Scholarship serving the Nazi State I: Studying the East

Michael Burleigh, GERMANY TURNS EASTWARDS: A STUDY OF OSTFORSCHUNG IN THE THIRD REICH, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, xii + 351 pp., £25.00.     

Race,ethnicity and German identity: a media analysis of the 2010 world cup men's national soccer team

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the ‘immigration background’ of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's ‘multicultural kickers’ became the focal point for those who wished to re-frame German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation.     

Racialized political shock: Arab American racial formation and the impact of political events

This article explores significant factors influencing the process of Arab American racial formation. I bring into conversation theories of racial formation and ‘political shock’ in social movement scholarship to develop the notion of ‘racialized political shock’ as an important factor in how racial and ethnic groups mobilize and organize. Many moments of political shock are highly racialized and have the potential to reorder the racial and ethnic landscape in ways that can open opportunities or introduce constraints to mobilizations around racial formation. Drawing on existing studies of Arab Americans, this paper highlights how Arab American racial formation has been galvanized during moments of racialized political shock. In the Arab American case, these moments have led to a call for recognition outside the category of white. I conclude by outlining ways forward in the study of Arab Americans, who have been overlooked in studies of race and ethnicity in the US.     

Both black and symbolically white: The ‘Bajan-Brit’ return migrant as post-colonial hybrid

The research presented in this article centres on an under-researched demographic group of young return migrants, namely, second-generation Barbadians, or ‘Bajan-Brits’, who have decided to ‘return’ to the birthplace of their parents. Based on 51 in-depth interviews, the essay examines the experiences of second-generation return migrants from an interpretative perspective framed within post-colonial discourse. The article first considers the Bajan-Brits and issues of race in the UK before their decision to migrate. It is then demonstrated that on ‘return’, in certain respects, these young, black English migrants occupy a liminal position of cultural, racial and economic privilege, based on their ‘symbolic’ or ‘token’ whiteness within the post-colonial context of Barbados. But this very hybridity and inbetweeness means that they also face difficulties and associated feelings of social alienation and discrimination. The ambivalent status of this transnational group of migrants serves to challenge traditional notions of Barbadian racial identity.     

The social position of multiracial groups in the United States: evidence from residential segregation

I use multiple perspectives on the racial order in the United States to generate hypotheses about the social position of mixed-race groups. Perspectives that view the racial order as binary, ternary with an undifferentiated middle, or ternary with a stratified middle present different expectations for the social position of multiracial groups. I use a group's level of residential segregation as an index of social position. In 2000, multiracial persons lived in neighbourhoods that were more white than the neighbourhoods of single-race minorities, though more diverse than the neighbourhoods of whites. Thus, multiracial groups appear to occupy an intermediate social position relative to blacks and whites, a finding that supports contemporary arguments about shifting colour-lines in the United States and the emergence of a triracial system of stratification. Yet, findings also suggest that the social space between blacks and whites is, itself, racially stratified.     

Moral bricolage and immigrant identification: The case of Romanian Americans

Immigration historians have illuminated the institutional forces that made possible Eastern and southern European immigrants' inclusion in the white racial category in the early twentieth century, initiating their ascent into mainstream America. Sociologists have shown that their descendants assimilated into American society while maintaining symbolic attachments to their ethnic roots. But, whereas current studies of immigrant racialization have focused on the strategies of immigrants of colour for asserting a higher position in the American social hierarchy, scholars have generally overlooked such processes for phenotypically white immigrants. This paper highlights first and 1.5 generation Romanian immigrants' strategies for navigating their ambivalent relationship to Americanness. While they assumed their whiteness unproblematically, Romanian Americans sought to distinguish themselves from whites and non-whites on the basis of their ethnicity. Furthermore, they used American values to distance themselves from their former compatriots. Through moral bricolage, Romanians made strategic use of desirable traits they associated with being Romanian and American, melding them into a particularly worthy ethnic identity.     

‘Minority’ as a sociological concept

This article considers how a Muslim cultural discourse of ‘propriety’ has influenced Muslim Arab Sudanese ethnic identity in two locations and time periods in an expanding diaspora. Focusing in particular on women and their embodied practices of whitening and propriety in Egypt in the nineties and the United Kingdom a decade later, I argue that the recent turn towards Muslim expressions of Sudaneseness is a form of resistance to racial labelling. While Sudanese have rejected being labelled ‘black’ in Egypt and in the UK, their renegotiation of a Muslim religious identity in the diaspora nevertheless confirms a racialized Sudanese ethnicity. This study contributes to the rethinking of ethnicity in a transnational space where ethnic nationalism and globalized Islamic discourse intersect with local histories and hierarchies of race and gender.     

Whiteness,class and place in two London suburbs

This article addresses a specific intersection of class, place and whiteness by focusing on distinctions between middle-class owner-occupiers in suburban London. Where whiteness is constructed through association with an imaginary of the unchanging nature of rural England and, in particular, the village, some suburban places provide a more ready village metaphor in support of whiteness than others. In a securely middle-class suburb residents are able to misrecognize their neighbourhood as a village, and beyond the metaphor, report feeling at home in rural England. In a marginal middle-class suburb whiteness is founded on weaker claims to the English village metaphor and, moreover, residents feel less at home in rural England. This article demonstrates the need to go beyond the often made distinction between the tactics of middle class (owner-occupiers) and working class (tenants) by identifying distinctions within the former group.     

‘It is hard being the different one all the time’: gringos and racialized identity in lifestyle migration to Ecuador

This paper explores the identities that North American lifestyle migrants in Ecuador adopt as they adjust to life in a new racialized social environment. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants from North America, as well as ethnographic field notes. North Americans describe their growing community in racialized terms and adopt a series of practices that demonstrate anxiety about their position in the racialized social order of Ecuador. The paper discusses the strategies that North American migrants engage in to diminish the importance of their racialized identities in Ecuador. I identify two main practices that complicate North American incorporation in Ecuador: self-policing practices that aim to optimize Ecuadorians' perceptions of them; and desires for integration and ethnic mobility, which seek to erase their ‘Otherness’.     

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.