White historical activity theory: toward a critical understanding of white zones of proximal development

Best known for arguing that individual development is part of social and historical development Vygotsky’s entry into education may be captured by his concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD). ZPD has not yet been synthesized with a critical study of whiteness. When ZPD is used to explain racial disparities in the service of inclusion, it is usually connected with the lives of people of color. This leaves out a critical understanding of racially dominant experiences, or whiteness. This article argues that a progressive union between Vygotsky and the field of race studies generally, Whiteness Studies specifically, benefits educators insofar as the concept of ZPD is applied to the particular ideological development of white identity. Likewise, Whiteness Studies gains an explanatory framework to account for the cognitive development of the dominant racial group, in short, a learning theory of whiteness. A Whiteness Studies intervention within Vygotskian theory pushes the limits of developmental theory when it analyzes the contours of a white ZPD. When racialized to consider whiteness, certain terms and concepts, such as Vygotsky’s genotypic and phenotypic analyses, take on a different significance, even different meanings. As a racially sensitive framework, particularly within a US-based understanding, Vygotskian theory is limited without critical attention to the development of white identity and whiteness as an ideology. By focusing on this nexus, Vygotskian theory fulfills part of its historical mission as a concrete study of cultural relations.     

Barack Obama,the New Politics of Race,and Classed Constructions of Racial Blackness

Based upon an analysis of the print and online media, this article examines the discourse of the “new politics of race” between 2007 and 2014. Part of the politics of postracialism, the new race politics first emerged as a set of guidelines for candidate Barack Obama, concerning how he should and should not handle racial matters if he hoped to win the presidency. In a larger sense, however, the new race politics is a class‐specific discourse of racial color blindness, one which positions the black upper middle class as a 21st‐century model minority, racialized in contradistinction to the black poor.     

Racism and pride in attitudes toward confederate symbols

In this essay, I describe and evaluate the contemporary debate over support for Confederate icons. This debate is often stylized as “heritage” versus “hatred.” In this debate, one side alleges that their favored Confederate symbols represent pride in Southern-Confederate identity, whereas the other urges that Confederate symbols represent racial hatred and white supremacy. I argue that the “heritage versus hatred” framing that typifies the public debate and the academic literature is not helpful. Additionally, the literature has largely ignored the views of Black Southerners, who have far more negative attitudes toward Confederate symbols compared to whites. Thus, many works implicitly assume a distinctly white southern past. Together, these shortcomings mean that existing research has likely overestimated overall public support for Confederate symbols and overstated the importance of Southern pride or heritage in informing that support, while at the same time underestimating the extent to which racial animus undergirds pro-Confederate views among whites.     

How Do We Know What Works? A Review and Critique of Current Practices in Ethics Training Evaluation

Training is a costly investment. As such, it is of great interest to know the extent to which that investment is yielding a positive return. Recent meta-analytic efforts have observed that ethics training programs are, indeed, having a positive effect, leading to the conclusion that the programs are working. However, they have also uncovered considerable variability in the effectiveness of ethics training programs, which leads to the purpose of the present study—to review current practices in ethics training evaluation. Through this review of 243 studies, consisting of 380 ethics trainings, we identified major themes in evaluation practices and training design. The tradeoffs associated with these evaluation procedures and designs are discussed, along with directions for future research.     

Working‐Class Jobs and New Parents' Mental Health

Little research has explored linkages between work conditions and mental health in working‐class employed parents. The current study aims to address this gap, employing hierarchical linear modeling techniques to examine how levels of and changes in job autonomy, job urgency, supervisor support, and coworker support predicted parents' depressive symptoms in a sample of 113 dual‐earner couples interviewed five times across the transition to parenthood. Increases in job autonomy and decreases in job urgency predicted fewer depressive symptoms in fathers at 1 year postpartum. For mothers, coworker support predicted fewer depressive symptoms, and supervisor support mitigated the negative effects of job urgency on depressive symptoms. Higher work hours coupled with low job urgency predicted declines in mothers' depressive symptoms across the first year of parenthood. Our findings suggest that interventions that lead to greater autonomy, less job urgency, and more supportive work relations may enhance employee well‐being among working‐class families.     

Racial Submarkets in Government Employment: African American Managers in New York State

This paper reports on a study of the employment situation of African American managers within New York State government. We argue that affirmative action, while having created employment opportunities for minority professionals, has also created racial submarkets in government. We identify three categories of jobs, a mainstream category and two sorts of minority categories, based on the racial composition of incumbents and constituencies that they serve. African Americans in minority submarket positions appear to have equal pay relative to comparable African Americans in mainstream jobs. They are less likely to have civil service job protection. There is limited mobility between submarkets; more professionals move from the mainstream to minority positions than vice versa. In the current period of budget reductions in state government, black professionals experience considerable job insecurity and express dissatisfaction with the policies that created the minority submarket.     

Bushfire catastrophe in Victoria,Australia: public record,accountability, commemoration,memorialization and heritage protection

In Australia, 7 February 2009 has become known as ‘Black Saturday’ because of the bushfire catastrophe that took 173 lives and devastated communities in the central parts of the State of Victoria. The paper considers how the 2009 fires have been recorded, how the issue of accountability has been dealt with, particularly in relation to the State and its agencies but also individual residents in the fire-devastated areas, and how bushfire deaths and other losses have been commemorated through remembrance events and museum collection projects and memorialized through the creation of new monuments and the protection of remaining physical structures as official heritage. Despite the major impact of bushfires on the State, to date few bushfire-related places have been protected. The former Cockatoo Kindergarten, which acted as a community refuge during an earlier catastrophic Victorian bushfire on Ash Wednesday, 16 February 1983, is an exception. Inscribed in 2012, the former kindergarten is the only bushfire-related place inscribed on the Victorian Heritage Register, in this case for its historical and social value as a place resonating with other communities affected by other bushfires and helping the broader Victorian public to come to terms with bushfire catastrophe. But, while bushfire commemoration activities and physical memorials, like those relating to war, help many societies remember individual and community pain and suffering, they can divert attention from the more fundamental questions of why they were there in the first place and what must be done to ensure the same catastrophe does not recur in the future. In this regard, the paper questions the oft-cited claim that bushfires are embedded in the Australian psyche, seeing links between the rhetoric around bushfire survival and Australian myth-making and nation-building.