Black Community Uplift and the Myth of the American Dream

Black Community Uplift and the Myth of the American Dream PDF

Author: Lori Latrice Martin

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1498579167

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book analyzes enduring racial divides in homeownership, work, and income using the politics of respectability concept. It also examines an alternative way of understanding the Black Lives Matter movement, NFL protests, and challenges facing various black ethnic groups.

Facing Up to the American Dream

Facing Up to the American Dream PDF

Author: Jennifer L. Hochschild

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1996-08-05

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1400821738

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent. Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks. Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.

Myths America Lives By

Myths America Lives By PDF

Author: Richard T. Hughes

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0252050800

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Six myths lie at the heart of the American experience. Taken as aspirational, four of those myths remind us of our noblest ideals, challenging us to realize our nation's promise while galvanizing the sense of hope and unity we need to reach our goals. Misused, these myths allow for illusions of innocence that fly in the face of white supremacy, the primal American myth that stands at the heart of all the others.

The Myth of Black Progress

The Myth of Black Progress PDF

Author: Alphonso Pinkney

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780521310475

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book analyses the status of black Americans since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Black Feminist Sociology

Black Feminist Sociology PDF

Author: Zakiya Luna

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1000452727

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Black Feminist Sociology offers new writings by established and emerging scholars working in a Black feminist tradition. The book centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens is to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the essays are critical, personal, political and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity. The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book’s key themes.

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Cassander L. Smith

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2023-10-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0807180726

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behavior of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Cassander L. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries.

Aesthetic Apprehensions

Aesthetic Apprehensions PDF

Author: Lene M. Johannessen

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1793633673

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities is a scholarly conversation about encounters between habitual customs of reading and seeing and their ruptures and ossifications. In closely connected discourses, the thirteen essays collected here set out to carefully probe the ways our aesthetic immersions are obfuscated by deep-seated epistemological and ideological apprehensions by focusing on how the tropology carried by silence, absence, and false familarity crystallize to define the gaps that open up. As they figure in the subtitle of this volume, the tropes may seem straightforward enough, but a closer examination of their function in relation to social, cultural, and political assumptions and gestalts reveal troubling oversights. Aesthetic Apprehensions comes to name the attempt at capturing the outlier meanings residing in habituated receptions as well as the uneasy relations that result from aesthetic practices already in place, emphasizing the kinds of thresholds of sense and sensation which occasion rupture and creativity. Such, after all, is the promise of the threshold, of the liminal: to encourage our leap into otherness, for then to find ourselves and our sensing again, and anew in novel comprehensions.

Woke Capitalism

Woke Capitalism PDF

Author: Carl Rhodes

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1529211670

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book delves into the corporate takeover of public morality, or ‘woke capitalism’. Discussing the political causes that it has adopted, and the social causes that it has not, it argues that this extension of capitalism has negative implications for democracy’s future.

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities PDF

Author: Melvin G. Hill

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1498583814

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection explores the Black body in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. Contributing to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, the chapters explore interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.

Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation

Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation PDF

Author: Rayvon Fouché

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2005-09-09

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780801882708

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

According to the stereotype, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marveling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers. In this pathbreaking study, Rayvon Fouché examines the life and work of three African Americans: Granville Woods (1856–1910), an independent inventor; Lewis Latimer (1848–1928), a corporate engineer with General Electric; and Shelby Davidson (1868–1930), who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department. Detailing the difficulties and human frailties that make their achievements all the more impressive, Fouché explains how each man used invention for financial gain, as a claim on entering adversarial environments, and as a means to technical stature in a Jim Crow institutional setting. Describing how Woods, Latimer, and Davidson struggled to balance their complicated racial identities—as both black and white communities perceived them—with their hopes of being judged solely on the content of their inventive work, Fouché provides a nuanced view of African American contributions to—and relationships with—technology during a period of rapid industrialization and mounting national attention to the inequities of a separate-but-equal social order.