Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity formation: the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu

This paper proposes a new understanding of race as an artifact constructed from racist violence and the trauma it engenders. The paper applies Jeffrey Alexander's concept of ‘cultural trauma’, i.e. when ‘members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness’, to the case of Korean immigrant merchants who were victims of violence during the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of four white police officers charged with violently assaulting a black motorist. Though the violence was contained to distinct neighbourhoods, the larger society experienced the terror because of the mass media. Over time this media-event led to the construction of a new identity rooted in violence and trauma. Through an examination of various texts, this paper argues that the Korean-American collective consciousness shifted discursively from an identity rooted in nationality to one incorporating race.     

Apartheid's end: South Africa's transition from racial domination

South Africa's transition to inclusive democracy does not conform to the prevalent theories of either revolution, or élite controlled ‘pact‐making’ as in Brazil. As a country long divided between supporters and opponents of racial domination, the loyalty of the former prevented a revolutionary overthrow, and the resistance of the latter drove and impinged upon negotiations. To account for South Africa's transition, we must take cognizance of the history of racial domination as the central impediment to democracy in that country. I argue that such racial domination was encoded as a means of unifying white ethnic groups, previously at war. Over the course of this century, amidst ongoing tension, intra‐white conflict was diminished with policies unifying whites on racial grounds. But such policies, excluding blacks, provoked massive resistance. When white unity had been more largely achieved, and the nation‐state and its economy threatened by growing protest by the majority, apartheid was ended. This process conforms with the seminal argument of Dunkwart Rustow (1970), that democracy can be achieved only with greater ‘national unity’ gained through contestation.     

Spatial scale resolves the niche versus neutral theory debate

The 50‐ha long‐term forest plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama was ‘ground zero’ for the development of ecology's ‘neutral theory’ and comparisons with its ‘niche theory’ counterpart. In this issue, Garzon‐Lopez and colleagues used tree distributions at this site to recast the unresolved (and unresolvable) debate to show that observational scale drives the perception of which processes predominate.     

‘They should hire the one with the best score’: White sensitivity to qualification differences in affirmative action hiring decisions

This paper uses innovative survey questions from the 1998 Detroit Area Study to examine how whites communicate their views about racial matters across three affirmative action hiring scenarios. Results suggest that most whites prefer explanations for not hiring blacks based on the abstract and decontextualized application of the principles of liberalism. Justifications that were initially offered emphasizing qualification thresholds, broad criteria, and contextual concerns, usually in support of hiring the black applicant, were largely withdrawn when the scenario was changed from one with equal scores to one with scores slightly favouring the white applicant. Concrete and contextualized concerns about workforce homogeneity and the slightness of score differences were raised in a conciliatory manner when scores were equal, but then were seldom maintained when scores favoured the white candidate. Whites also more readily voiced opposition when the reason for hire was changed from ‘diversity’ to ‘make up for past discrimination’, offering ‘reasonable’ responses about ‘the past is the past’ that don't deny concrete historical events, but dismiss their connection to today's racial order. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the language of universalism and minimization of racism allow most whites to communicate their views about affirmative action using rhetorical strategies that seem reasonable and moral.     

Constructing racial difference through group talk: an analysis of white focus groups' discussion of racial profiling

Overtly racist statements are socially and politically unacceptable in the USA. Yet black people in the USA continue to experience discrimination and prejudice at both the individual and institutional levels. This paper examines white people's talk about race in focus groups from the North Carolina Traffic Violation Study. The participants discussed race obliquely, by talking about hypothetical behaviour related to crime and police profiling while largely avoiding direct mention of race. At the same time focus group members voice different expectations for white people and black people. By differentiating between behaviours expected from individuals perceived to belong to different racial groups, they reproduced racial difference. Focus group members legitimized racial profiling and did so using language that was largely ‘colour-blind’ and socially acceptable by attributing the disproportionately high rate of stops for black drivers to ostensibly non-racial factors. The groups used mostly colour-blind language, but the result was racializing discourse.     

Interracial status competition and southern lynching, 1882–1930

This article provides theoretical grounds and empirical evidence that different types of lynching in the post-Reconstruction South were driven by social processes at different levels of analysis. County-level analyses based upon new detailed data on lynchings in Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 reveal that ‘private' lynchings, perpetrated by small groups outside the public purview without manifest ritual, were related to whites’ interracial status and social identity concerns on the interpersonal level, whereas ‘public' lynchings, involving larger mobs and ritualized violence, appear unaffected by such dynamics. These results validate relational and interactionist perspectives on violence, lend support to calls for disaggregation in the study of racial, ethnic, and nationalist violence, and shed light on the intertwining of racial identity formation with the generation of racial inequalities. They also carry implications for the study of contemporary ethno-racial hate crime.     

Segmented political assimilation: perceptions of racialized opportunities and Latino immigrants' partisan identification

Abstract

To account for Latino immigrants' assimilation into the American political mainstream, I derive social psychological factors from the contextual notion of ‘modes of incorporation’ in the segmented assimilation literature. These social psychological factors, perceptions of racialized opportunities (PROPs), relate to immigrants' adoption of political party identities (i.e. Democrat, Republican). I test these PROPs factors utilizing the 2006 Latino National Survey (N=5,717 immigrant Latino respondents). Multinomial logistic regressions predicting party identification, compared to either ‘Don't Know’ or ‘Don't Care’ options, indicate that PROPs are significantly related to Latino immigrants' identification as either Democrats or Republicans. High levels of identification with perceived white opportunities are related to Republican identity and high levels of identification with perceived black opportunities differentiate Democrats from Republicans.     

Researching ethnicity,identity, subjectivity: anything but the four-lettered word

This article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in fieldwork and discusses the implications of this for analysing the data. Although the aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, in order to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience, the effects of ‘racial automatisms’ upon migrant subjectivities cannot be ignored. Racist effects are nonetheless distinguished from racist intentions. The ethnography elucidates the political potential of ‘race’ to foment critical reflection upon the relationship between an individual's personal and collective identities.     

John W. Burgess,the racial state and the making of the American science of politics

This article examines the place of racial ideas in the constitution of political science as an academic discipline in the USA. For the Gilded Age generation that built the first PhD-granting departments in political science in the country, ‘race’ was the source of sovereignty, the basis of democratic legitimacy and a tool for delineating democracy's borders. It was also an important element of that cohort's aspiration to a ‘science’ of politics, distinct from what they viewed as the ‘abstract and formal’ theorizing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, while the brand of racialism that characterized this founding moment came to seem outmoded within a few decades, in the 1920s political scientists seeking once again to claim an empirical, scientific basis for their discipline – and for American democracy – turned to new accounts and sciences of race.     

The hollow shell: Loïc Wacquant's vision of state,race and economics

Wacquant's ‘Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neo-liberal City’ makes important contributions to our understanding of the role of state in shaping patterns of racial domination under neo-liberal regimes. As important as his contributions are, however, two major flaws in his conceptual framework undermine the utility of his approach for either scholarly analysis or political intervention. First, Wacquant systematically and incorrectly downplays the role of capitalism in shaping the dynamics of racial domination under neo-liberalism. Second, Wacquant, by focusing on what he calls ‘hierarchies of honour’, misses the essence of the racial order in the USA and worldwide – a racial order that continues to promote white supremacy as a system of exploitation and domination.     

‘I'm black and I'll always be that way’: black identities through the lens of interracial intimacy

Early research on black racial identity development cautioned that close relationships with whites signalled an alienation from blackness and a subconscious acceptance that ‘white is right’. These assumptions mirrored popular media and political discourse suggesting that romantic relationships outside of one's racial group reflect a devalued or inauthentic racial self. More recent scholarly research presents a mixed picture about the role of interracial intimacy on black racial identities. Using in-depth qualitative narratives with forty-two interracially partnered African Americans, this article explores whether interracial intimacy recasts the meaning or intensity of black racial identities. Findings affirm that black racial identities are heterogeneous – some partners experienced blackness as a central, fundamental identity while others possessed ambivalent attachments to blackness. Across these experiences, however, adult interracial intimacy had at most an incremental influence on racial identity. Interracial contact during adolescence was far more influential because it allowed blacks to develop dimensions of white cultural identity.     

Race,ethnicity and social science

The contours and complexities of race and racism continue to confound the social sciences. This problem originates in the historical complicity of the social science disciplines with the establishment and maintenance of the systems of racial predation, injustice and indeed genocide upon which the modern world was built. All the social sciences originate in raciology and race management, a fact that is rarely acknowledged. A critical reappraisal of ‘mainstream’ social science’s theoretical and methodological approach to race is therefore overdue. The Ethnic and Racial Studies Review is the right venue for this rethinking. Andreas Wimmer’s distinguished oeuvre provides an appropriate ‘case’ of the tendency that this editorial essay seeks to revise. Concentrating on Wimmer’s 2013 Ethnic Boundary Making, whose publication was the subject of a highly laudatory 2014 issue of ERS Review, this essay criticizes the book as an instance of the problematic social science approaches mentioned.     

Place,scale and the racial claims made for multiracial children in the 1990 US Census

Multiracial children embody ambiguities inherent in racial categorization and expose fictions of discrete races. Nevertheless, parents of multiracial children were asked for the 1990 US Census to report a single race for their offspring. Using confidential 1990 Census micro-data, we investigate the choices parents made for the three most common racially mixed household types (Asian-white, black-white and Latino-white) in twelve large metropolitan areas. We find that context affects the reporting of children's racial identity. We examine these effects with models that incorporate three spatial scales: households, neighbourhoods and metropolitan areas. Model estimates reveal that racial claims made by parents of Latino- and Asian-white (but not black-white) children varied significantly across metropolitan area. A neighbourhood's proportion white increased the probability that parents reported their children as white, while a neighbourhood's racial diversity increased the probability that black-white parents claimed a non-white race (black or ‘other’) for their children.     

The (dis)similarities of white racial identities: the conceptual framework of ‘hegemonic whiteness’

This article examines the processes of white racial identity formation in the United States via an examination of a white nationalist organization and a white antiracist organization. Findings indicate that the construction of white racial identity in both groups is based on the reproduction of various racist and essentialist ideologies. The realization that there is a shared ‘groupness’ to outwardly different white identities has the potential to destabilize the recent trend that over-emphasizes white heterogeneity at the expense of discussion of power, racism and discrimination. As a resolution to this analytic dilemma, this article advances a conceptual framework entitled ‘hegemonic whiteness’. White identity formation is thereby understood as a cultural process in which (1) racist, reactionary and essentialist ideologies are used to demarcate inter-racial boundaries, and (2) performances of white racial identity that fail to meet those ideals are marginalized and stigmatized, thereby creating intra-racial distinctions within the category ‘white’.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

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.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

Inequality from the top down and bottom up: towards a revised Wacquant

In this response I focus on two major themes in Wacquant's trilogy: (1) punishment and the state; and (2) territorial stigmatization. I discuss evidence that supports elements of Wacquant's argument, while at the same time demonstrating the need for an account that brings mediating institutional processes of the state, violence, the civil sphere and neighbourhood mechanisms more fully into the larger theoretical picture. I conclude that ‘bottom-up’ processes of inequality must be integrated with ‘top-down’ forces of the state to advance our theoretical understanding of penality and spatial marginality in federated and unitary governments alike.     

Ethnic identity on display: West Indian youth and the creation of ethnic boundaries in high school

The black immigrant population in New York City has grown exponentially since 1990, such that West Indians now compose the majority of the black population in several neighbourhoods. This article examines how this ethnic density manifests among youth in high school, and how it has influenced ethnic identity formation among second-generation West Indians. My findings are based on twenty-four interviews and eight months of participant observation in two Brooklyn high schools from 2003 to 2004. The results show that in both schools, Caribbean island identities have become a ‘cool’ commodity within peer groups. Further, although it was important to express pride in one's island identity, these young people often blurred their national origin boundaries by drawing on Jamaican popular culture as way of projecting a unified ‘West Indian identity’. The research also uncovers evidence of a de-stigmatization of Haitianness as a way to incorporate them as cultural insiders into the larger Caribbean collective.