Toward a Critical Race Praxis for Educational Research: Lessons from affirmative action and social science advocacy. (original) (raw)
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THE EVOLUTION OF AN ISSUE: The Rise and Decline of Affairmative action
Review of Policy Research, 2000
ABSTRACTThis article examines the development of the affirmative action issue since its inception, and compares its dynamics and evolution with the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It identifies and discusses three periods or phases of the affirmative action regime. This vein of research helps provide at least a partial explanation for why policies in related areas of civil rights may produce different outcomes, and explicates the broad resistance to key elements of the anti‐discrimination effort of the last three decades. A tentative model based on the congruence of the policy stance of political institutions to public opinion is suggested. We conclude that while issues such as affirmative action may be susceptible to long‐run institutional counter pressures, voluntary programs to increase diversity will certainly continue.
Sylviane Diouf ed. Africana Age, 2011
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, African Americans once again answered the call to transform the world. The social and economic ravages of Jim Crow era racism were all-encompassing and deep-rooted. Yet like a phoenix rising from the ashes of lynch mobs, debt peonage, residential and labor discrimination, and rape, the black freedom movement raised a collective call of "No More"! The maintenance of white power had been pervasive and even innovative, and hence those fighting to get out from under its veil had to be equally unrelenting and improvisational in strategies and tactics. What is normally understood as the Civil Rights movement was in fact a grand struggle for freedom extending far beyond the valiant aims of legal rights and protection. From direct-action protests and boycotts to armed self-defense, from court cases to popular culture, freedom was in the air in ways that challenged white authority and even contested established black ways of doing things in moments of crisis.
The goal of this study is to determine the applicability of pluralist, elitist, plural-elitist, Marxist class analysis and protest theory for explaining African-American political participation from 1940 to 2000. The significance of this study lay in the need to associate African-American politics with a major theoretical model. For theory has a great effect on the society at large, as it can influence public policy and the perceptions that policy makers have of target populations. A sociohistorical qualitative analysis was conducted by analyzing African-American political participation from the perspective of the tenets of each of the five competing models. A time series analysis was conducted to determine the impact of violent and nonviolent protests, the percentage of Democrats in congress, the percentage of African- Americans in the total voter population, the percentage of former Asian and African colonies gaining independence, the percentage of African-American in congress and the African-American poverty rate on the enactment of civil and social rights legislation from 1940 to 2000. The qualitative findings showed that pluralist theory had the greatest explanatory power when confined to the nature of state and group interaction, and the efficacy of democracy, while the other theories had some limited utility. In the areas of economics Marxist theory was of limited utility, whereas the other theories lacked significant explanatory power. Protest theory was at its strongest when explaining social change and social movements with regards to African-American political participation during the time period under investigation. None of the theories provided and adequate explanation of race relations or succinctly delineated the contours of the African-American historical political participation. The time series analysis found nonviolent protest, violent protest and Asian and African decolonization to have the greatest impact on the enactment of civil and social rights policies and showed that the control of congress for the majority of the period by the democratic party was not statistically nor substantively significant in accounting for the development of civil and social rights policies.
Political Opportunities and African‐American Protest, 1948–1997
American Journal of Sociology, 2003
Some contend that political opportunity theory is ad hoc, lacks clear measurement, and fails to distinguish opportunities from other conditions that contribute to protest. Others argue that the idea of "expanding opportunities" needs to be balanced by consideration of political threats. An annual time-series approach is used to examine the frequency of African-American protest in the United States from 1948 to 1997. Evidence of expanding opportunities created by divided government, strong northern Democratic Party allies, and, during the 1950s, Republican presidential incumbents responding to Cold War foreign policy constraints is found. African-American congressional representation provides routine political access, which reduces protest. The evidence also supports explanations based on collective grievances stemming from black/white income inequality, Vietnam War deaths, and low-to-middle black unemployment. In response to the general concern that "social movements and the state are seldom treated together as interacting dimensions of the same political process" (Walton 1992, p. 1), a number of scholars have advanced arguments about political opportunities to account for the mobilization, strategies, and outcomes of social movements (
The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Example of the Br (...) 2
1963
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