Race Contacts and Interracial Relations


Book Description

Race Contacts and Interracial Relations comprises five lectures that Alain Locke, Howard University professor of philosophy and critic of the Harlem Renaissance, delivered in 1916 at Howard University. Locke examines race and racism in twentieth-century social relations and provides a means of analyzing race and ethnic conflict in relation to economic and political changes in society. He suggests that a way to understand racial conflict is to look at nonracial issues that divide a society and at how race becomes a symbol of those issues and conflicts. Locke's early recognition and articulation of Franz Boas's theory of race in these lectures and his contention that racism is socially generated were intellectual departures at the time. While rejecting the biological basis of race, Locke proposes that the social concept of race could be employed by a minority as a cultural strategy for self-help and self-definition. Thus the lectures show that Locke's work in African American art and culture grew out of a considered analysis of race and modern society. In the introduction to this carefully edited volume, Jeffrey Stewart provides background on Alain Locke and other theorists on race whom Locke discusses, situates Locke's ideas on race within the context of his time, and relates Locke's lectures to his thought on art and culture and to contemporary arguments on race.




Alain Locke


Book Description




The Idea of Race


Book Description

A survey of the historical development of the idea of race, this anthology offers pre-twentieth century theories about the concept of race, classic twentieth century sources reiterating and contesting ideas of race as scientific, and several philosophically relevant essays that discuss the issues presented. A general Introduction gives an overview of the readings. Headnotes introduce each selection. Includes suggested further readings.




Reluctant Race Men


Book Description

Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness. Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reformers' challenges call into question the notion that race is a self-evident site of identity among Black people. Their ideas instead spotlight legal, political, religious, social, and scientific practices that configured human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness. They show how a diverse set of actions constituted multi-faceted American phenomena dubbed "race."




Alain Locke on the Theoretical Foundations for a Just and Successful Peace


Book Description

Alain Locke is most known for his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. However, he received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1918, and produced a very large corpus of philosophical work. His work shows him to have been a sophisticated philosopher who thought through practical and theoretical problems regarding the nature of cosmopolitanism, democracy, race, value, religion, art, and education. Although Locke’s philosophical work has been discussed in parts, there has been no theorizing about how his different philosophical commitments fit together. In this book Corey L. Barnes begins to systematize Locke’s philosophical thought, showing how his democratic theory, philosophy of race, and value theory are connected to and undergirded by a commitment to cosmopolitanism. In so doing, Barnes unearths aspects of Locke’s thought—for example, his economic thinking—that have not been accorded attention and reimagines parts of his work about which have been theorized, all while bringing Locke into current debates about each subject.




Navigating Interracial Borders


Book Description

"One of the best books written about interracial relationships to date. . . . Childs offers a sophisticated and insightful analysis of the social and ideological context of black-white interracial relationships."—Heather Dalmage, author Tripping on the Color Line "A pioneering project that thoroughly analyzes interracial marriage in contemporary America."—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States Is love color-blind, or at least becoming increasingly so? Today’s popular rhetoric and evidence of more interracial couples than ever might suggest that it is. But is it the idea of racially mixed relationships that we are growing to accept or is it the reality? What is the actual experience of individuals in these partnerships as they navigate their way through public spheres and intermingle in small, close-knit communities? In Navigating Interracial Borders, Erica Chito Childs explores the social worlds of black-white interracial couples and examines the ways that collective attitudes shape private relationships. Drawing on personal accounts, in-depth interviews, focus group responses, and cultural analysis of media sources, she provides compelling evidence that sizable opposition still exists toward black-white unions. Disapproval is merely being expressed in more subtle, color-blind terms. Childs reveals that frequently the same individuals who attest in surveys that they approve of interracial dating will also list various reasons why they and their families wouldn’t, shouldn’t, and couldn’t marry someone of another race. Even college students, who are heralded as racially tolerant and open-minded, do not view interracial couples as acceptable when those partnerships move beyond the point of casual dating. Popular films, Internet images, and pornography also continue to reinforce the idea that sexual relations between blacks and whites are deviant. Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal narratives, Navigating Interracial Borders offers important new insights into the still fraught racial hierarchies of contemporary society in the United States.




History in the Humanities and Social Sciences


Book Description

Offers a collaborative exploration of the role of historical understanding in leading disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.




Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality


Book Description

This study guide is designed to help students read and understand the text, African Americans in the U.S. Economy. Each Study Guide chapter contains the following pedagogical features: 1. Key Terms and Institutions 2. Key Names 3. True/False Questions 4. Multiple-Choice Questions 5. Essay Questions




Rethinking Race


Book Description

In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Williams explores these theories in a carefully crafted analysis of Franz Boas and his influence upon his contemporaries, especially W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, George W. Ellis, and Robert E. Park. Historians have long recognized the monumental role Franz Boas played in eviscerating the racist worldview that prevailed in the American social sciences. Williams reconsiders the standard portrait of Boas and offers a new understanding of a man who never fully escaped the racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology but nevertheless successfully argued that African Americans could assimiliate into American society and that the chief obstacle facing them was not heredity but the prejudice of white America.




Black Intellectual Thought in Education


Book Description

Black Intellectual Thought in Education celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues.