Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Race, Poverty And Education In The 21st Century, Joan Wallace-Benjamin

Trotter Review

I am here as the president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. I am here as a woman. I am here as a partner in the struggle for equal opportunity and access for - women, men, young people, the elderly, Black, white, Latino and Asian, who are not able to fully enjoy the educational, economic and social benefits of our American society. I am here as a colleague of Mary's, [Mary Lassen, Executive Director, Women's Educational and Industrial Union] who works with commitment and passion on these same issues and with whom I have collaborated and will continue to …

Disparities In The Health Care Status Of Women: Implications For Research, Marcia I. Wells-Lawson

Trotter Review

Even a cursory review of data on the health status of women reveals striking differences by race. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, death rates among Black women from the three leading causes of death (cardiac disease, cancer and cerebrovascular disease) exceed those of white, Asian, Native American and Latina women for each age category from 45-84. With the exception of Black women, the death rates among white women from these diseases exceed those of other ethnic groups of women. Data on two of the risk factors for cardiac and cerebrovascular diseases (hypertension and obesity), show …

Race, Economic Development, And The Role Of Transportation And Training, Joan Wallace-Benjamin

Trotter Review

As Massachusetts confronts its economic future and develops strategic plans for seizing competitive advantages, accessibility promised by proposed development plans for the transportation infrastructure must not only provide commuters with the means to get to work, but also increase the opportunity for participation in the economy for all citizens of the region. Changes in the transportation infrastructure will not ensure accessibility unless workers receive adequate training for the new types of jobs being offered. According to a recent report issued by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, authored by William P. O'Hare, "Black people who live in urbanized …

The Changing Significance Of Race For People Of Color, Juanita Tamayo Lott

Trotter Review

For more than two hundred years, race in the United States has been viewed as a black/white issue. Blacks have been defined not as a people unto themselves, but only in relationship to whites. This relationship is one of power with blacks as a “minority subordinate” group and whites as a “majority dominant” group. Other people of color—whether indigenous to the Americas, settlers who predated Western Europeans, nonwhite settlers with several generations of U.S.-born residents, or newly arrived immigrants and refugees—have been primarily defined as nonexistent. When other people of color have been recognized, it has been in a marginal …

The Hypocrisy Of The "Pigmentocracy", Lucas Rivera

Trotter Review

The following article is excerpted and reprinted with permission of the author and was originally published in two parts in the May 12—18 and 19—25 issues of The City Sun.

The question of race and skin color has haunted both the Latino and black communities, with far too many denying any ties to African ancestry—despite darker skin tones. But the choice many Latinos face—as to whether they should call themselves black or white—may be feeding into the hands of strategists, who may be making economic determinations based on the number of people of color.

Introduction, James Jennings

Trotter Review

This special issue of the Trotter Review is devoted to a broad range of topics related to race, power, and voting. Although voting is a critically important political tool for black America, the vote does not necessarily guarantee that a group will enjoy power in society. At the same time that we seek greater rates of voter registration and turnout at all levels of the electoral process, we must also continue to struggle towards an agenda that delivers power to the black community.

The issue opens with an explanation of why statehood for Washington, D.C., should be a key item …

Race And Presidential Politics '92: The Challenge To Go Another Way, May Louie

Trotter Review

At presidential election time in 1992, America is once again looking at limited political options for national leadership. The Republican party platform is its most conservative ever. The Democratic party ticket is dominated by southern Dixiecrats. And we who have marched and organized, and risked and sacrificed much for racial equality and political empowerment, must now match our sense of foreboding with our determination to meet the challenge before us. Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 nation-shaking, agenda-setting presidential campaigns took us to places we had never been before and gave us a glimpse at the possibility of racial and economic …

Crime, Drugs, And Race, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

The crime and criminal record statistics of black Americans are frightening; and they keep getting worse. These figures, of course, give us pause. Yet, it must be kept in mind that none of these figures demonstrates that blacks as a race are more prone to crime. Rather, the figures show that the average black person in the United States is more likely than the average white person to be so situated in the social structure that he or she is more likely to be involved in crime, with an even higher likelihood of being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

Miscegenation And Acculturation In The Narragansett Country Of Rhode Island, 1710-1790, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The histories of most New England states view blacks as a strange, foreign people enslaved in southern states, whom New Englanders rescued first by forming colonization and abolitionist societies and later by fighting a Civil War to free them. The existence of a black population in New England as early as the seventeenth century has been pretty much ignored. Indeed Anderson and Marten, of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, touched off a furor with their discovery that Abraham Pearse, one of the early residents of Plymouth Colony, was black.

The long neglect of New England’s black history has …

Race And Capital Punishment, Michael L. Radelet

Trotter Review

Whether it be lynching or legally-imposed capital punishment, the threat or use of death as a punishment has been a powerful means of class and race intimidation throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, statutes that explicitly considered race were not uncommon; in Virginia, for example, the statutes of 150 years ago listed five capital crimes for whites and 70 for black slaves. Today, historians interested in capital punishment use records of state compensations to slave owners to learn how many slaves were executed.