Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America

Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America PDF Author: Lori Latrice Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793648174
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
In Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America, Lori Latrice Martin demonstrates how racial realism is a key concept for understanding why and how black people continue to live between a cycle of optimism and disappointment in the United States. Central to her argument is Derrick Bell’s work on racial realism, who argued that the subordination of black people in America is permanent. Racial Realism includes historical topics, such as Reconstruction, race in the 20th century, and recent events like #BlackLivesMatter, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the killing of George Floyd. As the author lays out, at various times in American history, black people felt a sense of hopefulness and optimism that America would finally extend treasured American values to them only to find themselves marginalized. History shows that black people have had their expectations raised so many times only to find themselves deeply disappointed.

Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America

Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America PDF Author: Lori Latrice Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793648174
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Racial Realism and the History of Black People in America, Lori Latrice Martin demonstrates how racial realism is a key concept for understanding why and how black people continue to live between a cycle of optimism and disappointment in the United States. Central to her argument is Derrick Bell’s work on racial realism, who argued that the subordination of black people in America is permanent. Racial Realism includes historical topics, such as Reconstruction, race in the 20th century, and recent events like #BlackLivesMatter, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the killing of George Floyd. As the author lays out, at various times in American history, black people felt a sense of hopefulness and optimism that America would finally extend treasured American values to them only to find themselves marginalized. History shows that black people have had their expectations raised so many times only to find themselves deeply disappointed.

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race PDF Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

Racism and Resistance

Racism and Resistance PDF Author: Timothy Joseph Golden
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438485980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
African American legal theorist Derrick Bell argued that American anti-Black racism is permanent but that we are nevertheless morally obligated to resist it. Bell—an extraordinary legal scholar, activist, and public intellectual whose academic and political work included his employment as a young attorney with the NAACP and his pivotal role in the founding of Critical Race Theory in the 1970s, work he pursued until he died in 2011—termed this thesis “racial realism.” Racism and Resistance is a collection of essays that present a multidisciplinary study of Bell's thesis. Scholars in philosophy, law, theology, and rhetoric employ various methods to present original interpretations of Bell's racial realism, including critical reflections on racial realism’s relationship to theories of adjudication in jurisprudence; its use of fiction in relation to law, literature, and politics; its under-examined relationship to theology; its application in interpersonal relationships; and its place in the overall evolution of Bell’s thought. Racism and Resistance thus presents novel interpretations of Bell’s racial realism and enhances the literature on Critical Race Theory accordingly.

Faces at the Bottom of the Well

Faces at the Bottom of the Well PDF Author: Derrick Bell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 154161772X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The groundbreaking, "eerily prophetic, almost haunting" work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow). In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example—including the classic story "The Space Traders"—to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail, he writes, so long as the majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. Now with a new foreword by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, this classic book was a pioneering contribution to critical race theory scholarship, and it remains urgent and essential reading on the problem of racism in America.

Race, Racism, and American Law

Race, Racism, and American Law PDF Author: Derrick A. Bell
Publisher: Aspen Publishing
ISBN: 1543850308
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1266

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Book Description
Intended for use with the authors’ forthcoming casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law, Seventh Edition (forthcoming 2024), Race, Racism, and American Law: Leading Cases and Materials includes significant historical and contemporary cases and materials edited with an aim to foreground the most relevant sections and passages to illustrate the crucial role of race in the formation of US law. This new edition of Derrick Bell’s groundbreaking textbook Race, Racism, and American Law, like prior versions, eschews a traditional casebook format. The locus of analysis in this text is the struggle for racial justice, and its underlying history and political context as reflected in the ongoing contestation over law, legal reform, and transformation. As such the supplement includes but is not limited to Supreme Court cases. We follow Bell’s model of locating all edited cases and materials in the supplement, reserving the book’s text to provide historical and political context for significant cases or legislative actions, along with hypothetical questions, comments, and other tools of analysis. Professors and students will benefit from: Both legal and non-legal primary source material.Leading Cases and Materials includes selected historical and contemporary cases, legislation, and other legal materials that foreground the crucial role of race and racism, and the struggle for racial justice, within and through US law. A carefully selected compilation of United States Supreme Court Cases. Each case is chosen to guide readers through elements of US jurisprudence which reflect both reform and retrenchment of societal inequity as it relates to the question of race. Cases range from significant 18th century cases such as Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) (indigenous people cannot transfer full title to land) to contemporary civil rights decisions such as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) (further limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act) and Comcast v. National Association of African American Owned Media (2020) (limiting protections against racial discrimination in contracting). Doctrinally and theoretically significant cases from lower federal courts and state courts. Cases from lower courts are selected to provide critical race insights into how judicial institutions outside the US Supreme Court shape doctrine and debates over race and racial inequality. Cases range from Acre v. Douglass (9th Cir. 2015) (ban on teaching of Mexican American studies found unconstitutional) to Lobato v. Taylor (Colo. 2003) (speculator attempts to divest Mexican American landowners with defective title derived from Mexico). Significant legislative and executive legal documents. This supplement includes materials going beyond traditional edited cases, reflecting the insight that a critical race analysis necessitates a grasp of law beyond the courts. Additional materials range from the United States Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015) to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. Benefits for instructors and students: Provokes discussion on contemporary and historical legal controversies cases and materials edited to address issues the lens of critical race theory’s conceptual framework

After Civil Rights

After Civil Rights PDF Author: John D. Skrentny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168121
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
A provocative new approach to race in the workplace What role should racial difference play in the American workplace? As a nation, we rely on civil rights law to address this question, and the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemingly answered it: race must not be a factor in workplace decisions. In After Civil Rights, John Skrentny contends that after decades of mass immigration, many employers, Democratic and Republican political leaders, and advocates have adopted a new strategy to manage race and work. Race is now relevant not only in negative cases of discrimination, but in more positive ways as well. In today's workplace, employers routinely practice "racial realism," where they view race as real—as a job qualification. Many believe employee racial differences, and sometimes immigrant status, correspond to unique abilities or evoke desirable reactions from clients or citizens. They also see racial diversity as a way to increase workplace dynamism. The problem is that when employers see race as useful for organizational effectiveness, they are often in violation of civil rights law. After Civil Rights examines this emerging strategy in a wide range of employment situations, including the low-skilled sector, professional and white-collar jobs, and entertainment and media. In this important book, Skrentny urges us to acknowledge the racial realism already occurring, and lays out a series of reforms that, if enacted, would bring the law and lived experience more in line, yet still remain respectful of the need to protect the civil rights of all workers.

Black and White Strangers

Black and White Strangers PDF Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226873855
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
From Abraham Lincoln's wry observation that Harriet Beecher Stowe was "the little lady who made this big war" to Mark Twain's "wild proposition" that Walter Scott had somehow touched off sectional hostilities, there have been many competing theories about the impact of literature on nineteenth-century American society. In this provocative book, Kenneth W. Warren argues that the rise of literary realism late in the century was shaped by and in turn helped to shape the politics of racial difference following Reconstruction. Taking up a variety of novelists from this period, including most prominently Henry James and William Dean Howells, Warren demonstrates that even works not directly concerned with race were instrumental in forging a Jim Crow nation. As a literary history, Black and White Strangers places the writing of realistic novels within the context of their serialization in the monthly magazines of the 1880s. By viewing these novels in light of editorial policies regarding social propriety, national unity, and literary aesthetics, Warren reveals the often surprising ways in which realistic fiction at once challenged and abetted the growing conservatism of racial politics. Warren also seeks to bridge the gap between American and African-American literary studies, which have hitherto been "strangers" to each other. James and Howells, he argues, can be understood fully only when read alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Frances E.W. Harper; James's The American Scene, for instance must be seen as a companion text to Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. In making these connections, Warren challenges American and African-American studies to see themselves as mutually constitutive enterprises and to question the value of canon-based criticism in any complete investigation of the meaning of "race" in American cultural history.

Faithful Account of the Race

Faithful Account of the Race PDF Author: Stephen G. Hall
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458755568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans. Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counter narratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.

Deans and Truants

Deans and Truants PDF Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220235X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.

Representing the Race

Representing the Race PDF Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814743382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama’s creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what’s at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.