Abstracts of Contributions and Profiles of the Authors ~
1. The arrangement of abstracts corresponds to the Table of Contents. Each abstract is followed by the author's profile.
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The Review of Black Political Economy/Summer 2005
Abstracts B l a c k W o m e n and Racial A d v a n c e m e n t : The E c o n o m i c s o f Sadie Tanner Mossell A l e x a n d e r
Nina Banks This article discusses economic speeches of Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics (Pennsylvania, 1921). Circumscribed by racial and sexual discrimination from white and black institutions, Alexander was unable to obtain employment as an economist so she embarked on a career in law. Recent interest in her life by historians has focused on her milestones, her social activism, and her distinguished law career. However, there has been limited research on Alexander by economists. This article examines the extensive body of unpublished writings/speeches that Alexander gave to non-academic audiences that consisted primarily of African American women over a 40-year period. The author analyzes Alexander's speeches by contextualizing them in terms of late 19th- and early 20th-century black feminist thought as well as with the experiences of early women economists who were white. The particular attention that Alexander gave to the economic condition of African American women is one important way in which her research departed from her contemporaries in the economics profession. Alexander used her training in economics to challenge racial oppression in the United States. A b o u t the Author: Nina Banks is an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.
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Even the Errors Discriminate: How The Split-Population Model of Criminal Recidivism Makes Justice Even Less Colorblind
Brendan Cushing-Daniels In their 1989 paper on criminal recidivism, Schmidt and Witte develop the split-population model to capture a particular form of heterogeneity; that is, there are some criminals who will never repeat offend. This paper identifies and corrects the bias in the earlier model. While 54% of actual recidivists are nonwhite, the earlier model predicts that over 75% of recidivists will be non-white. The correction in this paper eliminates some, but not all, of the bias against non-whites in these predictions. Our results show that policymakers who, for example, consider parole decisions based on the constrained model will incorrectly deny parole to non-white offenders. About the Author: Brendan Cushing-Daniels is an assistant professor of economics at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA.
Book Review: Impr&oning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration, Mary Patillo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, editors
Mary King
About the Author: Mary King is Professor of Economics and Department Chair at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon.
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The Review of Black Political Economy/Summer 2005
SPECIAL SYMPOSIUM: The Black Presence in Mexico Organizer: William Darity
Afro-Mexicano Symposium: An Introduction
William Darity The very construction of the notion of the "mestizo" ("mestizaje") as the Mexican racial archetype--an admixture of Spanish ancestry and native ancestry-systematically omits the African origins of the Mexican population. Based upon longstanding American norms of race classification, there are regions of Mexico where people bear a phenotypical resemblance to African Americans. These include Veracruz, Oaxaca, and the Costa Chica zones in particular. Thus, it continues to be critical to recover Mexico's African past or, more precisely, Mexico's history as a black country.
About the Author: William Darity is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and adjunct faculty in sociology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is director of the UNC Institute of African American Research and is Research Professor of Public Policy Studies, African-American Studies and Economics at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University.
The African Diaspora through Ojos Mexicanos: Blackness and Mexicanidad in Southern Mexico
Bobby Vaughn Blackness and Mexican-ness exist in an uneasy tension in Mexico and this tension is apparent to blacks and non-blacks alike. This tension owes in large part to Mexico's nationalist preoccupation with race mixture, or mestizaje, which is understood by both blacks and non-blacks to be part and parcel of mexicanidad (Mexican-ness). While mestizaje has silenced blackness on a national scale, Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica live a black identity that is affected by, but not erased by such a national project. The meaning of blackness
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and Mexican-ness will continue to be contested and negotiated in the Costa Chica and in Veracruz, yet probably in dynamics that will afford Afro-Mexicans of both regions a new, more transnational self-consciousness.
About the Author: Bobby Vaughn is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Office of Mission and Diversity at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA.
Fading from Memory: Historiographical Reflections on the Afro-Mexican Presence
Ben Vinson 1II The field of Afro-Mexican studies is ironically older than the Mexican nation itself. This essay traces the contours of Afro-Mexican research from colonial times into the early national period. The impact of the writings of colonial administrators and chroniclers is assessed. The influence of the caste system is analyzed. The elimination of caste categories after Mexican independence is offered as an explanation why Afro-Mexicans have faded from the nation's historical consciousness.
About the Author: Ben Vinson III is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Penn State University and is the author of Bearing Arms for His Majes~: The FreeColored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2001), Flight: The Story of Virgil Richardson, A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico (Palgrave, 2004) and the co-author of Afrom(xico (with Bobby Vaughn, Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 2004).
Yanga and the Black Origins of Mexico
Sagrario Cruz-Carretero This article describes the historical roots and contemporary situation of Yanga, Veracruz--a community of black descendants of slaves who founded the first free black township on the American continent. It argues that the contemporary Carnival celebration in Yanga may be a factor in revitalization of black culture in the community.
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The Review of Black Political Economy/Summer 2005
A b o u t the Author:
Sagrario Cruz-Carretero, an anthropologist and professor at the Institute of Historical and Social Research, Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, has published extensively on Gaspar Yanga, the Mexican slave revolt leader.
