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James Oliver Horton, 1943–2017
No full textIn October 2017, hundreds of faculty, friends, and former students gathered at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to remember James Oliver “Jim” Horton. It was a fitting gathering place. As the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, commented, Jim’s legacy is everywhere at the museum, from the fact that several of his former doctoral students are now curators to the foundational commitment of the museum itself: that African American history is not a local branch of US history but integral to its core. Jim always insisted in his lectures and classes and on his many TV appearances and public engagements that “American history is African American history.”
A Precarious Confluence: Neoliberalism, Race, and Water Insecurity
No full textThree very different field sites—First Nations communities in Canada, water charities in the Global South, and the US cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan—point to the increasing precariousness of water access for historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and people of color around the globe. This multi-sited ethnography underscores a common theme: power and racism lie deep in the core of today’s global water crisis. These cases reveal the concrete mechanisms, strategies, and interconnections that are galvanized by the economic, political, and racial projects of neoliberalism. In this sense neoliberalism is not only downsizing democracy but also creating both the material and ideological forces for a new form of discrimination in the provision of drinking water around the globe. These cases suggest that contemporary notions of environmental and social justice will largely hinge on how we come to think about water in the twenty-first century
Marginalizing Poverty with Car-Dependent Design: The Story of Two Expulsions
No full textIn the twentieth century in Nova Scotia, at least two racialized communities were forcibly expelled from their land: Black Africville residents in Halifax and the Membertou Mi’kmaw First Nation in Sydney. Differences in the long-term outcomes of the two expulsions, however, reveal critical factors in how urban design can support or frustrate poverty alleviation. While the Membertou First Nation was relocated as a whole to a centralized context where they were geographically positioned to stage an economic transformation, Africville residents were more widely dispersed, many to areas with less access to jobs and other economic opportunities.This article analyzes the urban design elements in Halifax that create barriers to prosperity for the city’s historically Black communities and low-income residents. These factors include housing displacement, the suburbanization of poverty, and a lack of access to transit and other destinations within walking distance of homes. This article proposes three policy options to address these barriers and ensure that the city offers opportunity to all residents
Concluding Remarks: Social Justice Requires Biocritical Inquiry
No full textOur debate here, among social constructionists, has pivoted precisely on the fact that social constructionists are suspicious of claims about race and genetics for reasons that are much larger than science—issues tied to the limits of language and epistemology, the influence of cultural factors on knowledge production, and the economic realities that order social life. Unjust social and political systems necessarily alter the biological lives of marginalized groups and populations. Therefore legacies of discrimination, pernicious policy decisions, and economic inequality must be framed as causal factors in the emergence of health disparities and human biodiversity more generally. Social justice requires what I term a “biocritical inquiry,” which reverses the orthodox practice of situating genes as the base, foundation, and unmoved movers of human health, behavior, and perceived racial difference. Instead, biocritical inquiry synthesizes scientific research and critical forms of humanistic inquiry that denaturalize genetic differences, revealing the social inequalities and historical legacies of violence, conflict, and discrimination that are inseparable from human biological diversity
No Ordinary Time: Indigenous Dispossession and Slavery Unwilling to Die
No full textThe contemporary coalescence of Indigenous and Black peoples as aggrieved, insurgent, and mobilized polities reflects a shared recognition of more than the private, personal, and parochial concerns of members of those groups. The enduring consequences of Indigenous dispossession and what US jurist William O. Douglas aptly described in the 1960s as “the spectacle of slavery unwilling to die” are felt harshly and directly by First Nations and Afro-diasporic people around the globe, but they harm everyone. Racialized capitalism treats the planet and most of its people as mere objects to be manipulated in the pursuit of profits and power. As the system resorts to ever more desperate and dangerous forms of domination and exploitation, aggrieved communities of color see first the very worst that it has to offer. What happens to them today will happen elsewhere tomorrow. Their insurgencies are not pleas to be granted full recognition and rights within the world as it now exists but rather insistent struggles to transform radically a society that they rightly perceive to be decadent and dying. The turmoil of our time is evidence of chickens coming home to roost, of the ways in which the patterns of the past shape the contours of both peril and possibility in the present, and of the need for the world to be at last responsible and accountable for the cumulative costs of displacement, dispossession, slavery, and segregation
Deflective Whiteness: White Rhetoric and Racial Fabrication
No full textThis article focuses on the ways that minority identity politics are co-opted, decontextualized, and used by those invested in white supremacy and white identity politics to further their own racial project in seemingly benign, everyday cross-media discourse. This pattern of discourse, which the author terms “deflective whiteness,” deflects the fear, discomfort, and aggression that those invested in white supremacy feel when confronted with systemic racism and inequity. This fear and discomfort are transposed onto individuals linked with identity-based social movements, who are then faulted for causing a social disruption. The vantage point of deflective whiteness deliberately avoids recognizing the mission or goals of the social movement, and the resulting decontextualized chastisement is categorized as “common sense.” In the process, the original protest against white supremacy and its effects is ignored and overshadowed by a colorblind critique of those invested in identity politics as weak, unpatriotic, and naïve
The ENRICH Project: Blurring the Borders between Community and the Ivory Tower
No full textIn the spring of 2012, the author agreed to direct a project on environmental racism in Nova Scotia after meeting with Dave Ron, a social and environmental activist who had been involved for some time in the Save Lincolnville Campaign, a community-led initiative for the removal of the landfill near the African Nova Scotian community of Lincolnville. Thirsty for a new challenge that had the potential to effect real change in racially marginalized communities, she understood that the significance of the project lay in its uniqueness: few, if any, studies exist that examine environmental racism in both the Indigenous and Black communities in Canada. Given the dearth of research on environmental racism in Nova Scotia, particularly from the perspectives of these two communities, the project serves as a kind of case study for telling a particular kind of story situated in the Nova Scotian context and, in many cases, in the larger Canadian context.That project, which was later titled the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health (ENRICH) Project, is a community-based academic study of the socioeconomic and health effects of environmental racism in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities. From its inception, the mission of the ENRICH Project has been to employ an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological approach that bridges the academy and community to support ongoing and new efforts by Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotian peoples to address the social, economic, political, and health effects of disproportionate pollution in their communities
When Giants Leave the Forest, the Trees Carry Their Songs: Clarence Fountain, Edwin Hawkins, Walter Hawkins, Aretha Franklin
No full textThe musical legacies of Aretha Franklin, Clarence Fountain, and Edwin and Walter Hawkins are essential subjects of study in American culture. They have in common the religious culture of Black working-class communities. Each in his or her own distinct way broke through the barriers of segregation to create music for a society “where everybody is somebody,” to borrow from the motto of Rev. James Cleveland’s Gospel Music Workshop of America. Fountain, the Hawkins brothers, and Franklin have departed, but they have left us with plenty to listen to and to learn from
The Heroin and Opioid Epidemic: Pennsylvania’s Statewide Disaster Emergency
Get PDFThe Editor’s Note provides an introduction to the opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania. It also provides an overview of the articles in issue 20:2-3
Book Reviews
Get PDFThis section includes book reviews of Timothy Weaver’s Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom by Michelle J. Atherton and Char Miller’s edited volume Gifford Pinchot: Selected Writings by Wesley Leckrone