Everyone's favorite houseguest who never left, Leon Black (played by award-winning comedian JB Smoove on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm) drops his wisdom and good-bad advice for the masses. Learn the secrets Larry David has gleaned from the Falstaff of television."--Amazon.

That discrimination exists in courts of law is beyond dispute. In American murder cases, for instance, studies show that blacks who kill a white are much more likely to receive the death penalty than if they kill a black. Indeed, in Georgia, they are 30 times more likely to be condemned, and in Texas a staggering 90 times more likely. Conversely, in Texas, of 143 whites convicted of killing a black, only one was sentenced to die. But how (...) extensive is discrimination in the courtroom? Is it strictly a matter of racial prejudice, or does it respond to a wide range of social factors? In Sociological Justice, eminent legal sociologist Donald Black challenges the conventional notion that law is primarily an affair of rules and that discrimination is an aberration. Law, he contends, is a social process in which bias is inherent. Indeed, Black goes well beyond the documented instances of racial discrimination to show how social status, the degree of intimacy, speech, organization, and numerous other factors all greatly influence whether a complaint will be filed in court, who will win, and what the punishment or other remedy will be. Moreover, he extends his analysis to include not only the litigants, but also the lawyers, the jurors, and the judge, describing how their social characteristics can also influence a case. Sociological Justice introduces a new field of legal scholarship that will have important consequences for the future of law: the sociology of the case. Black discusses how lawyers can use the sociology of the case to improve their practice and, for those interested in reform, he suggests ways to minimize bias in the courtroom. Beyond this, Black demonstrates that modern jurisprudence, with its assumption that like cases will be treated in like fashion, is out of touch with reality. He urges the adoption of a new sociological jurisprudence, with a new morality of law, that explicitly addresses the social relativity of justice. A major contribution to legal scholarship, this thought-provoking volume is essential reading for anyone interested in law and justice in modern society. (shrink)

The installation in a society of ad hoc and contradictory legal policies over a foundation of equal liberty and justice under the rule of law results in social disorder. When these policies reflect economic interests, A feudal-Like form of economic determinism begins to close in. This in turn breeds inequalities, Frustrated expectations, Political favoritism and authoritarianism. Further, The 'success' of such policies in terms of visible changes in the social order cannot in principle be known. The paper demonstrates these social (...) disorders in terms of a current american mandate called 'reverse discrimination' which coerces industries and universities to favor and promote the economic and educational interests of some persons over others. (shrink)

*The views expressed are the author's own and should not be construed as representing the policies and opinions of the American Medical Association.

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that (...) captures the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel. (shrink)

Black, Alan W The Rationalist Press Association, which was one of the original sponsors of the British Humanist Association, was also one of the influences which helped to bring the New South Wales Humanist Society into being. The immediate event which triggered the formation of the latter society was the visit to Australia in 1959 of the American evangelist, Billy Graham. Bill and Daphne Weeks, two Sydney school teachers who were members of the Rationalist Press Association, felt the need (...) for an organisation to promote humanism in Australia. Even prior to the Graham visit, they and others of similar persuasion had been writing to the ABC Weekly urging the Australian Broadcasting Commission to include humanist views in its programmes. (shrink)

Out of many years of work with children and youth, Algernon D. Black, a Leader of the American Ethical Culture Movement, and Head of the Ethics Department of the Ethical Culture Schools, has written this simple and lucid book to help young  ...

There are surprisingly few texts in which Avicenna discusses our knowledge of separate substances. The most extensive account occurs in Metaphysics 3.8, a text which was cited by Aquinas in a small number of works from relatively early in his academic career. Aquinas’s attitude to Avicenna’s account, which he dubbed knowledge per impressionem, is by no means uniform, even within a single work. Sometimes Avicenna is an adversary; sometimes he is an ally; still other times he is an innocent bystander. (...) I explore the reasons for Aquinas’s shifting evaluation of Avicenna’s theory and show that Aquinas’s attitude depends in part upon whether the separate substance in question is God or the angels, and whether he is considering the soul as separated or embodied. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s abandonment of knowledge per impressionem reflects his general move away from any Avicennian influences that smack of dualism in his eyes. (shrink)

This article considers the theological influences on the Balfour Declaration which was made on the 2 November 1917 and for the first time gave British governmental support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It explores the principal personalities and political workings behind the Declaration before going on to argue the statement cannot be entirely divested from the religious sympathies of those involved, especially Lord Balfour. Thereafter, the paper explores the rise of Christian Restorationism in the context of (...) Scottish Presbyterianism, charting how the influence of Jonathan Edwards shaped the thought of Thomas Chalmers on the role of the Jews in salvation history which in turn influenced the premillennialism of Edward Irving and his Judeo-centric eschatology. The paper then considers the way this eschatology became the basis of John Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism and how in an American context this theology began to shape the thinking of Christian evangelicals and through the work of William Blackstone provide the basis of popular and political support for Zionism. However, it also argues the political expressions of premillennial dispensationalism only occurred in America because the Chicago evangelist Dwight L. Moody was exposed to the evolving thinking of Scottish Presbyterians regarding Jewish restoration. This thinking had emerged from a Church of Scotland ‘Mission of Inquiry’ to Palestine in 1839 and been advanced by Alexander Keith, Horatius Bonar and David Brown. Finally, the paper explores how this Scottish Presbyterian heritage influenced the rise of Zionism and Balfour and his political judgements. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 101-103.

There are surprisingly few texts in which Avicenna discusses our knowledge of separate substances. The most extensive account occurs in Metaphysics 3.8, a text which was cited by Aquinas in a small number of works from relatively early in his academic career. Aquinas’s attitude to Avicenna’s account, which he dubbed knowledge per impressionem, is by no means uniform, even within a single work. Sometimes Avicenna is an adversary; sometimes he is an ally; still other times he is an innocent bystander. (...) I explore the reasons for Aquinas’s shifting evaluation of Avicenna’s theory and show that Aquinas’s attitude depends in part upon whether the separate substance in question is God or the angels, and whether he is considering the soul as separated or embodied. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s abandonment of knowledge per impressionem reflects his general move away from any Avicennian influences that smack of dualism in his eyes. (shrink)

The Continuous Parameter Estimation Model is applied to develop individual genomic-level heritabilities for the latent hierarchical structure and developmental dynamics of Life History (LH) strategy LH strategies relate to the allocations of bioenergetic resources into different domains of fitness. LH has moderate to high population-level heritability in humans, both at the level of the high-order Super-K Factor and the lower-order factors, the K-Factor, Covitality Factor, and General Factor of Personality (GFP). Several important questions remain unexplored. We developed measures of genome-level (...) heritabilities employing an American sample of 316 monozygotic (MZ) and 274 dizygotic (DZ) twin dyads and a Swedish sample of 863 MZ and 475 DZ twin dyads. This novel heritability index measures individual genetic transmissibility, therefore opening new avenues for analyzing complex interactions among heritable traits inaccessible to standard structural equations methods. For these samples: (1) moderate to high heritability of factor loadings of Super-K on its lower-order factors is demonstrated, evidencing biological preparedness, genetic accommodation, and the gene-culture coevolution of biased epigenetic rules of development; (2) moderate to high heritability of the magnitudes of the effect of the higher-order factors upon their loadings on their constituent factors, evidencing genetic constraints upon phenotypic plasticity; and (3) that heritability of the LH factors, of factor loadings, and of the magnitudes of the correlations among factors are weaker among those with slower LH speeds, demonstrating that inter-individual variation in transmissibility is a function of individual socioecological selection pressures. (shrink)

John Ogbu has studied minority education from a comparative perspective for over 30 years. The study reported in this book--jointly sponsored by the community and the school district in Shaker Heights, Ohio--focuses on the academic performance of Black American students. Not only do these students perform less well than White students at every social class level, but also less well than immigrant minority students, including Black immigrant students. Furthermore, both middle-class Black students in suburban school districts, as (...) well as poor Black students in inner-city schools are not doing well. Ogbu's analysis draws on data from observations, formal and informal interviews, and statistical and other data. He offers strong empirical evidence to support the cross-class existence of the problem. The book is organized in four parts: *Part I provides a description of the twin problems the study addresses--the gap between Black and White students in school performance and the low academic engagement of Black students; a review of conventional explanations; an alternative perspective; and the framework for the study. *Part II is an analysis of _societal and school factors_ contributing to the problem, including race relations, Pygmalion or internalized White beliefs and expectations, levelling or tracking, the roles of teachers, counselors, and discipline. *_Community factors_--the focus of this study--are discussed in Part III. These include the educational impact of opportunity structure, collective identity, cultural and language or dialect frame of reference in schooling, peer pressures, and the role of the family. This research focus does _not_ mean exonerating the system and blaming minorities, nor does it mean neglecting school and society factors. Rather, Ogbu argues, the role of community forces should be incorporated into the discussion of the academic achievement gap by researchers, theoreticians, policymakers, educators, and minorities themselves who genuinely want to improve the academic achievement of African American children and other minorities. *In Part IV, Ogbu presents a summary of the study's findings on community forces and offers recommendations--some of which are for the school system and some for the Black community. _Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement_ is an important book for a wide range of researchers, professionals, and students, particularly in the areas of Black education, minority education, comparative and international education, sociology of education, educational anthropology, educational policy, teacher education, and applied anthropology. (shrink)

This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, phenomenological structuralism, highlights black American community transition from a pathological-pathogenic community to an intersectional one, which dominates the contemporary global order. The work posits that the constitution of black American communities and their identities have been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans have never been agents in the constitution of their (...) own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to integrate the American social structure. Contemporarily, their integration in post-industrial America is marked by their transition from a pathological-pathogenic community to a neoliberal intersectional one dominated by their youth, women, and queers. (shrink)

Purpose: A poetic work of fiction haunts the base of the Statue of Liberty. The act overshadowed the original tribute to the Civil War victory and the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln's praises of the Black American military fell silent. Eurocentrists shrouded centuries of genius and scaled-down Black American mastery. Sagas of barrier-breaking Olympians, military heroes, Wild West pioneers, and inventors ended as forgotten footnotes. Today, countries around the world fetishize Black American history and culture to the point (...) of ethnocide. The real-time case study of Woni Spotts explores the phenomenon. Until ancient traditions evolve with authenticity, global cultures will wither and die. The presented research chronicles over half a millennium of archives. Lists with names, dates, and genealogies seal the Black American legacy in stone. Methodology: The presented research for case studies draws from archival data, dated events, news articles, and an interview with Woni Spotts. The case studies generated three lists. Fifty sports and competitions were dated and cataloged. The athletes were analyzed by a genealogist. Forty music and dance genres were cataloged by publishing or recording dates. The artists were analyzed by a genealogist. Copyright infringements were noted. Inventors were researched for U.S. patents. NASA astronauts and inventors were analyzed by a genealogist. Findings: The presented research showed centuries of untold, reframed, stigmatized, and fetishized Black American history and culture. In the case studies, foreigners of African descent (Africans, Caribbeans, Central Americans, and South Americans) practiced ethnocidal behavior in concert with European descendants. Prolific abolitionists, patriots, politicians, and inventors were written out of history. Superstar athletes were obstructed or outshined by fictional Recommendations: Case studies showed centuries of fragmented narratives created biases and distortions. Black Americans were written out of history, reframed as background characters, stigmatized with skewed statistics, and fetishized globally to the point of ethnocide. The presented research stands as a vital resource for preservationists. Music and dance genre architects were solidified by publishing and recording dates. Athletic events, inventions, and NASA scientists were recorded. (shrink)

This essay argues that black Americans writing from outside or at the margins of the democratic polity shed important light on the nature of human dignity and on the political emotion that offers—to oneself and to others—the surest proof of the existence of such dignity: indignation. I focus in particular on four insights of this body of black American political thought: that the presumption of dignity is the basis on which citizenship is conferred, while its denial is (...) the justification by which citizenship is withheld; that dignity’s existence within a person is vouchsafed most effectively by indignation, a flash of emotion that arises in response to the insult of its denial; that even though dignity feels woven into one’s innermost being, it is always vulnerable to social denial and therefore stands in need of social confirmation; that indignation can and should be transformed into a self-opposing disposition that resists complacency and seeks continual reconfiguration, or enlargement, of the demos and of its democratic theory. (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born (...) before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

Many revisionist historians today try to make the late President Andrew Jackson out to be something that he was not—that is, a man of all the people. In our uninhibited, polarized culture, the truth should mean something. Therefore, studying the character of someone like Andrew Jackson should be fully investigated, and researched, as this work attempts to do. Indeed, this article tells us that we should not accept lies and conspiracy theories as the truth. Such revisionist history comes into sharp (...) focus in Bradley J. Birzer’s latest book, In Defense of Andrew Jackson. Indeed, his efforts are surprisingly wrong, as he tries to give alternative explanations for Jackson’s corrupt life and political malfeasance. Hence, the lawlessness of Andrew Jackson cannot be ignored or “white washed” from American history. More important, discrediting the objective truth about Andrew Jackson, and his blatant misuse of executive power as the U.S. President should never be dismissed, like his awful treatment of Blacks and other minorities in the United States. It should have been important to Birzer to get his story right about Andrew Jackson, with a more balanced approach in regards to the man. Finally, Jackson should have tried to eliminate Black slavery in his life time, not embrace it, based on the ideas of human dignity and our common humanity. To be brutally honest, it is one thing to disagree with Andrew Jackson; but it is quite another to feel that he, as President of the United States, was on the side of all the American people during his time, because it was not true. Perhaps the biggest question is: Could Andrew Jackson have made a positive difference for every American, even Black slaves and Native Americans? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent police brutality has reminded people in the United States of America that racism and discrimination toward Black Americans is still prevalent. Evidence supports the claim that many Black Americans experience racial trauma due to the relatively common occurrence of discriminatory racial encounters in their life. Racial traumas are events of danger related to real or secondary experiences of racial discrimination that may cause psychological, emotional, or physical injury. The goal of this article is to (...) identify the ethical complexities for psychologists in addressing racial trauma among Black Americans. First, the article describes examples of racial traumas for Black Americans and their impact on overall mental health. Second, there is an in-depth analysis of ethical issues for psychologists relevant to racial trauma in areas such as competency, discrimination and harassment, bias, assessment, training programs, and harm. Finally, recommendations for psychologists are provided to address racial trauma among Black American clients, students, supervisees, and colleagues. (shrink)

Since their enslavement in the U. S. Black Americans have longitudinally suffered some of the most heinous crimes against humanity. Yet, despite cultural policies intended to discriminate against, marginalise, oppress, and subjugate them, Black folx have unfailingly demonstrated remarkable creative resilience. This conceptual article explores three research questions: (1) in what ways have exclusionary U. S. cultural policies discouraged Black Americans’ cultural engagement, (2) how have Black Americans responded to exclusionary cultural policies in (...) the U. S. and (3) what longitudinal impacts might exclusionary cultural policies have on Black Americans’ creative and expressive lives, and the U. S. creative sector? This article used Critical Race Theory (CRT) and interpretive policy analysis to identify the ways in which racism has and continues to shape Black Americans’ creative and expressive lives. I conclude this article by making the case for a research agenda that comprehensively investigates Black Americans’ cultural engagement as well as other historically and continuously oppressed groups. (shrink)