Suchergebnisse

To talk publicly about race remains taboo in France. Since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the French Republic has grounded its political identity on the theoretical equality of all its citizens, regardless of their origins. In practice, this "universalist" ideology tends to deny and neglect blatant racial inequalities among French citizens. Unlike in the United States in recent years, there has been no public discussion about whether France has turned "post-racial" since most white French people consider that their country never entered any sort of "racial era" to begin with. In fact, the French academic world is one of the few arenas in which debates over the issue of race have been accepted and sometimes encouraged.

For generations scholars have defined covert action as plausibly deniable interventions in the affairs of others; the sponsor's hand is neither apparent nor acknowledged. We challenge this orthodoxy. Turning the spotlight away from covert action and onto plausible deniability itself, we argue that even in its supposed heyday, the concept was deeply problematic. Changes in technology and the media, combined with the rise of special forces and private military companies, gives it even less credibility today. We live in an era of implausible deniability and ambiguous warfare. Paradoxically, this does not spell the end of covert action. Instead, leaders are embracing implausible deniability and the ambiguity it creates. We advance a new conception of covert action, historically grounded but fit for the twenty-first century: unacknowledged interference in the affairs of others.

Related Content: Isett, Head and VanLandingham (PAR July/August 2017)
Related Content: Mergel (PAR July/August 2017)

More than 50 years after Brown v. Board, African American students continue to trail their White peers on a variety of important educational indicators. In this article, we investigate the political foundations of the racial "achievement gap" in American education. Using variation in high school graduation rates across the states, we first assess whether state policymakers are attentive to the educational needs of struggling African American students. We find evidence that state policymaking attention to teacher quality—an issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority students—is highly responsive to low graduation rates among White students, but bears no relationship to low graduation rates among African American students. We then probe a possible mechanism behind this unequal responsiveness by examining the factors that motivate White public opinion about education reform and find racial influences there as well. Taken together, we uncover evidence that the persisting achievement gap between White and African American students has distinctively political foundations.