Crystal M. Fleming

African Americans respond to stigmatization: the meanings and salience of confronting, deflecting conflict, educating the ignorant and ‘managing the self’

Abstract Drawing on interviews with 150 randomly sampled African Americans, we analyse how members of a stigmatized group understand their experience of stigmatization and assess appropriate responses when asked about the best approach to deal with stigmatization and about responses to specific incidents. Combining in-depth interviews with a systematic coding of the data, we make original contributions to the previous literature by identifying the relative salience of modalities and tools for responding. We also examine closely through qualitative data the two most salient modalities of response, ‘confronting’ and ‘deflating’ conflict, the most salient tools, teaching out-group members about African Americans, and ‘the management of the self’, a rationale for deflating conflict that is largely overlooked in previous studies. We find that ‘confronting’ is the more popular modality for responding to stigmatization among African Americans.

EVERYDAY ANTIRACISM: Competence and Religion in the Cultural Repertoire of the African American Elite

This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by unpacking the cultural categories through which everyday antiracism is experienced and practiced by extraordinarily successful African Americans. Using a phenomenological approach, we focus on processes of classification to analyze the criteria that members of the African American elite mobilize to compare racial groups and establish their equality. We first summarize results from earlier work on the antiracist strategies of White and African American workers. Second, drawing upon in-depth interviews with members of the Black elite, we show that demonstrating intelligence and competence, and gaining knowledge, are particularly valued strategies of equalization, while religion has a subordinate role within their antiracist repertoire. Thus, gaining cultural membership is often equated with educational and occupational attainment. Antiracist strategies that value college education and achievement by the standards of American individualism may exclude many poor and working-class African Americans from cultural membership. In this way, strategies of equalization based on educational and professional competence may prove dysfunctional for racial solidarity.

White cruelty or Republican sins? Competing frames of stigma reversal in French commemorations of slavery

Abstract This paper explores how French activists use claims about the history and legacies of slavery to combat stigmas associated with their group membership. Using a case study of a French Caribbean association (CM98) and a pan-African association (COFFAD), I examine how two organizations produce competing models for challenging and reversing the stigma of slavery. Through a process of normative inversion, activists assert the moral inferiority of dominant groups. CM98 rejects both a racial and an African identity, and seeks recognition for ‘French descendants of slaves’, using the language of citizenship to criticize the French government. COFFAD, by contrast, asserts an Afro-centric black identity and stigmatizes white Europeans. I argue that both destigmatization strategies unwittingly reinforce the stigma of historical enslavement.

Internalized HIV Stigma and Mindfulness Associations With PTSD Symptom Severity in Trauma-Exposed Adults With HIV/AIDS

Rates of both traumatic event exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; 22%-54%) are disproportionately elevated among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA). Trauma and related psychopathology significantly affect quality of life and disease management in this patient population. The current study examined associations between internalized HIV stigma, mindfulness skills, and the severity of PTSD symptoms in trauma-exposed PLHA. Participants included 137 PLHA (14.6% female; Mage = 48.94, SD = 8.89) who reported experiencing on average, five (SD = 2.67) traumatic events; 34% met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Results indicate that after controlling for sex, age, education, and number of traumatic events, internalized HIV stigma was positively related to overall PTSD symptom severity (β = .16, p < .05) and severity of re-experiencing (β = .19, p < .05) and hyper-arousal (β = .16, p = .05), but not avoidance, PTSD symptom clusters. Among the mindfulness facets measured, acting with awareness was uniquely negatively related to the overall severity of PTSD symptoms (β = − .25, p < .01) and the severity of re-experiencing (β = − .25, p < .05), avoidance (β = − .25, p < .05), and hyper-arousal (β = − .29, p < .01) PTSD symptom clusters. These effects were observed after accounting for covariates and shared variance with other mindfulness facets. Theoretically, the present findings suggest that internalized HIV stigma may serve as a vulnerability factor for the severity of certain PTSD symptoms, whereas acting with awareness may function as a protective or resiliency factor for the severity of PTSD symptoms. Implications for the treatment of trauma-exposed PLHA are discussed.

Responses to Discrimination and Social Resilience Under Neoliberalism

Members of stigmatized groups often live with the expectation that they will be overscrutinized, overlooked, underappreciated, misunderstood, and disrespected in the course of their daily lives. How do they interpret and respond to this lived reality? What resources do they have at their disposal to do so? How are their responses shaped by neoliberalism? How can responses to stigmatization foster social resilience?

Theorizing Ethnic and Racial Movements in the Global Age Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement

In this essay, we reflect on the history and legacies of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and suggest avenues of future research of interest to scholars of ethnic and racial movements. First, we unpack how the Civil Rights Movement developed as a major movement utilizing both international and domestic influences. Second, we consider the central role of technology—including television and Internet communication technologies (ICTs)—in shaping contemporary ethnic and racial activism. In so doing, we aim to enhance scholarship on movements and efforts by those committed to challenging racial and ethnic disparities. Finally, we explore how the collective memories of past racial and ethnic struggles, including the Civil Rights Movement, are constructed. We argue that activists and their opposition have stakes in how past ethnoracial oppression and movements alike will be remembered and interpreted. Such memories and interpretations can serve as the basis for additional demands that activists make on power holders and influence actions of the powerful to resist such demands.

Considerations for Research and Development of Culturally Relevant Mindfulness Interventions in American Minority Communities

As many health disparities in American minority communities (AMCs) are stress related, there has been an increased interest in the development of mindfulness programs as potential stress-reduction measures in these communities. However, the bulk of the extant literature on mindfulness research and mindfulness interventions is based upon experiences with the larger White community. The intent of this commentary is to share a framework that includes key cultural considerations for conducting research and developing culturally salient mindfulness programs with AMCs. We build on our experiences and the experiences of other researchers who have explored mindfulness in African- and Native American communities; in particular, we examine issues around community outreach with an emphatic gesture toward emphasizing protection of AMCs and their participants. Discussed are considerations with respect to attitudinal foundations in mindfulness-based research and program development with these communities. However, the overall message of this paper is not to provide a “to-do” list of research steps, but to rather, encourage researchers to turn inward and consider the development of skillful characteristics that will increase the likelihood of a successful research venture while also protecting the cultural traditions of the AMC of interest.

Theorizing at the Margins: Du Bois, The Scholar Denied, and the Matter of Black LivesTheorizing at the Margins: Du Bois, The Scholar Denied and the Matter of Black Lives

Who could deny the enduring relevance of Du Bois’s nearly century-long record of achievement and the genius of this brilliant scholar’s mind? In fact, as Aldon Morris chronicles in The Scholar Denied, almost all of Du Bois’s white peers—and subsequent generations of white sociologists— worked very hard to ignore, undermine, and minimize the accomplishments of the multitalented and multilingual scholar, activist, and educator. Disclosing the “who” involved in marginalizing Du Bois also involves uncovering the “why”: the dogged protection of whites’ material, political, and intellectual resources. An erudite study in the machinations of academic racism, Morris’s masterpiece is nothing less than the wholesale reconstruction of the history of sociology—and the history of race theory—as he unveils, in astonishing detail, the lengths to which racist white scholars worked to deny recognition and resources to Du Bois and an entire generation of black and white scholars working under his tutelage. In addition to exploring Du Bois’s major works and lesser known empirical studies, Morris provides crucial insight into intellectual projects the great scholar was unable to develop due to white racism. The Scholar Denied is at once an essential contribution to the history of science, sociology of knowledge, and sociology of racism. Marshalling a mountain of archival data, Morris analyzes Du Bois’s role in establishing the first scientific school of sociology and—all the more deliciously—reveals that this groundbreaking laboratory was housed in Atlanta University, a historically black institution. Supplanting the much heralded Chicago School of Sociology with the Du Bois-Atlanta School, Morris emphasizes not only the methodological, political, and conceptual innovations of Du Boisian sociology but also its temporal precedence. When Du Bois began building a sociology department in 1897, the American Sociological Society did not yet exist. It would be another eight years before his white colleagues managed to establish a national organization—and another 20 years before the emergence of the Chicago School. Morris presents Du Bois as a moral and intellectual champion, far ahead of his time, working to establish systematic methodologies—not only for sociological inquiry writ large, but for the specific, politicized purpose of challenging racial oppression, debunking racist beliefs, and proving the value of black lives. In contrast to white peers, who at the end of the twentieth century were busily crafting the well-funded institutional apparatus of white supremacist thought and scientific racism, Du Bois and his colleagues in Atlanta used their (deliberately) limited means to launch empirical studies in a variety of urban and rural settings and prove that racial disparities were rooted in discrimination—not biological inferiority. The book’s eight chapters are filled with as much data as drama: the reader encounters a long list of villains, including Robert Park, Booker T. Washington, and Melville Herskovitz, who scheme to alienate and undermine Du Bois. The first three chapters examine Du Bois’s intellectual development at Fisk and Harvard, as well as his studies abroad in Germany against the backdrop of scientific racism within the emerging social and natural sciences. Morris retraces Du Bois’s largely successful efforts to overcome the white supremacist 739585 SREXXX10.1177/2332649217739585Sociology of Race and Ethnicity research-article2017

Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative LanguageConceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language, by CazenaveNoel A.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 250 pp.

ger sense of the science on whether or not organics truly are better, healthier, or more ethical options (or which organics, across which contexts, and for whom). Under which circumstances might food choices, embodiments, or behaviors considered ‘‘healthy’’ actually be harmful to oneself, one’s family, food producers, or the environment? The authors’ inclusion of empirical evidence from critical studies across the areas of obesity, organics, and food production might have tempered the degree to which the voices of white, middleto upper-class women’s perspectives emerged as normative and even prescriptive across the text. Despite the limitations of the text, it remains a thoughtful and compelling read for those who are gender and food studies experts, as well as for those with little prior engagement with this area. Food and Femininity would capably serve as a supplementary text for courses across disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies. In sociology specifically, the text could be used in classes focusing on consumers and consumption, culture, gender, qualitative methods (given its rather extensive methodological appendix), and the family. Ultimately, the questions that Cairns and Johnston pursue, as well as the questions their work stimulates, provide just the sort of fodder for further analysis and engagement sure to inspire fruitful and lively debates in both our scholarship and classrooms.

80.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781442252356.

Angehorige stigmatisierter Gruppen leben oft mit der Erwartung, im taglichen Leben besonders kritisch beaugt, ubersehen, unterschatzt, missverstanden und respektlos behandelt zu werden.