Anti-racist Theory Research Articles

Romantic Movements

This Reflections essay considers antiracist theory and practice and its impact on Romantic Studies today as displayed in a master’s-level module aimed at introducing the use of theory to postgraduate students of nineteenth-century studies. Alongside these concerns, the reflection considers what it means to feel “Romantic” today, as well as the role and usefulness of discomfort in postgraduate pedagogy.

Music in the mind and primitive sounds: «only differences in kind»

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions.

Countering Systemic Racism through Antiracist Theory and Practice

Countering Systemic Racism through Antiracist Theory and Practice

“The Christian Does Rightly and Leaves the Results with the Lord”—Sometimes: On the Pragmatic Affinities between Antiracist Writing Pedagogy and Religious Practice

Critics of antiracist pedagogy analogize it to a religious practice in order to discredit it. This essay interrogates the rhetorical affordances and limitations of that analogy. Drawing on antiracist scholarship by Young, Inoue, and Kendi, critiques of antiracist pedagogy by Smith and McWhorter, and the author’s own experiences with Mennonite theology and antiracist pedagogy, the essay argues that despite the totalizing scope of some antiracist theory, its enactment in the classroom is often pragmatic and vitally attentive to local histories and needs. To demonstrate how antiracist pedagogy operates, the author offers two examples from the field of writing studies: code-meshing and labor-based grading. Close attention to these approaches shows that while some of the theory that underpins them is as rigid as some strict religious practices, antiracist writing pedagogy can be, and often is, enacted selectively and strategically to affirm and empower students.

The Role of the School and the Continuing Education of Teachers in Ethnic-Racial Relations in an Experience in the Community of Curuzu, Salvador-Ba

The present work aims to reflect on the pedagogical experience in the community of Curuzu through pedagogical coordination in the Lato-Sensu Specialization entitled “African and Afro-Brazilian Studies Methodology” of Integrated Colleges Olga Mettig in 2007. The General Objective was to train of education professionals and related areas on Law 10,639 and its operation in pedagogical work, whether carried out in the classroom or in another collective learning space. The specific objectives were: to provide pedagogical subsidies on Law 10.639 and to promote pedagogical interaction between the various cultural matrices that formed the Brazilian territory. This course was intended to comply with the operation of Law 10.639/03, having as its main target audience educators and graduates in the area of human and social sciences. The main results of this experience revolve around the access for educators to decolonial and anti-racist theories. Other important results revolved around the work of education professionals who received postgraduate degrees, where they demonstrated insertion in various segments of Bahian society, such as centuries-old institutions such as the Society for the Protection of the Underprivileged (SPD), founded 190 years ago, as well as in schools traditional public and private education systems and in Afro and Afoxé blocks.

Situating Anti-Semitism in Anti-Racist Theory and Pedagogy: The Case for Holocaust Studies in Higher Education

Situating Anti-Semitism in Anti-Racist Theory and Pedagogy: The Case for Holocaust Studies in Higher Education

Learning to Unlearn the Teaching and Assessment of Academic Writing

The last two years have raised important questions about how we can make the teaching of academic writing more equitable. In fact, the current moment invites us to “learn to unlearn” ways of teaching academic writing that perpetuate inequity. In this reflective article, I draw on decolonial theory and antiracist theory to unwind the ways coloniality has shaped the way that I have taught scientific writing for two decades. This work begins with a discussion of the idea of learning to unlearn from decolonial theory. I then examine how that perspective can change the way we teach scientific communication—for example, in contextualizing the development of scientific knowledge as a series of epistemological developments and exchanges, rather than from a zero point of Western thought. Spiraling outward from the classroom, I reflect on how scientific writing is part of a larger matrix of institutional structures that unwittingly compound colonial legacies inequities. In the end, if we are to address inequity in the teaching and assessment of academic writing in new ways, then we need to acknowledge and challenge the legacies of coloniality in the teaching and assessment of academic writing.

Disrupting White Supremacy in Assessment: Toward a Justice-Oriented, Antiracist Validity Framework

ABSTRACT In this article, we propose a justice-oriented, antiracist validity framework designed to disrupt assessment practices that continue to (re)produce racism through the uncritical promotion of white supremist hegemonic practices. Using anti-Blackness as illustration, we highlight the ways in which racism is introduced, or ignored, in current assessment and validation processes and how an antiracist approach can be enacted. To start our description of the framework, we outline the foundational theories and practices (e.g., critical race theory & antiracist assessment) and justice-based framings, which serve as the base for our framework. We then focus on Kane’s interpretive use argument and Mislevy’s sociocognitive approach and suggest extending them to include an antiracist perspective. To this end, we propose a set of heuristics organized around a validity argument that holds justice-oriented, antiracist theories and practices at its core.

Necessity is the mother of invention: Virtual campus conversations on antiracism during the pandemic and beyond

Drawing on theories of antiracist pedagogy, pandemic pedagogy, and racial identity development, this article demonstrates the benefits of campus-wide virtual conversations, arguing that they provide students in particular with salient opportunities to synthesize antiracist theory and praxis while further developing their racial identities. Using data from two such campus conversations, “Antiracism, Intersectionality, and Empowerment” and “Racial Trauma and White Fragility,” we offer a series of effective strategies, lessons learned, and preliminary antiracist outcomes. We suggest that campus-wide virtual forums on antiracism assist in building the interracial, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary coalitions necessary to begin to institutionalize antiracist praxis in a predominantly white university setting.

Continuous Action toward Justice

AbstractConservative activists and politicians have condemned critical race theory and have supported measures to prohibit teaching the subject in public schools. The anti-critical race theory movement is part of broader social movement activity inspired by the 2020 presidential election. Many conservatives view Donald Trump's defeat as a victory for antiracism. In response, they have portrayed the election as a product of fraud, enacted laws that will make it more difficult for people of color to vote, endorsed measures that would chill antiracist political activism, and banned instruction related to contemporary antiracist theory. These practices have been employed historically in response to antiracism. This history should guide social justice advocates as they analyze the meaning of countermovement activity and build strategies of resistance.

LEARNING FROM ANTIRACIST THEORIES TO REFRAME ENGINEERING EDUCATION RESEARCH ON RACE

LEARNING FROM ANTIRACIST THEORIES TO REFRAME ENGINEERING EDUCATION RESEARCH ON RACE

Commitment to Positive Change: Structural Anti-racism Audit of Nursing Education Programs

Amidst many opportunities to create positive change and examine systemic anti-racist decolonial practices (Moorley et al., 2020), we are advocating for concrete action at the root of Nursing education programs by way of a structural anti-racism audit. Based on decolonial and antiracist theory (Garneau et al, 2018; Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018; Kendi, 2019; McGibbon & Etowa, 2009), we propose to engage in systems-level action (McGowan et al, 2020; Mulgan, 2006; van Wijk t al., 2018) and examine institutional structures through an anti-racist framework (Sutton, 2002) based on audit processes for equity, diversity, and inclusion (Chun & Evans, 2019; Olson, 2020; Skrla et al., 2004; Skrla et al., 2009; Zion, et al., 2020). Structures within and influencing curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation will be examined to advance systems-level anti-racist practices and policies (Moorley et al., 2020) with Nursing students, faculty, staff, leadership as a foundation for equitable Nursing education and care (National Collaborating Centre for the Determinants of Health, 2014). This anti-racist approach to Nursing education reform promises to address the pernicious harms of discrimination in the healthcare system, as noted in a recent report on Indigenous-specific racism (Turpel-Lafonde, 2020). We aim to conduct a strengths-based structural anti-racism audit that does not lose sight of disparities (Fogarty et al., 2018). We are currently conducting a literature review and audit framework development and will pilot the structural anti-racism audit in fall 2021. Rather than requesting endorsement of our project, and with respect for diverse approaches, we asked Nursing colleagues to sign this letter to demonstrate shared commitment to critically examine racist challenges and anti-racist opportunities in their Nursing program at a structural level (see this survey: https://forms.gle/tZPN2z1kUoARNPp1A

Stories of Antiracist Theory, Instruction, and Practice: A Review Essay

Stories of Antiracist Theory, Instruction, and Practice: A Review Essay José Luis Cano Jr. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. By April Baker-Bell. New York: Routledge, 2020; pp. 128, $44.95 paper. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. By Aja Y. Martinez. Champaign, IL: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2020; pp. 201, $34.99 paper. Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics. By Louis M. Maraj. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020; pp. 208, $25.95 paper. I believe that we’ve all been telling stories all along, but some stories are elevated to the status of theory, scholarship, and literature, while, too often, minoritized perspectives are relegated to marginalized or overlooked “cultural rhetorics” methods or genres. –Aja Y. Martinez, Counterstory1 An Itchy Story: Y Sigue La Comezón I start with a story. Immediately after graduating from high school, two of my friends and I decided to take a road trip to explore a little bit of the US—I think we had watched too many white folk movies and their liberating road escapades. We hopped in the car and got to it. I drove while my two friends sat in the passenger seat and the back seat. It’s important to note racial and linguistic compositions. I pass off as white-ish when I’m in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas because I’m lighter complected, but once out of the Valley, I’m mostly Brown. My friends [End Page 107] have darker complexions, so they don’t pass off as white anywhere. We possess these complexions and speak with a certain “Valley accent.” So about four hours on the road, a cop caught us speeding. It’s my first ticket, so I’m not sure what to expect. An older white officer, probably in his fifties, walks toward us, positions himself slightly behind the driver’s window, and interrogates us. We respond by informing him that we’re stopping in a few places, but Pennsylvania serves as our final destination. My friend on the passenger side adds that his tía will host us over there, so that’s where we’ll be staying several nights. We wait for a response while the officer pieces this information in his head. As we wait, my friend on the passenger side scratches his upper right calf with his right hand. It turns out to be a horrible time to get an itch. The officer immediately yells, “Get your hands where I can see them!” My nervousness turns to terror, so I place my hands on the steering wheel, gripping it as if I’m holding a weightlifting bar with 300 pounds on it. The officer explains, “That’s how you get shot, son!” I feel my heart beating throughout my body. My hands tremble. I get the infraction slip and drive off. I call my parents to let them know I got a ticket but don’t elaborate on the incident. Talking about the infraction slip as a souvenir, my dad jokes, “Bueno, ya tienes un recuerdito del viaje.” In educational settings, I used to frequently think: Where do these stories belong? In my own field of rhet-comp, I contemplate how to make the connection between composing practices and the criminalization of racialized bodies. Here’s a preliminary response. In comparison to white folks, students of color receive less education yet more criminalization, so the composition course should concern itself with understanding how these students of color fail to reach/enroll in these courses, or once there, how these courses sometimes propagate similar stances. That is, the composition course should understand racism in white America. For the rhetoric component, I consider how to embed the above story as a rhetorical event and interaction, so I learned to use the word “democratic.” Understanding this aforementioned story in relationship with other stories complicates and advances democratic practice in the US—patriotism at its finest. In “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Black gender and race theorist Sylvia Wynter asks in 1992, If, as Ralph Ellison alerted us in his The Invisible Man, we...

‘I wanted to be white’: understanding power asymmetries of whiteness and racialisation

ABSTRACT This article uses a self-reflective autoethnography to critique colonisation and whiteness as systems of marginalisation and racialisation. I examine concepts grounded in post-colonial and anti-racist theories, and I interweave these with my experiences in white spaces in Colombia, the USA and Canada as an educator and researcher. I provide personal examples as data to explain how colonisation and whiteness have paved the road to my professional ‘success’, and I also illuminate how these have taken me away from understanding my cultural and linguistic roots. Contrary to conventional wisdom that formal education is empowering for racialised peoples, this article asserts that critical education has been fundamental to challenge inequality and power asymmetries. Finally, in reflecting on the depths to which whiteness has been entrenched in all aspects of my life and other racialised peoples, I seek determination and liberation by calling into question the normative historical raciolinguistic ideologies of whiteness.

Carbon Vitalism

Abstract This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and ecological standing. This philosophy contains a poetics of denial that is too often overlooked by studies of climate skepticism focusing narrowly on industry funding. Accordingly, this article develops a reparative theory of climate denial, asking what values and relations are gathered together within carbon vitalist speech and how speakers work to sustain these connections. Through close readings of carbon vitalist media and interviews with key figures in its network, the article demonstrates how the body is central to carbon vitalism’s rhetorical and emotional framing of ecological interdependence and epistemological populism. As such, carbon vitalism in effect reenacts long-established feminist appeals to the body (though to decidedly different political purposes). The article concludes by evaluating how the climate movement could both challenge and remobilize these logics, exploring what this corporeal turn in climate denial means for feminist and antiracist theories of environmental justice and the body.

Cornel West and Marxist Humanism

Humanity has experienced an explosion of anti-humanism in the form of authoritarian capitalism, postmodern filter bubbles, and global problems. Marxist/Socialist Humanism is the proper answer to the deep crisis of humanity. In this context, this article asks ‘How can Cornel West’s works inform a contemporary Marxist humanist theory of society?’ Taking West’s works as a starting point, what are the key elements of a Marxist humanist theory of society? Cornel West is one of the leading critical intellectuals today. His work has fused anti-racist theory, Black Liberation Theology, Marxist theory, pragmatism, and existentialism. This article especially focuses on West’s understanding of humanism and culture. It shows how his works and praxis can inform the reinvigoration of Marxist Humanism in the age of authoritarian capitalism as a socialist response. West’s thought can and should also inform the analysis of alienation, exploitation, domination, culture, the public sphere, the critique of ideology, and popular culture.

Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo and Kai Cheng Thom’s Sustainable Affects

Drawing on feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist theory, this article examines the transmission of affect between racialized queer and trans subjects as a mode of what I call feeling sideways. With this formulation, I seek to spark a discussion about the need to dislodge affect not only from gender and racial normative systems of power but also from linear understandings of growth and temporality. I here follow Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theories of sideways growth (2009) and Heather Love’s notion of backward feelings (2009) to unravel modes of feeling sideways as a potential form of what I call sustainable affect. As case studies, I put two transCanadian works beside each other: Shani Mootoo’s novel Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab (2014) and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017). In different but related ways, these texts illustrate how shame, anger, and empathy can become sustainable affects through touch and storytelling, with important ethical repercussions.

Restorative Relationships and 'Radical Help': Reimagining Welfare-to-Work Beyond the Market-Family Divide

The unprecedented global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of “essential” yet underpaid workers, the vast inequality between the wealthy and the less fortunate, and the bottomless pit facing those without a social safety net. While the crisis has laid bare the near-universality of human susceptibility to disease and unemployment in a world in which few can safely work, it has also highlighted the disproportionate precarity experienced by low-wage and contingent workers, people of color, and non-citizens. Well before the pandemic, rampant socioeconomic and racial inequality, high underemployment and concentration of wealth, and technological advances threatened to render many human workers obsolete, powerless, and in need of social support and care. At the same time, in the United States, the Trump administration targeted an already shrunken social safety net for elimination through the extension of punitive workfare ideology originally reserved for poor, single mothers to all forms of government-funded support, including health care, nutrition, and housing assistance available those just above the poverty line regardless of parental status. Such ideology effectively conditions public support to needy individuals (some already employed at low wages) on their willingness and ability to engage in (more) work, regardless of pay, employment conditions, or caregiving obligations. Left to our own devices, whether in times of crisis or calm, advocates have sought to strengthen interpersonal relationships and community bonds for the provision of basic social support for the poor, as a way for ordinary people to help those whom the government will not. This Article examines two experimental models—restorative justice and “radical help”—that seek to reform welfare administration explicitly to weave people back into the fabric of the social safety net. These social welfare innovations foreground human relationships as an underutilized resource to highlight the power of meaningful social connections to help those experiencing everything from disability and discrimination to bad luck not just avoid disaster, but thrive and flourish in strong communities. Each model emphasizes human relationships to help poor people benefit voluntarily from social supports and community engagement instead of punishing them for noncompliance with paternalistic and exploitative government program work mandates. Such relationships can center poor people’s lived experiences and combine collaborative, localized, and responsive community support with technology to facilitate social networking and, ideally, increased economic security and empowerment. At the same time, without appropriate safeguards or oversight, overreliance on private relationships for social welfare provision risks replicating existing forms of disempowerment. In practice, both models risk reinscribing a private, marginalized sphere, neither restorative nor radical, in which those who perform the work of nurturing relationships remain subject to the will of those with power to offer or withhold assistance. Cautious optimism must be combined with meaningful protections in order to preserve the most promising aspects of new models while preventing the worst harms of what could be in effect a return to private, discretionary provision—or deprivation—of social support. Informed by feminist and antiracist theories critical of both market relations mediated by the state and private family relations entirely insulated from oversight, this Article concludes that we must continue to explore and adapt new models of welfare provision that truly protect and promote all human potential.

Raciontologies: Rethinking Anthropological Accounts of Institutional Racism and Enactments of White Supremacy in the United States

ABSTRACTThis article presents a theory of raciontologies—the fundamentally racialized grounding of various states of being—that sheds light on complex forms of institutional racism and white supremacy. We are interested in exploring not only how institutional contexts and processes function as sites or vehicles for the reproduction of white supremacy but more specifically how institutions become endowed with the capacity to act in their own right. This approach represents a raciontological perspective that attends to the central role that race plays in constituting modern subjects and objects in relation to particular states of being. Raciolontologies powerfully shape how entities become endowed with the capacity to engage in particular acts, while also conditioning perceptions, experiences, and material groundings of reality. Our theorization of raciontologies combines anthropological analyses of institutional racism and ontologies beyond the human. These analyses point to the role of institutions in the reproduction of white supremacy and reimagine the range of entities capable of action, respectively. The broader goal is to suggest how new ways of understanding the raciontological nature of institutional enactments of white supremacy can inform antiracist theories of change. [race, ontology, institutional racism, white supremacy]

Peace and the Barrel of the Gun in the Internationalist Women’s Movement, 1945–49

Abstract In 1949, at a conference instigated by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) held in Beijing, China, the Asian Women’s Conference solidified an anticolonial, antifascist, and antiracist theory for organizing women transnationally. This transnational feminist praxis drew its movement demands and strategies from the masses of women in anticolonial movements, both rural and urban poor women. It also framed a two-fold theory of women’s organizing: it delineated one platform for women fighting imperialism within colonized countries, and another platform for women fighting imperialism within aggressor nations. This transnational feminism supported an explicitly pro-socialist vision for the future.