Genocide and the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples: The Extermination of the 19th Century Aboriginal Tasmanians

This article provides a brief outline of the genocides committed during the 20th century, examines the derivation of the appellation and concept of acts of genocide by the lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin and the development of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The narrative describes the extant socio-economic characteristics of global Indigenous peoples and their vulnerabilities to imposed violence. The work includes a succinct review of the contemporary continuing crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Chinese and Myanmar governments and concludes with the 19th century flawed British colonial administration of the Tasmanian Indigenous tribes between 1803 and 1876 and examines the causes contributing to the genocidal demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

A Load off Whose Heart? Psychiatry and the Politics of Respectability and Race Representation in Harlem, 1943-45

In wartime Harlem, liberal mental health professionals, eager to serve the black freedom struggle, sought to depict the minds of troubled black children as human without reinforcing pernicious racial stereotypes. This paper examines how psychiatrist Viola W. Bernard and the Community Service Society struggled to portray the black community as both psychologically damaged and morally beyond reproach when publicly presenting the cases of her male and female clients. As a consequence, liberals helped champion the mental health needs of delinquent black males as a matter of racial justice while rendering young unmarried mothers effectively invisible.

Racial mixture, blood and nation in medical publications on sickle cell disease in 1950s Brazil

This paper investigates continuities and changes in the definition of sickle cell disease in 1950s Brazil, taking into account that diseases have a history and are recognized as such according to the knowledge and perceptions available in a certain historical period and specific location. In the post-war era, new diagnostic tools, inheritance theories and, in particular, discussions on the concepts of race and racial relations, both nationally and internationally, were changing previous racialist and racist views. Nonetheless, the Brazilian medical interpretations of sickle cell disease continued to racialize it and even use deep-rooted racist formulations to explain its symptoms or the existence of the disease. It is argued that the celebration of racial mixture and racial democracy might have concealed racist presumptions biasing the study of sickle cell disease. Although race as a biological concept gradually gave way to other genetic expressions, in Brazilian medical papers on sickle cell disease, race continued to influence the interpretation of the disease, along with the persistence of concepts of heredity through blood mixture.

First African-American to hold a medical degree: brief history of James McCune Smith, abolitionist, educator, and physician

Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African-American to obtain a medical degree, has a remarkable legacy of historical proportions, yet his immense impact on society remains relatively unknown. He may be most celebrated for his effectiveness in abolitionist politics, however, his pioneering influence in medicine is equally remarkable. As examples, McCune Smith pioneered the use of medically based statistics to challenge the notion of African-American racial inferiority. He scientifically challenged the racial theories promoted in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson T., 1832), and he was a harsh critic of phrenology (study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities). Furthermore, notwithstanding being denied entry to America's universities and medical societies because of his race, McCune Smith became a giving physician to orphans, an accomplished statistician, medical author, and social activist who worked to end slavery. His pioneering work debunked doubts about the ability of African-Americans to transition into free society. Specifically, he used his training in medicine and statistics to refute the arguments of slave owners and prominent thought leaders that African-Americans were inferior and that slaves were better off than free African-Americans or white urban laborers. Frederick Douglass, narrator of the Anti-Slavery Movement, cited Dr. James McCune Smith as the single most important influence on his life. Dr. McCune Smith, along with Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, John Brown and other intellectual pioneers of the time, were instrumental in making the elimination of slavery possible.

Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation

This article presents a theoretical framework of how intergroup violence may figure into the activation and maintenance of group categories, boundaries, and identities, as well as the mediating role played by organizations in such processes. The framework's analytical advantages are demonstrated in an application to southern lynchings. Findings from event- and community-level analyses suggest that "public" lynchings, carried out by larger mobs with ceremonial violence, but not "private" ones, perpetrated by smaller bands without public or ceremonial violence, fed off and into the racial group boundaries, categories, and identities promoted by the southern Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century and on which the emerging Jim Crow system rested. Highlighting that racialized inequalities cannot be properly understood apart from collective processes of racial group boundary and identity making, the article offers clues to the mechanisms by which past racial domination influences contemporary race relations.

The rhetoric of racism: revisiting the creation of the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (1956-1962)

This paper revisits the 1962 splitting of the South African Psychological Association (SAPA), when disaffected Afrikaner psychologists broke away to form the whites-only Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA). It presents an analysis of the rhetorical justification for forming a new professional association on principles at odds with prevailing international norms, demonstrating how the episode involved more than the question of admitting black psychologists to the association. In particular, the paper argues that the SAPA-PIRSA separation resulted from an Afrikaner nationalist reading of the goals of psychological science. PIRSA, that is, insisted on promoting a discipline committed to the ethnic-national vision of the apartheid state. For its part, SAPA's racial integration was of a nominal order only, ostensibly to protect itself from international sanction. The paper concludes that, in a racist society, it is difficult to produce anything other than a racist psychology.

[The concept of racial democracy in Brazilian intellectual history]

This article aims to reconstruct the history of the term "racial democracy" in Brazilian sociological literature. This term, usually associated with the idea of "myth", is used in many studies of race relations without little definition or clarity. This article retraces its origins, in particular by showing that the concept is not the invention of Gilberto Freyre. It then examines the evolution of its use with particular emphasis on Unesco's research in the 1950s and the texts of Florestan Fernandes in the 1960s.

Legislating against hatred: meaning and motive in section six of the Race Relations Act of 1965

The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong.

[Germany and Brazil, 1870-1945: a relationship between spaces]

Relations between Germany and Brazil were influenced by different spatial orders which co-existed and influenced each other between 1870 and 1945. The article discusses the idea of living in different worlds, and being worlds apart. It argues that the concept of distance changed slowly, but surely, with the rise of modern communication technologies. Hierarchically structured spatial orders of centers and peripheries dominated the relationship in this period. Not only the Germans considered their own space superior, and on a higher level than the Brazilian, many Brazilians of the time agreed with this point of view, but also, since the First World War, were not willing to accept this allegedly natural order of the globe any longer.

[Between the European past and the American future: two papers about Brazil in the 1930s]

The article examines the idea of Europe conceived by Stefan Zweig and Hermann Ullmann in the similarly titled books about Brazil written in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the political context between the great wars marked by the rise of Nazism, the question is posed regarding to what extent Europe continues to serve as a model of civilization and what the critical dimension is that is expressed in concepts reversing the roles of Europe and Brazil. One detects a partial rupture with dichotomous and hierarchical viewpoints about the relationship between the Old World and the New World, and new forms of relationship between these regions within the worldwide context are suggested.

"No struggle, no fight, no court battle": the 1948 desegregation of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine

In 1948, over 30 percent of the approved medical schools in the United States excluded black students. However, on September 10, 1948, the University of Arkansas School of Medicine became the first Southern medical school to desegregate when Edith Mae Irby matriculated. Her admission occurred without incident. There were no jeering white mobs, no court action, and no federal troops. Irby's admission had its roots in a successful legal campaign launched by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to eradicate racial inequalities in professional and graduate education. A confluence of factors led the University of Arkansas to desegregate. These included the state's lack of the financial resources necessary to comply with U.S. Supreme Court decisions, a climate of racial moderation in Arkansas, shrewd political maneuvering by officials at the University of Arkansas, and Irby's academic accomplishments. Irby's historic admission is frequently overlooked as a historical milestone. Its invisibility is due in part to its sharp contrast to the dominant narratives of school desegregation in the South. Yet, the story of Irby's entrance into medical school is critical for a more complete understanding of the history of medical education and the civil rights movement.

The development of medical museums in the antebellum American South: slave bodies in networks of anatomical exchange

Prior to the American Civil War, museums were enthusiastically promoted in the annual circulars of southern medical colleges as valuable aids to medical education. Using case history narratives, medical college circulars, and announcements, this article examines the social origins of the region's collections of anatomical and pathological specimens and explores the professional agents and organizations responsible for their maintenance and development. The article is also concerned with exploring the racial framework in which these bodies and specimens were sourced and displayed. The social relations embodied in natural history and medical museum collections, and the emerging specialism of "negro medicine," were all elements of a context that subordinated and objectified blackness, as well as permitting and legitimizing the exploitation of black bodies. Medical museums function as a key case study for examining power relations among physicians, slaves, and slave owners, as well as underscoring southern medicine's dependence on slavery for its development.

Claiming space for an engaged anthropology: spatial inequality and social exclusion

I use the concept of “engaged anthropology” to frame a discussion of how “spatializing culture” uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology” is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on three fieldwork examples to illustrate the value of the approach: (1) a Spanish American plaza, reclaimed from a Eurocentric past, for indigenous groups and contemporary cultural interpretation; (2) Moore Street Market, an enclosed Latino food market in Brooklyn, New York, reclaimed for a translocal set of social relations rather than a gentrified redevelopment project; (3) gated communities in Texas and New York and cooperatives in New York, reclaiming public space and confronting race and class segregation created by neoliberal enclosure and securitization.

Aboriginal women and Asian men: a maritime history of color in white Australia

In 1901, Broome—a port town on the northwest edge of the Australian continent—was one of the principal and most lucrative industrial pearling centers in the world and entirely dependent on Asian indentured labor. Relations between Asian crews and local Aboriginal people were strong, at a time when the project of White Australia was being pursued with vigorous, often fanatical dedication across the newly federated continent. It was the policing of Aboriginal women, specifically their relations with Asian men, that became the focus of efforts by authorities and missionaries to uphold and defend their commitment to the White Australia policy. This article examines the historical experience of Aboriginal women in the pearling industry of northwest Australia and the story of Asian-Aboriginal cohabitation in the face of oppressive laws and regulations. It then explores the meaning of “color” in contemporary Broome for the descendants of this mixed heritage today.

The man with the dirty black beard: race, class, and schools in the antebellum South

The problem of poor, degraded white people in the antebellum South presented a problem to both reformers and proponents of slavery. Sharpening the differences of race meant easing those of class, ensuring that public schooling did not always receive widespread support. The cult of white superiority absolved the state of responsibility for social mobility. As better schooling was advocated for religious and civic reasons, wealthy planters determined to avoid taxes joined with their illiterate neighbors in fighting attempts at “improvement” that undermined the slave system based on the notion of black inferiority.

Racialized customer service in restaurants: a quantitative assessment of the statistical discrimination explanatory framework

Despite popular claims that racism and discrimination are no longer salient issues in contemporary society, racial minorities continue to experience disparate treatment in everyday public interactions. The context of full-service restaurants is one such public setting wherein racial minority patrons, African Americans in particular, encounter racial prejudices and discriminate treatment. To further understand the causes of such discriminate treatment within the restaurant context, this article analyzes primary survey data derived from a community sample of servers (N = 200) to assess the explanatory power of one posited explanation—statistical discrimination. Taken as a whole, findings suggest that while a statistical discrimination framework toward understanding variability in servers’ discriminatory behaviors should not be disregarded, the framework’s explanatory utility is limited. Servers’ inferences about the potential profitability of waiting on customers across racial groups explain little of the overall variation in subjects’ self-reported discriminatory behaviors, thus suggesting that other factors not explored in this research are clearly operating and should be the focus of future inquires.

The new "new racism" thesis: limited government values and race-conscious policy attitudes

Some contend that Whites’ application of values to form opinions about race-conscious policy may constitute a subtle form of racism. Others challenge the new racism thesis, suggesting that racism and values are exclusive in their influence. Proponents of the thesis assert that many Whites’ attitudes about such policy are structured by a mix of racism and American individualism. The author suggests that an even more subtle form of racism may exist. Racism may actually be expressed in opposition to big government. The test results presented here indicate that the effects of limited-government values on attitudes about race-conscious policy are conditional on levels of racial prejudice for many Whites, whereas the effects on racially ambiguous social welfare policy attitudes are not. The author contends that these results provide support to the argument that racism still exists and has found a new subtle expression.

Race and imprisonments: vigilante violence, minority threat, and racial politics

The effects of lynchings on criminal justice outcomes have seldom been examined. Recent findings also are inconsistent about the effects of race on imprisonments. This study uses a pooled time-series design to assess lynching and racial threat effects on state imprisonments from 1972 to 2000. After controlling for Republican strength, conservatism, and other factors, lynch rates explain the growth in admission rates. The findings also show that increases in black residents produce subsequent expansions in imprisonments that likely are attributable to white reactions to this purported menace. But after the percentage of blacks reaches a substantial threshold—and the potential black vote becomes large enough to begin to reduce these harsh punishments—reductions in prison admissions occur. These results also confirm a political version of racial threat theory by indicating that increased Republican political strength produces additional imprisonments.

The "Quadroon-Plaçage" myth of antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean phenomenon

The intimate relationships between white men and women of color in antebellum New Orleans, commonly known by the term plaçage, are a large part of the romanticized lore of the city and its history. This article exposes the common understanding of plaçage as myth. First, it reveals the source of the myth in a collection of accounts by travelers to the city in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Next, it uses a database of information on hundreds of white male-colored female relationships during the period to provide a more accurate account of the people in and nature of these relationships. Finally, it explains the purpose served by the myth by identifying three traditions that shaped its development: the culture of Southern Honor, the Anti-Slavery movement, and the bon-ton tradition of Georgian England. In a broader sense, this paper shows how myths are created and perpetuated, the temptations and dangers of uncritically accepting them, and the value to understanding their creation.

Skin lighteners, Black consumers and Jewish entrepreneurs in South Africa

This article considers the rise and decline of South Africa's lucrative and controversial skin-lighteners market through examination of the business history of the largest manufacturers, Abraham and Solomon Krok, and their evolving personas as millionaires and philanthropists. Such examination reveals how the country's skin-lighteners trade emerged as part of the broader growth of a black consumer market after the Second World War and how elements of that market became the target of anti-apartheid protests in subsequent decades. It also demonstrates how the Kroks' experiences as second-generation Jewish immigrants shaped their involvement in the trade and how, later, their self-identification as Jewish philanthropists informed their efforts to rehabilitate their reputations following South Africa's 1990 ban on all skin lighteners. Such efforts include the building of Johannesburg's highly acclaimed Apartheid Museum, modelled after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This article explores the profound ironies that some South Africans see in the fact that a museum dedicated to commemorating those who suffered under and, ultimately, triumphed against state racism was financed by a family fortune generated through the sale of skin lighteners to black consumers.

Welfare policymaking and intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender in U.S. state legislatures

Welfare policy in the American states has been shaped profoundly by race, ethnicity, and representation. Does gender matter as well? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid-1990s, we test hypotheses derived from two alternative approaches to incorporating gender into the study of representation and welfare policymaking. An additive approach, which assumes gender and race/ethnicity are distinct and independent, suggests that female state legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their African American and Latino counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which highlights the overlapping and interdependent nature of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. Our empirical analyses suggest an intersectional approach yields a more accurate understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and welfare politics in the states.

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.

African American southerners and white physicians: medical care at the turn of the twentieth century

Much of what scholars know about race and medicine in the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century South relates to the racial beliefs of white physicians and the segregated and exploitative treatment of black patients in hospitals and public health programs. This article shifts scholarly attention to the ways African American patients and their families took part in medical practice in commonplace settings of the home and office. The author examines how African Americans called upon local physicians in the rural and small-town South, how white physicians responded, and how they interacted in cases of serious illness, injury, and surgery. The claims of black southerners to physicians' treatments, in combination with small-town physicians' continuing reliance on interpersonal practices of medical care, made for an erratic but potentially distinctive cross-racial encounter-one involving a greater degree of negotiated authority and personal care than what generally has been recognized for this time and place.

Grandfather caregivers: race and ethnic differences in poverty

We use data from the 2006 American Community Survey to examine race and ethnic differences in the effects of marital status and co-residence of the middle generation on the likelihood of poverty among grandfathers who have primary responsibility for co-resident grandchildren (N = 3,379). Logistic regression results indicate that race/ethnicity and household composition are significant predictors of poverty for grandfather caregivers: non-Hispanic white grandfathers, those who are married, and those with a co-resident middle generation are the least likely to be poor. The effects of race/ethnicity, marital status, and the presence of a middle generation are, however, contingent upon one another. Specifically, the negative effect of being married is lower among grandfathers who are Hispanic, African American, non-Hispanic, and non-Hispanics of other race/ethnic groups compared to whites. In addition, having a middle generation in the home has a larger negative effect on poverty for race/ethnic minority grandfathers than for non-Hispanic whites. Finally, the combined effects of marriage and a middle generation vary across race/ethnic group and are associated with lower chances of poverty among some groups compared with others. We use the theory of cumulative disadvantage to interpret these findings and suggest that race/ethnicity and household composition are synergistically related to economic resources for grandfather caregivers.

Activating diversity: the impact of student race on contributions to course discussions

Racial diversity is understood to play an important role for all students on the college campus. In recent years, much effort has gone into documenting the positive effects of this diversity. However, few studies have focused on how diversity impacts student interactions in the classroom, and even fewer studies attempt to quantify contributions from students of different races. Using Web blog discussions about race and religion, the authors uncover the differences in contributions black and white students make to those discussions. The implications of these findings are important for scholars interested in how diversity impacts student learning, and for policymakers advocating on behalf of affirmative action legislation.

Evangelical Church polity and the nuances of white flight: a case study from the Roseland and Englewood neighborhoods in Chicago

Present patterns of residential segregation have been proven to have antecedents in the so-called white flight of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Close scrutiny of this social phenomenon has yielded results that indicate complicated impetuses and call into question sweeping assumptions about white flight. A case study of seven congregations from a denomination called the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) who left the Englewood and Roseland neighborhoods of Chicago during the juncture in question further reveals the dubious role of religious practices and arrangements in the out-migration of white evangelical Christians. By utilizing church histories, council minutes, and field interviews, it became readily apparent that the departure of the members of these congregations found sanction within the hierarchical apparatus (or lack thereof) of the church. The response of these CRC congregations exemplified how the political structures (congregational polity) and social networks of a particular denomination could allow for an almost seamless process of white flight.

Tourism and the Hispanicization of race in Jim Crow Miami, 1945-1965

This article examines how Miami's significant presence of Anglo Caribbean blacks and Spanish-speaking tourists critically influenced the evolution of race relations before and after the watershed 1959 Cuban Revolution. The convergence of people from the American South and North, the Caribbean, and Latin America created a border culture in a city where the influx of Bahamian blacks and Spanish-speakers, especially tourists, had begun to alter the racial landscape. To be sure, Miami had many parallels with other parts of the South in regard to how blackness was understood and enforced by whites during the first half of the twentieth century. However, I argue that the city's post-WWII meteoric tourist growth, along with its emergence as a burgeoning Pan-American metropolis, complicated the traditional southern black-white dichotomy. The purchasing power of Spanish-speaking visitors during the postwar era transformed a tourist economy that had traditionally catered to primarily wealthy white transplanted Northerners. This significant change to the city's tourist industry significantly influenced white civic leaders' decision to occasionally modify Jim Crow practices for Latin American vacationers. In effect, Miami's early Latinization had a profound impact on the established racial order as speaking Spanish became a form of currency that benefited Spanish-speaking tourists—even those of African descent. Paradoxically, this ostensibly peculiar racial climate aided the local struggle by highlighting the idiosyncrasies of Jim Crow while perpetuating the second-class status of native-born blacks.

The disgrace of commodification and shameful convenience: a critical race critique of the NBA

This essay positions sport as a pedagogical social institution from which people learn about race, gender, power, and privilege. The National Basketball Association is examined closely with a critical race lens with regard to the commodification of Black masculinity. A critical race analysis reveals the sharp contradictions between the league’s progressive image as an “industry leader” of racial diversity (Lapchick, Bustamante, & Ruiz, 2007, p.1) and the actualization of league discourse, policy, and practice.

Social energy and racial segregation in the university context

OBJECTIVES

Universities often promote their diversity as a selling point, but are students of different races at these universities integrated socially? Using theories on social energy, I examine racial segregation among university students.

METHODS

Quantitative data were collected on student residence patterns and social groupings formed at lunch tables at a case study university. In addition, interviews were conducted with 25 students.

RESULTS

Students are substantially more segregated than chance predicts. Blacks and Hispanics are particularly segregated. Interviews reveal that these students spend large amounts of social energy coping with prejudice and discrimination as well as functioning in a student culture they find unwelcoming and foreign.

CONCLUSIONS

Social energy drains on minority students from discrimination and an unwelcoming campus culture reduce energy left for interracial interaction, making these racial groups more segregated. The study highlights the need for understanding segregation as a function of the interaction of out-group preferences, in-group preferences, and the larger social context.

Black women talk about workplace stress and how they cope

Black women face the same struggles as White women; however, they have to face issues of diversity on top of inequality. The purpose of this study was to explore work-related stressors that affect the lives of Black women and how they cope with them. Using an exploratory design with grounded-theory methods, five basic themes emerged that identify when racism and sexism are experienced as stressors for African American women in the workplace. The themes are: (1) being hired or promoted in the workplace, (2) defending one’s race and lack of mentorship, (3) shifting or code switching to overcome barriers to employment, (4) coping with racism and discrimination, and (5) being isolated and/or excluded. The results from this study indicate African American women use emotion- and problem-focused coping responses to manage stress (e.g., racism and sexism) in the workplace. The article concludes with a discussion of practice implications of these findings.

Nationalism, racism and propaganda in early Weimar Germany: contradictions in the campaign against the "black horror on the Rhine"

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.

Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.

Venus, Serena, and the inconspicuous consumption of blackness: a commentary on surveillance, race talk, and new racism(s)

As the U.S. population becomes more racially diverse and different groups move in to previously White-dominated spaces, new techniques of exclusion and marginalization are being employed in an effort to regulate the opportunities and progress available to racialized minority groups. In this article, the author argues that mass media’s preoccupation with the Williams sisters’ “on-court” play and “off-court” activities constitutes a form of surveillance that is used by Whites to identify, observe, and ultimately, limit the range of available representations of Venus and Serena Williams. The author also suggests that this kind of public scrutiny produces racialized images and narratives constitutive of “race talk,” a key manifestation of the new racism(s) characteristic of the politics of this sociohistorical moment.

Quantitative evidence of the continuing significance of race: tableside racism in full-service restaurants

Despite popular claims that racism and discrimination are no longer salient issues in contemporary society, members of racially underrepresented groups continue to experience disparate treatment in everyday public interactions. The context of full-service restaurants is one such public setting wherein African Americans, in particular, encounter racial prejudices and discriminatory treatment. To further understand the pervasiveness of such anti-Black attitudes and actions within the restaurant context, this article analyzes primary survey data derived from a community sample of servers (N = 200). Participants were asked a series of questions ascertaining information about the racial climate of their workplaces. Findings reveal substantial server negativity toward African Americans' tipping and dining behaviors. Racialized discourse and discriminatory behaviors are also shown to be quite common in the restaurant context. The anti-Black attitudes and actions that the authors document in this research are illustrative of the continuing significance of race in contemporary society, and the authors encourage further research on this relatively neglected area of inquiry.

Overturning anti-miscegenation laws: news media coverage of the Lovings' legal case against the state of Virginia

This study fills a gap in scholarship by exploring historical news coverage of interracial relationships. It examines coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Times-Herald, and Chicago Tribune of the progression of the landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court overturned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, which prohibited marriage between any White and non-White person. An analysis of the frames and sources used in these publications' news stories about the case indicate all three publications' coverage favored the Lovings.

Being Yoruba in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

Through the experiences of two West Africans shipped to Bahia as slaves, probably in the 1840s, then sold south to Rio de Janeiro where they met, became lovers, bought their freedom, married, and divorced, I comment on an ongoing debate over the refashioning or transfer of African ethnic identities in American slave societies. The sources in this Brazilian case suggest that previous identities were not suddenly erased, but rather, new layers of understanding and ways of responding were added. Whatever the dynamic of cultural formation, it was memory that crucially bridged the distance between the past they carried with them and the present into which they were thrust; and so it becomes illuminating to reconstruct the plausibly remembered African pasts on which this couple drew to make sense of an unfamiliar Brazilian present.

Broken boundaries or broken marriages? Racial intermarriage and divorce in the United States

OBJECTIVE

Several recent studies have investigated the consequences of racial intermarriage for marital stability. None of these studies properly control for first-order racial differences in divorce risk, therefore failing to appropriately identify the effect of intermarriage. Our article builds on an earlier generation of studies to develop a model that appropriately identifies the consequences of crossing racial boundaries in matrimony.

METHODS

We analyze the 1995 and 2002 National Survey of Family Growth using a parametric event-history model called a sickle model. To appropriately identify the effect of interracial marriage we use the interaction of wife's race and husband's race.

RESULTS

We find elevated divorce rates for Latino/white intermarriages but not for black/white intermarriages. Seventy-two percent of endogamous Latino marriages remain intact at 15 years, but only 58 percent of Latino husband/white wife and 64 percent of white husband/Latina wife marriages are still intact.

CONCLUSIONS

We have identified an important deficiency in previous studies and provide a straightforward resolution. Although higher rates of Latino/white intermarriage may indicate more porous group boundaries, the greater instability of these marriages suggests that these boundaries remain resilient.

The two worlds of race revisited: a meditation on race in the age of Obama

Nearly fifty years ago, the American Academy organized a conference and two issues of its journal "Daedalus" on the topic of "The Negro American." The project engaged top intellectuals and policy-makers around the conflicts and limitations of mid-1960s liberalism in dealing with race. Specifically, they grappled with the persistent question of how to integrate a forced-worker population that had been needed but that was socially undesirable once its original purpose no longer existed. Today, racism has been discredited as an idea and legally sanctioned segregation belongs to the past, yet the question the conference participants explored -- in essence, how to make the unwanted wanted -- still remains. Recent political developments and anticipated demographic shifts, however, have recast the terms of the debate. Gerald Early, guest editor for the present volume, uses Barack Obama's election to the presidency as a pretext for returning to the central question of "The Negro American" project and, in turn, asking how white liberalism will fare in the context of a growing minority population in the United States. Placing his observations alongside those made by John Hope Franklin in 1965, Early positions his essay, and this issue overall, as a meditation on how far we have come in America to reach "the age of Obama" and at the same time how far we have to go before we can overcome "the two worlds of race."

D'Eichthal and Urbain's "Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche": race, gender, and reconciliation after slave emancipation

This article is a close reading of Gustave D'Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain's Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the "second" French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.

Unsightly urban menaces and the rescaling of residential segregation in the United States

In this article, the author uses a slum clearance project in Lexington, Kentucky, as a lens through which to examine the spatial dynamics of racial residential segregation during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time, urban migration and upward socioeconomic mobility on the part of African Americans destabilized extant residential segregation patterns. Amid this instability, various spatial practices were employed in the interest of maintaining white social and economic supremacy. The author argues that such practices were indicative of a thoroughgoing reinvention of urban socio-spatial order that in turn precipitated the vastly expanded scale of residential segregation still found in U.S. cities today. Evidence of this reinvented ordering of urban space lies in the rendering of some long-standing African American neighborhoods as “out of place” within it and the use of slum clearance to remove the “menace” such neighborhoods posed to it.

Infant health, race/ethnicity, and early educational outcomes using the ECLS-B

Using data from the "Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort," this article emphasizes the central role of poor infant health as a mechanism in the formation of early educational disparities. Results indicate that the varying prevalence of poor infant health across racial/ethnic groups explains a significant portion of the black disadvantage and a moderate portion of the Asian advantage relative to whites in math and reading skills at age four. Results also demonstrate that infant health is an equal opportunity offender across social groups as children with poor health are equally disadvantaged in terms of early cognitive development, regardless of racial/ethnic status. Overall, results indicate that health at birth has important consequences for individual educational achievement and racial/ethnic disparities in cognitive development and school readiness.

At last...?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, race & history

In this essay, Griffin brings to the fore two extraordinary black women of our age: First Lady Michelle Obama and entertainment mogul Beyoncé Knowles. Both women signify change in race relations in America, yet both reveal that the history of racial inequality in this country is far from over. As an Ivy League-educated descendent of slaves, Michelle Obama is not just unfamiliar to the mainstream media and the Washington political scene; during the 2008 presidential campaign, she was vilified as angry and unpatriotic. Beyoncé, who controls the direction of her career in a way that pioneering black women entertainers could not, has nonetheless styled herself in ways that recall the distinct racial history of the Creole South. Griffin considers how Michelle Obama's and Beyoncé's use of their respective family histories and ancestry has bolstered or diminished their popular appeal.

The two worlds of race: a historical view

Franklin's essay traces the practices, policies, and laws that, from colonial times through the mid-1960s moment when he composed his essay, created and sustained the two worlds of race in America. He outlines the history of efforts from that period to alleviate racial distinctions and to foster a "world of equality and complete human fellowship." Franklin cautions, however, that even certain well-intentioned efforts to extend services, opportunities, and rights to African Americans sometimes reinforced segregation and discrimination. He considers how key historical, legal, political, and social developments from the twentieth century -- World War II, the growth of labor unions, the Great Migration, America's ascendancy as a world power, among others -- advanced racial equality in America while often intensifying the backlash from opponents to such equality. Still, Franklin concludes optimistically that however strident those opponents may be, they "have been significantly weakened by the very force of the numbers and elements now seeking to eliminate the two worlds of race."

Saving the child to save the nation: poverty, whiteness and childhood in the Cape Colony, c.1870-1895

Children were central to efforts to eradicate white impoverishment in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. The education and training of poor, white children were believed to be the most effective ways of breaking cycles of poverty, and of ensuring continuing white control over the Cape's resources. Yet a closer reading of the evidence presented to the 1894 Labour Commission and the committee appointed to investigate the Destitute Children Relief Bill suggests that this interest in poor, white children also stemmed from concerns about the children themselves. Destitute white children - both male and female - were described, frequently, as representing a threat to the social, moral, and even economic order, and this view of poor white children shaped official responses to white poverty. This concern for white children reflected not solely their status as 'children' - that they represented the colony's future, were fairly malleable, and could be more easily 'reached' by projects and schemes to eradicate white poverty - but also their problematic class position in a colonial racial order that sought their reform, direction and education into acceptable productive citizens.