All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

The Racial Contract

MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. Race and American Culture. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508984-7; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-508983-9.) Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection interrogates the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South. The author hopes to explicate the ambivalence of emancipation in order to address the issues raised by the continuing subjugation of blacks in a liberal nation. Hartman gives particular attention to the role of force and violence in constructing and perpetuating subjugation. She speaks importantly to such major historiographical debates as the question whether antebellum southern slavery was a paternalistic institution. Paternalism has been presented as recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, in part as a response to northern liberalism and abolitionism. In contrast to claims that the master/slave relationship was based upon reciprocal ties of mutual responsibilities and affection, however, Hartman supports those who argue that slavery was fundamentally based upon dehumanizing white physical force and violence. What Hartman's postmodernist analysis perhaps particularly contributes to such debates is her creative use of both traditional and nontraditional historical sources of evidence to interrogate and deconstruct the meaning of the ordinary "scenes of subjection." She thereby reinterprets such routine practices as slave dancing and singing, seemingly encouraged by paternalistic masters, as required demonstrations of white dominance that were epitomized by the forced performance of terrified slaves on the auction block. Hartman's deconstruction of the legal non-existence of the rape of a slave woman also emphasizes the dehumanizing violence of the law of slavery. But, at the same time, the personhood of the enslaved was recognized in the sense that they could be charged and found criminally responsible and blameworthy for wrongdoing. The argument that the association of black agency with blameworthiness comprised a lasting legacy of slavery leads on to the book's second section, in which Hartman focuses on the South after emancipation. Hartman's extended deconstruction of meanings, and her prose, can at times be so convoluted that the reader might at times wonder what she means to say; however, the book's second section helps to clarify her thesis that emphasizing the damaging legacies of slavery to emancipation is central to her critique of an American liberalism that defines "liberty" as the self-mastery of the man who--owning himself--could freely exercise reason, choice, and consent. …

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Author(s): Horton, Matthew | Advisor(s): Nasir, Na’ilah | Abstract: This dissertation is an intervention into Critical Whiteness Studies, an ‘additional movement’ to Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory. It systematically analyzes key contradictions in working against racism from a white subject positions under post-Civil Rights Movement liberal color-blind white hegemony and "Black Power" counter-hegemony through a critical assessment of two major competing projects in theory and practice: white anti-racism [Part 1] and New Abolitionism [Part 2].I argue that while white anti-racism is eminently practical, its efforts to hegemonically rearticulate white are overly optimistic, tend toward renaturalizing whiteness, and are problematically dependent on collaboration with people of color. I further argue that while NewAbolitionism has popularized and advanced an alternative approach to whiteness which understands whiteness as ‘nothing but oppressive and false’ and seeks to ‘abolish the white race’, its ultimately class-centered conceptualization of race and idealization of militant nonconformity has failed to realize effective practice.Part 3 considers alternative identities to whiteness, argues for a stronger race-centered definition of whiteness as a secular coalition of previously antagonistic european peoples forged on global frontiers for the purposes of dispossessing, exploiting, and killing people of color, advances a framework for understanding processes of ‘becoming white’ without ‘necessary correspondence to class’, and proposes an alternative approach to ‘abolishing the white race’ focused on its internal ‘ethnic fissures’ called intersectional, anti-white, Irish Diasporic nationalism.

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Matthew Horton

Papers

Working Against Racism from White Subject Positions: White Anti-Racism, New Abolitionism & Intersectional Anti-White Irish Diasporic Nationalism