Darron T. Smith

Drawing on systemic racism theory, white racial framing and the notion of bad faith as the connecting, justifying thread between ideals of freedom and equality and actions realizing unfreedom and inequities, this essay explores the alchemy of race, masculinity, and racialized oppression and its consequences for Black men past and present in United States society. This essay’s aim is to trace the historical ideologies and cultural practices, relations, and normative standards that have contributed to, and hence must be challenged to confront, the inequitable, race-based relations of power, and privilege at the root of institutionalized injustices. To do so, this essay interrogates the dissonance of bad faith as a corrective mode of truth telling to highlight and tap the equity potential of Black men’s collective, historical rejections of the White mainstream’s conflicting definitions and deceptive reasonings requisite for pushing toward racial justice, healing, and peace.

College sports is a multi-billion-dollar business, and universities are looking for ways to remain competitive, including recruiting and retaining athletes from historically underrepresented groups to predominantly white institutions (PWI), many of which have a documented history of excluding non-white students, including blacks, indigenous peoples, and other people of color (often referred to as BIPOC). This article will examine the legacy of the racist teachings, past controversies, and compromises of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormons) along with persistent struggles to shake off its 130-year-old racist past in efforts for its flagship school, Brigham Young University, to stay competitive in the lucrative Big 12 Athletic Conference. Deeply ingrained in the LDS culture is a politic of religious conservatism. Politics has often been intertwined with organized religion with much influence, and the LDS faith is no different. The cumulation of these interlocking systems generates thoughts, attitudes, and feelings that foster a racial climate at Brigham Young University where black students have reported feeling unsafe and unsupported. While this is a well-documented problem at predominately white institutions (PWIs) across the country, BYU is in many ways unique, given the discriminatory overt policies and practices employed for generations. We contend that the LDS Church’s history of racial marginalization and exclusion of black people made its way into the sports consciousness of the church’s flagship school and is not likely to change anytime soon. Understanding religion in the tradition of Charles Long as an orientation and utilizing Derrick Bell’s notion of racial realism are critical to our analyses. The confluence of politics, religion, race, and sport cannot be easily untangled.

Psychedelic medicine is an emerging field that examines entheogens, psychoactive substances that produce non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is currently in phase-3 FDA clinical trials in the United States (US) and Canada to treat the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). MDMA is used in conjunction with manualized therapy, because of its effectiveness in reducing fear-driven stimuli that contribute to trauma and anxiety symptoms. In 2017, the FDA designated MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy,” signaling that it has advantages in safety, efficacy, and compliance over available medication for the treatment of trauma-, stress-, and anxiety-related disorders such as PTSD. In the US and Canada, historical and contemporary racial mistreatment is frequently experienced by Black people via a variety of macro and micro insults. Such experiences trigger physiological responses of anxiety and fear, which are associated with chronically elevated stress hormone levels (e.g., cortisol and epinephrine), similar to levels documented among those diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. This paper will explore the benefits of entheogens within psychedelic assisted-therapy and their potential benefits in addressing the sequelae of pervasive and frequent negative race-based experiences and promoting healing and thriving among Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC). The author(s) discuss the ethical responsibility for providing psychedelic-assisted therapy within a culturally competent provider framework and the importance of psychedelic researchers to recruit and retain BIPOC populations in research and clinical training.

Objective: To examine whether racial, gender, and ethnic salary disparities exist in the physician assistant (PA) profession and what factors, if any, are associated with the differentials.Data Sources/Study Setting: We use a nationally representative survey of 15,105 PAs from the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA).Study Design: We use bivariate and multivariate statistics to analyze pay differentials from the 2009 AAPA survey.Principle Findings: Women represent nearly two‐thirds of the profession but receive approximately $18,000 less in primary compensation. The differential reduces to just over $9,500 when the analysis includes a variety of other variables. According to AAPA survey, minority PAs tend to make slightly higher salaries than White PAs nationally, although the differences are not statistically significant once the control variables are included in the analysis.Conclusions: Despite the rough parity in primary salary, PAs of color are vastly underrepresented in the profession. The salaries of women lag in comparison to their male counterparts.

In this chapter, we use the concepts of emotional labor or emotion work to examine the experiences of transracial families – white families rearing Black adoptees. We focus on the emotion work done by the parents to inculcate and develop positive racial identities for their adoptive children as their adoptees experience racial mistreatment. We also use the concept of white racial framing to examine strategies for effectively coping with racial mistreatment. African Americans have more emotion work than the members of dominant group because of their status as stigmatized minorities in American society. African Americans adopted by white families have even greater emotion work because they tend to have the extra burden of living in predominately white communities where there are fewer people of color to serve as positive role models in the socialization process.

In this article, the authors examine White parents’ endeavors toward the racial enculturation and inculcation of their transracially adopted Black children. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the authors identify and analyze themes across the specific race socialization strategies and practices White adoptive parents used to help their adopted Black children to develop a positive racial identity and learn how to effectively cope with issues of race and racism. The central aim of this article is to examine how these lessons about race help to connect family members to U.S. society’s existing racial hierarchy and how these associations position individuals to help perpetuate or challenge the deeply embedded and historical structures of White supremacy. The authors use the notion of White racial framing to move outside of the traditional arguments for or against transracial adoption to instead explore how a close analysis of the adoptive parents’ racial instructions may serve as a learning tool to foster more democratic and inclusive forms of family and community.

Jan Shipps; Black and Mormon, Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 37, Issue 4, 1 November 2006, Pages 520–521, https://doi.org/10.2307/25443433

This essay is an intensely personal account of a teaching experience in Utah. It argues that being African American, progressive and Mormon poses unique challenges in the Mormon-dominated institutions of higher education in Utah. Little known outside ‘Mormondom’, the LDS Church forbade blacks from holding the priesthood until 1978, based on the belief, which persists today, that black skin represents the manifestation of a ‘divine curse’ placed on black people. The author spends a lot of time in the classroom directly confronting this sort of overtly racist discourse. His article shares anecdotes about confronting religiously based racism, and explores, in particular, the resistance of African-American Mormon students to counter-hegemonic discourses.