For What Are Whites to Hope?

Before directly addressing the titular question, this chapter examines how conceptions of hope often lead us astray, reaffirming rather than challenging the status quo. In analytic philosophy, hope is often understood as a desire that is not entirely justified with reasons. In critical theory, hope has recently been looked upon suspiciously, as an affect the circulation of which is intensified by neoliberal economics. In mid-twentieth-century German theology and theory, hope is viewed as entirely other-worldly. In liberation theology, the object of hope is identification with the poor. This article argues that each of these views produces antinomies, and each of these views ends up perpetuating the status quo: in a racial context, white supremacy. After exploring the antinomies of hope, the article urges that whites are to embrace these antinomies. They are to hope for despair.     

The Mousterian bone retouchers of Noisetier Cave: experimentation and identification of marks

Retouchers are fragments of bone used during the Paleolithic to strike stone flakes in order to transform them into retouched tools. Our experiments show that the mark produced on retouchers differs depending on whether they were used to strike flint or quartzite. Our results suggest that numerous pits, most often with an ovoid form, characterize the retouching of quartzite flakes. Most of the scores produced with this material have a sinuous morphology with rough interior faces. The areas with superposed traces have a pitted appearance. On the other hand, the retouching of flint flakes, produces pits that are most often triangular in form. Most of the scores have a rectilinear morphology with smooth interior faces and their superposition results in the formation of hatch marks. There is also a relationship between the characteristics of the mark and the relative state of freshness of the retouchers. The validity of the criteria identified was confirmed by a blind test. These diagnostic criteria were applied to archaeological retouchers from the Mousterian site of Noisetier Cave. The results obtained improve our knowledge of the technical behaviors of Neanderthals and allow us to address questions concerning their techno-economic implications.     

Multiculture,middle class competencies and friendship practices in super-diverse geographies

In this paper we use a small number of in-depth interviews with parents with primary school children to examine social mixing and friendship practices in two super-diverse North London boroughs. In these complex geographical contexts, characterized by gentrification processes and old and new migrations, we suggest that primary schools are convergent places where adults and children from different backgrounds are likely to meet and interact, and the paper explores the extent to which adults and children, thrown together in and through these sites, negotiate relationships with those who are differently socially and culturally situated to themselves. Informed by the interview narratives, the paper highlights the importance of focusing on the micro, quotidian ways in which differences in social and/or ethnic background shape those relationships and it explores some instances of the ways in which those differences are routinely encountered, managed and/or avoided. In this way the paper contributes theoretical and empirical nuance to current concerns around difference and diversity and the interactions of complex urban populations by ‘adding’ social class to everyday multiculture perspectives and everyday multiculture perspectives to urban middle class debates.     

The Inclusion of Minority Interests in Congress and the Presidency

Burke, Christopher M. The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 212. $59.95, hardbound.

Bybee, Keith. Mistaken Identity: The Supreme Court and the Politics of Minority Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 206. $40.00, hardbound.

Riley, Russell L. The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation Keeping from 1831 to 1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 373. $22.50, softbound; $49.50, hardbound.