Revolutionary Values, Property Rights, and Racial Formation

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts of political philosophy, property theory, disaster recovery, and racial formation across 5 lecture transcripts.

Second Treatise on Government

A 1689 work of political philosophy by John Locke asserting that legitimate government power is grounded in the social contract to protect natural rights to life, health, liberty, and possessions.

Labor Theory of Value (Lockean)

The philosophical premise that human labor, rather than nature itself, creates economic and moral value by mixing human effort with raw land and uncultivated resources.

Possessive Individualism

A conception of society as an atomistic marketplace where individuals are free to accumulate unlimited property and exercise free will with minimal obligation to the state or community.

Agrarian Populism

A political vision championed by Thomas Jefferson advocating for the broad, equitable distribution of public domain lands into small family parcels to sustain a democratic citizenry.

Acculturation

The process by which an individual or group adopts the dominant cultural values, language, patterns, and social norms of a host society.

Assimilation

The structural and institutional incorporation of a group into mainstream social, economic, political, and civic institutions.

Disaster Capitalism

A concept formulated by Naomi Klein describing the practice of exploiting national crises and environmental disasters to rapidly push through market-oriented, neoliberal economic reforms.

Property (MacPherson)

A social process consisting of enforceable rights and obligations in relation to a thing, rather than the physical thing itself.

Tenure System

A system of formal or informal rules, customs, and laws that allocates, governs, and regulates property rights within a society.

Sovereignty

Supreme political authority within a geographic territory, which in the United States constitutional framework is fundamentally vested in the people.

Usufructuary Rights

Limited property rights that grant the right to use and enjoy the fruits or benefits of a resource without damaging or destroying the resource itself.

Procedural Justice

Fairness and equitable access to decision-making institutions and democratic processes that resolve disputes and allocate societal resources.

Distributional Justice

The fair and equitable allocation of societal benefits, economic resources, public goods, costs, and environmental risks across communities.

Ideological Racism

A system of explicit or implicit ideas, beliefs, and stereotypes that asserts a social and moral hierarchy grounded in perceived biological differences.

Institutional Racism

Discriminatory policies, administrative practices, and entrenched patterns operating within a single specific institution.

Structural Racism

Racially coded disparities in access to power, resources, and opportunity that persist across interconnected social, political, and economic institutions.

Multiple Lines of Defense (MLOD)

A regional coastal planning framework combining natural coastal features like barrier islands and marshes with structural engineering to attenuate storm surge risks.

Bonnet Carré Spillway

A flood control structure upstream from New Orleans designed to divert Mississippi River floodwaters into Lake Pontchartrain, impacting salinity and local fisheries.

De Facto Sacrifice Zones

Peripheral or marginalized geographical areas onto which the environmental hazards, infrastructure risks, and economic costs of core urban developments are offloaded.

Racial Formation

The sociohistorical process by which racial categories and identities are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed over time.

Racial Project

An effort that simultaneously interprets, represents, or explains racial dynamics and attempts to organize and redistribute resources along racial lines.

Racist Racial Project

A racial project that creates or reproduces structures of domination, hierarchy, and inequality based on racial signification.

Anti-Racist Racial Project

A racial project that resists, challenges, or seeks to undo structures of domination and inequality based on racial signification.

Racial Common Sense

An internalized, widely shared set of cultural assumptions and preconceived notions regarding race that shape everyday social interactions and perceptions.

Racial Despotism

A historic regime of racial rule enforced primarily through state coercion, overt legal exclusion, and violence, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Racial Democracy

A modern post-Civil Rights system of racial rule in which minority groups gain political rights, relying on cultural hegemony and consent rather than direct legal coercion.

Cultural Hegemony

The process described by Antonio Gramsci by which a dominant class maintains power by projecting its worldview so effectively that subordinate groups accept it as common sense.

Max Weber's Definition of Power

The opportunity existing within a social relationship that permits an actor to carry out their own will, even against resistance.

Social Construction of Race

The scientific consensus that racial categories are sociohistorical products pegged to historical contexts like colonialism, rather than objective biological realities.

Scientific Racism

A debunked 19th- and 20th-century movement within anthropology and biology that attempted to use pseudo-scientific methods to prove innate racial hierarchies.