1 of 3 FIN 3302 – Exam I Review Fall 2017 Chapter 1.docx

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FIN 3302 – Exam I Review Fall 2017
Chapter 1
Chapter 5
-annual periods
Chapter 6

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Sample Questions
1) Which of the following goals of the firm are synonymous
(equivalent) to the maximization of
shareholder wealth?
A) profit maximization
B) risk minimization
C) maximization of the total market value of the firm's common
stock
D) none of the above
2) You inherit $300,000 from your parents and want to use the
money to supplement your
retirement. You receive the money on your 65th birthday, the

day you retire. You want to
withdraw equal amounts at the end of each of the next 20 years.
What constant amount can you
withdraw each year and have nothing remaining at the end of 20
years if you are earning 7%
interest per year?
A) $15,000
B) $28,318
C) $33,574
D) $39,113
3) The risk-free rate of interest is 4% and the market risk
premium is 9%. Howard Corporation
has a beta of 2.0, and last year generated a return of 16% with a
standard deviation of returns of
27%. The required return on Howard Corporation stock is
A) 36%.
B) 34%.
C) 26%.
D) 22%.

4) Today is your 21st birthday and your bank account balance is
$25,000. Your account is
earning 6.5% interest compounded monthly. How much will be
in the account on your 50th
birthday?
A) $159,795
B) $162,183
C) $163,823
D) $164,631
5) All of the following statements about agency problems are
true except:
A) Agency problems interfere with the goal of maximizing
shareholder value.
B) Agency costs are paid by the managers who do not act in the
shareholders' best
interest.
C) Agency problems result from the separation of management
and the ownership of a
firm.
D) The root cause of agency problems is conflicts of interest.

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6) Which of the following conclusions would be true if you earn
a higher rate of return on your
investments?
A) The greater the present value would be for any lump sum you
would receive in the
future.
B) The lower the present value would be for any lump sum you
future.
C) Your rate of return would not have any effect on the present
value of any sum to be
received in the future.
D) The greater the present value would be for any annuity you
future.
7) Investment A has an expected return of 14% with a standard
deviation of 4%, while

investment B has an expected return of 20% with a standard
deviation of 9%. Therefore,
A) a risk averse investor will definitely select investment A
because the standard
deviation is lower.
B) a rational investor will pick investment B because the return
adjusted for risk (20% -
9%) is higher than the return adjusted for risk for investment A
($14% - 4%).
C) it is irrational for a risk-averse investor to select investment
B because its standard
deviation is more than twice as big as investment A's, but the
return is not twice as big.
D) rational investors could pick either A or B, depending on
their level of risk aversion.
8) Joe purchased 800 shares of Robotics Stock at $3 per share
on 1/1/15. He sold the shares on
12/31/15 for $3.45. Robotics stock has a beta of 1.9, the risk-
free rate of return is 4%, and the
market risk premium is 9%. Joe's holding period return is:
A) 15.0%.
B) 16.5%.

C) 17.6%.
D) 21.1%.
Key
1. C
2. B
3. D
4. C
5. B
6. B
7. D
8. A
PEDIATRIC NURSING/September-October 2017/Vol. 43/No. 5
213
I
n August, our national news was
filled with horrifying images of
racism on display. If racism
weren’t such a serious issue, seeing

people marching with Tiki torches
might have almost seemed comical.
The Nazi flags were chilling. It was
quite the deadly show of visual, ver-
bal, physical, and emotional hatred
that I never thought I would ever see
again in my country.
Yet with this event and similar
ones that followed, we have learned
how deeply racism is imbedded in
American culture. Following the
rebuke from the United Nations on
human rights (Gearan & Wang,
2017). Malik (2017) pointed out the
following:
It took only eight months to go
from a nation that voted for a
black president two terms in a row
to one that is suffering from race
riots and killings, with officials
having to send troops out on to the
streets and declare a state of emer-
gency. The speed with which it
happened is the clue that it was, in
fact, happening all along, unseen.
And the fact that it was lying in
wait is an indicator of how little
racial equality is prized in the
United States’ DNA.
Malik (2017) explains why ostensi-
bly developed countries, once faced
with adversity, a vacuum of authority,
or questionable leadership, tend to

fall apart along the lines of race. In
stable times of prosperity and rational
leadership, “the promotion and en -
shrining of the rights of the more vul-
nerable is cosmetic at best, under-
mined and papered over at worst. The
foundations were there and contin-
ued to be laid even during Obama’s
leadership” (Malik, 2017).
Such a sorry state of affairs. How
does racism develop, what is its
impact, and what can we do about it?
The Development
Of Racism
Racism, a developed set of atti-
tudes, includes antagonism based on
the supposed superiority of one group
or on the supposed inferiority of
another group based solely on skin
color or race (Beswick, 1990). No
human being is born with racist, sex-
ist, and other oppressive attitudes.
Would children even notice differ-
ences if no one said anything about
them? Yes, they would, for the fol-
lowing reasons (Rollins & Mahan,
2010, pp. 70-71):
• Early on, children notice differ-
ences and mentally organize these
observations into categories. This
is how young children make sense
of their ever-expanding world.

• Attitudes about “us and them” are
learned and reinforced in the
home, school, and church, and
through the media.
• By 3 years of age, children have
learned to categorize people into
“good or bad” based on superficial
traits, such as race or gender.
• Children 2 years of age or younger
learn names of colors, then begin
to apply these names to skin color.
• By 3 years of age or even earlier,
children can show signs of being
influenced by what they see and
hear around them. They may even
pick up and exhibit “pre-preju-
dice” toward others based on race
or disability.
• Children 4 and 5 years of age may
use racial reasons for refusing to
interact with others who are dif-
ferent from themselves; they may
act uncomfortable around or even
reject people with disabilities.
• By the time children enter ele-
mentary school, they may have
developed prejudices. Stereotypes
remain until personal experience
or someone attempts to correct
them.

Savard and Aragon (1989) tell us
that parents are the earliest and most
powerful source of racial attitudes
(positive or negative); peers are a close
second. Open-mindedness increases
with age.
The Impact of Racism
On Health
Gee, Walsemann, and Brondolo
(2012) note studies that indicate racism
may influence health inequities.
Growing from infancy into old age,
individuals encounter social institu-
tions that may create new exposures to
racial bias. Gee and colleagues (2012)
view racism and health inequities from
a life course perspective. They found
that repeated exposure to moderate
racial discrimination can cause illness
after a time. Health can also be affected
by social systems, such as education,
the criminal justice system, and the
labor market. Racism leads to housing
and school segregation, limiting a per-
son’s social network, and eventually,
their employment opportunities and
health. Over a lifetime, an individual
who is subjected to racism has longer
periods of unemployment or under-
employment, incarceration, and/or
illness. Compared to someone who
has not experienced racism, someone
who has may have a shorter career

and retirement period, and eventual-
ly, a shorter life expectancy.
Racism also has an impact on the
health of those who migrate to a new
country. Although newly arrived
immigrants are reported to have bet-
ter health than non-immigrants in
North America, their health declines
The Depth of Racism in the U.S.:
What It Means for Children
Judy A. Rollins, PhD, RN
From the Editor
214
PEDIATRIC NURSING/September-October 2017/Vol. 43/No. 5
with increased length of stay. First
attributed to the process of adapting
to a new culture (sedentary North
American lifestyle and increased
intake of fatty food), research now
indicates decline may be due to
racism (Na, 2012).
Ausdale and Feagin (2001) note
that early childhood is a crucial sensi-
tive period when stressors such as
racial discrimination may have an
impact on an individual’s long-term
well-being, affecting brain develop-

ment and the formation of neutral
connections between different regions.
The brain and other parts of the body
do not forget when bad things hap-
pen in early life (Shonkoff, in Kuehn,
2014). In later years, children exposed
to racial discrimination may perceive
their own ethnic group negatively,
become self-conscious, and develop
low self-esteem and symptoms of
depression (Na, 2012).
Implications for Nursing
Research suggests efforts nurses
can take to help limit the effects of
discrimination. Mossakowski (2003)
found that the more strongly people
identified with their own ethnic
group, the less likely they were to dis-
play symptoms of depression. This
study showed that a stronger sense of
ethnic identify meant having a sense
of ethnic pride, being involved in eth-
nic or cultural practices, and having
knowledge about and commitment to
the ethnic group. She concluded that
ethnic identity not only directly pro-
tects individuals from discrimination,
but also buffers the stress of discrimi-
nation on mental health.
Nurses can support children’s eth-
nic identify by learning as much as
possible about the cultural back-
grounds of the populations served by

their practice that are different from
their own. They can encourage chil-
dren’s pride and self-esteem through
an eagerness and curiosity to learn
about children’s cultural heritage from
the children themselves. Healthcare
facilities can use art and design to cel-
ebrate the various cultures served to
provide a sense of welcome and pride
for those who receive treatment there.
Nurses should keep apprised of the
community’s political, social, racial,
and other related issues that could
have an impact on children and teens
in their practice. Talking to children
about discrimination is important for
their health and development, and
nurses should not avoid discussing the
topic. Supporting research-based cur-
ricula for children, such as Teaching
Tolerance, can also be encouraged.
Conducting parenting classes could
prove helpful. Research findings indi-
cate that parents’ responses to their
own experiences of racial discrimina-
tion can influence their parenting
behaviors (Sanders-Phillips, Settles-
Reaves, Walker, & Brownlow, 2009).
Parents who have experienced greater
racial discrimination may become less
sensitive to their children’s needs and
less able to display affection, fail to
prepare them for how to cope with

discrimination, and use harsh disci-
pline. At the same time, research tells
us that more nurturing and involved
parenting can weaken the adverse
outcomes for youth associated with
their own experience of discrimina-
tion (Gibbons et al., 2010).
We must never forget that whether
it is visible or not, hate can be lurking
just below the surface. As pediatric
nurses, we can make a difference to
diminishing racism and discrimina-
tion in our daily interaction with
patients and their families.
References
Ausdale, D.V., & Feagin, J.R. (2001). The
first R: How children learn race and
racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers.
Beswick, R. (1990). Racism in America’s
schools. ERIC Digest Series, EA 49.
Retrieved from https://www.ericdigests.
org/pre-9215/racism.htm
Gearan, A., & Wang, A (2017, August 16) In
veiled criticism of Trump, U.N. chief
says racism is ‘poisoning our societies.’
The Washington Post. Retrieved from
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/
national-security/in-veiled-criticism-of-
trump-un-chief-says-racism-is-poison-

ing-our-societies/2017/ 08/ 16/ ddd03984-
8 2 a 5 - 11 e 7 - a b 2 7 - 1 a 2 1 a 8 e 0 0 6 a b _
story.html?utm_term=.962893eebdfe
Gee, G.C., Walsemann, K.M., & Brondolo, E.
(2012). A life course perspective on how
racism may be related to health inequal-
ities. American Journal of Public Health,
102, 967-974.
Gibbons, F.X., Etcheverry, P.E., Stock, M.L.,
Gerrard, M., Weng, C., Kiviniemi, M., &
O’Hara, R.E. (2010). Exploring the link
between racial discrimination and sub-
stance use: What mediates? What
buffers? Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 99(5), 785-801.
Kuehn, B. (2014). AAP: Toxic stress threat-
ens kids’ long-term health. JAMA,
312(6), 585-586.
Malik, N. (2017, August 25). After a UN warn-
ing over racism, America’s self-image
begins to crack. The Guardian. Retrieved
from https://www.theguardian.com/com-
mentisfree/2017/aug/25/un-warns-us-
racism-but-trump-era-bigotry-not-blip-
charlottesville
Mossakowski, K. (2003). Coping with per-
ceived discrimination: Does ethnic iden-
tity protect mental health? Journal of
Health and Social Behavior, 44, 318-
331.

Na, L. (2012). Children and racism: The long-
term impact. Retrieved from http://
www.aboutkidshealth.ca/En/News/
NewsAndFeatures/Pages/children-
racism-long-term-impacts.aspx
Rollins, J., & Mahan, C. (2010). From artist to
artist in residence: Preparing artists to
work in pediatric healthcare settings.
Washington, DC: Rollins & Associates.
Sanders-Phillips, K., Settles-Reaves, B.,
Walker, D., & Brownlow, J. (2009).
Social inequality and racial discrimina-
tion: Risk factors for health disparities in
children of color. Pediatrics, 124(3),
S176-S186.
Savard, W.G., & Aragon, A. (1989). Racial
Justice Survey Final Report. Portland,
OR: Northwest Regional Educational
Laboratory.
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Racism’s Uprooting
White Racial Jeopardy and Democracy
To show what is beneficial,
what is obligatory, what
is good — that is the task of
education. Education concerns
itself w ith the motives
for effective action. For no
action is ever carried out
in the absence of motives
capable of supplying the
indispensable amount
of energy for its execution.
— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
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To varying degrees, the
approaches used to teach
anti-racism fall short
of their intended goals,
because of the tacit belief
that non-Whites alone
are harmed by racism,
while Whites reap only
its benefits.
This perspective is at odds with, and
unable to fully capture, many aspects
o f our national history and o f our
current reality. It cannot, for example,
account for the race-induced political
behavior o f poor and working-class
Whites. For several decades now,
that behavior has shown itself to be
pointedly self-endangering, culminating
with the election o f Donald J. Trump
to succeed President Barack Obama.
The anguished spectacle o f poor and

working-class Whites vacating their
economic and medical (self-)interest
in order to conform to race-induced
opposition to the pejoratively renamed
“Obamacare,” while pleading for (the
continuance of) Affordable Care, is
revealing. It indicates that for many,
racism has destroyed the ability to
define, assert, or defend their own
survival interests. Despite numerous
similar inconsistencies, the traditional
designation o f victims and beneficiaries
remains unchanged, perhaps, because
it is consistent with racism’s definition
o f the powerless and the powerful.
Insights on the psychology of oppression
developed by the twentieth century
French philosopher Simone Weil
offer a way out o f this impasse. Weil’s
analysis provides an urgently needed
framework for re-examining racism,
one that allows for a more complex
understanding o f the ways in which
people with W hite racial privilege are
endangered by that privilege.
In the collection o f essays translated
and published posthumously as
The N eed fo r Roots: Prelude to a
Declaration o f Duties towards M ankind,
Weil declares that “To be rooted is
perhaps the most im portant and least
recognized need o f the hum an soul”
(Weil 1978, 41). After describing the
familial and social structures through

which individuals are “rooted” so
as to achieve moral, intellectual, and
spiritual stability, Weil examines factors
contributing to its opposite, what she
calls “uprootedness.” Because she is
writing during the Second World War,
Weil focuses on contemporary causes
o f uprootedness, such as military
conquest and colonialism. W hile she
does not mention racism as a cause o f
uprootedness, numerous studies have
confirmed racisms uprooting effects,
most notably the doll studies developed
by Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps
Clark that were used in the Brown
v. Board o f Education case to end
state-sponsored school segregation in
the 1950s.' Contrary to expectations of
preference based on “similarity bias,”
the Black children in the Clark study
showed a distinct preference for and
favorable view o f W hite dolls and a
marked rejection o f the Black dolls with
which they nevertheless identified.
I will return to this point later in the
essay, as I examine the “narrative
relationships” deployed to destroy
self-image and self-esteem, and — in
the process — generate a negative
“similarity bias.”
Suffice it to say, Weil’s description o f
uprootedness as a “self-propagating”
social disorder illuminates one o f the
least understood, least examined aspects

o f the ideology o f race — its injurious
psychological, and perhaps neural,
impact on individuals and groups
positioned to internalize, act out, and
ostensibly, benefit from its suggestions.
As she observes, “Uprootedness is
by far the most dangerous malady to
which hum an societies are exposed,
for it is a self-propagating one__
Whoever is uprooted himself uproots
others. Whoever is rooted himself
doesn’t uproot others” (Weil 1978, 45).
Weil’s analysis makes clear that racism’s
uprooting o f Blacks and other racial
minorities is inevitably the secondary
effect o f racism’s uprooting o f Whites,
a latent source o fW h ite racial jeopardy.
That is to say, the ideology o f race must
first have destroyed or dismantled
certain vital hum an capacities within
the W hite population, as an absolute
pre-condition for the sustained
violence o f racism. O f these capacities,
perhaps the most im portant is
the cognitive capacity to perceive
non-W hite people’s equal humanity.
Examining racism through the lenses
provided by Weil’s analysis, new
questions emerge. Exactly how are
W hite people “uprooted” by racism?
How is uprooting manifested or
displayed? W hat are its psychological
contours? And given the new
developments in neuroscience research,
can we go beyond a psychological

mapping to identify the neural correlates
o f racism? M ost importantly, given
the long history during which it has
remained undiagnosed and untreated,
what are the long-term consequences
o f racisms uprooting o f Whites?
RE-EXAMINING RACISM’S
DIVIDE
In the following discussion, I attem pt
to answer these questions by looking
first at the pitfalls o f mainstream
understandings and approaches to
anti-racism and by applying recent
developments in neuroscience research
to expose racism and W hite privilege
as dangers to W hites and, ultimately,
to u.s. democracy. I argue that a
more efficacious design of anti-racist
education can only come from a
comprehensive understanding o f the
jeopardy we all face from racism’s
uprooting effects. For W hites, racism
and W hite privilege threaten those
competencies that enable and sustain
healthy social interactions, professional
performance, and democratic praxis in
a multiracial society, namely, effective
moral reasoning, moral decision-making,
historical thinking, social literacy,
and their prerequisites — emotional
engagement and narrative knowledge.

W ith few exceptions, scholarly analyses
o f racism are shaped by binary
assumptions about its impact: Whites
reap the benefit o f W hite privilege,
while Native Americans, African
Americans, Latinos, Asians, Muslims2,
and others are harmed by it. W hen
injury to W hites is mentioned, it is
generally no more significant than the
harm o f a guilty conscience.
In the best-seller Why Are A ll the Black
Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
A n d Other Conversations About Race,
psychologist Beverly Tatum recounts
an exchange with a student that
underscores the shortcomings o f most
current approaches to anti-racism.
In examining “The Cost o f Racism,”
Tatum describes a W hite male student
who, after completing her psychology
o f racism course, confessed that he
“now understood in a way he never had
before just how advantaged he was”
(Tatum 1997,13) because o f racism.
The student also shared that “he didn’t
think he would do anything to try
to change the situation. After all, the
system was working in his favor”
(Tatum 1997,13).
After noting that this response was an
anomaly, Tatum goes on to say that
it, nevertheless, raised two im portant
questions: “W hy should Whites who

are advantaged by racism want to end
that system o f advantage? [And] W hat
are the costs o f that system to them?”
(Tatum 1997,13). Tatum answers first
with a financial accounting o f what
racism costs the u.s. economy, citing
a 1989 article, “Race and Money,”
that appeared in Money magazine.
After furnishing anecdotal evidence
o f emotional loss suffered by W hite
women and men, Tatum asserts:
“W hite people are paying a significant
price for the system o f advantage.
The cost is not as high for W hites as
it is for people o f color, but a price
is being paid” (Tatum 1997,14).
Since I first read Tatum’s account of
her W hite male student’s response and
o f the questions it prom pted, I have
remained fascinated by both. I am
fascinated by the student’s response
because, it supplies language for what I
believe is a widely held view: that when
W hite people commit to anti-racism,
they are acting against their own rational
self-interest or are doing so as an
expression o f goodwill toward Blacks,
Latinos, Native Americans, Muslims,
and others who are disadvantaged by
race and racism. The suggestion that
racism is a threat to Whites, that they
too are in danger o f being uprooted by
it, is still a novel one.

I am fascinated by Tatum’s response
because she never poses what I view
as the more urgent questions: why
did her student not recognize what the
system was costing him? And how
might she and other anti-racist educators
be preventing this discovery in their
legitimate focus on defining racism as a
system o f advantage and disadvantage?
W hile she does not address these
questions, Tatum’s analysis does illustrate
just how the myth o f W hite people’s
imm unity to racism’s uprooting
is perpetuated. In discussing how
institutional racism hurt the u.s.
economy and, thereby, W hite Americans,
she mentions only those experiences
o f economic harm that people
disadvantaged by race experience,
namely, “real estate equity lost through
housing discrimination, or the tax
revenue lost in underemployed
communities o f color, or the high cost
o f warehousing hum an talent in prison”
(Tatum 1997,14). Here, Tatum 14
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suggests that the economic, social, and
psychological injuries sustained by
communities o f color am ount to a cost
to the economy as a whole, which is
the only measure o f (economic)
cost to Whites. To the extent that there
is only a collective — and not an
individualized — economic cost for
Whites, it must mean that relinquishing
W hite privilege or (with more difficulty)
overcoming racism can only be a
gesture of goodwill or economic
patriotism, not one o f self-preservation
or self-interest on the part o f W hite

individuals.
Peggy M cIntosh’s widely respected
essay, “W hite Privilege: Unpacking the
Invisible Knapsack” (1989), provides
further insight into the mythology of
W hite people’s im m unity to racism’s
uprooting effects. The essay opens with
an epigraph in which McIntosh
confesses, “I was taught to see racism
only in individual acts o f meanness,
not in invisible systems conferring
dominance on my group.” The catalogue
that follows is McIntosh’s attempt
to delineate this “invisible system.”
In listing what she calls the “Daily
Effects o f W hite Privilege,” McIntosh
does n ot include a single injury that
might accompany the many “privileges”
she identifies. In fact, the list displays
a peculiar lack o f reflection on, and
lack o f interest in, the harmful effects
o f W hite privilege. McIntosh is able
to avoid this discovery by a steadfast
refusal to expose or identify the hum an
agents implicated in the privileges she
enumerates. Putting the spotlight on
these persons, two details stand out.
First, hatred and/or meanness cannot
account for the spectrum of attitudes
and actions she describes. Second,
the persons dispensing or otherwise
responsible for the privileges she
enjoys have, to varying degrees, been
(psychologically and morally) uprooted.

Among the mundane examples o f
W hite racial privilege McIntosh pulls
out o f her invisible knapsack is the
following: “I can go shopping alone
most o f the time, pretty well assured
that I will not be followed or harassed”
(#4).3 The store clerk who does not
follow McIntosh but who peeps at me
through the fitting room door is
not mean, does not hate me. Disabling
narrative relationships — with
non-W hite characters in television,
cinematic, historical, and other
narratives — have triggered emotions
o f suspicion and impaired her ability
to see me. Uprooted by racism, what
she sees instead is a Black-female-and-
therefore-shoplifter. Favorable narrative
relationships with W hite characters
have also blunted her ability to discern
crime in White-face. So while she
follows me around in a harassing
performance o f helpfulness, the real
shoplifter menaces the merchandise.
Read carefully, one discovers that
the privileges in McIntosh’s invisible
knapsack have been stacked by
“invisible” people psychologically and
morally disabled by racism’s
uprooting, people whose ability to
accurately interpret human behaviors
and motives have likewise been
impaired. Her composition o f such
a comprehensive listing o f assumed

privileges can only mean that McIntosh
knows the stackers, has seen or has
been one o f them. If she had seriously
analyzed the type o f impairment their
actions or attitudes reflect, privilege
#15 — and perhaps the entire essay —
would have been framed differently.
Instead o f simply asserting, "I do not
have to educate my children to be
aware o f systemic racism for their own
daily physical protection,”4 McIntosh
would have added, “But I do have to
educate my children to be aware o f the
daily threat racism and W hite privilege
pose to their psychological, intellectual,
and moral health.”
Two defects weaken McIntosh’s
anti-racist methodology: first, not
identifying the people responsible for
the racial privileges she enumerates,
and second, not analyzing the full
range of psychological dispositions
involved in its operation. These defects
also appear in the structural racism
model championed by legal scholar
John A. Powell, former director o f the
Kirwan Institute for the Study o f Race
and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.
In “Structural Racism: Building
upon the Insights o f John Calmore,”
Powell asserts that “Racism need not
be either intentional or individualist.
Institutional practices and cultural
patterns can perpetuate racial inequity

w ithout relying on racist actors” (795).
Contrasting institutional and structural
racism, Powell notes:
The institutional racism
framework reflects a broader
recognition o f the forms
through which racialized
power is deployed, dispersed,
and entrenched. However,
while illustrating the ways in
which racism is often
non-individualist and
non-intentionalist, this
framework focuses too
heavily on intra-institutional
dynamics, and thus fails to
account for the ways in which
the joint operations o f social
institutions produce critical
racialized outcomes. [...]
Structural racism shifts
our attention from the
single, intra-institutional
setting to inter-institutional
arrangements and
interactions. (795-796)
As an intersectional approach,
Powell’s structural racism model
provides a means o f both identifying
and countering the structures of
compounding jeopardy that constrict

opportunities for poor African
American, Latino, Native American,
and other non-W hite communities.
However, in simultaneously reducing
the m ultitude o f racist dispositions
to the single stereotypical mindset o f
“bad actors” and substituting a focus on
residual effects o f presumably abandoned
mechanics, the structural racism
model moves the discourse from one
shaky leg to another.
The notion that structures can maintain
a racist disposition and continue to
produce racist outcomes w ithout the
involvement o f racist hum an agents
or that institutions do not reflect the
vision or mindset o f the people by
whom they are governed is simply not
credible. Recent events involving the
three branches of our own democratic
government are instructive. O n the
one hand, the machinations o f the
executive branch demonstrate that if
and when operated by individuals with
an autocratic vision (or personality)
democratic structures will not continue
to support democratic practices
or policies, or produce democratic
outcomes. O n the other hand, recent
rulings from the federal bench regarding
the Trump administrations Muslim
ban indicate that only when structures
are governed by human agents
committed to a democratic vision can

democratic outcomes be assured.
The same is true o f racism. As such,
an approach that combines the
critique o f structural racism with an
examination o f hum an agents
involved in its continuance would
be anchored by two legs and ensure
analytical symmetry.
The discomfort underlying the refusal
to expose hum an beings involved in
the practice o f racism stems from an
ahistorical and simplistic equation
o f racism with hatred or meanness,
as McIntosh admits to having been
taught. Recalling Tatums W hite male
student, however, it is clear that his
resolution to preserve racism and,
inevitably, to become a self-consciously
racist agent was undertaken, one might
say, “with malice toward none.”
Nevertheless, defining racism solely
as a system o f advantage to Whites
creates several significant impediments
to anti-racist education. First, this
definition supports a senseless and
binary positioning of W hite “donors”
and non-W hite “debtors,” with
opposing stakes.
Second, it simultaneously and
paradoxically entreats W hite “donors”
to relinquish certain modes o f racism
as a benefit to others and not on behalf

o f their own psychological, intellectual,
and ethical growth or liberation.
Third, in so doing, it replicates the
structure o f international relations
in the post-colonial era where formerly
colonized nations are defined as
debtors and those former imperial
powers enriched by the colonial
enterprise are defined as donors.
Fourth, it prevents, or else discourages,
W hite people from acknowledging
their own uprootedness, since doing
so carries an automatic indictm ent for
moral failure.
Fifth, it prevents people with race-based
privilege from discovering how they
too are endangered by structures of
thinking and structures of feeling that
directly and indirectly endorse
hierarchical distributions o f hum an
worth and rights.
Sixth, it fails to reveal the dangers
and dispel the potential envy of
a self-endangering racial privilege.
Seventh, it fails to fully interpret the
significance and value o f the intellectual,
psychological, ethical, spiritual, and
material resourcefulness manifested
in African American, Asian, Latino,
Native American and various non-

Western cultural traditions and histories.
In sum, the view o f racism as solely
or primarily a system o f W hite racial
advantage fails to adequately empower
or motivate W hite, Asian, Native
American, Latino, African American,
and other non-W hite communities
for the collaborative task o f ending
racism. The misconception that W hite
people are not individually harmed
by racism, that it is not a threat to
them, inhibits the mass com m itm ent
and participation needed to effectively
counter racisms uprooting.
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A key reason for W hite people’s seeming
lack o f concern for their own racial
jeopardy is the assumption that racism
is a moral defect and that having a
sufficient moral foundation confers
immunity. Numerous historical
examples, however, amply demonstrate
that having an extensive moral
foundation is no defense against racist
indoctrination. Recall that despite
being versed in the moral teachings
o f the New Testament that include
instructions to love your neighbor
as yourself and to treat others as you
would like to be treated, the earliest
European arrivants to the Americas
were unable to resist racist conscription.
In tracing the history o f legislative
violence in seventeenth-century
Virginia from which race and racism
ensued, political scientist Joel Olson
notes that “Race as we now know it
did n ot exist when the first colonists

landed on the shores o f the New W orld”
(Olson 2001,165). Racism, Olson
asserts, “was a deliberate, public,
conscious policy o f the Virginia ruling
elite” (Olson 2001,167) invented to
preempt cross-racial economic and
political alliances. In the article titled
“The Democratic Problem o f the W hite
Citizen,” Olson recounts,
Through a series o f acts
from r670 to 1705, the
Virginia assembly made laws
distinguishing African and
Indians from Europeans.
They forbade Africans and
Indians to own Christian
servants and the legal
definition o f “Christian” now
excluded baptized African
and Native Americans...
Through various legislative
measures and social pressures
Virginia elites simultaneously
fastened Africans to a lifetime,
hereditary, degraded status
and created a new group of
relatively privileged people
heretofore unknown in
hum an history. Remarkably,
these measures amassed rich
and poor, planter and servant,
esteemed and lowly into a
single group unified not by

ancestry but by the right to
own property (including
hum an property), the right to
share in the public business,
and a pledge to ensure the
degraded position o f all those
defined as black. (Olson 2001,
166-168)
W hile the legislative acts that
engineered racism and W hite racial
privilege equalized the social status of
all those defined as “W hite,” it did not
equalize the economic and political
interests o f poor W hites and the ruling
(White) elite. That is to say, although
the social identities o f W hite workers
improved, their economic interests
were neither aligned with nor prioritized
by the ruling elite. In acquiescing
to this new regime, therefore, poor
W hites sacrificed their economic and
political self-interest for the mostly
symbolic “wages o f Whiteness.”
In systematically discrediting the
image o f non-Whites and enlisting the
participation o f poor W hites in this
project, the ruling elite launched a
two-pronged psychological assault on
non-Whites and on poor Whites.
By assimilating to this new racialized
self-definition, poor English workers —
and later Irish, Italian, German,
Polish, and other ethnic Europeans
in the u.s. — relinquished their

cultural distinctiveness, class-specific
epistemological standpoint,
and interpretive autonomy.
Their acculturation to the illusion o f
dominance shared with the ruling
elite was the first indication o f racism’s
ability to uproot, to impair intellectual
agency and interpretive competence.
In effect, W hite racial privilege was the
nation’s first designer drug, consuming
vital capacities — intellectual,
psychological, moral — with every
thrilling intake. The “pledge” among
W hites to “ensure the degraded
position” o f all those defined as
non-W hite would find expression and
fulfillment through narrative acts
and the re-configuration o f “empathic
bias.” This would involve scripting
negative narrative relationships toward
non-Whites and positive narrative
relationships toward Whites sufficient
to overshadow the empathic biases
that would otherwise have evolved
from their lived interactions and moral
commitments.
From the outset, therefore, racism was
a psychological, not a moral, disorder
dependent on a conditioned emotional
detachment. W hile this detachment
and resulting disorder can have moral
effects and/or implications, the
disorder is itself psychological with

perhaps identifiable neural correlates.
As a psycho-social spectrum disorder,
racism stems from an involuntary and
symmetrical blindness to one’s own
and to other people’s human worth.
It involves both conditioned emotional
detachment and hyper attachment and
produces disparate forms o f impairment
and disability. From its foundational
measurement o f hum an worth, racism
establishes other “race”-based
measurements o f hum an capacities,
human achievements, hum an potential,
human rights, and hum an responses.
W hile racism’s blindness is typically
assumed to manifest itself in attitudes
and acts o f hatred or meanness, these are
merely points on the racism spectrum.
The socialized blindness that undergirds
racism can manifest in a broad spectrum
o f attitudes and actions, involving
varying degrees o f emotional
detachment or hyper-attachment
towards persons positioned at various
tiers on the hierarchy o f human
worth and entitlement posited by the
ideology o f race.
Attitudes and actions toward persons
positioned at or near the bottom o f
the hierarchy o f hum an worth include,
but are not limited to: suspicion,
fear, unwarranted and frequently

self-endangering mistrust, disinterest,
apathy, a lack o f concern for actual
and potential danger or injury to such
persons, sexual attraction, curiosity,
envy, a desire to help or rescue, a
lack o f self-restraint or gentleness
towards such persons, indifference or
permissiveness about abuse towards
such persons — a spectrum o f
psychological dispositions conditioned
by emotional detachment.
Attitudes and actions toward persons
positioned at or near the top of
the hierarchy, and that constitute
W hite racial privilege, include but are
not limited to: feelings o f comfort,
interestedness, empathy, unwarranted
and frequently self-endangering trust,
feelings o f concern and distress at
real or imagined danger or injury to
such persons, a sense o f the greater
value, greater relevance o f their roles
and contributions — a spectrum of
psychological responses conditioned by
hyper-attachment.
As a psycho-social spectrum disorder,
racism also involves a socialized
blindness to the structures through
which hierarchical distributions o f
advantage, opportunity, immunity, and
material resources are made. As such,
it self-propagates through a concurrent
blindness to its own operation,
an effect with considerable strategic

significance. As Wahneema Lubiano
has observed, it allows W hite people
to see themselves as acting morally
when, according to their own moral
tenets, they are not.5 The tendency to
self-propagate, as Weil emphasizes,
is precisely what makes uprootedness
(through W hite racial privilege)
“the most dangerous malady to which
hum an societies are exposed”
(Weil 1978, 45).
The stark contrast between policy
responses that criminalized the mostly
African American and Latino crack
addicts in the 1980s and 1990s and the
policy responses seeking therapeutic
options for todays mostly W hite
heroin addicts is noteworthy. It attests
to the differing degrees of emotional
attachment to persons situated at
different tiers on the hierarchy of
hum an worth posited by the ideology
o f race. If racism had not created
an emotional detachment toward
non-White people, politicians and
policy-makers would not have been
uprooted by this socialization and
would have experienced feelings of
concern, if not alarm, at the loss o f life
among crack addicts. W ith feelings
and emotion intact, they would have
been able to exercise the type o f moral
reasoning that would have provided
a basis for acquiring “narrative

knowledge” — to be discussed
hereafter — in the quest for appropriate
policy responses. If emotional
detachment had not impaired policy
makers’ ability to formulate effective
moral judgm ent about the addicts
o f the late twentieth century, the
therapeutic solutions now being
pursued would have been proposed
then. Lives would have been saved then
and, with structures already in place,
lives would be saved now.
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EXPOSING THE NEUROSCIENCE
OF RACISM
Emotional detachment toward
non-Whites is the foundation — and
catalyst — for a vast structure of
dystopian feeling toward the poor,
prison inmates, the homeless,
immigrants, low-wage workers, people
with intellectual disabilities, and other
groups defined as disposable. The
broad spectrum o f impairment and
disability resulting from the emotional
detachment conditioned by racism
becomes especially significant when
viewed in relation to the work o f the
renowned neuropsychologist Antonio
Damasio on the role o f emotion and
feeling in moral judgment.
In presenting to the public his clinical
findings that “certain aspects o f the
process o f emotion and feeling are
indispensable for rationality” (xiii) and
“that the absence o f emotion and feeling
is no less damaging” than emotional
biases (xii), Damasio mentioned first his
own cultural socialization with regard to
rational decision-making. In Descartes’
Error (1994), Damasio writes,

I had been advised early in
life that sound decisions
came from a cool head, that
emotions and reason did
not mix any more than oil
and water. I had grown up
accustomed to thinking that
the mechanisms o f reason
existed in a separate province
o f the m ind, where emotion
should not be allowed to
intrude, and when I thought
o f the brain behind the
m ind, I envisioned separate
neural systems for reason and
emotion, (xi)
The case that prom pted Damasio to
re-think the role o f emotions and
feeling in effective decision-making
was that o f a patient who “had had
an entirely healthy m ind until a
neurological disease ravaged a specific
sector o f his brain” causing a
“profound defect in decision-making”
(xii). According to Damasio,
The instruments usually
considered necessary and
sufficient for rational behavior
were intact in him. He had
the requisite knowledge,
attention, and memory; his
language was flawless; he

could perform calculations;
he could tackle the logic o f an
abstract problem. There was
only one significant
accompaniment to his
decision-making failure: a
marked alteration o f the
ability to experience feelings.
Flawed reason and impaired
feelings stood out together as the
consequences o f a specific brain
lesion, and this correlation
suggested to me that feeling
was an integral component
o f the machinery o f reason.
Two decades o f clinical and
experimental work with a
large num ber o f neurological
patients have allowed me
to replicate this observation
many times, and to turn a
clue into a testable hypothesis.
(xii) (Emphasis added.)
In the years since its initial publication,
several studies have confirmed
Damasio’s “testable hypothesis.”6
Among other effects, these findings call
into question the preferred formula for
effective decision-making — one that
excludes emotion and feeling — that
has been disseminated and established
as a requisite guideline in almost every
arena o f public, professional, and
personal decision-making from the law

and law enforcement, to business,
international relations, politics,
economics, diplomacy, medicine,
journalism, education, sports, marriage,
and family life.
Given the pervasive influence o f
Descartes’ cogito on Western culture
and its widespread cultural diffusion
as a decision-making protocol, the
neuroscience research confirming the
essential role o f emotion and feeling
in moral decision-making raises new
questions. Has the cogito already
“marked” what Western researchers
view as a healthy/integrated brain?
Can “impaired feelings” be caused by
factors other than disease or physical
injury to the brain? Can socialization,
for example, impair or deactivate
the brain’s emotional circuits?
Can the gender socialization that males
in particular receive about the
incompatibility o f emotion and reason
produce neural effects and a similar
impairment o f feelings as those caused
by injury or disease? Can race or gender
socialization deactivate emotional
systems o f the brain in general or with
regard to specific stimuli? Conversely,
are there deficits in neural processing in
a healthy — non diseased, uninjured —
brain that can be attributed — broadly
speaking — to cultural socialization?
Or, to p ut it succinctly, is socialized

brain injury possible? W hat is the role
o f emotion and feeling in public policy
decision-making? To what extent might
defective public policy decision-making
be attributable to emotional detachment
toward dispossessed and disposable
constituencies? To the extent that
emotion is essential to moral reasoning,
how might emotional detachment
affect historical thinking, social literacy,
and the practice o f democracy, all of
which involve moral reasoning?
O f the many studies inspired by
Damasio’s clinical findings, one o f the
most instructive is a 2001 study by an
interdisciplinary team o f investigators
lead by Harvard professor Joshua
Greene, at the time a doctoral student
in Princeton’s Philosophy department.
In the article “An fMRI Investigation
o f Emotional Engagement in Moral
Judgment,” Greene and his colleagues
describe using functional magnetic
resonance imaging — fMRI — to
observe the neural activity o f test subjects
faced with a variety o f decision-making
scenarios involving “moral-personal
conditions,” “moral-impersonal
conditions,” and “non-moral
conditions.”7 The study focused on two
moral dilemmas representing
moral-impersonal and moral-personal

conditions, respectively. O ne involved a
runaway trolley, the other a footbridge.
As they describe the two dilemmas,
A runaway trolley is headed
for five people who will be
killed if it proceeds on its
present course. The only
way to save them is to hit
a switch that will turn the
trolley onto an alternate set
o f tracks where it will kill
one person instead o f five....
[In] a similar problem, the
footbridge dilem m a... a
trolley threatens to kill five
people. You are standing
next to a large stranger on
a footbridge that spans
the tracks, in between the
oncoming trolley and the five
people. In this scenario, the
only way to save the five
people is to push this stranger
off the bridge, onto the tracks
below. He will die if you do
this, but his body will stop
the trolley from reaching the
others. (2105)
The researchers predicted the absence
o f what they called “emotional
interference” for responses to the
impersonal trolley dilemma, as
measured by both neural activity and

faster response times.
As expected, Greene and his colleagues
found that most respondents said
yes to re-directing the trolley onto
an alternate track in the first
(moral-impersonal) dilemma, while
most respondents said no to pushing
a stranger off the footbridge in the
second (moral-personal) dilemma.
They concluded that,
.. .from a psychological point
o f view, the crucial difference
between the trolley dilemma
and the footbridge dilemma
lies in the latter’s tendency to
engage people’s emotions
in a way the former does not.
The thought o f pushing someone
to his death is, we propose, more
emotionally salient than the
thought o f hitting a switch that
will cause a trolley to produce
similar consequences, and it is
this emotional response that
accounts for people’s tendency
to treat these cases differently.
(2106) [Emphasis added.]
Although not its intended objective,
the Greene study offers a preliminary
basis for speculating about the ways
in which a particular socialization —
whether shaped by race or any
other ideology — might lead to the

type o f emotional detachment that
prevents the neurological engagement
and activity essential for healthy
decision-making about other people’s
lives. This is im portant because
racially-informed responses, misreadings,
behaviors, and actions toward
non-Whites are in some senses an
accumulation o f emotionally detached
(mis)judgments.
Looking closely at the study, one
notices that the “impersonal” character
or framing o f the trolley dilemma
seems to rest upon the social identities
o f the people on the track and the
empathic ability o f particular
respondents, n o t on the dilemma itself.
This can easily be illustrated by
re-framing the dilemma, re-imagining
the unknown person on the alternate
track, and allowing that person to
attain the same hum an distinction as
the stranger on the footbridge whom
test subjects have to touch. W ould test
subjects be as emotionally detached in
reasoning about the runaway trolley
scenario if the person on the alternate
track were an acquaintance — whether
liked or disliked? Would they be as
emotionally disengaged if the five were
five Mexicans crossing the border
illegally and the one were a u.s. border
patrol agent? O r if the “trolley” were a
grenade misfired from a u.s. military
launcher and the five were five Afghan

civilians and the one were a u.s. soldier?
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RE-VIEWING RACISM AS A
THREAT TO DEMOCRACY
My point here is not to suggest that
under these different (narrative) frames
test subjects in the u.s. would make

different judgments and require longer
response times in resolving the trolley
dilemma, although this seems highly
probable. Rather, my point is that to
the extent that the variations suggested
above elicit a more intense emotional
engagement, they also reveal the social
invisibility and/or disposability of
the person on the alternate track and
the resulting detachment with which
test subjects were likely to have
engaged the dilemma. Since social
identities are charged — positively and
negatively — with different emotional
valences, moral judgm ent about
those lives will inevitably be influenced
and perhaps determined by these
pre-set valences. These judgments are
particularly fraught in professional and
public policy deliberations.
Re-examining the results o f the Greene
study, the researchers seem to have
overlooked one o f the most salient
discoveries o f their own research:
the neural similarity displayed between
moral-impersonal and non-moral
decision-making. If emotions are
essential to moral reasoning, the
observed non-involvement o f test
subjects’ emotions in the trolley
dilemma, as measured by neural activity
and faster response times, would suggest
that these decisions are neurologically
defective. Thus, the researchers’ tacit
acceptance o f this defect, their failure

to read these responses as defective, is
perhaps indicative o f persistent cultural
assumptions — and misconceptions —
about the limited utility o f emotions.
Their reference to, and perhaps
preference for, the absence o f “emotional
interference” is revealing.
If the neural and behavioral responses
to the moral-impersonal trolley
dilemma in the Greene study are
(socio-culturally) representative,
they may indicate a significant pattern
o f emotional disengagement in
moral-impersonal decision-making
about socially invisible “strangers,”
the type o f decision-making voters in
a democratic society must routinely
perform. This finding that neural
responses to “moral-impersonal” and
“non-moral” dilemmas involve similar
types o f emotional disengagement is
particularly troubling since professional
and public policy decision-making
tends to occur in situations that resemble
the conditions o f moral-impersonal
decision-making in which the people
at risk on policy-making “trolley tracks”
remain invisible. It should be obvious
that an adult citizen ought n ot to
approach — or (neurologically)
experience — the choice o f whether or
not to fund at-home healthcare
options for people with disabilities
(a moral-impersonal dilemma) in the

same way as deciding whether to
take the 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. flight from
Washington, D C back to Kentucky
or Wisconsin (a non-moral dilemma).
And yet, this appears to be happening
in the Congress on a daily basis.
The Greene’s study and its overlooked
implications provide a basis for
theorizing about the neurological
jeopardies underlying the intellectual
habits that attend W hite racial
privilege and their inevitable impact
on the range o f decision-making
responsibilities accompanying
democratic participation and professional
practice in a multi-racial society.
Most discussions o f racism as a threat
to democracy focus on the cliched
assertion that, as an impediment to
national reconciliation, it prevents
u.s. Americans from achieving “a more
perfect union.” W hile accurate,
this summary view overlooks and
overshadows the more consequential
ways in which racism and W hite racial
privilege jeopardize u.s. democracy
by fostering inept historical thinking,
social illiteracy, defective moral
reasoning, defective (public policy)
decision-making, and self-endangering
voting behaviors. In large measure,
these effects stem from the narrative
relationships that precede and that are
the blueprint for social interactions.

Analyses o f the ways as prompts for
racism tend to focus on the
proliferation o f racist images and
characterization. To fully understand
racism as a psychological spectrum
disorder, however, one must examine
the emotional quality o f narrative
relationships engineered through the
distorted representations o f non-White
and W hite peoples in historical,
literary, theological, cinematic, and
other narratives. Specifically, one must
understand the ways in which narrative
relationships function as both
emotional guides and emotional triggers.
Racism operates through distorted
narrative relationships that undermine
both narrative knowledge and social
literacy. “Narrative knowledge” is the
term used by narrative medicine
pioneer and medical educator, Dr. Rita
Charon, to describe a set o f critical
competencies instilled by literary reading.
In Narrative Medicine: Honoring the
Stories o f Illness (200 6), Dr. Charon, an
internal medicine specialist who later impaired by a long history
o f racist
earned a Ph.D. in English, notes that socialization.
If narratives are stories that
have a teller, a listener, a time

course, a plot, and a point,
then narrative knowledge is
what we naturally use to make
sense o f them. Narrative
knowledge provides one
person with a rich, resonant
grasp o f another persons
situation as it unfolds
in time, whether in such
texts as novels, newspaper
stories, movies, and scripture
or in such life settings as
courtrooms, battlefields,
marriages, and illnesses. (9)®
As a key com ponent o f narrative
medicine, narrative knowledge is
envisioned as a remedy to a medical
education process that many believe
produces doctors with tremendous
technical skills but who “lack the
hum an capacities to recognize the
plights o f their patients, to extend
empathy toward those who suffer, and
to join honestly and courageously
with patients in their struggles toward
recovery, with chronic illness, or in
facing death” (3). In designing narrative
medicine as a response to these deficits,
Charon and other narrative medicine
theorists recognized that “[u]sing
narrative knowledge enables a person
to understand the plight o f another
by participating in his or her story
with complex skills o f imagination,
interpretation, and recognition” (9-10).

It is my belief that the narrative
knowledge supporting both interpretive
and ethical competence in medical
practice is equally im portant to
rehabilitating the range o f social and
professional interactions that have been
In the article titled “How Narrative
Relationships Overcome Empathic
Bias,” literary scholar Mary-Catherine
Harrison makes the case for narrative
relationships as an empathy generator
based on the claim that they can
overcome the limitation of being tied
to similarity bias — that is, the notion
that people are more likely to empathize
with those they view as similar to
themselves. As she sees it, narrative
relationships formed with fictional
characters, especially in literature
and cinema, can be an im portant
mechanism for generating empathy
by circumventing the similarity bias
that is alleged to be normative. In
presenting her argument, Harrison
first outlines the normative parameters
o f narrative relationships, similarity
bias, and empathic bias, citing several
studies that corroborate the association
o f similarity bias with empathy, that
confirm the importance o f empathy as
a precursor to “helping behaviors,” and
that associate the lack o f empathy with
“psychopathy, criminality, aggression,
and anti-social behavior” (256).9

O ne pronounced omission in the
studies Harrison mentions is a lack of
attention to the ways in which racial
narratives, since the seventeenth
century, have re-ordered the importance
o f race-based similarity and, thereby,
re-configured the experience o f
empathy.10 Recall that the experiences
and preferences o f Black children in
the Clark study did not conform to
expectations o f preference/empathy
based on similarity bias. If, as Harrison
and other narrative theorists assert,
narrative relationships can be a vehicle
for overcoming similarity bias
and generating empathy for people
who don’t share prom inent social
characteristics, it must be the case that
narrative relationships o f a different
sort were first used to construct and
cultivate (racialized) similarity bias as
a basis for empathy.
Re-visiting the seventeenth century
legislative acts used to craft race
and racism, it is clear that these alone
could n ot have generated the
widespread emotional detachment
toward non-W hite peoples and the
hyper-attachment toward Whites.
Narrative relationships were and are
a vital mechanism for producing this
outcome. Reverse sequencing from
contemporary understandings of

narrative relationships, empathy, and
similarity bias, it is easy to see how
Whites and non-W hites must have
been uprooted by the narratives
relationships with characters that
peopled the W hite supremacist
narratives in literature, law, science,
theology, and cinema in the centuries
and decades before the social
transformations o f the Civil Rights
era. Long before the narrative
transformations o f the Black Arts
Movement and related developments
in the publishing industry enabling
the distribution o f literary works by
non-W hite writers, before curricular
expansions prom pted by the demands
o f Black college students in the 1960s,
dominant cultural narratives constricted
empathic parameters throughout the
society.
In The Bluest Eye, for example,
Toni Morrison depicts how Pauline
Breedlove’s positive narrative
relationships with W hite characters in
1940s cinematic narratives overshadow
her negative social interactions with 15
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hostile and/or racist Whites and
produce a positive empathic bias
toward them. This positive empathic
bias generates caring behaviors toward
her employers W hite daughter and
a concurrent negative empathic bias
toward and progressive emotional
detachment from her own children.
W ith no similarity bias to overcome,
W hite consumers o f the period’s
cinematic narratives would have been
even more likely to have embraced

the favored narrative relationships with
W hite characters and the negative
narrative relationships with cinematically
“absent” or caricatured non-Whites, and
to have internalized their corresponding
emotional templates.
The common belief today is that these
mechanisms were destroyed with the
mid-twentieth century civil rights
movement. O ne must recall, however,
that the legal remedies, including
school desegregation and busing, that
ended formal apartheid in the u.s. were
not designed to repair the rampant
uprootedness caused by centuries o f
dedicated racism. Taking seriously
Weil’s observation that uprootedness is
a psycho-social disorder, it is difficult
to imagine how it could have been
healed or transformed in the absence
o f deliberate therapeutic interventions.
Recent scholarly studies o f racism’s
impact in several key arenas suggest
that the narrative instruments used to
generate a racist socialization are
re-fashioned and/or re-invented with
each generation, and that the untreated
uprootedness o f earlier decades
continues to self-propagate. In fact,
several studies now confirm significant
patterns o f racialized thinking in the
generation that was born and raised
after the narrative instruments o f the
pre-Civil Rights era were discredited.

In March 2002, the Institute of
Medicine o f the National Academy
o f Sciences released a report titled,
“Unequal Treatment: Confronting
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health
Care,” that documented widespread
and substantial disparities in the
treatment doctors dispensed to
Whites and non-W hite patients.
The congressionally mandated study
noted that these disparities persist
“even when insurance status, income,
age, and severity o f conditions are
comparable.” The report’s authors
defined “disparities in healthcare as
racial or ethnic differences in the
quality o f healthcare that are not due
to access-related factors or clinical
needs, preferences, and appropriateness
o f intervention.” They noted that
these disparities are associated with
greater mortality and are, therefore,
“unacceptable.”
In “The Apartheid o f Children’s
Literature,” published in The New
York Times in 2014, writer Christopher
Myers cites a 2013 study by the
Cooperative Children’s Book Center at
the University o f Wisconsin showing
that only 93 o f the 3,200 children’s
books published in 2013 were about

Black people.
A recent study, “W ho believes in me?
The effect o f student-teacher
demographic match on teacher
expectations,” published in the
Economics o f Education Review in 2016,
reveals that “non-black teachers o f
black students have significantly lower
expectations than do black teachers,”
that “ [t]hese effects are larger for black
male students and [non-black] math
teachers,” and that Black teachers have
equal expectations for their non-Black
and Black students.
More recently, a study published in
the Proceedings o f the National Academy
o f Sciences (pnas) in March 2017,
“Language from police body camera
footage shows racial disparities in officer
respect,” confirms that “Police officers
speak significantly less respectfully
to black than to white community
members in everyday traffic stops,
even after controlling for officer race,
infraction severity, stop location, and
stop outcome.”
At the time he shot and killed 32-year
old Philando Castile in July 2016,
M innesota police officer Jeronimo
Yanez was a young man in his late 20s.
Looking at the dash cam and other
footage o f the shooting, it is clear that

Castile’s killer had no mental script
in which a Black man could own
a gun and not be a threat. Narrative
relationships formed through and with
television, cinematic, historical, and
other narrative characterizations o f
Black men as savages, brutes, and thugs
were the likely emotional triggers that
preempted his human response to this
family. Before, during, and after the
killing, Officer Yanez displayed no
empathy for Castile, for his girlfriend,
nor for the traumatized 4-year old
child in the backseat his bullets
narrowly missed hitting, a child who
will undoubtedly need caring and
professional support to become
re-rooted. The jury’s endorsement of
Yanez’s demeanor suggests that racism’s
uprooting is widespread and unabated.
For African-Americans, the public
slaughter o f men, women, and children
by police and by civilians has become
an ongoing roadside holocaust.
O n the one hand, these killings are
consistent with popular understandings
o f the ways in which non-Whites are
endangered by racism. Read more
carefully, however, these developments
are also indicative o f a larger pattern of
detachment, defective moral reasoning,
and misreading responsible for an

alarming decline in the nations
democratic institutions, provisions, and
commitments, and an increase in policies
that have endangered the poor and
middle classes across all racial groups.
As discussed above, these new jeopardies
are the end-results o f a process set in
motion in the seventeenth-century
colonies. In their quest to halt, if not
reverse, this decline, several commentators
have developed lucid descriptions of
the threatening behaviors but have
failed to examine their psychological
foundations in the ideology of race.
A useful example is the book What’s
the Matter with Kansas? (2004), in
which writer Thomas Frank unmasks
the voting behaviors o f working and
middle class W hite men in endorsing
policies and candidates inimical to
their own economic interests. Frank
blames these developments on what
he calls “the Great Backlash, a style of
conservatism that first came snarling
onto the national stage in response to
the partying and protests o f the late
sixties”(5) - As he notes, “W hile earlier
forms o f conservatism emphasized
fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes
voters with explosive social issues —
summoning public outrage over
everything from busing to un-Christian
art — which it then marries to
pro-business economic policies”^ ).

Although he faults the Democratic
Party for becoming “the other
pro-business party,” the group that
comes in for a scathing indictm ent in
Frank’s analysis is the vast and diverse
m ultitude o f working-class voters:
sturdy blue-collar patriots
reciting the Pledge while
they strangle their own life
chances;... small farmers
proudly voting themselves
off the lan d ;... devoted
family men carefully seeing
to it that their children
will never be able to afford
college or proper health
care;... working-class guys
in midwestern cities cheering
as they deliver up a landslide
for a candidate whose policies
will end their way o f life, will
transform their region into
a ‘rust belt,’ will strike people
like them blows from which
they will never recover. (10)
The working-class political behavior
Frank describes can be more fully
understood as the calculated effect of
focusing illusions. As defined by
cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman,
a focusing illusion is any single issue
that is given an exaggerated importance
in decision-making, because o f a false
calculation o f its impact on expected

outcome. Historically, race has been
a central focusing illusion for many
W hite working-class voters in the u.s.
who mistakenly believed that their
economic interests and future quality
o f life would be secured by supporting
candidates who endorsed racist
positions. The Trump campaign was
perhaps the most successful among
recent deployments o f race as a focus
illusion. W hite working-class voters
thrilled to Trump’s promises to exclude
Mexicans, ban Muslims, and dismantle
the policies (and legacy) o f the first
Black president, (mistakenly) convinced
that their lives would be improved
by these actions, and, like their
seventeenth-century predecessors, that
their economic interests would be
prioritized and secured by a W hite rich
president.
The widespread vulnerability to focusing
illusions is a direct consequence o f
emotional detachment from those
“other” people who are (mistakenly)
expected to bear the full brunt of
particular policy decisions, a detachment
ffequendy accompanied and exacerbated
by deficits in social literacy and
historical thinking. A recent example
can be observed in the farmers from
California and other Western states
who cheered on the Trump

anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant agenda
with no empathy for the psychological
distress o f the Mexican workers they
had employed for years and whom they
knew. Belatedly recognizing that their
own economic well-being is dependent
on these “disposable” people, these
W hite farmers are now anxious to have
the administration reverse course.
In Historical Thinking and Other
Unnatural Acts (2001), education
psychologist and cognitive scientist,
Samuel W ineburg differentiates
between historical knowledge and
historical thinking. As he sees it, “to
engage in historical thinking [is to
be] called on to see hum an motive in
the texts we read; called on to mine
truth from the quicksand o f innuendo,
half-truth, and falsehood that seeks to
engulf us each day; called on to brave
the fact that certainty, at least in
understanding the social world,
remains elusive and beyond our grasp”
(83). For Wineburg, the ability to
engage in historical thinking is an
essential component o f “social literacy,”
“a literacy n ot o f names and dates but o f
discernment, judgment, and caution” (ix).
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In a 2012 lecture that now seems
prescient, retired Supreme Court justice
David Souter expressed his concern that
u.s. democracy would be endangered
not by foreign agents or military force
but by a decline in the populations
social literacy. Prefacing his commentary
with the observation that “Democracy
cannot survive too much ignorance,”

Justice Souter explained,
I don’t worry about our losing
republican government in
the United States because I’m
afraid o f a foreign invasion
[...] or a coup by the military
as has happened in other
places [...] W hat I worry
about is that when problems
are not addressed people will
n ot know who is responsible.
[...] If something is not done
to improve the level o f civic
knowledge, that’s what I
worry about.11
Although Justice Souter mentions
dangers arising from a lack o f “civic”
knowledge, the substance o f his
analysis is about dangers stemming
from a populace whose ability to
engage in historical thinking has been
severely diminished. The paradox
here is that while racism has largely
contributed to the loss o f these
essential competencies, a society
conditioned to recognize only
racialized dangers may not be capable
o f fully appreciating or adequately
responding to ongoing threats to its
democratic institutions when those
threats are in White-face.
Throughout the nation’s history, race
has been the most frequently deployed,

the most effective mechanism for
undermining the interpretive
competence and interpretive agency
o f people with W hite racial privilege.
It does so, first, by its positioning of
particular groups on the lower tiers
on the hierarchy o f hum an worth and
concurrently defining them as
disposable. The resulting emotional
detachment toward these groups infects
and impairs emotional attachment
toward other non-racialized groups,
eroding the capacity for effective moral
reasoning and healthy decision-making.
Second, by generating narratives that
assign blame to these constituencies for
failures in economic and social policy.
Third, by orchestrating narrative
relationships that function as disabling
emotional guides and emotional
triggers, inhibiting narrative knowledge
and social literacy. And finally, by
prescribing indifference regarding
threats to those defined as disposable
and simultaneously obscuring the
connection between such threats and
jeopardy to those defined as valuable.
Now, at the start o f the Trump
presidency, it is becoming all too
apparent that u.s. democracy is
imperiled by the very intellectual
habits that sustain the racial privileges
McIntosh and other W hites carry in
their “invisible knapsacks.”
Despite this, I hope for a future secured

by the possibilities o f re-rooting through
racial self-evaluation, self-diagnosis,
and self-correction: a future in which
a parent might say to a friend,
“I’m worried about my teenage son.
He’s showing signs o f racism spectrum
disorder.” Or, a volunteer might say
o f herself, “I’m beginning to realize
I’m on the racism spectrum and that
the volunteer work I do really stems
from the fact that I don’t see my clients
as having the same capacities that
I do.” A future in which a co-worker
might say, “My parents were on the
racism spectrum and worked really
hard to provide my brother and me
with learning opportunities to make
sure that we wouldn’t be.” A future
in which a colleague might say, “My
students and I are developing a model
to counter r.s.d through an elementary
school reading curriculum.” O ne in
which a political scientist will decide to
measure the ways in which r.s.d. — not
just the Russians — affected the 2016
presidential elections, and in which
doctors and law enforcement officers
will be screened for r.s.d using fMRI
technology and offered appropriate
therapies. A future in which voters who
lack personal knowledge of the many
strangers on the “trolley tracks” o f
domestic and foreign policy debates
will seek new narrative knowledge

and be guided by it in effective moral
reasoning and moral responses. O ne
in which young people will not need
to remind uprooted compatriots that
“Black lives matter!” If not this future,
then it will be, as writer James Baldwin
forewarned, the fire next time. ■
WORKS CITED
Baldwin, James. 1962. The Fire Next Time. New York:
Vintage Books.
Charon, Rita. 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the
Stories o f Illness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark. 1947. "Racial
Identification and Preference in Negro Children." E.L.
Hartley, ed. Readings in Social Psychology. New York:
Holt, Rinehart,Winston. Print.
Clore, Gerald L., and Janet Palmer. 2009. “Affective
guidance of intelligent agents: How emotion controls
cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research 10,21-30. Print.
Damasio, Antonio, R. 1994. Descartes’Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons. Print.
Frank, Thomas. 2004. What’s the matter with Kansas: how
conservatives stole the heart o f America.
Gershenson, Seth, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas W.

Papageorge. 2016. "Who believes in me? The effect
of student-teacher demographic match on teacher
expectations." Economics o f Education Review 52.
209-224. Print.
Greene, Joshua D., R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom,
John M. Parley, and Jonathan D. Cohen. 2001. "An fMRI
Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral
Judgment.”Science Vol. 293, September. 2105-2108.
Print.
ENDNOTES
1 The Clark study showed th a t contrary to psychological
predictions th a t children would prefer dolls that most
closely resembled themselves i.e. would display prefer-
ence based on similarity bias, Black children rejected
as "ugly” the Black dolls with which they identified,
and preferred the White dolls instead.
2 Although the followers of Islam include people from
all races and nations, the term "Muslim” in the
White/Western imagination is as much a signifier
of (non-White) racial difference as of religious
distinction.
3 McIntosh’s first listing of over 50 privileges appeared
in a 1988 essay titled “White Privilege and Male
Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See
Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.”
A year later, she published an abridged version of
the essay, titled "Unpacking th e Invisible Knapsack,”
with a shorter list of only 26 privileges.
4 This privilege is listed in the 1988 but not the 1989
version.

5 Wahneema Lubiano, “Introduction,” p.vii.
Harrison, Mary-Catherine. 2011. “How Narrative
Relationships Overcome Empathic Bias: Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Empathy across Social Difference.” Poetics
Today 32:2 (Summer). 255-288. Print.
Institute of Medicine. 2003. Unequal Treatment:
Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare.
Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky, eds. 2000. Choices,
Values, and Frames. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press. Print.
Lubiano, Wahneema, ed. 1997. “Introduction.” The House
That Race Built. New York: Vintage Books. Print.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1989. “White Privilege: Unpacking the
Invisible Knapsack” Peace and Freedom July/August:
io-i2. Print.
Morrison, Toni. 1970. The Bluest Eye. New York: Knopf. Print.
Myers, Christopher. 2014. “The Apartheid of Children’s
Literature.” The New York Times Sunday Review
March 15. Print.
Olson, Joel. 2001. “The Democratic Problem of th e White
Citizen.” Constellations Vol. 8, No. 2. Print.
Powell, John A. 2007. "Structural Racism: Building upon
the Insights of John Calmore." North Carolina Law
Review 86:791- 816. Print.

6 As Gerald L. Clore and Janet Palmer note, "it turns out
that affect and emotion play critical roles in good
judgm ent and in the adaptive regulation of thought."
7 According to Greene and his colleagues, “Typical
examples of non-moral dilemmas posed questions
about whether to travel by bus or by train given
certain tim e constraints and about which of two
coupons to use at a store" (2106).
8 To Charon's listing of “life settings” in which narrative
knowledge is essential, I would add the many other
social and professional arenas — neighborhoods,
k-through-12 classrooms, airports, restaurants,
playgrounds, police precincts, newsrooms, legislative
chambers, and corporate boardrooms — in which
citizens interact in our democracy.
9 It is im portant to note th a t a lack of empathy on
th e part of the ruling elite does not typically involve
th e familiar displays of petty criminals. In fact,
these displays are usually not defined as criminal.
Nevertheless, the characteristics associated with a
lack of empathy are obviously at work in the economic
policies and behaviors of the ruling elite who are
frequently detached from working-class employ-
ees, tenants, patients, students, clients, and other
subordinates.
Souter, David. 2012. “Constitutionally Speaking with
Justice David Souter and PBS senior correspondent
Margaret Warner.” September 14. Capitol Center for
the Arts, Concord, New Hampshire. Audio.
Tatum, Beverly. 1997. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting
Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations

About Race. Print.
Voigt, Rob, Nicholas P. Camp, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran,
William L. Hamilton, Rebecca C. Hetey, Camilla M.
Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L.
Eberhardt. 2017. "Language from policy body camera
footage shows racial disparities in officer respect."
Proceedings o f the National Academy o f Sciences.
Weil, Simone. 1949. The Need fo r Roots: Prelude to a
Declaration o f Duties toward Mankind. London and
New York: Routledge. Print.
Wineburg, Samuel. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other
Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future o f Teaching the
Past. Philadelphia:Temple University Press. Print.
10 At this historical juncture, it is difficult to tell whether
empathy was/is always dependent and/or limited by
social difference, especially race. The New Testament
narrative of the “good Samaritan" is one of perhaps a
few examples of empathy unrestrained by social dif-
ference. So, too, is Toni Morrison’s revisioning of this
narrative in her depiction of the encounter between
the White teenager Amy Denver and Sethe, the refu-
gee from slavery, in th e novel Beloved.
11 "Constitutionally Speaking with Justice David Souter
and PBS senior correspondent Margaret Warner.”
On September 14,2012 at the Capitol Center for the
Arts in Concord, New Hampshire.
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The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race
and the Politics of Sexual Orientation
in Philadelphia, 1969-1982
Kevin J. Mumford

In 1985 the veteran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin joined a
gay and lesbian coalition in New
York City that was about to make a final push for passage of an
amendment to the city's
administrative code to prohibit discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation. Rustin wrote
to the city council and to Mayor Edward I. Koch, vowed to
lobby the four opposing African
American councilmen, and called for "the extension of freedom
and justice for all Americans."'
Unusual for Rustin, in this instance his activism ceremoniously
concluded rather than pio-
neered a social movement for change when the city council
passed the bill the next year.
More than fifteen years before, the first gay liberationists had
introduced such a bill
that was defeated by stiff opposition from conservative
politicians and religious leaders.
That mobilization helped spark organizing and demonstrating
for similar laws in cities
and towns during the 1970s and 1980s—a local political
movement and discourse that
remains largely unexamined. In recent writing on sexual
politics, however, Matthew D.
Lassiter, Robert O . Self, Whitney Strub, and others have
analyzed controversies over
gay visibility in the media, conflicts over the regulation of
urban vice, and the political
cooptation of pornography to understand shifts in American
liberalism, and they suggest
that the rise of gay liberation served as a foil against which
liberals reconfigured the
public/private divide and conservatives mobilized a rightward
political turn. From
another perspective, despite the rise of the New Right, the cause

of gays and lesbians did
advance during the 1970s, with the proliferation of community
pride, new national organi-
zations, and the passage of protective ordinances. Utilizing a
case study of Philadelphia, this
essay examines how the pursuit of equal protection led gays and
lesbians to clash with reli-
gious and racial conservatives who challenged not only their
rights but also their legitimacy
Kevin J. Mumford is a member of the Department of History at
the University of Iowa
He wishes to thank the following for encouragement and advice:
Clarissa Atkins, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Zoe Burk-
bolder, Christopher Capozzola, Matthew Countryman, Rachel
Devlin, Steve Estes, Estelle Freedman, Thomas
Guglielmo, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Andrew Kahrl, Linda
Kerber, Scott Kurashige, Kenneth Mack, Charles
Morris, David Roediger, Bob Skiba, Marc Stein, Shelton
Stromquist. the audiences of the Charles Warren Center
for Studies in American History and the 2009 annual meeting of
the Organization of American Historians, and the
anonymous reviewers for theJAH.
' Bayard Rustin, memo, March 11, 1986, in
7^?ß/Z)iari^/?«jft«Pi7/)frj. ed. Bayard Rustin and Nanette
Dobrosky
(Frederick, 1988); Rustin to Edward 1. Koch, Feb. 2, 1985, ibid;
"Bayard Rustin's Statement on Proposed Amend.-
ments to Law Banning Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual
Orientation," April 17, 1986, ibid,; Rustin to Howard
N. Meyer, Dec. 8, 1986, ibid; Rustin to Hon. Mary Pinkett,
March 22, 1985, ibid.; John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet:
The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York, 2003), 489-
90; "Text of the New Bill of Rights," New York Times,

Jan. 23, 1986, p. B2; "Rights Measure Ready for Vote after 12
Years," ibid., March 20, 1986, p. Bl; "Amending the
Homosexual Rights Law," ibid.. May 3, 1986, p. A26.
doi: 10.1O93/jahist/jarl39
© Ihe Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on
behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions^poup.com
June 2011 The Journal of American History 49
50 The Journal of American History June 2011
as a minority. It also explores how they developed racial
diversity to respond to those threats
and ultimately argues that gays and lesbians reconstructed their
identities in the process of
negotiating race relations and extending the liberal impulses of
the 1960s into the 1980s.'
Perhaps more than any other field, gay and lesbian studies
concentrates on the origins
and meanings of identity, creating discussions that often evolve
into what is referred to as
the essentialism versus constructionism debate. Essentialist
scholars conceive of sexuality
as a transhistorical essence located in the self, and they tend to
see the gays, lesbians, or
homosexuals of the past as identifying and desiring in much the
same way as they do in
the present. By contrast, social constructionist scholars argue
that the very categories of
homosexuality and heterosexuality change historically in

relation to the forces of capital-
ism, the family, urbanization, and scientific knowledge. Most
historians are by nature
constructionists, and they generally agree that by the outbreak
of the Stonewall riots in
1969, when New York City police raided the gay-friendly
Stonewall Inn and patrons
fought back, gay and lesbian identities and communities had
formed across metropolitan
America. Even so, sexual historians entertain a variety of
interpretations about which
processes or forces most affected the dynamics of identification.
Anne Enke reconstructed
1970s civic spaces (such as dance halls and ballparks) and
Martin Meeker pointed to contact
zones of literature, periodicals, and photographs to describe
areas of popular interaction that
defined sexual subjectivities. Margot Canaday uncovered the
extensive operation of constitu-
tive regulation by what she termed the "straight state" to
illustrate the powers of government
interdiction and neglect, and Joanne Meyerowitz analyzed
paradigms of racial and sexual
knowledge to uncover changing processes of subjective
interpolation that sometimes served as
self-representations. In turn, my reconstruction of the politics of
sexual orientation in Phila-
delphia highlights the impact of intersections of race and
sexuality on identity formation.
As Matthew J. Countryman demonstrated in his study of civil
rights and black power
movements in Philadelphia, black leadership protested against
workplace discrimination,
promoted educational reform, and gained control in municipal
government. At the same
time, gay organizers, volunteers, witnesses, and audiences in

the city, along with readers of the
gay press and other media, were influenced by black political
actors and gay people of color as
they struggled for a place in the rights revolution of the 1970s.'
By the rights revolution, I not only refer to Jacquelyn Dowd
Hall's phrase the "long civil
rights movement" and her influential reading of racial struggle
that extended the chronology
of the movement, enlarged its scope from the South to the
nation, and stressed the role of
working-class politics, but I also incorporate what the
sociologist John Skrentny conceived
of as a minority rights revolution, or the expansion of the black
civil rights movement
^ Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in
American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2002);
Matthew D. Lassiter, "Inventing Family Values," in Rightward
Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s,
ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.,
2008), 13-28; Robert O. Self, "Sex in the City: The
Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963-1979,"
Gender and History, 20 (Aug. 2008), 288-311; Whitney
Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and
the Rise of the New Right (New York, 2010), 260-61 ; Josh
Sides, "Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco,"
Journal of Urban History, 32 (March 2006), 355-79;
Peter Braunstein, '"Adults Only': The Construction of the Erotic
City in New York during the 1970s," in America
in the Seventies, ed. Beth L. Bailey and David Färber
(Lawrence, 2004), 129-56. esp. 146.
' Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested
Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham, N.C., 2007);
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship

in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2009); Joanne
Meyerowitz, '"How Common Culture Shapes the Separate
Lives': Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century
Social Constructionist "Vnon^u Journal of American History, 96
(March 2010), 1057—84; Joanne Meyerowitz,
"Transnational Sex and U.S. Wsx.ov¡^ American Historical
Review, 14 (Dec. 2009), 1273-86; Matthew J. Countryman,
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia
(Philadelphia, 2006), 117-52, 236-44, 312-27.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 51
to include women, the disabled, the elderly, and other groups.
His synthesis argued that
"though victimized like blacks, gays and lesbians were not
legitimate victims," in part
because they failed to demonstrate how they were analogous to
recognized groups. Historians
of the legal regulation of sexuality have focused more on the
issues of marriage and sodomy
than on antidiscrimination legislation, while the recent growth
of historiography on the
northern civil rights movement largely overlooks gays and
lesbians. Instead, the study of
sexual orientation ordinances has been taken up by social
scientists who measure discrete
variables—religiosity, population size, socioeconomic status,
and education—to explain
why some locations passed laws and others did not. Following
their lead, my analysis com-
pares the legislative failure in 1975 to the eventual legislative
success in 1982 in Philadelphia
but focuses less on why it occurred than on how it occurred, in

part because of how race
became crucial to arguments against gay rights as well as
central to their passage. Although
historians have examined the impact of race on sexuality,
particularly in studies of "misce-
genation," relatively few studies of gay and lesbian
communities have done so. My analysis
pursues the same sort of questions about homophobia that
historians traditionally ask
about racism: What were the dominant images and logics
presented to the public? What
did it justify? How did it respond to challenges and reform? My
work also locates a kind
of racial conflict between white gays and black gays that
undermined the movement from
within, which the historian of feminism Winifred Breines has
conceptualized as a cycle of
personal misunderstanding that troubled social movements—one
of "profound racial dis-
tance and tentative reconciliation." In Philadelphia and other
cities with significant minor-
ity demographics, sexual politics operated in some relationship
to patterns of race relations."*
Race and Gay Liberation
Since the emergence of modern discourse on gay and lesbian
identity, writers and aca-
demics have often compared the condition of the homosexual to
that of a racial minority.
•• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and
the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of
American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233-63; John D.
Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002), 20, 304-5, 315, 326. On the long civil rights

movement, see Sundidata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence
Lang, "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial
Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Smd^its," Journal
of/^can American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265-88; and
Samuel Walker, The Rights Revolution: Rights and Com-
munity in Modern America (New York, 1998), 44-48. On the
long civil rights movement and working-class politics,
see Nancy MacLean, Ereedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of
the American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). For
studies of sexual orientation ordinances, see Kenneth D. Wald,
James W. Button, and Barbara A. Rienzo. "The
Politics of Gay Rights in American Communities: Explaining
Antidiscrimination Ordinances and Policies,"" Ameri-
can Journal of Political Science, 40 (Nov. 1996), 1157-78; Gary
Mucciaroni, Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and
Eailure in the Struggles over Gay Rights (Chicago, 2008), 31;
Craig A. Rimmerman, Kenneth D. Wald, and Clyde
Wilcox, Ihe Politics of Gay Rights (Chicago, 2000) ; and Wayne
Van der Meide, Legist/! ting Equality: A Review of Laws
Affecting Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered People in
the United States (Washington, 2004). On Philadelphia
gay institutions and sexual orientation rights, see Robert W.
Bailey, Gay Politics, Urban Politics: Identity and Econom-
ics in the Urban Setting (New York, 1999), 249-79. On the
impact of race on sexuality, see Peggy Pa.scoe, What
Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race
in America (New York, 2009); Renee C. Romano. Race
Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Cambridge,
Mass., 2003); David !.. Chappell, A Stone of Hope:
Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill,
2004), 114-18; White Interveners in Still v, Savannah-
Chatham County Board of Education, "In Defense of School
Segregation,"" in The Development of Segregationist
Thought, ed. I. A. Newby (Homewood, 1968), 146-53; Pete
Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
(Chapel Hill, 2000), 148-75; and 1. A. Newby,//'w Crow's

Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930
(Baton Rouge, 1965), 92-95. Winifred Breines, The Trouble
between Us: An Uneasy History of the White and Black
Women in the Eeminist Movement (New York, 2006), 7. On
race and feminism, see also Sara M. Evans, Personal
Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979); and Anne
M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Eeminism and Black
Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana, 2008).
52 The Journal of American History June 2011
In his influential 1951 treatise. The Homosexual Minority in
America, Daniel Webster
Cory included homosexuals in the so-called minority problem of
Jews and Negroes, as
did some of the writings of the gay black novelist James
Baldwin and brief letters by the
black playwright Lorraine Hansberry that were published in a
1957 issue of a lesbian
journal. Even so, what was known as the homophile movement
(a number of advocacy
organizations founded in the postwar era) remained largely
white and more culturally,
strategically, and personally conservative. In his classic account
of homophile politics,
John D'Emilio argued that they were influenced by the
"headline-making black civil
rights movement," but that the rank and file sought a kind of
invisible integration and
could be compared to only the most conservative of black
organizations. My own reading
of the national organizational journals—Mattachine Review, the
Ladder, and ONE—

revealed that homophiles were more involved in efforts to
achieve civil liberties and gain
public acceptance than demonstrating for rights, and they
infrequently mentioned
African Americans. Conversely, in the 1950s the black popular
periodical/i?i routinely ran
stories on homosexuality or gay sex scandals, though rarely in
connection with civil rights.
O n rare occasions writers observed the intersection of the two
causes. In 1962 the homo-
phile publication ONE published a review that characterized
James Baldwin as "one of a
number of current writers who is discovering a homosexual
dimension to the current
Negro revolution."'
By the 1960s, homophiles in Philadelphia had begun to adapt
what Marc Stein termed
"multiple models of African American resistance" to the
advancement of their cause, and
on July 4, 1965, they held the first Annual Reminder
demonstration at Independence
Hall to demand recognition of their rights of citizenship. Even
before the 1969 Stonewall
riots, Philadelphia gays and lesbians had formed the Homophile
Action League (HAL) to
break away from the civility of the homophiles; a week after the
riots, HAL and other
radicalized activists challenged the conventionality of the fifth
Annual Reminder by reftis-
ing to conform to its usual dress code. The new radical HAL
later discovered less rebellion
and more apathy in its ranks, however, and therefore urged
readers to follow "our fellow
victims of discrimination and oppression—blacks, women, the
poor, political dissi-

dents—[who] are fervently pressing their battles." In 1970 the
HAL announced that it had
testified for a "state Human Rights Act" before the state
platform committees of both the
Democratic and Republican parties. The league also sponsored a
booth where crowds of
supporters "filled 10 pages of the homosexual 'civil rights'
petition." Similarly, Martin
Duberman stressed the connections of race and sexuality in a
narrative on the Stonewall
^ Daniel Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A
Subjective Approach (NewYork, 1951), 4; Letter from L.
N. H.[Lorraine Hansberry], Ladder, 1 (May 1957), 26-28. On
Lorraine Hansberry's letters, see also Lisbeth Lipari,
"The Rhetoric of Intersectionality: Lorraine Hansberry's 1957
Letters to the Ladder," in Queering Public Address:
Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E.
Morris III (Columbia, S.C., 2007), 233-35; and Cheryl
Higashida, "To Be(come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine
Hansberry's Existentialist Routes to Anticolonialism,"
American Quarterly, 60 (Dec. 2008), 899-924. James Baldwin,
Another Country (New York, 1962); James Baldwin,
"The Male Prison," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Nonfiction, 1948-1985, by James Baldwin (New York, 1985),
101-05; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:
The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1982), 174, 224; Chuck Stanley,
review of Another Country by James Baldwin, One,
10 (Nov. 1962), 21-22. Andrew Bradbury, "Race and Sex," ibid,
12 (Oct. 1964), 17-21; Review of "The Toilet"
by Le Roi Jones, ibid., 13 (March 1965), 16; Richard Mayer,
review o( Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Matta-
chine Review, 3 (April 1957), 33; 'A Moral Revolution: For
Homosexuals?," Pursuit and Symposium, 1 (March—April
1966), 31—33. On homophile ethnic analogy, see Barbara

1 of 3 FIN 3302 – Exam I Review Fall 2017 Chapter 1.docx

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