Racism in the US Collection
As a taster of our publishing in this field, we've compiled a selection of articles and chapters exploring contemporary racism, structural and institutional discrimination, whiteness, shame and othering, as well as the intersection of migration and race in the US. To access more content from our subject collections, consider asking your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Racism in the US Collection
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Few topics in education have dominated the news since 2021 as much as efforts to ban critical race theory (CRT) from public schools in the United States. The larger problem is the widespread effort to impede public education, stifling students’ opportunities to think critically about our nation’s history and denying them their right to a complete education. In September 2020, after protests over the police killing of George Floyd prompted new conversations about structural racism in the US, the Trump administration issued a memo to federal agencies directing them to identify and cancel any staff trainings that focused on CRT or “White privilege.” Weeks later, President Trump issued Executive Order 13950, prohibiting federal agencies and recipients of federal funding from teaching “divisive concepts,” including the idea that the US is “fundamentally racist or sexist.” Trump’s focus on CRT likely originated with a 2020 Fox News interview of Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative scholar, who warned of the “cult indoctrination” of CRT and the “danger and destruction it can wreak”; Rufo helped draft the Executive Order. Conservative think tanks, thought leaders, media figures, and politicians operationalized and conflated “divisive concepts” to mean “CRT”—a college-level analytical framework rarely taught in K-12 schools that examines how race and racism intersect with other forms of social identity, power, and oppression. The theory, which emerged in the mid-1980s in American law schools, holds that racism is not simply expressed on a microlevel but, rather, is deeply rooted in the nation’s laws, policies, regulations, and institutions.
This article aims to explore the appeal of racist narratives and how they are used in populist politics to manipulate and exploit, leading to a rise in xenophobia and race hate crimes. Beneath the surface of the rhetoric is a predictable constellation of thoughts and feelings that create a racist imagination whose emotional atmosphere is melancholic and potentially murderous. The entangling of grief with racism is exploited through political messaging which aims to create false narratives of hope that attempt to bring to life a regressive fantasy of a return to an idealised past, into the material reality of the present by racialising others and treating them with impunity. I consider the extent to which we can learn about the challenges of engaging with these forces by turning to the experience of working clinically with these states of mind to translate a psychoanalytic sensibility to the political, one that is sensitive to the complexity and conflation of race, class and biography.
This chapter summarizes gentrification, settler colonialism, and Whiteness literature by focusing on race, place, and space. What becomes apparent in the discussion is the importance of private property as it is tied to White children and families to achieve exclusive White futures. By focusing on private property through the lens of a wide variety of disciplines, the chapter highlights the utilization of discourses about the White child and family as tools for the extraction and hoarding of resources and the advancement of exclusionary White futures. The term gensociocide is proposed to address what housing advocates state about gentrification, that it is a form of genocide.
Chapter 3 explores the concept of ‘permanent racism’ by returning to the work of Derrick Bell, founder of Critical Race Theory. His idea of the permanence of racism is troubling, at odds with Britain’s contemporary postracial turn. CRT’s defining quality is its stark rejection of liberal models of race equality. This chapter traces CRT’s emergence from US critical legal studies, and its revisionist critique of civil rights policy. Examining these origins enables effective understanding of CRT concepts such as ‘interest convergence’, ‘contradiction closure’, ‘colourblindness’ and the critically important stabilising role of racism. Chapter 3 also discusses Bell’s satire ‘The Space Traders’, which narrativises Bell’s social analysis. Bell’s ideas are compared with those of US peers, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and also with British scholars such as Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher, whose ideas about capitalist realism have under-discussed parallels with Bell’s ‘racial realism’. Chapter 3 traces CRT’s development across fields, through offshoots such as LatCrit and QueerCrit, and its international influence: in particular its growth in Britain, which has been contested but has been important in contemporary Black and antiracist thought. This chapter establishes CRT as a framework for examining Britain’s postracial turn.
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme racist beliefs are cognitively processed before, during and after an individual is involved in the White supremacist movement. In doing so, we fill a critical gap in the literature by providing an empirical analysis of intuition. We illustrate the analytic contributions of our approach, and we conclude by drawing on our evidence to elucidate three puzzles, including: (1) why racist beliefs persist; (2) how people draw on implicit beliefs to make explicit judgements; and (3) how explicit beliefs become encoded in intuitive pathways.
The demonstrations, protests, and uprisings against police internationally, and the rise of the BLM movement, are inextricably connected to police violence and deaths in custody, and especially the deaths of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour. While there is a long history to policing as the violent arm of colonialism and slavery as discussed in Chapter 2, the more recent history of the struggle against police violence arises in the global revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-imperialist struggles against the US war in Vietnam and opposition to its interventions and support for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, the anti-apartheid movement, the civil rights movements, the rise of worker’s and student’s militancy, and the women’s rights and gay rights movements, brought a generation of people into direct contact with the ferocity of state power. Police in various countries were at the forefront of often violent repression of these popular movements. The other important lesson from the resistance to police violence is that the popular movements were not simply oppositional – they were concerned with responding to the needs of communities in areas such as access to health, education, legal services, and housing, and in building solidarity across groups. Taking Australia and the US as examples, the struggle against police and state violence was central to the radical politics of the Black Panther and Indigenous liberation movements. The Chapter also explores the Black struggle against police violence in the UK and the various strategies that developed as a result. The chapter concludes that new forms of community-based organisations and resistance grew out of the activist movements which developed in opposition to police violence and racism.
The United States’ long history of structural racism, permeating all aspects of life including housing, employment and healthcare, placed American minorities at disproportionate danger from COVID-19. The combination of American racism and COVID-19 resulted not only in spikes in hate crimes and discrimination, but also the avoidable deaths of thousands of Americans. This case study reviews structural racism’s mounting death toll and culture wars and clashes in the context of the US political landscape during COVID-19.
While some individuals and non-governmental organisations moved to fill voids left by government inaction on racism and xenophobia, others actively sought to escalate racial tensions. The structural racism and social determinants of health that set the stage for the harm American minority communities endured in the pandemic’s first year and beyond remain deeply ingrained in the American cultural, political and social systems.
Racism is alive and well in many countries around the world in 2020 [the time of this writing]. Ethnic and racial discrimination and inequality seem to be endemic in our society, manifest in the revival of protests internationally supporting Black Lives Matter. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted inequality with many countries exhibiting a disproportionate number of cases in Black and minority ethnic communities as compared to White communities. In the 1970s and 1980s multicultural and anti-racist initiatives in the form of laws and guidelines were put in place to counter racism and education. By now racism should have been a thing of the past –+ but it is not. Where did we go wrong and what can be done differently now to eliminate racism? This chapter presents a case study that will focus on education, re-examining 20th-century initiatives and drawing from them the lessons that can be learned for educational settings today. It will address the role of the concept of White privilege in systemic racism and seek to draw up guidelines for eliminating racism in schools and other public services. The examples in this chapter are drawn from the US and UK. It provides one example of a case where evidence of a problem existed, and where various initiatives and strategies were adopted to address the problem. Some policies were effective, and others were not. This case study points to the importance of ensuring that all the available evidence on a topic, especially one as complicated as racism and education, is taken into account, and that approaches are evaluated as they are implemented to provide further evidence to guide policy revisions and changes.
This article emphasises the role that political leaders’ discourse plays in evoking positive emotions among citizens in uncertain times, such as feeling protected, secure and proud in addition to the leaders’ (often interconnected) role of encouraging negative feelings such as fear, resentment and anger. The article argues that such discourse frequently involves performances of gendered leadership. It cites examples from a range of countries to illustrate the points being made, but focuses on the 2020 US presidential election which saw a contest between two forms of protective masculinity: Trump’s exclusionary, macho, hypermasculinity versus Biden’s more socially inclusive, empathetic and softer version. Trump’s protective masculinity failure over managing the COVID-19 pandemic was arguably one of the factors contributing to his electoral defeat, while Biden aimed to make voters feel safer and more protected than under Trump. The article also provides examples of protective femininity, with a particular focus on the discourse of New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.
Fifty years later, Martin’s quote is still an eerily accurate description of the juvenile justice system in the United States. In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Native American juveniles are two and a half times as likely as White youth to be arrested rather than cited, Black juveniles are more than twice as likely to be arrested as are White juveniles, and Latinx juveniles are almost twice as likely. Our data—from Oklahoma City—are consistent with national levels of overrepresentation by race and ethnicity in the juvenile justice system. This overrepresentation has been relatively consistent since it was first studied. In 1970, four years before the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, Black juveniles were 2.3 times as likely as White juveniles to be arrested nationally (Racial Disparities in Youth Commitments and Arrests, 2016). In almost 50 years, we have done little to lessen the impact of disproportionate minority contact (DMC).
This book examines how structural racism dramatically impacts the lives of non-White youth through their interactions with the juvenile justice system. Specifically, we aim to answer the question: To what extent is minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system due to differential involvement/behavior (i.e., non-White youth commit crimes at a higher rate) and to what extent is minority overrepresentation attributable to differential treatment (i.e., racism/racial bias within the system)? We hypothesize that non-White youth are over-policed, with the rationalization of over-policing resting upon juvenile justice officials incorrectly overgeneralizing the high rates of violent crime among a small number of non-White youth to include all or most non-White youth.
