Old Stereotypes New Convictions

Despite improvements in the position of ethnic Chinese in the reformasi era, critical and negative perceptions of them persist among prominent pribumi personalities, particularly in recent years. These include leaders of several Islamic organizations, nationalists who harbour suspicions about foreign powers, and some who were in mid-career and/or were well placed in the last years of the Suharto era. This latter group consists of retired senior military officers, senior scholars, as well as current and former senior government officials. The ethnic Chinese are often portrayed as outsiders who are already dominant economically, and who are trying to be politically dominant as well. Furthermore, it is often claimed that ethnic Chinese tend to be loyal towards China. At the same time, there are others, including politicians affiliated with pro-government political parties, high-ranking officials, leaders of NGOs sympathetic to President Jokowi, as well as advocates of multiculturalism (many of whom are scholars and Muslim leaders), who believe that Chinese Indonesians are first and foremost Indonesians. The evidence they cite to support this belief varies, from past heroic actions by ethnic Chinese to the identity constructs of Chinese Indonesians, which is usually based on Indonesia or some Indonesian region.

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

By 2030 there will be about 70 million people in the United States who are older than 64. Approximately 26 percent of these will be racial and ethnic minorities. Overall, the older population will be more diverse and better educated than their earlier cohorts. The range of late-life outcomes is very dramatic with old age being a significantly different experience for financially secure and well-educated people than for poor and uneducated people. The early mission of behavioral science research focused on identifying problems of older adults, such as isolation, caregiving, and dementia. Today, the field of gerontology is more interdisciplinary. When I'm 64 examines how individual and social behavior play a role in understanding diverse outcomes in old age. It also explores the implications of an aging workforce on the economy. The book recommends that the National Institute on Aging focus its research support in social, personality, and life-span psychology in four areas: motivation and behavioral change; socioemotional influences on decision-making; the influence of social engagement on cognition; and the effects of stereotypes on self and others. When I'm 64 is a useful resource for policymakers, researchers and medical professionals.

How can a developing, democratic and predominantly Muslim country like Indonesia manage its foreign relations, while facing a myriad of security concerns and dilemmas in the increasingly complex post-Cold War international politics, without compromising its national interests and sacrificing its independence? Approaching this problem from the vantage point of the Indonesian foreign policy elite, this book explores the elite's perceptions about other states and the manner in which these shape the decision-making process and determine policy outcomes. The combined qualitative and quantitative research strategy draws on a unique series of in-depth interviews with 45 members of the Indonesian foreign policy elite that included the country's (present and/or former) presidents, cabinet ministers, high-ranking military officers, and senior diplomats. Among all state actors, Indonesian relations with the United States and China are the highest concern of the elite. The leaders believe that, in the future, Indonesia will increasingly have to manoeuvre between the two rival powers. While the United States during George W. Bush's presidency was seen as the main security threat to Indonesia, China is considered the main malign factor in the long run with power capabilities that need to be constrained and counter-balanced.

Eyewitness research has focused mainly on stranger identification, but identification is also critical for the "familiar stranger", and understanding how variability in an eyewitness's familiarity with the perpetrator may influence recall and recognition accuracy will facilitate swifter and more just resolutions to crime. Familiarity and Conviction in the Criminal Justice System examines the notion of familiarity between an eyewitness/victim and a perpetrator, ranging from complete unfamiliarity (as with a total stranger) to a very familiar other. Authors Joanna Pozzulo, Emily Pica, and Chelsea Sheahan define what is meant by "familiarity" in an eyewitness context and how it has been operationalized and manipulated, exploring factors that may interact with familiarity and examining jurors' perceptions of it. The first half of the book draws on various sub-areas of psychology to understand familiarity against the backdrop of eyewitness identification: social psychology theories of how familiarity is established; cognitive psychology and its theories of recognition; face processing literature; and eyewitness literature. The second half of the book surveys system and estimator variables that influence identification, such as lineup procedures, interviewing techniques, the role of age, race, and more; as well as how familiarity is weighed in juror decision-making. A final chapter issues a call for continuing research examining the notion of familiarity and its impact on the criminal justice system.

When a woman survives a deadly assault by her male abuser by using lethal self-defense, she often faces a punitive criminal justice system—one that largely failed to respond to her earlier calls for help. In this book, Elizabeth Dermody Leonard examines the lives and experiences of more than forty women in California who are serving lengthy prison sentences for killing their male abusers. She contrasts them with other women prisoners in the state and finds substantial differences. Leonard's in-depth interviews reveal that the women are slow to identify themselves as battered women and continue to minimize the violence done to them, make numerous and varied attempts to end abusive relationships, and are systematically failed by the systems they look to for help. While in jail, these women receive liberal dosages of psychotropic drugs, damaging their ability to aid in their self-defense. Moreover, trials and plea bargains feature little or no evidence of the severe intimate abuse inflicted upon them. Despite a clear lack of criminal or violent histories, the majority of women found guilty of the death of abusive men receive first- or second-degree murder convictions and serve long, harsh sentences. Leonard concludes the book with a discussion of policy implications and recommendations arising from this research.

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in Black and white “peoplehoods.” Some of the white ones, commanding the nation’s “public square,” structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of “ethnicking,” was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing. This Was America is a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic’s public square.

A key concern in postwar America was “who's passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.