Thinking Through Race and Racism

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious , K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most vexing problem. Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life. Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy. Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency has been widely hailed as evidence that the United States is now a post-racial society, that we have fulfilled Dr. King’s dream that his children would one day be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Yet such claims evade the questions of what post-racialism actually is, what it would look like, and how we would know if it were really here. Moreover, the assertion that Dr. King’s dream was that race would never be mentioned rather than that racial justice would become a reality is a perverse distortion of his statements and beliefs. This article challenges the claims of post-racialism by imagining how Dr. King would respond to the celebration of post-racialism if he could be here to see and hear it. Recalling Dr. King’s claim at the March on Washington in 1963 that the “promissory note” issued by the United States pledging full citizenship and freedom for Black people had come back marked “insufficient funds,” this article imagines Dr. King viewing post-racialism as a form of bankruptcy that allows the nation to forever default on its promises. Recalling Dr. King’s exact words from the 1960s and imagining how he would reiterate them today leads to a critique of color blindness as an evasion rather than an achievement, a recipe for disaster because it presents one of our nation’s most serious problems as something that cannot even be named, much less solved.

Reviewed by: The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s Diane Batts Morrow The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. By Amy L. Koehlinger. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. x, 304. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-67402-473-1.) In this innovative study,Amy Koehlinger combines the methodologies of history and anthropology to examine how "in just a few short years sisters had transformed themselves from virtual inmates of their own religious institutions into public activists agitating for the liberation of others" (p. 2). In the 1950s Pope Pius XII urged sisterhoods worldwide to modernize and streamline their rules to improve their relevance and effectiveness in their apostolates. The Sister Formation Conference within the United States emphasized expanding educational opportunities for sisters. These prefatory reform efforts prepared American sisters to capitalize on the unique opportunities that the historic confluence of the Second Vatican Council, the civil rights movement, and the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty presented them to engage the world in transformative ways. Koehlinger identifies the Department of Educational Services (DES) of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) as the primary agency responsible for implementing racial-justice programs for the sisters and facilitating their placement in specific projects. The DES focused on racial justice between 1965 and 1968. She argues that by 1972, clerical opposition to the sisters' apostolic innovations preoccupied the DES, which "simply and gradually shifted its focus away from racial justice in American society and toward gendered oppression within the Church and by extension, away from African Americans and back toward sisters themselves" (p. 121). Koehlinger's efforts to obfuscate the racial identity of the new nuns pose a problem. Her use of such phrases as "the inconclusive race of sisters in [End Page 611] Selma" (p. 154),"Sisters' sense of nonwhiteness" (p. 155),"racial passing" (p. 157), and her bold assertion that "[n]either white nor black, ... sisters then constituted a third racial category, the category of 'sistah'" (p. 239) prove unpersuasive. Was the sisters' actual racial identity in question or their experience of their whiteness? What did it mean for the sisters to say,"For all practical purposes we are 'Negroes' living in a Negro community"? Were these sisters truly "no longer entitled to privileges attached to whiteness in a racist society" (p. 156)? The very fact that they could register to vote despite harassment meant that southern voting officials recognized their whiteness. In significant ways, the epiphanies the sisters had in the racial apostolate and subsequently applied to their internal religious reforms post-Vatican II replicated the epiphanies a century earlier that antebellum white women abolitionists fighting slavery had had and then applied to their own legal and economic restrictions as women in American society. The racial apostolate had long historical roots. Indeed, several white sisterhoods throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had engaged in catechizing and educating black pupils, both briefly and long-term. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had ministered to black and Indian peoples exclusively since 1891. Koehlinger cites Blessed Sacrament Sister June Fisher's frank statement of the preferred traits that historically black Xavier University in New Orleans sought in a prospective staff member in 1969. Fisher's enumeration eloquently attested the capacity of white sisters to identify effectively with African Americans, an example that eludes Koehlinger, who inexplicably identifies the Blessed Sacrament Sisters erroneously as "an African American congregation of women religious" (p. 226). Situating her treatment of women religious engaged in the racial apostolate in the 1960s more accurately within its historical context would have enhanced Koehlinger's portrayal of the new nuns. Nevertheless, in this otherwise thoughtful and elucidating study, Koehlinger poignantly chronicles the frustrations, tensions, and triumphs the new nuns experienced as they negotiated tortuous paths between their own moral imperatives toward racial justice and the recalcitrance and opposition of racist laity, clergy, and even other sisters. Diane Batts Morrow University of Georgia Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Individual and systemic racism are pervasive in K-12 schools in the United States and threaten the well-being of Students of Color. Understanding the extent to which school psychology research has examined students’ perceptions of individual and systemic racism in schools is critical for advancing the field’s antiracist scholarship and practice. The present review systematically evaluated empirical articles published in eleven major school psychology journals between 2011 and 2021 that focused on K-12 students’ perceptions of individual and systemic racism. Twenty studies met criteria for inclusion and examined racism in relation to: (a) interpersonal relationships; (b) mental health and psychological outcomes; (c) academic outcomes; (d) school climate; and (e) behavioral outcomes. A majority of these studies included racially/ethnically diverse students (n = 6; 30%) or exclusively Black/African American students (n = 7; 35%) in their samples. Most used quantitative methods (n = 16; 80%), whereas relatively few employed qualitative methods (n = 4; 20%). These findings suggest the presence of a foundational yet developing literature on students’ perceptions of racism in schools. Implications for school psychology practitioners and researchers in furthering antiracist efforts are discussed.

Disparities in autism research and practices based on race and ethnicity are evident across many outcomes and life course stages. However, most of the research has focused on outlining differences and not the underlying systemic inequities driving these disparities. In this conceptual paper, we aim to shift the focus by outlining mechanisms of structural racism within the institutions of science, healthcare, and residential segregation and educational systems in the United States (U.S.). We argue that these and other forms of institutional racism constitute structural racism that are influencing the racial and ethnic disparities we see in autism services and care. For each of these institutions, we identify institutional racism related to autism and offer an example of how it shapes interpersonal racism and adverse outcomes, including misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, unequal access to educational services, and differential treatment in clinical encounters. We then provide anti-racism approaches in autism research and practice for each of these institutions that addresses institutional and interpersonal racism shaping autism inequities among racial and ethnic minorities. We conclude with a call to action to clinicians, researchers, and others to prioritize and disrupt the impacts of structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism through targeted anti-racism approaches.

The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War. Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. 360 pp. $39.95 hbk.One of the most fruitful recent developments in the study of the civil rights era in the United States has been what might be called the global turn. Beginning with Mary Dudziak's 2000 book Cold War Civil Rights, new scholarship has increasingly viewed the postwar struggle over racial equality as an international story, necessarily examined in the context of the global cold war and the emergence of new nation-states in the postcolonial era. Seen in this broad perspective, the course of the American civil rights movement was significantly affected by the propaganda war between the United States and its communist adversaries as both sides sought prestige and influence among the nonaligned states in what were then called the third world. The American problem gave a significant propaganda advantage to its enemies. How could lynching, legal segregation, and the everyday humiliation of racial minorities take place in a nation that cast itself as a model of freedom and democracy?Scholars have long noted that racial inequality, especially when it turned violent, was America's greatest embarrassment on the global stage. The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War, by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, is a far-reaching study of the role of the press as the forum in which these contentious issues played out. Lentz, a longtime journalism educator, and Gower, who teaches at the University of Alabama, have unearthed a great number of examples from foreign newspapers that clearly show how negative stories about race relations tarnished the American image, which is not entirely new.What is immensely useful with this book, however, is the authors' examination of the extensive efforts undertaken by the U.S. government to monitor, in hopes of countering, this negative international publicity. To some degree, this was reported in the American press. News magazines, for example, used to run articles on how the foreign press reported on stories about race relations. Much more evidence is drawn from the files of State Department foreign service officers and diplomats, who paid attention to the local press in their region and reported back to Washington on the way news about the United States was handled. Lentz and Gower have also unearthed records from organizations like the United States Information Agency and United States Information Service, which made more formal and systematic efforts to track and analyze press reports from overseas. This information was used to determine what kind of propaganda response, whether in the form of media messages or publicity tours by American jazz musicians, should be undertaken in response.The heart of the book is arranged in a roughly chronological manner, with chapters detailing foreign press response to incidents like the response to the Brown decision, the Emmett Till murder and subsequent trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Crisis, the Freedom Rides, and the riots in Watts, among others. …

In mainstream US sporting discourse, the contributions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans are often ignored or underappreciated, whether as participants, fans, or journalists. In this work, José M. Alamillo examines the multidirectional development of the Mexican diasporic sporting culture that permeated both sides of the US-Mexico border in the first half of the twentieth century and continues to wield a significant impact on US sporting culture today.Deportes centers on the transnational development of Mexican sporting culture in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Alamillo focuses on the Mexican diaspora, also known in some intellectual circles as “Greater Mexico,” and how “Mexican origin” (3) athletes made use of their transnational networks to assert their dignity and place in a US society that often rejected and othered them as “brown.” These connections were bidirectional, however, as the Mexican government realized the potential of reaching out to México de afuera to develop the sports culture within Mexico. In the introduction, Alamillo clearly lays out his five foci, which include the role of US imperialism in creating a Mexican diaspora, the ways in which sports engendered solidarity and pathways to political power for ethnic Mexicans, the importance of understanding the role of the “brown” racial category within US sporting discourse, the impact of gender, and how hybridity helped create a Mexican diasporic sporting identity in the United States. Furthermore, Alamillo argues that the creation of Mexican American and Mexican identities in the United States were “simultaneous rather than sequential” (10).To substantiate his argument, Alamillo relies on meticulous research framed by a thorough investigation of the scholarly literature on Mexican sport, Mexican American sport and politics, US racial relations, and diaspora and identity. In addition, he has scoured several English- and Spanish-language periodicals from the United States and Mexico and employs archival evidence from the US National Archives and Records Administration, the Mexican Archivo General de la Nación, as well as smaller archives and private collections. This myriad of evidence results in a nuanced analysis that incorporates several perspectives on the creation of a Mexican sporting diaspora.Alamillo documents this process through an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter centers on the development of “modern” sporting culture in Mexico and the use of sport to “Americanize” “problematic” Mexican immigrants up to the 1920s, with a particular focus on the YMCA and the Spanish-language press in both the United States and Mexico. The second chapter focuses on boxing in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the exploits of Bert Colima, Baby Arizmendi, and Rodolfo Casanova. The immigration issues the latter two encountered provide a completely new understanding of how race impacted ethnic Mexican sporting celebrity in the 1930s. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of a hybrid baseball culture among ethnic Mexicans in the 1920s and 1930s that included attempts to create cross-border solidarity and highlights women's agency through creating their own baseball teams. Chapters 4 and 5 both examine transnational outreach by governmental agencies, with the former analyzing attempts by the Mexican government to build a relationship with the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California in the 1930s and early 1940s and the latter centering on the US Office of Inter-American Affairs’ efforts to promote sports like American football in Mexico in the 1940s. Chapter 6 examines Mexican American efforts to battle juvenile delinquency, build diasporic ties, and frame a civil rights agenda through sport during and after World War II.The strengths of this book are its thorough research, clear organization, accessible writing style, and balanced approach to the topic at hand. As a result, it offers a picture of Mexican diasporic sporting culture that incorporates the perspectives of sporting bureaucrats, political leaders, celebrity athletes, and lesser-known athletes, including women and youth. The analysis is further infused with a personal touch, as each chapter begins with a biography of a Mexican-origin sports figure or a personal anecdote, such as the author's experiences betting on boxing matches with his family or living through Fernandomania (the hoopla surrounding the exploits of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela) in the early 1980s. These stories provide some background as to how the author can wade through Mexican American and Mexican historical processes so effortlessly. In addition, he draws special attention to women's participation, particularly in baseball and boxing, portraying them as active agents even if they faced significant racial and gender discrimination.Deportes is the product of an experienced and impassioned historian in tune with current trends in sport historiography. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sport, Mexican, Chicanx/Latinx, or US history and would work well if assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses on those subjects.

This article examines employee perceptions of the implementation of a local authority race equality plan in the United Kingdom. It explores the way in which the changed landscape of local authorities in the 1990s affected the implementation of race equality policies. We seek to shed light on black and ethnic minority people’s experiences of their treatment within organizations in the context of the appearance of ‘institutional racism’ on the UK public agenda. We do so whilst recognizing the complex interplay of race and gender in perceptions and experiences of organizational inequalities. The analysis focuses on employee perceptions of the culture of the authority and of the performance, ownership and efficacy of the race equality plan. The article highlights the importance of exploring and understanding workforce perceptions of equal opportunities policies.

This article examines the ways in which race relations and foreign affairs intersected for the United States between 1945 and 1952. It draws on an array of archival and other primary as well as secondary sources to focus on the manner in which the Truman administration responded to pressures for racial reform both in the international sphere (decolonization) and in the domestic sphere (civil rights organizing). It finds that the segregationist backgrounds of elite American policy makers were a crucial element in official U.S. policies regarding civil rights and decolonization. It places postwar struggles over segregation and racial equality at home in the context of similar global struggles. And it argues that there was a surprising malleability to the concept of “race” and to racial designations in these years. It concludes that much, but not all, changed along the color line in the Truman years.

The period between mid-June and mid-July 1971 constituted a perfect storm of consequential events. On June 13, the New York Times brought to light a top secret Department of Defense study of the origins of a war that was still raging in Vietnam and that was ripping apart American society. The leak of the Pentagon Papers led to the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States, which an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who is interviewed in this documentary calls the most important First Amendment case in the nation's history. That is an exaggeration, but the 6-3 decision to lift injunctions against the New York Times and the Washington Post was surely the most significant Supreme Court opinion ever to define the scope of freedom of the press. Thus stymied by the judicial branch of government, the executive branch quickly proceeded to give dirty politics a bad name,...

Mixed Messages: Doing Race in the Color-Blind Era - D.L. Brunsma. Shifting Color Lines. Defining Race: Comparative Perspectives - F.J. Davis. Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States? - E. Bonilla-Silva and D.E. Embrick. Racial Justice in a Black/Nonblack Society - G. Yancey. Carving Out a Middle Ground: The Case of Hawai'i - J. Moniz and P. Spickard. New Racial Identities, Old Arguments: Continuing Biological Reification - R. Spencer. Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice? - C.A. Gallagher. Racism, Whitespace, and the Rise of the Neo-Mulattos - H.D. Horton. Manipulating Identities. Race, Multiraciality, and the Neoconservative Agenda - G.R. Daniel and J.M. Castaneda-Liles. White Separatists Define Multiracial - A.L. Ferber. Defining Racism to Achieve Goals: The and Black Reparations Movements - J.E. Foster. Selling Mixedness: Marketing with Identities - K.M. DaCosta. Socialization in Families. It All Starts at Home: Racial Socialization in Families - K.A. Rockquemore et al. Racial Logics and (Trans)Racial Identities: A View from Britain - F.W. Twine. Black and White: Family Opposition to Becoming - E.C. Childs. Dilemmas of Identity. Negotiating Racial Identity in Social Interactions - R.L. Lewis and K. Bell. Black/White Friendships in a Color-Blind Society - K. Korgen and E. O'Brien. Black and Latino: Dominican Americans Negotiate Racial Worlds - B. Bailey. Finding a Home: Housing the Color Line - H. Dalmage. Confronting Racism in the Therapist's Office - K. Owusu-Bempah. Culture and Identity in Mixed-Race Women's Lives - D. Storrs.

Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means to eliminating future racial inequity—its central objective—by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students. Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind mind-set, as opposed to a value-diversity mind-set, were actually less likely both to detect overt instances of racial discrimination and to describe such events in a manner that would prompt intervention by certified teachers. Institutional messages of color blindness may therefore artificially depress formal reporting of racial injustice. Color-blind messages may thus appear to function effectively on the surface even as they allow explicit forms of bias to persist.

Settler Societies, Open Societies, and Colonialism Matthew L. Basso (bio) David Hackett Fischer. Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 656 pp. Appendix, notes, maps, illustrations, and index. $34.95. During the presidency of George W. Bush, it was commonplace for politically progressive Americans to claim that, if things got bad enough in the United States, they were going to move to New Zealand. Although usually unmentioned, New Zealand’s attractiveness to would-be expats stemmed first and foremost from linguistic and cultural similarities rooted in both countries’ British colonial pasts. It was, however, the perceived differences between the two that were crucial to the public face of this comparison. New Zealand did not fancy itself an imperial power. Its race relations were considered superior, as were its attitudes toward the environment. It had a low crime rate and tight regulation of guns. Conservative religious values did not overly influence its centrist, if not left-leaning politics, which were manifested by a national health system. Although much of this is true of Canada too, New Zealand, in addition, has that well-publicized Lord of the Rings landscape. If New Zealand occupying this particular place in the imagination of some Americans is relatively new, the interest in comparing the two nations is much older. For well over a hundred years pundits and intellectuals have been writing about the relative merits of the two countries; but none has considered the question to the extent that David Hackett Fischer does in his latest book, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies. Over more than 600 pages, Fischer shows that, far from just interesting cocktail talk, putting the two countries side-by-side reveals facets of their history that often lay in the shadows. For Fischer there is a second payoff to the comparison: it also sheds light on the operation and possible trajectories of open societies, the social and political system first described by Henri Bergson and elaborated on by Karl Popper, which increasingly defines nations around the globe. Fischer’s basic argument is that “fairness” is the overriding characteristic of New Zealand, “freedom” that of the United States, and that the reason two seemingly similar open societies have followed these different guiding [End Page 36] principles can be found in their histories. Fairness and Freedom elaborates extensively on these points, and in so doing provides a wide-ranging history of both nations. It is the sort of deeply researched, highly erudite, and eminently readable work of scholarship that we have come to expect of Fischer. However, because it raises but fails to adequately address important questions about the intertwined and multivalent aspects of fairness and freedom, the complex character and history of both countries and the transnational Pacific connections that link them, and the place of colonialism in these two open societies, it is ultimately a frustrating book. Fairness and Freedom consists of an introduction, conclusion, and thirteen chapters broken up into three sections—“Origins of Open Societies,” “Nation Building as Open Processes,” and “Open Societies in World Affairs.” In a helpful introduction, Fischer examines the language of fairness across English-speaking countries, one of the numerous places where this book offers unexpected rewards. (He does not provide an equally nuanced treatment of “freedom,” perhaps because he published a book on the concepts of freedom and liberty in U.S. history not long ago.) A variety of evidence, including the remarkable number of terms New Zealanders use to delineate types of fairness and unfairness, like “fair dinkum” and, intriguingly, “yankee grab,” suggest the importance of the concept (p. 14). However, although they share an affinity for fairness, Fischer notes that what it means to put it into practice is and has been a point of contention. Some New Zealanders put “fairness to the individual first” (p. 8), while others had a collectivist ideal. New Zealand feminists argued that fairness had to apply to employment, whereas business leaders held “a true concern about equity must emphasise individual freedom and opportunity” (p. 9). Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, critiqued the application of the idea of fairness...

In recent years, there has developed in the United States a substantial and growing interest in the role of religion in the public square. Within religious communities, the conversation has, at times, focused on the approach of specific religious traditions toward their own responsibilities to contribute to and influence the moral, ethical, and legal standards of American society. For Jewish communities living in the United States, these questions comprise yet another application of issues the Jewish people has confronted throughout its history. To the extent that the nature of American political and social structures differ significantly from those experienced by Jewish communities in the past, the questions themselves may need to be particularized and considered in the context of newly developed conceptual frameworks. Levine shows that the broader questions regarding the responsibilities of the Jewish people toward the public square, including obligations to influence law and public policy, represent concerns that date back to the very origins of the Jewish nation, and continues throughout the Bible. Toward that end, he provides a brief survey of several important stages in the biblical history of the Jewish nation. It begins with the figure of Abraham, founder and father of that nation, then turns to the nation's slavery in, and Exodus from, Egypt, continues with the Revelation at Sinai and the resulting establishment of a sovereign and independent government in the Land of Israel, and concludes with a look at the nation in exile in the Book of Esther. Levine suggests that in each of these settings, though in different ways, Jewish leaders and communities acknowledged and successfully confronted the challenges of maintaining their own unique identity while concomitantly engaging and involving themselves in the interests of the societies surrounding them. For Jewish communities in the United States, the biblical teachings continue to offer important lessons. Contemporary American law and society provide a degree of freedom and personal autonomy that is likely unprecedented among the seemingly countless nations and generations in which the Jewish people have lived in exile. On one level, increased freedom brings increased opportunities for engagement in and potential influence on public policy. Nevertheless, increased involvement in the political arena carries the potential for increased challenges to maintaining the Jewish people's distinct spiritual and ethical integrity. Levine concludes that participation in the public square, however necessary and noble, must always be coupled with careful adherence to abiding moral virtues and values.

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship