Ideologies of legitimate mockery

This article examines the racial messages and lessons students get from parents and teachers in one suburban school community. I examine the explicit and “hidden” curriculum of race offered in the school as well as exploring community members’ racial discourse, understandings, and behaviors. During a yearlong ethnographic study, all community members consistently denied the local salience of race. Yet, this explicit color-blind “race talk” masked an underlying reality of racialized practices and color-conscious understandings—practices and understandings that not only had direct impact on students of color at the school, but also have implications for race relations more broadly. I argue that this apparent paradox is related to the operation of new racial ideologies becoming dominant in the United States today, and conclude with suggestions for how this racial logic might be challenged.

Rhetoric, Racist Ideology, and Intellectual Leadership Carrie Crenshaw and David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen Despite gains in the struggle for civil rights in the late twentieth century, racism still ravages individual lives and causes savage societal inequities.1 Stuart Hall has argued that racism is entrenched in our culture because it is "one of the most profoundly 'naturalised' of existing ideologies."2 Because racist ideology is produced and reproduced through discourse, investigation of the rhetorical dimensions of racism is essential to anti-racism.3 Language is the medium of a racist ideology, and racist rhetoric is an important vehicle for the reproduction of most other racist practices.4 While there are many kinds of racism(s), the rhetoric of academic intellectuals can play an important role in the preformulation and legitimation of racist ideologies by preparing prejudiced arguments that inspire, motivate and disseminate popular forms of racism.5 The influence of academic intellectuals is tremendous because scholars are culturally situated as the producers, managers, or brokers of knowledge who supply support for popular forms of racism and the racist claims of other elites.6 Van Dijk argues that "if knowledge is power, then knowledge of other people may be an instrument of power over other people. This truism is especially relevant in examining the academic discourse of race and ethnicity"7 and its impact on public policy discourse. In this essay, we explore the contemporary role of traditional intellectual rhetoric in promoting consent to racist ideology. Understanding how this discourse "works" to sustain racism in the face of challenges to it helps us to grasp the configuration of civil rights in the postmodern era. Drawing upon the insights of Antonio Gramsci's study of hegemonic ideologies, we argue that "moral and intellectual leadership" attempts to sustain consent to racist ideology through specific forms of racist intellectual rhetoric. While many scholars have studied racism and white privilege ,8 examined the social and cultural construction of "race,"9 and advanced our understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of racism,10 this study explores the speCarrie Crenshaw is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen is the Reese Phifer Professor of Communication Studies and an Associative Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He also serves as coeditor of the journal Media Psychology. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2,1999, pp. 275-302 ISSN 1094-8392 276 Rhetoric & Public Affairs cific question: What are the characteristics and strategies of an intellectual rhetoric designed to promote hegemonic consent to a racist ideology? In answering this question, we enter an on-going conversation about the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's theory for understanding democratic struggle and its impact upon the rhetorical and material construction of civil rights in our society. We offer an analysis of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,11 a widely disseminated book authored by two academic intellectuals that had a decided impact on broader discussions of welfare, affirmative action, and other public policies.12 While others have directly refuted The Bell Curve's claims, we examine it as an example of traditional intellectuals' rhetoric that operates as a vehicle of moral and intellectual leadership and seek to understand how it "works" to justify and promote public cooperation with coercive racism and to condone white privilege. Moreover, the extensive responses to the Bell Curve demonstrate its importance as a useful example of traditional racist intellectual rhetoric in defense of itself. It is clear from the text that the book's authors anticipated such a firestorm of criticism. Thus, we believe that understanding The Bell Curve's specific rhetorical strategies can help us to understand the rhetorical strategies that traditional intellectuals generally employ in defense of a racist ideology when that hegemonic ideology is contested. We first discuss our theoretical starting point for this study and then offer an analysis of the primary characteristics of The Bell Curve's claims. Through a critical discussion of its rhetorical strategies, we show how the authors exemplify racist intellectual argument in defense of itself. We conclude by highlighting the contributions of this study to a rhetorical theory of the...

As one of the most visible and powerful media institutions of U.S. popular culture, advertising plays a central role in conveying and disseminating a dominant racial ideology. After establishing an analytical framework based on the relationship between racial ideology and stereotypes of Asian Americans, this study investigates how Asian Americans are represented in American news magazines advertising and how racial ideology is embedded within those depictions. Quantitative analysis found Asian Americans are frequently depicted as highly educated, proficient with technology, and affluent. A textual analysis reinforced these findings and also led to additional insights related to gender dynamics, potential conflicts within the Asian American category, and the relationships between Asian Americans and other minority groups.

Race, Sexuality, and Representation in David Mura’s The Colors of Desire 1 Xiaojing Zhou (bio) In Asian American literary discourse, identities of race, gender, and culture have been highly contested sites, whereas sexuality is still an emerging terrain of literary and critical exploration. 2 Sexuality, especially homosexuality, intersected by race, gender, and class, as a central theme has developed rapidly, but only recently as shown by Timothy Liu’s collections of poetry, Vox Angelica (1992), Burnt Offerings (1995), and Say Goodnight (1998), and by anthologies such as A Lotus of Another Color (1993), The Very Inside (1994), On A Bed of Rice (1995), and Asian American Sexualities (1996). 3 David Mura’s second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire (1995), is part of this significant development among Asian Americans and their growing consciousness of the complex relations between race and sexuality. Mura’s volume also marks a new departure in Asian American writers’ treatment of sexuality as a racialized and gendered positionality. 4 Mura’s poems explore the connections between racial ideologies and representational deployments of sexualities, and their effects on sexuality. They also illustrate that prohibition and taboo imposed by law or dominant ideology on sexual transgressions are enabling conditions for both the articulation and subversion of racialized heterosexual norms. Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter considers ideologically determined sexual prohibitions as “constitutive constraints,” which make the “performativity” of gender and sexuality possible. Butler further argues [End Page 245] that the “performative” dimension of the construction of sexuality is “precisely the forced reiteration of norms.” In other words, Butler contends, constraint should be “rethought as the very condition of performativity”; “the law is not only that which represses sexuality, but a prohibition that generates sexuality or, at least, compels its directionality.” 5 Butler’s theory of performativity in terms of the regulative and generative functions of power in constructing sexuality, can shed light on Mura’s representation of the connections between racial identities and sexualities. Butler’s argument that “the law is . . . a prohibition that generates sexuality or, at least, compels its directionality” can also illuminate Asian American men’s feminized stereotypes, and their counter-representations by Asian American writers of their racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities. These representations and their historical roots provide an important context for our understanding of Mura’s Colors of Desire. According to the editors of one of the earliest Asian American literary anthologies, Aiiieeeee! (1974), the history of Asian Americans is one of disempowerment and marginalization, or “emasculation” to use King-Kok Cheung’s word. 6 While fully aware that “terms such as ‘emasculated’ and ‘effeminate’ presume and underwrite the superiority of the masculine over the feminine,” Cheung examines the “emasculation” of Asian Americans as an imposition upon Asian immigrants and Asian Americans by the dominant power in the historical, cultural, and political contexts of the United States. 7 Cheung’s location of Asian American gendered identities helps shift the terms of the debate on gender issues in Asian American literary discourse from patriarchal sexism and cultural nationalism versus feminism to a more complex consideration of gender in terms of power relations, racial ideologies, and historical specificities. 8 Jinqui Ling’s recent essay on Asian American masculinity further contributes to dismantling binarisms in the debate on issues of gender. Ling argues that in investigating the meaning of Asian American men’s experience troped on their “emasculation” or “feminization,” it is necessary to contextualize these terms in a social and historical framework. 9 Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men is perhaps the most informative and galvanizing work which provides a historical context for an [End Page 246] understanding of Asian American men’s social, political, and sexual “emasculation,” as well as an Asian American writer’s counter-representations of Asian American manhood. Although Asian American sexualities have always been constructed as part of their racial and ethnic identities, Asian American writers’ rearticulations of their identities have been more concerned with the racialization and ethnicization of gender, and the engendering of race and ethnicity than with sexuality. 10 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong notes a curious absence of sexuality in works by American-born Chinese American writers since the 1960s in contrast to those...

Considering the call for a global approach to analysing race, this study develops a theoretical framework of how racial ideology becomes structured at a global, transnational level. Drawing from approximately 500 hours of ethnographic participant observation at a predominantly white university located in the Southern United States, this study illustrates how Koreans and Korean Americans reproduce a transnational racial hierarchy at a predominantly white university. My findings show how Korean and Korean Americans normalize the imperial U.S.-Korea relations through a racially affective economy of language use in social interactions. The imperial standpoint observed in Koreans and Korean Americans calls into question the role that honorary whiteness plays in the United States’ triracial order. I further discuss the implication of Asian and Asian American's possessive investment in honorary whiteness, which is central to the maintenance of a transnational triracial order with Korea as an extension of the U.S. empire.

When comedian Margaret Cho introduced herself to the American public in the early 1990s, it was the first time most, if not all, Americans had seen a popular Asian American – specifically Korean American – comedian (Rotella 2001). Though outspoken women comedians such as Roseanne Barr, Joan Rivers, and Brett Butler had already entered the typically male-dominated world of stand-up comedy before Cho, not yet had an Asian American man or woman offered a humorous voice to audiences on such a large scale. Unwilling to shy away from a predominantly white male profession, over the past 20 years, Cho has forged an unlikely path within the world of stand-up comedy, commonly discussing specific aspects of her Korean heritage. Whether it is because of or in spite of her minority status, Cho has developed a substantial and loyal following since her first appearances on the stand-up comedy stage and television shows, and was recently named the “Number One Asian American Comedian of All Time” (Fung 2010). She has become best known for her social commentaries about gender, sexuality, and, perhaps most notable, race. Additionally, to discuss such heavy issues, Cho routinely uses aggressive, confident, and unapologetic humor while voicing her opinions (Holden 2000). Though she has parlayed her talents into successful television, movie, and music careers, she began (and continues to be most known for) her work as a stand-up comedian.

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850-1924 By Jennifer C. Snow. Studies in Asian Americans: Reconceptualizing Culture, History, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2007. xx + 179 pp. $95.00 cloth. - Volume 76 Issue 4

This article draws parallels between Twain's critique of racial ideology in Pudd'nhead Wilson and the modern concept of color-blind racism to argue that Twain's seeming avoidance of racial issues actually highlights a new, burgeoning racial ideology. Using Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's four classifications of color-blind racism, the article explores how Twain's characters, narrator, and setting exhibit the frames of naturalization, minimization, cultural racism, and abstract liberalism that enable this ideological bias. Twain diagnoses a social evil that takes shape in the Jim Crow era but continues today, outlining how our institutions not only create and reinforce systemic racism but also our blindness to it.

Color-blind racial ideology has historically been conceptualized as an ideology wherein race is immaterial. Efforts not to ‘see’ race insinuate that recognizing race is problematic; therefore, scholars have identified and critiqued color-blindness ideology. In this paper, we first examine Gotanda’s (1991) identification and critique of color-blind racial ideology, as it was crucial in troubling white supremacy. We then explore literature in both legal studies and education to determine how scholars have built upon Gotanda’s intellectual theoretical foundations. Finally, using a Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) framework, we end by expanding to a racial ideology of color-evasiveness in education and society, as we believe that conceptualizing the refusal to recognize race as ‘color-blindness’ limits the ways this ideology can be dismantled.

In this article, three Latina sociologists discuss how they engage in teaching in a predominantly white discipline during a sociopolitical context of overt xenophobia and racism. Under the Trump administration, the United States has witnessed increased rates in harassment, hate crimes, and mass shootings against people of color. Despite the 2020 Presidential Democratic win, the racist ideology that led to Trump’s sway over voters demands that we continue to contend with its remnants or what some refer to as “Trumpism.” We find it critical to engage with pedagogy today more than ever as our contemporary gendered racialization and past experiences inform our teaching pedagogy. Drawing on the outsider within paradigm and critical race theory, we advocate that educators should embrace their own identities and those of students in the teaching of class and research concepts. We offer an important focus on Latina voices in the teaching of race and ethnicity at two private research universities on the West Coast and one public university in the South. We also note that to be fully able to do this type of work, we need our colleges and universities to protect Latina scholars and other faculty of color from potential backlash from students, colleagues, and community members, who may not approve of a critical pedagogy.

The ethnographic study of tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean offers the opportunity to examine the ways that racial ideologies perpetuate social inequality, debunking the myth of racial democracy in countries such as Brazil. In the case of Brogodó, in Bahia, Brazil, structural inequality and racial ideology limit the equal participation of Brazilians of African descent in the local ecotourism industry. This article draws on evidence from ethnographic research to investigate the relationship of structural inequality, racial ideology, and cultural and symbolic capital. In the ecotourism industry, employer discourses emphasizing the limits of local community members’ cultural capital conceal their preference for employees exhibiting both the habitus and phenotypic traits associated with whiteness, reflecting broader social and economic practices that discriminate against African-descendent Brazilians. The ability to naturalize habitus and disguise racial ideology behind discussions of education and qualifications reflects employers’ and members of the dominant classes’ symbolic power.

Nowadays, class consciousness among members of the Western working class seems to be obfuscated by their nationalist and chauvinist beliefs, as they tend to assume that they have more in common with other members of a nation, people, and/or ethnic group, rather than with other people in similar class positions and with similar economic interests. In this article, we argue that nationalist and racist ideologies can reproduce themselves in the consciousness of the working and capitalist classes because they are present in existing class relations, specifically because of the economic rewards that the members of the business community and white employees can reap as a result of their willingness to discriminate. From an historical materialist perspective, the failure of the labor movement to consistently fight racism can be viewed as the expected outcome of a racial segmentation of the labor market that rewards class compromise by both autochthonous workers and their employers.

This article traces the rise and fall of psychiatric evaluation in criminal trials from the School of Criminal Anthropology of the late nineteenth century to the current Italian justice system. Influenced by positivism and by specific theories on human evolution, Cesare Lombroso considered criminal action as the result of organic causes excluding any kind of legal autonomy and responsibility of the accused. The Positive School of Penal Law he founded with Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo profoundly inspired the Rocco Code, on which the current Italian Penal Code is still based, albeit with revisions and repeals. Drafted in 1930 during the fascist government (1922–1943), the latter has also suffered from racial ideology. In order to assess potential mental illnesses that would exclude the responsibility of the accused, to determine their level of dangerousness and to establish the corresponding security measures introduced by the Rocco Code, Italian criminal justice consolidated the link between penal law and psychiatric instruments. Such faith in psychiatric evaluation, however, has been particularly questioned by the increasing frequency of judicial processes involving members of different cultural communities in Italy since the 1970s. Thus, the predominantly pathological aspects evaluated by forensic psychiatrists have often proved to be conceptually and methodologically inadequate to take fully into account the differences between cultures, as well as the different social and cultural conditions affecting the defendant’s behaviour. This paper argues that cultural anthropology is particularly suited as an instrument capable of disclosing the cultural implications of the legal process and encourages the use of cultural expertise as an important tool for the inclusiveness and understanding of diversity.

The current study examined whether Black people’s racial ideology, experiences of racism, and their interaction predict their acceptance of Black-White Multiracial people. Black racial ideologies represent an aspect of Black people’s racial identity that addresses their perspectives on how people within the Black community should behave. Participants ( N = 325) were administered a series of measures. Latent class analysis revealed three classes of Black racial identity: undifferentiated (average ideologies), integrationist (high assimilationist, humanist, and oppressed minority), and nationalist (high nationalist). The nationalist group was most likely to endorse rejecting Multiracial people as members of the Black community and also to endorse forcing a Black identity onto Multiracial people, whereas the integrationist group was least likely to make such endorsements. For participants in the nationalist (but not integrationist or undifferentiated) cluster, personal experiences of racism were related to endorsement of forcing a Black identity onto a Multiracial person. Findings suggest that Multiracial people might achieve the most identity affirmation and sense of community among Black people holding integrationist views.

Focusing on the Margins:Light in August and Social Change Abdul-Razzak Al-Barhow (bio) In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), a number of figures actively engaged in social change are introduced as Joanna Burden narrates to her lover Joe Christmas the history of her ancestors, and as the defrocked minister Gail Hightower reflects, while sitting in the window of his study, on the history of his family, which was narrated to him by the family's ex-slave when he was a child. Hightower's father was an abolitionist even though "he would neither eat food grown and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed prepared by, a negro slave" (355, 351). Joanna's ancestors received a commission from the government in Washington to go down to the South "to help with the freed negroes," and two of them were shot dead by the slaveholder John Sartoris over a question of Negro votes in a state election (189). Joanna, the last Burden in the South, carries on with this "commission" until she is killed by Joe Christmas.1 The appeal of the engagement with social change in Faulkner's text does not lie in these characters, however, and the way the Burdens perform their commission remains, after all, questionable. Instead, the force of Light in August derives from its ability to dramatize the social and racial contradictions, which are set in motion by Joe Christmas's indeterminate racial origins. The need for, if not the inevitability of, social change in racial relations is made even more pressing through Faulkner's [End Page 52] demonstration of how the racial ideology that holds this society together is the same ideology that will tear it apart. The determination of the white community in Jefferson to guard the binaries of their ideology and maintain the fixity of its categories, we come to know, is no other than its unwillingness to admit the vulnerability of the very basis of its ideology and the malleable nature of its categories, as the incident of Joanna's death has revealed to them. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, who interprets rituals relating to the human body by regarding the body as a symbol of society, observes that "all margins are dangerous…. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins" (Purity 115, 121). Douglas's observation is helpful in understanding the way Light in August dramatizes the process of social change by demonstrating the vulnerability of the southern "structure of ideas" at its margins. Faulkner's text chooses its main characters from the margins of the white community in Jefferson and makes the way these marginal characters engage with their community's "structure of ideas" the subject of the community's verbal exchange. As John N. Duvall notes, "marginal" members of the white community in Faulkner's texts function to counter racist and patriarchal proscriptiveness (Faulkner's xvii). As it dramatizes social relations in the form of "talk," or verbal exchange of meanings and values, Light in August examines social change on a linguistic level as a shift in the semantic weight of categories and binaries toward a performative view of race, in contrast to the biological concept that the community's "voices" are desperately trying to maintain. Social change is examined further in the overall structure of the book in the way the three stories of Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Gail Hightower are juxtaposed. Christmas's violent story is framed by the more optimistic stories of Hightower and Lena, which not only dramatise examples of the possibility of breaking free from the fetters of society, be it in the form of racist and patriarchal ideology, institutional religion, or the ghost of the past in the form of dead father figures, but also of contributing positively to social change and looking forward to a new social order based on love and acknowledgment of human needs and emotions. In contrast to the violent deaths of Joanna and Christmas, positive change in the stories of Hightower and Lena is suggested by both the birth of Lena's baby and the rebirth that both Byron Bunch and Hightower experience as Bunch falls in love with Lena and as Hightower acts...