Complex Intersections: Reproductive Justice and Native American Women

This article presents an overview of reproductive justice as a theoretical and activist paradigm developed in response to reproductive oppression in the United States, and focuses on the reproductive justice needs of Native American women, as well as the responses developed by Native American women and their allies to these needs. I make explicit the links between reproductive justice, environmental justice and human rights for Native American communities, and articulate the ways in which reproductive healthcare for Native American women as it is provided by the Indian Health Service (IHS) acts as a fulcrum for these links. Ultimately, the failure of the IHS to meet the reproductive healthcare needs of Native American women reflects the failure of the federal government to meet its obligations to Tribal nations; further, these failures produce structures of reproductive oppression in Native communities which scholars and activists seek to redress utilizing the rubric of women’s reproductive health.     

Latina and African‐American Girls in the Juvenile Justice System: Needs,Problems, and Solutions

This review focuses on Latina and African‐American girls in the juvenile justice system with a special emphasis on their mental health, substance abuse, and treatment needs. Like many young women in the juvenile justice system, Latina and African‐American girls often have histories of neglect, abuse, and trauma, which contribute to later mental health and substance abuse issues. Despite these histories, juvenile justice professionals sometimes rely on stereotypes rooted in cultural deficit thinking to explain Latina and African‐American girls' delinquency. Relying on gendered, racialized, and classed stereotypes and assumptions can result in decisions that negatively impact Latina and African‐American girls' access to mental health, substance abuse, and other types of treatment. Policy and practice implications for better addressing the needs of Latina and African‐American girls are discussed.     

Rethinking the Scope of Environmental Injustice: Perceptions of Health Hazards in a Rural Native American Community Exposed to Carbon Black

Abstract We use in‐depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine perceptions of environmental health and justice among Native Americans in a rural Oklahoma community. Residents live near the Continental Carbon Company, which manufactures a rubber compound know as “carbon black.” Ponca tribal members believe their respiratory problems and other health concerns are directly related to the black dust emanating from the facility, but they have been unable to validate their health claims through institutional channels. We examine how Native American respondents interpret the environmental pollution as a threat not only to their health and well‐being but also to their sense of community. We address the perceived pattern of institutional denial and highlight the obstacles facing an impoverished Native American community attempting to validate their environmental health claims.     

Negotiating class,femininity and career: Latin American migrant women entrepreneurs in Spain

This article analyses how the gendered and classed positions of migrant women explain the meanings of becoming an entrepreneur and the role of their spouses in their occupational trajectories. Using a translocational positionality approach, the article challenges the claim that women escape patriarchal domination by establishing their own businesses. The narratives of 35 Latin American women entrepreneurs in Spain reveal that becoming an entrepreneur is conditioned by class‐based ideas of masculinity and femininity. I argue that middle‐class Latin American immigrant women become entrepreneurs to promote their spouse's career advancement while conforming to class‐based norms of femininity. In contrast, lower class Latin American women view the business as a space of autonomy and occupational upward mobility that nevertheless also complies with working‐class definitions of femininity. The policy implications of these findings relate to making class aspirations central to the support of labour market integration and empowerment of migrant women.     

APA and ACOG: Screen pregnant women for substance use

In “Substance Use Disorders in Perinatal Women,” Kimberly Yonkers, M.D., gives a sobering presentation on the consequences of substance use in pregnant women, on the women themselves, their pregnancies and their offspring, in the perinatal period. Yonkers' presentation took place April 25 as part of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) virtual online annual meeting; the meeting itself, scheduled to be in Philadelphia, was canceled due to COVID‐19. Yonkers' presentation touched on social justice as well as medical issues.     

"We All Have Identity at the Table": Negotiating Difference in a Southern African American Environmental Justice Network

This article focuses on conflicts and resolutions among members of a south-wide environmental justice network as they negotiated their collective goals, identities, and strategies. I find that the process of building and advancing this network raised a host of questions about what it means to be a Black activist in the post-civil rights-era, as well as how to resolve multiple and divergent ideas about contemporary African American identity and the implications of claiming race as a primary basis of identification in social movement organizing. As activists' debates grew heated, they tended to frame their disagreements in class terms; however, I argue that class discourses were flexible and contingent, and reflected important organizing values. In part, due to the flexibility of these categories, I find that, ultimately, activists were able to reframe their differences as a larger problem of racism and move forward as a collectivity.     

Gender and Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Social work interventions for youths should be based on understanding how youths think about important issues in their lives. This study assesses the moral reasoning of 43 urban, low-income African American seventh graders in response to questions about how to handle dating dilemmas. Responses to videotaped dating situations were analyzed using qualitative methods to distinguish between justice and care perspectives. The majority of responses from both genders came from the justice perspective. Girls gave more responses that reflected care and combined justice and care perspectives. Boys were less skillful in communicating and tended to focus on negative consequences. Culture and social class appeared to play important roles in moral reasoning.     

Gender and Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Social work interventions for youth should be based on understanding how youth think about important issues in their lives. This study assesses the moral reasoning of 43 urban, low-income African American seventh graders in response to questions about how to handle dating dilemmas. Responses to videotaped dating situations were analyzed using qualitative methods to distinguish between justice and care perspectives. The majority of responses from both genders came from the justice perspective. Girls gave more responses that reflected care and combined justice and care perspectives. Boys were less skillful in communicating and tended to focus on negative consequences. Culture and social class appeared to play important roles in moral reasoning.     

Environmental Justice and Social Power Rhetoric in the Moral Battle over Whaling*

This study examines the ideological battle between the Makah Indian Tribe and anti‐whaling activists over the Tribe's quest to resume its 2000‐year‐old tradition of hunting gray whales for traditional and ceremonial purposes. Through qualitative discourse analysis of 268 newspaper articles, this study analyzes the competing rhetoric surrounding the indigenous whaling issue and exposes fundamental differences in how the opposing campaigns frame their arguments. This study contributes to the literature on social movements and environmental justice in two primary ways. First, this article exposes the social power dynamics and experientially based assumptions inherent in the “framing contests” of competing social movements that comprised those from diverse racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Second, this article expands existing work in the field of environmental justice to include American Indian issues and concerns.     

Citizenship Social Work: A Community Environmental Scan of Re-enfranchisement Social Work Supports after Felony Conviction

Alexander (2012) argues that the corrections system relegates African American men to permanent second class status. Although social work has advanced the democratic project, African Americans often have had to forge a parallel social assistance system. In a community environmental scan, the authors apply the Citizenship Social Work framework to assess availability of services, supports, and advocacy efforts to address civil, political, social and economic rights for African American men with felony convictions. The authors find that a number of social work services are available, but the majority focus on social and economic rights, rather than civil and political rights, perhaps emphasizing professional service over social justice.     

The American Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered: Teaching the Role of Women

Abstract

This article examines coverage in social studies curriculum and U.S. history textbooks, specifically, of women in the American Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and considers how social studies teachers can broaden the narrative they teach to include more gender-related issues and the work of women activists. The author found that despite a rich body of scholarship focused on women in the CRM, textbooks, which still serve as the central curriculum documents in most secondary social studies classrooms, provide a relatively cursory treatment of women’s roles in the movement. The context of women’s activism and the intersections of race and gender, particularly around sexual violence and sexism within the movement, are rarely examined. To address this problem, the author provides examples of critical issues confronted by African American women in the era of the CRM as well as examples of activists that teachers could incorporate into their CRM units. In addition, the author argues that an inclusive study of the American CRM provides an excellent opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the many ways in which women and girls—often in the face of great personal danger—acted with courage and skill in the fight for racial justice.     

Cultivators of Change: Food Justice in Social Work Education

Food security is an important social work issue historically, and social work educators are responsible for teaching a curriculum that ensures social workers advance human rights, social justice, and economic justice. Contemporary food justice work focuses on the intersecting issues of policy, health, social justice, economic development, and the natural environment. The long-term global public health and environmental threats posed by the mainstream food system in combination with increasing poverty and food insecurity have led to questions about the ability of communities to sustain a nutritionally adequate and equitably distributed food supply. This paper provides examples of social work courses, units, and assignments that focus on educating students about food and environmental justice issues. Much of this work is based on service learning, which is an effective pedagogical tool for fostering connections between classroom concepts and practice. Courses that help students understand the contextual environments in their local communities provide optimal learning environments to address social, economic, and environmental injustices in the food system. Food justice, in particular, is one lens by which students can learn about environmental justice issues for application to their future practice.     

Mobilizing motherhood: The gendered burden of environmental protection

Maternalist framing has been a consistent part of a long history of powerful, often successful organizing for environmental protection and justice. Yet today's calls on individuals to simultaneously engage in proenvironmental behavior and to protect themselves from environmental threats through consumption have mobilized maternal discourse in a way that is likely demobilizing in the long run. Indeed, the increasing individualization of the environmental movement is intersecting with persistent, unequal gendered structures of labor in a way that places the burden of environmentalism and environmental risk management on women and mothers. I argue that precautionary consumption and other forms of individualized environmental risk management add to the “third shift,” on top of the disproportionate burden of household labor and care work that women already face. This phenomenon is concerning because it has the potential to (1) limit women's engagement in other forms of environmental advocacy and leadership, and to (2) reproduce existing gender inequalities not only between men and women but also among women of different levels of race and class privilege. Thus, the increasing individualization of the environmental movement also potentially exacerbates environmental injustice at the household level. Despite such emerging concerns, the domestic scale remains an often overlooked site of environmental harm and gendered burden.     

And Some of Us Are Braver: Stress and Coping Among African American Women

African American women fulfill many roles within their family and community. Most notably, these women are often defined by their “strength” and rarely seen as “vulnerable.” Many African American women demonstrate strength as they struggle to maintain employment, raise children, and nurture spouses and extended family, but these same women are at risk for a higher rate of health and emotional problems. In this article, the authors use relational cultural, stress and coping, and lifespan theories, along with Black feminist thought to discuss the interlocking effects of race, gender, and class regarding the psychological well-being of African American women 18 to 55 years old. We conclude with a discussion of research, practice, and teaching implications.     

Breaking the Food Chains: An Investigation of Food Justice Activism*

This article develops the concept of food justice, which places access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. Through comparative ethnographic case studies, we analyze the demands for food justice articulated by the Karuk Tribe of California and the West Oakland Food Collaborative. Activists in these communities use an environmental justice frame to address access to healthy food, advocating for a local food system in West Oakland, and for the demolition of Klamath River dams that prevent subsistence fishing. Food justice serves as a theoretical and political bridge between scholarship and activism on sustainable agriculture, food insecurity, and environmental justice. This concept brings the environmental justice emphasis on racially stratified access to environmental benefits to bear on the sustainable agriculture movement's attention to the processes of food production and consumption. Furthermore, we argue that the concept of food justice can help the environmental justice movement move beyond several limitations of their frequent place‐based approach and the sustainable agriculture movement to more meaningfully incorporate issues of equity and social justice. Additionally, food justice may help activists and policymakers working on food security to understand the institutionalized nature of denied access to healthy food.     

Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Environmental Labour Studies may benefit from incorporating the perspective of environmental justice. We offer a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing a severe environmental and public-health crisis. We show how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to environmental justice.     

The Victim Advocacy and Research Group: Serving a Growing Need to Provide Rape Victims with Personal Legal Representation to Protect Privacy Rights and to Fight Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System

The Constitutional guarantee of procedural “due process,” arguably the most essential principle of the American justice system, provides that no person should be deprived of their rights without, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing. Yet the personal rights of crime victims and other third parties are often violated in criminal proceedings in the absence of even minimal respect for due process. The problem persists, in part, because the system does not provide victims with personal legal advocacy and prosecutors are neither obligated nor empowered to serve as the victim’s lawyer. This lack of systematic zealous advocacy for victimsproduces harmful common law principles that depend on andperpetuate false and prejudicial notions about the credibility of rape victims, and women as a class. This article calls for the creation of public and privately supported lawyers for victims at both the trial and appellate levels of the criminaljustice system in an effort to ensure respect for fundamental constitutional principles, and to identify and eradicate gender bias in the criminal common law.     

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.     

The Victim Advocacy and Research Group: Serving a Growing Need to Provide Rape Victims with Personal Legal Representation to Protect Privacy Rights and to Fight Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System

The Constitutional guarantee of procedural due process, arguably the most essential principle of the American justice system, provides that no person should be deprived of their rights without, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing. Yet the personal rights of crime victims and other third parties are often violated in criminal proceedings in the absence of even minimal respect for due process. The problem persists, in part, because the system does not provide victims with personal legal advocacy and prosecutors are neither obligated nor empowered to serve as the victim's lawyer. This lack of systematic zealous advocacy for victims produces harmful common law principles that depend on and perpetuate false and prejudicial notions about the credibility of rape victims, and women as a class. This article calls for the creation of public and privately supported lawyers for victims at both the trial and appellate levels of the criminal justice system in an effort to ensure respect for fundamental constitutional principles, and to identify and eradicate gender bias in the criminal common law.     

Gender and Organizational Justice Preferences

Despite evidence that women and men possess similar workplace values, debate continues regarding gendered preferences for justice in the workplace. In particular, some have argued that women and men have fundamentally different justice orientations, which lead men to value fair outcomes and women to value fair procedures. Recent research finds that such beliefs may influence managers to reward men with greater monetary rewards than those provided to women. Here, we review this literature and argue that men and women do not have fundamentally different justice orientations. Instead, the few findings of gender difference in preferences for procedural vs. distributive justice in the workplace are a function of status differences between men and women.