What are the politics of choosing specific frames? This chapter is anchored on this question and finds a marked difference between frames employed at the field level and those by subfields in each country. It finds, for example, that the Kenyan national subfield’s favored frame resembled those selected by fields in the Global North. Concomitantly, it finds an ambivalence in using the genocide frame to talk about the atrocities in Darfur, arguing that this ambivalence is due to perceptions of how the frame would affect peace negotiations and the posture taken by transnational organizations such as the ICC, UN, and AU.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

Women from Black, South Asian and other ethnic minority groups experience gendered racism. Gender and race intersect in such a way that Black and ethnic minoritised women are not only sometimes afraid of seeking help from mental care, but also are invisible to services and their needs are ignored. There has been a significant tension in feminism between respecting culture and faith and attention to women’s human rights (cultural relativism). However, when women feel entrapped within their families and culture and are subject to forced marriage, domestic violence or FGM, resulting in major mental health problems and suicide, we cannot condone abuse and violence. Black women’s mental health and wellbeing is an important focus for Black feminism, which was largely excluded from second-wave feminism. Concepts of ‘mental illness’ do not always fit easily with personal healing that focuses on emotional and spiritual growth and overcoming oppression. Cultural humility is essential and its crucial for services to collaborate with NGOs that are trusted by the women in communities and run by them. As women we must call out discrimination and racism and challenge it.

In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.

This chapter examines the different aspects of enslaved Africans’ humanity that writers of neo-slave narratives felt was limiting, dehumanizing, or incomplete. To do this, this chapter also investigates the changing trends in the study of the sociology and history of enslaved Africans, speeches by Ossie Davis, and the writings of Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison – all of which contributed to ideas about black humanity. This chapter turns the kaleidoscope of neo-slave narrative by looking at a narrower, yet significant, angle of political life, form, and style of being Black and human, in the context of trends in mass consumption that gave shape to the landscape of this fiction about slavery.

Relationship scientists have focused on dimensions of relationship dynamics and processes including initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution, yet most of this research is decontextualized, especially as it pertains to race and racism. Among the relationship research that accounts for race, the treatment of race as a factor to be controlled or as a comparison variable ignores the realities of racism as a system that historically influenced and continues to shape romantic relationship development and functioning. Thus, the primary aim of this chapter is to investigate how systemic racism shifts our understanding of romantic relationships by providing an integrative review and critique of the existing literature using Black romantic relationships as an exemplar. We conclude with recommendations for future relationship science across five key domains: conceptualization and theory, measurement, privilege exploration, and within-group heterogeneity.

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

This chapter addresses the challenges that often arise for Black transgender men and romantic partners when seeking support in therapy. It covers key terminology related to gender identity and its application to clinical practice with Black transgender men and their romantic partners. To further understand how to navigate couples therapy with transgender men, this chapter provides details on how to differentiate between gender and other facets of identity, like biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, gender presentation, and sexual orientation. The chapter also summarizes major Narrative Therapy concepts and explores Narrative Therapy interventions for working with Black transgender men and their romantic partners. A case example will serve as an education tool to illustrate Narrative Therapy with Black transgender men and their romantic partners.

Chapter 4 explores conceptions about race and multiraciality as articulated by and about métis. These ideas were central in defining the meaning and practice of French citizenship and social childhood welfare in French Africa during and after World War II (1939–1950). The main focus is Brazzaville, the capital of Free France in World War II and the center of contestations regarding the “métis question.” The chapter chronicles how what was debated, decided, and rejected here reverberated elsewhere in FEA and FWA. Even as Vichy, Free France, and post-Nazi occupation factions competed about who was the legitimate government, “the métis question” remained critical in the effort to maintain the French Empire in years of precarity. Métis people forwarded various multiracial identities and claims to legal status and quotidian rights. Their demands sparked contestations with and within the post-1946 French government and among French-educated black Africans. There was increasing mobilization by collectives of people of varied ethno-language groups in French Africa, who came together around thier shared identity as black (noire) and hightled the antiblack racism of French colonialism and of métis themselves.

From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

Chapter 1 answers the question of what citizens perceptions of the school closure policy are and how these attitudes vary by race. It reveals that African Americans and Latinx citizens – the majority of those affected by the policy – have highly negative attitudes toward public school closures. Whites express the most supportive attitudes toward closure, despite rare experiences with the policy. To explain these disparities, it highlights how African Americans and Latinx shared experiences with previous education policies and shared status as minorities contribute to the development of a shared target identity. Their identification as shared targets result in similar assessments of the closure policy, regardless of whether they are directly affected by it. Whites, in contrast, adopt a viewpoint akin to the purveyors of the policy. These findings have implications for understanding the challenges associated with working across racial lines, toward improved race relations and thus democratic progress.

Chapter 3 examines how the closure process facilitates increased participation of affected citizens at the local level, in part, through the channeling of resources by the school district, which wants to be perceived as collecting community input. The resources provided by the district and community organizations facilitate increased protests of closure decisions. From their actions, this chapter demonstrates that affected citizens become the most likely group to attend a community meeting, to support an elected school board, and to turn out to vote. And yet, in the end this chapter raises the question of whether their actions lead to lasting policy change.

The book concludes by emphasizing how targeted citizen’s experiences with public school closures, and thus local government, weakens their trust in the political process and reduces their perceived value as citizens. Ultimately, the insights revealed in the book make clear that the closing of public schools contribute not only to the death of a school and its surrounding community but also to the slow death of citizens belief in, and access to, American democracy. Nonetheless, it also posits a potential way forward.

Though Civil War battle reenactment is widely viewed as a set of regressive practices defined by a preoccupation with the past, African American-centered performances highlight its transformative potential in terms of offering counternarratives to dominant memories of the era and connecting the war and its legacies to the present. Traditional reenactment, as performed primarily by white men, focuses more on authenticity, masculine gunplay, and battle minutiae, which has the impact of divorcing the practice from its causes and consequences. Black reenactments focus more on the pedagogical goals of recentering visitors’ focus on slavery as the primary cause and emancipation as its most important consequence. This recovery of African American memory alters the meanings assigned to the sacred space of the battlefield and offers a critical interrogation of many of the core assumptions about contemporary Blackness, both of which further enhance the practice’s resistant potential.