Chapter 5 compares the experience of the Black, Hispanic/Latino, Native American, and Alaskan Native communities during the pandemic with White Americans. It identifies the extent and causes of the greater health disparities and social and economic inequities experienced by these communities. The chapter links these disparities with historical and contemporary patterns of racism and structural inequalities shaping the political and social determinants that disadvantage these racial groups. It also documents the inadequacies of the policies adopted during the pandemic. Additionally, it considers what could have been done to prevent the high rates of morbidity and mortality and dislocation people of color suffered.

Comparisons of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism reveal that the two movements bore more similarities than differences and often emulated each other. In their cultural policies, both embraced corporatism in organizing their cultural workforce, both invested heavily in cultural institutions and high-profile events, and, despite their authoritarian and racist practices, both exercised considerable caution in implementing censorship, contrary to postwar assumptions. Following a comparative overview of Nazi and Fascist approaches to architecture, visual art, film and theater, this chapter explores the challenges both systems faced in censoring music. Practiced in a wide range of amateur and professional performance experiences, music was by its very nature extremely difficult to control. Strong rhetoric denouncing ‘alien’ musical forces was far more pronounced in Germany than in Italy, but both countries needed to hold back on aggressive censorship practices that might risk alienating the public. The only arena in which censorship could be effectively imposed was upon Germany’s oppressed Jewish community.

This chapter provides detailed commentary on and analysis of director Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! First produced at Bard College’s SummerScape in 2015, it was then reimagined for an off-Broadway production at St Ann’s Warehouse in 2018 and a Broadway production at the Circle in the Square Theatre the following year. It subsequently toured the US, played at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2022 and transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End for a limited run in 2023. The chapter looks at how Oklahoma! can function as a ‘machine for distraction’, addresses historical contexts for the story, including the Dust Bowl, the Trail of Tears and the Black history of Oklahoma, and shows how whiteness, sexual attraction, gun violence and colour-conscious casting all play important parts in Fish’s Regietheater approach.

The King and I (1951) undoubtedly provokes controversy and debate. Its imperialist and racist resonances stem from its source materials, Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and Anna Leonowens’s own writings, and were transferred to the musical itself. But just as Anna in the musical wants to conquer the attitudes of the historical King Mongkut, so do Rodgers and Hammerstein want to conquer the fundamental racial and geopolitical challenges of the story. They do this through their musical numbers, their ‘delivery system’, through which they bring forth the audience’s most profound emotional responses that centre on love. The ballet ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, Tuptim’s re-envisioning of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin receives particular attention for its rhetoric about slavery and freedom as well as Jerome Robbins’s choreography. The chapter also explores the 2018 musical Soft Power (book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music by Jeanine Tesori) as a ‘reverse’ The King and I.

Chapter 2 examines the adaptation of the unemployment novel in midcentury African American fiction and in the racialized labor market of the United States. It argues that the resentment in the traditional unemployment novel was given a tone of despair in mid century African American literature – similar in affective structure to the longer tradition of the blues.

Chapter 8 discusses the dim future that is implied by the findings of this book. If politicians previously felt that they had to tread lightly when negatively stereotyping minoritized ethnoracial groups and mobilizing white racism, that no longer appears to be the case. We are in the midst of witnessing this change in US politics, with Donald Trump's successful capture of the Republican Party. This book demonstrates, though, that this phenomenon is not specific to any one politician or political moment. Instead, it is inherent to whiteness itself. Understanding the conditions under which negative racial appeals flourish, as this book has sought to do, is a first step in combatting the kind of rhetoric that functions to reify white dominance and the unequal racial hierarchy in the US.

This chapter pays close attention to two stories from Simin Daneshvar’s 1961 collection Shahri Chun Behesht (A City Like Paradise), reading “Vakil Bazaar” and “The Playhouse” as modernist “rehearsals” of racist archetypes, representing a literary-historical moment when socially progressive Iranian writers were just starting to situate their work within global discourses of antiracism and contending with problematic historical legacies in theater and narrative. Briefly summarized, the chapter takes into account, first, a “child-snatcher” character accused of Jewish blood libel against Muslims (associated by the child narrator with both her lower-class nanny and with the self-flagellation of Ashura), and second, an actor whose blackface performance signifies lowbrow humor and a lack of inhibitions. Ostby examines these isolated incidents in Daneshvar as a kind of prism onto a larger modernist moment, marked by socialist class struggle and women’s rights initiatives, but also racial purity discourse. Her readings trace where uses of metaphor and allegory we might consider “modernist” aesthetics in Daneshvar’s work obscure or even actively prevent the social critique associated with “modernist” politics.

In a series of controversial interviews, and in the stories and non-fiction of The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s forthright views on Islam and Muslims led to charges of racism and Islamophobia. This chapter explores the nature of Amis’s objections to what he termed the ‘dependent mind’ of religion more broadly and Islam in particular. Amis repeatedly blurs the key distinction between Islam and Islamism, with the result that his charges against political Islam rebound on whole communities. The chapter situates these views in the highly charged context of the post-9/11 moment, showing how his hostility to Islam – based on an ideal of western culture under threat – has strong affinities with resurgent Orientalist and Islamophobic currents of thought circulating at the time. It argues that this derivative quality in Amis’s thinking limits the effectiveness of his defence of rationalism and gives impetus to discriminatory attitudes and stereotypes that are still with us today.

An important aspect of the developmental pathway for international adoptees involves issues of self-identification and the formation of a cultural–social identity. This chapter will review existing literature and highlight key challenges related to identity development among international adoptees. A major focus within this research is transracial adoption, which will also be discussed. Special attention will be given to practices aimed at fostering identity, including partial identification with the country of birth through linguistic and cultural connections.

Using Susan Stryker’s references to the ‘suturing’ of the gender binary onto all individuals as a launching point, the chapter begins by investigating the discussions of ‘suturing’ and ‘seamlessness’ in phenomenological analyses of racism in Martín Alcoff, Yancy, and Al-Saji. It then turns to Husserl’s ‘levels of constitution’ as a means to provide further insights into the experiences of emotions and vulnerabilities in racist encounters. Finally, after a critical assessment of Al-Saji’s notion of ‘hesitation’, the chapter reviews Yancy’s ‘ambush’ and ‘tarrying’, as well as Martín Alcoff’s ‘crisis’ and ‘bracketing’ as indicating the important moments of interruption and pause that can begin an anti-racist project.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes were underfunded, under-regulated, and wildly at risk of a mass viral event. For decades industry watchers had called for oversight, but media accounts regarding home closures were misleading and poorly sourced. Increased private equity interest and legislative inaction heightened risks across the sector. COVID-19 was a perfect storm, preying on these systemic challenges and decimating robust, lively resident populations. More than 200,000 elder and disabled residents of nursing homes died of COVID-19 or related causes between March 2020 and March 2022. That number is grossly underestimated because nursing homes, which self-report their number of ill and deceased, feared bad reputations; many concealed deaths, mis-ascribed causes of death, or sent ill residents to nearby hospitals to avoid deaths on site. The conclusion of lawyers, staff, residents, and experts is that, while COVID-19 was a disaster waiting to happen, the mass deaths experienced in nursing homes could have been prevented. Since the initial years of COVID-19, some efforts by subsequent state and federal administrations have addressed inadequacies, but on the whole, little has been done to correct the many challenges the industry continues to face, even as the US elder population continues to rise.

This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

Burroughs and the monstrous have always gone together, and this chapter examines how not only his work but Burroughs himself was from the start defined in terms of monstrosity. It traces the origins of the association back to his early critical reception and even earlier fictionalization as a profoundly sinister persona in the novels of Jack Kerouac. The specific grounds for identifying Burroughs or his work as monstrous have changed over time, often focusing on ambiguously misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic content, and on his identity as a homosexual and drug addict. His accidental shooting of his second wife, Joan Volmer, has cast the darkest shadow, but, this chapter argues, it has obscured the actual significance of monstrosity in Burroughs’ work. This, as critics such as Wermer-Colan and Stevenson have argued, lies in how he embraced complicity rather than hypocritically denied it, resulting in strategies that weaponize monstrosity as a mirror for the dark forces at work in the world.

Despite decades of theoretical conceptualization of racism’s complexity as a multilevel and multidimensional construct, the measurement of racism has largely ignored these important nuances. Prior empirical research has largely focused on interpersonal racism, its antecedents, and its consequences. The present chapter summarizes the variety of methodological tools that have been used to evaluate youths’ experiences with interpersonal racism. We highlight opportunities to advance the scientific rigor of each method and technique, with particular considerations for measurement inclusive of the Intersectionality framework. We also argue for measuring racism beyond the individual level. Cultural, institutional, and structural racism are delineated, and tangible recommendations are provided for advancing the measurement of each type of racism among marginalized youth populations. The chapter concludes with promising avenues of future research to support the triangulation of measurement and enhance the scientific understanding of the impact of racism.

This chapter advocates a transformation of the profession. Transformation requires turning everything on its head and rearranging to create something better – in this case a more racially just and equitable social work practice. The first section of the book begins with the macro, uncovering the why and how of racism in the US and globally, discussing how these precepts trickle down to micro social work practice. Without posturing macro and micro as an “either/or” the authors discuss these as “yes ands …”, advocating, instead, for a critical approach to practice spanning the continuum of social work systems of practice.

Practicums in social work are referred to as the profession’s signature pedagogy, where students put their learning to work under the guidance of seasoned professionals. Students of color, however, face uneven experiences in the predominantly white social work profession. While on one hand they are sought after because in some cases they reflect the clientele being served, they are also easily dismissed and encounter various levels of conflict with the practicum instructor. This chapter examines these experiences using LatCrit methodology.

CRT is a plausibility structure that explains why and how racism persists, and society’s disregard for health, educational, and welfare discrepancies between white and minoritized peoples. It explains why a profession like social work has not seriously addressed racial injustice, instead content to treat gross disparities applying whitesplanations and colonized theories to those suffering from socially unjust systems. This chapter provides a history of CRT and five theoretical tenets applicable to social work, each of which will be developed further in the text, and argues that CRT is an appropriate transformational framework for social work.

The institutional terrain in which chaplains operated shifted in moral terms. Until the twenty-first century, the Army was overwhelmingly white, male, heterosexual, Christian and resistant to change. The RAChD did little to challenge that status quo or to combat the racism, sexism and homophobia that arose from it. If, with the same complaisance, it went on to adhere to an externally driven equality and diversity agenda, it had a lot more to say about the ethics of war. Significantly, its Journal aired debates over nuclear weapons and issues of war and peace with surprising freedom. Evidently, killing still raised strong ethical concerns in a professional culture informed by Christian morality and by the just war tradition, with its problematics exacerbated by a growing tangle of legal expectations and constraints. Despite imputations to the contrary, and especially in the complex and controversial counter-insurgency campaigns of the later twentieth century, there is scant evidence to justify the suspicion that unit chaplains, as military pastors, were simply predisposed to connive in the misconduct of soldiers and some clear indications that their influence was one of restraint.