Search Results (87)

This auto-theoretical essay examines the philosophical and historical underpinnings of suicide through a critical analysis of the author’s own suicide note, employing psychoanalytic theory and post-colonial critique. Through historical investigation, the author traces how the concept of suicide, coined in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne, emerged alongside new configurations of selfhood that were fundamentally shaped by colonial encounters, particularly the “discovery” of America and the rise in modern liberal thought. The analysis reveals how suicide’s conceptual structure is inextricably linked to Western modernity’s founding ruptures, where the capacity for self-destruction became a marker of Western subjectivity while being denied to colonized and enslaved peoples. The author concludes that suicide, far from being a purely personal act, is fundamentally structured by colonial history and white supremacy, functioning as a form of “white enjoyment” that attempts to resolve the metaphysical ruptures at the heart of Western consciousness. Full article

This article examines the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy politics in Western societies through the lens of status, honor, and dignity. By focusing on the political appeal of leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and others, this study argues that these leaders resonate with primarily white, male supporters who feel that their social status and cultural identity are under threat. Drawing on works by Isabel Wilkerson, Ashley Jardina, and Arlie Hochschild, this analysis highlights how anxieties surrounding demographic shifts, perceived “status loss”, and narratives of cultural displacement fuel support for authoritarian policies. It posits that contemporary right-wing movements in the US, Europe, and Latin America are less about economic grievances and more about defending a social hierarchy in which white identity is paramount. This pursuit, while objectively not the same, still mirrors struggles among historically marginalized communities, as discussed by scholars like Bhimrao Ambedkar and Gopal Guru, challenging traditional rational-choice models of political behavior. Relying on an auto-ethnographic account obtained from living in one of the US’s most conservative regions, the West Texas plains, this study suggests that authoritarianism’s appeal lies in its promise to restore a social order steeped in white male dominance, showing how feelings of honor and pride can override democratic principles and fuel political polarization. Ultimately, this article cautions that a social science approach relying solely on rational actor models risks overlooking the potent influence of status anxieties in shaping modern political landscapes, with significant implications for democracy and justice. Full article

Contrary to what other mayors had done to deal with calls to remove Confederate monuments in their cities, the first Black woman mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina appointed a 2020 commission to evaluate and make recommendations for dealing with the monument controversy. As the state’s largest city and “international gateway” to the New South, Charlotte had long wrestled with tensions over cultural memory. Utilizing a mixed methods “embedded design” case study approach, this article examines quantitative and qualitative data, including an analysis of newspaper articles from The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer, to ascertain public reaction to the commission. Results show that media accounts often framed the city’s monument controversy as reflecting the locale’s new sociodemographic reality, a euphemism for lingering conflicts in the jurisdiction over cultural memory, heritage claims, electoral representation, race, and monumentality. Full article

Christian slaveholding should not be forgotten or minimized, nor should its mythologies go unchallenged or uncritiqued. This article surveys some of the leading Southern Baptist women slaveholders and mythologizers before and after the U.S. Civil War. It examines sources of SBC hagiography about the Convention foremothers and their persistent apologia for slaveholding. In particular, it discusses how female mythologizers in the antebellum and postbellum eras linked slaveholding, evangelism, and mission identity. It demonstrates how postbellum Southern Baptist women chose to view women slaveholders as moral exemplars for their current missions. It concludes that understanding the myth-making by and about women slaveholders in Southern Baptist patriarchal society is instructive for understanding this group of American Evangelical Protestants in Christian history. Full article

In 1837, Danish philologist Carl Christian Rafn published Antiquitates Americanæ, which introduced Americans to the Vinland sagas—medieval texts that suggest that Norse explorers “discovered” North America around the turn of the first millennium. Rafn, who saw it as his mission to promote Old Norse literature around the globe, presented some of his research in a way that would appeal to Anglo-American prejudices, particularly through the obsession with American Antiquities and the question of a pre-Columbian civilization. His conclusions and the Vinland sagas consequently entered the American racial and religious discourses. Like other discovery myths, the Vinland sagas were used by intellectuals to argue for an early white presence on the continent. Later that century, the Norse discovery was framed in religious terms as some white Americans attempted to replace the figure of Christopher Columbus with that of Leifur Eiriksson as the true discoverer of America. The ramifications of Rafn’s work and its reception can be seen in twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of Vikings in American popular culture. Full article

This study examines the influence of local norm shifts driven by white supremacist ideology on hate crime reporting by US law enforcement agencies. Results show a substantial association, indicating a threefold increase in expected hate crimes reports in counties experiencing a spike in local hate group activity. Specifically, Republican vote share acts as a moderator, reducing reported hate crimes by 23% in counties with strong Republican support and right-wing hate group presence. Adjacent Republican counties also show a 13% reduction in expected reports, suggesting a spillover effect. Beyond local politics, a regional impact is evident; Northeastern counties with higher right-wing hate group presence show a 23% lower incidence rate. Using longitudinal data from the FBI UCR, SPLC, MIT Election Lab, and the US Census (2010–2020), through negative binomial regressions, this study highlights how right-wing hate groups can affect law enforcement’s enforcement of general civil rights depending on the local context. Full article

The field of sociology has largely ignored critical race theory (CRT) as a relevant theoretical and pedagogical framework for the study of white supremacy and Indigenous and Black race relations in Canada. In the United States, CRT has long been a theoretical framework tethered to and contextualizing the underpinnings of systemic racism and white supremacy as the cornerstone of structural oppression in American legal society. The initial focus of this work was to study the operationalization of the myriad ways in which race and racial power were constructed and represented in American law and society and the attendant ways in which Black civil rights under American law could never be achieved through the application of legal jurisprudence. CRT’s theoretical milieu has expanded beyond legal research to examine the sphere of racist structural oppression as systemically embedded in immigration, housing, education, employment, healthcare, and child welfare systems. The writing of this article has been an intentional active disruption to the claims that multiculturalism has the answers to race relations in an ever-changing Canadian society. While there are six main tenets of CRT, this article specifically focuses on three core tenets of CRT which argue that (1) racism is an ever-present dynamic of life in Canada; (2) racial subordination remains endemically tied to the political, cultural, and social milieu of white supremacy impacting the lives of Indigenous and Black peoples in Canada; and (3) racism has contributed to all historical and contemporary manifestations of structural oppression related to land theft and anti-Black racism. As such, CRT has much to contribute to race-radical research, pedagogy, and praxis when it comes to understanding race relations in a Canadian society grappling with an ever-changing multicultural narrative. Full article

Informed by ideas drawn from critical race theory and decolonial thought, in this paper, I mount a critique of Roy Jackson’s proposal for an Islamicate philosophical and theological contribution to the Transhumanist goal of forging a posthuman successor to humanity. My principal concern is to draw attention to the assimilatory nature and status of Islamicate Transhumanism within the broader context of Transhumanism, understood as a technological articulation and refinement of global white supremacy in a technoscientific register. Full article

Students of Color have historically faced explicit and implicit forms of discrimination and oppression in educational settings. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the decades as Students of Color continue to experience white supremacy and other systems of oppression. As Students of Color enter graduate school, there are often fewer Students of Color, making these educational settings isolating and hostile. These experiences often encompass white supremacist policies, practices, and remarks that negatively impact Students of Color. With this in mind and as someone who identifies as a Chicana who was once in a doctoral program, I questioned how doctoral Students of Color navigate their programs at a predominantly white institution amidst racial trauma and stress occurring in and out of academia. This project is specifically guided by the following question: In what ways do doctoral Students of Color rely on each other to help navigate higher education? In order to address this, this project utilized participant observations, in-depth interviews, and pláticas. From the extensive community-based and collaborative work I conducted with a doctoral Student of Color group, two themes emerged from the data, which included (1) Community Space of Rest and (2) A Place to Heal. This project ultimately informs how various fields of study, especially social work, can better holistically support doctoral Students of Color in educational settings by centering healing frameworks that actively address and challenge white supremacy, along with other systems of oppression. Full article

The adultification of Black children is a form of anti-Blackness that brings Black children into adult situations. The adultification of Black children can be rooted in early 20th-century children’s books with minstrel imagery showing Black children in perilous situations for adult entertainment and for white children’s learning. This essay puts “digital blackface”—the online cross-racial memes using Black children’s reactions, emotions, and stereotypes as cross-racial humor—in conversation with historical children’s books featuring Black children. Linking digital representations and misrepresentations to children’s picture books demonstrates how Black children in both formats and social spheres are thrust into adult politics at their expense. Adultifying Black children across time in children’s books with minstrel imagery and digital blackface shows how Black children have never been exempt from the anti-Blackness and systemic white supremacy erroneously believed to be an adult issue. Full article

This paper discusses the pivotal role emotions can play in the higher prevalence of disease and mortality in Black populations in North America. There is a large body of research on the potentially harmful effect of negative emotions upon physical well-being. However, many scholars continue to interpret this link via a biological and reactive lens of emotion. By largely disentangling the embodiment of emotions from the traditional biological framework to which they are typically tied, we seek to analyze the nexus of race, emotion, and health through political, historical, and even ontological lenses. This analysis leverages Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion to elucidate the tangible impact of emotion on physical well-being and, in conjunction with Afropessimist metatheory on race, the potential contribution to understanding premature mortality among Black populations in North America. Barrett’s theory offers insight into how the persistent experience of negative emotions related to race can disrupt the delicate balance of an individual’s body-budget. The detrimental impact of White supremacy’s affective classifications and associated emotion concepts on Black populations is a stark reality, contributing significantly to daily health challenges faced by these communities in North America. Full article

Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa and in the wake of Black migratory waves from the post/neo-colony (Angola in this case) to the former metropolis. Almeida’s novel provides a literary intervention in grappling with the economic and institutional reinvention of anti-Blackness in Europe after settler colonialism, while also imagining and inscribing modes of Black being within and beyond the materialities of white supremacy. Towards this end and against the racial, gendered, and ableist logics of capital, the Black body in Almeida’s novel becomes a site through which the relationships between humans and matter as well as mind and body are decolonially revised. Full article

In this article, I critically analyze and respond to empirical data in the form of racialized discourse—specifically, racist messages sent directly to me as a result of my previously published article entitled, “A Love Letter to Educational Leaders of Color: CREWing UP with Critical Whiteness Studies”. Being informed by a robust racial analysis of acts that reinforce white supremacy, this article will likely be perceived as not nice by those who benefit from and work to protect white supremacy. Likely, I will be the one accused of being hateful, divisive, and even racist. In order to interrogate the weaponization of this conception of “niceness”, my analysis will be driven by Critical Race Hermeneutics with white emotionality and whitelashing used as interpretive lenses. As this article’s engagement with these critical race frameworks poses a threat to those who benefit from racism, this is a dangerous, not-so-nice critical race love letter. Full article

This paper examines school leaders’ evasive attitudes towards race in Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah, between 1969 and 1975. Salt Lake’s unique demographic status as predominantly white and Mormon underscored elements of white anti-Black racism under the guise of innocence. Utilizing critical whiteness theory and historical inquiry to analyze archival documents and interviews, I highlight one white superintendent, Arthur Wiscombe, and his failed attempts to confront anti-Blackness in schools as he navigated his conflicting values of racial justice, good intentions, and white Niceness. Framing the past as prologue, I uncover the historical legacy of white supremacy’s influence on local school policies and leaders’ actions, and make explicit connections to the repetition of these patterns today. Contemporary iterations of white supremacy rely on the same tools of whiteness used during intense periods of integration and racial awareness in Salt Lake City in the 1960s and 1970s. I conclude that white educational leaders must look more closely at the ‘nice’, color-evasive discourse that enables them to maintain power and privilege in their communities. Full article

Using the social scientific theory of “weathering”, the case study presented here reveals the broader explanatory power of the theory. Arline Geronimus developed the concept to describe the impact of racist systems on marginalized populations. Based on more than four decades of empirical research, Geronimus posits that the cumulative impact of navigating the structural racism embedded in US institutions results in accelerated declines in health and premature aging. The historical case study of the Łódź ghetto demonstrates that Nazi persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust resulted in a similar process of weathering among Jews. From 1939 to 1945, German authorities systematically dispossessed and uprooted, purposely starved, and exploited for labor the tens of thousands of Jews held captive in the Łódź ghetto. Despite valiant Jewish efforts to ameliorate the hardships of life in the ghetto, the persistent onslaught of racist policies and degradation ultimately resulted in widespread weathering of the population on an individual and communal level. I propose that the concept of “weathering” developed by social scientists has broad interpretative power for understanding the personal and communal impact of white supremacist societies in a historical context. The case of the Łódź ghetto is instructive beyond what it reveals about the particular persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich. The abrupt imposition of a racist system of government, the steady escalation of antisemitic policies from oppression and exploitation to genocide, and the relatively short duration of the ghetto’s existence lays bare the cumulative effects of widespread individual weathering on the vitality of the community itself. In the Łódź ghetto, prolonged exposure to an environment governed by white supremacy also resulted in communal weathering. Full article