Color Experience Research Articles

Racism Postrace ed. by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray

Reviewed by: Racism Postrace ed. by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray Stefanie Boulila Racism Postrace. Edited by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 352. Paper $28.95. ISBN 978-3503122196. Racism Postrace presents postracialism as the defining racial project in the present era. Although postracialism has different histories in the US and Europe, its effects are both material and discursive in each context. In the US, "postrace" became part of the public vocabulary with the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president. In Europe, the ascent of the postracial has been less overt. Postracialism is a productive imaginary that denies racial hierarchies and places antiracism in the realm of excess. In 2010, Prospect Magazine claimed that Britain is postrace due to the high number of Black and ethnic minority senior civil servants and an allegedly colorblind economy. Apart from this explicit attempt to introduce postrace into the British political vocabulary, postracialism in Europe unfolds its power out of sight and through a different vocabulary. It is a logic that has been identified to materialize through resistances to "multiculturalism" and depoliticized diversity paradigms as well as through anti-PC rhetoric and resistances against calls for reparation for crimes committed under colonial rule. As in the US, postracialism denies the political power of race, doing so from an unmarked position. The term "postrace" seems untranslatable to many European languages, including German. Sometimes mistranslated as Postrassismus (postracism), the lack of language points to an analytical failure to engage with race as a technology of power. It is a failure to retreat from the UNESCO-induced antiracialism that has dominated European antiracist struggles in the aftermath of Nazism as Alana Lentin has argued in Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (2004). Antiracialism in Europe follows the logics of the UNESCO statements on "the race question" that in the 1950s banished the term race from political debates. However, this reductive view of race as a descriptor for biologists' claims to human difference undervalues what race has enabled as a political dimension of power. As a signifier, race has referred to multiple archives throughout the European history of colonialism. These have included religion, claims to cultural superiority, and claims to natural difference, as David Theo Goldberg has shown in The Racial State (2002). Banning the term race but making racial claims through alternative notions, like culture or ethnicity, has allowed existing power relations to remain in place. [End Page 450] The alleged untranslatability of both antiracialism and postracialism into German points to an unwillingness to engage with processes of racialization and historically grown racial power relations. It is also a refusal to engage with people of color's experiences of racialization, racial state structures, and racializing cultural scripts. The lack of vocabulary poses difficulties for critical German scholars who want to engage with racism and its representation. It also leaves an analytical void for those studying institutional racism, which remains a pressing issue in the aftermath of the unresolved National Socialist Underground murders, the rise of far-right attacks on people of color and refugees and the debate about racist policing practices following the death of Oury Jalloh in police custody in Saxony-Anhalt. Throughout its thirteen chapters and divided into two parts titled Assumptions and Performances, Racism Postrace, though mainly rooted in the American experience of postracialism, presents many analyses that are relevant to European and German-speaking contexts. Critically engaging with Assumptions and race-making, Herman Gray, for example, prompts us to look closer at the media and digital technologies of postracialism. Gray illustrates that in the digital age, racial science has flourished beneath the official scientific repudiation of race. "Modern" racial science claims its innocence as it is deployed in struggles for the protection of land rights of indigenous populations and in targeted medical therapies for Black and ethnic minorities. Gray demonstrates the adaptive lure of racial science as race making is immanent in those seemingly progressive promises. Another promising avenue for the exploration of European contexts is Cynthia A. Young's theorization of postracial whiteness. Analyzing the cultural politics surrounding right-wing conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, Young...

Learning from What Color Experiences Are Good For

Color is an incredibly controversial topic. Here is a sample of views taken seriously: colors are dispositions to look coloured; colors are physical properties of surfaces or of light; colors are properties of certain mental states, which get projected onto the surfaces of objects or onto reflected or transmitted light; colors are an illusion; colors are sui generis. One hopes to break the impasse by finding a compelling starting point—one drawing on obvious points that are common ground—which naturally evolves into the theory of color one likes. I start with remarks about the utility of having mental states with a phenomenology, remarks which are, I urge, non-controversial. I develop them into the theory of color I favor. According to it, colors are properties of objects as objective as their shapes. The final section explains how the theory handles the best argument for subjectivism about color.

Doctoral Women of Color Coping with Racism and Sexism in the Academy

Doctoral Women of Color Coping with Racism and Sexism in the Academy

Maximizing #MeToo: Intersectionality and the Movement

Although women of color experience high rates of harassment and assault, the #MeToo movement has largely left them on the margins in terms of (1) the online conversation, (2) the traditional social movement activity occurring offline, and (3) the consequential legal activity. This Article analyzes how race shapes experiences of harassment and how seemingly positive legal strides continue to fail women of color thirty years beyond Kimberle Crenshaw’s initial framing of intersectionality theory. I discuss the weaknesses of the reform efforts and argue for more tailored strategies that take into account the ineffectiveness of our current Title VII framework and, more specifically, the continuing failure of the law to properly deal with intersectionality. This analysis and the resulting proposal demonstrate how advocates can leverage #MeToo as an opportunity to reshape law, organizations, and culture in a way that better protects all women, and particularly women of color.

In Our Heart Circle for Two

In Our Heart Circle for Two Juan Miera (bio) Ceci n'est pas une histoireCeci n'est pas un poèmeCeci n'est pas un filmC'est mes sentiments en ce moment I speak my name into our circle: Juan Juan, Juan, Juan I feel nervous, it is a rapid pulse and a jolt of adrenaline. I feel insecure, it sits in my chest like a mini black hole. I feel moved, it's a surge that travels my core leaving bits of reverence and gratitude and joy in its wake. I feel hopeful, my head seems lighter and there might be a song on the tip of my tongue. Mostly I find my feelings in the love quadrant. Tenderness is a softening, I'm melting a little inside and my edges are getting less sharp on the outside. Desire is hard to look in the face, it's an averted gaze even though I really want to lock eyes, it's flushed cheeks and a tingle on the back of my neck where I like to be touched. Longing is a tightening in my throat like I'm choking on a bit of loneliness. [End Page 176] Affection is a magnetic force that makes me want to lean in; it is skin that just felt a hug and wants to be part of another. It's a faint smile and a gleam in my eye that I think—that I hope— you can see when you look at me. [End Page 177] Juan Miera Juan Miera is a retired academic who continues to explore the intersections of language, queerness, and Latinidad through short film and creative writing. He remains active in professional circles with invited lectures on queer pedagogy and is currently working on a feature-length, grant-funded documentary on the ways in which queer people of color experience and embody masculinity. Copyright © 2020 Feminist Formations

Homeplace: Care and resistance among public housing residents facing mixed-income redevelopment.

Low-income communities of color experience significant political, economic, and health inequities and, not unrelatedly, are disproportionately exposed to violent crime than are residents of higher income communities. In an effort to mitigate concentrations of poverty and crime, governmental agencies have partnered with affordable housing developers to redevelop public housing "projects" into mixed-income communities and to do so within a "trauma-informed" framework. The current study analyzes how residents have historically and contemporaneously negotiated, endured, and resisted structural and interpersonal violence in 2 long-standing, predominately African American, public housing communities undergoing a public-private housing redevelopment initiative. Interviews with 44 adult public housing residents (age range = 18-75 years; 82% African American/Black) were conducted during a 2-year period while residents' homes were being demolished and rebuilt into mixed-income communities. Analysis of in-depth interviews used constructivist grounded theory principles to reveal a common theme and basic social process of the ongoing formation of homeplace, with subthemes focusing on the ways homeplace emerges through shared lineage, knowing and caring practices; how homeplace is maintained through networks of protection in unsafe contexts; how homeplace is disrupted as a result of redevelopment activities; and the reclamation of homeplace during redevelopment in the service of hope and healing. These findings offer a nuanced view of resident's lived experiences of place-based trauma and collective resistance and resilience, while also highlighting the place-specific ways in which redevelopment unsettles deeply rooted sociocultural configurations of home and community. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Dimensions of burn survivor distress and its impact on hospital length of stay: A national institute on disability, independent living, and rehabilitation research burn model system study

ObjectiveGuided by the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, this study seeks to (1) examine the independent relationships between the level of distress among burn survivors, pre-morbid psychiatric history, and burn severity on length of hospital stay, and (2) to examine the relationship between having a premorbid psychiatric history and level of distress following a burn injury. MethodsData collected by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, Rehabilitation Research funded Burn Model System (N = 846) was used to theoretically link psychological distress with the length of hospital stay for survivors of burn injuries. Structural Equation Modeling was used to evaluate the aims of this study. ResultsAlthough counterintuitive, and while significant, burn severity was found to have a rather modest association with a burn survivor’s level of distress, indicating that one’s ability to cope may be a better predictor of distress rather than burn severity alone. Premorbid psychiatric history was significantly associated with increased levels of distress. While burn severity was associated with length of stay, level of distress did not act as a partial mediator. Length of stay was, however, significantly related to having a premorbid-psychiatric history. Of notable interest, a significant racial, ethnic, and gender difference exists in level of distress. Women and people of color experience higher levels of distress holding constant burn severity and psychiatric history. ConclusionA need exists to assess for and address premorbid and current mental health challenges of burn survivors, specifically the ability to cope, especially among people of color and women, regardless of the burn size or severity.

Précis of "Transformative Experience"

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that affect our future circumstances and shape the sort of person we will become. Some of these are major, life-changing decisions. In such cases, we stand at a personal crossroads and must choose our direction. If we make these sorts of life-changing decisions about our futures rationally, can we also make them authentically? In Transformative Experience I argue that, under the most natural and ordinary construal of decisions like this, we cannot. My argument draws on debates in philosophy of mind about how experience is necessary for us to have certain epistemic capacities and cognitive abilities. It also draws on debates about the intrinsic value of subjective color experience, and the importance of the first-personal perspective in understanding the self and its possibilities. I use familiar examples from these classic philosophical debates to raise new questions about experience, its value, and its role in prospectively assessing our first personal futures. Using formal tools drawn from decision theory, causal modeling, and cognitive science, I assess first personal decision making and self-construction in contexts of what I call “transformative decision-making”, a well-defined and—it turns out—very common choice situation in everyday life. In the Afterword, I discuss how the argument has formal applications in and substantive relevance to counterfactual semantics, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of statistics, social science, cognitive science and psychology.

A Prospective Examination of Racial Microaggressions in the Medical Encounter.

Disparities in healthcare and health outcomes between whites and non-whites continue to plague the US healthcare system. A large literature suggests that people of color face obstacles at various points in the healthcare system. This article examines one such obstacle: whether patients of color experience microaggressions from physicians during primary care medical visits. A majority of microaggression studies are qualitative and retrospective in nature. In the current study, we use a prospective approach to broaden how microaggressions are measured, as well as understand differential treatment of racial minorities within healthcare. Using data derived from audio recordings of medical visits (n = 224), we utilize a quantitative measure to examine microaggressions in the medical encounter. We find that when race status differences are present between patient and physician, patients of color are more likely to experience microaggressions from their physician. The results suggest that medical encounters differ depending on characteristics of the parties involved. These differences may not only perpetuate the differential treatment of people of color but also contribute to health disparities for people of color.

Digital Redlining: Poor Rural Communities’ Access to Fintech and Implications for Financial Inclusion

ABSTRACT Financial technologies (fintech) are proposed to expand access to financial services in rural communities as bank branches decline; however, poor rural communities and rural communities of color have limited access to high-speed internet connections required for fintech. Leveraging the universe of U.S. rural zip codes, this paper investigates associations between communities’ poverty rates, racial makeup, and rates of fintech. Poor rural communities of color experience digital redlining by having the lowest fintech rates. Rural communities’ increasing white population is associated with higher high-speed internet rates, an advantage of whiteness observable even in the presence of high poverty. Implications are discussed.

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

(UN)EQUAL BURDEN OF CARE: STAFF PERSPECTIVES ON NURSING HOME CARE AND QUALITY OF LIFE FOR RESIDENTS OF COLOR

Racial disparities in quality of care (QoC) and quality of life (QoL) for nursing home (NH) residents persist even as the proportion of minorities is significantly increasing. Staff of color are a growing part of the long-term care workforce and staffing is a key component for delivering quality care. This study looks at staff (n=60) perspectives on resident QOL through semi-structured interviews, using thematic analysis in six Minnesota high proportion minority NHs. Key findings show that staff of color are concerned about the QoC and QoL residents of color experience, and take extra steps to provide care that goes beyond addressing their clinical needs. This agency of providing extra care is a factor in burnout among staff of color. More research on how this unequal burden of care impacts QoC/QoL is important to address the disproportionate role that staff of color play in reducing disparities in resident QoC and QoL.

What Cognitive Neurology Teaches Us about Our Experience of Color

Color provides valuable information about the environment, yet the exact mechanisms explaining how colors appear to us remain poorly understood. Retinal signals are processed in the visual cortex through high-level mechanisms that link color perception with top-down expectations and knowledge. Here, we review the neuroimaging evidence about color processing in the brain, and how it is affected by acquired brain lesions in humans. Evidence from patients with brain-damage suggests that high-level color processing may be divided into at least three modules: perceptual color experience, color naming, and color knowledge. These modules appear to be functionally independent but richly interconnected, and serve as cortical relays linking sensory and semantic information, with the final goal of directing object-related behavior. We argue that the relations between colors and their objects are key mechanisms to understand high-level color processing.

The biological basis of the experience and categorization of colour.

We used the Land Colour Mondrian experiments in a Bayesian context to test the degree to which subjects vary in categorizing the colour of different patches, when each patch is made to reflect light of the identical wavelength-energy composition. The brain uses a ratio-taking mechanism to determine the ratio of light of every waveband reflected from a surface and from its surrounds. Our (Bayesian) hypothesis was that this ratio-taking mechanism is similar in all humans and therefore leads to a constant categorization of colours that differs little between them. The similarly categorized colours are the initial priors, with initial hues attached to them. Twenty subjects of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, for all but one of whom English was not the primary language, viewed eight patches of different colour in two Mondrian displays; each patch, when viewed, was made to reflect identical ratios of long-, middle- and short-wave light. Subjects were asked to match the colour of the viewed patch with that of the Munsell chip coming closest in colour to that of the viewed patch, without using language. In terms of hue, there was less variability in matching warm hues than cool ones. In terms of colour categorization, there was little variability overall. We take the lack of significant variability between subjects in the matches made as a pointer to similar computational mechanisms being employed in different subjects to perceive colours, thus permitting them to assume that their categorization of colours has universal agreement and assent.

Inclusion and Exclusion in the White Space: An Investigation of the Experiences of People of Color in a Primarily White American Meditation Community

More people of color have begun to attend American convert Buddhist communities that have, until recently, been almost exclusively white in composition. This study seeks to explore the ways in which people of color experience racialized inclusion and exclusion in one such community. Utilizing a phenomenological methodology to examine the experiences of eleven participants of color, the present study extrapolates six distinct themes related to their experiences of racialized inclusion and exclusion. These themes are Interpersonal Barriers to Full Participation, Institutional Barriers to Full Participation, Strategies for Coping with Racialized Exclusion, Failures of Leadership Support for People of Color, Range of POC Experiences, and Promoting Equity and Inclusion. Following the explication of themes, the authors offer recommendations for primarily white meditation communities to help guide their efforts toward greater inclusion and equity for people of color.

Information and power: Women of color's experiences interacting with health care providers in pregnancy and birth

RationalePreterm birth and other poor birth outcomes disproportionately affect women of color. Emerging evidence suggests that socially-driven issues such as disrespect, abuse, and discrimination within the health care system influence how people of color experience care during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, which contributes to poorer outcomes for the mother and baby. ObjectiveAs recommended by community partners, we explored how interactions with providers were perceived and understood in the context of seeking care for pregnancy and birth. MethodFor this constructivist grounded theory study, we recruited 22 self-identified women of color 18 years of age or older and who were between six weeks and one year postpartum. Women participated in interviews exploring their experiences, which were audiorecorded and transcribed. Data were analyzed using dimensional analysis and situational analysis methods. ResultsThe concepts of information and power surfaced in analysis, in which providers have control over the information they share and “package” information to exert power over women's ability to participate in decision-making. An established relationship with providers and acknowledged levels of privilege or marginalization influenced how information was shared. Contextual factors included provider bias and judgment towards their patients, health care system structural issues, and the overall power dynamic between patient and provider. ConclusionsWomen of color's experiences during pregnancy and birth were influenced by how they were treated by providers, particularly in how information was shared and withheld. The providers' control over information led to a power dynamic that diminished women's ability to maintain autonomy and make health care decisions for themselves and their children. This study provides insight and impetus for change in how providers share information, utilize informed consent, and provide respectful care to women of color during pregnancy and birth care.

Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis of mauveine and phenosafranins in black precipitate from the Bradford Colour Experience Museum

Mauveine chromophores and a family of phenosafranins have been extracted from the Colour Experience Museum black precipitate with boiling ethanol and separated by chromatography. Phenosafranin (287.1295), monomethylphenylsafranin (301.1452) and a dimethylphenosafranin (315.1609) were observed. Tentative evidence for small quantities of N- tert-butylmauveine A and N- tert-butylmauveine B has been found by comparison of the data to standard retention times and accurate mass data. A synthetic method which reproduces the composition of mauveine extracted from the black precipitate, which is rich in mauveine A, is described.

Data-Driven Discovery of Full-Visible-Spectrum Phosphor

The development of extra-broadband phosphors is essential for next-generation illumination with better color experience. In this work, we report the discovery of the first-known Eu2+-activated full-visible-spectrum phosphor, Sr2AlSi2O6N:Eu2+, identified by combining data mining of high-throughput density functional theory calculations and experimental characterization. Excited by UV-light-emitting diodes (LEDs), Sr2AlSi2O6N:Eu2+ shows a superbroad emission with a bandwidth of 230 nm, the broadest emission bandwidth ever reported, and has excellent thermal quenching resistance (88% intensity at 150 °C). A prototype white LED utilizing only this full-visible-spectrum phosphor exhibits superior color quality (Ra = 97, R9 = 91), outperforming commercial tricolor phosphor-converted LEDs. These findings not only show great promise of Sr2AlSi2O6N:Eu2+ as a single white emitter but also open up in silico design of full-visible-spectra phosphor in a single-phase material to address the reabsorption energy loss in ...

Assessment of Social, Economic, and Geographic Vulnerability Pre- and Post-Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas

Across the United States, low-income populations, people of color (POC), and marginalized and disenfranchised groups experience an unequal burden from environmental hazards such as Superfund sites, toxic release inventory (TRI) facilities, and other locally unwanted land uses (LULUs). Disproportionate distribution of these exposure sources causes inequities in exposure to natural disasters such as hurricanes since LULUs could release chemicals and contaminants that can exacerbate environmental injustice and increase vulnerability within communities that are susceptible to flooding. We conducted spatial analysis to examine proximity to these environmental hazards and determined the vulnerability of underserved populations in Houston, Texas, to chemical contaminants mobilized by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Health care infrastructure (e.g., federally qualified health centers [FQHCs], hospitals, and home health centers) were also assessed as potential salutogens since Houston is home to a large concentration of industrial sites. We determined significant differences in aggregate pollutant counts between quartiles of both POC (51 sources in the lowest quartile and 217 in the highest) and people in poverty for TRI facilities (Chi-Square = 27.402, DF = 3, p < 0.001), air pollution sources (Chi-Square = 32.092, DF = 3, p < 0.001), and FQHCs (Chi-Square = 29.029, DF = 3, p < 0.001); whereas no significant differences existed for percent elderly and home health centers (Chi-Square = 4.2731, DF = 3, p = 0.2334). Essentially, low-income communities of color experience disproportionate exposure to chemical hazards mobilized by floods, and the elderly especially lack access to quality medical care. Policies should aim toward reducing exposure to environmental toxicants and targeting health care resources to under-resourced populations since differential exposure could adversely impact the health of residents.

Speculation as Surplus-Value

Speculation is an artist’s capital, enabling the emergence of the new. This is art’s capacity to bring about new frames of reference—new kinds of questions, experiences, events or encounters— to leverage difference in order to open onto an indeterminate future. As Elizabeth Grosz (2014: 123) notes, ‘(i)f art reads as other than an artistic expression, it is always about the summoning up of a new future, and as such it’s always a kind of political gesture’. Brian Massumi (2018: 25) regards this gesture as a means of reclaiming value from its reduction to the economic logic of the market, in order to emphasise the intensities of experiences that have value in and of themselves, such as the singular vivacity of an experience of colour. Excess is at the core of this theory of value, the unselected that forms the virtual background, a world of surplus. However, Massumi argues that capitalism produces an impoverished version of surplus value, dependent on a continual accumulation of increasing quantity to the detriment of the singular quality appearing as such. Artists’ social, affective and material speculations, their attempts to create something new, produce a processual surplus value as an affective excess that differs in kind from the surpluses of capital accumulation. We will argue that these speculative practices ought to be understood primarily in terms of an ethos actualised in an artist’s practice and not, as is so often the case, only in terms of the speculative financial returns the products of such practices may yield in the global art markets. The paper will explore the affective aspects of speculation through an investigation of the practice of Belgian artist Joelle Tuerlinckx. Her associative mode of working produces a web of processual thinking that forms connections as well as leaving loose ends open, often reactivating forgotten or abandoned objects, in a manner that produces a different order of value. Grosz, Elizabeth and Esther Wolfe (2014). ‘Bodies of Philosophy: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz’, Stance 7, April, pp 115–126 Massumi, Brian (2017). ‘Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value’, in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, Erich Horl with James Burton (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, pp 345–373.