White Girl Research Articles

AMBER Alert: An Ironic Antidote to “Missing White Girl Syndrome”?

“Missing White Girl Syndrome” (MWGS) has been coined in critique of news media coverage favoritism of victims fitting that description. The AMBER Alert child recovery system was in fact inspired by the abduction and murder of a missing white girl, and some have argued its issuance decisions reflect MWGS. We examine this question using secondary data, including the annual AMBER Alert reports provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), and the National Crime Information Center (NCIS). We compared the demographics of victims from official AMBER Alert data (NCMEC) with cross-comparable demographics from the two official missing persons data sources to test for potential main-effect bias favoring whites or girls. A fourth dataset derived from media accounts of AMBER Alerts is used to test for any potential interaction effect of issuance preference for white girls. Overwhelmingly the findings suggest AMBER Alert issuance decisions do not reflect MWGS. Thus, we argue the system has the potential to function as an ironic “antidote” to MWGS by virtue of the identities of the children for whom it is routinely deployed. However, we qualify by acknowledging limitations with available data, and that the “black box” of AMBER Alert issuance decisions remains unstudied, leaving open the question of race and/or gender bias occurring at that point. Policy discourse and future research implications are discussed.

Fat Ham by James Ijames, and: White Girl in Danger by Michael R. Jackson (review)

Fat Ham by James Ijames, and: White Girl in Danger by Michael R. Jackson (review)

Inside/Outdoor Sign Savvy in Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Paradise

Abstract: In her 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature , Toni Morrison asserts: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (22). The Dancing Mind (1996), her extended meditation on the art of reading and writing, laments language proficiency as an imperiled survival skill. A Mercy ’s (2008) Florens confirms, however, that locating “[w] hich is the true reading” matters less than the reading itself since language itself is “a way” (139). If we adopt a neo-domestic/eco-critical approach, we not only address Morrison’s disparagement toward a state of modern criticism that talks about itself as though it were the work of art (LeClair, 376–77), but adhere to her directive that the critic should trail the writer. Tracking her use of ordinary inside/outdoor imagery allows us to solve the respective riddles of “Recitatif” (1983) and Paradise (1998): which girl is what race and who is the shot white girl.

“I didn’t want to promote it with a white girl”: marketing practices and boundary work at popular music festivals

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how music festival organisers negotiate diversity and inclusion in marketing and promotion practices through symbolic and social boundaries.Design/methodology/approachBased on semi-structured interviews with 18 festival organisers in Rotterdam and participant observation with six festival photographers I show that symbolic and social boundaries are employed in three areas: (1) boundaries in festival format (i.e. [partially] free or ticketed), (2) boundaries in distribution partners and technologies and (3) boundaries in promotional content.FindingsSymbolic and social boundaries are intentionally used by festival organisers to build and delineate festival audiences. Implications are drawn on current understandings of the accessibility of music festival spaces, arguing that festival research should move beyond within-space dynamics to grasp the negotiation of diversity and inclusion at festivals more fully.Originality/valueWhile music festivals are often marketed as celebratory spaces that are “welcoming to everyone”, few studies have investigated diversity and inclusion nor marketing and promotion practices at music festivals. This study shows how festival audiences are shaped through marketing and promotion practices.

White Girls in the Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at the End of the World

The post-apocalyptic white girl savior is merely one installment in a long line of young adult tropes for female characters. Popular media in the post-apocalyptic girl savior subgenre include novels and media adaptations of The Hunger Games (2008; 2012), and The Red Queen (2015), and television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Once Upon a Time (2011), Van Helsing (2016), Wynonna Earp (2016), and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018). Critical discussions of whiteness in film, television, and literature independently draw attention to how each of these forms constructs race and cultural belonging. In this article, I draw from all three formats in order to interrogate formations of whiteness specific to teen and young adult women. Valerie Babb comments that “because it is a created identity, whiteness is sustained through hegemony, a complex network of cultural creations, including among other things, literature, museums, popular music, and movies” (Babb 4-5). Building on Babb’s assertion of the omnipresence of whiteness in culture, the cross-media scope of this project shows the consistency of racial assumptions across platforms. This discussion of white girl saviors is particularly important since these stories are often left out of critical discussions of the White Savior trope. The white girl saviors in these stories often win at the expense of people of color, reifying whiteness, and specifically white reproductive femininity as the anchor of moral right and cultural progress. I identify six common traits that the post-apocalyptic girl savior subgenre uses to substantiate its heroines’ whiteness as a central and natural aspect of heroism including: belonging to the lower socio-economic class, being the chosen one, being uncomfortable with her symbolic role, being at the center of a love triangle, caring for a child, and being a tragic figure. These traits reflect larger patterns that scholars such as Richard Dyer explicitly link to the cultural naturalization of whiteness and power, and I argue, establish certain cultural expectations for teen activists that ignore the historical patterns of activism and may create hostility toward, or even foreclose opportunities for, activists who do not meet these requirements.

An Endless Capacity for Dissembling: Representing Teenage Girls on the American Stage from The Children's Hour through If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka

One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this experience was watching Ella Kennedy Davis playing a thirteen-year-old white girl named Julie who takes out her anger, grief, and confusion about this senseless violence on those around her. Davis spent much of the play on the emotional limits of anguish, screaming, crying, and shaking to the point where she continued to do so throughout the curtain call. Both my discomfort with the actor's obvious distress, and my genuine dislike for the whiny, sad, one-dimensional role—whose main characteristic is her ignorance of previous school shootings—were enough to distract me from the play itself. But what created this distancing effect? I first thought of Bert O. States's phenomenological observation that children onstage often break our illusion of the theatrical world, but I noted that my phenomenological response was distinctly different from what I feel when I see children acting onstage. Instead of wondering if the actor understood the play she was in, I instead feared she understood all too well.

White Girl Wasted: Gender Performativity of Sexuality with Alcohol in National Panhellenic Conference Sorority Women

White Girl Wasted: Gender Performativity of Sexuality with Alcohol in National Panhellenic Conference Sorority Women

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

James McNeill Whistler’s painting, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, has been the focus of much art historical analysis, but the animal rug beneath the feet of his model has received little attention. In this essay I suggest that Whistler represented a mounted wolf’s head sitting on top of a large sheepskin rug, i.e., a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Exploring the diverse meanings of this symbol within the context of the painting complicates how we understand the work and reinforces its importance as a reflection of the artist’s life and ambitions at the time he created it.

Attending to what prospective teachers notice about students' intersecting identities

AbstractTo develop an equity‐centered orientation in teacher education programs, it is essential to recognize what prospective teachers (PTs) attend to in classroom events and how they relate these events to mathematics instruction. We examined how race‐gender intersections of a child (Black boy, Black girl, White boy, and White girl) in a written vignette shape PTs' noticing. Using an intersectional noticing lens, we analyzed PTs' responses with respect to race‐gender intersections. The results indicated how racism and sexism can permeate PTs' implicit bias, positionality, and social expectations, which continue to oppress Blacks and girls within mathematics teaching and learning.

Is My Child Racist? Supporting Caregivers in Conceptualizing Race for Children.

M is a 4-year-old White girl whose parents contact their primary care pediatric clinician with a behavioral concern: over the course of several months, M has insisted that she is pregnant with quintuplets. Although some of the quintuplets have light skin tones, others have darker skin tones. When elaborating about the fantasy, M often explains that the babies fight in her tummy, and the Brown babies are "acting badly" by spitting, scratching, and hitting the others. Although M can sometimes provide an explanation for why the Brown babies misbehaved (i.e., they ate chocolate), often she is not able to produce an answer. The child frequently reiterates the same story to her parents, which has left M's parents uncertain how to react.In terms of her life course thus far, M has had typical development and behavior. She has attended all her well-child visits and met the usual developmental milestones. Beyond general development, her exposure to diverse people has been ample because she is from a multiethnic household in which 2 languages are regularly spoken. Outside of her home, she has close Brown and Black friends in her preschool, and the school has discussed race and skin color in an affirming way with the children. At home, she has books that feature children of different skin tones.What advice can M's pediatric clinician offer? How can parents and pediatric clinicians support children who present with race-based thoughts or actions that seem discriminatory?

Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children

In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children’s sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses’ websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children’s sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.

The Magic of a Fetal Fetish in the Face of Climate Crisis and the Expanse of Dense Temporalities

In times of cultural upheaval, the image of the child, typically a White girl, has been used to represent the vulnerability of humanity as a whole. In the face of escalating climate crisis the fetus is now standing in to represent the future, and the uterus has become the only environment many politicians are willing to legislate. It appears the fetus has become a flexible fetish object used both to displace growing annihilation anxieties in the present and as a way of racially colonizing the future. As fetal protection and anti-abortion laws spread across the United States, gestating bodies have been identified as the primary threats to healthy pregnancy. Integrating psychoanalytic theory with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I outline a situation where the fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation that is currently being used consolidate and secure White, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity and human exceptionalism.

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

Cakewalk through Kudzu, and: In the Spirit of Dorothy Dandridge—, and: The White Negro Girl's Diary

Cakewalk through Kudzu, and: In the Spirit of Dorothy Dandridge—, and: The White Negro Girl's Diary Kathy Z. Price (bio) Cakewalk through Kudzu Kudzu rings through the broken fences. We strip thebattered white and cut our fingers on roughunstained wood. Your fingers in my mouth the dayturns the children sit at the base of a tree wherethey were buried there is a slight opening in thecracks in your fingers your eyes disappear and shinethrough the shade this is not a wisdom or poem ortruth, or even a lie there is relief in vagueness I imagine her, pulling out white ghosts out of herbody as if stitching away mist of handkerchiefwatched each man slide under her and her and her,mouths cinched up, too flazy for the kiss on top ofthe burial ground, sweating beads on the stones,owls hurl out acrid bellows, I imagine her How to define the way moon tilts elbow your heels the way you all conspire to change the heat under themonarch's wing the collusion of twin moths singed in ash on a floor lamp that too,is dance [End Page 1] In the Spirit of Dorothy Dandridge— The silence was palpable, Diahann Carroll said of DorothyDandrige who somehow always seemed to look slightly amusedExcept the day her naked body was found on the bathroom floorIn her photos, the beauty mark, the ha-ha to those who said, prettiness is white deep, that half grin on her lipsdimmed when otto preminever said, I am gonna showthe Negroponte who is master, I will make you my birchwoodwhitened and stripped till the sap runs dry, in front of everyone till Sidney went natt on fraulein's son,& crowned her with, magenta, frangipani, and marigoldsI see her up-do, large swinging earrings, the cherry-pickedbosom that looked like it bloomed out of afallen southern pecan, and today, so many stings, the gnats are not contentto mist their pinpricks with a stab here or there, nothey must lift off a quarter of flesh, to, day is not the day you carry away my naked beingI have a secret, I am getting stronger, and when gnatsaim for the iris, the wires of my eye, to blind, I move as if birthed from the clusterof butter pecan, the birchwears a half-amused smile but onlyhalf because none of you are funny so I walk through you, look out,I am channeling the best of dorothy dandridge,the beauty mark above my lips … singsha-ha [End Page 2] The White Negro Girl's Diary Fields vagrant as crows one will die pass for what, not white. dry as a psalm one will burn feed the raven to peck out your eye throw something in the grave that won't return in the middle of a sermon she suckt blood out of a cut sun drew sweat from her young girl body in her mouth a beautiful snake & screamed only living virgin in Ezra her tongue caught in your throat had tired of johns and their red eyes walked on these hot roads to come to this on her knees naked for the very first time or so she said provided what every preacher must have clear water & weeping to refrain from blood peace is it peace Go without shoes shine on a boxcar, a risen chrism, eulogize lovers who betrayed you, to find their way back to beauty, paint your lips through a night of djembes made from the bones of guitar-p lucking skeletons, midnight runs soft between our fingers, cry turmeric and brush it off the armpits crouching outside Hades stick her shadow to the front door quartered like the woman mounted on the windowless window, wishing she could run back to Deuteronomy go to bed at eleven watch the dead bury the living witness Cerberus laughing at the yogis, spiraling in downward dog, Mississippi on your back Blessed is the beating of the fallen bark, the twisted limbs of the star-leaf trees, found her in the dark, moistened his...

A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now by Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis

Reviewed by: A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now by Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis Britt Halvorson Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis, A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now. Columbus: Trillium/The Ohio State University Press, 2021. 243 pp. $24.95 (paper). A central problem in critical whiteness studies has been what historian Kathleen Belew has identified as a perceived bifurcation between violent White nationalist groups and mainstream American life. A History of Hate in Ohio joins a variety of other recent works in challenging that division. Although it focuses mainly on White power groups, the book examines White supremacy broadly and gives attention to its many forms, from segregated [End Page 199] public schools to settler violence toward Native Americans. Collectively, these different manifestations paint a portrait of racism across different periods of Ohio history in legislative and everyday forms as well as among White mobs and White hate groups. While readers should be warned that the content is disturbing, the book's unflinching, detailed account of White racial violence in Ohio can serve as a valuable reference for not only experts but also anti-racist organizations and perhaps even movements toward reparations. One of the book's contentions is that, due to Ohio's well-documented abolitionist history, the state's longstanding White racial violence has been hidden behind a "mythology of Ohio as a racial utopia somehow free from the racism of the South" (65). The authors point repeatedly to Ohioans' ties with White hate groups and discriminatory legislation elsewhere in the U.S., questioning the state's exceptionalism in this regard. For instance, the author of the book's first half, historian Michael E. Brooks, describes how nineteenth-century Black Laws in Ohio restricted the movement of free Black individuals and were based directly on similar laws in Virginia and Kentucky that supported plantation owners' interests. The state required that, beginning in 1804, Black individuals carry a certificate of freedom. Employers could not hire people without this certificate and were subject to fines if they did so. Through a sleight of hand, the Ohio legislature even passed laws beginning in 1829 that ensured that public taxes went to the education of White but not Black children, because persons of color were not levied property taxes in support of schools. Combined with an 1861–1887 ban on interracial marriage, these laws created a far-reaching system of racial inequality, even though racial discrimination was officially banned in public spaces by a little-enforced 1884 civil rights act. Through its historical reach, the book also assembles a view of both White mob violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its relationship to the later terror campaigns of the Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and other neo-Nazi groups. In one case, a White mob formed in 1862 when Black dock workers in Toledo began receiving the same wages as White laborers. In another, a White crowd of fifteen hundred gathered in Akron in 1900 when a Black man, Louis Peck, was accused and convicted of assaulting a White girl, even though Peck was later pardoned by the governor in 1916. Such mob violence eventually morphed, following the cultural rise of sympathetic portraits of White nationalism in Birth of a Nation and elsewhere, into public Klan rallies in the 1920s. These were major [End Page 200] spectacles, with one at the Wood County Fairgrounds numbering fifteen thousand people. Over the next century, White power organizations went through numerous re-groupings in Ohio, as leaders were sometimes tried for crimes or had ideological disagreements. Against this backdrop of the continued reorganization of White hate groups, the book shows that civil rights had to be legally and socially fought for by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Black activists at each step, from Black customers being refused service at a Yellow Springs barber shop to Black patrons being denied entry to Cincinnati's Coney Island theme park (which did not admit Black patrons until 1955). By offering a meticulous analysis of Ohio's White hate groups through the present, the book also gives scholars and activists...

“Into the Widest Imagination”

“Into the Widest Imagination”

A SYSTEMIC RACISM TOWARD ETHNIC MINORITY IN THE MOVIE “A UNITED KINGDOM”

In this study, the researcher examines A United Kindom, a film written by Guy Hibbert and directed by Amma Asante. This film depicts prejudice between Seretse Khama, a black man, and white people, as well as his contentious marriage to a British white girl. In this study, the researcher discovered Systemic Racism Toward Ethnic Minorities in a United Kingdom Film. The researcher analyzed the data using racism from Chaney theory as a reference to address the study questions of issue identification. In this study, a sociological method was also applied. The researcher employed the writing approach to acquire data. The descriptive approach was utilized to analyze the data in this study. The data was acquired by the researcher from the screenplay and some scenes in the movie "A United Kingdom." Before gathering data, the researcher must determine how the information will be used. As a result of this research, three aspects of racism are presented in Amma Asante's A United Kingdom Movie: (a) intolerance, (b) discrimination, and (c) separation.Keyword: Systemic Racism; Ethnic Minority; Movie

Walk Down Memory Lane: Racial Injustice in Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds

Using as a stepping stone Mating Birds by the late South African novelist Lewis Nkosi, I take a trip down memory lane to grapple with the issue of justice in apartheid era South Africa. The paper argues that the scales of the judiciary under the system of institutionalized racism was heavily weighted in favour of the white minority who ruled the roost in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Underpinned by a racist ideology that foregrounded the supposed purity of Afrikanerdom, the steamroller of the judicial system under apartheid denied any rights to South African blacks and coloured alike to the point of forefending love across the colour bar. The lead character in Mating Birds, to wit Sibiya, knows only too well the strictures of an unfair administration of justice. Sentenced to death by hanging for allegedly raping a white girl, his dogged impassioned denials fails to pack a punch as the laws of his country make it a crime for a black man to even have designs (no matter how sincere) on a white girl. Tapping into a methodology based on philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, psychological perspectives, the paper brings to light the multifaceted cruelty of race-spiked injustice as evidenced by Sidiya’s plight.

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

A Dandelion in the Desert of the World The Love Chase in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The BluestEyegives a detailed account of the ways that Afro-American girls’ and women’s lives are distorted by internalized white standards of beauty. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, from the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of white beauty in the movies, to Pauline Breedlove’s preference for the young white girl she works for over her daughter. Adult women who have learned to hate the blackness of their bodies cannot help turning that contempt on their kids:Mrs. Breedlove believes Pecola is ugly, and Geraldine, who has lighter skin, curses Pecola’s blackness. Pecola is, indeed,the character who suffers the most from white beauty standards. For her, being beautiful is the required condition for being loved.That is whyshe feels that having blue eyes will make the harshness in her life disappear and be replaced by healthy affection. This hopeless desire ultimatelyleads to madness, which suggests that white beauty may destroy black sanity.