The Strange Career Of Racial Liberalism
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The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism
Author: Joseph Darda
language: en
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Release Date: 2022-03-15
How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism—with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness—has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.
The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North
Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too. Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow’s many strange careers in the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas. The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.
Complicity in American Literature after 1945
Author: Will Norman
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-10
Complicity in American Literature after 1945 offers a literary and intellectual history of the idea of complicity in the United States, proposing a new frame for understanding American literature in the period. The term “complicity” derives etymologically from the Latin complicãre, which means “to fold.” If one is complicit, one is folded into a larger system of social harm over which one has little or no direct control. In the period from 1945 to the early 1970s, complicity with structural racism became a central concern for American writing and thought, as it grappled with the Holocaust, colonialism, the Vietnam War, and racial domination at home in the United States. Writers and thinkers grasped complicity both as a social phenomenon to be represented and as a problem threatening to enfold writing itself. In addressing complicity, intellectuals were obliged to reconsider their social role and to innovate means of literary expression capable of articulating new experiences of guilt and responsibility. Complicity in American Literature after 1945 tells the story of that process as it took place across several genres, from highbrow short stories to crime fiction, and from experimental metafiction to the reportage essays of the New Journalism. It argues that the history of racial complicity is inseparable from the history of liberalism, and shows how we can make sense of our present preoccupations with complicity by studying its origins in the past.