White Elite Research Articles

“You Betray Your Country”: Remembering and Forgetting the Stolen Generations in the Metropolitan Press

ABSTRACTIn 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Bringing Them Home, documenting historical practices of forced Indigenous child removal in devastating detail. The report was released into a fractious political environment in which historicised understandings of race were being heatedly debated. Responses to the report played out through the media as conservatives sought to reassert a traditional narrative of Australian history. The Howard Coalition government steadfastly refused to implement most recommendations of the report, including a formal national apology. The government’s stance, and its capacity to dominate the news cycle, almost immediately shifted public focus from the contents of the report to its reception. This reframing meant that, when a formal national apology was finally offered by the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2008, it offered closure not to 220 years of racial violence as was claimed, but to a 20-year acrimonious debate dominated by white elites. This process demonstrates the ways that, against the starkest evidence, institutional power can be leveraged to facilitate widespread forgetting of historical violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. Indigenous children in Australia continue to be removed from their families at heavily disproportionate rates.

The Revolution that Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches by Adam Fairclough

Reviewed by: The Revolution that Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches by Adam Fairclough Justin Behrend (bio) The Revolution that Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches. By Adam Fairclough. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. Pp. 400. Cloth, $29.95.) The Revolution that Failed offers a sweeping interpretation of the Reconstruction era that is at once conventional and not altogether convincing. The claim that Reconstruction failed dates back to the first scholarly interpretations produced by William A. Dunning and W. E. B. DuBois, who offered, of course, starkly different accounts. What makes Adam [End Page 138] Fairclough's argument different is that he attributes Reconstruction's failure to black suffrage, and he does so through a close analysis of politics in Natchitoches Parish, instead of an overall assessment of the era. In the first chapter, Fairclough argues that Reconstruction failed because congressional Republicans extended voting rights to black men. The entire Reconstruction project, by which he means African American citizenship and voting, "proved to be an error" because Republican idealism prevented them from recognizing that "most whites were violently hostile" (15). As a result, Fairclough asserts, black suffrage "prolonged the chaos of the postwar years" (20). There are a number of problems with this interpretation. The argument hinges on the intentions of Republican congressmen, yet Fairclough does not examine the debates, speeches, or correspondence of these leaders. Instead, he uses abstractions, such as "Congressional Reconstruction assumed" and "Congressional Republicans knew" to impute motivation and agreement to a group of politicians who were famously divided between radical and moderate factions (19). Additionally, he implies that white violence against black people followed black male enfranchisement, yet numerous studies have shown how violence increased dramatically before black male enfranchisement between 1865 and 1867. Moreover, while Fairclough castigates Republican leaders for not doing enough, he is often silent about southern whites' racist actions, assuming that they were predisposed to violence against black people. More troubling, his argument about Reconstruction's failure rests on the recklessness of white Republican congressmen, but he ignores the demands of ordinary freedpeople for the vote. If Republican leaders deserve blame for Reconstruction's failure because they implemented black suffrage, should not black people also share the blame? In the subsequent chapters, The Revolution that Failed shifts to a tighter focus on Natchitoches Parish. We learn much about the variations and nuances of this community as it adjusted to rapid and substantive change. Fairclough is at his best when he shows the interconnections between local issues and statewide politics, particularly in how patronage appointments and factionalism sowed seeds of mistrust and illegitimacy in communities, such as Natchitoches, where little corruption existed. But for all of the attention to local political leaders and the particularities of the Natchitoches story, Fairclough's history does not shed much light on the black majority, whose votes propelled Republicans into office in Louisiana. While we learn about notable black leaders, such as Alfred Raford Blunt and John Gideon Lewis, the aspirations and actions of ordinary freedpeople remain hidden. Black women are rarely referenced, and [End Page 139] black political mobilization is assumed rather than analyzed. Fairclough is more interested in white Republican leaders, devoting a whole chapter to this small group. He mentions the few but "silent Unionists" during the Civil War—a reference to a handful of white people—but this phrase ignores the fact that nearly every black person in the parish would fit this label (28). Natchitoches, Fairclough asserts, was an anomaly in the midst of the notoriously violent Red River valley, known for the Colfax and Coushatta massacres. The parish was a place of "relative tranquility" where planters were "less exploitative … less cruel, [and] less inclined to employ violence" (40, 45). This peace and orderliness is nearly always attributed to "the white elite," but curiously, black people's role in creating a more egalitarian culture is not considered (116). Fairclough also deemphasizes the role of U.S. troops in mitigating white violence and maintaining social stability. Over a thousand troops were stationed in the parish in the summer of 1865, followed by a company during the 1867 and 1868 election season as well as during the turbulent era from November 1874 to December 1876. Indeed...

Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel

Reviewed by: Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel Daniel Mandell Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896. By Charles Postel. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Pp. [x], 390. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-7963-6.) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 examines the origins, leadership, policies, and evolution of three huge organizations—the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor—that emerged after the Civil War and became prominent national organizations pushing deep egalitarian reforms. Unfortunately, as Charles Postel shows, when these organizations each launched a southern strategy to gain national strength, they and their egalitarian ideals foundered on the rocks of racism and Redemption. Postel begins with the Grange, organized in December 1867 to advocate for farmers' rights against corporate interests. Although it embraced sexual equality, when the organization emphasized politics, women found themselves relegated to kitchens. More significant, one of the Grange founders, Oliver Kelley, sought sectional reconciliation, which meant "white solidarity between the northern farmer and the southern planter, and silence on the question of equality for African Americans" (p. 21). By the mid-1870s, Grange groups in the South were known for Ku Klux Klan activities and helped Democratic "redeemers" impose white rule, and those in the North built anticorporate coalitions with racist Democrats. Equality then delves into the WCTU, organized in 1873 and for decades the country's largest and most powerful women's organization. The WCTU [End Page 925] connected prohibition to sexual equality in the family, community, and workplace, with a liberal wing (led by Frances Willard) advocating woman suffrage. The WCTU similarly pursued white nationalist reconciliation, as Willard traveled to the South and returned to launch a national party that would "weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family" (p. 138). The WCTU incorporated racialist ideas in calls to limit the political rights of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. Postel then examines how the Knights of Labor became the first significant national labor organization after Terence V. Powderly became its head in 1879. It enlisted all laborers regardless of trade, skill, sex, or race (with the glaring exception of the Chinese). But in 1885, Powderly went south, like Kelley and Willard, and endorsed racial separation. Black laborers in the South still joined in large numbers as Knights leadership continued to push for equal wages and conditions, but that egalitarian element was shattered when white Louisianans joined to massacre striking cane workers in 1887. Equality ends by examining how, despite these organizations and the egalitarian writings by Henry George and Edward Bellamy, the United States descended into the Gilded Age and violent apartheid in the late 1880s. The Supreme Court overrode the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect economic and racial hierarchies; the WCTU defended lynch mobs as defenders of white women; and the Knights through Powderly applauded the explicitly "whites only" Farmers' Alliance. These organizations, in combination with other groups, formed the People's Party in 1892, which marked the crest of the post–Civil War egalitarian wave but ultimately failed as racism created fatal fissures. An epilogue brings readers to the present, noting how labor unions played a critical role in forging a more equal nation during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but were dismantled by corporations and their political allies in the 1980s. Postel's view of late-nineteenth-century America spotlights how the efforts of reformers to counter the growing power of wealthy corporations and "bosses" were undermined by the embrace of racism. He emphasizes the role of the South in this process, as each organization went off the rails when their leadership forged alliances with white elites in the region. While readers might want to know more about the nation's racist soil that seemed so receptive to those southern seeds, Postel's deep dig into the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor provides useful lessons about reform efforts during that period as well as about the persistent fissures in the long effort to build "a just and equal society" (p. 318). Daniel Mandell Truman State University Copyright © 2020 Southern...

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations ed. by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrision Marks

Reviewed by: Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations ed. by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrision Marks Brian Kelly Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations Edited by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrision Marks. Foreword by Julie Saville. Series on Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. This wide-ranging collection of essays, based on a symposium held at Rice University in 2012, explores common threads in the idiosyncratic configurations of race and nation across the Atlantic world over the long nineteenth century, reflecting both the centrality of emancipation to the remaking of these societies and the persistence of racial hierarchy and "variant forms of exclusionary citizenship" after abolition. Building upon a generation of local studies and rich comparative scholarship, the editors highlight the central role played by people of African descent in the fundamental reimagining of national communities during and after slavery's demise. Although "black freedom varied immensely" across the diverse societies of the Atlantic world, their involvement at the heart of this process imbued freed slaves and their descendants with a "shared vision of freedom" that transcended national boundaries, placing them at the center of what Paul Gilroy has called a "counter-culture of modernity." Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations is constructed around four main themes: law, mobility, labor and the public sphere. In a concise foreword that situates the volume in an expansive literature, Julie Saville explores the paradoxical relationship between abolition and citizenship at the irregular boundary between emancipation and nation-making: "State-sponsored abolition produced more noncitizens than citizens," she reminds us. Denied their rights within new polities, free people of color and former slaves embraced a "multiethnic, pluralist" vision of nationhood that "remains unrealized more than two centuries later" (xi–xii). The eleven essays comprising the volume range expansively over time and place, from revolutionary and antebellum era North America to post-independence Haiti, the British Caribbean under apprenticeship, mid-nineteenth-century Mexico and post-abolition Brazil. The transregional, Atlantic world vision pursued in the introduction justifies the inclusion of two compelling essays on Liberia—one on its attraction as a laboratory for entrepreneurial nation-making among upwardly mobile African Americans, a second on the demarcation between "civilized" colonists from the US and Barbados on one hand and recaptives and Indigenes on the other. The opening section, on mobility, reflects the formative role of "networks and movement" in shaping Black politics before and after emancipation. Matthew Spooner reflects on spaces opened up by revolutionary upheaval in Britain's North American colonies for "individual and collective routes of escape" from slavery. Challenging an ostensibly cheery historiography that understates the hardship inscribed in Black experience during the revolutionary era, Spooner acknowledges the "chaos" that "allowed enslaved men and women an unprecedented degree of movement" (14) but insists that this was temporary. As conditions settled, White elites reasserted control, introducing "new restrictions on black mobility" and reenslaving substantial numbers who had tasted freedom briefly. The argument is persuasive, though perhaps not so out of line with recent historiography. Over the period that followed, a growing free Black community weighed its options in a society regarding them as a "troublesome" presence. Andrew Wegmann argues that an upwardly mobile Black middle class dispersed across the urban US (and particularly in creole New Orleans) came to regard Liberian emigration as its most promising course. They sought a "nation" of their own, where they might escape indignity, realize their entrepreneurial ambitions and, paradoxically, "remake themselves in the image of America's [sic] political elite" (42). Wegmann sees in Black elite "volition" a corrective against the traditional view of colonization as a pet project for White separatists, but passes over the relative exceptionalism of his cohort. Further north in Canada, Black refugees from the post-revolutionary United States forged exile communities that understood their own condition as akin to the forced movement of peoples fleeing absolutist regimes that had weathered revolutionary challenges in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Canada's Black abolitionists were alert to the contrast between White valorization of "noble" freedom seekers like Kossuth and their own denigration, Ikuko Asaka observes: they presented themselves not as a...

Projeto 500: desafios da inclusão de estudantes negros numa universidade pública de pesquisa nos Estados Unidos, 1968-2018

Resumo O artigo analisa uma política de inclusão de estudantes negros em uma importante universidade pública de pesquisa nos Estados Unidos, desde o período em que foi implementada, através do Projeto 500, no final da década de 1960, até os dias atuais. Levam-se em conta relações raciais e peculiaridades do sistema de educação superior norte-americano na contextualização dessa política de ação afirmativa. Examina-se o modo como um grupo historicamente discriminado em instituições de educação superior que formam a elite branca do país questiona não apenas a organização interna da instituição, mas também a relação universidade e sociedade.

An Intolerance of Idleness

Abstract Despite the fact that disasters, usually induced by hurricanes, were a near-annual experience in the nineteenth-century British-controlled Caribbean, the immediate response of white elites (plantation owners and colonial officers) to these events has remained largely underexamined. This article fills that lacuna by examining the concerns that, across the long nineteenth century, informed British responses to some of the most devastating nature-induced disasters in this period. Though the damages wrought by these events always necessitated some form of humanitarian relief, across the period 1831–1907 the survival of labor regimes and the plantation economy always remained the paramount concern of British officials. White elites viewed their minority control over colonies in the region as contingent on their ability to make African-Caribbean people labor for them. Consequently, because disasters so often destroyed plantations and other sites of labor, colonial responses to disaster were primarily informed by a desire to coerce the African-Caribbean population back to work. Reflecting a preoccupation with “idleness” that was mirrored in domestic poor relief and disaster relief throughout the British Empire, white elites often attempted to withhold needed foodstuffs and materials for rebuilding from the African-Caribbean population until they re-engaged in labor for the colonial state. This article, through showing that a preoccupation with idleness remained central to colonial disaster response, reveals an underexamined continuity between the eras of slavery and emancipation.

Life Expectancy of White and Non-White Elite Heavyweight Boxers

BackgroundIn post-industrial countries, ethnic minorities suffer poorer health and premature deaths. The present study examined ethnic differences in life expectancy and related features among elite heavyweight boxers.MethodsDates of birth and death, anthropometry, and championship years were gathered from media archives for champions and challengers (never been a champion) between years 1889 and 2019. Cox regression adjusted for age at contest, nationality, BMI, champion/challenger status, and number of contests was used to assess survival.ResultsAll 237 boxers, 83 champions (37.3% whites) and 154 challengers (61.0% whites), who contested for heavyweight championships were identified. By 2019, 110 (75 whites, 34 non-whites) were known to have died. Non-white boxers died at an earlier age than whites boxers (mean ± SD = 59.8 ± 14.2 years versus 67.3 ± 16.4 years, p = 0.018) and had shorter survival: HR = 2.13 (95% CI = 1.4–3.3). Among non-white boxers, deaths were higher from neurological disorders: OR = 8.2 (95% CI = 1.3–13.5) and accidents: OR = 15.1 (95% CI = 2.3–98.2), while death from natural causes was lower: OR = 0.2 (95% CI = 0.03–0.8). After boxing careers, fewer non-white boxers had non-manual jobs (34.4% versus 71.8%) than manual (34.4% versus 19.7%) or were unemployed (28.1% versus 2.8%). Reported substance abuse was similar across ethnicity (8.0% versus 8.8%) but conviction rates were higher among non-white boxers (17.6%) than white (1.3%).ConclusionsCompared with white boxers, non-white boxers tend to die younger with excess neurological and accidental deaths, and they have lower social positions in later life. Sporting authorities should reappraise the wisdom of permitting head injuries in sport and monitor and support the health and wellbeing of sports men and women after retirement.

Turning Back the Clock? Violence against Women and the Trump Administration

ABSTRACTThe Trump Administration has engaged in a systematic rolling back of protections, regulations, and a host of other social safety net programs for vulnerable people, leaving over half of the population in dismay while others celebrate archaic triumphs. In this context, our focus is limited to the Trump Administration’s efforts—through law and words—to turn back the clock for women. We examine the reinforcement of overt forms of inequality rooted in patriarchy through domestic law as well as Trump’s misogynistic attitude and language toward women. Given that his words hold a greater significance now that he is President of the United States, he has a “gold-plated” pulpit to share and spread his misogynistic hostile rhetoric and propaganda: anti-women objectification, devaluing, and demonization through hegemonic “wordfare” while feeding and fueling sexism across the country. We conclude by suggesting that Trump’s rhetoric and that of other leading political figures are contributing to a darker time for those not in the white elite heteronormative order with short and long term implications and harm. We caution that the current dangers posed by these attacks are entering us into an endemic misogynist normal: retroactively moving the Country back in time at a dangerous speed.

Who Differentiates by Skin Color? Status Attributions and Skin Pigmentation in Chile.

A growing body of research has shown that phenotypes and skin pigmentation play a fundamental role in stratification dynamics in Latin American countries. However, the relevance of skin color on status attribution for different status groups has been little studied in the region. This article seeks to broaden the research on phenotypic status cues using Chile as a context for analysis – a Latin American country with a narrow although continuous spectrum of skin tones, marked status differences, and a mostly white elite. We draw on status construction theory to hypothesize that skin pigmentation in Chile has become a status cue, although its heuristic relevance could differ across status groups. Using visual stimuli and a repeated measure design, we studied this relationship and tested whether the use of skin pigmentation as a status cue is conditional upon the status of those categorizing others. The results reveal that participants attribute, on average, lower status to others of darker skin. Besides, skin pigmentation has a conditional effect on the social status of participants: whereas skin pigmentation does not work as a status cue for lower status participants, it is an important status marker for the categorizations that middle and especially higher status participants perform. The phenotypic composition of reference groups of low- and high-status individuals and system justification are discussed as potential explanations for these results.

The Uplift Generation: Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia

The Uplift Generation is an excellent examination of race relations and interracial cooperation in Virginia during the early twentieth century. Exploring the actions and motivations of white and black leaders from approximately 1900 to 1930, Clayton McClure Brooks sets out to counter historians who have argued that collaboration across the color line directly threatened the state's emerging system of Jim Crow segregation. The author instead asserts that cross-racial efforts actually “helped build and reinforce the segregation of Virginia” (p. 2). In many respects, Virginia's story is unique. Because the state's white elite wholeheartedly embraced the Lost Cause tradition, including a belief that slavery had been a benign institution due to the paternalism of its great planters, they sought to assist their supposedly inferior African American neighbors secure better lives while concurrently preserving traditional patterns of white superiority. Unlike J. Douglas Smith's Managing White Supremacy (2002), which focuses on politicians and government actions, Brooks's work examines influential black and white activists outside of government who worked together to lobby for causes they believed would improve the material situation of the state's African American population.

Reframing Black Southerners’ Experiences in the Courts, 1865–1950

In civil cases that took place in southern courts from the end of the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century, black men and women frequently chose to bring litigation and then negotiated the white-dominated legal system to shape their cases and assert rights. In some ways, these civil cases were diametrically opposite from the criminal cases of black defendants who did not choose to enter a courtroom and often received unequal justice. However, this article draws on almost 2,000 cases involving black litigants in eight state supreme courts across the South between 1865 to 1950 to argue that in both civil and criminal cases African Americans were at times shaping their cases and fighting for their rights, as well as obtaining decisions that aligned with the interests of white elites. Southern state courts during the era of Jim Crow were thus spaces for negotiating for rights and sites of white domination, in both criminal and civil cases.

U.S. settler colonial climates: Southern California, Hawai‘i, and the healthful tropics

ABSTRACTThis article traces how Anglo-Americans invoked climatic and racial ties between Hawai‘i and Southern California in the late nineteenth century to forecast an American settler colonial future for the islands and obviate Native Hawaiian efforts to restore native sovereignty, after white elites overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and sought annexation to the United States. This climatic binding between continental and insular spaces – present in U.S. tourist and travel writing, diplomatic correspondence, and press coverage – brings into stark relief Hawai‘i’s often detached status in American history and historiography. By focusing on transpacific discourses of race and climate, I seek to show how – rather than as disparate places, separated by vast watery and intellectual gulfs – Hawai‘i and California were conceived in much more connected ways, as benign and (racially) healthful tropics for U.S. settler colonists in the Pacific West.

Chavista ‘thugs’ vs. opposition ‘civil society’: western media on Venezuela

Since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has undergone a period of intense racial and class conflict, as a multiethnic subaltern coalition has begun to assert itself politically against a previously hegemonic and inordinately dominant white elite. Scholars have highlighted the local media’s racial and class snobbery when covering social movements and civil society, attempting to split the country into two groups: ‘underclass mobs’ and ‘respectable’ civil society. This article, which analyses media coverage at crucial points of conflict – 1998/9, 2002, 2013 and 2014 – finds that western media have overwhelmingly matched the local media, portraying only the largely dark-skinned working-class chavista groups as vicious ‘mobs’, ‘hordes’ and ‘thugs’, while representing the white, upper-class opposition as ‘civil society’.

‘We’re not the hottest ethnicity’: Pacific scholars and the cultural politics of New Zealand universities

ABSTRACTAcademic labour markets around the world are increasingly globalised and tied to transnational circuits of neoliberal capital. Universities in New Zealand are closely aligned with these trends and an academic labour force has developed over time that reflects these economic flows and currents. This labour force is characterised by an exceptionally high number of multinational academic staff, many of whom contribute to research and inquiry aimed at maintaining and broadening the influence of their institutions abroad. Pacific faculty, however, experience the micro-geographies of New Zealand universities in different ways from other migrant scholars, especially those who hail from the global North. They are rarely included in academic ‘prestige economies’ or elite scholarly networks and are often isolated in their academic departments. This paper draws on a study about the experiences of senior Pacific academics in Aotearoa New Zealand and explores how they formulate pan-Pacific solidarities within the neoliberal and settler-colonial milieu of higher education. We focus on the often fraught dynamics of encounters between Pacific scholars, white academic elites and indigenous Māori colleagues as they map academic identities on to institutional space.

Gregory W. Bush, White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami’s Virginia Key. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. 352. $29.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsGregory W. Bush, White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami’s Virginia Key. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. 352. $29.95 (cloth).Tiyi M. MorrisTiyi M. MorrisOhio State University Search for more articles by this author Ohio State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn May 1945, attorney Lawson Thomas led a small group of black Miamians in a wade-in at Baker’s Haulover Beach State Park. No arrests were made, and subsequent negotiations between the black activists and white city officials led to the creation of Virginia Key Beach for blacks three months later. Gregory W. Bush marks this demonstration as a significant battle in Florida’s own “long Civil Rights Movement.” In White Sand, Black Beach, he examines the decades-long struggle over public leisure space in southern Florida centering on the Virginia Key Beach Park, which became the “first legally recognized bathing beach for people of African descent” (5). In so doing, he demonstrates the complex relationship between urban development, tourism, civil rights, and the role of government in a racially diverse community. Bush’s narrative of Virginia Key as a contested space spans the entirety of the twentieth century and concludes with contemporary efforts of restoration and preservation.Lest the reader assume a desire for access to recreational spaces a luxury when compared with other civil rights issues such as voting rights and equitable educational opportunities, Bush centers blacks’ fight for access to the beach in Miami as “part of their efforts to attain a more equitable share of public services, greater economic opportunities, and a measure of political power” (7). While black Floridians experienced the all too common realities of segregation, lack of political power, and inequitable public services, Bush contends that this civil rights struggle was unlike those in many other Southern cities. White elites in Miami evaded the violent confrontations that marred other cities to avoid disrupting its tourist economic base. Yet Bush demonstrates that the civil rights struggle in Miami was a long and persistent one that was heightened by an expanding suburbia and increasing tourism and consumerism.White Sand, Black Beach examines the establishment, evolution, demise, and efforts to revitalize Virginia Key as not only a key civil rights event but also as an important observation of black community building. Bush recounts the victory of securing a black beach, as well as the myriad and complex feelings that existed within the community. The joy of having a space they could call their own and that served as a crucial space for community and cultural development juxtaposed the persistent indignity of knowing that it was not equal with the places of leisure available to whites. The use of oral histories from blacks who frequented the beach to hang out or to attend special events such as baptisms, weddings, and church socials, brings the story to life and underscores the centrality of the use of public space and institution building to community development. Bush’s expansive use of secondary sources from environmental to urban history undergirds the importance of contextualizing the narrative in a frame that is broader than civil rights alone; however, the numerous historiographical comments would have been better placed in the footnotes, as they disrupt and weigh down the narrative. Furthermore, the civil rights story itself occasionally gets lost in this long and repetitive contextualization.As Bush traces the history of Virginia Key, he also recounts its demise, as integration led to abandonment and neglect. In the final chapter, Bush incorporates his own civic involvement in recent years in efforts to preserve Virginia Key and prevent commercial privatization of the island, reemphasizing that the struggle is far from over. While the book covers an important civil rights issue of equal access to public space, at times the reader is left feeling that civil rights takes a back seat to a history of city planning and development. The text would have benefited from greater use of the experiences and voices of African Americans, throughout the text, to balance out what is a long and somewhat cumbersome narrative of city planning. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701080 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race by Adrienne Brown

Reviewed by: The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Raceby Adrienne Brown Fallon Samuels Aidoo (bio) The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. By Adrienne Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Hardcover $42.95. The Black Skyscraper, a critical reflection on sociotechnical changes to American racial consciousness and identity, reveals that an overdue literary turn in the history of technology may have arrived. Readers of David Nye's Electrifying Americaand Emily Thompson's Soundscapes of Modernitymay find, in Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper, an unfamiliar framework for intellectual and cultural history of industrial urbanism—critical race theory—envelops a familiar body of evidence: the memoirs and novels of metropolitan elites and strivers. However, The Black Skyscraperilluminates archival and analytical paths rarely taken by historians of technological determinism and enthusiasm since Bruce Sinclair and Carroll Pursell assembled Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Studyand A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experiencein 2006. Likewise, The Black Skyscraperis not just a road map to overlooked observers, producers, and critics of technological change but also a treasure map leading to those who invested, financially and intellectually, in racial perspectives of architectural invention. Building on critical race theories of corporate architecture and urban histories of racial formation, The Black Skyscraperunravels the double consciousness of white and black writers who imagined towering offices and apartments would radically recast whiteness and blackness in metropolitan America. The early skyscraper's height, steepness, reflexivity, shadows, [End Page 324]and transparency, Brown argues, compelled both black liberationists and white nationalists to assess the pyscho-spatial power of this technological form and its materiality. Some joined Ann Douglass as she and others reveled in this technology of anonymization, abstraction and aggregation, while others imagined the imperceptibility of racialized bodies and spaces could only lead to the disappearance of white suburban commuters or their "racial suicide" (pp. 162–66). The Black Skyscrapercontains revelatory analyses of technological determinism and enthusiasm in literary traditions as distinct as the black liberation theories of Richard Wright and the (white) New Woman fiction of Faith Baldwin. Altogether, Brown's selection of American literature showcases how the literary construction of life amid and around skyscrapers extended America's Reconstruction into the midtwentieth century. The Black Skyscraperdeftly realigns the "uppity" fictions of modernity's white elite with the uplifting non-fiction writings of both black men and white women striving for a place in the "free market" of corporate industrial expansion. Brown devotes equal attention to these distinct bodies of literature and bodily experiences after outlining how the vertical city transformed "the ability to perceive race and to feel raced"—a "practice heavily reliant on the believed accessibility of racial evidence on and around the body" (p. 2). Opening the book's examination of black insecurity, Passingfollows a fair-skinned African-American woman as she deceptively and apprehensively crosses America's color lines and glass ceilings—both the suburban/urban frontier and streetscape/rooftop of a midtown skyscraper. The Great Gatsby, an exposition of shape-shifting, code-switching and the illusion of belonging in metropolitan America, closes out the book's exploration of white fragility. Such intricate yet insightful analyses of corporeality and consciousness make metropolitan elites and strivers across the color spectrum material to the social construction of the skyscraper "as a technology of perception and sensation" (p. 17). Brown's engrossing literary analyses of "vertical city" makers and materiality leave little room in The Black Skyscraperfor reflection on racial perceptions of non-fiction skyscrapers. If racial perception is not a singular or instantaneous act but rather a "complex series of procedures involving judgment, reading, rationalization and conjecture" (p. 23), as Brown explains at the outset, then the racial perception of skyscrapers extends beyond the lens of literature and literati. Brown introduces, toward the end of the book, the written and graphic work of Le Corbusier and Lee Galloway, noting how other engineers, architects, organizational psychologists, and managers invited their professions and metropolitan professionals to identify skyscraper builders as white saviors of darkening cities and white managers...

A "Fine Liberal" in Black Radical History: W. E. B. Du Bois's Strategic Citation of Carl Schurz

A "Fine Liberal" in Black Radical History:W. E. B. Du Bois's Strategic Citation of Carl Schurz Sarah Papazoglakis (bio) "There is probably no man living who has a more intimate knowledge of the Negro Question than Mr. Schurz," wrote S. S. McClure in the editor's introduction to Carl Schurz's 1903 McClure's Magazine article, "Can the South Solve the Negro Problem?"1 No one living, except, of course, the entire black community who intimately knew what it was to experience what W. E. B. Du Bois theorized as "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others."2 In fact, months before Schurz's essay appeared in McClure's Magazine, Du Bois had published The Souls of Black Folk, his profound work on race and double consciousness that explained the "problem of the color-line" as a problem of "the disfranchisement of the Negro."3 Yet, without a hint of irony, McClure made this hyperbolic claim, naming Schurz, a German American white elder statesman, the ultimate authority on racial conditions in the United States. He did so in the face of a significant body of black activism, writing, and scholarship. Du Bois confronted this fallacy by leveraging Schurz's acclaim among the political and social white elite to turn him into an unlikely ally, citing Schurz throughout much of his scholarship on Reconstruction as he wrote against the grain of the "standard—anti-negro" revisionist histories proliferating at the turn of the century and beyond.4 By strategically citing Schurz, Du Bois could more easily defend against racialized charges of bias and more effectively appropriate and exploit white discourses on race widely considered to be neutral. Du Bois positioned himself alongside and against Schurz as a widely respected liberal figure. Despite the praise of the prestigious, middle-brow, muckraking magazine, Schurz's record in the struggle for civil rights was controversial at best, [End Page 97] given that he, like many other Radical Republicans, "abandoned the negro" as the political tide turned against Reconstruction policies in 1872.5 Schurz's liberalism included the belief that racial inequality was a troubling exception to equal rights and opportunity. However, at the turn of the century, he was portrayed as radical by the conservative Dunning School historians who gave scholarly credibility to blatantly racist accounts of Reconstruction, casting it as a failure because of black incompetence. Du Bois shows that the Dunning School's framing of the liberal Schurz as a radical was part of a larger effort by Southern apologists to rewrite the Reconstruction Era as one of "unrelieved sordidness in political and social life."6 In Du Bois's works, Schurz emerges as an exemplary liberal figure whose writings could only be seen as radical if placed in contrast to extremist antiblack propaganda. To advance a black radical interpretation of the era that would situate a material history of racial exclusion and oppression at the center of—rather than incidental to—American democracy, Du Bois needed to dramatically shift the discourse on Reconstruction. In Du Bois's hands, Schurz became the perfect foil for white supremacist views of Reconstruction, legitimated in large part by Dunning School scholars. By moving the narrative of Schurz to the right and exposing exclusionary tenets of liberalism, Du Bois insisted on black radical resistance at a time when much of the popular commonsense discourse on racial inequality focused on accommodation, compromise, and reform. For Du Bois, Schurz came to represent the racialization of gatekeeping in a number of contexts. In many ways, Schurz's prominence symbolized the currents of white supremacy that undergird white liberalism, which does not appear openly racist or hostile but relies on more polite forms of racial violence. That "fine liberal," as Du Bois called him, could silence the black community by promoting a white perspective as more objective and more knowledgeable than even the most credentialed black scholar. While Schurz's moderate views—later characterized by Du Bois as "fair to indifferent to the Negro"—displaced black voices in magazine outlets, Schurz also embodied the progressive outer limit of elite power circles and demarcated the racial and social boundaries that...

The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil

This The Color of Modernity is an outstanding examination of the role of race, regional, and nationalistic ideologies in the creation of modern-day Brazil. Barbara Weinstein focuses on the rise of the mainly white elite of the State of São Paulo as the prominent economic, political, and intellectual leader of the region and the country. The analysis articulates methodical theoretical approaches of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and politics of identity. It investigates the intricacies of how the coffee barons and intellectual Paulistanos managed to construct an image of modernity, entrepreneurship, and success as the paradigm of a new Brazil.What appears is a representation of an exceptional paulistano identity that Brazil that cannot emulate.

‘Colonial livery’ and the chemise à la reine, 1779–1784

When Jane Austen wrote in January 1801 that ‘Mrs Powlett was at once expensively and nakedly dressed’, the fashion for muslin dresses had existed for some eighteen years. This article examines the crucial period between 1779 and 1784 when the muslin garment, which became known as the chemise à la reine, was developed and refined. Originating in the French West Indies, the gaulle was the ‘colonial livery’ worn by the wives of the white elite, the ‘grands blancs’, and first appeared as a costume in a ballet performed in Paris in 1779. The version worn by Queen Marie Antoinette in Vigée Le Brun's controversial portrait of 1783 provoked, according to the Baron de Frénilly, ‘a revolution in dress’ which eventually destabilized society. The article focuses on the role played by Saint-Domingue, France's most valuable overseas possession, in the transference of the gaulle from colonial to metropolitan fashion, and how the colony became one of the major providers of unprocessed cotton to the French cotton industry.

Maps of Englishness

Maps of Englishness