Abstract
The time period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s witnessed the rise of a “market-centered agenda” in domestic and global relations that has ushered in the neoliberal age.1 Neoliberal ideology is grounded in a privileging of the individual, the free market, and the noninterventionist state. Central to neoliberalism is the assumption that individuals’ freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market. American neoliberalism is characterized by the fluid movement of capital across regional and national boundaries in a proverbial “race to the bottom.” Here, low-wage local, regional, or national economies attract capital, with jobs subsequently being moved from place to place, “leaving disarray and unemployment where jobs have vanished and dislocations and worker exploitation where those jobs are relocated.”2 Caring effectively for the souls of black folks in the neoliberal age thus requires a historical analysis of the various factors that contributed to its emergence in the aftermath of the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
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Notes
Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 20.
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Mark L. Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 56–57.
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Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 217.
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James H. Cone, Martin &; Malcolm &; America: A Dream of a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 286.
See Anthony Badger, “Martin Luther King, Jr.” and Patricia Sullivan, “Civil Rights Movement” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience , ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999).
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 91.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 390.
Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 14.
George Winslow, Capital Crimes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 142.
Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 16.
David Wilson, Inventing Black on Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 44.
G. Galster and J. Daniell, “Housing,” in Reality and Research: U.S. Urban Policy Since 1960 , ed. G. Galster (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1996), chap. 5, 95.
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Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 424.
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Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity , Anniversary edn (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 119.
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Also see Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 169 and 172.
Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 469–470.
Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 175.
Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 195.
Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 199.
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© 2016 Cedric C. Johnson
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Johnson, C.C. (2016). Race to the Bottom. In: Race, Religion, and Resilience in the Neoliberal Age. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_2
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