This chapter centers on the counterculture’s attitude toward “greatness,” primarily through the odd coupling of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. The chapter addresses racism, the Vietnam War, and the rebellion against the idyllic forms of greatness furnished by the so-described establishment of the 1950s. The Beatles and Ali (and their supporters) had to come to terms with new expectations and measures of American greatness.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.

This chapter examines the nature of slavery, and particularly chattel slavery, in the trans-Atlantic region in the modern period in order to structure the analysis of freedom to follow in subsequent chapters.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

I highlight three issues pertaining to the Implicit Association Test (IAT). First, using the test’s documented validity estimates, I show that using the IAT to classify individuals can result in lower adherence to a benchmark of rationality than using a blatantly unfair categorization scheme. I also suggest that using base rates to classify people when negligible individuating information is available is rational. In fact, people use racial base rates when executing their own classification strategy but denigrate other people for doing so. Second, I emphasize the very tenuous relation between one’s IAT score and dependent variables such as medical therapy choices which can be influenced by multiple factors other than prejudice. Third, I question the use of the IAT as a basis for deeming a person to be implicitly racist and therefore ineligible to be hired or in need of “diversity training” whose benefits have yet to be established.

The chapter analyzes the situation of Jews, Jewish organizations, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the development of racist ideologies.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.

This chapter explores how the evolving disease environments of the tropics shaped free and forced migration patterns at English sites. The globalization of forced labor markets and trade were catalysts in the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and that disproportionately weakened or killed English migrants to the tropics. These were the two deadliest mosquito-borne fevers that the English encountered in the tropics. The ways in which the English understood and responded to evolving tropical disease environments and their differential effects on European and non-European populations contributed to the rise of enslaved majorities in the tropics and informed ideas about human difference that would coalesce into nineteenth-century racism. The chapter will also show how epidemiology made English footholds in the tropics much more precarious and dependent on non-Europeans than the English footholds in other more temperate zones of the empire. The chapter relies on case studies of disease outbreaks in the Caribbean, on the West African Gold Coast, and in Sumatra at key points in the seventeenth century.

HB2281 (2010) was a state law meant to eliminate the TUSD MAS program. This is not conjecture but rather a direct statement from the law’s chief architect, former state superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne. This brief chapter provides a broad overview of the history and key figures in this protracted, painful, community-oriented drama of resistance, while also considering the difficulties of telling this story honestly. It draws a direct line between the current banning of Critical Race Theory nationally and this piece of Arizona legislation.

This chapter reviews research on a contemporary form of prejudice – aversive racism – and considers the important role of implicit bias in the subtle expressions of discrimination associated with aversive racism. Aversive racism characterizes the racial attitudes of a substantial portion of well-intentioned people who genuinely endorse egalitarian values and believe that they are not prejudiced but at the same time possess automatically activated, often nonconscious, negative feelings and beliefs about members of another group. Our focus in this chapter is on the bias of White Americans toward Black Americans, but we also discuss relevant findings in other intergroup contexts. We emphasize the importance of considering, jointly, both explicit and implicit biases for understanding subtle, and potentially unintentional, expressions of discrimination. The chapter concludes by discussing how research on aversive racism and implicit bias has been mutually informative and suggests specific promising directions for future work.

On August 22, 2017, Judge Tashima issued a blistering ruling finding that state representatives created the law and banned MAS based upon racial animus and partisan political gain in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Mexican American students in TUSD. There was a massive local and national uproar, celebrating the end of this racist law. Though different Tucson factions claimed shared victory due to the ruling, persistent community divisions remained. This chapter details the post-ruling celebrations, the continued community divisions, a summary of where the key actors in this drama ended up, the current state of MAS in TUSD, and the national Ethnic Studies renaissance that the Tucson struggle spawned. Of equal importance, this chapter details how the lessons of the MAS controversy can help inform the work of those challenging Critical Race Theory bans throughout the country.