White Owners Research Articles

Race and class distinctions within black communities in the United States and United Kingdom: a reading in phenomenological structuralism

This article examines the constitution of black consciousness within the United States and Great Britain via structuration theory and phenomenological structuralism. Against the postmodern and poststructural logic of intersectionality and Du Boisian double consciousness as articulated contemporarily in the discourses of postsegregation black scholars in the likes of Cornel West and Paul Gilroy to explain the constitution of black consciousness, we argue that the aforementioned are postindustrial bourgeois identity constructions or discourses. Concluding that where they exist, the majority of the divergences of black practical consciousnesses from the social class language game of the upper-class of white owners and high-level executives, in the two societies are, for the most part, class, and not racially or culturally, based.

Dollars to Donuts

Dollars to Donuts

A Dynamic Study of Racial Inequality in Home Equity during the Housing Bubble

From 2001 to 2005 the American housing market witnessed a housing bubble with rising housing prices and home ownership rates. Home equity that constitutes a large share of net worth for most families increases also during this housing bubble. This paper examines the degree to which the overall increase in housing prices and in home ownership rates affected the wealth accumulation of whites and various minority groups. Using data from the American Housing Survey of 2001 and 2005, we find that the distance between white and Black homeowners in home equity is amplified between 2001 and 2005, but the advantage of white owners over Hispanic owners disappears once other factors are held constant. Asians benefit dramatically from the housing bubble, their home equity surpasses that of whites after other variables are controlled. These findings further broaden our understanding about racial stratification in wealth in American society.

Social cohesion for the unfinished business of land reform in South Africa

This article aims to discuss social cohesion as an alternative instrument to address the ever dragging land question in South Africa. Although there are various activities that have been undertaken and policy programmes that have been proposed, all those initiatives have not been able to completely translate land reform policy into practice as intended. Other than recognising the ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ policy which appears not to have been internalised by the stakeholders concerned, this article also presents a transformative approach for both white land owners and black emerging farmers to work together in a tolerant and amicable manner. The most critical step that is required for land reform in the whole country is a public consultation process for government to be able to engage with all parties and to put a list of informed alternatives on the table for discussion. Obviously, that includes the willing seller willing buyer policy. Based on the outcomes of such discussions, the government has to play a mediation role to heal the racial division caused by the Natives Land Act of 1913. In short, this discussion presents social cohesion to heal the past without land owners perceiving transformation policies as apartheid in reverse.

Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O'Connell Killen Roberta Stingham Brown

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James Brown, who legally converted his hereditary slaves,Richard and Lucy Brown,to contractual employees in order to use California’s legal system, which had banned slavery, to protect his rights to the Browns’labor until they could meet his emancipation fee. Smith describes Oliver Wozencraft and hisYuki Indian domestic servant, Shasta, held under legal guardianship as his ward, as well as Lucy Young of the Lassik people, stolen, sold, escaped, captured, and traded between white owners most of her life. And then there is the story of Ma Ho, her six-year-old daughter Quin Ti, and the Chinese man Chu Quong,who was either Ma Ho’s wronged husband or the person who held her in prostitution and kidnapped her daughter to do the same. These are poignant portraits of the visceral reality of unfree labor, race, and the law in a free state. Freedom’s Frontier is thoroughly researched, but it is also well written and a pleasure to read. Smith makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the antebellum West and the complicated story of human bondage that unifies western history with our national history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. David Rich Lewis Utah State University Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen translated by Roberta Stingham Brown University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 288 pages. $40.00 cloth. Although the Roman Catholic Church played a major role in the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century, for many decades research on the church’s activities was largely the realm of Catholic scholars,such as Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., author of A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest (1987). With the publication of the Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla and Nesqualy, 1846–1879, editors Patricia Stringham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen have provided a useful resource that will appeal to a wider audience. Following extensive research on the A.M.A Blanchet collection of some 900 missives, Brown and Killen selected forty letters addressed to a diverse group of historical figures and organizations ,includingA.M.A.Blanchet’s brother F.N. Blanchet, Bishop of Oregon City; church officials in Quebec, the eastern United States, Europe, and the Vatican; the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France; federal officials and military officers in both Washington Territory and Washington City; and local clergy and missionaries in Blanchet’s bishopric.  Reviews Brown and Killen open the volume with a preface that outlines the scope of the project, their method and approach to editing the letters, and their attention to three “sensitive topics”: the use of ethnic labels, relations between missionaries and Native peoples, and the connection (or distance) between the perspectives of the editors and those expressed in the letters (p. xii). In the introduction, the editors provide a concise overview of Blanchet’s biography and his career, beginning with his ordination in Lower Canada in 1821.As Brown and Killen observe, Blanchet’s life spanned a dramatic and tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest, and his correspondence provides a window in the multi-cultural, “cosmopolitan reality of the Washington Territory” during the 1800s (p...

Divided by Law: The Sit-Ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement

The lunch counter sit-in movement of 1960 was a contest not only over nondiscriminatory access to public accommodations, but also over the role of the courts in the developing civil rights movement. The students who launched the sit-ins explicitly defined their protest as an alternative to litigation-based reform tactics. Leading civil rights lawyers, in contrast, urged the students to rely on the judicial process. White business owners and local officials also divided over whether criminal prosecution of the protesters would best serve their interests. These divergent attitudes toward the courts derived from differences of strategy and ideology. They were also affected by developments in Fourteenth Amendment doctrine: by 1960, whether the non-discrimination principle of Brown v. Board of Education reached (or would soon reach) privately owned public accommodations was an open question. Conflict over the appropriate role of the courts ultimately worked to the students’ advantage. It contributed to their collective identity as a protest movement, helped secure outside support, and divided their opponents. Attention to the expectations diverse people placed upon the courts offers a vehicle for charting the ways law and perceptions of law shaped the sit-in movement at various levels — in the streets as well as the courts, among laypeople as well as lawyers and judges. This approach suggests new insights into the intersection of formal legal change and social movement mobilization.

Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation

In this well-researched and engagingly written book, Gretchen Long explores the significance of medical care as an expression of freedom and independence for African Americans in the context of slavery, war, and emancipation. According to Long, African Americans recognized that healthcare and the control of their bodies were crucial for securing and finding meaning in freedom. To make her case, she examines the intersection of cultural attitudes, differing medical systems, pseudo-scientific ideas about the black body, and conflicts between alternative sects and modern medicine. It is within these contexts, Long argues, that African Americans defined their personhood, political rights, and cultural place in American society. Long's first chapters recount health and medicine in slavery and the different ways the African American body was understood by slave owners and to a lesser extent by leading abolitionists. She focuses on the cultural connections between medicine and dependency, racial ideology and medical practice, and medical and political ideas to demonstrate the diverse ways the black body was manipulated. In newspapers and works of fiction, abolitionists articulated a vision of the black body as noble but broken and abused. In contrast, slaveholders wrote long justifications for slavery, which routinely emphasized that slaves were healthy and well cared for, but also dependent and physiologically less fit for freedom. The two views, while dissimilar, both contained a political message. African Americans offered yet another perspective, relying on their own healing practices, which were grounded in an understanding of their body which differed from their white owners. In the process, African Americans developed a sense of community that centered on control of the body; this focus on the body shaped their expectations of freedom and citizenship.

When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime by Lisa D. Alexander (review)

Reviewed by: When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime by Lisa D. Alexander Jennifer J. Asenas and Kevin A. Johnson Lisa D. Alexander. When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime. Jefferson nc: McFarland, 2013. 194 pp. Paperback, $39.95. Lisa Doris Alexander examines the way members of the media frame identities in their coverage of Major League Baseball (mlb). Specifically, Alexander is concerned with “what mlb conveys about power relations along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (7). Chapter one examines “how the salience of race/ethnicity and nationality became visible through the controlling images, or stereotypes, that were created and/or exploited during the 1998 McGwire/Sosa home-run chase” (2). Chapter two “analyzes how race and nationality influenced the different ways in which issues of sexual identity were discussed for Mike Piazza and Kazuhiro Tadano” (3). Alexander argues that “Piazza’s status as an elite white male, combined with the homophobia present in society at large, and sports culture more specifically, allowed questions surrounding his sexual orientation [End Page 146] to turn into a media spectacle” and that “race-and gender-based stereotypes regarding Asian masculinity dampened discussions about Tadano” (32). In chapter three, Alexander argues that “issues of race, nationality, class, and objectification became salient when Alex Rodriguez” signed his contract with the Rangers (3). Alexander contextualizes Rodriguez’s contract by noting that, “Race enters the picture because mlb’s power structure is organized with white owners (with one exception: Angels owner Arte Moreno), controlling a labor force comprised largely of black and Latin labor” (51). Chapter four considers how “society’s very definitions of race came into play when Effa Manley became the first woman inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2005” (3). Alexander argues, “Manley’s history, and the way that history was framed during her induction, highlights how the intersection of race and gender functioned during the World War II period” (71). Chapter five examines Barry Bonds’ record-breaking seasons and his “complicated relationship with sportswriters, the specter of performance-enhancing drugs, and his age as well as his race” and the way each “combined to influence how Bonds’s achievements are framed” (3). Alexander argues that “sportswriters adopted a guilty-until-proven-innocent posture toward Bonds where performance-enhancing drugs are concerned, when some other (white) athletes were perceived to be innocent until proven guilty” (85). Chapter six discusses “how issues of race, nationality, and reputation intersected during [mlb’s] continuing efforts to purge performance-enhancing drugs from the sport” (3). Alexander examines the cases of Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and Alex Rodriguez and notes that “Media representatives have responded to these steroid allegations with disbelief, anger, and indifference” (118). She asks, “With such a range in responses, … what accounts for the different ways suspected steroid users have been treated by sportswriters? Does race and/or ethnicity help explain the different responses” (118)? Chapter seven examines the “ways mlb honors Jackie Robinson, and brings up questions surrounding how we view history and how race influences the narratives we tell about baseball’s past, present, and future” (3). Alexander argues that mlb “is comfortable with a certain version of Jackie Robinson: mlb prefers the quiet version of Robinson, the version that turned the other cheek and did not speak out against the verbal and physical abuse he encountered” (153). Scholars and fans alike can appreciate this book. Alexander makes astute observations about troubling instances of racism in mlb. For example, Alexander points out how some baseball writers have used a phonetic style when quoting players or managers who speak English as a second language. For [End Page 147] example, one sportswriter quoted Ozzie Guillén as saying, “If I was black, could jew be sayeeing these theengs? An beside, Spaneesh ees groweeng so fas een thees country. Why no writers lur Spaneesh” (18)? Alexander also provides compelling evidence of racial tensions in the Bonds steroid saga by citing one member of the baseball media who stated, “If [Bonds used steroids], hang him. Now I’m not saying hang...

Black and white homebuyer, homeowner, and household segregation in the United States, 1990–2010

As homeownership has been expanding in the United States over the past several decades, residential segregation between blacks and whites has been declining in most metropolitan areas. However, the degree to which the residential patterns of new homebuyers have mirrored these overall trends in segregation and how the massive increase in home buying has related to changes in segregation has remained largely unexplored. This paper examines the segregation of new black homebuyers from white households, new white homebuyers from black households, and black and white households from each other using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data from 1992 to 2010 merged with data from the Census and ACS. I find that black homebuyers are less segregated from white households than black homeowners overall and black households in general, providing evidence in support of the spatial assimilation model that would predict better outcomes for homeowners. Also consistent with the spatial assimilation perspective, I found in the multivariate models that increased income parity between blacks and whites and growth in black lending are associated with average declines in black/white household segregation from 1990 to 2010. Although subprime lending was not associated with overall changes in segregation, metropolitan areas with higher percentages of loans to blacks from subprime lenders experienced increases in segregation of both black homeowners from white households as well as white owners from black households.

From Haiti to Nat Turner: Racial Panic Discourse during the Nineteenth Century Partisan Press Era

This research examines published correspondence and other news items regarding the 1791 outbreak of Haiti's slave revolt, Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave conspiracy, the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt, Denmark Vesey's 1822 slave conspiracy, and Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt. It finds that a racial panic discourse emerged in newspaper coverage of American slave troubles during the partisan press era, and it situates that discourse within a moral panic framework that suggests elites, including editors and white slave owners, consciously and unconsciously exacerbated or diminished the threat of slave revolt as a means to maintain power. White fears of slave violence intensified after the Haiti revolt, and references to the “horrors of Santo Domingo” (now Haiti) became shorthand for the frightening prospect of black on white violence. White newspaper readers encountering such information may have believed an authoritative response was required. The research argues that this discourse has a legacy.

Managed Diversity

In the early 1950s, as neighborhoods around the country experienced widespread racial antagonism and white flight, Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy bucked powerful legal and cultural trends to create an institutional mandate toward racial integration. But even as those efforts brought together black and white community leaders under a common goal, there quickly emerged a fundamental disconnect among residents over the meaning of integration; whereas white home owners saw living in an integrated community as a way of legitimizing their identities as liberal, urban Americans, black residents overwhelmingly viewed integration as a means toward achieving a set of very tangible material conditions. At first, this distinction was benign; within two decades, however, the ideological disconnect gave way to a heated battle over the daily experience of integrated living. In the mid-1970s, the growing crisis of crime became the terrain on which battles over local control and racial representation were fought in West Mount Airy.

“Last Evening I Saw the Sun Set for the Last Time”: The 1832 Treaty of Washington and the Transfer of the Creeks’ Alabama Land to White Ownership

“Last Evening I Saw the Sun Set for the Last Time”: The 1832 Treaty of Washington and the Transfer of the Creeks’ Alabama Land to White Ownership

Transatlantic poetics of haunting

This essay discusses issues relevant to current redefinitions of the Black Atlantic through a comparative reading of the novels At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Le Livre d'Emma (2001) written, respectively, by the Trinidad-born Dionne Brand and the Haitian-born Marie-Célie Agnant, both of whom emigrated to Canada in 1970. Agnant's novel is primarily concerned with exposing the legacy of pain, abjection, and silence that has been passed on to black women of the African diaspora, a legacy that persists in the present and is finally overturned when the suicide of the Haitian protagonist enables her to escape her “captivity” in a mental clinic in Québec. As for Brand's novel, its narrative inquest locates a similar act of sacrificial rebellion in the past (the putting to death of a slave woman who, in an act of revenge against the white plantation owners, poisoned her companions) and deploys this act strategically to open up the way to a drifting transatlantic progeny scattered across the Old and New Worlds. By focussing on these two exemplary Black Atlantic texts I explore their different approaches to issues such as the haunting effect of colonial history in the lives of the contemporary descendants of the African slaves, the curse (or the gift) of genealogical memory and forgetting, and the dislocating/relocating routes of the Black diaspora.

Between African-American and European: Kenny Clarke's musical migrations

Constrained by racism and increasing white ownership of the music industry in the United States, African-American jazz drummer Kenny Clarke exited the New York jazz scene for Paris in 1956. Clarke's migration not only represented social freedom but also creative freedom. Through his mentorship of French artists and his work to universalize jazz beyond the authority of just African-American musicians, Clarke signified blackness and Europeaness. In the process of his migration, musicianship and mentorship, Clarke used jazz to meld African-American culture with the music, culture and socio-political concerns of European musicians and fans. This paper argues that even though he was not born in Europe or colonized by European countries, Kenny Clarke and other exiled African-American artists offer an alternative narrative to the negotiation between being black and European.

Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910. Part of this early convergence is accounted for by falling white ownership due to movement out of agriculture, but most is accounted for by post-emancipation gains among blacks. After 1910, white and black households increased ownership, but the racial gap barely changed. We discuss the influence of residential segregation, public policy, and permanent income on the ownership gap.

Capital, Subsistence, and Lakeside Violence

The tranquil setting in the North Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota obscures a centuries-old history of resource conflict between indigenous Ojibwe people and whites. The subsistence activities of the Ojibwe, including hunting and fishing, have been restricted by whites to ever-smaller geographies in part to bolster capitalist extractive industries and tourist economies. Only recently have the Ojibwe successfully reasserted their treaty rights to hunt and fish off their reservations through litigation with the States of Wisconsin and Minnesota. White business owners- in what became known as the walleye wars- subsequently spurred violent protests at lakes where the Ojibwe exercised their reclaimed right to spear valuable sport fish. Other Ojibwe legal victories during the course of the walleye wars forced state fish and game authorities to better cooperate with the tribes to regulate fish and game outside the reservation system. One example is the killing of thousands of fish-eating birds called cormorants on an Ojibwe-controlled island in Leech Lake, Minnesota. Ojibwe authorities and state fish and game managers touted their work together to exempt the cormorants nesting there from protection because they both claimed the waterfowl destroyed the local walleye fishery. I argue this killing of cormorants is actually an extension of the original walleye war aimed at the Ojibwe because both events criminalized subsistence in order to protect fish as capitalist commodities. Violence is necessary in the criminalization process to replace the labor of subsistence with labor that produces surplus and exchange value from walleyes. Thus I argue this constitutes a fundamental contradiction for the Ojibwe who must manage walleyes simultaneously as a means of subsistence and as commodities for the market. The real danger here is that Ojibwe authorities- in the act of shooting cormorants- inadvertently support the same violent logic used against their people in the past that could be deployed against them again in the future.

Comparison of strength of the human-animal bond between Hispanic and non-Hispanic owners of pet dogs and cats

To assess differences in strength of the human-animal bond between Hispanic and non-Hispanic owners and determine whether these variations were associated with differences in medical care for pets. Survey. 419 pet owners presenting a dog or cat for veterinary services at private veterinary clinics in Aurora, Colo; Chula Vista, Calif; and Mexico City. Procedures-Owner and pet demographic information was obtained via open-ended interview questions. The human-animal bond was assessed through the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale. Pet health data were obtained from medical records for the specific visit observed, and a body condition score was assigned. Hispanics were more likely to own sexually intact dogs and cats as pets than were individuals of other race-ethnicity groups. Overall, owners were most likely to classify their pets as providing companionship. When data for the 2 US locations were examined separately, no significant difference existed between how non-Hispanic White and Hispanic owners viewed their pets, and scores for the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale did not differ significantly among race-ethnicity groups. There was a strong human-animal bond among Hispanic respondents, and Hispanic pet owners in the United States and Mexico verbalized this attachment in similar ways to non-Hispanic White owners. There was no observed association between owner race-ethnicity and strength of the human-animal bond for Hispanic and non-Hispanic White pet owners in the United States. Thus, other factors must be considered to explain the observed difference in percentages of neutered animals between groups.

Executive Summary of Dissertation on Gender, Race, and Credit Rationing of Small Businesses

Using data from the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances, this dissertation examines the extent to which credit rationing occurs in the small business credit market in the U.S. Women- and minority-owned businesses are studied to determine whether there is significant difference in their loan denial (type II credit rationing) compared with male and white owners and how this affects their likelihood of applying for a loan. Also, type I credit rationing is examined as well as loan sizes using simultaneous equation model. We find, in general, women and minorities are rationed more than male and white owners.

Family Money: Race and Economic Rights in Antebellum US Law and Fiction

Through the efforts of historians and literary critics over the last few decades, we now possess much greater understanding of enslaved women's sexual exploitation. Under the law requiring the condition of the child to follow that of the mother, sexual violation of enslaved women without any economic responsibility on the part of white men, and indeed, often to their remuneration, was essentially sanctioned. Yet we have less understanding of a possibility that existed at the margins of slavery's sexual economy: what if a sexual relationship between an enslaved woman and a white owner resulted in a bond that, in turn, led a southern patriarch to go against prevailing social and legal norms by financially providing for the woman, perhaps even including an effort to treat her financially as if she were his legal wife?1 Rather than the fancy dresses, isolated cabins, and other accoutrement that notoriously accompanied enslaved women's sexual abuse, I refer more specifically to white owners' attempts to transfer property to their concubines. These property transfers usually occurred through the owner's will, as he sought to move white wealth to enslaved persons who had been freed either before he died or by declaration in the will itself. Historian Dorothy Sterling notes the existence of nearly 100 such wills in the antebellum South (29). Efforts to transfer property holdings from whites to blacks raise issues more complex than the false payoffs and ugly bribery that, for example, Harriet Jacobs excoriates in her denunciation of Dr. Flint's plan to build a sex cabin for her away from the main plantation in her well-known autobiography.2 As the court cases and novels I discuss below disclose, these attempted property transfers hinge on more than owners' bribery or romantic largesse. A crucial part of this story is the effort of black former slaves to claim white-owned property, to establish themselves as economic agents, and thereby demand what would legally be theirs as a wife or as a child but for the law's refusal to attach legally enforceable rights to interracial coupling.

Pesticide use among emerging farmers in South Africa: contributing factors and stakeholder perspectives

The commercial agricultural sector in South Africa has historically been dominated by large-scale operations run by white owners and managers. In redressing this imbalance, black farmers classified as ‘emerging’ are being encouraged to engage in high-input agricultural production in order to obtain ‘commercial’ status. Since existing practices in commercial agriculture rely heavily on pesticides, emerging farmers aspiring to become commercial are pressured to adopt and/or increase the use of pesticides. However, problems of access to land, finances, resources, skills and markets overshadow the health and safety of these farmers and their labour force that may be affected by exposure to pesticides. This paper presents the results of a policy study based on primary interview data with key stakeholders and secondary documentary review data, to illustrate how pesticides are used in an occupational health and safety vacuum because the focus of key institutions is rather on economic productivity.