‘There’s just places ya’ don’t wanna go’: the segregating impact of hate crime against Native Americans

Between 1999 and 2001, I interviewed or surveyed nearly 300 Native Americans in seven states, in an effort to uncover insights into the prevalence, dynamics, and local contexts of hate crime as experienced by Native Americans living in remote, rural reservations. One of the predominant themes that emerged revolved around one of the most damaging effects of the ongoing racial harassment and violence that threatens them on a daily basis. What I have observed is that hate crime has become an institutionalized mechanism for establishing boundaries, both social and physical. It reinforces historical patterns of withdrawal and isolation, in short, segregation. Through violence, the threat of violence, or even through the malevolent gaze, Native Americans are daily reminded that there are places in which they are not welcome. For too many American Indians, the perception, if not the reality of ‘what’s out there’ has its intended effect of keeping people in their place.     

The politics of China's peasant revolution

Abstract

Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of “peasant nationalism,” emphasizes the importance of the Japanese invasion for rural mobilization in China. Mark Selden, by contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime policies—the “Yenan Way”—as the key to revolutionary victory. Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.