The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide Erin L. Murphy Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. In the social sciences, there is a dearth of scholarship connecting the politics of emotion with the politics of racism. Paula loanide's work in The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness makes a significant contribution toward filling this gap by showing the ways in which emotion reinforces structural and institutional racism. With this project, she argues that we need to recognize public feelings as currency in emotional economies, a metaphor that captures how many US citizens feel about an investment in gendered and racial discrimination and violence, which comes to be expressed through political desires, pleasures, fears, and/or anxieties. By focusing on the impact of emotions on political debates, Ioanide beckons us to consider how to more effectively achieve racial and gendered justice when skeptics and opponents dismiss and/or disavow social scientific facts that have been carefully accumulated over decades of research. As she astutely frames it, the problem is that, unfortunately, facts by themselves don't debunk the stereotypes. This is because emotions shape our "sense of realness" and buttress racial and gender ideologies (2). Therefore, loanide rejects notions that only gathering more data to disprove the latest neoliberal, racist, and sexist discourse blaming the most marginalized groups for their discrimination will be effective in itself. Rather, she argues persuasively that anti-racist and feminist scholarship and practices need to incorporate knowledge of emotions as well as account for the weight of ideological fantasies in constructing realities. She aptly characterizes her book in the title, which also signals the structure of the text as she takes four cases where emotional [End Page 323] attachments to racist stereotypes are marshaled against the groups who are under attack. As she covers the expansive ground laid out in these cases, her narrative is sensitive, moving, and necessarily upsetting. She follows in the steps of Herbert Blumer (1958) in his classic work on race prejudice. He asserted that race is socially constructed through the sense of being part of a racial group and that that sense of groupness has influential feelings attached to it. Ioanide also considers feelings of race prejudice from the "emotional and psychological impact of losing white cultural dominance" with local demographic shifts to the "pleasurable thrills or psychological losses" when white police officers sexually and physically brutalize immigrants and people of color (2). Along with the sense of racial groupness comes the ideology of American exceptionalism, which is the belief that the United States and its people are morally and politically superior to other nations. Ioanide also builds on insights from critical American Studies scholars, like Amy Kaplan (1993) and Donald Pease (2009), noting how ideological fantasies of American exceptionalism and white superiority are built upon practices of "disavowal," where facts or arguments that would contradict beliefs in American superiority are conveniently ignored, denied, or dismissed. After a gripping and theoretically grounded introduction that assesses the violence and racism of the color-blind era, Part I transitions the reader to the strongest chapter for demonstrating how to connect the historical details of a case to the theoretical insights raised in the introduction. Chapter 1 covers the rage of white police brutality in New York through the horrors of the physical and sexual violence the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima suffered in 1997. After it became public that police officer Joshua Volpe raped Louima with a broomstick in the police department bathroom as he was held for questioning, the public became horrified, and Louima's allies immediately marched to protest. Giuliani had set the stage for the brutality by passing punitive policing measures with racially coded law and order rhetoric to protect corporations and the wealthy, while further marginalizing impoverished populations. The story of Volpe's wanton violence and Louima's resistance afterward shows how police can experience incredible rage at the thought of people, like a Haitian immigrant man, challenging their authority. Louima's perseverance...