A Threat to Liberty

Abstract

More than 2,000,000 people are currently incarcerated in the United States. This incarceration rate is unprecedented and unequaled in any other nation, at any other time in history. The severity of the situation is exacerbated given the disproportionate incarceration rates of African American and Hispanic males and females. This article critically examines the influence of White privilege as a form of social control that results in racist practices that lead to the disproportionate incarceration of African American and Hispanic men and women. Strategies to address this endemic problem through personal, political, and preventive interventions are also discussed.     

Violence Against African Americans in Corporate America

Abstract

Increasing numbers of African Americans are entering the corporate workplace and becoming vulnerable targets for insidious, devastating and punishing forms of abusive behavior exhibited at all levels in America's corporate structures. This article explores violence against African Americans who are attempting to climb the “crystal staircase” in these formal organizations. A model is proposed to assist black executives survive hostile environments in corporate America and in other settings.     

Self-Perceived Physical Attractiveness,Self-Esteem,Race, and Gender

Abstract

African American self-perceptions of physical attractiveness are found to be higher than white self-perceptions, while there is no difference by race in the correlation between self-perceived attractiveness and self-esteem. Controlling for self-perceived attractiveness, African Americans have lower self-esteem than whites, suggesting that African American perceptions of physical attractiveness, mirrored in the slogan “Black is Beautiful,” may have contributed to the disappearance over the past forty years of the gap between African American and white self-esteem. Self-esteem is more strongly related to self-perceived physical attractiveness for females than males, particularly among whites.     

Racial and ethnic differences in patterns of adolescent tobacco users: A latent class analysis

BackgroundLittle is known about how tobacco use varies among youth of different racial and ethnic groups and how these patterns are related to levels of nicotine dependence.ObjectivesThis study investigated the tobacco use patterns of White, African American, and Hispanic high school students. We further explored whether tobacco use patterns were associated with levels of nicotine dependence and gender.MethodsData were analyzed from the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) of high school students who endorsed at least one form of tobacco use in their lifetime (n = 4691). Three separate latent class analysis (LCA) models were estimated using seven different types of tobacco products as indicators. Also, the level of nicotine dependence was compared with one class to another class in three racial/ethnicity groups.ResultsFour classes of White youth were identified: (1) “Non-user” (67%), (2) “Polytobacco” (6%), (3) “Chewing Tobacco” (8%), and (4) “(E-)Cigarettes” (19%) classes. The “Polytobacco” class had the highest nicotine dependence followed by “Chewing Tobacco,” “(E-)cigarettes,” and “Non-user.” Among African American youth, two tobacco patterns were identified: “Non-user” (91%) and “Cigarette/Cigar” (9%). The “Cigarette/Cigar” class had greater nicotine dependence than the “Non-user” class. Among Hispanic youth, three subgroups were identified: “Non-user” (78%), “(E-)Cigarette/Cigar” (14%), and “Hookah” (18%). “(E)Cigarette/cigar” had the highest nicotine dependence in Hispanic youth followed by the “Hookah” and “Non-users” classes.ConclusionWe found distinct classes of youth tobacco use by race/ethnicity. Although poly-tobacco use was common, White, African American, and Latino youth used different tobacco types, suggesting that racially and ethnically targeted prevention strategies may be indicated.     

The racialized patterns of police violence: The critical importance of research as praxis

The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.     

Introduction

Abstract

This article discusses why it is important to consider how cultural racism contributes to the construction of motives and justifications among individuals who have committed acts of structural violence, including, lynching, hate crime and police violence against African Americans. Cultural racism is also discussed as a factor that contributes to interpersonal structural violence in situations involving black offenders and victims.     

Violence Against African American Women in Prisons and Jails

Abstract

The United States prison population is bulging and in recent years, the percentage of African American women being incarcerated far outnumber any other group. As the Black women in jails and prisons grow, so do the whispers about sexual abuse and labor abuse inside these institutions. This article discusses the nature of violence directed against incarcerated Black women and why it is important to direct national attention to this problem. It argues that though the violence may be individually directed, it is institutionally founded. Strategies are proposed for humanizing local jails and federal and state prisons.     

Can social workers and police be partners when dealing with bikie-gang related domestic violence and sexual assault?

Welfare and criminal justice systems manifest different goals, cultures, values and working methods. In Australia, the welfare sector has a culture of empowerment and concern for victims’ rights, within which social workers focus on social justice and social change. In contrast, the criminal justice sector (police) is patriarchal and para-military in structure, focusing on enforcing and maintaining community order and safety. These differences can create tension when social workers and police need to work as partners in response to violence against women, in particular violence against women from bikie gangs. This article addresses the issue of partnerships between social workers and police when working with abused bikie-gang women. It presents the findings of recent research into social work practice with such women in South Australia, in conjunction with a brief exploration of the international literature on social work and police cultures, and partnerships. It concludes that whilst there is a great need for genuine collaboration and partnership between social workers and police in the complex context of domestic violence with links to organised crime, the cultures and mandates of these different professions make this difficult.     

“We have to take these guys out”: Motivations for Assaulting Incarcerated Child Molesters

We know very little about how incarcerated men justify assaults against at‐risk inmates such as child molesters. For this article, we fill this gap in the literature by examining how men describe these assaults as a way to align their own violent behavior with more conventional mores. We find that formerly incarcerated men justify violence as a way to raise their own social status and promote cultural norms against child abuse. When inmates attack someone convicted of child molestation, they do so to punish him and provide a “service” to their community. Furthermore, they elevate their own social status and distance themselves from these offenders. Theoretically, this work broadens our understanding of verbal justifications for violent action.     

Promoting Health and Wellness in African American Males through Rites of Passage Training

The current work presents exploratory research findings related to the effectiveness of Let the Circle Be Unbroken, an African-centered “rites of passage” training program, to promote health and well-being in a sample of high-risk, African American males. An abbreviated version of the ADPRC-TADPOLE questionnaire was administered to 39 African American boys, between the ages of 8 and 16 years, who were participating in a community-based “rites of passage” training program. Findings suggest that the Let the Circle Be Unbroken training program is a viable program for improving self-esteem among young African American males. The implications of this research are relevant to the reduction of some health disparities observed among underrepresented populations, especially African American males.     

The Risk of Partner Violence Among Low‐Income Hispanic Subgroups

Women with few social resources are at elevated risk of partner abuse. Certain evidence suggests that African American and Hispanic women, who are overrepresented in the lower socioeconomic strata, are at particularly high risk. We compare women's risk of partner violence, defined as moderate and severe, among 2,400 low‐income African American, Hispanic, and non‐Hispanic Whites from “Welfare, Children and Families: A Three City Study” and find that these groups differ in their risk of degrees of violence. Specific nation‐of‐origin Hispanic subgroups also manifest important differences in their violence risk profiles. We argue that a better understanding of victimization requires more detailed ethnic categorization and a more refined understanding of the meaning of domestic violence for different groups.     

Once in Parkland,a Year in Hartford,a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, are viewed as routine whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are extraordinary and worthy of outrage. In this article, we draw on ethnographic observation to compare protest vigils in urban communities comprised predominantly of people of color, in suburban areas that are mostly white, and at the national level in order to uncover the racialized processes of symbolic classification by which this “commonsense” view is produced and how it is challenged by activists. We use the framework of cultural pragmatics to analyze these vigils, making visible the racialized forms of domination that structure activism and, we contend, ultimately divide gun violence into two distinct phenomena rather than constituting a master category. We argue that cultural pragmatics provides a way to understand what it means to challenge culture as emphasized by the multi‐institutional politics approach to social movements.     

Gender differences in the experience of violence,discrimination, and stress hormone in African Americans: Implications for public health

Violence is more prevalent in African American communities than in other American communities. This has impacts not only on criminal justice interventions but also on the physical and mental health of these communities including their risk for acquiring life-threatening diseases. While many studies have focused on the effects of violence on African American males, we sought to understand the relative gender effects that violence has on African American females. This is of particular interest given the wide array of scientific literature suggesting maternal health has inter-generational health effects. Understanding gender differences associated with exposure to violence, depression, and immune function is an important step in understanding how young women perceive and internalize societal violence directed toward and around them. We analyzed a cohort of 557 young African American adults aged 18–25 years old from the Washington, DC area. We use sociological, epidemiological, mental health, computational biology, and quantitative genetics approaches to build a predictive portrait of the effects of violence on African American health. This study demonstrates that African American males and females experience different constellations of societal violence, that African American women report greater perception of racial and gender bias, and that cortisol, an indicator of stress response, is correlated to perceived discrimination. This work contributes to current understandings of how violence contributes to negative health outcomes and lays the foundation for a predictive model for sociological, health, and behavior risk that young African Americans encounter.     

Everyday Restriction: Central American Women and the State in the Mexico‐Guatemala Border City of Tapachula

Media coverage and emerging scholarship have brought increasing international attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis facing Central American transmigrants as they navigate landscapes of violence in Mexico. While stories of Central American immigrants who remain in Mexico are largely absent from this coverage, there is arguably a “Central Americanization” occurring on the southern border through this permanent settlement. Central Americans choosing to establish themselves in the border state of Chiapas do so in a socio‐spatial and political context defined by the introduction of “progressive” state‐ and national‐level migration policies on the one hand and the persistence of discrimination and violence on the other. We know little about the implementation of these policies on the ground, namely how they are applied and the impacts they have on the immigrant experience in Mexico. To begin to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the experiences of Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico‐Guatemala border city of Tapachula. Employing a feminist geopolitical lens, which encourages conducting research and analysis at diverse scales, it examines their everyday interactions with low‐ to mid‐level representatives of the Mexican state as they seek to avail themselves of their legal and social citizenship rights, and the impacts of these interactions on their livelihoods. This article argues that low‐ to mid‐level officials’ actions reveal the importance of a form of extra‐official, subtle, yet pervasive regulation through which immigrant women are denied rights they are entitled to, inducing negative impacts to their livelihoods, which I term everyday restriction.     

“The First Mark of Pain”: Toward a child-centered methodological reorientation of social theory,race and corporal punishment in American life

The current white supremacist racial order in America fundamentally relies on fear and pain to shape the subjectivities of Black people in childhood. This violence is most visible when enacted by police officers against unarmed Black youth. A less visible yet more pernicious form of racist violence against Black children is exercised by community proxies such as Black teachers and parents. Annual government reports reveal that Black children are more likely to be injured or killed by their parents than by police. In this paper we inquire as to why, despite the many Black writers who have described parental violence as an intergenerational re-enactment of the violence of slavery, and despite decades of research on the harms of hitting children, social theorists have not analyzed how Black parents can serve as proxies for white supremacist violence. We argue that Black parenting culture has in many ways internalized the white supremacist view that corporal punishment is required to instill the discipline necessary to spare Black youth from police violence and incarceration. We conclude that until social scientists foreground the voices of Black youth in their studies, rather than adults, our ability to understand and confront the reproduction of white supremacist violence will be impeded. We argue that the physical punishment of children in Black families is an aspect of the legacy or “afterlife” of slavery. We contend that this omission persists because Black youth voices are absent from social analysis on the issue of physical punishment, existing only in clinical studies divorced from macro-sociological analysis, and we discuss how this omission occurred as a matter of scholarly history.     

Lifting the Veil: African American Images and the European American Gaze

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American “gaze,” multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics.     

Not Necessarily Solidarity

Since the idea of “women's rights as human rights” emerged, there has been a wave of international donors, organizations and transnational feminist activists successfully delivering pressure and resources in the struggle to mitigate violence against women worldwide. Through these transnational networks, decisions regarding which local problems to address and how to manage them are often made at the international level. Most scholarship has rightly celebrated the advances for women's rights that have been made possible due to the impact of international organizations and transnational advocacy networks. However, there are many dilemmas that arise from this North-centric approach to assigning and managing priorities – especially among development aid organizations. Coordination with international donors is often necessary and has been a major source of advances. However, there are still some potentially harmful impacts of having to engage in these networks in order to address violence against women – including a disproportionate focus on short-term results while neglecting long-term goals. This article articulates these dilemmas and explains how international feminist human rights norms can be more successfully translated into a stronger sense of solidarity across borders and more sustainable advances for women. Examples are drawn from the Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.     

Cultural Alignment African American Male Youths and Violent Crime

Abstract

Four theories-racial inferiority, culture of poverty, racial discrimination, and political economy-are usually advanced to explain violence among African Americans. These theories, however, fail to underscore the deleterious influence that cultural oppression and cultural alienation have on African Americans generally and African American male youths specifically. To examine the role both cultural oppression and cultural alienation play in the lives of African American male youths, this article presents a Cultural Alignment Framework. The basic assumption of the framework is that African American male youth violence is a function of these males' internalization of alien concepts of manhood that reflect the impositions of European American culture and the nefarious legacy of slavery.     

Positive Men: searching for relational dignity through health activism in a South African township

This paper explores how men from a South African township appropriate health and rights discourses in times of existential needs and uncertainties, in order to construct isidima, or what the author calls a relational model of dignity. The activists’ efforts were tied to gendered moral practices of granting respect to others and expecting to be respected as “positive” men who struggle against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. Their involvement in situations of moral breakdown, however, forged a situated transfiguration of gendered social relationships that went beyond both “traditional” notions of masculinity and “modern” ideals of liberal citizenship. The findings are based on life histories of 15 Xhosa-speaking men who were involved in the group Positive Men (PM). Furthermore, they are the result of direct and participant observation of key events that took place between 2007 and 2010.     

Homeless Military Veterans and the Intersection of Partner Violence

The objective of this paper was to identify, screen, and assess homeless veterans through outreach for domestic abuse services. This study focuses on 507 homeless veterans, from 2002 to 2007 identified in a homeless shelter and a transitional housing program. Homeless veterans completed the Domestic Violence/Abuse Screen (DV/AS) and psychosocial assessment. The majority were males, African American, divorced, Army, Vietnam, substance-dependent, and homeless, while the minorities had combat-PTSD; were charged and convicted of domestic violence; were on supervised parole or probation; had juvenile records; were victims of domestic violence during rearing; had a perpetrator relative; had prior domestic violence treatment; and were referred for domestic abuse treatment services. There is a lack of research evidence for the effectiveness for screening of homeless veteran partner violence. This sample shows the benefit of integrating domestic abuse screening into homeless programs and more research.