundry ticket to cheat an African American customer. By 1916, these enactments were so common that Lester A. Walton, the regular theater critic for the African American newspaper the New York Age, remarked that “for years the colored performer has been sadly declaring: ‘Our field is limited; our color permits us to appear on the stage as Negroes only, maybe now and then a Chinaman.’”5 Reviews of these Chinese acts published in 1916 in the Indianapolis-based African American newspaper, The Freeman, affirm how these acts were often noted for their presumed verisimilitude. Performing in Boston, Gus Stevens is praised as having played the part of “One Lung, the Chinaman, so natural, his make-up, dialect and every move was so perfect that few could detect that he wasn’t a real Chinaman.”6 Another reviewer in Philadelphia comments that “George Catlin has the reputation of being the best Chinese impersonator in the country and speaks the real language.”7 At first glance, praise for the authenticity of African American yellowface seems similar to that given to white actors performing such caricatures. Since the 1850s, the figure of the “Chinaman,” a characterization informed by the virulent anti-Asian sentiments that were also manifested in exclusion laws and racial violence, had been regularly enacted...

Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

Reviewed by: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black Andre Seewood Liza Black. Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 354 pp. Hardcover, $65.00. The Hollywood Indian is a well-known constructed figure born within the mythology of White civilizing of the American wild West as represented in hundreds of Hollywood films of the twentieth century and beyond. Various Native American, White, and Black scholars have [End Page 405] studied the construction of the Hollywood Indian from White actors painted in “red face” to the dramatic binary trope of the savage Indian and the noble savage. The Hollywood Indian is a necessary component of the White racial imaginary, just as its counterparts of the Black and the ethnic other form the base upon which an ideal of White purity can exist. That much we know is true, but the book Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black takes an altogether different approach to the construction and maintenance of the Hollywood Indian during and through the immediate postwar period. Through combined methodologies of archival research, tribal histories, actor biographies, and labor histories Black provides insightful, “connections between Indian Actors and the tribes represented on screen” (11). Black teases out tensions between the White man’s Indian and the Native American individuals and tribes surviving their attempted cultural erasure and negotiating resistance to the mythology of settler colonialism as actors within the Hollywood Western. Black’s study of the lives, labor, and organized guilds of Native American and (faux) Native American actors within the Hollywood film industry is not a recuperative gesture, but instead it is a radical intervention that turns the tables on the simple vilification of the Hollywood Indian and the settler colonialist ideology imbued within the films. If Picturing Indians is a book about tribal sovereignty, then the author looks at that sovereignty through a critical lens to address how “Native Americans as employees in the film industry . . . sought to delimit and control their representations,” within a system of production created only to exploit that tribal sovereignty for its own gains (4). In an approach similar to that taken by African American scholar Cedric J. Robinson (Forgeries of Meaning and Memory, 2007), whose critical reading of the performances of African American actor Mantan Moreland revealed a thinly veiled secondary message of resistance and criticism of Whites in his once-thought stereotypical servant roles, Black reads a similar thinly veiled resistance and criticism in the work of Native Americans cast as extras or in supporting roles in Westerns. For example, when Native Americans were hired in Hollywood films for authenticity and to speak their native language, Black discusses how these actors either intentionally spoke gibberish or words that when accurately translated were critical of the settler colonialist ideology, the [End Page 406] role, or the accuracy of the representation of historical events in the Hollywood Western. This resistance and criticism were cloaked from the Whites controlling the film but could be understood by those Native Americans participating in the film and any of those who might watch it. Just as the “twoness” of the African American allowed for a double-coded gesture of resistance against the White racial imaginary within the servant role in film, there is a “twoness” in the representation of the Hollywood Indian that also affords a mode of resistance through language for Native Americans. Black’s intervention into the labor of Native Americans allows her to investigate the material construction of a mythological figure. The mass manufacture of fake Indian noses, the accumulation and refinement of fake Indian wigs, and the mass body painting of Native American extras with cost projections and limits provides the scale and scope of the economy of racial misrepresentation in the construction of the Hollywood Indian. Black invites us to contemplate the material basis of a racist mythology as an economic artifact and as a cultural ideal for transnational export. If Native Americans were to be confined to roles of extras and small speaking supporting roles, then the notion of tribal sovereignty is maintained by the creation of labor guilds and the acceptance of several...

Which story to tell?

Which story to tell? Richard Carr Christos Tsiolkas. 7½. Sydney: Allen and Unwin Press, 2021. 344 pp. A $32.99. ISBN: 9781761065330 Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) centers on a filmmaker suffering from director's block who goes into retreat in a hotel [End Page 296] seeking to overcome this personal and artistic impasse. Christos Tsiolkas gives a nod of homage to the late director in his latest novel, 7½. Like the Italian master, the narrator—Christos, a novelist—enters into a two-week retreat in a rented seaside house, intent on making headway on at least one of the writing projects bedeviling him. "It is treacherous being a writer," the narrator avers after sketching the floor plan of the house and environs (4), laying out for his readers the current relationship between himself and his profession. "I have come here to write a book," the narrator states (4), and though he struggles to name what kind of book it will be—a novel? a play? a screenplay?—he is firm about its focus: "I do know this. … All of those matters—politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future—all of them now bore me" (4). These early sections of 7½ introduce us to Christos at this stage of his life—successful, nearing sixty, his body conceding some defeat to the predations of old age—as he sets up his routine and presents us with a current manifesto: "I am writing at a time when the novel is unbearably timid" (33). Christos follows memory threads back to childhood and adolescence—to Stavros, a man sharing the Tsiolkas household in his childhood, defined, for the young Christos, by the alluring reek of his sweat; to his cousin Manolis, or Mani, growing up a peasant in Greece, who encourages "the chubby young boy from Melbourne" (36) to scale a cliff with him and his friends; to his surprising interruption of two men in sexual congress alongside a urinal. Such memories, in fact, are a source or set of sources for one of his book ideas: "I want to re-create a world that has disappeared through the sensual experiences of a child" (38). It is another idea, however, that has most captured the narrator's imagination. Another memory thread leads us back to the 1990s, when Christos watched gay porn on a VHS tape featuring a white actor identified as Paul Carrigan cavorting with a Black actor. Something electric in that viewing experience has stayed with Christos as he shares a history he has invented for Paul over time and a likely story line for his new work. Paul will now be a retired actor from the porn industry, an American married to a retired fellow performer named Jenna. They now live in her native Australia and are blessed with an adolescent son, Neal. In the developing draft, Paul receives an offer from an American viewer of his videos, an elderly man who, for $180,000, requests that Paul fly to California to spend three nights with him. Of course, there will be sex but "nothing sordid or disgusting" (48). Enticed by the sum, Paul and Jenna decide that he will return to California, where he will accede to the gentleman's request in return for the sum. While there, Paul will also encounter old friends from the industry and the suppressed temptations of his old life. 7½ unravels in multiple ways. The narrator guides us through his daily regimen of swims and walks and details his breakfast and dinner menus. Though striving to block himself from the outside world, he calls or is called by Simon, his enduring life partner-lover, and he visits Andrea, a lifelong friend with whom he quarrels over the nature of his creative gifts. Telling her that he no longer sees himself as rebel or reformer but as one who loves the world, Christos is humiliated by her dismissal of his current vision: "You can't write about beauty. … You don't have that talent. … You're shit at metaphor" (81). And as he sits at his desk, the narrator delves further into memories—of his immigrant family come to Melbourne in search of the...

Witnessing racial discrimination shapes collective action for racial justice: Enhancing awareness of privilege among advantaged groups

AbstractThree studies tested whether witnessing incidents of racial discrimination targeting Black people may motivate White people to engage in collective action for racial justice. In studies of White Americans (Study 1) and self‐identified White activist “allies” (Study 2), witnessing incidents of racial discrimination predicted greater willingness to participate in collective action for racial justice, through the pathway of enhanced awareness of racial privilege. Studies 1 and 2 showed that awareness of racial privilege uniquely predicted the link between witnessing incidents of racial discrimination and willingness to participate in collective action for racial justice; these effects were consistent both with and without controlling for Whites’ sense of identification with their own racial group. Study 3 tested experimentally how witnessing incidents of racial discrimination may compel White people to become more motivated to engage in collective action for racial justice. Compared to those in a control condition, White participants who were randomly assigned to watch a brief video depicting recent discriminatory incidents targeting Black people (e.g., Starbucks incident in Philadelphia, housing incident at Yale University) tended to show greater motivation to engage in collective action for racial justice, an effect accounted for largely by enhanced awareness of racial privilege. How witnessing incidents of racial discrimination can transform views of privilege and willingness to stand up for racial justice among members of advantaged racial groups is discussed.

Author’s Response

Author’s Response

The Skin of our Teeth, by Ellen Geer Will

The Skin of our Teeth, by Ellen Geer Will

Discursive burdens: negotiating difference in an education movement

ABSTRACT Recent efforts to opt out of assessments have focused attention on the role that testing plays in accountability reforms in the United States. While opt-out activists often invoke the disproportionate impact of these reforms on communities of color, opting out has been more widespread in mostly White, affluent, and suburban communities. This study explores how resistance to testing is embedded in larger discourses of race, privilege, and opportunity in education. Through discourse analysis, we explore how activists located themselves within racial groups at a national conference in the United States. We show how (1) the mention of racialized identities was often accompanied by discursive markers that anticipated social discomfort and (2) activists of color named their racialized identities more so than White activists, and in ways that were strategic, suggesting activists of color did the harder work of weaving together a racially diverse movement.

“Our Sisters in China Are Free”: Visual Representations of Chinese and Chinese American Suffragists

AbstractBoth white and Chinese American suffragists in the United States closely watched and discussed the events of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). They were aware of the republican revolutionaries’ support for women's rights, which conflicted with American stereotypes of China as a backward nation, especially in its treatment of women. Chinese suffragists, real and imagined, became a major talking point in debates over women's voting rights in the United States as white suffragists and national newspapers championed their stories. This led to prominent visual depictions of Chinese suffragists in the press, but also their participation in public events such as suffrage parades. For a brief time, the transnational nature of suffrage conversations was highly visible as was the suffrage activism of women in U.S. Chinese communities. However, because Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship by U.S. immigration law, white activists tended to depict Chinese suffragists as foreign, resulting in the erasure of their memory in the U.S. suffrage movement.

Nepantla Environmentalism: Challenging Dominant Frameworks for Green Religion

AbstractScholarship on religious environmentalism and green religion in the United States has privileged the actions of progressive white activists who view nature through an Enlightenment framework. In response to a call in the 2015 JAAR’s roundtable on climate destabilization and religion to engage in discourse about “the myriad causes and myriad possible solutions to our environmental crisis,” this article examines religious environmentalism from a nondominant perspective. Based on ethnographic research among Latinx churchgoing Catholics in Los Angeles, I have identified a widespread ethic of living lightly on the earth, which I call nepantla environmentalism. It is grounded in an immanent, relational worldview in which God is present in the material and the human-nature boundary is porous. A focus on nepantla environmentalism calls attention to the raced and classed biases embedded in dominant understandings of green religion in the United States. It demonstrates that there are different ways of being a religious environmentalist.

Racial Valuation: Cultural Gatekeepers, Race, Risk, and Institutional Expectations of Success and Failure

Abstract Racial inequality persists in culture industries, despite increases in representation. Focusing on the Hollywood film industry, this research analyzes written correspondence to understand how, in their discourses, cultural workers as intermediaries or gatekeepers construct ideas about race to make predictions about economic value, success, and failure of cultural products. Findings demonstrate that cultural workers make racial valuations, or race-based judgments about the economic worth of cultural products—in this case by associating white actors with low economic risk, increased chances of profitability, and the expectation of success and linking black actors to high economic risk, decreased chances of profitability, and the expectation of failure. This practice of racial valuation disrupts conventional logics that emphasize the financial ambiguity of cultural markets to advance white institutional logics that invoke raced-based projections about a cultural product’s expected performance. Ultimately, these racially biased assessments affect people, products, and processes along the film production, distribution, and consumption spectrum, especially privileging white workers and limiting Black workers in foreign markets, thereby creating and reinforcing unequal racial outcomes within culture industries.

Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970, by Stanley Keith Arnold

<i>Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970</i>, by Stanley Keith Arnold

The Human response to Pet Rescue TV Commercials

According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 6.5 million abandoned pets are housed in shelters in the United States. Of those who are sheltered 670,000 dogs are euthanized. An opportunity exists to reduce the number of euthanized animals, primarily through adoption. Several benefactors to this animal rescue initiative have prompted pet rescue adoption through television commercials. This study explored the perception of viewer “attitude toward the ad” and “intent to adopt” for a pet rescue television commercial. Study respondents (N=335) watched “Somebody to Love” a commercial featuring a lonely man and his emotional attachment with an abandoned dog. Gender identity was significantly related to attitudes toward the commercial. Participants identifying themselves as feminine held more favorable attitudes towards the commercial, whereas participants identifying as more masculine reported less favorable attitudes towards the commercial. Work status and ethnicity were also significant predictors of attitude toward the ad. Non-workers were more highly responsive to the commercial, than were students or those in working capacity. Participants identifying as any ethnicity other than white held less favorable attitudes towards the commercial, which features white actors. This implies it is important to examine commercial content regarding plot and context, as the viewer response is affected by gender, ethnicity and employment status. Producers of future animal rescue commercials should consider content specific to alternate human identities, where rescue animals can facilitate a common compassion among potentially discordant identity groups.