Everyday forms of racism in contemporary Ecuador: the experiences of middle-class Indians

This article studies anti-Indian forms of racial discrimination in present day Ecuador. Drawing on thirty eight in-depth interviews with middle-class Indians, this exploratory research analyses the different mechanisms of racial discrimination and the responses to it in a context of transition from a paternalistic system of racial domination to a possible democratization of racial and ethnic relations. The following dimensions of discrimination are examined: the site, the range of discriminatory actions and the responses. I also analyse how ethnic categories such as Indian, mestizo and white are constructed in Ecuador. The article concludes with a reflection on the obstacles of racism for democratization.     

South‐east Asian refugees in Paris: The evolution of a minority community

This research explores the intertwined construction of race and gender in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. Additionally, I argue that race and gender are inextricably linked. Exploring how meaning works in white supremacist discourse, this research provides an analysis of the construction of racial and gender difference within the framework of the equality versus difference dichotomy. Within this framework, difference requires hierarchy, so that any effort to redress inequality is posited as a threat to difference. The primary project of the white supremacist movement is the construction of white racial and gender identities as naturalized and hierarchized differences.     

Can I see your hair? Choice,agency and attitudes: the dilemma of faith and feminism for Muslim women who cover

This paper argues that the current climate of Islamophobia has burdened Muslim women who cover with additional problems in terms of their politics, their lived experiences and their life chances. It is the contention of this paper that the myths about the hijab have created a modern-day form of Orientalism that objectifies the women who cover and otherizes them as oppressed, perhaps exotic and possibly dangerous. Such stereotypical views, at times articulated by Western feminists, create stumbling blocks that bar the way to the feminist ideal of respect unity and community of goals.     

The nonlinear link between height and wages in Germany, 1985–2004

Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel, this article investigates the relationship between height and wages by gender. Unlike previous investigations, which have been limited to an examination of linear effects, this one finds that height influences on wages are curvilinear, and more so for men than for women. More specifically, it finds that women who are shorter than average and men who are somewhat taller than average, but not among the tallest, enjoy significant wage advantages. Furthermore, using Blinder's decomposition to determine two components of wage differences, we find that these differences can be partitioned into an endowment component and unexplained influences (discrimination). There is a difference between the public and private sectors and between men and women as to the degree of the latter effect. This investigation supports the hypothesis that short and very tall men employed in the private sector are disadvantaged the most. The outcome for women is less robust than for men.     

Neoliberalism and stories of racial redemption

Two contradicting ideas dominate political discussions of race in the United States. In the first, Americans of all political stripes glory in the idea that the country's race relations have improved, largely due to changes collectively labeled as ‘the civil rights movement.’ Yet when Americans move their gaze to broader issues—often presumed to be beyond “race”—of economics, public education, and civic life, they embrace a second, and seemingly opposed narrative of decline. There, social scientists have wedded this image of social decay into ideas of neoliberalism, which they take to be the state's steady disinvestment in public goods like education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation. Though the rise of civil rights and neoliberalism have overlapped historically, social scientists have shown determined reluctance to make any connection between the two; and further, few have been willing to see the two processes as interwoven and collaborating in the production of the contemporary political economic landscape. This essay argues that academic neoliberal discourse has unwittingly functioned to relieve civil rights institutions of any responsibility for current racial conditions in the US by taking critical attention away from how federal agencies and local politicians have implemented racial reforms. In the current scenario, neoliberalism is to blame for undermining or retrenching the nation's commitment to racial equality, and civil rights victories are the victim. Ethnographic and historical material on race relations in Fayetteville NC, USA, is presented to argue instead that the relationship between the two turns out to be much more complex.

Like one of the family: race,ethnicity, and the paradox of US national identity

The tensions between individual rights promised to US citizens and group discrimination targeted against African Americans and similar racial/ethnic groups constitute one enduring paradox of US society. This essay examines this paradox by exploring how a gendered family rhetoric contributes to understandings of race and US national identity. Using African American women's experiences as a touchstone for analysis, the article suggests that African American women's treatment as second-class citizens reflects a belief that they are 'like one of the family', that is, legally part of the US nation-state, but simultaneously subordinated within it. To investigate these relationships, the article examines 1) how intersecting social hierarchies of race and ethnicity foster racialized understandings of US national identity; 2) how the gendered rhetoric of the American family ideal naturalizes and normalizes social hierarchies; and 3) how gendered family rhetoric fosters racialized constructions of US national identity as a large national family.     

Equality and exclusion: ‘Racism’ in a Swedish town

Research on racism is prolific but ethnographic studies of what could be termed racism in everyday local social life are much less common. The article examines local Swedish classifications of difference and belonging in relation to meaning of racism and considers how ideologies of equality relate to forms of exclusion and racist expressions. The aim is to discuss the articulation of distinctions of exclusion and inclusion in everyday contexts through the presence of the refugee Other. The material is based on fieldwork conducted during the first half of the 1990s in a small town in central Sweden. The establishment of a refugee reception center in the town had concrete and symbolic repercussions on the local residents, making people's sense of belonging and processes of exclusion more openly conflictual.     

Concepts of race vanishing,movements of racism rising? Global issues and Austrian Ethnography

This article discusses a contradiction: while notions of race are disappearing from public and academic discourses, numbers of racist socio-political movements are rising. This paradox is examined, first, on a conceptual and methodological level, and some different uses of the relevant terms (e.g., ‘race’ and ‘Rasse’) between English- and German-language spheres are explored. Then, the paradox is assessed through an ethnographic case from Austria. The rise of racist and xenophobic attitudes during the 1990s is discussed for one region where explicit racist language was nevertheless minimal. The analysis relates this to the persistent reproduction of certain cultural practices. Local perceptions of ‘warrior monuments’ are taken as an example to argue that changes in official terminology may conceal, rather than disrupt, the emotional continuities of supremacist nationalism.     

Risk aversion and religious behaviour: Analysis using a sample of Danish twins

Economics offers an analytical framework to consider human behaviour including religious behaviour. Within the realm of Expected Utility Theory, religious belief and activity could be interpreted as an insurance both for current life events and for afterlife rewards. Based on that framework, we would expect that risk averse individuals would demand a more generous protection plan which they may do by devoting more effort and resources into religious activities such as church attendance and prayer, which seems to be in accordance with previous empirical results. However, a general concern regards the problems of spurious correlations due to underlying omitted or unobservable characteristics shaping both religious activities and risk attitudes. This paper examines empirically the demand for religion by analysing the association between risk attitudes on the one hand, and church attandance and prayer frequency on the other controlling for unobservable variables using survey data of Danish same-sex twin pairs. We verify the correlation between risk preferences and religion found previously by carrying out cross-sectional analyses. We also show that the association between risk attitudes and religious behaviour is driven by the subgroup of individuals who believe in an afterlife. In addition, when re-analysing our results using panel data analyses which cancel out shared factors among twin pairs, we find that the correlation found between risk aversion and religious behaviour is no longer significant indicating that other factors might explain differences in religious behaviour. Caution is needed in the interpretation of our results as the insignificant association between risk aversion and religious behaviour in the panel data analyses potentially might be due to measurement error causing attenuation bias or lack of variation within twin pairs rather than the actual absence of an association.     

Racist victimization among children in The Netherlands: the effect of ethnic group and school

Using data from a nation-wide study, this article examines the extent of racist victimization among Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese children (10-13 years) in The Netherlands. The responses indicate that ethnic minority children are more often victim of racist name-calling and social exclusion than are Dutch children. Furthermore, Turkish children are more likely to face racism than Surinamese and Moroccan children. Using multilevel analysis, the effects of multicultural education and the ethnic composition of the school were also examined. If teachers reacted to incidents, this had a positive effect on racism. Furthermore, multicultural education was positively related to reported experiences with racist victimization, but this effect was only found for the Dutch children. In addition, a higher percentage of Dutch pupils was related to less racist victimization of the Dutch and to more victimization of the three ethnic minority groups.     

Racialization: the genealogy and critique of a concept

Recently sociological analysis of what used to be identified as 'race' and 'race relations' has shifted to racism as an ideology and racialization as a process that ascribes physical and cultural differences to individuals and groups. While scholars have critically examined 'race' and 'race relations', the concept of racialization has received insufficient systematic attention. The purpose of this article is to trace the genealogy of concepts of racialization and deracialization and to demonstrate that the meaning of these designations has changed since their appearance in the late-nineteenth century to the emergence of racialization in contemporary debates on effects of racism; and to trace the different trajectories of racialization from the centre and from the periphery.     

Creationism in Germany and its Possible Cause

In a widely cited essay published in the journal Science (Aug. 2006), it was stated that in Germany a large majority of adults are convinced of evolution. Based on a new poll, I document that this conclusion is questionable. In Sept. 2005, 60.9% of the German population accepted naturalistic evolution, whereas 37.7% were creationists or adherents of intelligent design. Because among Christians of both confessions the percentage of anti-evolutionists is much larger than among atheists, I suggest that religious indoctrination of children may in part be responsible for the rejection of the concept of evolution, notably in the western part of Germany.

The limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’: stories from young South Africa

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with one another, this increased ‘contact’ does not amount to greater racial integration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which ‘whiteness’ continues to be privileged over ‘blackness’. The result is that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial ‘other’ than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcing their expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. While contact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict, racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrovertible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption that there exist different (biological) races which evince different forms of social behaviour and that these are essential properties of people rather than being historically or socially contingent.     

Cultural diversity and schooling

Ashley H. Robins, BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HUMAN PIGMENTATION, (Cambridge Studies in Biological Anthropology, 7), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xiii + 253 pp., £37.50.

Ulfried Geuter, THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF PSYCHOLOGY IN NAZI GERMANY. Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, v‐xxi + 335 pp., npl.

Clare Midgley, WOMEN AGAINST SLAVERY. THE BRITISH CAMPAIGNS, 1780–1870, London: Routledge, 1992, xii + 281 pp., £37.50.

Maryinez Lyons, THE COLONIAL DISEASE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF SLEEPING SICKNESS IN NORTHERN ZAIRE, 1900–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xvi + 335 pp., £50.00.

Wim van Binsbergen, TEARS OF RAIN: ETHNICITY AND HISTORY IN CENTRAL WESTERN ZAMBIA, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1992, 495 pp., £45.00.

Albert B. Robillard (ed.) SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS, London: Kegan Paul International, 1992, xvi + 507 pp., £45.

Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood (eds) ‘VIVA’: WOMEN AND POPULAR PROTEST IN LATIN AMERICA, London: Routledge, 1993, 270 pp., £12.99 pb; £40.00 hb.

Cindi Katz and Janice Monk (eds) FULL CIRCLES: GEOGRAPHIES OF WOMEN OVER THE LIFECOURSE, London: Routledge, 1993, 317 pp., £12.99 pb; £40 hb.

Hans van Amersfoort and Hans Knippenberg (eds), STATES AND NATIONS. THE REBIRTH OF THE ‘NATIONALITIES QUESTION’ IN EUROPE, Netherlands Geographical Studies 137, Amsterdam: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1991, 189 pp., Dfl. 29.50.

Elizabeth D. Huttman, Wim Blauw and Juliet Saltman (eds), URBAN HOUSING SEGREGATION OF MINORITIES IN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, xiii + 431 pp., npl.

Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano (eds) JAPANESE AMERICANS: FROM RELOCATION TO REDRESS, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1992, 264 pp., $17.95 US (paper only).

David J. O'Brien and Stephen S. Fugita, THE JAPANESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, 178 pp., £8.99 (paper).

Paul James Rutledge, THE VIETNAMESE EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, 173 pp., npl.