Property relations: alien land laws and the racial formation of Filipinos as aliens ineligible to citizenship

Because Filipino Americans are racially categorized as Asians today, many scholars presume that they were automatically included within the provisions of the alien land laws at the time of their legislation. The following article suggests that the racial status of Filipino Americans, during this early period, was much more ambiguous. Instead, most Americans perceived Filipinos in relation to Native and African-Americans. The Alien Land Laws (1913–1952) were, together with anti-miscegenation laws and the Tydings-McDuffie Act, a regime of legal policies that eventually transformed Filipinos into Asians by 1934. Meanwhile, their racial ambiguity provided early Filipino immigrants with significant opportunities to challenge their exclusion in American society, and especially the alien land laws.     

White doctors and nurses on racial inequality in health care in the USA: whiteness and colour-blind racial ideology

In this paper we report on an interdisciplinary project interviewing doctors and nurses about racial inequality in health care in the USA. We analysed data from interviews with twenty-two white doctors and nurses in which they were asked to offer explanations for racial inequality in health care. Results provide insight into how whiteness operates to provide white patients more often with appropriate health care and how colour-blind ideology can be adapted to accommodate naming white advantage and potential racial discrimination. However, even when naming mechanisms of white advantage in accessing resources, the white respondents avoided acknowledging how they are implicated in racial inequality in health care. We discuss the implications for understanding whiteness and colour-blind ideology.     

White families and race: colour-blind and colour-conscious approaches to white racial socialization

This paper examines the role that social context plays in mediating racial socialization in upper-middle-class white families. Outcomes of white racial socialization, as well as the process itself, depend in large part on the distinctive racial contexts designed by parents in which white children live and interact. I examine variation in white middle-school-aged children's common-sense racial knowledge and discuss the importance of exploring the social reproduction and reworking of racial ideologies and privilege in childhood.     

The politics of race and sport: Resistance and domination in the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement

Using the case of the African American Olympic protest movement that grew out of the crisis of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s, this article is an attempt to argue that work involving identity, culture and popular culture is crucial to the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world. A reconstruction of this movement demonstrates, first of all, how a cultural arena like sport can make it possible for otherwise powerless racial and ethnic minorities to draw attention to their cause. Of course, as with most insurgent movements, such initiatives ultimately (and often very quickly) come up against structural impediments that work to reject or absorb their challenge and reinforce the hegemony of the established regime. But the precise nature of the structural constraints operating in this particular case provides profound insight into the construction of social order in liberal democratic settings and the threat posed by cultural politics to this order. More specifically, I argue that athletic protest was overwhelmingly condemned and rejected because it threatened to rupture the homologies between sport culture and liberal democratic ideology that otherwise legitimated a fundamentally individualist, assimilationist vision of racial justice and civil rights in the United States. In more general theoretical terms, then, culturally‐oriented movements expose the ways in which domination itself is deeply structured in and through culture. The article concludes by suggesting that this, especially in an age when capital and power have discovered techniques to insulate themselves against traditional, materialist forms of resistance, is why cultural forums and identity politics have become primary sites of the struggle for hegemony.     

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.     

Fighting racism,battling burnout: causes of activist burnout in US racial justice activists

Social movement scholars have identified activist burnout – when the accumulation of stressors associated with activism become so overwhelming they compromise activists’ persistence in their activism – as a threat to movement viability. This phenomenological study on the causes of burnout among racial justice activists in the United States was designed to bolster understandings of burnout and inform strategies for sustaining racial justice movements. Thirty racial justice activists who had experienced burnout were interviewed. They described four primary burnout causes: emotional-dispositional causes, structural causes, backlash causes, and in-movement causes. Implications for activist and movement sustainability are discussed.     

Immigrant political socialization as bridging and boundary work: mapping the multi-layered incorporation of Latin American immigrants in Toronto

We present a longitudinal map of three overlapping organizational trajectories developed by Latin American immigrants in the city of Toronto. We propose the concept of bridging and boundary work to specify how new (1) intersectional political identities and organizational agendas are constituted by Latin American feminist women and artists in the interstice of (2) country-of-origin and (3) mainstream pan-ethnic organizations. Boundary work occurs as activists with intersectional priorities carve out a distinct political agenda; the ‘out-group’ relations based on a shared sectoral focus constitute bridging work. Tracing changes in the local and transnational political opportunity structures, we consider how negotiations over resources, representation and agendas between these three Latin American organizational forms generate multi-directional political learning and socialization and the coexistence of different Latin American political cultures. We define political socialization as in-group and out-group encounters between political cultures understood as civic toolkits or ways of doing politics.     

Peddling sport: liberal multiculturalism and the racial triangulation of blackness,Chineseness and Native American-ness in professional basketball

Abstract

Deploying liberal multiculturalist discourse, the media depicts professional basketball as a post-racial space where all talented players, regardless of their race, can thrive if they work hard. An analysis of the construction of non-white players in the 1930s and in 2010 demonstrates sport as modulated by racially charged discourse. As part of a liberal multiculturalist frame, the coding of basketball players as hero, threat and novelty serve to privilege whiteness and replicate racialized and gendered images that can be traced to the 1930s. In doing so, the article highlights how liberal multiculturalism involves racial triangulation and the simultaneous processes of hyper-racialization and de-racialization.     

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.     

Some observations about racial boundaries and the experiences of American Indians

The number of inter‐racial marriages has increased sharply in the last two decades. There are a number of factors that might account for this development ‐ for example, immigration, changing norms, and marriage market composition ‐ but one indisputable outcome has been a rise in the number of persons with multiracial backgrounds. This article argues that multiracial persons have a number of options about how they might identify their ancestry, and this is causing fluidity and instability in racial divisions that were once considered fixed and immutable. While this might be seen as a recent development, American Indians historically have had high rates of intermarriage with other racial groups. The experience of American Indians with regard to the dilemmas posed by shifting racial identities are discussed for the purpose of anticipating the experiences of other groups. In particular, these issues pose a number of challenges to public policies based on increasingly obsolete conceptions of race.     

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.     

Inflective and reflective whiteness in the sociology of race and ethnicity: a comment on an integrative framework for the field

Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza offer an integrative framework for the sociology of race and ethnicity to bridge a divide undergirding different, yet related perspectives in the field. Their work provides an initial roadmap for linking the cultural perspectives often taken in the study of ethnicity to the structural perspectives utilized in the study of race. The authors put these perspectives in dialogue with one another to elucidate the strength of integrating commonly used approaches in each area, while avoiding the pitfalls of relying only on one paradigm. Behind much of sociology’s theoretical developments to understand racial and ethnic groups’ experiences in US society, and in relation to global discussions of race and ethnicity as well, are influences of identity and ideological processes inflected and reflected by whiteness. This comment reflects on how these processes can shape future conversations considering the intertwined cultural and structural processes framing group experiences and life chances.     

‘Our bones are made of Iron’: the political ecology of Garhwali women's activism

In the Garhwal Himalaya of India's Uttarakhand State, a series of social movements emerged in the late 2000s to contest hydroelectric dams on a tributary of the sacred River Ganga. Within these opposition movements, men often took high‐profile leadership roles whereas women from a range of socio‐economic backgrounds formed the overwhelming base of participation at meetings, assemblies, and rallies. This article draws from event‐based participation and semi‐structured interviews to explore the diverse concerns that women gave to explain their engagements with opposition efforts. I counter essentialist frames and employ a feminist political ecology approach to argue that the gendered dynamics are attributable to historical, cultural, religious, and political‐economic influences. The article contributes to anthropologies of gender, environment, and social movements by taking an approach focused on disparities of practice and power that helps situate Garhwali women's roles in development contestations.     

A political body of civic and communal belonging: political memories in the creation of the Australian immigrant society

Any notion of political belonging is highly contested. Ultimately though, the political body of a society is shaped by contestation of two modes of belonging: civic and communal. In Australia, the relationship between these two modes of belonging has been negotiated through political conflicts, not least in reference to immigration, since the early years of European settlement. This article traces the trajectory of these conflicts by analysing political memories, specifically those of Australia Day commemorations, to engage with the underlying tension that constitutes the country's political body. Engaging with the long-standing civic/ethnic debate, it is argued that the actual relationship between civic and ethnic/communal belonging, rather than any separate references to them, is crucial to the specific constitution of sovereign political bodies, their particular form of social and political conflicts, and the ensuing implementation of policies, not least regarding migration.     

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.     

Changing racial boundaries and mixed unions: the case of second-generation Filipino Americans

I examine an understudied topic of intermarriage – nonwhite mixed unions. Drawing on a study of second-generation Filipino Americans, I compare how respondents in inter-ethnic (those partnered with other Asians) and nonwhite interracial (i.e. Latino, black, and non-Asian bi-racial) unions perceive racial boundaries, or their ‘racial schemas’. I argue that mixed unions can change how partners view racial boundaries. Drawing on phenotype, culture, and power position, both inter-ethnically and nonwhite interracially partnered respondents viewed themselves as different from whites. However, they differed in how they constructed nonwhite boundaries. Respondents in inter-ethnic unions drew on their Asian identity to distinguish themselves from Latinos and blacks, while informants in nonwhite interracial unions highlighted their Filipino identity to distance themselves from East Asians and align themselves with Latinos and blacks. These findings show that marriage affects racial boundary development and that mixed unions impact individuals’ racial incorporation.     

Sociology is an applied science,and the application is social change: a contribution to the discussion of Aldon Morris’ The Scholar Denied

I argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’ expulsion from academic sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century was not only animated by the gatekeepers’ desire to maintain academe as a whites-only domain. It also constituted an active effort to defend Social Darwinist dogma, which dominated (white) social science at that time, from the formidable challenge of a resourceful and scientifically superior perspective. The successful exclusion of Du Bois (and his growing legion of colleagues) allowed sociology to drift into functionalist dogma, with its immutable hierarchy and denial of sociology’s role in facilitating social change. The exclusion of Du Boisean analysis, which placed human agency – and especially subaltern groups – at the centre of social change – rendered sociological analysis irrelevant to addressing social problems and social justice, until the Civil Rights Movement in America broke down the walls of the sociological ghetto, allowing it to access the rich Du Boisean perspective.     

Organizational life and political incorporation of two Asian immigrant groups: A case study

Civil society is the foundation of a healthy democracy but its immigrant element has received little attention. This paper is a case study of immigrant organizations of highly skilled Asian Indians and Chinese immigrants in a suburban town of Edison, New Jersey. I find that civic participation of Asian Indian immigrants spills over into political incorporation while Chinese immigrant organizations remain marginalized. I argue that local processes of racialization are central in explaining differences in political incorporation of immigrants. In the local context, the Chinese are seen as successful but conformist model minorities and Asian Indians as invaders and troublemakers. The racialization of Asian Indians has resulted in more political activity and higher levels of political visibility of their organizations. The results highlight shortcomings of current assimilation theories, which give little space to civic and political incorporation and view human capital in an unqualifiedly positive light.     

Who's invited to the (political) party: race and party politics in the USA

ABSTRACT

From the political behemoths of the Democratic and Republican Parties, to the Civil Rights Era racially progressive Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and reactionary American Independent Party, to the contemporary third party Green and Libertarian Parties, party politics in the USA has a long and storied relationship to the reproduction and contestation of racial domination. Recent works illuminate the strategic use of racial discourse by major party political elites, their deployment of racialized political platforms, and the relationship of these phenomena to power dynamics and racial interests but have yet to fully move beyond the two-party system and engage with innovations in political and cultural sociology. We outline openings for an empirically-grounded sociology of political parties that would reveal the micro- and meso-level features of racialized party politics and the operations of discursive and performative power within both major and minor political parties.     

Constructing difference and sameness: the politics of assimilation in London's Arab communities

Contemporary migration has spurred reconsideration of the theoretical concepts used to explain immigrant-host society relationships. Traditional conceptions of assimilation have been an important topic of debate. Some urban sociologists question whether timeworn assimilation models 'fit' contemporary circumstances. Others challenge assimilation theories on a more fundamental level, abandoning notions of 'group adaptation' and focusing instead on social difference and cultural identity. Thus far, there has been very little dialogue between different theoretical perspectives. I attempt to bridge this gap by conceptualizing assimilation as observable, material processes of accommodation of and conformity to dominant norms. Assimilation, in this respect, is profoundly political rather than ecological or 'natural', and is relevant across geographical and historical contexts. Drawing on interviews with Arab immigrants in London, I shall illustrate the ways in which the construction of sameness (as well as difference) is central to immigrant experiences.