Black History Month

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, so we will analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes.

A poem written by Olena Kalytiak Davis. Her most recent collection is The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press). She lives and practices law in Anchorage, Alaska.

A critical examination of the ways racially minoritized college students who served as peer socialization agents (i.e., orientation leaders, tour guides) experienced their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and student ambassador positions. Framed by critical race theory, the counternarratives of 11 racially minoritized peer socialization agents at a historically White institution illuminated the ways racially minoritized student leaders experienced pervasive racism despite their prestigious status at the institution.

This essay takes up, from a psychoanalytic and cultural theory perspective, the underpinnings and psychic structures of racism, as it is lived out and practiced in the North American context. This essay is focused on the tenacity of the conscious and unconscious commitments “white” people make to white privilege.

One of the worst aspects of racism is the damage inflicted on the human person by evoking feelings of separateness and inferiority. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King meant to capture that impact by referring to a "degenerating sense of nobodiness." This essay invokes King's reference to "nobodiness" and connects it explicitly with the negative effects on three particular elements of the human person. Those are having a unique and expressive voice, living a narrative life, and being a Thou.

This paper focuses on the 1908 book Studies in the American Race Problem, a collection of essays by Mississippi planter Alfred Stone and Massachusetts statistician Walter Willcox, in order to examine the ways in which agricultural industrialization was articulated as a racial project in the early 20th century. Notions of development and competition in agriculture were closely tied to plantationist racial conceptions, and Studies in the American Race Problem evidences the articulation of white supremacist racial conceptions with liberal statistical practices which examined race as a population-level phenomenon.

"Trans" or transgender topics have exploded in the last ten to fifteen years, as even those scholars of music who actively avoid culturally critical work would be hard-pressed to ignore. The first section of the essay examines the performative effect of a term that is taken to be transgressive. The second section traces several genealogies of queer and feminist scholarship and provides context for raceing queer music scholarship. The third section suggests that musicology may ironically be well positioned to intervene on the deracination of "queer" and "trans" in both scholarly and cultural spheres.