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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
[Introduction To] Racism In The Nation's Service: Government Workers And The Color Line In Woodrow Wilson's America, Eric S. Yellin
[Introduction To] Racism In The Nation's Service: Government Workers And The Color Line In Woodrow Wilson's America, Eric S. Yellin
Bookshelf
Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration's successful 1913 drive to segregate the federal government was a pivotal episode in the age of progressive politics. Yellin investigates how the enactment of this policy, based on Progressives' demands for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of African Americans for decades to …
Development And Hope: Comments On Thomas Mccarthy's Race, Empire, And The Idea Of Human Development, Ladelle Mcwhorter
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 …
Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin
Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin
History Faculty Publications
On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution.
Book Panel Response: Symposium On Ladelle Mcwhorter's Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Book Panel Response: Symposium On Ladelle Mcwhorter's Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Unfortunately I do not have space to address individually each issue these four papers raise. Instead, I will first situate my work in relation to identity politics and address fears that my approach is reductive. Then, building on comments from Professors Wilkerson and Al-Saji, I will offer some remarks about aims, methods, and shortcomings.
Racism, Eugenics, And Ernst Mayr’S Account Of Species, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Racism, Eugenics, And Ernst Mayr’S Account Of Species, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Philosophy Faculty Publications
At his death at age one hundred in 2005, Ernst Mayr was hailed as the greatest evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century. His definition of species, published in 1942 in Systematics and the Origin of Species and known as the “biological species concept,” is familiar to every tenth grader: “Species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” That definition, together with Mayr’s and Theodosius Dobzhansky’s theory of speciation, enabled the integration of modern genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this paper I will argue that it imported racism into the heart of modern …
Racism And Biopower, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Racism And Biopower, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Philosophy Faculty Publications
While ignorance, or at least a lack of clear and distinct experience, does not seem to have stopped our predecessors from philosophizing about all manner of things from matter to immortal souls, in the latter half of the twentieth century North American philosophers became increasingly timid about advancing propositions based primarily not on logic informed by material evidence but on intuition, creative imagination, and passionate desire. By the 1960s our generation's teachers and mentors, perhaps battered by the McCarthy years or humbled by the dazzling successes of their colleagues in the "hard" sciences, had redrawn the disciplinary boundaries tightly enough …