Racialization: a defense of the concept

This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when “racialization” is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, “racialized group.” Racialization is often used as a synonym for “racial formation.” I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory is committed to racial ontology, but racialization is best understood as the process through which racialized – rather than racial – groups are formed. “Racialization” plays a unique role in the conceptual landscape, and it is a key concept for race eliminativists and anti-realists about race.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

The legitimacy of elite gatekeeping

Natasha Warikoo’s study of how students at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities view race and fairness highlights the vast differences between the U.S. and Britain with respect to perceptions of meritocracy by these winners in the competition for places in elite institutions. The strict enforcement of uniform standards for admission is seen as critical and legitimate at Oxford, whereas a more holistic approach in the U.S. – one that sees racial diversity as an important and desirable part of the institution’s culture and identity – is seen as critical to a “diversity bargain”. I question the sources of students’ ideas about race and the diversity bargain, suggesting that they may be rooted more in their pre-college experiences than in their life at university. I also raise questions about whether and how an admissions lottery would work to address some of Warikoo’s concerns.     

The Dolezal affair: race,gender, and the micropolitics of identity

ABSTRACT

This article treats the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined discussion of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation. I situate the Dolezal affair in the context of the massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks, which has significantly enlarged the scope for choice and self-fashioning in the domains of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. Anxieties about opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent identity claims have generated efforts to “police” unorthodox claims – as well as efforts to defend such claims against policing – in the name of authentic, objective, and unchosen identities. Instead of a shift from given to chosen identities, as posited by theories of reflexive modernity, we see a sharpened tension between idioms of choice, autonomy, subjectivity, and self-fashioning on the one hand and idioms of givenness, essence, objectivity, and nature on the other.     

Buddha's Painter

This study examines the relationship between media constructions of First and indigenous peoples, and the “performative primitives” who are employed in “cultural” villages in the South African province of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN), with specific reference to Shakaland where the TV series, Shaka Zulu, was filmed in the late 1970s. A Perceian‐derived semiotic method is applied in analysis of the nature of tourist encounters with performers, the relationship between the Western Same and the African Other, and anthropologists’ /observers’ studies as a kind of cultural tourist. Through a discussion of the relationship between science and priestcraft I offer a theory which accounts for new ways of thinking about relations between emotional and active rhetorical discourses. This new form of “scientific discourse” is argued so as to be couched within related discourses of “development”, “conservation”, and “eco‐tourism”.     

Race,class, politics,and the disappearance of work

“When Work Disappears” has shaped research agendas on poverty, racial hierarchy, and urban social and economic dynamics. That is a lot for one article, yet two issues warrant more analysis. They are the ways in which socially defined “race” – rather than or in combination with class – explains the impact of sustained joblessness, and the political behaviours that may emerge in response to work’s disappearance. I point to evidence showing that both race and class have independent associations with the loss of work in poor African-American communities, as well as interactive effects. In the political arena – too often neglected by sociologists studying poverty – sustained, community-wide joblessness or underemployment are associated both with withdrawal from political engagement and with the recent resurgence of right-wing populism. Even after several decades of intensive research, we have more to learn about the interactions of race, class, politics, and the disappearance of work.     

Theoretical perspectives on cinema in Africa: Culture,identity and Diaspora

The study of African cinema is often assumed to be the study of black film. This paper examines this notion with respect to definitions of Africa, questions of identity, and different historical discourses of resistance. Western psychocentric approaches to film criticism are criticized. The issue of authorship is revisited with the question: Can a white director make a film reflecting the “black” experience? This question is explored with reference to debates about Spike Lee's Malcolm X and South African director Oliver Schmitz's Mapantsula. In the process, J examine how meanings are articulated and rearticulated in specific contexts by both those who define them and audiences which interpret them. The articulations of “race wars” in the USA and South Africa respectively are discussed, as is the relationship between race and class in the anti‐apartheid struggle. The disarticulation of Black Consciousness in South Africa from its popularizer, Steve Biko, by film activists in the Mass Democratic Movement during the 1980s, provides a background for the emergence of “non‐racial” cinema. Reception is suggested as a more subtle means of film categorisation. Mapantsula, for example, though made by a mainly white crew, is understood by black audiences to be a film accurately reflecting the experience of the black oppressed in South Africa. Though reception is a dynamic response, shifting and responding to historical trajectories and new discourses, with interpretations fragmenting between different classes and class fractions at different times, such a strategy for area and cultural classification of films avoids the pitfalls of categories based on ideology, myth, race and language.     

Sex Cells: Gender and the Language of Bacterial Genetics

Between 1946 and 1960, a new phenomenon emerged in the field of bacteriology. “Bacterial sex,” as it was called, revolutionized the study of genetics, largely by making available a whole new class of cheap, fast-growing, and easily manipulated organisms. But what was “bacterial sex?” How could single-celled organisms have “sex” or even be sexually differentiated? The technical language used in the scientific press – the public and inalienable face of 20th century science – to describe this apparently neuter organism was explicit: the cells “copulated,” had “intimate contract,” “conjugal unions,” and engaged in “ménage ã trois” relationships. And yet, to describe bacteria as sexually reproducing organisms, the definition of sex itself had to change. Despite manifold contradictions and the availability of alternative language, the notion of sexually active (even promiscuous) single-celled organisms has persisted, even into contemporary textbooks on cell biology and genetics. In this paper I examine the ways in which bacteria were brought into the genetic fold, sexualized, and given gender; I also consider the issues underlying the durability of “bacterial sex.”     

‘To bring out the best that is in their blood’: Race,reform, and civilization in the journal of race development (1910–1919)

The Journal of Race Development [JRD], published out of Clark University in the United States between 1910 and 1919, aimed, in its founder's words, “to present … the important facts which bear upon race progress, and the different theories as to the methods by which developed peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped”. Its basic premise was that scientific knowledge could harness racial or civilizational “evolution” and turn it into “development”. This article examines that project, the conceptual apparatus that the JRD's writers and editors brought to bear on it, and how racial ideas informed their conceptions of development and progressive social change through elite scientific and political intervention. Central to this project was an organic notion of “civilization” in which “nature” and “culture” did not so much overlap as flow seamlessly one into the other.     

The rhetoric of Islamophobia: an analysis of the means of persuasion in Hege Storhaug’s writings on Islam and Muslims

Few actors have had a greater impact on the “framing of Muslims” as a social and political “problem” in Norway since 2001 than Hege Storhaug of the government- and corporate billionaire funded civil society organization Human Rights Service (HRS). Using the methodological tools of the “rhetorical branch” of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and applying the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, logos and pathos, we analyze the bestselling popular title on Islam and Muslims ever published in Norway, namely Storhaug’s self-published 2015 title “Islam – The Eleventh Plague”. We argue that Storhaug’s popular success must be understood in light of her rhetorical appeals to femonationalism, the critique of religion and “Enlightenment” values. We show how she in her writings incites fear of the Muslim “Other” through specific rhetorical devices and a positioning of herself as a defender of the “nation” and the “people” – against national and international “elites”.     

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.     

Possibility,legitimacy, and the new ontologies of choice: a comment on Brubaker

In Trans, Rogers Brubaker makes a major argument about the contentious politics of the contemporary self. In this commentary, I first lay out what is think is the solidity of the book’s contrasting tableau of the functioning of race and gender in American society and beyond. I then point to Brubaker’s bundling together of issues of legitimacy and issues of ontology and begin to imagine what alternative analyses can come out of their unbundling – suggesting that race and gender are perhaps more analogous social formations than Trans argues. Finally, I bring attention to the role of ontological hierarchy in the formulation and policing of identity claims and conclude that the return of biology and the new empire of choice may not be two parallel, independent developments but one and the same process. Theoretically, I amplify one of the book’s epistemological contributions by calling for a reflexive turn in social-constructionist thought.     

De-indigenized but not defeated: race and resistance in Colombia's Peace Community and Campesino University

Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia's Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José's peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José's farmers were “de-indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.     

Revisiting the rural/race debates: A view from the Welsh countryside

The analysis of the specific features of rural racism and rural/race issues is a developing field of study. Much of the debate and existing research focuses on demonstrating the “specificity” of rural/race issues and responding to the “rural ethnic subject” as the victim of racial exclusion and/or violence. Drawing on a study conducted in the north of Wales and work on Welsh narratives on race, this article seeks to revisit the rural/race debate and argues for its repositioning within wider discourses of British multiculturalism. It explores the conceptual basis of the rural racism debates, in particular seeking to qualify the notion of the “specificity” of rural/race matters within the context of the newly devolved nations and particular constructions of “the ethnic subject” in rural/race relations. It suggests ways in which the “rural” discourse on race decentres the dominant narratives of multicultural Britain and is contributing to its reformulation.     

Imagining race and nation in multiculturalist America

Post-1965 demographic changes in the United States [US] have brought blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans into direct conflict, raising the question of how and whether law and public policy should attempt to adjudicate conflicts among racialized minority groups. I argue in this article that for the past few decades, national political leaders in the US have promoted an official multiculturalist discourse that actually discourages Americans from naming and addressing these intergroup tensions. This discourse superficially reimagines race and nation – by moving from a biracial, black-white focus to a formal acknowledgment of multiracial difference – while refusing to acknowledge the complex interminority inequalities and antagonisms generated by this new diversity. How might we refocus national attention on the serious interminority conflicts and racial justice struggles unfolding around us? I consider resurrecting the traditional notion of racial hierarchy as a counter-narrative to official multiculturalist discourse before arguing instead for one which involves a more complex notion of “racial positionality”.     

Female college students and cosmetic surgery: an investigation of experiences, attitudes, and body image

This large, multisite study investigated female college students' experiences with and attitudes about cosmetic surgery. The study also assessed the relationship between several aspects of body image, including appearance satisfaction and investment and symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder, and interest in cosmetic surgery. Thirty (5 percent) of the 559 women surveyed reported that they had undergone cosmetic surgery. Two thirds of respondents reported knowing someone who had received cosmetic surgery, and approximately one third indicated that a family member had undergone surgery. Overall, participants held relatively favorable attitudes about surgery. Regression analysis suggested that a greater psychological investment in physical appearance and greater internalization of mass media images of beauty predicted more favorable attitudes toward cosmetic surgery. Fourteen women (2.5 percent) screened positive for body dysmorphic disorder based on the nature and severity of their self-reported body-image concerns. Results of this study provide new information on young women's experiences and attitudes about cosmetic surgery and how these attitudes relate to body image.     

From whiteness to diversity: crossing the racial threshold in bicentennial Argentina

This article examines recent transformations on the discourses of race and nation in bicentennial Argentina, which have shifted from the notion of a fundamentally white nation to an assertion of its racial and cultural diversity. I examine the production of race in contemporary institutional and non-institutional practices that challenge the discourses of modernity according to which Argentina is a white, homogenous and Europeanized nation. The article focuses on a set of cultural manifestations involving Japanese Argentines that – as non-traditional actors in the racial and national stages and as ‘desirable’ immigrants – reveal some inherent fissures in the current official narrative that ostensibly progresses from homogeneity to diversity, and from exclusion to inclusion. By observing the performativity of race and a non-constructivist understanding of race embedded within these cultural manifestations, I argue that the newly multicultural nation continues to inherit its mechanisms of racial production from the modern nation.     

LGBT+ Individuals’ Perceptions of Healthcare Services in Turkey: A Cross-sectional Qualitative Study

When accessing healthcare services, LGBT+ individuals are often exposed to segregating and marginalizing discourses. Knowledge about how such experiences are reflected in the moral world of LGBT+ individuals living in Turkey is limited. This study examined LGBT+ individuals’ lived experiences when utilizing healthcare services. The findings are discussed in terms of moral discourses related to LGBT+ individuals’ gender identity and sexual orientation. A qualitative field study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with fifty-five LGBT+ individuals from Turkish cities who were in contact with various non-governmental organizations that conduct studies on gender identity and sexual orientation. A questionnaire was administered with items on participants’ demographic information, experiences, behavioural patterns, and knowledge regarding healthcare services. The data were analysed thematically. The findings were evaluated within the framework of “access to healthcare service” theme related to “healthcare service demand” context. Additionally, the “interaction with physicians” theme was addressed in the context of “physician–patient/counselee relationship.” LGBT+ individuals state that they are exposed to stigmatizing and segregating discourses by healthcare professionals, which might pose an obstacle for adaptive health-seeking behaviours. These results suggest that physicians’ professional approach has a considerable influence on LGBT+ individuals’ capacity for utilizing healthcare services.     

Press discourses on Roma in the UK,Finland and Hungary

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from Central and Eastern Europe countries following the fall of communism. The authors have analysed left of centre and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were the foci of public debates during the last two decades. We also examined a common case study in 2013 (“blond Maria”) that was discussed throughout Europe. In each news paper, the constructions of Roma, local and migrant, and the changes to related discourses over the period were studied. In conclusion, we examine the multi-layered processes of social and political borderings in Europe which dominate discourses on Roma, “indigenous” and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent “European” construction of “the Roma”.