Four thoughts on Charles Mills – Black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism

In what follows I provide a review of Charles Mills’ text, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. In four points I critique and build upon Mills’ contributions on (1) the multidimensional character of race, (2) the faith in liberalism to alleviate racial injustices, (3) the place of patriarchal tendencies in philosophy, and (4) the “white space” of sociology.     

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.     

Myths of meritocracy: caste,karma and the new racism,a comparative study

The discourse of karma (behaviour), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the person/group (guna), was at the heart of India’s caste ideology. This systematic and intuitive, albeit convoluted and phantasmic doctrine was critical to bridge the discrepancy between a pantheistic religious imaginary and the reality of exclusion and abjection. Although “karma” evokes an exotic orient, this ideology is near identical with the ideas of “idleness” and “instant gratification” used to make sense of racial inequities in the contemporary United States. In both cases, the idea of behavioural and moral deficiency is used to justify evident abjection and discrimination, within the frame of an encompassing ideology of social equality. Thus, this use of the notions of “work” and “discipline”, extrapolated to the moral quality of the group or individual, is no passing argument of the “new racism”. It is a proven ploy of assigning blame on the victim.     

The Good Farmer: Morality,Expertise, and Articulations of Whiteness in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

In Zimbabwe, land has always been a visible index of racial domination and oppression. Following independence in 1980, the redistribution of white property to black farmers emerged as one of the most contentious battlegrounds for refiguring citizenship and nationhood. This article explores how white farmers in a small community in western Zimbabwe fought to establish claims to belonging as they faced the threat of imminent land reform at the turn of the millennium. Drawing upon Tania Li’s concept of articulation [2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (1): 149–179], I suggest that farmers constructed themselves both as moral subjects who cared for the environment, and skilled subjects with the technical know-how to safeguard and maximise the country’s resources. In the absence of claims to indigeneity, farmers attempted to offset their own compromised morality by invoking the language of expertise. By examining this intersection between morality and expertise, I argue that white farmers in Zimbabwe brought together logics typically imagined to be distinct as a strategy to claim moral belonging while obscuring the historical and political factors that threatened to void those same claims.     

Whose chosenness counts? The always-already racialized discourse of trans – response to Rogers Brubaker

The Jenner/Dolezal moment, while it appears to provide a neat comparative experiment in gender and racial classifications, is itself the artefact of an invisible, already racialized gender system. If we take this question at the heart of Rogers Brubaker’s provocative new book on its own terms, we find, like Brubaker, that very different rules, and indeed, different institutional architectures, govern the two categorical systems. Closer inspection reveals the ways claims to gender legitimacy are always strained through the mesh of racial legitimacy. What is more, the social forces at work in trans “recognition” politics may underwrite some of the most pernicious forms of racialized violence in the contemporary United States.     

‘To bring out the best that is in their blood’: Race,reform, and civilization in the journal of race development (1910–1919)

The Journal of Race Development [JRD], published out of Clark University in the United States between 1910 and 1919, aimed, in its founder's words, “to present … the important facts which bear upon race progress, and the different theories as to the methods by which developed peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped”. Its basic premise was that scientific knowledge could harness racial or civilizational “evolution” and turn it into “development”. This article examines that project, the conceptual apparatus that the JRD's writers and editors brought to bear on it, and how racial ideas informed their conceptions of development and progressive social change through elite scientific and political intervention. Central to this project was an organic notion of “civilization” in which “nature” and “culture” did not so much overlap as flow seamlessly one into the other.     

De-indigenized but not defeated: race and resistance in Colombia's Peace Community and Campesino University

Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia's Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José's peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José's farmers were “de-indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.     

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.     

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.     

Unsettling intersectional identities: historicizing embodied boundaries and border crossings

At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings “trans/gender” and “trans/racial” creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. His main argument is that the distinction between sex and gender allows us to construct gender identity as personal, individual and separate from the (biologically) sexed body. In contrast, other people always have a stake in allowing or challenging identity claims to racial identity. Brubaker’s argument is persuasive. However, he treats both race and sex/gender as solipsistic and neglects the wider social context that has produced the conditions of possibility for the entrenched differences he records. An intersectional approach would have deepened his discussion of the place of categories in “trans” arguments.     

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.     

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.     

“Whoever decides for you without you,s/he is against you!”: immigrant activism and the role of the Left in political racialization

Much of the migration literature neglects the questions of why and how “native” allies obstruct activism by immigrants and ethnic minorities. Left-wing organizations in particular are often assumed to be supportive of inclusion, and little research exists on the ways they have prevented the migrant population from having a voice in the political arena and from taking part in society as equals. Drawing on the critical theory literature, I introduce the concept of political racialization. This concept refers to mechanisms whereby political actors, in order to legitimize their work on immigration, have partially included immigrants in the political sphere, but in a relationship of “ethnic” or “racial” subordination. Through the analysis of 57 in-depth interviews with immigrant activists, I show how political racialization works within the Italian Left and how it contributes to marginalize the migrant population. I further explain how immigrant activists have challenged political racialization through their activism.     

What is a species? Essences and generation

Arguments against essentialism in biology rely strongly on a claim that modern biology abandoned Aristotle’s notion of a species as a class of necessary and sufficient properties. However, neither his theory of essentialism, nor his logical definition of species and genus (eidos and genos) play much of a role in biological research and taxonomy, including his own. The objections to natural kinds thinking by early twentieth century biologists wrestling with the new genetics overlooked the fact that species have typical developmental cycles and most have a large shared genetic component. These are the “what-it-is-to-be” members of that species. An intrinsic biological essentialism does not commit us to Aristotelian notions, nor even modern notions, of essence. There is a long-standing definition of “species” and its precursor notions that goes back to the Greeks, and which Darwin and pretty well all biologists since him share, that I call the Generative Conception of Species. It relies on there being a shared generative power that makes progeny resemble parents. The “what-it-is-to-be” a member of that species is that developmental type, mistakes in development notwithstanding. Moreover, such “essences” have always been understood to include deviations from the type. Finally, I shall examine some implications of the collapse of the narrative about essences in biology.     

Democratic Hauntings: Michael Hanchard’s the Spectre of Race and the challenge of comparison

Michael Hanchard’s the Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy is a sophisticated examination of the disciplinary absence and seething presence of race in the subfield and substance of comparative politics. Hanchard’s analysis reveals a genealogy of how certain concepts, such as political culture, came to be institutionalized in the discipline. Because disciplines discipline, the resultant marginalization of race in comparative politics is itself an act of power. Many of his insights are revelatory, though a more explicit excavation of racial transnationalism is warranted. Such an effort would: first, demonstrate that the transnational “entanglements” Hanchard details are even more knotted than originally presumed; second, challenge the conflation of racialization and colonialism; and third, question whether liberal democratic inclusion is possible or even worth the price of the ticket.     

Everyday forms of racism in contemporary Ecuador: the experiences of middle-class Indians

This article studies anti-Indian forms of racial discrimination in present day Ecuador. Drawing on thirty eight in-depth interviews with middle-class Indians, this exploratory research analyses the different mechanisms of racial discrimination and the responses to it in a context of transition from a paternalistic system of racial domination to a possible democratization of racial and ethnic relations. The following dimensions of discrimination are examined: the site, the range of discriminatory actions and the responses. I also analyse how ethnic categories such as Indian, mestizo and white are constructed in Ecuador. The article concludes with a reflection on the obstacles of racism for democratization.     

The rhetoric of Islamophobia: an analysis of the means of persuasion in Hege Storhaug’s writings on Islam and Muslims

Few actors have had a greater impact on the “framing of Muslims” as a social and political “problem” in Norway since 2001 than Hege Storhaug of the government- and corporate billionaire funded civil society organization Human Rights Service (HRS). Using the methodological tools of the “rhetorical branch” of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and applying the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, logos and pathos, we analyze the bestselling popular title on Islam and Muslims ever published in Norway, namely Storhaug’s self-published 2015 title “Islam – The Eleventh Plague”. We argue that Storhaug’s popular success must be understood in light of her rhetorical appeals to femonationalism, the critique of religion and “Enlightenment” values. We show how she in her writings incites fear of the Muslim “Other” through specific rhetorical devices and a positioning of herself as a defender of the “nation” and the “people” – against national and international “elites”.     

The failure of the importation of ethno-racial statistics in Europe: debates and controversies

The 2010 census round has shown a significant growth in the number of countries collecting ethnic and racial data as a consequence of the increasing consciousness of their internal ethnic diversity and to implement more active equality policies addressing ethno-racial discrimination. However, Europe is not part of this dynamic: almost nothing has changed on the ethnic statistics’ frontline in between the two census rounds. This article addresses some of the justification for the enduring resistance of “statistical blindness” to ethno-racial diversity in Europe, locating it mainly in the strategy to erase race from the public sphere as a leverage to combat racism. The limits of this strategy in the context of mass migration from former colonial empires where racial subordination and classification have been produced and developed are discussed. Europe should ultimately face its past domination (rebranded but still active today) without silencing its consequences.     

Georgy Gause’s shift from ecology and evolutionary biology to antibiotics research: reasons,objectives, circumstances

Georgy Gause (1910–1986) is best known for his contribution to ecology and evolutionary theory. His book “The Struggle for Existence” (1934) inspired generations of ecologists. Yet his scientific interests were diverse, embracing many aspects of the life sciences and medicine. The most notable shift in his research took place in the early 1940s when he began to study antibiotics and discovered Gramicidin S. Superficially, this shift looked like an attempt to switch from purely theoretical to applied research during the years of World War II, but Gause’s decision may also have been seriously affected by the “Great Purge” and the growth of Lysenkoism. Personal factors played a significant role in his career too. In this article, we propose four factors which drove Gause to switch his focus from ecology to antibiotics: the inner logic of his scientific research, Stalin’s science policy and the growth of Lysenkoism, the sociopolitical influence of World War II, and personal relationships. We will also show how all these factors are interdependent to some extent.