Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Police Brutality: The Nexus Between Historical Injustices, Police Culture And The African American Experience, Claude M. Rhone

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study focused on the harassment, maltreatment, and brutality of African Americans by police officers. The recent widespread condemnation and social justice protests in response to incidents of police brutality point to historical injustices inherent to the culture of policing. Slavery provides the overarching backdrop; however, Jim Crow laws cultivated the structural adaptations necessary to fulfill segregation between African Americans and Whites. The American policing model, which evolved from slave patrols to public entities, continued as an apparatus in the marginalization and disenfranchisement of African Americans. The narrative of “defunding the police” suggests that the past’s cultural proximity renders the …

Racialized Disablement And The Need For Conceptual Analysis Of “Racial Health Disparities”, Desiree Valentine

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

It is well established that racial health disparities are impacted by structural racism, but the imbrication of racialization processes with processes of disablement remains underdeveloped. This essay advocates for a conceptual lens that looks historically and politically at the co-constitution of “race” and “disability.” Racism and ableism intersect in ways that manifest what I call racialized disablement, a key heuristic for building a fuller understanding of “race” and “racial health disparities.” This terminology, I propose, helps illuminate the following about race and racism in healthcare: first, racialized disablement seeks to denaturalize both race and disability to focus on their political …

Neither Race Nor Ethnicity: Latinidad As A Social Affordance, Adam Burgos, Alejandro Arango

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Reckoning With Race And Disability, Jasmine E. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

Our national reckoning with race and inequality must include disability. Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history. Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy. This approach has ignored the ways in which states have relied on disability as a tool of subordination, leading to the invisibility of disabled people of color in civil rights movements and an incomplete theoretical and remedial framework for contemporary justice initiatives. Legal scholars …

Asian American Politics: A Case Study Of Hmong Americans In St. Paul, Mn, Thilee Yost

Honors College

Despite being a relatively new refugee group relocating to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, Hmong Americans have emerged as a major political influence in St. Paul, Minnesota. With a population of over 68,000 Hmong Americans, St. Paul has been called the Hmong capital of the world. It has a very dense network of Hmong individuals who have proven to be an emerging political force. During the past November 2018 midterms seven, a record number, of Hmong Americans were elected to public office in the Twin Cities area. Since Asian Americans are expected to make up 10% of …

Theorizing About Human Capacity: A View From The Nineteenth Century, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Discussions of eugenic policy of the nineteenth century are too often isolated from the larger debates in political economy over human capacity. These debates centered on two questions. First, do all people have roughly the same capabilities, or do some groups have a lower capacity than others? Second, capacity for what? In the nineteenth century political economists in the tradition of Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill argued that, as Gordon Tullock would later put it, “people are people” and there are no racial or other distinctions to be made about our capabilities for labor market, family formation, or other …

What Race Terms Do: Du Bois, Biology, And Psychology On The Meanings Of “Race”, Glenn "Boomer" Mac Trujillo

Faculty Scholarship

This paper does two things. First, it interprets the work of W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal that the meanings of race terms are grounded by both a historical and an aspirational component. Race terms refer to a backward-looking component that traces the history of the group to its present time, as well as a forward-looking component that sets out values and goals for the group. Race terms thus refer to a complex cluster of concepts that involve biological, sociological, historical, moral, and political properties. Second, the paper defends W. E. B. Du Bois’s conservationist thesis about races, which …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Poetic Witness In A Networked Age, Jerome D. Clarke

Student Publications

When online videos mobilize protestors to occupy public spaces, and those protestors incorporate hashtags in their chants and markered placards, deliberative democratic theory must no longer dismiss technology and peoples historically excluded from the arena of politics. Specifically, political models must account for the role of repetition in paving the way for unheard and unseen messages and people to appear in the political arena. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the Performative and Hannah Arendt’s Space of Appearance, this paper assesses that critical and generative role of iteration. Repeating unheeded acts performs the capacity for those acts to be entered …

Racism At Home And Abroad: Thoughts From A Christian Ethicist, Michael Jones

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article Christian ethicist Michael S. Jones introduces the work of Princeton University ethicist Thomas Pogge on the areas of global poverty and global justice. He then applies Pogge’s ideas to an ethical issue of continuing importance: racism. He discusses the history of racism in the United States and Romania, pointing out numerous parallels both historical and contemporary. He then discusses the appropriate attitude for Christians to adopt on the issue, arguing that while Christian sources are not univocal on the subject, there is an egalitarianism at the heart of Christianity that rules out racism as a Christian attitude. …

The Compensation Principle, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

In "Should Race Matter?," David Boonin proposes the compensation principle: When an agent wrongfully harms another person, she incurs a moral obligation to compensate that person for the harms she has caused. Boonin then argues that the United States government has wrongfully harmed black Americans by adopting pro-slavery laws and other discriminatory laws and practices following the end of slavery, and therefore the United States government has an obligation to pay reparations for slavery and discriminatory laws and practices to those who have been harmed by them - in particular, to contemporary black Americans. Here I argue that the compensation …

Sheltering Xenophobia, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

What is xenophobia? Why is xenophobia immoral? How is xenophobia’s conceptual and moral meaning diminished? Investigations of these questions would invigorate xenophobia as a topic in public morality and discourage the public’s acquiesc- ing to xenophobia’s new prominence. This paper focuses on the third question, the diminishment of xenophobia. In the first sec- tion, I outline a general conception of xenophobia. In the second, I explain how theories of membership in liberal democratic soci- eties relegate xenophobia to a minor moral concern. And, in the third, that the conflation of xenophobia with racism disadvantages the former. How liberal Democratic nations …

Comment On Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative Of Integration, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Elizabeth Anderson draws the attention of moral, social, and political philosophy to the idea of integration, an idea that is most often associated with the struggles to desegregate schools and neighborhoods in the years before and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board. Her book, The Imperative of Integration, is a remarkable contribution because integration is not frequently mentioned outside of debates in the fields of urban affairs and education policy, and residential integration and segregation are rarely mentioned in academic philosophy. There are, however, some concerns with her defense of her defense of integration that …

Nietzsche And Darwin, Babette Babich

Working Papers

Abstract

I argue against the popular view of Nietzsche as Darwinist and I concur with other Nietzsche scholars who have also noted that other authors worked in Nietzsche’s thinking in association with Darwin, not only Spencer and Malthus but also Roux and Haeckel among others which also for Nietzsche included Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche offers plain condemnation of Darwin’s views but he is also often associated with Darwin owing to Darwin’s racism and his own vision of rank-order. I conclude with an emphasis on style and Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity to highlight the distinction he sought to make …

Development And Hope: Comments On Thomas Mccarthy's Race, Empire, And The Idea Of Human Development, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Thomas McCarthy’s Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development is an intriguing and important book; moreover, despite its heavy themes and its fine scholarship, it is extremely readable. And it is very timely. The questions it takes up are some of the most pressing of our age: globalization, international distributive justice, and sustainable economic development in particular. Its central problematic concerns the detrimental effects of developmental thinking as a core feature of modernity. The book seeks, says McCarthy, to make “a contribution to the critical history of the present” (2), but it does not stop with critical analysis; McCarthy …

How Porous Are The Walls That Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’S Incarceration, And The Unsettled Self, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that …

The Incorrigible Social Meaning Of Video Game Imagery, Stephanie Patridge

Religion & Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, I consider a particular amoralist challenge against those who would morally criticize our single-player video play, viz., 'come on, it's only a game!' The amoralist challenge with which I engage gains strength from two facts: the activities to which the amoralist lays claim are only those that do not involve interactions with other rational or sentient creatures, and the amoralist concedes that there may be extrinsic, consequentialist considerations that support legitimate moral criticisms. I argue that the amoralist is mistaken and that there are non-consequentialist resources for morally evaluating our single-player game play. On my view, some …

What ‘Biological Racial Realism’ Should Mean, Quayshawn Spencer

Philosophy

A curious ambiguity has arisen in the race debate in recent years. That ambiguity is what is actually meant by ‘biological racial realism’. Some philosophers mean that ‘race is a natural kind in biology’, while others mean that ‘race is a real biological kind’. However, there is no agreement about what a natural kind or a real biological kind should be in the race debate. In this article, I will argue that the best interpretation of ‘biological racial realism’ is one that interprets ‘biological racial realism’ as ‘race is a genuine kind in biology’, where a genuine kind is a …

The Down Low And The Sexuality Of Race, Brad E. Stone

Philosophy Faculty Works

There has been much interest in the phenomenon called "the Down Low," in which "otherwise heterosexual" African American men have sex with other black men. This essay explores the biopolitics at play in the media’s curiosity about the Down Low. The Down Low serves as a critical, transgressive heterotopia that reveals the codetermination of racism, sexism, and heterosexism in black male sexuality.

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …

Race And Place: Social Space In The Production Of Human Kinds, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Recent discussions of human categories have suffered from an over emphasis on intention and language, and have not paid enough attention to the role of material conditions, and, specifically, of social space in the construction of human categories. The relationship between human categories and social spaces is vital, especially with the categories of class, race, and gender. This paper argues that social space is not merely the consequent of the division of the world into social categories; it is constitutive of social categories. To put it more bluntly, if who we are is bound up with place, then not only …

The Pimple On Adonis's Nose: A Dialogue On The Concept Of Merit In The Affirmative Action Debate, Tobias Barrington Wolff, Robert Paul Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Efforts at progressive educational reform in general, and affirmative action in particular, frequently encounter a rhetorically powerful objection: Merit. The story of merit proclaims that high-achieving applicants - those who have already made effective use of educational opportunities in the past and demonstrated a likelihood of being able to do so in the future - enjoy a morally superior claim in the distribution of scarce educational resources. Past achievement, in other words, entitles an applicant to a superior education. This moral framework of merit serves as a constant counterpoint in debates over affirmative action, including those contained in the Court's …

Race, Face, And Rawls, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Deadweight Costs And Intrinsic Wrongs Of Nativism: Economics, Freedom, And Legal Suppression Of Spanish, William W. Bratton, Drucilla L. Cornell

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On Being A Role Model, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.