Hajar Yazdiha | |
---|---|
Born | 1983 (age 40–41) Berlin, Germany |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Virginia Brooklyn College University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Occupation | Sociologist |
Employer | University of Southern California |
Notable work | The Struggle for the People's King |
Website | hajaryazdiha |
Hajar Yazdiha (born 1983) [1] is an American sociologist focusing on the politics of inclusion and exclusion with regard to ethno-racial identities. [2] She is the author of the 2023 book, The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. [1] [2] [3]
Yazdiha was born in Berlin to political refugees from Iran. [1] She grew up in Northern Virginia. [1] She was inspired by a high school AP English teacher who wrote her a note saying, "You are one of a handful of true academics. Speak up and use your voice." [1]
Yazdiha enrolled in the University of Virginia, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English in 2005. [1] [4] She was particularly interested in the work of Black writers, including W.E.B. du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. [1]
After spending six years in New York City, Yazdiha graduated from Brooklyn College with a master's degree in sociology. [1] [5] [4] She continued to study sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a master's degree in 2013 and a doctorate in 2017. [1] [5] [4]
Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. [2] [5] She is affiliated with the school's Equity Research Institute. [5] [6]
In May 2023, Yazdiha published her first book,The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, which explores how the words of Martin Luther King Jr. have been co-opted and sanitized. [3] [7] [8] She was first inspired to write the book when reading coverage of the Abigail Fisher case against the University of Texas at Austin, in which she saw the words of King "were being misappropriated to claim affirmative action was anti-white racism." [2]
In addition to her articles in academic journals, Yazdiha has written editorials about King, civil rights, and related subjects for a number of publications, including The Conversation , [9] The Hill , [10] the Los Angeles Times , [11] and Time . [12]
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
Black supremacy or black supremacism is a racial supremacist belief which maintains that black people are inherently superior to people of other races.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, its stated mission is "to bring about equality for all people regardless of race, creed, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or ethnic background."
Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class. The term could also encompass other social phenomena which are not commonly understood as exemplifying identity politics, such as governmental migration policy that regulates mobility based on identities, or far-right nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic others. For this reason, Kurzwelly, Pérez and Spiegel, who discuss several possible definitions of the term, argue that it is an analytically imprecise concept.
James Morris Lawson Jr. is an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Alveda Celeste King is an American activist, author, and former state representative for the 28th District in the Georgia House of Representatives.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing how social and political laws and media shape social conceptions of race and ethnicity. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
No Name in the Street is American writer and poet James Baldwin's fourth non-fiction book, first published in 1972. Baldwin describes his views on several historical events and figures: Francisco Franco, McCarthyism, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The book also covers the Algerian War and Albert Camus' take on it.
Dorothy Cotton was an American civil rights activist, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a member of the inner circle of one of its main organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As the SCLC's Educational Director, she was arguably the highest ranked female member of the organization.
Khalilah Sabra ( is an American advocate, attorney, and author best known for her work with refugees in the Middle East and literary contributions to the Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg series Transgression: Cultural Studies and Education.
"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", also referred as the Riverside Church speech, is an anti–Vietnam War and pro–social justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. The major speech at Riverside Church in New York City, followed several interviews and several other public speeches in which King came out against the Vietnam War and the policies that created it. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and the editorial page writers of The Washington Post and The New York Times called the Riverside Church speech a mistake on King's part. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the Anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. It was written by activist and historian Vincent Harding.
Azadeh N. Shahshahani is an American human rights attorney based in Atlanta. She is the legal and advocacy director for Project South. She previously served as president of the National Lawyers Guild and director of the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Georgia.
Peniel E. Joseph is an American scholar, teacher, and public voice on race issues especially the history of the Black power movement. He holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in at the University of Texas at Austin. Joseph joined UT Austin in 2015 from Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he had founded the school's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD). He founded the second Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) on the University of Texas campus in 2016, and is director of the center.
Natalia Molina is an American historian and Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Fit To Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939,How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, and A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. In 2019, Molina co-edited a series of essays on the formation of race in the United States, Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, in collaboration with Daniel Martínez Hosang and Ramón Gutiérrez. She has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals and contributes op-eds in nationally circulated newspapers. She received a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship for her work on race and citizenship.
Multiracial feminist theory is promoted by women of color (WOC), including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis within feminist discourse.
Brittany Michelle Friedman is an American sociologist focusing on criminology, racial inequality, and incarceration. She is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and the Equity Research Institute. Her research intersects at the sociology of law, sociology of race, economic sociology, and criminal justice. Friedman is most known for her research on the Black Guerilla Family and the black power movement behind bars, and the financialization of the criminal legal system. She is an outspoken proponent of criminal justice reform and a frequent commentator on public media outlets. Her most notable project is a book manuscript tracing the relationship between the rise of the Black Guerilla Family in California, institutional logics, and racial oppression. Separate work includes studies of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system and policies such as pay-to-stay.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is an American sociologist. Her main areas of research are gender, migration studies, and Latino studies. She has authored several books, received numerous awards and honors, and contributed to the field through various talks, publications, and mentoring. In 2015, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association, International Migration Section, and in 2018 she received the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section.
Christian Robert Grose is an American political scientist. He is a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southern California, academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, and served as director of the Political Science and International Relations PhD Program from 2015 to 2018. He studies behavioral elite decision making in politics, racial and ethnic politics, public policy, voting rights, political representation, and legislative politics.
Toward a Du Boisian Framework of Immigrant Incorporation: Racialized Contexts, Relational Identities, and Muslim American Collective Action