The American Untouchables: America & the Racial Contract

A historical perspective on race-based politics

Andre Smith, Harris Stowe State University

The issue of race is often a scab Americans choose to ignore. However social science has a responsibility and an obligation to examine not simply the amenable subjects but also the controversial. This work, in a word, is controversial. Thomas Franks (2004) argued that cultural differences led white Kansans to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the 1980s. He specifically argued that abortion was the unifying issue in this ideological migration. Simultaneously, future President Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the sight of the massacre of four young civil rights activists over a decade earlier. Race has and is a factor in the American experience; Franks’ premise is simply that the absence of the concentration of African Americans in the Kansas area negated the influence of the “black threat hypothesis” on the observed ideological switch of white Kansans. This work argues that Franks’ premise fails to incorporate the over arching ideological switch of white voter migration to the Republican party that was occurring during the same period, and that Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was an overt cue that he was rejecting the civil rights consensus for an historically established “race-based social contract” that positioned people of color outside the traditional bounds of the social contract. The study is a sociopolitical analysis of the African American experience utilizing the “racial contract” framework developed by Charles Mills. The “racial contract” holds that the social contract explicitly dictates interactions and transaction costs between citizens and government. Mills supposition is that historically non-Western Europeans were excluded from the penalties for violations of the social contract, and a tacit race based contract dictated transaction costs and interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. The work utilizes the framework to trace the sociopolitical environment from the first appearance of Africans in America to the present. It has the supposition that the initial sociopolitical status of Africans in America was as a result of the reformation of the Western feudal agrarian culture, with African captives attached to the land as the neo-serfs; but that the reformation of feudalism was only possible within the context that Africans were implicitly viewed as outside the bounds of the codified social contract. It traces American sociopolitical conflict over the expansion of the “racial contract,” which was the basis of the American Civil War; and the establishment of an implicit sociopolitical order within the bounds of the racial contract at the end of the Civil War, with codified sanctions for violations of commensality and endogamy.

Revitalizing History

Recognizing the Struggles, Lives, and Achievements of African American and Women Art Educators

Edited by Ami Kantawala, Teachers College, Columbia University and Paul Bolin, University of Texas at Austin

Historical inquiry forms the foundation for much research undertaken in art education. While traversing paths of historical investigation in this field we may discover undocumented moments and overlooked or hidden individuals, as well as encounter challenging ideas in need of exploration and critique. In doing so, history is approached from multiple and, at times, vitally diverse perspectives. Our hope is that the conversations generated through this text will continue to strengthen and encourage more interest in histories of art education, but also more sophisticated and innovative approaches to historical research in this field. The overarching objective of the text is to recognize the historical role that many overlooked individuals—particularly African Americans and women—have played in the field of art education, and acknowledge the importance of history and historical research in this digital age. This text opens up possibilities of faculty collaborations across programs interested in history and historical research on a local, national, and international level. By assembling the work of various scholars from across the United States, this text is intended to elicit rich conversations about history that would be otherwise beyond what is provided in general art education textbooks.

Broken Branches

A philosophical introduction to the social reproductions of oppression from an intersectional feminist perspective

Latashia Nicole Harris, University of Portland

Broken Branches places a critical lens on the infrastructure, institutions, social processes and practices that govern our society. The text examines the ways that neoliberalism influences society and our lives across generations. The practice of colonialism is deconstructed, showing how this practice has been renamed, but holds steadfast to its original intention of cultivating institutionalized oppression that feeds social perception. The author exposes the ways that social perceptions, juxtaposed semantics, commonly accepted definitions, practices, rhetoric and propaganda create products of maintained systemic injustice when resistance is absent and desensitization is prevalent. Colonialism and its consequential social reproductions of oppression continue to traverse across land, body, and mind in individual as well as collective contexts. Broken Branches explores the tributaries of oppression but also highlights the source of oppression within the United States. The philosophical, intersectional and feminist approach of critical analysis lays the framework for further interrogation and utilizes the catalyst of historical precedence to initiate this introduction. The author implores the reader to take introspective steps towards understanding where one’s own complicity exists in oppression as well and addresses the cognitive dissonance we have become accustomed to in perpetuating oppression. Broken Branches offers suggestions on how to forge forward to create substantive and structural change that is not contingent on the dispossession and oppression of the marginalized so that the health and vitality of a few is sustained. Broken Branches encourages the practice of continuous inquiry and acknowledges that transformation is not possible without change. The author pushes for collectively empowered marginalized voices, operationalized pathways to inclusion, intersectional and equitable perspectives, and an increased investment in healing the trauma caused by the perpetuation of colonialism.

Showing and Telling: Film heritage institutes and their performance of public accountability

Nico de Klerk, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, Austria

Showing and Telling is the first academic work to explore how publicly funded film heritage institutes account for their mandate in their public activities. It does that by inspecting and evaluating public presentations and visitor information about these presentations. The research was done by juxtaposing two complementary approaches. The first is grounded in the author’s experience as a collection researcher and curator and makes a case for the richness of archival objects usually ignored for their lack of aesthetic qualities. The second is a survey of the public activities of 24 institutes worldwide, based on their websites, in February 2014; the latter constitutes a unique source. This original work uncovers the disconnect between the curatorial activities of these institutes and their missions. A central finding is that publicly funded film heritage institutes give their public an inadequate sense of cinema history. By and large they offer a mainstream-oriented repertoire of presentations, overwhelmingly consisting of feature fiction; they show a disproportionate amount of recent and new works, often through commercial distribution; their screenings consist of an unexplained melee of technological formats (sometimes substandard); and their presentations monotonously frame film as art, although their professed aesthetics are mostly of a cinephile nature and rest on received opinion. Specific materials, early cinema in particular, and specialist knowledge, both historical and methodological, are largely restricted to their network of peer communities. Wholesome transfer of full knowledge, in word and image, to the public is not a major concern. Showing and Telling concludes with recommendations for curatorial activities. Firstly, with a conceptual apparatus that allows a more complete understanding of film heritage and its histories. Secondly, with a plea for rethinking the institutes’ gatekeeper function and for developing more varied, imaginative, and informative public presentations, both on site and online, that reflect the range of their collections and their histories.

The Bottom Line: Unfortunate Side Effects of Capitalist Culture

Arthur McGovern, Nichols College

This monograph explores the role of culture in modern societies and the side effects that result when that role is distorted. The basic premise of this book is that many of the dominant cultural characteristics of modern life, like the ideologies and values associated with materialism and consumer capitalism, are cultural phenomena with influences that are in many ways problematic and in some ways downright detrimental to our sustained societal well-being. I argue in this book that the globalized capitalist economic system has become increasingly efficient in terms of scale and scope, but has also become less humane in many regards; less connected to human needs and concerns. Of particular concern is the encroachment of economic interests into areas of human society that traditionally have been free from profit motives, or at least only minimally influenced by them; areas such as scientific research, the justice system, and even family relationships. I suggest that there is a slow but steady intrusion into these areas of human life that were once considered off-limits to naked economic incentives and calculations. This intrusion puts the idea of America as a free and democratic society increasingly at risk when private economic stakeholders meddle in the political and cultural areas of society in ever more insidious ways to further their own enrichment at the expense of the public. Furthermore, the vast capitalist economic system is in many ways increasingly disconnected or disembedded from the contexts and regulations of traditional social relations as in the past.