The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.

Race neutral leadership is not an option. Education leaders are on the frontline in the fight for racial justice and must co-construct practices to disrupt storylines, policies, and practices that perpetuate opportunity gaps. Drawing from established research and the wisdom of teachers, young people, parents, community members, policy advocates, and school leaders, Play the Race Card is a guide for frontline leaders at every level to confront and disrupt racism, whiteness, and anti-Black racism. Designed for leaders working to support educators in building transformative and provocative policies and practices, this book provides a road map for building anti-racist leadership capacity in today’s turbulent political environment. Features include Eight interrelated tenets of Frontline Leadership Strategies for supporting faculty, staff, students, and the broader community in practices centering racial justice and equity Guidance for dismantling the lies and beliefs that perpetuate inequities Design principles and strategies to cultivate opportunity-rich and robust curriculum, instruction, relationships, and assessment The frontline isn’t always a comfortable place, but it’s where education leaders are needed right now. Lead the fight for truth in your school community and help change history—by putting our nation back on the path to racial justice.

"First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux"--T.p. verso.

"The organization of the reader′s guide—especially the groupings of landmark cases, race riots, and criminology theories—is impressive ... Other related titles lack the breadth, detail, and accessibility of this work ... Recommended for all libraries; essential for comprehensive social studies collections." —Library Journal As seen almost daily on local and national news, race historically and presently figures prominently in crime and justice reporting within the United States, in the areas of hate crimes, racial profiling, sentencing disparities, wrongful convictions, felon disenfranchisement, political prisoners, juveniles and the death penalty, and culturally specific delinquency prevention programs. The Encyclopedia of Race and Crime covers issues in both historical and contemporary context, with information on race and ethnicity and their impact on crime and the administration of justice. These two volumes offer a greater appreciation for the similar historical experiences of varied racial and ethnic groups and illustrate how race and ethnicity has mattered and continues to matter in the administration of American criminal justice. Key Features Covers a number of broad thematic areas: basic concepts and theories of criminal justice; the police, courts, and corrections; juvenile justice; public policy; the media; organizations; specific groups and populations; and specific cases and biographies Addresses such topics as gender, hate/bias crimes, immigrant experiences, international and cross-cultural issues, race and gangs, and race and law, Presents experiences of all major racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., including Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Ethnic Whites, as well as religious minorities, such as Muslims Includes coverage of recent incidents like the alleged rape of a black female North Carolina Central University student by white male members of the Duke University Lacrosse Team;, the Jena 6 incident; the Tulia, Texas drug arrests; the Rodney King beating; the O. J. Simpson trials in the 1990s; and more recent racial profiling incidents Two appendices provide information on locating and interpreting statistical data on race and crime, as well as detailed instructions on how to access statistical data on the web for such specific areas as arrests, drugs, gang membership, hate crimes, homicide trends, juvenile justice, prison populations, racial profiling, the death penalty, and victimization Because the topic of race and crime is of wide interest and relevance, entries in this Encyclopedia are written in an accessible style to appeal to a broad audience, making it a welcome addition to academic and public libraries alike.

This is a work of cultural studies rooted in critical feminist thought that grapples with AfroSwedishness in relation to processes and experiences of racialization, imagination of self, and notions of belonging, agency, and kinship. Nana Osei-Kofi focuses on the function of diverse forms of critical cultural expressions, paying particular attention to their liberatory public pedagogical potential. Drawing from biographical narratives, documentary film, digital Black feminism, and queer organizing, Osei-Kofi offers insights into the embodied, affective, and experiential processes through which the formation of an emergent AfroSwedish coalitional identity is made possible. Through self-reflexive, structural, and community-based forms of exploration that resist binary oppositions, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging asks what the nomenclature of AfroSwede, AfroSwedish, and AfroSwedishness brings into being, what it makes possible, and what this means for Swedish society from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. This work brings together two identity categories that have historically been constructed as not only mutually exclusive but oppositional to detail the emergence of AfroSwedishness as a counterhegemonic and coalitional act. AfroSwedishness, Osei-Kofi argues, must be understood as a coalitional identity, one made legible through kinship-based community.

The second edition of The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity offers readers a broad overview of scholarly exploration of the ways that humans have organized themselves (and have been organized) according to racial and ethnic divisions. More than 80 scholars from around the world and representing multiple academic traditions contribute entries to this accessible yet sophisticated volume that addresses contemporary issues in historical context. The first half of the book challenges readers to grapple with some of the most controversial aspects of categorization, prejudice and discrimination through focused chapters ranging from the notion of Whiteness to the supposed biological rationale for racial categorization. The second half is comprised of 70 shorter entries on specialized concepts, persons and groups that are crucial to understanding these issues. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a broad, multi-disciplinary and global overview of issues that continue to provide challenges to notions of equality and justice.

In Whiteness Interrupted Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority-black schools in which he examines the limitations of understandings of how white racial identity is formed. Through in-depth interviews with dozens of white teachers from a racially segregated, urban school district in Upstate New York, Bell outlines how whiteness is constructed based on localized interactions and takes a different form in predominantly black spaces. He finds that in response to racial stress in a difficult teaching environment, white teachers conceptualized whiteness as a stigmatized category predicated on white victimization. When discussing race outside majority-black spaces, Bell's subjects characterized American society as postracial, in which race seldom affects outcomes. Conversely, in discussing their experiences within predominantly black spaces, they rejected the idea of white privilege, often angrily, and instead focused on what they saw as the racial privilege of blackness. Throughout, Bell underscores the significance of white victimization narratives in black spaces and their repercussions as the United States becomes a majority-minority society.