Silent Covenants


Book Description

Looks at continuing repercussions of Brown v. Board of Education and, despite the original intentions, its frequently negative impact on the educational needs of African-American children.




Silent Covenants


Book Description

When the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Fifty years later, despite its legal irrelevance and the racially separate and educationally ineffective state of public schooling for most black children, Brown is still viewed by many as the perfect precedent. Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling. He notes that, despite the onerous burdens of segregation, many black schools functioned well and racial bigotry had not rendered blacks a damaged race. He maintains that, given what we now know about the pervasive nature of racism, the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains, is made through silent covenants--unspoken convergences of interest and involuntary sacrifices of rights--that ensure that policies conform to priorities set by policy-makers. Blacks and whites are the fortuitous winners or losers in these unspoken agreements. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms. Strategies must recognize and utilize the interest-convergence factors that strongly influence racial policy decisions. In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book.




Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men


Book Description

Black men need hope to survive and, ultimately, flourish. As mental health is a critical but often neglected issue, especially among Black men, Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men examines that sensitive topic in conjunction with reflections on race, gender, sexuality, and class to offer a hopeful and constructive framework for care and counseling, particularly for Black men. These are not separate from spiritual health and growth, as well, but both are integral to holistic, dynamic wellbeing. In this, the author provides a careful and critical analysis of spiritual hope and healing as ingredient to individual and communal flourishing. As such, this volume will be a vital resource for health practitioners, spiritual caregivers, and providers in community care who serve to bolster the mental wellbeing of Black men.




Racism and Resistance


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.




Government Responsiveness in Race-Related Crisis Events


Book Description

Government Responsiveness in Race-Related Crisis Events argues that decision-making in crisis events related to race and ethnicity (RRCEs) is distinctive based upon the historical treatment of people of color and current narratives surrounding race in the United States. The author presents racially sensitive crisis events, not as independent problems, but as symptoms of an underlying condition which began upon the country's founding. She contends public officials will need to recognize and draw upon the interrelated nature of these crises for effective solutions and introduces a decision-making model for race-related crisis events. The author uses grounded theory and a critical race lens to explore the decision-making of public officials in Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi concerning the removal of the Confederate Flag from state grounds in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston Church Shooting.




Education as Freedom


Book Description

Education as Freedom is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, a dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. Education as Freedom is a long awaited text that historicizes the current racial achievement gap as well as illuminates the myriad of African American voices and actions to define the purpose of education and to push the limits of the democratic experiment in the United States.







Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question


Book Description

A systemic analysis of anti-Black racism in the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. While acknowledging Hannah Arendt’s keen philosophical and political insights, Kathryn T. Gines claims that there are some problematic assertions and oversights regarding Arendt’s treatment of the “Negro question.”Gines focuses on Arendt’s reaction to the desegregation of Little Rock schools, to laws making mixed marriages illegal, and to the growing civil rights movement in the south. Reading them alongside Arendt’s writings on revolution, the human condition, violence, and responses to the Eichmann war crimes trial, Gines provides a systematic analysis of anti-black racism in Arendt’s work. “Hannah Arendt: political progressive and committed anti-racist theorist? Think again. As Kathryn Gines makes inescapably clear, for Arendt the “Negro” was the problem, whether in the form of savage “primitives” inseparable from Heart-of-Darkness Africa, social climbers trying to get their kids into white schools, or unqualified black university students dragging down academic standards. [Gines’s] boldly revisionist text reassesses the German thinker’s categories and frameworks.” —Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University “Takes on a major thinker, Hannah Arendt, on an important issue—race and racism—and challenges her on specific points while raising philosophical and methodological shortcomings.” —Richard King, Nottingham University “Gines carefully moves through Arendt scholarship and Arendt’s texts to argue persuasively that explicit discussions of the “Negro question” point up the limitations of her thinking.” —Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University “Gines has delivered an intellectually challenging book, that presents one of the most important figures in Western philosophy of the 2nd half of the 20th century in a different and, perhaps, somewhat less favorable perspective.” —Philosophia “Offers a wealth of research that will be valuable to scholars and graduate students interested in how racial bias operates in Arendt’s major works. Gines’s writing style is lucid and to the point, and her engagement with secondary sources is comprehensive.” —Hypatia




A Worthy Piece of Work


Book Description

The story of Madeline Morgan, the activist educator who brought Black history to one of the nation’s largest and most segregated school systems A Worthy Piece of Work tells the story of Madeline Morgan (later Madeline Stratton Morris), a teacher and an activist in WWII-era Chicago, who fought her own battle on the home front, authoring curricula that bolstered Black claims for recognition and equal citizenship. During the Second World War, as Black Americans both fought to save democracy abroad and demanded full citizenship at home, Morgan’s work gained national attention and widespread praise, and became a model for teachers, schools, districts, and cities across the country. Scholar Michael Hines unveils this history for the first time, providing a rich understanding of the ways in which Black educators have created counternarratives to challenge the anti-Black racism found in school textbooks and curricula. At a moment when Black history is under attack in school districts and state legislatures across the country, A Worthy Piece of Work reminds us that struggles over history, representation, and race are far from a new phenomenon.




Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger


Book Description

In Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger, the veteran journalist Justin Murphy makes the compelling argument that the educational disparities in Rochester, New York, are the result of historical and present-day racial segregation. Education reform alone will never be the full solution; to resolve racial inequity, cities such as Rochester must first dismantle segregation. Drawing on never-before-seen archival documents as well as scores of new interviews, Murphy shows how discriminatory public policy and personal prejudice combined to create the racially segregated education system that exists in the Rochester area today. Alongside this dismal history, Murphy recounts the courageous fight for integration and equality, from the advocacy of Frederick Douglass in the 1850s to a countywide student coalition inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s. This grinding antagonism, featuring numerous failed efforts to uphold the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, underlines that desegregation and integration offer the greatest opportunity to improve educational and economic outcomes for children of color in the United States. To date, that opportunity has been lost in Rochester, and persistent poor academic outcomes have been one terrible result. Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger is a history of Rochester with clear relevance for today. The struggle for equity in Rochester, like in many northern cities, shows how the burden of history lies on the present. A better future for these cities requires grappling with their troubled pasts. Murphy's account is a necessary contribution to twenty-first-century Rochester.