Category Archives: Race & Ethnicity

Read: Introduction to Ghosts of Jim Crow

Posted on by

February is drawing to a close, and we’d like to kick off the last few days of Black History Month by featuring the introduction to F. Michael Higginbotham’s forthcoming book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (NYU Press, March 2013).

In Ghosts of Jim Crow, Higginbotham persuasively challenges the notion that we’re living in a post-racial America—and offers prescriptions to heal our country’s racial inequality. But don’t just take it from us. According to Publishers Weekly, Higginbotham “contributes an indispensable perspective on an enduring ‘racial paradigm’ in contemporary American society, while insisting, with concrete proposals, that true racial equality remains within reach.” Start reading below.

Introduction to Ghosts of Jim Crow by F. Michael Higginbotham

Black History Month: “Wrong Complexion for Protection” when disasters strike

Posted on by

—Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright

In thinking about Black History Month and the great strides that have been made in the arenas of civil rights and racial equality, an immense body of work about the glaring racial disparities in employment, education, income and wealth, housing and health care comes to mind. However, far less has been written or publicized about the glaring inequities that exist in government response to natural and human-induced disasters. Decades before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, millions of African Americans learned the hard way that waiting for the government can be hazardous to their health and health of their community.

In Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Westview Press, 2009), we documented that racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed Katrina exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs.

We expanded this analysis and focus in The Wrong Complexion for Protection (NYU Press, 2012), a book that places the government response to natural and man-made disasters in historical context over the past eight decades—from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.  Here, we compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats, and natural and human-induced disasters that disproportionately affect African Americans.

Our analysis chronicles history lessons not learned, government failures, and inadequate and inequitable government response to natural and human-induced disasters and emergencies.  Our goal is to shed new light on issues of health equity, environmental and climate justice, spatial and racial vulnerability, and the government’s role in providing equal protection under the law for all Americans, without regard to race, color, national origin, or income.

Too often, African Americans have experienced slow, unequal or no response from various local, state, and federal government agencies on a range of emergencies.  This scenario has often been the rule—not the exception—as in the case of the USDA and the discriminatory treatment of black farmers and the slow and inept response by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect black landowners in Dickson, Tennessee, tagged the “poster child” for environmental racism.

The simple but urgent message of this book is equity, justice and fairness. Centuries of black exploitation, experimentation, drug testing, and forced surgeries have engendered mistrust of government, medical establishment, and biomedical research. Fairness is essential to building trust and reaching any meaningful solution to natural and human-induced disasters and for achieving sustainability and homeland security.  Fairness matters. It matters how we design and plan strategies for addressing public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents and spills, earthquakes, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and bioterrorism threats. Making disaster response equitable is a matter of civil and human rights, and in the spirit of Black History Month, we must strive for equality in the sectors which have historically excluded or otherwise exploited African Americans.

Robert D. Bullard (Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston) and Beverly Wright (founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, New Orleans) co-authored The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African Americans (NYU Press, 2012).

Beyond heroism: Rethinking Black History Month

Posted on by

—Dayo F. Gore

As we begin the annual celebration of African American achievements known as Black History Month, I am struck again by the promises and perils of this type of accounting. Initially founded in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson as Negro History Week, it was intended to rectify the exclusion of African American experiences from the national record. It has become a bonanza of lectures, luncheons, and special programing centering the black experience and, more often than not, a collective celebration of “how far we’ve come” as a people born into slavery and a nation built upon it.

Black History Month tends to highlight the most venerable leaders and singular figures in African American life and their most inspiring moments of victory. Yet the messy and complicated details of centuries of oppression and resistance, which I believe make African American experiences so imperative in the national narrative, rarely garner attention during this brief month. Instead, black heroes and heroines are appointed to stand along side white leaders and adventurers, serving as examplars of American progress and triumph.

Now I don’t want to discount the importance of this month of celebration and study, nor the crucial role of historical recovery and inclusion. It is understandable (and maybe even necessary) for Americans to hear heroic narratives about those too often marked as a suspect class and denied access to the halls of power. However, in making their voices fit the dominant narrative of triumphant democracy and progress, we diminish and distort the histories of struggle from which they emerged. Thus we are treated to the oratory power and charismatic leadership of Marin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington (with no mention of the jobs theme or political conflicts over message that shaped the event) and engage the victorious moment of Brown V. Board of Education (but with little attention to the long fought battles in the North and South to make law into reality). Too often we are reminded of the unique achievements of particular individuals, while ignoring those who held them up.

I want to encourage a different framework for Black History Month. One that still embraces historical recovery but does so by expanding our conception of “leadership” and looking beyond “victory.” I want to spotlight some of the less successful moments in the black freedom struggle, to look to less well-known leaders and indeed to those who, for all intents and purposes, failed. Paying closer attention to these experiences illuminates a rich history of struggle built on collective action, persistence, and long-term commitments to creating change.

My recent book Radicalism at the Crossroads, which uncovers the voices, intellectual work and activism of a community of black women radicals operating within New York’s black left during the height of the Cold War, embraces such an approach. In making visible the powerful but largely obscured activism of this network of women, which included well-known figures such as playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activists such as Vicki Garvin, my work joins a host of new scholarship that moves beyond heroic narratives of the black experience.

In so doing these studies demonstrate that even in complicated moments of constraint and seeming defeat, there is still much to learn and celebrate about African American life in the U.S. Perhaps if we can make these stories a larger part of Black History Month, we would all gain a better understanding of African Americans’ lived experiences. What’s more, popularizing these narratives might a spark interest in black history that last for more than just one month.

Dayo F. Gore is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego and has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (NYU Press, 2011) and co-editor (with Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard) of Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (NYU Press, 2009).

NYU Press celebrates Black History Month!

Posted on by

February marks the month-long celebration of the history, influences, and contributions of African American people and culture. To honor Black History Month this year, we’re offering 20% off some of our favorite books in African American studies and history. (Check out the full list, with discounted prices, here.)

The offer ends on February 28, 2013, but not the celebration! This spring, we’re publishing titles in African American studies that are sure to become classics. Take a sneak peek at the forthcoming books below.

In Ghosts of Jim Crow, F. Michael Higginbotham convincingly argues that America remains far away from the  imagined utopia of a post-racial society. Using history as a roadmap, Higginbotham arrives at a provocative solution for ridding the nation of Jim Crow’s ghost, suggesting that legal and political reform can successfully create a post-racial America, but only if it inspires whites and blacks to significantly alter behaviors and attitudes.

» READ: The book’s introduction.

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. In examining figures such as hip-hop artist Jay-Z, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men.

» READ: “Love in the Stacks: Some Thoughts on Black History Month” (Huffington Post)

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, renowned scholar-activist Akinyele Umoja persuasively argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation. He challenges long-held beliefs about the role of nonviolence within the civil rights movement and uncovers the hidden narratives of Mississippi’s black armed resistance groups.

» VIEW: “Dr. Akinyele Umoja On Alfred ‘Skip’ Robinson“

Stay tuned for more on these titles, and more, throughout Black History Month!

Announcing our Spring 2013 Catalog…

Posted on by

NYU Press Spring 2013 Catalog is now online, featuring an exciting range of new books in history, media studies, law, and more!

Highlights include:
TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE: Making the case for a two-party, two-person presidency, this “pipe dream of a book” presents a “novel and provocative thesis worth hearing out” (Kirkus Reviews).

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK: Marion Wesson, author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, combines drama and intrigue  with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory in this superbly imagined historical novel.

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: Charlene Mires tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in an extraordinary race to host the U.N. headquarters at a pivotal moment in history.

(You can also click here to access this catalog via our website, or find our catalogs available on Edelweiss.)

Revisiting the Emancipation Proclamation, 150 years later

Posted on by

—Kidada E. Williams

Eric Foner, in his 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Fiery Trial, described President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as one of the most misunderstood documents of American history. Many Americans hold it in the same esteem as they do the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but the actual document is rarely read and its context is far more complex. The Emancipation Proclamation will celebrate its 150th anniversary on January 1, 2013. As we approach its sesquicentennial, the time feels right to put the document and its impact into proper historical context.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military strategy for winning the war against the Confederate rebellion. By 1862, the war had been going on for longer than either the Union or the Confederacy expected. A number of Unionists concluded that taking away the Confederacy’s most valuable resource, their slaves, was the best way to cripple their ability to continue the fight. Some officials also wanted to arm enslaved black men and believed that the best way to obtain their loyalty to the Union was to free them and their families. As the chaos of war continued, the Lincoln administration searched for military solutions.

Although he was opposed to slavery, Lincoln was slow to use secession and the war to abolish slavery. He understood and respected that the Founding Fathers ensured that the Constitution protected slavery. In the face of mounting demands that he end slavery, Lincoln made clear that his paramount objective was to preserve the Union—the country established by the Patriots who rebelled against Great Britain—and not to destroy slavery.

Lincoln also knew that many white Unionists opposed increasing the size of the free black population for fear of economic and political competition. In his Second Annual Message he explained that a policy of wartime emancipation was the best way to win the war and preserve the Union. The next month, Lincoln used his power as the Commander-in-Chief during a time of armed rebellion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is important to understand what the proclamation did and did not do. It did not free all enslaved people. The proclamation did free enslaved people in states and parts of the states that were still in rebellion against the United States by January 1, 1863. That left more than 800,000 people legally enslaved.

Instead of being a panacea that destroyed slavery, the proclamation’s effect was quite limited. Confederates dismissed the proclamation, believing they could win the war and create their own slaveholding republic. Additionally, as historian James McPherson pointed out, the proclamation’s effectiveness was hindered by the fact that it could not be enforced in areas Union forces did not control militarily. The armies would not control the Confederacy until the war ends fifteen months later. In the end, the proclamation freed only some enslaved people, which is why Lincoln pushed Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment.

One under-appreciated feature of the proclamation is that it authorized the enlistment of African American men in the Union’s military forces. In 1861, when Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the Confederate rebellion, many free black men answered. Lincoln refused their offer to serve because he believed that allowing them to fight might make people think that his priorities for the war had shifted from saving the Union to abolishing slavery. Down but not defeated, some black men continued to prepare for combat. As the war continued, Union forces suffered high casualties, and Lincoln moved closer to instituting a wartime emancipation policy, the president and others conceded that they should use black men in combat; he included that provision in the proclamation, which allowed roughly 185,000 black men to serve.

Civil War-era Americans’ reactions to the proclamation were mixed. Enslaved and free African Americans as well as white abolitionists were elated. More enslaved people who learned of the proclamation and could escape their masters to find Union forces did. Confederates, however, saw the proclamation as an attack on their very way of life, and it renewed their determination to fight. The Confederate Congress and Army responded further by instituting a policy that determined that any black soldiers captured by Confederate forces could be re-enslaved, enslaved (if they were already free), or executed.

As Gary Gallagher shows, many white Unionists supported the proclamation not because they opposed slavery but because they believed that freeing Confederates’ slaves was the fastest way to win the war. However, others worried about the larger social, economic, and political ramifications of ending slavery, namely sharing the benefits of American citizenship with people who they thought were inferior.

One key to understanding the mixed reactions to the proclamation is to remember that Americans during the Civil War knew that the proclamation did not end slavery or the war. The war continued until 1865 when the Confederates surrendered and slavery continued until the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect in December of that year.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation was a military document that had significant limitations, its political implications cannot be overstated. It marked the legal beginning of Americans’ effort to redeem the nation for what many people call the “original sin of slavery” and authorized the enlistment of black men to military service. The Emancipation Proclamation stands as a symbol of American freedom and deserves its place in the nation’s memory, right alongside the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Thirteenth Amendment.

Sources: Emancipation Proclamation Map: http://www.ushistory.org/us/34a.asp.

Kidada E. Williams is Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University and the author of They Left Great Marks on Me (NYU Press, 2012). You can find her on Twitter @kidadaewilliams.

Soft soil, black grapes—and choice holiday wines

Posted on by

—Simone Cinotto

My book, Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California began while I was researching for another project on the foodways of Italian immigrants in New York, 1900-1940 (The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City, forthcoming next fall).

During my research, I began to notice that almost all of the wine and wine grapes Italian New Yorkers consumed during the early 1900s were produced and shipped through the North American continent by other Italian immigrants in California. I thus set out to discover the dynamics of this vast ethnic market. The first step was to deconstruct the popular myth—as widespread in my native Piemonte (Italy) as it was in existing scholarship—that California functioned as the ideal environment to where Northern Italian immigrants could easily transplant their traditional winemaking skills. Actually, none of these pioneers had any prior training in the business, and, lacking any significant capital, had to work their way up by transforming cheap patches of land into vineyard (this made possible by the intensive labor of their fellow contadino immigrants).

It wasn’t the “soft soil” that provided Northern Italian immigrant winemakers with a decisive edge over competitors—but instead their ability to navigate the complex racial scenario of turn-of-the-twentieth-century California. The presence of disenfranchised Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican grape workers, coupled with the discrimination Italian laborers faced at the hands of Anglo winemakers, helped these immigrant wine entrepreneurs secure a skilled and loyal labor force with low social conflict. Northern Italian immigrant winemakers were then able to present themselves in the eyes of the white elites of San Francisco and Los Angeles as the last offspring of a classic culture of wine, reliable ethnic leaders, and enthusiastic believers in the gospel of American capitalism.

Perhaps because of my difficulty in reconciling with my own past, it was only at the end of my work that I realized how autobiographical my story was. My father grew up in a small village in the Alps, not far from the French border—a place where almost all working-age men, and some women, had left in search of jobs in the coal mines of Southern Illinois, Colorado, Nevada, and California. Many had later sent for their spouses or families; some had managed to raise their own farm, cultivate grapes, and make their beloved wine in their new land.

My father was born later, in 1938. In the 1950s, he immigrated to Turin, which at the time was experiencing a population boom—mostly the influx of “dark” Southern Italians—because of the expanding auto industry. As he was educated and well read despite his social extraction, he soon landed a white-collar job with the Italian National Railroads. Yet he remained a wine drinker of the working-class kind. He bought his wine in bulk from a producer in the Monferrato region who shipped to Turin. Since he wanted to have hands-on knowledge of what he drank (decades before this became fashionable) he asked his purveyor to work for him in the picking, and the first phases of winemaking, every vintage for a few years. This meant, beginning one September when I was eight or nine, he would drag me to his friend’s place in Calosso d’Asti to  accompany him as he worked in the vineyards and cellar. Against my will, for weekends after that, I kept him company in the dark, small basement of our apartment house in Turin as he transferred the wine from the demijohns into bottles—just as thousands of the immigrant consumers I describe in my book did. I dreaded the experience, which I recall also because it was down there that I got sickly drunk for the first (and perhaps the last) time, furtively tasting the bubbling purple liquid that ran through that funny plastic hose.

As you see, I am not that nostalgic for those times. Yet to this day, the wines that my father bottled during those weekends in the early 1970s (Barbera and Dolcetto) are among my favorites, and I cannot think of wines that are more representative of the story of the people who travelled half the world to recreate their wine culture in California. The wines made from Barbera and Dolcetto grapes are the most rooted in the traditional everyday cooking of the Piemonte region (much more so than the famed, complex, and sophisticated wines of the Nebbiolo family: Barolo, Barbaresco, and Gattinara). Both Barbera and Dolcetto are wines of important character, whose flavors span from chestnuts to berries, and unique tastes reflect the different terroirs of Southern Piemonte. In fact, these grapes are truly manifestoes of the cultural and biodiversity of the region. There are important differences between the two: Dolcetto tends to be more fruity and acidic; Barbera is more tannic, ranging from sparkling light to seasoned and strong. Yet again, both wines are great with homemade egg pasta or risotto and meats—from stewed and roasted beef to pork, from frog to rabbit or snails.

I hope you might consider spending some time this holiday season reading my book and tasting some nice Barbera and Dolcetto; the two will make for an interesting and pleasurable combination. I truly wish you all fantastic holidays and much happiness.

Simone Cinotto teaches History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. He also taught at NYU as “Tiro a Segno” Visiting Professor in Italian American Studies.

Election 2012: The death of the Southern Strategy?

Posted on by

—Steven A. Ramirez

For many decades the GOP played the politics of racial divisiveness to further the cause of tax cuts, deregulation and a more limited federal government. The election of 2012 promises to end this ugly chapter in American politics. The ultimate outcome will change our political landscape in far-reaching ways.

Surprisingly, Republican leaders openly admit that their party used race to appeal to white voters (particularly in the old Confederacy) disaffected with the perceived embrace of racial equality within the Democratic Party. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips openly admitted to seeking out the votes of “negrophobe whites” in the New York Times in 1970. The Nation very recently posted the actual audio recording of Reagan Administration Official Lee Atwater articulating how the GOP implemented the Southern Strategy in sordid (and highly offensive) detail in 1981. Atwater unabashedly ties the politics of race to economic issues such as tax cuts. Two Republican National Committee Chairs actually apologized for the Southern Strategy.

In my book Lawless Capitalism, I argue that the politics of racial division led directly to the subprime debacle through massive financial deregulation beginning in the Reagan Administration. Deregulation of mortgage lending, the basic structure of globalization, and financial consolidation all find their roots in the Reagan Administration. Indeed, the fundamental explosion in American debt started in 1980. To be fair, the Democrats contributed much to the crisis too. The crisis resulted from longstanding and bipartisan policies. Nevertheless, the Southern Strategy dominated the political scene in the decades preceding the subprime debacle.

The election of 2012 may spell the end of the Southern Strategy, at least as a means of GOP success. African American and Latino voters turned out in record numbers. Asian American voters supported President Obama over Mitt Romney by 73-26, a margin that exceeds Obama’s advantage among Latino voters.

The viability of the GOP’s Southern Strategy will continue to fade. Asian Americans form the fastest growing minority group in the nation. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Research Center projects that the voting power of Hispanics will double by 2030—to nearly half of the electorate. If the Democrats continue to run candidates of color to energize this base, then these growing voting groups will constitute a formidable foundation for a durable Democratic majority. Meanwhile, the GOP base still today favors discriminatory practices, such as anti-immigration laws and legislation designed to suppress the vote of minority communities.

On issues relating to immigration, education, voting rights, the war on drugs, and many others, a fundamental change in political calculus is afoot. I contend the change may be even more monumental than such core issues. Ultimately, without the ability of governing elites to use the politics of racial division to further their interests, the very high level of economic inequality currently burdening our nation may be unsustainable.

Steven A. Ramirez is Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago, where he also directs the Business and Corporate Governance Law Center. His book, Lawless Capitalism: The Subprime Crisis and the Case for an Economic Rule of Law, will publish in December 2012.

Stop the bleeding: Prescriptions to heal racial economic inequality in America

Posted on by

—F. Michael Higginbotham

Recently, Americans elected Barack Obama as President for a second term. When Obama began his first term, economic disparities between blacks and whites were alarmingly wide. Black unemployment, poverty, and homelessness were twice that of whites. Wealth accumulation for blacks was one twentieth of what it was for whites. A similar disparity existed for Latinos/as. During the last four years, the gap widened.

It’s important to recognize that racial inequality today is a reality. There is no such place as a post racial America. While the causes of racism are more complex than they were under discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow Era, today this divide is primarily caused by choices that result in economic hardship, housing isolation, education inequity, and criminal justice stereotyping.

One choice is exemplified in the story of Tim Carter and Richard Thomas, arrested in 2004 in separate incidents three months apart in nearly the same location in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police found one rock of cocaine on Mr. Carter, who is white, and a crack pipe with cocaine residue, on Mr. Thomas, who is black.

Both men claimed drug addictions, neither had any prior felony arrests or convictions, and both men potentially faced five years in prison. Mr. Carter had his prosecution withheld, and the judge sent him to drug rehabilitation. Mr. Thomas was prosecuted, convicted and went to prison. Their only apparent difference was race.

Another choice is reflected in the pattern of property ownership and the fact that whites continue to embrace the “tipping point” notion in housing integration. “Tipping point” bigotry inspired Jeremy Parady, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy to commit arson in a series of fires in a new housing development in Southern Maryland. Parady admitted that he set fire to this development because many of the buyers were blacks and the surrounding neighborhood was mostly white.

While these disparities have been persistent, they need not be permanent. As a long term strategy, let’s equalize funding for public schools, prohibit racial profiling, eliminate laws that have a severe racially disproportionate impact, redefine our notion of racism to include negligent acts, criminalize intentional acts of racism, and increase integration in neighborhoods and schools. Such changes would go a long way to reducing current racial inequities.

For now as a start, let’s pass the American Jobs Act which contains several components that would reduce racial inequality in employment. First, the act is aimed at revitalizing and rebuilding communities where unemployment has risen most sharply, especially urban areas. Many such areas have a high percentage of black unemployment. Second, the act is aimed at neighborhoods where the foreclosure rates are highest. This includes many areas with high concentrations of blacks. Third, the act is aimed at decreasing youth unemployment by creating summer and year-round jobs for impoverished teenagers and young adults. Many of these youths are black with little chance of finding employment under current economic circumstances.

Too many Americans are hurting under this extended economic slump. Blacks and Latinos/as have been particularly hit hard with unemployment near 15%. Healing the racial divide must begin soon. Stopping the bleeding in employment discrimination must begin now.

F. Michael Higginbotham is the Wilson H. Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is the author of Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions and Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (forthcoming from NYU Press, March 2013).

For our First Black President, no more racial niceties

Posted on by

—Enid Logan

Social scientists have spent a great deal of time in recent years writing about covert racism, also known as colorblind racism, have-a-nice-day racism, or racism lite. Many of us have believed ourselves to have entered into a new racial era wherein overt racist sentiments are rarely uttered aloud, and in which the mechanisms that sustain white supremacy, though insidious and impactful, are now much more subtle and hard to pin down. But then Barack Obama ran for, and won, the presidency and Overt Racism once again reared its ugly head.

At this juncture, I believe, many scholars and non-scholars alike are trying to figure out just what is going on. How is it that in the era of racial niceties, where racial meaning is most often conveyed through “sanitized” and deracialized discourse, old style racism, overt racism, or “Archie Bunker” racism has suddenly moved from the fringes to the conservative mainstream? How is it that a moment that was supposed to represent the nation’s triumph over racism has seemingly lead to the opposite?

In the last several years, we have seen the vilest of racial imagery applied to the President, his young daughters, and his wife. Particularly visible early on was the signage at the rallies of the so-called “Tea Party” in 2009-2010. President Obama was figured variously as an African witch doctor, as Hitler, or as a white-faced Joker, with black circles around his eyes and bloody red lips. Comments about the Obamas left on the internet over the past several years have been especially vicious. And, in November 2009, it was revealed that the top ranked Google search image for Michelle Obama was a Photoshopped rendering of her as an ape. As sociologists Adia Harvey Wingfield and Joe Feagin report, in July 2009, one anonymous reader at the Free Republic—an online message board for independent, grass-roots conservatism—described 11-year old Malia Obama “as ‘a common street whore’…and went on to “wonder when she will get her first abortion.” And in March of this year, a federal judge circulated an email in which it was implied that Barack Obama had been conceived at a party during which his mother had had sex with both a black man and a dog.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Obama has faced lashes of anger and incivility directed at him from white elected officials. Consider Congressman Joe Wilson who yelled “You lie!” at Obama from the Senate floor, and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who greeted the President with a finger in the face as he arrived at a Phoenix airport. Once considered primarily to be an extremist, fringe political movement, the Tea Party itself has achieved sweeping electoral success, as a number of its candidates were elected to the U.S. Congress during the 2010 midterm elections, largely on the grounds of their fierce opposition to the President.

During his brief, fake bid for the Republican presidential nomination, business tycoon Donald Trump based his entire political platform on the clearly race-baiting ideology of “birtherism.” This is the view that Obama’s presidency is illegitimate, because his birth certificate is a fake, and that he is not a U.S. citizen. While this belief would seem to be a highly illogical and irrational one, an August 2010 poll found that 41% of Republicans and 1 in 4 Americans overall believed that the president was probably lying about his citizenship.

But perhaps the most ominous development we have seen in recent years lies in the area of voter policy. Legislatures in 41 states have introduced restrictive voter identification laws in the last year, designed expressly to limit the access to vote. Voting rights would particularly be curtailed among the young, the elderly, and non-whites—all liberal-leaning constituencies that are likely to vote for President Obama in 2012. Critics have likened these measures to the poll taxes and literacy tests that restricted African American access to the vote for seven and a half decades after the Reconstruction.

So what has happened? Was Overt Racism always already in the background, ready to reemerge at any moment, and had we just been fooling ourselves to think that it would stay there? Is this a calculated political strategy on the part of the Right, designed to inflame racial fears and drive whites to the polls on election day? Or does it represent the uncoordinated, inchoate rage of a segment of the white population that perceives itself to be imperiled by the impending “non-white” demographic takeover of the U.S.?

I believe it to be a mixture of the two. The reaction demonstrates that for all the claims that Obama is a milquetoast moderate who has brought about very little change and done almost nothing to shake up the status quo, not everyone is in agreement. The reappearance of Overt Racism in the Age of Obama tells us that white racial anxiety and anti-black hostility in the U.S., as well as an abiding investment in the U.S. as a white nation, run much, much deeper than many of us had imagined.

Obama’s victory seemed at first to portend great things for the U.S. As I have written in my recent book, from 2006 to 2008, a chorus of pundits proclaimed that Barack Obama offered redemption, absolution, and renewal to the nation, all of which was refracted through the magic of his blackness. Above all, we were told, the election of a black man as president would prove that whites had largely gotten over the issue of race, and Real Racism was now firmly in our past.  But this has been proven to be manifestly false. And let’s be clear. It was John McCain who won the majority of the white vote (56%) in 2008, and without the high turnout of the black, Latino and Asian electorate, he would have won the presidency.

Obama’s election was without a doubt a triumphal and defining moment in our nation’s history. But it was a moment that awoke the dormant T-Rex of Race, igniting a special kind of fear and loathing in the nation, aimed directly at our First Black President. If Obama wins the election in 2012, it will be despite the power of racial fears to sway some whites towards the GOP ticket. It will also be because the expanding multiracial electorate turns out for Obama in large numbers, thus helping continue our march towards an America that is red, white, blue, and brown.

Enid Logan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her book, “At this Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race was published by NYU Press in 2011.

Reflections on NYU Press book banned in Arizona

Posted on by

—Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

The rapid growth of populations of color, especially relatively young groups like Latinos, has created a number of conflicts over schools and schooling. In Arizona, a successful program of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson school system drew the ire of state authorities who deemed it un-American and biased. Its defenders countered that it greatly boosted attendance, engagement, and graduation rates for hundreds of Latino schoolchildren who made up over fifty percent of the student bodies in many schools in Arizona, and was not at all unpatriotic or divisive.

The Tucson program had increased graduation rates from below half to over ninety percent, with many of the students, most from poor families, going on to college.  Taught by charismatic young instructors, many with degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of Arizona, the program featured Latino history and culture, including works by well known author such as Rodolfo Acuna, Sandra Cisneros, Paulo Freire, Howard Zinn, and William Shakespeare. Students studied the great empires of Mesoamerica, the War with Mexico, and the colonization of Puerto Rico. They studied the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and the role of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Denver-based Corky Gonzales. They learned to play mariachi music, dance Mexican dances, and create poetry.

When Arizona authorities banned the program under a new bill (H.B. 2281) forbidding the teaching of ethnically divisive material and removed the offending textbooks to a distant book depository in front of crying students, the local Latino community exploded in indignation. A Texas community college professor organized a caravan of “libro-traficantes” (book traffickers) to smuggle “wet books” into Tucson, where they gave them away to bystanders from a taco truck borrowed for the occasion. Librarians and publishing houses across the nation donated copies of the banned books. Sympathetic Anglos wrote columns or spoke at teach-ins supporting the program.

Teachers who were fired or transferred brought a number of legal actions challenging the bill or book ban, which included works by each of the authors mentioned above, as well as our book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (NYU Press). This straightforward exposition of critical race thought had been in use in a number of the Tucson classes to explain racial dynamics in the United States. NYU proudly issued a new edition of this best-selling book in 2012 and was happy to donate copies to the beleaguered children of Tucson.

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are Professors of Law at Seattle University and have collaborated on four previous books, including The Latino Condition, Second Edition (NYU Press, 2010), The Derrick Bell Reader (NYU Press, 2005), How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds, and Understanding Words That Wound.

☞ Also, a special congratulations to @writerswriting, winner of our book giveaway of Critical Race Theory during last week’s Banned Books Week!

Chinese growth and happiness

Posted on by
—Peter N. Stearns

Recent surveys on Chinese life satisfaction provide yet another indication of the fraught relationship between modern development and overall happiness. The New York Times report by Richard Easterlin—always one of our most interesting social scientists—shows pretty clearly that stupendous growth in the overall economy and in consumption standards over the past two decades has not only not generated corresponding increases in reported satisfaction, but has actually accompanied a decline. Results plummeted as growth accelerated in the 1990s, then picked up a bit in the past few years but without recovering 1990 levels.

Happiness is a tricky thing to measure, of course, and it’s interesting that the Easterlin terminology alternates between happiness and life satisfaction, which are not necessarily exactly the same things. Comparative studies suggest that happiness is a tricky concept in East Asian cultures (in contrast to the West and Latin America), but this would not per se distort findings over time within the same culture.

It’s certainly nice to see a discussion of Chinese issues free from our common impulse to bash or gloat. This is a nervous time for mutual U.S. and Chinese perceptions, and we often distort problems in an effort to feel better—happier?—about China’s impressive surge. (Here’s a scary thought: How much has American happiness come to depend on claims we’re better than others, regardless of data?)

But the Easterlin findings do suggest a couple of further thoughts about happiness and modernity:

First, the findings are absolutely unsurprising in any historical perspective. China is still in relatively early phases of industrial maturation. I don’t think there is any record of any society in a similar phase in which happiness does not decline. Of course we lack the polling data for the past that we now enjoy, so my assertion can’t be fully proved. But the major source of outright decline in China rests among the bottom third of the population, faced with massive change including introduction to factory work conditions and encounters with urban life even as attachments to the countryside remain strong. This sounds eerily familiar to historians who have worked on Britain’s—or Germany’s, or Japan’s—industrial surge—or even the United States’s in its period of massive industrial immigration. This doesn’t detract from the Easterlin findings, or prevent us from hoping that the Chinese will more quickly figure out how to do things better. But it does remind us—regardless of our views on the benefits and drawbacks of more fully achieved modern economies—that modernization has always come with a price.

Which means that, in evaluating modernity more generally, the more interesting Easterlin finding may be the only moderate improvement in satisfaction among the upper third of the Chinese population. These folks are not facing the worst strains of the process. They are by definition more prosperous, and often more accustomed to urban conditions. Yet even they are not jumping with joy.

Easterlin concludes that the Chinese data point to the important of beefing up the safety net, to provide fuller protections for the poorer classes: more job security, better health care, more help for children and the elderly. And he uses his findings to warn Americans about tolerating too much further deterioration in our own nets. I don’t disagree, and would only add a plea for attention to environmental safety nets as well.

But there is probably more than safety nets involved, which is where the upper third comes in—and where we can also draw some lessons for ourselves. We know that, reflected in the Chinese case, a first turn to consumerism increases happiness but that the surge is often moderate and that it’s always finite: further improvements don’t help. China may be facing not only safety net issues but also broader concerns about finding value and meaning in modern life. And here, though there may be more specifically Chinese factors involved, they clearly join the modern throng.

For although modernized societies tend to be happier than nonmodern, the gap is variable and not, on the whole, as great as might be expected given standard of living gains. Here is where, along with safety net repair, Chinese and American observers unquestionably find common ground. We all need to be thinking about improving our management of modern success at both social and personal levels. We need to seize opportunities to share insights and learn from mutual experience. More and more of us, obviously, are in the modern boat together, and we can probably figure out how to steer it better.

Peter N. Stearns is Provost and University Professor at George Mason University. He is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Social History, and author of Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society (NYU Press, 2012).