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.     

Colour-blindness and diversity: race frames and their consequences for white undergraduates at elite US universities

In this paper we bring together the literatures on frame analysis, the meaning of race and campus racial climate to analyse the race frames – lenses through which individuals understand the role of race in society – held by white students attending elite US universities. For most, the elite university experience coincides with a strengthening or emergence of the diversity frame, which emphasizes the positive benefits of cultural diversity. Still, many also hold a colour-blind frame, which sees race groups as equivalent and racial identities as insignificant. We highlight the ambivalence that these divergent frames create for student perspectives on affirmative action and interracial contact on campus. Our findings demonstrate the mutability of race frames. We also highlight the impact that institutions may have on individuals' race frames. The paper is based on in-depth interviews with forty-seven US-born white undergraduates attending Brown University and Harvard University.     

The state of ethnicity and the ethnicity of the state: Ethnic politics in Southeast Asia

Attitudes about racial inequality in the United States are often viewed through the lenses of discrimination and disadvantage. However, as whiteness studies suggest, systems of racial inequality produce both disadvantage and advantage. National surveys have documented explanations for African American disadvantage but have not collected data on explanations for white advantage. African American disadvantage and white advantage are two sides of the same coin – racial inequality. To understand attitudes about racial inequality, we need to know Americans' beliefs about both sides of the racialized system. This research uses national survey data to examine explanations for both sides of racial inequality and identifies which factors are believed to be most important in explaining white advantage, finding that racial attitudes are complex and are dependent upon the specific situation and context. This research will provide a valuable contribution to both whiteness studies and race relations research.     

How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality

The current debate over racial inequalities in health is arguably the most important venue for advancing both scientific and public understanding of race, racism, and human biological variation. In the United States and elsewhere, there are well-defined inequalities between racially defined groups for a range of biological outcomes—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, low birth weight, preterm delivery, and others. Among biomedical researchers, these patterns are often taken as evidence of fundamental genetic differences between alleged races. However, a growing body of evidence establishes the primacy of social inequalities in the origin and persistence of racial health disparities. Here, I summarize this evidence and argue that the debate over racial inequalities in health presents an opportunity to refine the critique of race in three ways: 1) to reiterate why the race concept is inconsistent with patterns of global human genetic diversity; 2) to refocus attention on the complex, environmental influences on human biology at multiple levels of analysis and across the lifecourse; and 3) to revise the claim that race is a cultural construct and expand research on the sociocultural reality of race and racism. Drawing on recent developments in neighboring disciplines, I present a model for explaining how racial inequality becomes embodied—literally—in the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals. This model requires a shift in the way we articulate the critique of race as bad biology. Am J Phys Anthropol 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

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”.     

Dividing and defending Ogden: the intersection of race making and space making in a diverse community

While researchers frequently link the construction of racial meanings with the construction of spatial meanings, studies of race have paid little attention to how other forms of space making affect racial divisions. This study, based on interviews collected while residents of Ogden, Utah travelled around their city, explores how collective attachments to place intersect with racialized divisions of it. Residents saw their community as divided into good (white) and bad (people of colour) areas. Yet, they also united as residents to defend the city against negative assessments. These multiple and shifting understandings, simultaneously dividing and uniting the city, suggest that other forms of spatial meaning making can challenge racialized definitions of space.     

Innovating inequity: if race is a technology,postracialism is the genius bar

ABSTRACT

In this essay I posit race as a kind of technology, one that creates parallel universes and premature death, requiring routine maintenance and upgrade. I suggest that David Theo Goldberg’s Are We Postracial Yet? is a story of innovation that expertly exposes the trade secrets of the social production of race. I argue that not only are technological and social innovation metaphorically linked; technoscience is also one of the most effective conduits for reproducing racial inequality, and so I extend Goldberg’s analysis to address the central role of science and technology in modern statecraft and racecraft. Finally, if postracial innovators are busily refurbishing racism to remake inequality, then those who seek radical transformation in the other direction, towards freedom and justice, must re-examine the default settings, rather than the routine breakdowns, of social life.     

U.S. racial and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century

The study of U.S. racial and ethnic relations is often reduced to the study of racial or ethnic relations. This article reveals the limitations of a focus on ethnicity or race, in isolation, and instead urges a new framework that brings them together. We consider three cases that have been conceptualized by the ethnicity paradigm as assimilation projects and by the race paradigm as structural racism projects, respectively: (1) African-American entrepreneurs; (2) the Mexican middle class; and (3) black immigrant deportees. We reveal the shortcomings of the ethnicity paradigm to consider race as a structural force or to acknowledge that structural racism conditions incorporation in marked ways; and the limitations of the race paradigm to take seriously group members’ agency in fostering social capital that can mediate racial inequality. Instead, we offer a unifying approach to reveals how ethnicity and race condition members’ life chances within the U.S. social structure.     

Reconstructing race and gender in American cosmetic surgery

While scholars have examined how cosmetic surgery can reinforce gender norms, the development of racially specific standards is a more recent phenomenon that has received less scrutiny. This article examines how cosmetic surgeons conceptualize race and its intersection with gender. Through analysis of eighty surgeon-authored procedural guides, I find that surgeons engage in what I term the biological construction of social difference, mixing discourses of biology and physical difference with social and cultural discourses to describe patient beauty ideals. Surgeons develop an expert discourse on race and gender that is simultaneously about difference and beauty. The development of “ethnic” specific cosmetic surgery standards enshrines a “white” default referent even as it opens the door to other configurations of physical appearance. Cosmetic surgery implies that physical markers of race and gender are mutable – literally, via the surgeon’s scalpel – even as it relies on and reinforces established notions of racial difference.     

A critical race theory approach to black American entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a growing literature has suggested that self-employment is a viable means of solving economic problems for a wide range of groups who are subject to poverty, discrimination and other disadvantages. Yet African Americans have not developed an ethnic economy large enough to solve many of their economic problems. To explore the question, this paper reviews three of the most common explanations for black Americans’ low rates of entrepreneurship: the cultural/psychological perspective, the ethnic enterprise perspective and the critical race approach. While the first two are widely accepted, neither approach identifies black Americans as a racial group, instead defining them as a cultural or ethnic group. Accordingly, neither apprehends the full impact of racial inequality in limiting black Americans’ entrepreneurial opportunities. Following a discussion of race-based obstacles to entrepreneurship, the paper concludes that the critical race view provides the most convincing explanation for black Americans’ limited entrepreneurial achievements.     

Racialized national identity construction in the ancestral homeland: Japanese American migrants in Japan

This article examines Japanese Americans in Japan to illuminate how ‘Japanese American’ – an ethnic minority identity in the US – is reconstructed in Japan as a racialized national identity. Based on fifty interviews with American citizens of Japanese ancestry conducted between 2004 and 2007, I demonstrate how interactions with Japanese in Japan shape Japanese Americans’ racial and national understandings of themselves. After laying out a theoretical framework for understanding the shifting intersection of race, ethnicity, and nationality, I explore the interactive process of racial categorization and ethnic identity assertion for Japanese American transnationals in Japan. This process leads to what I call racialized national identities – the intersection of racial and national identities in an international context – and suggests that US racial minority identities are constructed not only within the US, but abroad as well.     

Introduction: race critical public scholarship

In a climate marked by expanding scholarship in ethnic and racial studies alongside sweeping changes in universities and the conditions of academic work, we seek to explore the nature of and challenges for critically engaged research, teaching and scholarship on race and racism. In particular, we look at the connection between academic scholarship and political engagement and activity that we are calling race critical public scholarship. We situate the discussion within various recent debates about universities and ‘publics’, and the public orientation and reach of academic work. We set out three frames for these issues: the impact of social movements in establishing race and racism as legitimate topics of academic investigation and setting the agenda for race research; the differing role of academics as public intellectuals and scholar-activists in addressing and engaging with publics and race issues; and the scope and limits of public sociology in addressing the responsibilities and institutionalized power of the academy. We argue that each of these frames offers a partial insight, but that further work is needed based on cases and examples that explore the facility for and challenges of undertaking race critical scholarship.     

Race-centrism: a critique and a research agenda

This article reviews some of the most prominent books in the field of race studies in the USA and identifies their shared assumptions: that racial inequality is the primary principle of stratification in the USA; that is has transformed but not lessened since the civil rights era; that it can be explained by the racist inclinations of the white majority, which operates as a collective, strategic actor to preserve its dominance; and finally, that racial domination plays a similarly crucial role around the world. I explore what kind of questions would need to be answered in order to put these assumptions on firmer empirical and theoretical ground and outline a corresponding research agenda. Some empirical evidence is provided to question the assumption that race plays a dominant role around the world and is associated with more political inequality than ethnic divisions.     

On Are we all postracial yet?

ABSTRACT

If the postracial is a coherent formation, it is produced not by ideological lock-step but by distributed affinities and relations in a transnational space of interconnection and exchange. The neoliberal erasure of ‘?…?the structural conditions of racial reproduction and racist articulation’ (34) and the clouding of the historicity of racisms produces postraciality as ‘the illusion that the dream of the nonracial has already been realized’ (180). This illusion is familiar in writing on the postracial that focuses on the denial – be it through the averted gaze of ‘color-blindness’, or the official state prohibition of racism, or the triumphalism of strategic declarations of the ‘end of racism’ – of enduring racialized inequality. Goldberg’s advance is to explore how the illusion has become increasingly weaponized; that far from signalling the end of race, it represents an emergent ‘neo-raciality, racism’s extension if not resurrection’ (24).     

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.     

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.     

The racial formation of medieval Jews: a challenge to the field

Social science discourse on race and racism has limited itself through processes of periodization and temporal constructions of racial differences, and recent scholars continue to posit race and racism as effects of modernity rather than investigating its development prior to modernity. This article looks to present a challenge to contemporary understandings of the phenomena of race and racism through a historical investigation of Jews' relationship to medieval Christendom. Through the framework of racial formation (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994) I look to show how race as a marker of both corporeal difference and socio-political consequence was formulated over time through a rearticulation of Church doctrine which first positioned the inferiority of the Jew within their religious practices, to one which located their inferiority as inherently part of their soul and manifest upon their bodies – from fixable through conversion to incurable and diseased.     

Janus-faced race: Is race biological,social, or mythical?

As belief in the reality of race as a biological category among U.S. anthropologists has fallen, belief in the reality of race as a social category has risen in its place. The view that race simply does not exist—that it is a myth—is treated with suspicion. While racial classification is linked to many of the worst evils of recent history, it is now widely believed to be necessary to fight back against racism. In this article, I argue that race is indeed a biological fiction, but I critique the claim that race is socially real. I defend a form of anti-realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups mistakenly believed to be races. I argue that this is the most attractive position about race from a metaphysical perspective, and that it is also the position most conductive to public understanding and social justice.