Liberalism and racism: an ‘elective affinity’?

This appraisal of David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín's Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas argues that there is no ‘elective affinity’ between liberalism and racism, which is the core argument of the book. The notion of ‘elective affinity’, which the authors borrow from Max Weber, requires a structural homology between the ‘electively’ related elements that just does not exist in this case. The relationship between both is entirely contingent, ‘racism’ being a doctrine of inter-group relations while ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine of intra-group relations, with no consideration of how the boundaries of the group are constituted.     

Is there a post-racism? On David Theo Goldberg’s conjunctural analysis of the post-racial

ABSTRACT

I comment on David Theo Goldberg’s Are We all Postracial Yet? by interpreting it as a programmatic essay towards a new conjunctural analysis of a globalizing racism, and as an emerging globalizing dialogue against racism. In the spirit of Goldberg’s book I relate these two modes of critical engagement in order to open a global perspective through which a relational understanding of racism can be formulated with respect to two neoliberal contexts, continental Europe and the United States. To this end I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar and in particular his early consideration of ‘neo-racism’.     

Looking for immigration law

Culling the Masses by Professors David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín is an impressive work that makes important scholarly contributions. It analyses the trend in the USA, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina away from explicit racial discrimination in immigration laws. One layer of the book's argument examines how ‘vertical’ (domestic) and ‘horizontal’ (external) forces led these countries to abandon explicit racism. In another layer, the book argues that this anti-racist turn was not a product of democracy. Instead, racist immigration laws were often the product of democratic influences and institutions. The nuanced examination of external influences on national immigration laws in Culling the Masses is an invaluable contribution. However, its inconsistent definition of ‘immigration law’ across countries leaves incomplete both its assessment of racism in the present-day immigration laws, and in turn, its assessment of the relationship between democracy and racism.     

Charles Mills for and against liberalism

Charles Mills both severely criticizes and reluctantly accepts liberal political theory’s approach to race and racism. In this new book, he develops contract theory’s understanding of race and racism in the effort to resuscitate liberalism from the racist deathbed on which it lies. To do this he must wrestle with political forms of black resistance that comport uneasily with liberalism, at best: nationalism notably, but also other types of racially oriented collective subjectivity, for example, identity politics. The book represents a major advance in Mills’s thought, but his work remains uneasy about the instability of race and the flexibility of racism.     

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.     

A polyethnic London carnival as a contested cultural performance*

This article argues that the theoretical problem of the new racism thesis, as originally formulated in the 1980s, was the account of the discursive change it proposed and the role and significance of Powellism in this process. In offering a modification of the thesis I highlight the significance of the use of anecdotal accounts of the plight of ordinary English people in areas of black settlement as central to the re-articulation of racialized common sense in Powellism. I go on to argue that the particular discursive form of the racialized anecdote is one that is developed within Parliamentary debates from at least the mid-1950s onwards and that Enoch Powell is not the author but the elite beneficiary of this ideological work. I suggest that this Commons' sense informs and makes possible the success of the campaign for exclusion of black Commonwealth migrants prior to Powellism, and that Powell fashions his own elite/populist version of such narratives in 1968. Offering an account of racism as a discursive fiction, I argue that the anecdotal form of political racism in post-war Britain is a political and ideological response to the public prohibition on 'race' talk in public space. In offering a tentative theory of post-'race' signification which is consistent with empirical evidence, I argue that the 'moment' of re-articulation of racism in post-war politics is one consistent with the evacuated space of the prohibited notion of 'old' racism.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia

My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism – that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives fail in their analysis of contemporary racism. They posit backward attitudes as the main hindrance to the eradication of racism and displace racism as a constitutive feature of modern political forms onto individual and collective sensibilities. Instead of the fast track diagnosis of racism that animates liberal anti-racism, I suggest that an analysis of racism should integrate attention to the common elements of modern racism across political regimes and the historical particularities that shape public and political subjectivities in concrete places.     

Towards unifying racial and ethnic paradigms

Bridging the divide between the ethnic/assimilation and the race literatures has long vexed sociologists. Valdez and Golash-Boza are to be commended for the intellectual effort they display in this article to engage this messy and contentious relationship. The distinction between the ethnic paradigm which produces assimilation projects and the racial paradigm which produces structural racism projects is important. I further this by noting that the process involved in the racial paradigm is racialization. I engage three examples: Mexican Americans, African-Americans, and white Americans. Together, these provide clarity to the discussion of how to pursue a unified approach.     

Folk conceptualizations of racism and antiracism in Brazil and South Africa

Abstract

Folk conceptualizations of racism can be defined as ordinary people's understandings of the sources and persistence of racism. They function as equalization strategies – by denying the legitimacy of racism – and guide beliefs regarding antiracism strategies. I explore folk explanations of racism among black professionals in Brazil and South Africa by drawing on sixty interviews with members of these groups. In Brazil, racism is understood as an historical lingering, a product of ignorance, which will disappear with time and education. In South Africa, racism is viewed as more resilient, as a part of human nature and as a consequence of the competition for resources. These explanations of racism are closely related to the antiracism narratives that are salient in these two contexts: while Brazilian respondents affirm their belief in racial mixture and moral education, South African respondents are more uncertain about the possibilities of weaker racial boundaries in their country, relying on institutional constraints as their main antiracism strategy.     

Rereading The Empire Strikes Back

This piece reviews key aspects of the volume The Empire Strikes Back in order to reconsider the approaches to analysing state racism and economic crisis and to suggest parallels for our time. The piece examines the manner in which the authors seek to position an understanding of racism at the heart of any class analysis. The piece also considers the representation of black feminism in the collection.     

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.     

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.     

Getting respect or getting along with stigma?

By paying attention to the apparently minor forms of stigmatization, Getting Respect uncovers an underworld of threats that contribute to shape the sense of being disqualified and enlarge our understanding of racism and discrimination. In this paper, I engage with the main findings and argument of the book, especially the comparative dimension, questioning the status of the Israeli component of it. How “assaults on worth” that are key in this book are related to discrimination remain to be disentangled. One open question after reading this great research is whether we are facing a reformation of racism, with the new public debate on microaggression being both a symptom and a parameter of this evolution, or the book is a contribution to a deeper understanding of the expression of stigmatization in the same context of “racism without race” or “Laissez faire racism”.     

Racial comparisons,relational racisms: some thoughts on method

The dominant method in studies of race and racism across different geographic and temporal instances has been comparative. This, I suggest, has been predicated on a set of assumptions about the discreteness of the instances. By contrast, I argue that comparativism misses deeper and larger issues about the workings of race and racism fuelled by the relations between racial configuration and racist conditions across times and places. I trace the varying methodological modalities of comparativism and relationality in the study of race and racisms, their contributions and shortcomings, contrasts and connections.     

A Plethora of ‘suitable enemies’: British racism at the dawn of the twenty-first century1

In this article, I begin by looking at older forms of British racism before addressing myself to some newer forms – anti-asylum-seeker racism, xeno-racism and Islamophobia. I argue that in contemporary Britain there are a plethora of ‘suitable enemies’. Given that contemporary British racism is multifaceted, and in order to set the scene for newer forms of racism, I begin by contextualizing them alongside older forms of racism, while also demonstrating that these older forms continue to flourish. For conceptual clarity, I deal separately with colour-coded racism, non-colour-coded racism, and what I will call hybridist racism.     

Critical realism,agency and sickle cell: case studies of young people with sickle cell disorder at school

Critical realism suggests that historical structures may operate as underlying generative mechanisms but not always be activated. This explains the near-absence of references to racism by black students with sickle cell disorder (SCD). Through case studies we show how latent mechanisms are not activated, and how social actors come to develop corporate agency. Themes discussed include: wider/historical racisms (carers' own experiences of overt racism at school); conscious actions (moving away from a school where racism was experienced); awareness of anticipatory retaliation (multiculturalism as a form of societal inoculation against accusations of racism); naming racism as an emergent strategy (when communal discussions enable multiple negative experiences to be framed and named as racism); and ‘passing’ (not ostensibly experiencing racism if one is sufficiently light-skinned). Critical realism suggests how racism may be structuring the experiences of students with SCD at school even in the absence of specific accounts by young people.     

Species recognition by five macaque monkeys

Sixteen monkeys of five macaque species (Macaca fuscata fuscata, M. mulatta, M. radiata, M. nemestrina, andM. arctoides) pressed a lever to see a variety of pictures (35 mm slides) of seven macaque species including their conspecifics. The subjects were allowed to see the same picture for the duration of the lever press and were able to see the same picture repeatedly by pressing the lever within 10 sec after the previous release of the lever. When 10 sec passed after releasing the lever, the next picture was set on the slide projector. All monkeys exceptM. arctoides and two infantM. fuscata fuscata pressed the lever to see their conspecifics for the longest duration. For all of the adult subjects, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) based on the mean duration of lever pressing responses (D) and the mean interval between the responses (I) revealed that the data for conspecific stimuli were distributed at significantly different locations from those for at least one of six close species on a two-dimensional space constructed with D and I. These results suggest that adult macaque monkeys visually discriminate their conspecifics from close species based on the still images of them.     

Computer Simulation of Hydrogen Adsorption on Graphitic Materials

Abstract

I was delighted and honoured to have been asked to participate in the meeting organised by Nick Quirke to celebrate David Nicholson's achievements in the field of molecular simulation. I was a PhD student with David (and Neville Parsonage) between 1987 and 1990. The experience was sufficiently agreeable that I returned to do a further two years of postdoctoral research with David between 1992 and 1994.