Browsing by Subject "Civil Rights Movement"
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Item The crossroads of race : racial passing, profiling, and legal mobility in twentieth-century African American literature and culture(2004-08) Dunbar, Eve, 1976-; Woodard, Helena, 1953-; Harlow, Barbara, 1948-Item "Our Generation Had Nothing to Do with Discrimination": White Southern Memory of Jim Crow and Civil Rights(2012-07-16) Lavelle, Kristen MarieThe ways in which white Americans understand the racial landscape and their own racial identities are not well understood. Through the lens of the racial past, in this study I investigate how memory operates within the white racial frame, the dominant white-centric worldview, to uphold systemic racism and to maintain whites? collective and individual identities. Through a narrative analysis of original in-depth interviews conducted with 44 ordinary white southerners ? lifetime residents of Greensboro, North Carolina ? who lived through the legal segregation and civil rights eras, this research demonstrates the interviewees? contemporary investment in positive notions of the white self and white society. The respondents' autobiographical narratives of life during legal segregation, a time of overt white supremacy, are typified by nostalgia for a childhood era of safety, security, and "good" race relations. Interviewees' narratives of the civil rights era, including nonviolent student sit-in protests for which Greensboro is known and school desegregation, have themes of disruption, danger, and white victimization. Overall, respondents portray Jim Crow segregation as a calm and peaceful time and the civil rights era as chaotic and harmful to whites, at the same time as they acknowledge, to a limited extent, the unfairness of Jim Crow's blatant racial inequalities. In this work I propose the concepts white victimology, white protectionism, and white moral identity. I argue that white victimology ? whites' perception, largely imagined, of their own racial victimization ? is a major ideological and emotional facet of the white racial frame, whereby whites dismiss the historical and contemporary reality of white racism. My analysis demonstrates that white victimology is a primary way in which whites assert themselves, individually and collectively, as racial innocents and "good" people. In this work I also conceptualize the dynamic of white protectionism, explanatory and rhetorical ways in which whites "rescue" white acquaintances and family members from potential accusations of racism. Ultimately, I argue that whites' investment in perpetuating white dominance and upholding the white racial frame occurs through white moral identity-making, myriad active and subtle ways that whites continue to construct themselves positively and construct people of color, especially black Americans, negatively.Item Social movement towards spatial justice : crafting a theory of civic urban form(2010-08) Wilson, Barbara Brown; Moore, Steven A., 1945-; Sletto, Bjorn; Mueller, Elizabeth; Davis, Janet; Davis, DianaBuilding codes are socio-technical regulations that govern the manner in which the built world is designed, constructed, and maintained. Instituted in order to protect the health, safety, and welfare of humans in the built world, codes also serve as an index of always changing societal values. If codes do not co-evolve with social values, however, they often perpetuate standards that no longer reflect the priorities of mainstream society. As crises arise and as cultural practices change, regulatory institutions are charged with creating new or amend old codes to reflect these societal shifts. Emergent social values are often dismissed by the general public, misrepresented by their political representatives, or abstracted by the louder voices of the market and the state. In a few critical moments in modern history, however, society successfully adopted and institutionalized previously underrepresented values into urban form. Social movements provide a primary venue for such paradigmatic change. They do this through the production of new knowledge that aims to alter the cognitive praxis of its citizenry and to generate the momentum required to codify grassroots ideals into the built world. Exploring how this confluence of socio-technical innovation functions within the built world, this dissertation addresses the primary research question: What is the relationship between urban social movements, the values they espouse, the building codes they construct, and the liberative function of the spaces produced? In this dissertation, I investigate three established and one emerging social movement to discern the characteristics of democratic code formation that lead to civic urban form. These four case studies are analyzed in terms of their origins, the claims made, strategies employed, and outcomes achieved. Patterns are then extrapolated from this analysis to identify qualities of collective action that contribute to the codification of civic urban form. The research discussed herein was conducted in two phases to develop a historical base from which to evaluate contemporary efforts to codify civic urban form. The first phase of this exploratory investigation tells the story of three intrinsically valuable, but also comparable case studies of social change in the United States: the community development strategy pursued by the civil rights movement, the architectural accessibility platform advocated by the disability rights movement, and efforts to institutionalize new building practices through voluntary building assessment systems by the environmental movement. The second phase extrapolates patterns from the established cases to inform the investigation of proto-movements currently coalescing around issues of spatial justice. Both phases are then reflected upon in order to propose a theory of civic urban form that recognizes the dialectic between social movements, emergent social values, building codes, and the physical spaces they inform. The thesis statement underlying this dissertation is that urban social movements in the U.S. require a myriad of different activist organizations— radical and mainstream, professional and grassroots— to simultaneously employ diverse strategies through an integrated frame of collective action in order to institutionalize new types of civic urban form. Based on the theoretical framework developed to conceptualize the production of civic urban form, I go on to argue in the concluding chapters that urban social movements currently seeking various means to codify the tenets of sustainable development in the United States might benefit from couching their collective actions within an integrated action frame of spatial justice.