Download or read book The Spectre of Race written by Michael G. Hanchard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How racism and discrimination have been central to democracies from the classical period to today As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race, Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood. Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies —France, Britain, and the United States—profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as "racial regimes" to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership. Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person's status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.

Download or read book Race and Democracy in the Americas written by Georgia A. Persons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and Democracy in the Americas examines dimensions of the comparative dynamics of race and ethnicity, with a directed focus on the Americas, most particularly Brazil and the United States. Brazil and the United States are two countries in the Americas that have been major hosts for the African diaspora. Both countries experienced prolonged enslavement of Africans and both now claim to be beacons of democracy for much of the developing world. Both Afro-Brazilians and African Americans have fielded major liberation movements against racism and oppression yet both groups continue to experience considerable residual racial discrimination and displacement. Brazil and the U.S. remain racialized societies though both officially purport to be otherwise.The chapters of this volume illuminate a common search for understanding how race operates in societies generally, and how shapes life opportunities for African Americans and Afro-Brazilians, both oppressed by this most detrimental social construction. The project that fueled this volume represented a rare opportunity for collaboration between Afro-Brazilian scholars and their African American counterparts.This volume offers a passionate conversation between colleagues who have endured common sociopolitical and cultural struggles, but who have only belatedly been able to meet and connect as individuals. Both groups share identities as scholars and activists, for neither identity alone is sufficient to nourish the longings of their hearts nor of their consciences. This volume also represents an all too rare opportunity to give voice and expression to the work of Afro-Brazilian scholars.Volume 9 of the National Political Science Review also carries a special tribute to Mack Henry Jones, a senior black political scientist retiring from Atlanta University and honors Jones's legacy and continues his quest for understanding the nature and intricacies of oppression and possible paths to liberatio

Download or read book The New Color Line written by Paul Craig Roberts and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 1997-05-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The New Color Line, authors Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton boldly challenge the affirmative action policies that have governed America for the past thirty years. The authors show that equality under the law has given way to legal privileges based on race and gender. Liberal society is being lost along with the presumption of goodwill that is the basis of democracy. The New Color Line offers an explanation for these ironic outcomes: judicial and regulatory edicts have taken the place of statutory law accountable to the people, and coercion has replaced persuasion. This happened because elites regarded democracy as the problem, not the solution.

Download or read book An American Dilemma written by Gunnar Myrdal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark effort to understand African American people in the New World, Gunnar Myrdal provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The title of the book, 'An American Dilemma', refers to the moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks. The appendices are a gold mine of information, theory, and methodology. Indeed, two of the appendices were issued as a separate work given their importance for systematic theory in social research. The new introduction by Sissela Bok offers a remarkably intimate yet rigorously objective appraisal of Myrdal—a social scientist who wanted to see himself as an analytic intellectual, yet had an unbending desire to bring about change. 'An American Dilemma' is testimonial to the man as well as the ideas he espoused. When it first appeared 'An American Dilemma' was called "the most penetrating and important book on contemporary American civilization" by Robert S. Lynd; "One of the best political commentaries on American life that has ever been written" in The American Political Science Review; and a book with "a novelty and a courage seldom found in American discussions either of our total society or of the part which the Negro plays in it" in 'The American Sociological Review'. It is a foundation work for all those concerned with the history and current status of race relations in the United States.

Download or read book Discrimination Danger to Democracy written by Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Discrimination Jobs and Politics written by Paul Burstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-02-28 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout this impressive and controversial account of the fight against job discrimination in the United States, Paul Burstein poses searching questions. Why did Congress adopt EEO legislation in the sixties and seventies? Has that legislation made a difference to the people it was intended to help? And what can the struggle for equal employment opportunity tell us about democracy in the United States? "This is an important, well-researched book. . . . Burstein has had the courage to break through narrow specializations within sociology . . . and even to address the types of acceptable questions usually associated with three different disciplines (political science, sociology, and economics). . . . This book should be read by all professionals interested in political sociology and social movements."—Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Social Forces "Discrimination, Jobs and Politics [is] satisfying because it tells a more complete story . . . than does most sociological research. . . . I find myself returning to it when I'm studying the U.S. women's movement and recommending it to students struggling to do coherent research."—Rachel Rosenfeld, Contemporary Sociology

Download or read book Working Together written by Cynthia Estlund and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Structure and rules are, in fact, central to the answer. Workplace interactions are constrained by economic power and necessity, and often by legal regulation. They exist far from the civic ideal of free and equal citizens voluntarily associating for shared ends. Yet it is the very involuntariness of these interactions that helps to make the often-troubled project of racial integration comparatively successful at work. People can be forced to get along - not without friction, but often with surprising success.".

Download or read book When the State Speaks What Should It Say written by Corey Brettschneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action--expressive and coercive--Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

Download or read book The Multicultural Path written by Gurpreet Mahajan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Racism in a Racial Democracy written by France Winddance Twine and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy. This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

Download or read book The Politics of Democratic Inclusion written by Christina Wolbrecht and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How institutions foster and hinder political participation of the underrepresented

Download or read book The Abolition of White Democracy written by Joel Olson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racial discrimination embodies inequality, exclusion, and injustice and as such has no place in a democratic society. And yet racial matters pervade nearly every aspect of American life, influencing where we live, what schools we attend, the friends we make, the votes we cast, the opportunities we enjoy, and even the television shows we watch. Joel Olson contends that, given the history of slavery and segregation in the United States, American citizenship is a form of racial privilege in which whites are equal to each other but superior to everyone else. In Olson's analysis we see how the tension in this equation produces a passive form of democracy that discourages extensive participation in politics because it treats citizenship as an identity to possess rather than as a source of empowerment. Olson traces this tension and its disenfranchising effects from the colonial era to our own, demonstrating how, after the civil rights movement, whiteness has become less a form of standing and more a norm that cements while advantages in the ordinary operations of modern society. To break this pattern, Olson suggests an "abolitionist-democratic" political theory that makes the fight against racial discrimination a prerequisite for expanding democratic participation.

Download or read book From Multiculturalism to Democratic Discrimination written by Alberto Spektorowski and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The effect of Islam on Western Europe has been profound. Spektorowski and Elfersy argue that it has transformed European democratic values by inspiring an ultra-liberalism that now faces an ultra-conservative backlash. Questions of what to do about Muslim immigration, how to deal with burqas, how to deal with gender politics, have all been influenced by western democracies’ grappling with ideas of inclusion and most recently, exclusion. This book examines those forces and ultimately sees, not an unbridgeable gap, but a future in which Islam and European democracies are compatible, rich, and evolving.

Download or read book Inequality and American Democracy written by Lawrence R. Jacobs and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, the United States ended some of its most flagrant inequalities. The "rights revolution" ended statutory prohibitions against women's suffrage and opened the doors of voting booths to African Americans. Yet a more insidious form of inequality has emerged since the 1970s—economic inequality—which appears to have stalled and, in some arenas, reversed progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy. In Inequality and American Democracy, editors Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol headline a distinguished group of political scientists in assessing whether rising economic inequality now threatens hard-won victories in the long struggle to achieve political equality in the United States. Inequality and American Democracy addresses disparities at all levels of the political and policy-making process. Kay Lehman Scholzman, Benjamin Page, Sidney Verba, and Morris Fiorina demonstrate that political participation is highly unequal and strongly related to social class. They show that while economic inequality and the decreasing reliance on volunteers in political campaigns serve to diminish their voice, middle class and working Americans lag behind the rich even in protest activity, long considered the political weapon of the disadvantaged. Larry Bartels, Hugh Heclo, Rodney Hero, and Lawrence Jacobs marshal evidence that the U.S. political system may be disproportionately responsive to the opinions of wealthy constituents and business. They argue that the rapid growth of interest groups and the increasingly strict party-line voting in Congress imperils efforts at enacting policies that are responsive to the preferences of broad publics and to their interests in legislation that extends economic and social opportunity. Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Dianne Pinderhughes demonstrate the feedbacks of government policy on political participation and inequality. In short supply today are inclusive public policies like the G.I. Bill, Social Security legislation, the War on Poverty, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that changed the American political climate, mobilized interest groups, and altered the prospect for initiatives to stem inequality in the last fifty years. Inequality and American Democracy tackles the complex relationships between economic, social, and political inequality with authoritative insight, showcases a new generation of critical studies of American democracy, and highlights an issue of growing concern for the future of our democratic society.

Download or read book Democracy Difference and Social Justice written by Gurpreet Mahajan and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume reflects upon the known and received ways by which differences have been understood and accommodated within democratic theory. The concluding section addresses this issue as relating to the Indian context.

Download or read book Reactionary Democracy written by Aurelien Mondon and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy is not necessarily progressive, and will only be if we make it so. What Mondon and Winter call 'reactionary democracy' is the use of the concept of democracy and its associated understanding of the power to the people (demos cratos) for reactionary ends. The resurgence of racism, populism and the far right is not the result of popular demands as we are often told. It is rather the logical conclusion of the more or less conscious manipulation by the elite of the concept of 'the people' and the working class to push reactionary ideas. These narratives place racism as a popular demand, rather than as something encouraged and perpetuated by elites, thus exonerating those with the means to influence and control public discourse through the media in particular. This in turn has legitimised the far right, strengthened its hand and compounded inequalities. These actions diverts us away from real concerns and radical alternatives to the current system. Through a careful and thorough deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse currently preventing us from thinking beyond the liberal vs populist dichotomy, this book develops a better understanding of the systemic forces underpinning our current model and its exploitative and discriminatory basis. The book shows us that the far right would not have been able to achieve such success, either electorally or ideologically, were it not for the help of elite actors (the media, politicians and academics). While the far right is a real threat and should not be left off the hook, the authors argue that we need to shift the responsibility of the situation towards those who too often claim to be objective, and even powerless, bystanders despite their powerful standpoint and clear capacity to influence the agenda, public discourse, and narratives, particularly when they platform and legitimise racist and far right ideas and actors.

Download or read book Palestinians in Israel written by Ben White and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palestinians in Israel considers a key issue ignored by the official "peace process" and most mainstream commentators: that of the growing Palestinian minority within Israel itself. What the Israeli right-wing calls "the demographic problem," Ben White identifies as "the democratic problem," which goes to the heart of the conflict. Israel defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as a Jewish state, despite the substantial and increasing Palestinian population. White demonstrates how the consistent emphasis on privileging one ethno-religious group over another cannot be seen as compatible with democratic values and that, unless addressed, will undermine any attempts to find a lasting peace. Individual case studies are used to complement this deeply informed study into the great, unspoken contradiction of Israeli democracy. It is a pioneering contribution which will spark debate among all those concerned with a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.