This project examines the role cultural transmission of historical myths plays in power relationships and identity formation through a study of the Mississippi textbook regulatory agency and various civic organizations that shaped education policy in addition to textbook content. A study of massive resistance to integration, my project focuses on the anticommunism and conservative ideology of grassroots segregationists. Civic-patriotic societies such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, and Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation formed as the major alliance affecting the state’s education system in the post-World War II era. Once the state department of education centralized its services in the late 1930s and early 1940s, civic club reformers guarded against integrationist and multicultural content found in textbooks, deeming both as subversive and communistic. From the early 1950s through the 1970s, Mississippi’s ardent segregationists and anticommunists shaped education policy by effective statelevel lobbying and grassroots activism. I demonstrate that the civic clubs had more influence in the state legislature than did the upstart Citizens’ Council movement. In addition, I show that once social studies standards emphasizing God, country, and Protestant Christianity became codified in state education policy, it became ever more difficult for other reformers, namely James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, to dislodge and alter those standards. Through numerous legal cases, DAR and Farm Bureau ephemera, and state superintendent of education files, this work argues that the civic clubs played an integral role in defense of white supremacy—a role that has been underemphasized in the existing literature on massive resistance.

This dissertation is an institutional history of the Mississippi State Hospital. Specifically, it is a study of the use of the hospital as an institutional instrument to establish, maintain, reinforce state-sponsored racial segregation and white supremacy during the period of Jim Crow in Mississippi. Mississippi's institution for its mentally ill residents became an instrument to reinforce the state's racially, socially, and economically rigid society.

There has been a rise in Right-wing extremism (RWE) mobilizing within what is known as the setter-colonial state of Canada, with some groups espousing values and narratives grounded in White nationalist ideology which have led to instances of violence and harm against community members. These incidents of harm and violence occur in the context of the Canadian state's claims to inclusive multiculturalism, civility and benevolence. While there are many looking into the presence of RWE groups to document their existence, mobilizing patterns and tactics, very little analysis exists that offers a deep analysis into these groups and situates their political ideology within the broader context of the Canadian state’s governance logics. Therefore, to push the discussion on this topic further, this project looks at the specific case of the Canadian Nationalist Front's (CNF), a White nationalist group in Canada, and unpacks the discourse shared on their blog. Through dissecting the CNF's blogpost with a theoretical framework of analysis that moves beyond understanding this group as merely a fringe group which holds fundamentally different values than the Canadian state, I make links to the existing literature that demonstrates the parallels between the two. I argue that the racialized governance logics of White nationalist groups, like the CNF, are also shared in the settler-colonial logics of the Canadian state's border governance strategies. Further, I highlight the ways in which groups like the CNF ground their movements in the superiority of Whiteness, while using the state's claims of inclusivity and multiculturalism to justify their entitlement to hold these exclusionary ideologies while presenting themselves as victims of those that they "Other". Finally, I contextualize their discourse within the context of neoliberalism, which has intensified the harms of racial capitalism in a way that has also impacted the White working class and allowed groups like the CNF to use economic grievances to mobilize their movements.

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Raven Sinclair (2004) locates the social worker at the heart of the colonial project, carrying out violent and assimilative government policy in Canada (p.50). Social work's connections to colonialism have been consciously and some would say “innocently” mutually dependent (Rossiter, 2001; Heron, 2007). Social work responses over time have been criticized for being non-performative (Ahmed, 2004), upholding institutional power (Bunjun, 2014) and ignoring ongoing colonialism (Lawrence & Dua, 2005). This study explores how self-identified white social work managers and directors reflect on and understand their roles in relation to reconciliation policy. It looks at the way discourse interrupts or maintains ruling relations including white supremacy and other colonial continuities (Heron, 2007). “In order to avoid further complicity, in assimilative and colonial practices, non-indigenous helpers must develop a clear understanding of their privilege and of their professions’ complicity in past and present colonial practices embedded in their practice”(Baskin, 2016). Through qualitative interviewing the study used critical whiteness studies and critical discourse analysis with the concept of relational validity in mind (Tuck & Yang, 2018). “What is valid in research is that which resonates with people’s lives and informs their power to make change” (Tuck & Yang, 2018, p.xiii). The findings suggest that participants orientation to reconciliation in the workplace, is controlled and continually reinforced through state discourses (neoliberal, neocolonial, reconciliation). Interestingly, the findings also suggest that participants may be de-contextualizing AOP discourses to neutralize and depoliticize their professional roles in the colonial project, as well as to rationalize their reluctance to take action. This suggests current approaches are not adequate to address colonial continuities in an era of reconciliation. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the relationship between democracy and race in the United States federal government. To analyze this problem, I rely on archival research from the 1967-8 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly known as the Kerner Commission, after chairperson Governor Otto Kerner) to examine how the discussion and management of hundreds of so-called "race riots" in the summer of 1967 both challenges civil disobedience and embodies structural racism. Employing a content analysis of the final 425-page Kerner Commission government report, I assess the categorization, labeling, and language used to describe and document the hundreds of "race riots" and related state violence through acts of police misconduct that engulfed the country in the summer of 1967. I rely heavily on the report and background research itself, as well as major books related to race riots and presidential commissions, such as Anthony Platt's 1971 The Politics of Riot Commissions and Steven Gillon's 2018 Separate and Unequal. I incorporate theories of exit and the entitlement to rights advanced in literature by scholars like Jennet Kirkpatrick, James C. Scott, and Hannah Arendt. This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between morality and civic participation in democratic politics. I analyze Christopher Kutz's book Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age to delve into the ramifications of democracy and US citizenship being considered a kind of "collective project" and further contemplate what obligations and implications exist for citizens in US democracy against racial injustice. Since the Kerner Commission coincided with the rise of "law and order" politics in the nation's political vernacular, it represents a unique opportunity to witness an ideological shift toward a Garrison state and neoliberal ethos, both of which undermine the country's espoused democratic values, resting on the grammar of equality and justice for all. The Kerner Commission can provide valuable lessons in studies of political domination that remain pertinent to overcoming oppression and injustice today. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation is broadly concerned with the relationship between democracy and race in the United States federal government. American democracy espouses moral virtues related to freedom and justice for all, and yet structural racism remains pervasive in how the government operates. To analyze this problem, I rely on archival research from the 1967-8 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly known as the Kerner Commission, after chairperson Governor Otto Kerner) to examine how the discussion and management of hundreds of so-called “race riots” in the summer of 1967 both challenges civil disobedience and embodies structural racism. I rely heavily on the report and background research itself to do a content analysis. I also use major books related to race riots and presidential commissions, such as Anthony Platt’s 1971 The Politics of Riot Commissions and Steven Gillon’s 2018 Separate and Unequal. Given that this dissertation is concerned with how morality shapes civic participation in democratic politics, I analyze Christopher Kutz’s book Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Since the Kerner Commission coincided with the rise of “law and order” politics in the nation’s political vernacular, it represents a unique opportunity to witness an ideological shift toward a Garrison state and neoliberal ethos, both of which undermine the country’s espoused democratic values, resting on the grammar of equality and justice for all. Individual advocates as well as scholars can learn valuable lessons from the Kerner Commission about oppression and injustice in today’s society.

This dissertation examines how institutions and individuals navigate the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism by focusing on architectural preservationists' explanations of what are referred to as white cities. Through dialogue between architectural history, international relations, and critical heritage studies, I map the making and remaking of the histories of white cities, or what were designed as "European" zones – in opposition to "Indigenous" zones – that brought together modernist architecture, white supremacy, early twentieth-century European settler colonialism, and architectural preservation. My focus on preservationists' narrations of these white cities extends interdisciplinary work charting their historical production from a group of scholars focusing on the relationship of architecture in the production of domination in European colonialism. My work extends this scholarship by shifting to preservationists' narrations of white cities through the question: how do preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that underpinned the production of white cities? In this dissertation, I argue that preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that produced white cities by relying on what I refer to as didactic narratives to legitimate preservation interventions. Preservationists use these didactic narratives to reframe white cities as part of national histories, the universalism of the World Heritage List, and the history of the modernist movement in architecture and planning. My argument advances by showing preservationists' appropriations of the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List inscription materials for White City of Tel Aviv (2003), Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City: A Shared Heritage (2012), and Asmara: A Modernist African City (2017) and through ethnographic fieldwork with local preservationists in Casablanca and Tel Aviv. To frame these analyses, I map the institutional changes within the UNESCO World Heritage Committee that sought greater legitimacy by expanding the typological and geographical scope of the World Heritage List. To do so, the institution enlisted the International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO-International) to recraft the criteria to include twentieth-century modernist architecture onto the List. However, DOCOMOMO promoted a particular way of interpreting white cities through the didactic narratives that led to the proliferation of white cities on the World Heritage List. By charting the different ways that preservationists appropriate the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List materials and in the text of semi-structured interviews and from participant observation, I show how the intersecting power structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism that were embedded in the production of white cities are adapted by preservationists in the co-constitution of international institutions, disciplinary knowledge, and individual subject positions. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation considers how the histories of race and colonialism are narrated by architectural preservationists. I do so by focusing on preservationists' narrations of white cities, "European" enclaves designed in opposition to "Indigenous" zones in early 20th century settler colonialism. By focusing on the preservation of what were designed as racialized spaces, I explore how these histories of racial difference and colonialism are mediated by forms of knowledge, institutions, and individuals. Yet it is the focus on preservationists that I detail how preservationists silence, downplay, or mobilize the histories of white cities through three different narrative tropes of national histories, the universalism of the World Heritage List, and modernist movement architecture and design. I show how these narrative tropes justify preservation interventions while making some histories more accessible and others less so. To analyze how preservationists remake the histories of white cities, I map the creation and transformations of the primary international preservation organization, the World Heritage List. These institutional changes led to the addition of white cities in Asmara, Rabat, and Tel Aviv based on preservationists' adaptations of the three narrative tropes. I then show how these same narrative tropes are appropriated by local preservationists to remake the histories of race and colonialism in white cities. By drawing attention to the ways that the histories of race and colonialism are remade through the intersections of individuals, institutions, and forms of knowledge, the project shows how knowledge on the modernist movement is implicated in the constitution of power in the World Heritage List and in consolidating privileged subject positions. Moreover, my analysis opens up questions on the co-constitution of institutions, forms of knowledge, and individual subject positions. Lastly, the analysis demonstrates that individuals have the potential to challenge – rather than to uphold – the constellations of power etched into white cities. I show one instance of architectural preservationists challenging these structures of power in the preservation effort of Les Abattoirs in Casablanca in 2009-2013.

History / D. Litt. et Phil. (History)