Search Results

This chapter combines critical autoethnography with reflections on interviewing recently-migrated Asian teachers as co-researchers, using in-depth semi-structured interviews, conducted online. Reflective methodological reading combines with personal stories, allowing the reader to empathise and actively participate in the researcher’s thoughts and experiences, connecting past incidents of everyday racism with heightened awareness of anti-Asian racism surfaced by the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic. Critical auto-ethnography exposes a ‘vulnerable self’, sharing private details and emotions and engaging traditional and non-traditional audiences in dialogue. By writing stories about experiences that are not often told, the author exposes, analyses and challenges majoritarian stories of racial privilege and broader structures of racism. Autoethnography is political in nature, and critical autoethnography aims to catalyse emancipatory personal and social change.

This chapter explores how Black college football and FAMU reckoned with the civil rights movement. Gaither preferred interracial cooperation rather than direct action as a means for racial change. The civil rights movement, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, and including the bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and the sit-ins of the early 1960s, undermined Gaither’s reputation with activists. Gaither’s opposition to immediate desegregation not only was an attempt to hold on to his powerful football program but also showed an understanding of how integration would perpetuate athletic dominance by predominately white institutions. Gaither’s experiences with structural racism in building Bragg Stadium provided an alternative perspective to the civil rights movement.

This chapter will first summarize how the book’s review of multiracial discrimination cases reveals the enduring power of white privilege and the continued societal problem with non-whiteness in any form. Specifically, the cases illustrate the perspective that non-whiteness taints rather than the concern that racial mixture itself is worrisome. Yet this insight is lost in the midst of the multiracial-identity scholars’ singular focus on promoting mixed-race identity. Multiracial victims of discrimination will be better served by legal analyses that seek to elucidate the continued operation of white supremacy. Such a focus will also better serve all Equality Law and public policies. But this can only be done by shifting away from a focus on personal individual identity recognition to a focus on group based racial realities. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an explicit “socio-political race” lens for analyzing matters of discrimination rather than the Personal Identity Equality perspective that misapprehends the social significance of race in the assessment of equality problems. The book’s emphasis on a socio-political race perspective meaningfully preserves an individual’s ability to assert a varied personal identity, while providing a more effective tool for addressing racism and pursuing equality.

This chapter looks at the Black experience in the FDNY during the last quarter of the 20^th Century. During this period, the City, fire department, and the fire unions all vigorously resisted efforts by the Vulcan Society and the United Women Firefighters to address structural and institutional racism and sexism. Black representation, after growing slightly and then stalling in the mid 1980s, receded slowly and steadily as the century closed.