In An American Health Dilemma (2000), W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton synthesized historical scholarship to trace the devastating health impacts of chattel slavery, White supremacy, and racial science. Their study exposed disparate levels of death and illness experienced by generations of enslaved African Americans. My retrospective review of An American Health Dilemma demonstrates how subsequent scholarship has reinforced Byrd and Clayton's analysis of the roots of African American health disparities but also illuminated some of the limitations of the authors' physician perspectives. By decentering biomedical frameworks and introducing new interdisciplinary approaches, historians of enslaved health and healing complicate the authors' conceptualization of the "slave health deficit" and challenge their assumptions about the "slave health subsystem." New studies of slavery and capitalism, gender, reproduction, and disability expand the account of slavery's full impact on African American health. Furthermore, rather than viewing enslaved healers as members of a subsystem of superior Euro-American professional training, a new body of literature today explores the spiritual and intellectual worlds of Black healers grounded in Black mobility and the cultures of the African diaspora. (Am J Public Health. 2026;116(5):649-656. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308422).

In 2025, as part of a broader campaign built around the punning slogan “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” US denim brand American Eagle released an advertisement that paired the tagline with a subtle reference to Sweeney’s blue eyes and a less subtle meditation on genetic inheritance. The ad quickly became a flashpoint in the online culture wars. Left-leaning commentators condemned it as a fascist dog whistle, while right-leaning pundits dismissed it as the harmless spectacle of “a hot girl in jeans.” In an effort to move beyond this impasse, this essay revisits Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aesthetic politics,” a concept that—like the Sweeney-American Eagle ad—has provoked polarised interpretations. Against readings that cast aesthetic politics as either a flight into an autonomous aesthetic domain, or as a purely instrumental deployment of aesthetics for political purposes, I argue that for Benjamin, aesthetic politics strategically mobilises the rhetoric and affect of l’art pour l’art to disguise the instrumental aims it simultaneously serves. Read in this light, the now-notorious American Eagle ad is neither apolitical spectacle nor white supremacist provocation. Rather, both responses arise from—and are sustained by—the aesthetic–political mechanism Benjamin describes.

ABSTRACT Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s ‘Metal’ (part I of the third omnibus edition volume of Wood’s Northlanders comic book series) anachronistically echoes contemporary Western anti-immigration rhetoric in its depiction of the Christianisation of Norway. Characters associated with the church are framed as morally evil invaders, whose influence over Norse politics will ultimately lead to the destruction of Norse cultural identity and to the subjugation of the people of Norway. What sets ‘Metal’ apart from other comics that incorporate the motif of church burning – such as Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints and Søren Mosdal’s Erik the Red: King of Winter – is its framing of arson as a morally just act, disregarding any contemporary understanding of human rights and, especially, the fundamental right to life. In this article, I offer a close reading of the three graphic narratives and situate Wood and Burchielli’s ‘Metal’ within the context of far-right, white nationalist politics. While I do not argue that Wood and Burchielli’s work is deliberately far-right or white nationalist, its interpretation of history – as Elizabeth Woock has persuasively argued with regard to the larger Northlanders series – closely resembles contemporary Odinist thought. The comic’s reliance on black metal motifs – its church burning scene visually resembles the 1992 arson of the Fantoft Stave Church in Norway, part of a spree of church burnings perpetrated by black metal musicians – further connects it to the anti-Christian, white supremacist beliefs that were popular in the early Norwegian black metal scene and that still shape Odinist thought today.

Anthropologists disowned their race-science roots one hundred years ago and the field has been a charade since—according to today’s White power activists. Those activists do not spurn anthropology, but they do spurn ancestor worship of Franz Boas, charged with fabricating data to advance a “woke” agenda and “perverting” a once-noble occupation. This article explores the ancestral angst that irks the field’s self-styled defenders and their efforts to revive what they figure as a White man’s discipline. In my analysis, the “Boas conspiracy” transposes old obsessions with blood purity onto the anthro-family tree and points to Boas as an illegitimate father whose bad seed must be purged if blood or knowledge is to be reclaimed. Mapping this degradation plot alongside its counterpart within the discipline, born from a Boasian romance, I then ask: what other plots are possible for anthropologists who wish to see their work deployed against the very White supremacists who claim it?

ABSTRACT As global migration reshapes school demographics, migrant teachers often face symbolic racism, subtle yet pervasive exclusion through deficit framings, epistemic violence, and the devaluation of non-Western knowledge. This article examines how migrant teachers navigate (c)overt forms of racialization within systems shaped by colonial and white supremacist ideologies. Grounded in the principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT), the study reveals how racialized norms of “proficiency” and legitimacy impact teachers’ positioning. However, rather than focusing solely on their marginalized experiences, the study highlights migrant teachers’ agency, resistance, and resilience toward dominant ideologies and practices. Through qualitative methodology, the article explores how they challenge dominant discourses, create affirming pedagogical spaces, and assert themselves as capable educators and transformative leaders. The study contributes to broader conversations on racial justice in education by centering the counter-narratives of migrant teachers who both endure and reshape the institutional boundaries that seek to confine them.

ABSTRACT This paper develops the concept of cis hell to describe the regulatory normativity over all bodies based on gender biopolitics as a global political pandemic. Centring the recent UK Supreme Court’s 2025 Equality Act ruling and connecting it to similar examples across the world, we demonstrate how biopower operates through social movements inspired by the new authoritarianisms to establish transnational regimes of bodily control. Drawing connections between trans exclusion in the UK, USA and pronatalist policies in Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, we argue these seemingly disparate developments represent coordinated manifestations of biopolitical logic reducing human worth to reproductive capacity. Authoritarian innovation threatens and destroys modest progress towards human rights for vulnerable groups. ‘Gender-critical’ activism, despite protection claims, functions within a broader masculinist restoration project threatening collective prosperity by constraining human potential and re-centring white, male, and cis supremacy. The purported ‘safety’ of cisgender categorization creates a hell of rigid taxonomies undermining human flourishing across the gender spectrum, necessitating a radical reimagining of gender justice as essential to global prosperity through participative co-design processes inherent in new social movements theory focusing on social identity, human potential, and affect.

ABSTRACT Reactionary discourses are maintained by a characteristic refusal of ambiguity, contingency, and uncertainty. While rhetorical criticism is a valid means of approaching these discourses, they are structured by key signifiers that are understood in anti-rhetorical terms by their users and interpreted as non-arbitrary indicators of hidden truth. This article proposes the notion of atropic or anti-rhetorical devices and analyzes the role of bone as an example in White supremacist, incel, and anti-trans communities. Attention to anti-rhetorical strategies of reading may offer conceptual clarity to the study of far-right discourses and clarify the potential of rhetoric to disrupt them when understood as a mode of engagement with the world that exceeds its battery of specific techniques.

ABSTRACT Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) is shaped by historical legacies of racism and white supremacy that continue to structure pedagogical norms, curricular priorities, and professional expectations. These legacies are often reproduced through developmentalist and ostensibly neutral approaches that obscure power, normalize anti-Blackness, and reinforce deficit-based narratives of children, families, and educators. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and counternarrative methodology, this article presents counterstories from our experiences as Asian American (AA) women teacher educators working across community college and university contexts. We analyze our pedagogical practices alongside student reflections, course artifacts, and institutional interactions to examine how justice-centered teaching is enacted, constrained, and contested within ECTE. Our analysis identifies three intersecting areas of pedagogical disruption: (1) cultivating relational and collective care cultures, (2) redistributing power through assessment and participation practices, and (3) naming and addressing racialized and oppressive realities through critical engagement, imagination, and action. Together, these disruptions challenge dominant Eurocentric logics and unsettle claims of neutrality in teacher education. By centering students’ lived experiences, community knowledge, and cultural wealth, this study demonstrates how counterstorytelling and justice-centered pedagogy can function as sites of resistance, possibility, and collective responsibility for systemic transformation in ECTE.

The inception of Jamaica’s education system was built based on European settler colonial ideologies and White supremacist logic. Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery and over six decades after independence from British rule, colonial vestiges pervade Jamaican education policy and practice, resulting in the continued marginalisation of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Despite the commissioning of multiple reports on the state of the education system, these racist and classist injustices persist. In this article, we examine social justice issues at the nexus of national education policy and school leadership practice in Jamaican public schools based on our reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with two Jamaican education policymakers, five education researchers and four public school leaders, alongside Jamaica’s National Student Dress and Grooming Policy Guidelines 2018. Our findings highlight a hierarchical relationship among stakeholder groups in the creation and implementation of Jamaican education policy. Our findings also highlight four themes suggesting that this results from deeply ingrained valorisation of Eurocentric values in policy design that leads to heightened tensions between the Ministry of Education and Youth (MOEY) and school administrators at the level of policy implementation, distraction of school staff from teaching and learning, and disproportionate exclusion of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Implications from our study are the need for stronger cohesion among education policy stakeholders, the incorporation of social justice in teacher and leader preparation and the integration of critical pedagogies at all levels of the Jamaican education system.

ABSTRACT This article draws upon the experiences of three members of an Anti-Racist Task Force (ARTF) at a predominantly white university (PWI) in the Midwest. The group was conceived as a space where selected faculty members would think deeply about and respond to the racial and social unrest that overtook the United States in the summer of 2020 and identify ways the unrest brought to light the university’s role in turning away from anti-racist practices instead of embracing them. Police murders of unarmed Black people made trauma associated with white police officers and Black people in the U.S. even more apparent. Coupled with this was the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the isolation of all people, making it difficult to engage with others. The article shares relevant reflections on the potential and difficulties of anti-racist work; offers ways faculty at other institutions can strive to dismantle white supremacy in higher education educational spaces; and bestows practical strategies for engaging in anti-racist advocacy on behalf of university faculty. Implications and limitations of this labor are also recognized.

Most jurisdictions formerly ruled from London as the British West Indies (BWI) are unimportant for offshore tax planning and offshore money creation, despite sharing traits conventionally associated with tax havens. Why have only some former BWI colonies become attractive locations for the main offshore activities while most others have not? We argue that soil fertility ultimately explains this variance. Settlers created plantation economies on islands with good soils and maritime economies on islands with bad soils. Plantation economies were profitable enough for income taxes. Maritime economies relied on subsistence farming and fishing, therefore lacking the required tax base. Plantation economies, moreover, experienced the horizontal mobilization of racialized laborers, whereas maritime economies were shaped by patron-client relationships. Plantation economies, therefore, democratized earlier than maritime economies, where white oligarchies prevailed. When the Suez crisis increased demand for offshore activities, the maritime economies thus combined no income taxes with white supremacy, conveying political stability to Western professionals and asset holders. Hence, offshore activities grew faster in maritime than in plantation economies during the 1960s, a divergence that has persisted because of agglomeration effects. We use Comparative Historical Analysis, combining statistical matching with process tracing, to probe the plausibility of our causal sequential argument.

This article discusses the unanticipated, but not unexpected, prevalence of racism in response to a post made on Facebook seeking participants for a study about the coronial jurisdiction. A critical understanding of the coronial jurisdiction is presented here, with a focus on the racism encountered online when seeking participants for the study. Facebook was used as a primary data source and recruitment tool due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions. A microcosm emerged in response to the Facebook post, unintentionally providing a space for white Australia to interrogate and assert who belongs and who does not, and revealing tropes of criminalisation and white supremacy.

ABSTRACT This introduction discusses the mechanisms of racialization, resistance, and white supremacy in education and outlines our approach to critical anti-racist praxis as rooted in the lived experiences, knowledges, insights, and practices of racialised groups and individuals. We then present the contributions in this special issue that engage with critical and interdisciplinary perspectives to expand the conversation on critical anti-racist research and praxis in education.

ABSTRACT Racial realism is an ideological stance and a mind-set or philosophy substantiating the permanence of racism in U.S. society. It originates from critical race theory. It incriminates white supremacy. It eviscerates racial progress narratives. Yet racial realism simultaneously offers Blacks strategies to achieve fulfillment and even triumph. With nationally representative data from the 2008–2009 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES08-Online) panel survey, we investigate racial realism’s prevalence and predictors. Specifically, we create a proxy measure of racial realism using Blacks’ perceptions of race relations before versus after Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election, which most Blacks (and whites) interpreted as indicating white supremacy’s decline. We next construct a profile of racial realists using (1) social location variables, (2) a feeling thermometer rating of Barack Obama, (3) a summary score capturing Blacks’ awareness of white stereotypes, and (4) Black solidarity variables. We estimate 30 percent of Black adults are potential racial realists. We find racial realists are aware of white stereotypes, supportive of racial and economic uplift, and likely to feel linked fate.

In his Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation, Edward Robert McClelland has written an engaging and enlivening narrative of the political rivalry between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. McClelland relates the oft-told story well and draws on period newspapers, excellent source material typically neglected, to flesh out the political combat, beginning his narrative in 1858 on the cusp of the seven debates, following with the little-known Ohio campaign of 1859 in which both Lincoln and Douglas parachuted in for speeches and rallies while not facing each other, then the campaign of 1860 and secession winter and war. A perceptive chronicler, McClelland offers a compelling portrait of two political titans at the height of their powers competing as the country's nihilistic Southern white supremacists plunged it into a destructive civil war.McClelland placed great emphasis on Douglas's efforts to stave off disunion from October 1860, when the first state elections revealed he would lose the presidential contest, to his death in June 1861. We follow Douglas over secession winter as he tries to broker a last-minute compromise with aged former Whig John J. Crittenden, the man who betrayed Lincoln in the 1858 Senate contest by endorsing Douglas and thereby greatly helping him carry the Old Whig swing vote in the center of the state. Douglas's behavior in this period is characterized as noble compared to recent presidents (i.e., Donald Trump) who refused to accept defeat. Yet while Douglas's conduct in what were, unbeknownst to him, the last months of his life is deserving of praise, that approbation must be tempered by his repeated rash and poor decisions and perpetual race baiting. Douglas started the sectional crisis that ended in war with his incredibly unfortunate 1854 decision to repeal the Missouri Compromise restriction on the expansion of slavery. That legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, splintered the Democratic Party, strengthened its increasingly extremist Southern faction, created an anti-Nebraska coalition that matured into a sectional political organization, the Republican Party, and prompted a mini civil war in Kansas, a bloodletting that further radicalized the abolitionist John Brown and set him on a path to the Harpers Ferry Raid. Compounding his legislative disaster, Douglas smeared the new political party as the Black Republican Party, publicly dismissed the natural rights affirmations of the Declaration of Independence, excluding Black Americans, and creating an image of the Republicans and of Lincoln as favoring Black social and political equality, a depiction that was never true. In his 1858 debates with Lincoln, described here, Douglas used the most vulgar racist language to tie Lincoln to the abolition movement and play to the lowest sentiments of whites in anti-Black Illinois. Yet McClelland implausibly argued that Douglas was never personal in the contest. “Throughout the campaign, he (Douglas) was much more likely to compliment Lincoln, both on the stump and in person, than vice versa” (p. 39), McClelland wrote. Douglas also called Lincoln a drunken ruffian, a gambler, a traitor for his criticism of the Mexican War, and an abolitionist. Even during the secession winter, while pursuing compromise in the one honorable moment of his life, Douglas struggled to rein in his partisan invective, blaming the Republicans for the sectional crisis, arguing that they purposely brought it on to destroy slavery in the South, thereby undercutting his own self-proclaimed compromise efforts. The simple truth is that even with his work in the secession winter, and his support for the Union and Lincoln after the attack on Fort Sumter, in his heart, Stephen A. Douglas remained an unrelenting partisan to the end.

ABSTRACT Asian Americans as a racial category achieve educational and socioeconomic attainments that seemingly defy traditional theories of racial disadvantage. While acknowledging the ways that the model minority stereotype reproduces meritocratic myths and justifies white supremacy, this discourse analysis focuses on uncovering the underlying ideological perspectives of second-generation Asian Americans that lead them to value and pursue academic achievement and STEM-oriented careers. Based on interviews with second-generation Asian American college students (n = 20) from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, the findings suggest that family-based ideologies concerning education and the duty and responsibility of the child figure prominently in the practices and decisions of the second generation. This article concludes by offering a more nuanced and humanizing approach to understanding ethnoracial communities that considers both broader forces of racialization and internal family-based ideologies.

Black women’s mental well-being during reentry from incarceration remains critically understudied. This critical scoping review examines the extent and nature of research on Black women’s mental well-being post-incarceration, how mental well-being is conceptualized in the literature, and the methodological challenges in conducting culturally responsive research. Guided by Black Feminist/Womanist theory, Black Critical Theory, and Anti-Black Sanism, a systematic search across eight databases published between 2000 and 2022 yielded 29 studies for inclusion (18 qualitative, 9 quantitative, and 2 mixed methods). Findings reveal that research on Black women’s mental well-being during reentry remains fragmented, with limited geographic scope, narrow demographic representation, and inconsistent theoretical and methodological grounding. Many studies reduce mental well-being to pathology, emphasizing trauma, mental illness, and substance use while overlooking holistic well-being, structural determinants, and culturally grounded healing practices. Although qualitative studies captured Black women’s voices, carceral logics persist, reinforcing Western psychiatric models and deficit-based interpretations that obscure agency, joy and collective care. Measurement bias is also prevalent, with few validated mental health tools for or with Black women, and participatory research methods remain rare, marginalizing Black epistemologies and community-driven knowledge production. This review underscores the urgent need for justice-oriented research that moves beyond deficit-based frameworks to center Black voices, challenge white supremacy and gendered anti-Blackness, and advance culturally responsive, community-centered approaches to mental well-being during reentry. Reflexive, transformative methodologies that prioritizes healing, structural change, and self-determined care are essential for reimagining mental well-being beyond carceral constraints.

This article explores the work of an anti-racist book group, whose genesis stems from the 2021 British Association of Music Therapy Race Awareness Panel. The group, initially formed by white music therapists grappling with white supremacy, expanded to include Black and Brown activists, including other arts therapies. They utilised the art technique of the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) to examine racial tensions and belonging. Inspired by Layla F. Saad’s work in challenging understandings of whiteness, this article employs the cadavre exquis to express both differences and shared experiences, demonstrating that belonging is cultivated, not assumed. This Surrealist technique involving collaborative, unseen artistic contributions reflects the group’s process. Participants contribute written pieces and musical offerings in response to a central theme (Examining emergent cultural content from within and without: What’s in the room and where do I belong?), highlighting the impact of events like the murder of George Floyd and the pervasive nature of systemic racism from the viewpoints of Brown, Black, and white bodies. This collaborative approach seeks to create a space for open, honest, and sometimes painful dialogue, aiming to deepen understanding, foster connections, and promote action against racial injustice.

ABSTRACT This article explores how African Americans used wedding announcements to resist the implications of white supremacy. On the pages of Black newspapers, Black wedding announcements challenged hegemonic discourse about Black family dysfunction and Black inferiority; demonstrated Black participation in civic life; and publicized Black educational and financial advancement. In short, wedding announcements of African American unions countered negative images of Black people in American society, evoked race pride, and demonstrated Black joy throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Despite the wide interest toward the impact of antiracism or anticolonial trainings on White and settler peoples, there is a lack of consideration of the experience of racialized or Indigenous trainers. Yet, the few existing studies suggest major negative impacts: stress, emotional labor, burnout. This study explores the experience of 12 Indigenous facilitators raising awareness about colonialism in “Quebec” and the risk of negative effects on them, through participatory research, using qualitative methods and thematic analysis. The results show that the main difficulties are dealing with the participants, namely their questions, comments, emotions, and the ambivalence in navigating the power dynamic between settlers and First Peoples, expressed through various contradicting injunctions. This seems tolerable to the trainers as facing White settlers is worse in their daily lives. The workshops appear as an interpersonal reflection of settler-colonialism and White supremacy, through White and settler fragility and normalization of colonial violence.