Belief in a Just World and Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action

The effect of identity, as socially constructed by race and gender, on social policies has been widely examined in policy analysis. Policy analysis would be improved by a wider discussion that includes the influence of social‐psychological constructs on social provision. We fill this gap by drawing on the theory of the “belief in a just world” and link this theory to attitudes toward the support of controversial government programs. We argue that this theory is a critical antecedent to the previous research on social construction. We hypothesize that citizens who perceive that the world is just and that opportunities are equal between groups are much less likely to favor government interventions altering market outcomes. We find that after controlling for race, sex, and political ideology, respondents who believe that luck is the primary determinant of success (low belief in a just world) are more supportive of preferential hiring programs for African Americans and women.     

THE ENDURING POWER OF RACISM: A RECONSIDERATION OF WINTHROP JORDAN'S WHITE OVER BLACK

As a history of the origins and development of American racism, White over Black received great acclaim upon its publication in 1968. Deeply researched and covering some 650 pages, it eschewed professional jargon and offered a deft prose style and close attention to matters of sexuality in revealing the origins and lasting influence of racist attitudes arising from Englishmen's impressions of blacks before they became, preeminently, slaves in North America. Jordan's careful weighing of evidence and causation made readers appreciate what he believed his evidence repeatedly demonstrated about white Americans’ attitudes toward African‐Americans: “the power of irrationality in men.” Despite the initial acclaim and scholarly achievement, White over Black soon lost pace with the curve of politics and academic fashion. By the mid‐1970s, the post‐World War II liberal consensus on racial issues had disintegrated, and professional historians were writing principally for other professional historians. Within a decade after its publication, White over Black was relegated to the wasteland of the “suggested supplemental reading list.” However, the book's grasp of the fundamental historical issues requiring explanation has received recent affirmation from influential scholarly and political quarters. A dispassionate review of the literature leading up to and following White over Black's publication indicates that Jordan's emphasis on the causal contribution of racist attitudes to the rise of African slavery in British North America was on target. Moreover, Jordan's appreciation that academic historians should write for nonprofessionals is now widely held inside the academy. The historical accuracy and cogency of expression of Jordan's perspective on race and slavery make White over Black worth reexamining.     

“Half Bacchanalian,Half Devout”: White Intellectuals,Black Folk Culture,and the “Negro Problem”

In the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration.     

Natural hazards and religion in New Orleans: Coping strategies and interpretations

Socially disadvantaged people are more vulnerable and exposed to the effects of extreme natural events and the social disasters which follow. This article presents the coping strategies and cultural creativity of the most vulnerable (non‐conformist African American religious/spiritual) communities in New Orleans today and in the aftermath of Katrina. Rituals and religious practices play an important role in resilience‐building and for relief and recovery from disasters. Case studies are presented to demonstrate how these devotions, and the community‐building and mutual support that take place as a result (as well as individual practices), have assisted practitioners in their struggle for survival during Katrina and the yearly hurricane season. The article also examines how natural hazards are perceived and reflected in religious explanations and expressions, as well as in spiritual arts, and how they lead to change and adaptations. Here, affected people are not regarded as ‘passive victims’ but as creative and active agents.     

Innovation in Urban Policy: Movement and Incorporation in City Administration and Community Development

While much recent thinking about city administration suggests tinkering with attitudes of administrators, it will be useful to review how administrators and officials encounter deeper social forces: the continuing inequalities and separations of race and class. Cases of "progressive government" experience—in Chicago; Boston; Berkeley; Santa Monica; Burlington, Vermont; and elsewhere—and of community development institutions spread more broadly through US. cities, suggest the outlines of new challenges and response by urban administrators and politicians.     

Psychiatry and race during World War II

Although the American literature on "war neuroses" expanded during World War II, psychiatrists remained more interested in dramatic instances of "combat fatigue" than in the problems of soldiers who broke down far from the field of battle. This bias in the medical literature shaped both diagnosis and treatment. It had an especially powerful effect on African American soldiers who, in the "Jim Crow" army of World War II, were assigned in disproportionate numbers to service units. When military neuropsychiatrists did write about troubled young African Americans, many revealed a racial conservatism that was surprising given the liberal environmentalist paradigm of the day. (Here, a particularly useful source is the two-volume history of Neuropsychiatry in World War II, produced by the Medical Department of the U.S. Army.) The major challenge to such views came from the National Medical Association (NMA). Despite its many criticisms of military medicine, the NMA argued that African American soldiers and veterans needed more, not fewer, psychiatric services. NMA members also joined their white counterparts in the campaign to diminish the stigma of mental illness, especially among the families of soldiers returning home. We need more investigation of the subsequent history of race and psychiatry, especially within the Veterans Administration.     

Should we allow terrorists to terrify us?

These two books focus not on terrorism as such, but on its psychological impact on society. Stuart Croft traces the formation of American public opinion on terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. He argues that public opinion might have followed a different course, but stresses that attitudes to terrorism were formed not just by government or the media, but were linked to other forces such as fundamentalist religion and were even reflected in works of fiction. John Mueller asks which is the greater threat: terrorism or our reaction to it? He cites numerous cases in the past where Americans overreacted to perceived dangers; and points out that terrorism causes far fewer deaths than, for example, road accidents. He ends by suggesting that the best way to disarm terrorists is to persuade Americans to stop worrying about them—while conceding that this advice is unlikely to be followed. Critics of this book may object that it implicitly underrates the terrorist threat. But this in no way invalidates the message of both these books—namely that a genuine, or genuinely perceived, threat can sometimes lead to a disastrous response. Therefore, reports of alleged threats require more careful scrutiny by both politicians and the media.     

近50年来我国的美国黑人史研究

中国学近50年来对美国黑人史的研究可分为三个时期。20世纪50—70年代,美国黑人史研究在中国成为一个研究热点,取得一批重要成果,但不可避免带有政治化的倾向。80年代,黑人史研究略显沉寂,处于承上启下阶段。90年代以来,取得很大的进展,研究的领域和深度都有所拓展和深入。但总的看来,我国的美国黑人史研究还远未成熟,尚处于起步和奠基阶段。     

Working in the shade: agriculture,race, and recreational landscapes in Connecticut, 1940–1950

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, shade tobacco growers in the state of Connecticut employed white high school students from Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as African Americans from southern black colleges and high schools to harvest and process their crop. This paper traces the history of these workers as a means for examining overlooked processes of racialization in rural New England, and for expanding on discussions of race, agriculture, and rural landscapes through the context of leisure. I argue that racialization among student workers unfolded according to the structure, management, and representation of leisure and the recreational landscapes that were opened (or closed) to them. Additional contexts bearing on this process included gender, class, and status as resident or non-resident, each of which informed race-based discussions about leisure and recreational landscapes. This empirical study infuses cultural geographic studies of race and agriculture, whether in New England or beyond, with a depth of perspective not normally associated with rural landscapes. It argues for the extension of cultural geographic inquiry on leisure and racialization into the contexts of agricultural and rural landscapes.     

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction

Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and ‘hostile privatism’ toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storm's social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies – explicit and implicit – that have produced this situation.     

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex,Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working‐class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain's port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.     

美国公立学校种族隔离制度的形成与终结--以非洲裔美国人的经历为例

美国公立学校种族隔离制度是在内战结束以及公立学校开始普及的社会背景下形成的,为了废除这种制度,非洲裔美国人进行了长期不懈的努力,其斗争的鲜明特征是组织性和法律性。废除学校种族隔离的过程集中体现了法律的神圣性以及司法部门的独立性,同时联邦政府也进行了有效的干预和控制。     

‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain

In the 1964 general election, the English town of Smethwick outside Birmingham became infamous for the unprecedented way in which issues of immigration, race and racism entered British national politics. Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths captured the Smethwick seat in Parliament from long-standing Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, aided by the slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’—a watershed episode soon overshadowed by the rise of Powellism in the late 1960s. Debates between Griffiths, his supporters and his opponents in the early to mid-1960s about the local and national implications of ‘coloured’ immigration (particularly of Indian Sikhs) from the Commonwealth and the legacy of empire drew upon a densely entangled set of global reference points that went beyond a ‘multi-racial’ Britain being reshaped by its ‘multi-racial’, postcolonial Commonwealth. Racist rhetoric, as well as an increasingly assertive anti-racist activism by the Indian Workers' Association and other groups, turned to analogies ranging from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, as well as to protest techniques inspired by Gandhi in colonial India and African Americans in the civil rights movement. In Smethwick c. 1964, the global met the local, illuminating transnational flows of people and ideas about race and cultural diversity nonetheless contingent upon their time and place.     

The Spa‐cial Formation Theory: Transcending the Race–Class Binary in Environmental Justice Literature

Two schools have dominated environmental justice literature: the race school and the class school. The class school tends to explain cases of environmental injustice exclusively from the vantage point of socioeconomic differences. The race school, however, foregrounds racism as an explanatory framework, while still acknowledging the relative role of class in this regard. Both schools tend to base their analyses primarily upon research findings from empirical/geographical studies. This paper joins its voice with the recently growing body of literature that has started to call for the need to transcend this cumbersome race–class dichotomy and move beyond the mundane pattern of case studies research and statistical data gathering. Specifically, it propounds a theory of spa‐cial formation that illuminates the parallel processes of spatial discrimination and racial subjugation, stresses the historical contingency of environmental racism, and highlights the role of the various cultural images, representations and meanings attached to black geographies in laying the moral and ideational foundations facilitating the process of spatial and environmental discrimination against African Americans.     

Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880–1930

The reproduction of racism and class-based oppression are taught to children through various cultural media, including toys and games. Between 1880 and 1930, the popularity of racialized toys and banks were fear-based responses to the perceived encroachment by “foreign and exotic” migrations of African American, Chinese, Irish and Native Americans into the cultural landscape of white middle-class America. This article analyzes how artifacts associated with children, such as mechanical banks, clockwork figures, and other toys are part of a larger cultural structure that viewed race and class as inseparable, and that these objects were essential in the development of a learned habitus that exposed white middle class children in the Victorian era to a racially and class oriented world. We argue that these objects reflect both the times in which they were made, and illuminate the relationship between adults and a newfound emphasis on children and childhood, in which toys serves as symbolic mediators of culture.     

Weathering the Ill Wind: The Affective and Embodied Dimensions of Anti-Immigrant Political Discourses on Young African Men in Italy

Using the election of the far-right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti-Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.     

Dependence of ionospheric response on the local time of sudden commencement and the intensity of geomagnetic storms

A study has been designed specifically to investigate the dependence of the ionospheric response on the time of occurrence of sudden commencement (SC) and the intensity of the magnetic storms for a low- and a mid-latitude station by considering total electron content and peak electron density data for more than 60 SC-type geomagnetic storms. The nature of the response, whether positive or negative, is found to be determined largely by the local time of SC, although there is a local time shift of about six hours between low- and mid-latitudes. The time delays associated with the positive responses are low for daytime SCs and high for night-time SCs, whereas the opposite applies for negative responses. The time delays are significantly shorter for mid-latitudes than for low-latitudes and, at both latitudes, are inversely related to the intensity of the storm. There is a positive correlation between the intensity of the ionospheric response and that of the magnetic storm, the correlation being greater at mid-latitudes. The results are discussed in the light of the possible processes which might contribute to the storm-associated ionospheric variations.     

The Race Relations Policy of the First Wilson Government

This article seeks to explore the evolution of a race relationspolicy in the first period of the Wilson government. It is arguedthat Wilson adopted a triple approach. This included the followingcomponents: a tightening of immigration control to satisfy seniorfigures in his government who had been badly shaken by the Smerhwickelection result; a commitment to outlaw racial incitement which,it was hoped, would influence favourably Commonwealth and widerworld opinion; the introduction of race relations machineryto promote integration and reconciliation, advocated both bymore progressive elements in his own party and in the widerpolitical world. In 1965 he attempted to ensure that all theseapproaches were kept in balance and that the issue of race,rising up the political agenda in the early 1960s, ceased tocreate the prospect of dangerous disagreements with his mainpolitical opponents. In the short term he overcame a range ofchallenges and secured a political agenda in which issues concerningimmigration became less confrontational. After marginalizationof immigration issues in the 1966 election Jenkins had spaceto pursue the more liberal aspects of the policy. The exodusof East African Asians, together with Enoch Powell's determinationto use the lessons of Smethwick to exploit differences withthe Conservative leadership, ensured that Wilson's success was,however, short-lived.