Bringing the margins into the middle: reflections on racism,class and the racialized outsider

This paper explores Virdee’s account of how racialized minorities in socialist movements ‘played an instrumental role in trying to align struggles against racism with those against class exploitation’ (p. 164). In so doing, Virdee makes an important intervention at a time when popular historians and other ideologues are colluding in the elevation of myths and – no doubt in their view – noble lies that preclude these stories. Moving through theoretical debates concerning the relationships between race and class, the nature and form of sociologies of ‘outsiders’, to political issues of mobilization, Virdee’s book successfully brings in from the margins an account the multi-ethnic character of the working class in England from the very moment of its inception.     

Fixing the cultural fallacy

ABSTRACT

In this review essay, I place The Asian American Achievement Paradox, by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou within a broad framework that reaches beyond immigration studies. I consider the book’s main contributions surrounding immigrant hyper-selectivity and stereotype promise in relation to class background, noting how the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of variations in educational achievement within and among ethno-racial groups. I note the relationship between stereotype promise and Robert K. Merton’s classic understanding of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Finally, I draw attention to the way in which race and culture have been conflated thus creating new intellectual challenges for those interested in reaching greater levels of precision in analysis.     

Sources of resistance to stem nematode, Ditylenchus dipsaci (Kühn) Filipjev, in species of Medicago and Trifolium

The putatively resistant lucerne cv. Euver was as susceptible to 11 English and 11 French populations of ‘lucerne race’ stem nematode, Ditylenchus dipsaci, as the susceptible cv. Europe. The ‘resistant’ cv. Vertus showed some resistance to five of the English and four of the French populations but was just as susceptible as Europe to three English and four French populations. Twelve annual species of Medicago were very resistant to a mixture of two English and two French populations of the nematode. None of 13 perennial spp. of Medicago was very resistant to the same mixture of nematodes but resistant plants were identified in M. borealis, M. dzhawakhetica, M. glutinosa and M. romanica. Twenty six spp. of Trifolium were resistant to a mixture of two English and two French populations of ‘red clover race’ stem nematode.     

Outsiders and insiders: changing boundaries of radicalism,racism and class

Virdee's book adds enormously to our understanding of two interconnected processes: the ways in which racism and nationalism in England/Britain became totally intertwined and embedded in working-class views of the world, and how at certain key moments those racially cast out from that depressing maelstrom may become the champions of an anti-racist internationalism. I am fractionally less negative than the author about the seemingly total hold of racism/nationalism on the whole working class, and less certain about racialized ‘outing’ as the key to the DNA of universalist anti-racists. Using the Garibaldi mobilizations of 1862–64, I suggest he may have underestimated the potential and reasons for ‘insider’ working-class resistance to racism/nationalism, and suggest greater caution in arguing an association between ‘racialized outsiders’ and internationalist views.     

Discontinuous intersections: second-generation immigrant girls in transition from school to work

This article provides a theoretical framework for analysing discrimination against second-generation immigrant girls in education and the labour market by proposing an intersectional approach. Drawing upon selected elements of the findings of our Neskak Gora Project – a qualitative research conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK and funded by the EC Daphne III Programme – we show that the intersection of class, gender and ‘race’/ethnicity, which is at play at the structural, institutional and discursive levels of systems of intersectional discrimination, works in variable ways. While gendered educational structures seem partly to benefit female immigrant youth at school, gendered disadvantages are experienced particularly in the transition to the labour market. This highlights the necessary acknowledgement of the ‘discontinuity’ of axes of inequality that are manifested in different ways, according to specific contexts, institutional settings and moments of the individual's life cycle.     

Opening a dialogue on race,class and national belonging

In this essay, I respond to the reviewers of my book, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, including Bhattacharrya, Frost, Jefferys, Meer, Roediger and van der Linden. In particular, I elaborate further on the epistemological foundations of the book, including my aim to stretch the concept of working class to accommodate both ethnic diversity, and the significance of racism and anti-racism within it. Then, I state the case for how the concept of the racialized outsider can help transform our understanding of the key signposts of English working-class history. The significance of the anti-racist accomplishments of the 1970s and 1980s are also given further consideration alongside the relevance of the book and its arguments to the present environment – a period where those accomplishments have started to be reversed.     

LIBRARY LETTERS

Lampert, W. & Sommer, U. (1997) Limnoecology: the ecology of lakes and streams. Oxford University Press, Oxford. xiv+382 pp., figs, tables, index. Hardback: Price £37.50. ISBN 0-19-509592-8. This book is an English translation of a volume that was first published in German in 1992 and is the result of a collaboration between Winfried Lampert, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology at Plon, and Ulrich Sommer, Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Kiel. The book was written in response to the criticism that most textbooks in ecology use examples that are drawn, almost exclusively, from terrestrial systems. The authors’ intention was to produce a book on limnology that would highlight fundamental principles and would thus be of interest to a much wider audience. The first chapter, ‘Ecology and evolution’, develops the theme by explaining that one of the main aims of ecology is to investigate not only how organisms are adapted to their environment but also why they have developed particular adaptations. A number of important concepts, such as the difference between proximate and ultimate factors, are discussed and illustrated with examples drawn from the aquatic literature. The second chapter, ‘Methods of ecological research’, describes some of the methods used to test hypotheses and includes advice on the design of laboratory and field experiments. Some of this advice may appear elementary, but experienced researchers would do well to remember that ‘correlation analysis can be used to draw numerical, but not functional, relationships.’ Chapter 3, ‘Special features of aquatic habitats’, has clearly been included for the sake of completeness. The basic physical and chemical characteristics of lakes are discussed in time-honoured fashion and a few pages devoted to the special characteristics of running waters. The organization of Chapter 4, ‘The individual in its habitat’, is rather unbalanced and clearly reflects the authors’ areas of special interest. The best sections in the chapter are those devoted to the functional responses of aquatic organisms and the feeding mechanisms of the microcrustacea. Chapter 5, ‘Populations’, combines an introduction to the basic principles of population ecology with a review of more recent issues, such as the concept of r and K selected organisms. The factors that control population size are discussed in a simple but informative way, and are illustrated with examples drawn from studies of phytoplankton and zooplankton. Chapter 6, ‘Interactions’, is the longest in the book and clearly reflects the author's interest in the temporal dynamics of planktonic crustacea. The chapter starts in a fairly traditional way by reviewing the competition models of Lotka-Volterra and Tilman but then pursues a number of specialist issues, such the impact of chemical signals (kairomones) on the growth of rotifers. Chapter 7, ‘Communities’, is largely devoted to a discussion of the ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ controversy that has preoccupied plankton ecologists for several decades. The authors provide a commendably dispassionate overview of the historical argument and highlight some recent studies that try to reconcile these opposing views. The chapter includes a brief discussion of the causes and maintenance of diversity and ends with a somewhat displaced account of the river continuum concept. Chapter 8, ‘Ecosystem perspectives’, is another chapter that appears to have been written as a matter of duty. The carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and silica cycles are, however, described before the authors return to the terra firma of plankton succession and the ‘climax’ concept. Chapter 9, ‘Final remarks’, is only three pages long but leaves the reader in no doubt as to why this book was written. The authors clearly view the recent trend towards more marketable ‘applied’ research with considerable concern: ‘The objective of this applied ecology is not the development of generalized theories, but the optimization of human living conditions.’ In a concluding paragraph, they point out that the relationship between ecology and environmental science can be compared to the relationship between physics and engineering. ‘Physics provides the fundamental materials from which the engineers make products.’ This is not a new definition of ecology, but we are left with the clear implication that this book would not have been written if the authors had spent most of their time working in the ‘engineering’ department! Like any book, its structure and content is strongly influenced by the specialist knowledge of the writers. The authors are at their best when they describe recent developments in their own fields of interest. The least satisfactory sections are the chapters and sections devoted to lake physics, chemistry and the spatial organization of limnetic systems. For example, in Chapter 3 the authors include a figure that purports to show that small vertical variations in water temperature can produce micro-layers of phytoplankton in the near-surface ‘mixed zone’. Thermally induced layers of this kind are periodically recorded in lakes, but in this example there is no evidence of any physical discontinuities. In 1892, Forel, a Swiss Professor, defined limnology as ‘the oceanography of lakes’. This book has not been designed as a textbook in that classical sense but provides an excellent introduction to those aspects of limnology that have a strong ecological bias. The book is well produced with clear line drawings and includes boxed sections of text that explain some technical issues in more detail. The translater should be congratulated for producing a text that reads very well in English and, as far as I can judge, conveys the philosophical as well as the factual message of the original text. Overall, it is a valuable, indeed elegant, addition to the existing English texts, which I would also recommend to those interested in general ecological theory.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

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.     

Ricochet pollination in Senna (Fabaceae) – petals deflect pollen jets and promote division of labour among flower structures

• Naturalists Fritz and Hermann Müller hypothesised that heteranthery often leads to a division of labour into ‘feeding’ and ‘pollinating’ stamens; the latter often being as long as the pistil so as to promote successful pollination on the bees’ back. In many buzz‐pollinated species of Senna, however, the so‐called pollinating stamens are short and not level with the stigma, raising the question of how pollen is shed on the bees’ back. Here we explore a mechanism called ‘ricochet pollination’. We test whether division of labour is achieved through the interaction between short lower stamens and strongly concave ‘deflector petals’.
• We studied the arrangement and morphology of the floral organs involved in the ricochet pollination, functioning of the flowers through artificial sonication and observed the interactions between bees and flowers in the field.
• The middle stamens are adapted to eject pollen downwards, which can be readily collected on the bee mid legs. Most of the pollen is ejected towards the deflector petal(s). Pollen from this set of stamens is more likely to contribute to pollination. The pollen grains seem to ricochet multiple times against the deflector petals to eventually reach the bee's back.
• The pollen ricochet mechanism promotes a division of labour by involving additional floral organs, such as petals, reinforcing the Müllers’ division‐of‐labour hypothesis. However, alternative, non‐multiexclusive hypotheses could be explored in genus Senna and other angiosperm species.

     

Not just class: towards an understanding of the whiteness of middle-class schooling choice

There is increased attention to questions of class in studies of education, particularly among those who adopt a Bourdieuian perspective. This paper explores the burgeoning literature on school choice and class (in particular middle ‘classness’) to argue that there are serious analytical and sociological costs to a singular focus on class without due attention to race. Examining interview material, it will show instances where the racialized nature of schooling choice has been ignored or overlooked. It argues that viewing the literature through the lens of race and class is imperative for an understanding of the complexities of class and white middle classness in particular.     

The racial body is gendered: a comment on Emirbayer and Desmond’s The Racial Order

ABSTRACT

In The Racial Order, Emirbayer and Desmond offer a systematic theory of race. The social psychology of race is central to the theoretical framework of this book. In their discussion of bodily aesthetics, bodily cognition, and bodily morality, they neglect the important theoretical insights and empirical contributions of feminist sociologists who have studied the racialized and gendered body. The exclusion of the intersectional research of feminist sociologists weakens their analysis of ‘relational social epistemology’. Intersectional research conducted by feminist sociologists during the past decade should be central to any theoretical discussion of the social psychology of race in North America, which is their primary focus.     

Labour's ‘strange blindness’ and the end of Jubilee

ABSTRACT

This essay responds to David Roediger's Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. After a brief examination of the central themes of the book, I turn to the author's emphasis upon political agency. I argue that this emphasis is necessary, given the political and scholarly aims of the book. At the same time, I suggest that the agency depicted in Seizing Freedom was simultaneously constrained by the cultural, political, and social forces discussed in Roediger's earlier companion volume, The Wages of Whiteness. I end the essay with a short discussion of the labour leader William Sylvis that attempts to synthesize insights from Seizing Freedom and The Wages of Whiteness in order to explain the ‘strange blindness’ that led white labour to systematically ignore and repress the activity of black workers.     

The racialised and classed constitution of English village life

This article explores ethnographically the ‘village’ as a stage for the enactment and reproduction of a racialised set of white middle-class social and moral values. To do this I draw upon interview material with middle-class whites who live in a suburban ‘village’ on the border of rural Leicestershire and urban Leicester in England. I explore the way in which my co-conversationalists reflexively and imaginatively defend their area's ‘village’ identity through a discourse that ‘others’ its wealthy Asian residents. Although these raced others have achieved economic parity with the more affluent wealthy white middle-class residents, they are imagined to lack the ‘proper’ middle-class values of respectability and decorum, which are associated with the traditional white rhythms of English village life.     

Can there be a truly systematic and comprehensive theory of race?

ABSTRACT

In this ambitious new book, Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond contend that there has never been a truly comprehensive and systematic theory of race. They go on to argue that ‘Much of our best work no longer tells us how to understand or reconstruct racial dynamics but simply gives us concrete proof of their continuing significance’ (3). To what extent does The Racial Order theoretically advance existing theorizing of race? An important contribution – and a central plank in the book – is the way in which a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena is discussed and interwoven into the analysis. The authors draw most heavily on Bourdieu, Dewey, and Durkheim, in their elaboration of the racial order.     

Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives

This article engages critically with concepts of ‘skill’, ‘expertise’, and ‘capacity’ as they operate as markers of distinction and domination and shape migratory labour relations among road construction workers from across South Asia in the Maldives archipelago. The article examines roadwork at three levels: the professional biographies leading to ‘flexible specialization’ rather than technical expertise amongst Maldivian managers; the technical expertise and social incorporation of ‘skilled’ Sri Lankan supervisors; and the key material expertise of ‘non-skilled’ Bangladeshi labourers in precarious employment. Whilst discussions of South Asian labour migration have been dominated by caste and class, this article argues that it is important to consider how the cultural production and understanding of concepts such as ‘expertise’, ‘capacity’, and ‘exposure’ at worksites can (also) become distinguishing factors in (hierarchical) migratory labour relations.     

How can we meet ‘the demands of the day’? Producing an affective,reflexive, interpretive,public sociology of ‘race’

This article argues for a public sociology of ‘race’ that can respond to Weber's injunction that sociology should ‘meet the demands of the day’. While the author's version of these demands – for a society of autonomous individuals and groups, living as equals – is utopian, the main argument offered here is that a sociology of ‘race’ should be a modified version of Burawoy's ‘public sociology’. Adopting Bauman's notion of a sociology of interpreters, a further suggestion is that this type of sociology needs to be reflexive and affective. Based on an analysis of his own sociological education in the late 1960s, his participation in social and political movements in which ‘race’ was key, and with brief reference to the sociology of ‘race’, the author argues that the emotions that circulated in each arena need to be examined, acknowledged and incorporated if theoretical and practical progress is to be made.     

Books received,August 1st to October 31st 1989

Abstract

This article focuses on two important questions. First, how can we explain changes in the employment position of England's racialized minority groups over the past three decades? And second, why have these changes taken place at a different pace for different minority groups? It is argued that much of the increase in Asian self-employment represents working-class accommodation to the inferior conditions of employment available under neo-liberal modernity rather than evidence of upward social mobility as current orthodoxy claims. It is also contended that the growing representation of minorities in junior non-manual work was driven by anti-racist activism around a racialized ‘black’ identity and confirms the continuing significance of ‘race’ in the English labour market. By unravelling the complex relationship between the geographical distribution of different minority groups, their educational qualifications, anti-racist activism, and racism, the study establishes why such employment change has taken place at a different pace for different minority groups.     

How selective migration enables socioeconomic mobility

ABSTRACT

Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s new book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, revives Asian American scholarship from a period of relative stagnation and elevates the discussion from the morass of cultural essentialism. Its major contributions are to extensively articulate: (1) how much cultural explanations are actually class-based explanations and (2) how selective migration creates the conditions that promote social mobility. This book resolves empirical paradoxes in the scholarship and engages broader debates on race, immigration and inequality.     

The empire disintegrates

This short article comments on the Symposium in ERS vol. 37/10 in which current scholars revisited the book The Empire Strikes Back and its legacy. The article comments on the book's assertion that a historical background is necessary to understand the absorption of migrant labour into capitalist societies, and notes the prevailing ignorance of the history of imperialism in UK schools and society. It discusses the current assumptions that if schools teach ‘fundamental British values’, racial and religious conflicts will somehow be minimized.