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racism

  • SOURCE: Truthout
    5/18/2023

    George Yancy and Joe Feagin on How to Fight Back Against Book Bans

    The sociologist, whose books on racism have been banned, argues "U.S. book banning has been widespread and routinely targeted books with diverse ideas and perspectives for centuries now, especially those challenging white conservative sociopolitical ideas, norms and values."

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    5/12/2023

    Big Win for Victims of Restrictive Covenants

    by James Gregory

    Restrictive covenants and other housing policies created a housing market defined by racial segregation and locked generations of Black Americans out of wealth-building. Now courts frown on race-aware remedies for past discrimination. Has the state of Washington figured out a way around that to deliver reparations? 

  • SOURCE: CNN
    5/15/2023

    I'm Headed to Florida to Teach-In Against DeSantis's Education Policies

    by Kellie Carter Jackson

    This May 17 saw a 24-hour teach-in by historians in St. Petersburg, Florida, to protest the restrictions on curriculum, books and ideas pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies. As a historian of abolition, the author stresses that denying people the pen may influence them to pick up the sword. 

  • SOURCE: Daily Beast
    5/17/2023

    Florida Just Banned Everything I Teach

    by William Horne

    Black historians during the Jim Crow era observed that the history taught in schools justified slavery, segregation, and lynching. A professor thinks that's where Ron DeSantis's vision of history is headed. Some politicians may think curriculum is a winning issue, but students and society will lose. 

  • SOURCE: Woodrow Wilson Center and National History Center
    5/16/2023

    Chad Williams on W.E.B. DuBois and the First World War

    Michelle Moyd and David W. Blight comment on Chad Williams's discussion of DuBois's unfinished manuscript about the deep questions of race, democracy, and world affairs raised by the first World War. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/10/2023

    Who's Afraid of a Black Cleopatra?

    by Gwen Nally and Mary Hamil Gilbert

    The controversy over the portrayal of Cleopatra by the Black British actress Adele James highlights the difficulty of reading modern ideas of race and identity back onto the past. But more interesting questions arise around why people in the present seek commonality with past figures. 

  • SOURCE: History Workshop
    5/11/2023

    Ayahs, Amahs and Empire: The History of Domestic Care Work under Colonialism

    by Julia Laite

    The history of domestic and child care work has become increasingly robust, but museums and public exhibitions have struggled to find ways to represent the work and experiences of women, many from south Asia, who traveled with white colonial families to perform this labor, putting marginalized people in charge of the empire's children. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    4/26/2023

    Why a Book About Two Bunnies Marrying Was Banned in 1959

    Illustrator and author Garth Williams feigned incredulity that his tale of a white and black rabbit's romance ran afoul of Jim Crow sensibilities, but it's hard to see how else it was likely to be perceived, says Sharon Patricia Holland of the University of North Carolina. 

  • 4/30/2023

    For Derby Day, a Note of Caution About Horses and "Races"

    by Mackenzie Cooley

    The thoroughbreds on display at Churchill Downs next Saturday carry on Italian renaissance practices of horse breeding for sport and aesthetic pleasure. But the spectacle warns of another legacy: the fateful transfer of the term "race" from purposefully selected lineages of horses to broad groupings of humans. 

  • SOURCE: CommonPlace
    4/23/2023

    Thomas Jefferson's Secret Plan to Whiten Virginia

    by Timothy Messer-Kruse

    After the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned from the Continental Congress to a seat in the Virginia legislature, where he undertook an ambitious effort to overhaul the laws. His work is an illuminating look at Jefferson's vision of the ideal American republic as a place purged of both slavery and of Black people. 

  • SOURCE: Oxford UP Blog
    4/24/2023

    Where to Look for the Evidence of Colonial Violence

    by Erik Linstrum

    The British government's efforts to conceal potentially embarrasing records as decolonization accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s means that historians need to know where to look for contemporary evidence of the violence of colonization and counterinsurgent tactics.