Offer good through September 30, 2021, only available through US retailers.

Forging a Laboring Race

The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination

by Paul R.D. Lawrie

“The book is a reminder of the need to examine the production, dissemination, and broad acceptance of scientific knowledge in historical context, and does so itself in a compact analysis that will interest scholars of race and ethnicity, progressivism, state formation, and the history of science.”—Choice

“A painstakingly thorough examination of the black worker as a commodity and a concept within the Progressive imagination. . . . Lawrie boldly demonstrates how a race-based form of industrial capitalism was central to the making of the modern U.S. state during the Progressive Era.”—Davarian L. Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College

Labor’s Home Front

The American Federation of Labor during World War II

by Andrew E. Kersten

“Labors Home Front is an outstanding contribution. Balanced and fair-minded, Kerstens richly documented account puts the AFL at the center of wartime labor relations and domestic history generally. . . . Kersten also sheds new light on the key role of the AFL in the emergence of social democratic liberalism during the era of World War II.”—Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

“Kersten boldly goes where few historians have gone beforeand it’s about time. . . . Zeroing in on significant issues including wartime labor relations, race and gender discrimination, and postwar planning, Kersten provides ample evidence of both change and continuity.”—Journal of American History

The Rag Race

How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire

by Adam D. Mendelsohn

“An inquiry into the wellspring of modern Jewish economic success, [The Rag Race] attends to the origins of the garment industry, poking around in the dusty, and often little-known, corners of a global exchange basedon kinship and the Jewish collective…The Rag Race is a remarkable achievement, a testament to the vitality of the historical imagination.”—Jewish Review of Books

“In The Rag Race, Adam Mendelsohn traces the intertwined fates of the Jewish community and the garment industries in America and Britain…Like any good historical writer, he turns documents and data into relatable human stories.”—Sewjewish.com

Making the Empire Work

Labor and United States Imperialism

Edited by Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman

“Bender and Lipman have assembled a collection of short studies that conflate labor studies, imperial analyses, and diplomatic history to produce a challenging, insightful means of viewing such histories simultaneously. The innovative subjects and rigorous scholarship in this highly readable volume are accessible to general readers and scholars alike.”—Choice

“Making the Empire Work is a game changer. This spectacular volume will transform the way U.S. historians conceive, write and teach about empire. Workers were everywhere in the U.S. empire: building and serving it, shaped by and suffering from it. The work collected here gives new meaning to William Appleman Williams trenchant call for us to consider ’empire as a way of life.'”—Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Reframing Randolph

Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

by Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang

“Reframing Randolph is a terrific examination of one of the twentieth centurys most important social and political figures. Along with a stellar list of contributors, Kersten and Lang provide an unmatched assessment of Randolph’s social and political activism and labor organizing that uncovers important new insights and exposes critical nuances of his thought and character.”—Cornelius L. Bynum, author of A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights

“The volume succeeds admirably, building a series of partially overlapping portraits from different perspectives but also through lenses of varied focal length.”—Journal of American History

Fueling the Gilded Age

Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country

by Andrew B. Arnold

“In this beautifully crafted new history of capitalism, Arnold shows us how rough and tumble community unionism worked in the years before unions came to the coalfields. We learn about strikes led by women, rough music, square turns, and miners freedoms and then how the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers both emerged by relying on these long and deep coalfield traditions. Vital for anyone wanting to understand the relationship between international capitalism and workplace rights.”—Scott Nelson, Legume Professor of History, The College of William & Mary

“Arnold presents a deliberately complex portrait of developments. Hence, he finely depicts the complicated relations among mine owners, major railroad companies, and coal miners.”—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

All Together Different

Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism

by Daniel Katz

“This exciting book upends the conventional wisdom that puts ethnic identity and class identity at odds. Katz recovers a rich legacy of Yiddish socialist wisdom that saw how the one could animate the other, and he shows how women organizers, in particular, applied this understanding to rebuild their union in the Depression era. Cultivating mutual cultural appreciation among struggling African American, Latino, Italian, and Jewish workers, they fostered union loyalty and labor militancy. A surprising story full of timely insights for today’s readers.”—Nancy MacLean, Duke University, and author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace

“All Together Different will be a useful text for students of American labor, immigration, Jewish studies, and women’s studies. It should also be required reading for any current labor activist or activist on the political left interested in bridging the ethno-racial differences among the ’99 percent.'”—American Historical Review

The Master of Seventh Avenue

David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement

by Robert D. Parmet

“The Master of Seventh Avenue explores the life of David Dubinsky, an East European Jewish immigrant who grew up with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. One of the most forceful labor leaders of the twentieth century, Dubinsky also pioneered in the civil rights movement, actively involved his union in domestic politics, and fought vigorously for all workers in the international sphere. One of the most forceful labor leaders of the twentieth century, Dubinsky also pioneered in the civil rights movement, actively involved his union in domestic politics, and fought vigorously for all workers in the international sphere. Parading across the pages of this insightful and colorful biography are men like, George Meany, Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis, Fiorello LaGuardia, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Arthur Goldberg, and Adlai Stevenson. Parmet examines the work of labor leaders and politicians from the inside out. It is certainly a sight worth viewing.”—Leonard Dinnerstein, author of Antisemitism in America

Working the Diaspora

The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850

by Frederick C. Knight

“Working the Diaspora is a welcome contribution to the study of labor and culture under slavery. Spanning the colonial through the antebellum period, Knight argues that Africans brought much more than brute strength to their work in sugar, rice, tobacco and indigo fields. By carefully contextualizing his study of labor practices in the Americas in the African past, Knight offers a compelling argument for the crucial role of African knowledge in the building of staple crop agriculture in the Americas.”—Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery

“Working the Diaspora is one of few books about American slavery to take Africa seriously…Knight deserves high praise for telling the story.”—Walter Hawthorne, New West Indian Guide

Offer good through August 31, 2021, only available through US retailers.

The Kids Are in Charge

Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children

by Jessica K. Taft

“The Kids Are in Charge is a powerful, provocative, and necessary book. Centering the voices and strategies of the Peruvian movement of working children, Jessica Taft urges us to question assumptions about children—who they are, and who they can be—to imagine childhood otherwise. In engaging and accessible prose, Taft’s analysis of children as critical thinkers and political agents should be required reading not only for scholars of Latin America, but teachers, parents, policy makers and everyone concerned with the complexity of childhood.”—María Elena García, author of Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru

Kids at Work

Latinx Families Selling Food on the Streets of Los Angeles

by Emir Estrada

“This original, thoughtful, engaging ethnography vividly captures the texture of everyday life among immigrant children and children of immigrants who work selling food in the streets of Los Angeles. In the children’s own voices, we learn about their economic contributions, their lives, and aspirations, but also from them about immigrant entrepreneurship, the complex dynamics in immigrant families, and childhood in general. Kids at Work resists facile explanations and makes an enduring contribution to the immigration scholarship. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in immigrant families.”—Cecilia Menjívar, co-author of Immigrant Families

Don’t Use Your Words!

Children’s Emotions in a Networked World

by Jane Juffer

“Juffer values children’s media, demanding that we pay attention to how influential their cultural production is. Including cultural analyses of Blue’s Clues to YouTube, electoral politics to immigration policy, and education to affect theory, Juffer deepens each field as much as she puts them in conversation with each other through careful, deliberate inspection. Her discussions of emotional intelligence, expression, and management are woven alongside her treatment of children’s drawings, art exhibitions, and writings in a way that expands the scope of contemporary media studies. Don’t Use Your Words! is a great accomplishment and a true gift to us all—children, parents, and scholars alike.”—Sara Projansky, author of Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture

“Juffer raises provocative questions concerning children’s emotions… Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”—Choice

White Kids

Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America

by Margaret A. Hagerman

“By studying how affluent white children think about race, we can see how racist attitudes permeate the structures of power in our society and what it would take to change them… its sobering message should be required reading for all affluent white parents (and affluent white college students)—and especially those who believe in social justice.”—American Journal of Sociology

“Hagerman’s book is a careful, painful and convincing argument that when white people give their children advantages, they are often disadvantaging others. Racism is so hard to overturn, in part, because white people prop it up when they work to make sure their children succeed.”—NBC’s “Think” blog

Girlhood in the Borderlands

Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration

by Lilia Soto

“Lilia Soto brings fresh perspectives to our understanding of transnational migration through the eyes of Mexican teenage girls. Her analysis of their shifting temporal and spatial imaginaries illuminates how neoliberal thinking permeates life in Mexico and the United States.”—Patricia Zavella, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Girlhood in the Borderlands is a compassionate and compelling binational multi-site ethnography. It reveals the hardships and heartaches of lives interrupted, but also the determination and dignity of young women coming of age on both sides of the border. With an attentive ear and a discerning eye, Lilia Soto chronicles how immigration shapes the contours of gender and generation in unexpected ways by requiring young women to develop complex cognitive mappings of time and place, and to make meaning in their lives under conditions they do not control.”—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

Growing Up Queer

Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity

by Mary Robertson

“With clarity and rich detail, Robertson tells the story of growing up queer and the community organizations and institutions that buoy today’s LGBT youth. It is a deeply engaging account of both the dignities and indignities of becoming queer, leaving us with a more complicated portrait of youth resilience and risk.”—Amy L. Best, Author of Fast-Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines and Social Ties

“Robertson, rather artfully, nestles her work into the empty space in LGBTQ youth research; how youth become gendered, how they become sexual, and how they come to embrace the identity language that fits them with the most precision. Robertson not only adds to the existing research, but also weaves in and out of it, highlighting its relevance, but also indicates where it proves to be archaic.”—Journal of Youth and Adolescence

Fast-Food Kids

French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties

by Amy L. Best

“In Fast-Food Kids, Amy Best takes us beyond the hype about obesity epidemics and food deserts, vividly bringing us into the world of young people and their food cultures. From the bustling cafeteria, to the local fast food joint, Best shows us how issues of class, race, health and indeed youth culture itself are shaped and shaped by food choices, eating practices and food availability. An important read for those concerned about young people, health and inequality.”—C. J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You’re a Fag

“[Fast-Food Kids] seeks to make apparent the moral dimensions and judgments that attach so readily, and strongly, to the choices that are imagined as being open to us all as we feed ourselves and our families. In these ongoing debatesBests book makes a valuable contribution.”—American Journal of Sociology

Lighting Up

The Rise of Social Smoking on College Campuses

by Mimi Nichter

“Why does college-age smoking persist at notable and alarming levels while smoking in the adult US population has significantly declined over the past four decades? Mimi Nichter disentangles and illuminates the lure and social gains of smoking on campus through rich ethnographic accounts. This book helps to unravel the complexity of incentives to smoke among college-age students.”—Linda A. Bennett, author of The Alcoholic Family

“Anthropologist Nichter presents an important new contribution to the literature on youth smoking of interest to both tobacco researchers and general readers.”—Choice

Getting Wasted

Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

by Thomas Vander Ven

“Vander Ven…leads the reader through a well-researched and comprehensive overview of college drinking…I would urge anyone preparing for college, or preparing another for college, to read this book.”—John S. Wodarski, Contemporary Psychology

“The book offers a realistic portrayal of socially bonding drinking behaviors and attitudes. Vander Ven suggests stellar ways campuses can reduce the harm of excessive drinking.”—Library Journal

Punished

Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

by Victor M. Rios

“With Punished, Rios joins an expanding cadre of social scientists who lament the directions that juvenile justice has taken in the United States in recent decades. He argues that in an era when the Unites States has achieved world-record levels of incarceration, of you people as well as adults, the widespread adoption of severe, hastily adopted get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s has gone hand in hand with the vilification and persecution of black and Latino youths.”—Peter Monaghan, The Chronicle Review

“Rios’s book is a valuable contribution to the field because it is an interdisciplinary work that addresses fundamental and ongoing concepts of juvenile delinquency and gang participation.”—Madeleine Novich, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review

How has writing this book changed how you approach parenting?

A colleague posed this question to me after reading a draft of Queer Stepfamilies: The Path to Social and Legal Recognition. I have revisited the question often since then. As this book neared completion, so did my decade long relationship with my daughter’s other parent. During this devastating time, I found myself repeatedly recalling the book respondents’ words. It was they who helped me envision what a healthy post-relationship parenting relationship can look like. I learned from their struggles but also, I followed their examples in setting goals for how I want us to plural parent our daughter. I coined the term plural parent in this book to describe what I observed the study families doing: parenting among three or more individuals of varying sexual and gender identities after a relationship dissolution.

In Queer Stepfamilies, I feature families formed after a relationship dissolution. Some families were formed after a heterosexual divorce, others after a same-sex divorce, and others after one person came to parenting as a single individual. Despite the varied ways they were formed, these families shared similar struggles in parenting their children. They endured social stigmatization and a lack of recognition as lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer parented families. They also endured legal ambiguities as they found themselves navigating their legal needs, while the United States battled the right for same sex couples to legally marry.

Parenting with this backdrop required these families to practice extreme flexibility, ingenuity, and resilience. These skills ultimately served them well in learning to plural parent. By interviewing the study families, I got a window into their plural parenting arrangements. Ultimately, my biggest take-away was that even at its messiest, plural parenting is inspiring.  The study families experienced varied levels of success in plural parenting: some parented relatively seamlessly as a team, others found the arrangement tolerable, and some just struggled.  

Hearing families describe how plural parenting arrangements worked in their homes resonated with me because this arrangement captured a village model of raising children.  I have always believed it takes a village and watching parents in the United States struggle to raise their children without outside support networks and with increasing work demands has always bewildered me. I was raised in a village, albeit different from the arrangements the study families described in this book. A village, nonetheless, complete with multiple adults who served as my go-to for all things financial, physical and emotional. My experience has always been that life is hard, parenting is harder, and we need each other to survive it! Queer Stepfamilies’ plural parenting arrangements functions as a kind of village. Most of the children were raised with three or more parents of various genders, sexualities and even different races. The kids in these families are growing up with a rich array of experiences that their peers in nuclear families will not have. Discussions in their homes about acceptance, inclusivity, and normativity are part and parcel of their daily lives.

How has writing this book changed my approach to parenting?

These families have gifted me a roadmap for how to plural parent. They are #goals not only when their arrangements were smoothest, but more so when they walked through the ugliness of their relationship dissolutions and subsequent custody disputes with grace.  I could never convey to these families how very much they sparked in me the belief that people can build plural parenting relationships after a relationship dissolution that is stronger than parenting in a two-parent intact family. 

In this book, I strive to offer readers an honest unsanitized glimpse into their parenting journeys. I aimed at every step to extend to lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer parented families the same privilege that heterosexual parents have: permission to be imperfect, to not always get it right, and to not have their parental fitness questioned on account of it. In the book’s pages, the reader will find families who navigate parenting without legal recognition, in mixed-race families, and in homes with both biological and adopted children. In these pages, the reader will find an account of what queer stepfamilies look like.

Katie L. Acosta is Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgia State University. She is the author of Queer Stepfamilies (NYU Press, 2021) and Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family (Rutgers University Press, 2014).

Image by Mario Renteria from Pixabay

This article first appeared on the USC Equity Research Institute blog—read the original post here.

Most people continue to think of immigrant integration this way:  Immigrants come to a new place.  They stumble and struggle mightily.  But they learn the language, the dominant customs and culture, and they somehow manage to fit into the dominant society.   That’s American assimilation in a nutshell.  It includes slipping into whiteness, upward class mobility and moving to a suburban neighborhood.

Assimilation, in this form, is a Hollywood movie. Maybe it screened once, but it’s now mostly an American myth.  Yet it has long-standing ideological power and remains a theoretical paradigm still taught in universities and guiding a lot of sociological research.  Astonishingly, graduate students taking qualifying exams in international migration must still prove familiarity with the variants of assimilation theory.  In my view, a twenty-first century perspective on immigrant integration needs to better account for race and the way immigrants and their kids experience their lives in particular places.

In our book South Central Dreams, Manuel Pastor and I tell the story of Latinx immigrants in South Los Angeles.  The 1980s and 1990s were boom years for Mexican and Central American immigration to the United States.  Facing crowded, substandard housing in LA’s traditional Latinx neighborhoods, many working-class Mexican and Central American families moved to South Los Angeles, to historically African American neighborhoods that stretch over an expansive 50 square mile region.   Using qualitative and quantitative sources of data, our research team looked closely at social dynamics that have emerged here about thirty years after the arrival of Latinx families.  Since the area is so big, we focused our study on demographic changes in three distinctive neighborhoods: Watts, Historic South Central, and Vermont Square/Slauson.

We chronicle how first generation Mexican and Central American immigrants went about making new homes for themselves, and we analyze their relationships with African Americans.   Working-class Latinx families encountered a tough landscape of de-industrialization. In the 1980s this included a crack epidemic, gang wars, racial resentment, street holdups and over-policing. When some of them became victims of street theft at the hands of Black youth, they often responded by “shutting in and shutting out,” seeking security, familiarity and autonomy in their homes, and literally putting bars up in their windows and doors.  As one man recalled, “No eramos personas de la calle…We weren’t people of the street. We were people who went to work, the laundry, the market, and to work.  Well, we would visit family (elsewhere)…but to go to the parks?  You couldn’t.  People just didn’t feel safe.”  Many Mexicans and Central Americans also brought with them their own anti-black racist ideologies beliefs fostered in their countries of origin, and once in this country, they quickly learned U.S. color lines.  This together with the monolingual language barriers meant many of them could stretch only as far as superficial next door civility with their older African American neighbors.  “Nos saludamos no mas…We just greet one another,” is a phrase we heard from more than a few folks.  Some did form deeper relationships, and in our book, we examine the dynamics of immigrants expressing gratitude for Black parental mentorship offered by African American neighbors, teachers and volunteers.  While newcomer Latinx immigrants interacted with their immediate neighbors, for the most part, they didn’t get involved in local civic organizations.  This scant Latinx civic and political engagement remains an ongoing issue, a challenge for civic leaders and community organizers.

The second generation Latinx folks grew up in a very different scenario.  Reared in South LA, they came up, as one young woman said, “in an aura of blackness.”  They grew up with Black friends, played on the same sports teams, listened to the same music and many fondly recalled significant Black teachers and mentors.  Yes, there were Black-Brown tensions, sometimes even “race riots” in the schools, and this required the necessity of familiarity with micro-geographies for safely navigating the streets (notably, most of them recalled police violence, not Black youth, as the major danger).  The important point is this: they developed a sense of home defined by place-based racial identity, one articulated as affinity with Black people and culture.  

Conventionally, we think that parents socialize and teach children, and while that certainly occurs, it’s also true that children teach their parents.   In this case, the second generation Latinx women and men proactively try to educate their immigrant parents and grandparents on race and racism.  These are not civic campaigns, but rather inter-generational family conversations, and it’s possible to see this as part of their continued Black- Brown home-making strategy.

In 2021, coming out of Covid and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, we have a new public awareness of how much immigrant rights campaigns and Latinx communities need to actively oppose anti-blackness.  But in many ways, the second-generation Latinx folks raised in South L.A. have already been doing this work.  They do this in their families and many of them also do this work in their social justice, service-oriented jobs, as teachers, community organizers, and counselors.  They love South L.A. and remain committed to uplift for all residents.

The Hollywood assimilation movie is no longer screening, and while there has been struggle and the story is still unfolding, we see South L.A. residents innovating an immigrant integration script that includes shared futures, Black-Brown solidarities, a deep love and pride of place, and a dedication to racial justice and belonging in South L.A.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is the Florence Everline Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is author of Gendered Transitions (1994), Domestica (2001/2007), God’s Heart Has No Borders (2008), and Paradise Transplanted (2014). She has edited or co-edited five other books. Her new book with Manuel Pastor, South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A., is now available from NYU Press.

As a kid that was adopted, I was always attuned to social discussions about what constituted “real” families. I took note when the media highlighted the adopted status of children of celebrities, in contrast with the presumably “real” children born into their families. Like many other adoptees, I struggled as a kid trying to construct a sense of familial belonging in the context of a society that tells us that biology and genetics are the key to who we are. As I write about in my book Queering Family Trees, I was confused by a genealogy assignment I was given in school when I was about ten years old. Everything I had ever heard in the media suggested to me that my “real” identity was determined by biology. I didn’t know much of anything about my birth parents or their family histories. If biology determined where I fit in a family tree then I was without a history. I knew, even at ten, that family was shaped by love and lived experience; I loved my family and had no trouble feeling a sense of belonging. But I didn’t know my adoptive family’s ancestors, so I didn’t know how to envision a connection with them. Like many adoptees, I struggled to find a sense of realness or legitimacy as a member of a family not connected by biology.

As a queer mom and a researcher that does work on same-sex marriage and adoption, I wonder how adopted kids of queer parents are interpreting the recent news attention to the adoption of children by same-sex couples. On June 17, 2021 the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Catholic Social Services of Philadelphia, affirming the agency’s right to refuse to certify same-sex couples as foster parents. As many legal scholars have noted, this particular decision will not have widespread implications concerning the legal status of same-sex adoption and foster care. Yet how does this public discussion affect widespread social understandings of family? The central tensions in this case are larger than this lawsuit, and concern our very definitions of family. SCOTUS wrote:

CSS holds the religious belief that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Because CSS believes that certification of prospective foster families is an endorsement of their relationships, it will not certify unmarried couples—regardless of their sexual orientation—or same-sex married couples (SCOTUS, 2021, pg. 1).

This policy reveals a concern with legitimacy. In a patriarchal system legitimacy is determined by marriage to a man. They refuse to certify same-sex couples, but they also deny services to unmarried heterosexual couples. This is significant because it reveals that the church is more concerned with the “sanctity” of heterosexual marriage than with a view of homosexuality as deviant. Public narratives about the relative “fitness” of married versus unmarried parents are grounded in patriarchal definitions of legitimate relationships.

As I demonstrate in Queering Family Trees, in contrast to public declarations that queer folks are now “equal,” legalizing same-sex marriage was not the key to full equality it was purported to be. Yes, same-sex couples are now allowed to marry, and without a doubt this has provided a range of family rights and protections to a large population of families that were not protected prior to the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v.  Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage. However, the right to marry does not constitute social equality, as is evidenced by the continued lack of housing, employment, and adoption and foster care protections for families headed by same-sex couples.

Remarkably, Catholic Social Services’ language excluding same-sex couples is not significantly different from the language used to legalize same-sex marriage in Obergefell v.  Hodges. Both perspectives celebrate marriage. Indeed, one of the key findings of the court was that marriage is the “keystone of the nation’s social order” (SCOTUS 2016, 3-4). “Social order” is code for a particular vision of society that supports and reproduces the status quo. My interdisciplinary research draws on over 100 interviews with African American, Indigenous, Latina, Asian American, and white queer mothers living in a range of US states, considered in relation to news media and public law and policy debates. The lives of these mothers demonstrate that intersections of racial-ethnic identity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, tribal affiliation, and geography profoundly shape access to family protections, rights, and privileges. Some families are more vulnerable to the lack of protection than others, and the closer one is to the white, middle class, heterosexual ideal family, the more protection one typically enjoys. How meaningful is marriage when one faces continued housing and employment discrimination? The lived experiences of the people I interviewed make clear that in fact, laws facilitating adoption (including second-parent adoption) and foster care were typically considered more important to parents than marriage.

What counts as “legitimate” constitutes a narrow slice of family experiences in the U.S., and this ideal has been used strategically throughout history to justify discrimination against people and families outside that norm. At the same time, this “legitimate” family is represented as if it were grounded in biology and genetics through heterosexual reproduction. The representation of family trees as natural obscures attention to power relations. Adoptees belong to their families through law, love, affiliation, and stories. Their family ties are not grounded in solely heterosexual relationships, nor biological ties.

The metaphor of a grafted tree is what helped me reconcile my childhood dilemma over belonging to my family genealogy. An apple branch grafted onto a peach tree will still be nurtured by the roots of the tree onto which it is grafted. Grafted trees reproduce outside of what we think of as “normal” propagation. Metaphors of grafted trees emphasize care, affiliation, and culture, alongside biology, genetics, and law, in understanding kinship. Perhaps most important for this discussion, stories about grafted trees make power relations visible, allowing us to see whose stories are excised from legitimate history, and how that slight-of-hand is accomplished. Indeed, the grafting of a tree requires human intervention to facilitate reproduction. We can learn a great deal about the ways that all families are shaped by social structure by considering the lives of adoptees. Indeed, it is clear that many of the choices about who adoptees are to become are made by people outside our families; social workers, lawyers, administrators, and legislators all contributed to the creation and maintenance of social policies that determined what makes a good adoptive family. Our origin narratives teach us explicitly that our identities were, at least in part, constructed by the state.

Sandra Patton-Imani is Professor of American Studies at Drake University, where she teaches Anthropology, Sociology, and Women’s Studies. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park in American Studies with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. She earned a B.A. in Radio/TV/ Film and American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of Queering Family Trees and BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, New York University Press 2000, as well as numerous scholarly articles on adoption, race, gender, and family.

Image by Helger11 from Pixabay

How was the Trump presidency a symptom of a long and enduring history of systemic white power in the US?

During his presidency, Trump was continually depicted as an anomaly. People described him as everything from a racist to the second coming of Hitler. While those sorts of characterizations have a grain of truth, they are also dangerous because they misdirect us. If dramatic, Trump’s presidency was continuous with a history of systemic white power that dates back to the origins of this country. In other words, Trump was a symptom of this history, not an aberration.

Who are the white power extremists who suddenly became visible in Trump’s America and how do they fit into the country’s history of systemic white supremacy?

Many people were shocked to see white power extremists suddenly marching in the streets of Charlottesville near the start of the Trump administration in 2017. But they shouldn’t have been. Far-right extremists, including a range of white power groups and militias, have long been active in the U.S. Their origins date back to the beginnings of this country, including the early slave patrols. These groups, perhaps most famously the KKK, sought to enforce white supremacy through extrajudicial means that supplemented the larger formal system of white supremacy. The two are intertwined, of course, as illustrated by how the KKK not just collaborated with police but at times included police and government officials among their ranks.

How did white power views move closer to the mainstream during Trump’s presidency?

From start to finish, Trump brandished white nationalism in a loud and open manner that was the stuff of white power extremist dreams. White power extremists were delighted and celebrated it. Many view themselves as locked in a battle to shift “the narrative” and make their ideas more mainstream and event acceptable. Trump gave them an enormous assist. What was once considered outrageous or taboo became increasingly commonplace, a point underscored regularly on Fox News and even members of the GOP.

You were an expert witness at Khmer Rouge’s Nuon Chea’s trial.  How does Trump, white power extremism in the US, and the Khmer Rouge regime use hate speech and fear mongering in similar ways to achieve their goals?

At the time, in March 2016, Trump was just about to take the lead in the race to become the GOP presidential nominee. As he would throughout his presidency, Trump was already invoking white nationalism themes and racist dog whistles, warning against immigrants and other non-white “threats.” The Khmer Rouge used a very similar strategy of playing on grievance, fear, and hate speech to gain recruits, seize power, and ultimately commit atrocity crimes. I was struck by the parallels at the time and became increasingly alarmed as the parallels continued to grow during the Trump administration. By the time of the election, the alarm bells were ringing. The Capitol Insurrection is bad. But things could have ended up much worse.

Could white supremacists commit a genocide in the US?  What buffers and safeguards are in place to stop this from happening today? 

Of course. It has happened here before. It can happen again. I prefer to discuss genocide as one among several possible atrocity crimes, which also encompass crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. U.S. history is filled with atrocity crimes committed on U.S. soil and abroad. As I noted before, prevention begins with understanding and acknowledgment. You can’t prevent something you ignore and deny. With understanding and acknowledgment, it becomes possible to move forward with redress as well as the creation of buffers such as education, government training, and even the creation of a domestic atrocity crimes mechanisms of the sort that some other countries have developed. Perhaps this also brings us back to the issue of critical self-awareness, a sort of grassroots prevention mechanism that enables us to speak out in the public sphere in the face of looming atrocity crimes.

How can genocide and atrocity crimes be prevented?  What can we do as individuals and as a society?

After the Holocaust, the world gained a host of new instruments meant to prevent mass human rights violations, including the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN Genocide Convention. Today we have international courts, monitoring groups, and doctrines like the responsibility to protect that help prevent atrocity crimes. Each country has its own sets of mechanism to help in the fight to prevent genocide. President Obama was a strong advocate of prevention and helped strengthen related government infrastructures. And, during the Trump administration, Congress passed the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention act. What the U.S. has not done such a great job of, however, is grappling with its own past and also setting up official domestic monitoring mechanisms. This is one key way all of us can contribute to the fight to prevent genocide – putting pressure on our government to account for atrocities crimes in our country’s past and establish new mechanisms to prevent them in the future.

June 12, 2021, marks the 54th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, Supreme Court decision which invalidated interracial marriage bans in the United States in 1967.  Interracial marriage has been legal for nearly half a century.  But the children of those marriages and other interracial unions are subject to discrimination that reveals a great deal about the continued vibrancy of White Supremacy in the United States.

For instance, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination’s examination of the criminal justice context (along with other civil rights contexts) found that mixed-race arrestees describe their experiences of racial profiling and police violence in much the same way that single-race identified non-Whites do. Thus, like George Floyd, the African American man killed in 2020, by police officer Derek Chauvin, multiracial persons can also experience being viewed as so inherently suspicious that they warrant out-sized interventions based upon their non-White racial appearance.

The excessive force case of Brian and Derek Patterson against five White officers from the City of Akron police department is one such story detailed in Multiracials and Civil Rights. Brian and Derek are brothers who identify as biracial and of African ancestry.  They came home to Akron, Ohio to visit their family and friends over a Memorial Day weekend.  The brothers met with friends at the Fat Tuesday Bar in downtown Akron, near the University of Akron.  Approximately several hundred people were gathered together outside chatting when the bars closed that evening.  Unfortunately, the congenial gathering with friends was radically transformed by the racial harassment of the Akron police.  

For the brothers, a simple gathering with friends over a holiday weekend resulted in them being exposed to unprovoked police violence because their presence in the predominantly White space was interpreted as hostile from what the police called their “defensive posture.” Unlike the many White young people who were similarly socializing with Brian and Derek out on the sidewalk amidst parked cars and police cruisers, it was only Brian and then his brother Derek who were viewed as inherently suspicious and their leisure as warranting regulation and control.  When the brothers refused to leave the gathering with their friends, the police handcuffed them.  While handcuffed the police stung them repeatedly with their taser guns.

The brothers’ personal racial identity as biracial did not mitigate their exposure to racially informed excessive force.  Other narratives in Multiracials and Civil Rights, show that multiracial persons can be targeted for police interrogation based upon their racial appearance, just as innumerable other non-Whites are on a daily basis.  Mixed-race identity does not alter the influence of racialized stereotypes and implicit bias regarding the inherent criminality of those viewed as non-White.  Like so many other anti-discrimination law contexts examined in the book (employment, housing, public accommodations, and education), the criminal justice system operates in a seemingly White/non-White binary that entangles people not based upon their mixed-race personal identity, but instead based on a knowledge of or a viewing of their non-White appearance.  Fifty-four years after the Loving v. Virginia decision, interracial marriage bans no longer exist, but White Supremacist violence and rhetoric still flourish. 

Tanya Katerí Hernandez is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she co-directs the Center on Race, Law & Justice as its Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives. She is the author of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, now available in paperback from NYU Press. 

Feature image by Matheus Viana from Pexels

Below is a commentary presented by Myra Marx Ferree at the University of Texas book launch for Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring. Read another commentary on the book from Aili Mari Tripp here, and explore a piece by the editors of the volume here.

Over time, gender regimes have been changed by both the gradual transformations of political and demographic conditions and by the active engagement of women as challengers. This lovely collection by Rita Stephan and Mounira Maya Charrad highlights the voices of the challengers and their perspectives on what must change and how to create a democracy in which they are full participants. They have assembled an amazing diversity of standpoints from academia to activism, and from one state to another across the region. The multiplicity of styles in the writing and perspectives of the authors is stunning. There are collective poems, discussions of how to interpret graffiti, descriptions of activist leaders and their impacts but also essays considering the role of labor rights mobilizations, queer identity struggles, nationalist aspirations among Palestinians and Kurds, and service provision by organized religious women’s groups. WOW! The idea that the editors express of shattering the West’s illusion of homogeneity in the Middle East and North Africa, the so-called MENA region, has led them to unearth a staggeringly rich variety of women’s voices.  

Despite their diversity, there are a few common themes that emerge. One is the sense of women discovering who they are as individuals, people with their own hopes and dreams, and also a new recognition of their own personal strength to act on these feelings. Whether in the form of praise for education as unlocking unknown potential or as a story of the exhilaration of acting together in resisting sexual harassment or demanding regime change or as a personal account of how art or song or performance opened up their own minds as well as those of the others to whom it was addressed, all of the stories told share a feeling of discovering for themselves that as women their power has been unknown and untapped for too long.  

A second theme is that of solidarity in the pursuit of women’s shared identity as a collective. The power and hope unleashed in these moments of change also produce a commitment to telling the stories of the struggles of women who preceded them, the groups these women founded, the successes they booked in reforming laws at the national level, and the potential for sharing across the region the distinctive strategies and tactics they applaud. The category “women” is thus imagined not as the state would have it, as mothers and wives who are mere adjuncts to men and children, but as women themselves are making it collectively real in their relations to other women. Women’s groups not only serve as anchors for the discovery of individual potential, but also as doors to the reality of shared experiences, the dawning realization that there are many other women “just like me” who also do not fit into the stereotypes and who stand together against institutional barriers that feel personally crushing to individual women’s spirits.

A third theme is that of active citizenship, of being part of a nation that is struggling to find its way to make a state that will be free of the autocracy, violence, oppressions and exclusions that their nations have been experiencing. These voices say that openings for democracy are pregnant with possibility for women, but these voices also tell of dreadful abuses and both institutional violence and impunity. The desire to be citizens with full rights to participation in determining the future of the state that will govern them is articulated in so many different forms, from the claim to legislative representation in it to the resistance to violence in the movements to overthrow it completely. Despite the downward spirals into violence that have torn Syria and Iraq apart with such deadly consequences, the ideal of citizenship as respectful of difference and nonviolent in practice remains a commitment that spans the full diversity of women’s experiences with their states. 

There is finally also a theme of hope. By looking back on slow change and frequent repression in the past, the stories here also point forward with hope rather than resignation or despair. Whether the account is of painfully slow reform processes in Saudi Arabia, or of the destructive choice of the Syrian resistance to take up armed resistance, or the civil war erupting in Yemen, the tragic implications are also illuminated by the emphasis on how it could be otherwise someday. Women’s efforts to make reform are continuing even when the situation is deteriorating. Hope is flower that appears in the form of graffiti saying “no” to Syrian repression and to revolutionary violence.  

The Arab Spring of 2011 is a decade in the past already, and many of the authors are looking back from a place that they never anticipated being in when they engaged in social movements in this period. The stories offer not only accounts of the surprises that sometimes came next, for example, in the form of repressive dictatorship in Egypt and wars in Syria and Yemen, but also the ongoing developments in which the spring of 2011 was merely a minor punctuation mark in a struggle for democracy that began decades or more before and which is still being pursued today. The results of these less glamourous transformations, as with changes in the personal code that governs family relations, draw less Western attention but are shown here as part of a diversity of changes across the MENA region. Just as there was not one Arab Spring even though revolutionary energies flowed across borders in the region a decade ago, there is not one Arab winter now either, as women’s demands for individual freedoms, collective recognition, democratic influence and a non-violent future also circulate and sustain hope.    

Rita and Mounira, as editors, have emphasized the variety of experience and this is a huge contribution. But I also found the common elements important to stress. To be sure, these various stories are often told in the West with an erasure of national particularity and with a lens that only captures women as either collective victims or individual heroines.  But I also draw some other lessons from this exploration of the roots of and results for women in the various uprisings understood collectively in the west as the “Arab Spring.”   As a consumer of media based outside these countries, I read the coverage as primarily presenting the uprisings themselves as being a kind of classic liberal democratic claim on rights that is ungendered and irrelevant to women’s future status. Women themselves may be victimized, for example by mobs of men in Tahrir Square, and become symbols of oppression like the “blue bra woman” or be individual iconoclasts who share viral memes or take symbolic actions on their own account that the west can celebrate as heroic, but women’s rights as actually embraced by the women of the MENA region themselves remain outside the Western picture. 

The notion of “women’s rights” or “gender inequality” remains in Western eyes part of what “we” have and “they” need. This critique of western fantasies of “rescue” is familiar and apt, but tends to be too limited, focusing on such disastrous uses of the trope to justify agendas to “liberate” Kuwait, or the Kurds, or the Iraqis. The accounts in Women Rising tell a richer and more interesting story of how MENA women themselves note and resist the rescue mythology and separate their own claims from those of the feminist movements of both the West and of other parts of the global South. What MENA women want in relation to their own states reflects their own diagnoses of their own situations, which are not reflected in the struggles of Chilean claims for reproductive rights or Peruvian demands for recognizing indigenous women. In other words, it is not enough to “refrain from rescue” to hear the distinctive contributions of these women’s voices.

What I hear, listening to the voices Mounira and Rita have collected, is a strong focus on democracy as an unrealized political aspiration, whose achievement will take decades of struggle to either extend the inclusiveness of formally institutionalized democratic systems, or to introduce democratic governance as system into autocratic states.  As an American thinking a lot recently about our own country’s limitations in democracy, I hear these voices as a challenge to us to consider the links between democratic states and democratic family systems, between democracy in law and in practice, between democracy as a formal political institution and democratic access to participation in voting, in access to public spaces, and in representation.  I see MENA women challenging limits on their ability to “go public” in physical spaces and on-line and am reminded of the harassment that US women, especially women of color face, the deadly violence directed at people of color, and the embrace of guns and gun violence as an ordinary fact of life that is expanding here.  I am not only reminded, therefore, of the very bravery of the women speaking out in the MENA struggles but of the challenges US women face in claiming that their own democracy is not democratic enough.

Most especially, I appreciate some of the imagery in this volume that illuminates what democracy should be but does not yet offer in terms of partnerships and participation unlimited by gendered regulations imposed both by states and civil society. There is the metaphor of “coming out” as not just a matter of the work of LGBT individuals, but of all non-gender-conforming people, whether that gender non-conformity is wearing a hijab where it is not accepted or not wearing one where it is demanded, or appears among men who stand up publicly against sexual violence in their families or among their peers, or gender nonconformity of the type of making oneself visible as a single or married woman in a space defined as inappropriate for you.  The “coming out” image invoked across several of these selections is a terrific way of emphasizing the individual self-recognition and bravery of asserting oneself, but also stressing the rewards of discovering one is not alone, and the opportunities for collective action that “coming out” creates.  The connection between democracy as a system and women’s position in society is made explicit in many of the essays collected here, not just as a claim on the future but as part of what women are making as they “come out” as labor leaders, public speakers, bloggers and educators.  

As the diversity of democratic aspirations and practices make clear in this book, the Arab Spring is not an isolated moment but a piece of a long and complex trajectory of democratic reforms and resistances in which women have always played a significant role. As an internationally visible tip of a decade plus wave of reform movements and revolutionary uprisings, the Arab Spring revealed women as engaged citizens in a process of renegotiation with their states.  The popular will was crushed in some places, but has reemerged and been reimagined in very diverse ways across the region. 

Tucker Carlson is upset. Again. This time it’s the Grammys. Tucker claims Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance at the Grammys this week is “trying to degrade our culture and hurt our children.”  Quelle horreur, Tucker.  The performance of Cardi B’s song “WAP” was provocative, but I question Tucker’s indignation given we live in a culture that sexualizes everything from hamburgers to breast milk, in which men air drop dick pics to unsuspecting passengers on trains, busses and planes, female FOX news anchors wear tight-fitting sheath dresses, Christian pastors compliment their “hot” wives from the pulpit, and the former president could brag about “grabbing women by the pussy” and still get elected.  This is what I call “raunch culture” which I explore in my book, The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society.

I date raunch culture to the mid-1990s, a time when the internet became increasingly important in our daily lives, and internet porn influenced media outlets to represent women as not only impossibly beautiful, but also sexy and DTF (down to fuck).  Thirty years later we can see raunch culture everywhere in our porn nation – in churches, workplaces, schools, and shopping malls; through our phones to magazines, movies, television, music lyrics, comedy material, and even in politics.

Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are both a mirror of the culture, and a flashpoint of resistance to it for some.  In my book I talk about pornification and race, particularly how the legacy of slavery in which white male owners could legally rape enslaved black women still influences how people read black women’s bodies today.  In a pornified society, it’s difficult for any female performer to avoid sexualization, given the insistent pressure they experience to be “sexy and hot.”  It’s worse for black women whose bodies are historically and culturally “owned” more often than white ones. 

Rather than singling out any one performer to praise or blame, I recommend we focus our attention on the culture.  Pornification is complex, and we need better skills and more practice talking about it.  Raunch culture matters because it is sexist, not because it is sexy. It sets expectations that women dress provocatively, and appear always “up” for sex while encouraging everyone to sexually objectify women. 

Raunch culture also socializes women to focus on how they appear, not on how they feel.  In this way, pornification is the performance of sexy, not the juicy experience of it.  This is logical given that raunch culture is the offspring of the sex industry, what it looks like when attitudes, behaviors, and accoutrements once exclusively reserved for sex work filter into the mainstream like twerking, fake nails, breast implants, push-up bras, long dyed hair, smoky eye makeup, plump lips, Brazillian waxes, platform stiletto shoes (or “stripper shoes”), pole-dancing classes for exercise, thongs, and hairless bodies.  To be like a stripper or porn star is to look hot, and pretend arousal.  Actual strippers are reviewing their grocery lists, or figuring out if they have enough money for the electric bill during those lap dances, not feeling turned on by a customer’s erection.   

Pornification takes a woman out of her own body and defines her sexual worthiness through the male gaze.  The women I interviewed for my book explained that the heightened body consciousness promoted in raunch culture makes them feel unattractive, unhappy, and unworthy – and this inhibits their experiences of sexual pleasure.  For example, “Nicole” said that she feels self-conscious about the way she looks when she is having sex.  She explained, “I am thinking about how my thighs look fat from this angle, and I’m not in the moment.”  In any case, women’s actual sexual pleasure is irrelevant within raunch culture, which instead markets the following sexist narrative: it’s empowering to be a live sex toy for men.  In other words, women should fake those orgasms to show how “hot and sexy” they are, not actually have any.  The cycle of blame and outrage media personalities like Tucker Carlson accelerate when they attack celebrities like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion keeps viewers focused on “bad actors” rather than a problematic culture.  I suggest that if Tucker really “doesn’t hate” nor want to “degrade” women, perhaps his energy would be better spent addressing the sexualized workplace at FOX news, and its casting couch culture. 

Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Morehead State University, and the author of Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. Her new book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society is now available from NYU Press.

Feature image by Frank Schwichtenberg used under Creative Commons license