Racial Formation Research Articles

The ambiguous lives of ‘the other whites’: Class and racialisation of Eastern European migrants in the UK

A body of recent literature has examined how migrants from Eastern European countries have been racialised in the UK both pre- and post-Brexit, and has explored the limits of their earlier assumed ‘invisibility’ owing to their perceived whiteness. Less attention has been placed on understanding how intersections of class and nationality may play out in these processes of racialisation. In this article we argue that it is precisely the entanglements between racialisation, nationality and class that are conditioning unequal possibilities of inclusion for different groups of migrants in British society, especially in the post-Brexit reality. Based on a qualitative longitudinal study with over 70 migrants from Poland and Lithuania, undertaken between 2019 and 2021, we demonstrate how cultural capital and other resources help migrants to ‘pass as white’ or, more precisely, ‘middle class white’ to escape certain forms of racialisation and othering experienced by their co-nationals. The acceptance into the ‘community of value’ is nevertheless conditional. The racialised and classed forms of othering force migrants to constantly prove their ‘good immigrant’ status either by reaffirming their class position, hiding their Eastern European origins and/or racialising other groups. Our article sheds light on the relational and entangled ways in which race, nationality and class are lived, negotiated and resisted by migrants and how they can be experienced simultaneously as a privilege, a burden and a weapon (for othering others).

Racialized Tensions and Affinities: Puerto Rican “Apprentices” and the Policing of Female Masculinity

The Great Migration of African Americans and La Gran Migración of Puerto Ricans enabled socio-political affinities and tensions to develop in reaction to racial formations in spaces that became Black and Puerto Rican dominant. I link these racial formations to Muñoz’s nomenclature “Brownness,” which describes a shared experience of marginalization from existing outside of White and sexual normativity. I show how affective solidarity and tensions are operationalized within the exotic dance setting, “Divine Dancers.” Divine Dancers are a Black and Puerto Rican collective of women who convene to perform in exotic dance shows for other women. I analyze the disciplining of Puerto Rican masculine-presenting women through a racialized lens. As the most prized gendered sexuality among Divine Dancers, dom identity reflects racialized, gendered, and sexualized discourses that participants draw upon to position themselves as “authentically” masculine.

Food insecurity among African Americans in the United States: A scoping review.

In 2019, the estimated prevalence of food insecurity for Black non-Hispanic households was higher than the national average due to health disparities exacerbated by forms of racial discrimination. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black households have experienced higher rates of food insecurity when compared to other populations in the United States. The primary objectives of this review were to identify which risk factors have been investigated for an association with food insecurity, describe how food insecurity is measured across studies that have evaluated this outcome among African Americans, and determine which dimensions of food security (food accessibility, availability, and utilization) are captured by risk factors studied by authors. Food insecurity related studies were identified through a search of Google Scholar, PubMed, CINAHL Plus, MEDLINE®, PsycINFO, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, and Web of Science™ (Clarivate), on May 20, 2021. Eligible studies were primary research studies, with a concurrent comparison group, published in English between 1995 and 2021. Ninety-eight relevant studies were included for data charting with 37 unique measurement tools, 115 risk factors, and 93 possible consequences of food insecurity identified. Few studies examined factors linked to racial discrimination, behaviour, or risk factors that mapped to the food availability dimension of food security. Infrequently studied factors, such as lifetime racial discrimination, socioeconomic status (SES), and income insecurity need further investigation while frequently studied factors such as age, education, race/ethnicity, and gender need to be summarized using a systematic review approach so that risk factor impact can be better assessed. Risk factors linked to racial discrimination and food insecurity need to be better understood in order to minimize health disparities among African American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Memory Meetings: Semra Ertan’s Ausländer and the Practice of the Migrant Archive

Turkish migration to Germany has long been debated as not having been sufficiently documented and given an adequate place in German national archives. But these debates have often reified a static and nationally organized logic of the archive. This essay instead traces the literary figure of the Ausländer as poetically claimed by the writer Semra Ertan and visually staged by media artist Cana Bilir-Meier in order to give an account of the unspeakable experience of racialization as ongoing foreignization in a Germany shaped by labor migration. Based on the discussion of Ertan’s select poems and the textual, visual, and audible material compiled by Bilir-Meier, this article demonstrates how the figure of the Ausländer animates “memory meetings.” Ertan’s words and personal experience are co-produced by Bilir-Meier’s interventions and given out to meet with contemporary intersectional anti-racist activists, who are enabled to make a claim about their own present in which the figure of the Ausländer has been mostly forgotten.The article makes several claims based on the figure and the workings of the Ausländer in these memory meetings. The first claim is that the figure of the Ausländer allows a conceptualization of race in Germany that is grounded in the experience of alienation—as seeing oneself from a racializing gaze—resulting from unequal labor, institutional abandonment, and the devaluing of migrant-knowledge production. Another claim pertains to the nature of the archive itself. The material collected from various sources, including German and Turkish national media, in which the details about Ertan are rather marginalized or documented to be forgotten, are reorganized by Bilir-Meier from the margins to establish its own center. This archive is situated in migrant-knowledge, particular to the experience of Ertan’s migration and affectively charged, but able to tell a larger story about the racializing experience of migration. Taking these claims together, the article argues that migrant archives are not just dispersed documents waiting to be nationally organized and acknowledged. Rather, the “the migrant archive” is a form of embodied, lived, and practiced knowledge with others in moments of commemoration. The migrant archive then is a dynamic and shifting practice, able to adapt to transnationally moving experiences if it can find a ground for mnemonic interaction regardless of, or even in counter-position to, a nationally sanctioned status.

Precarious whiteness in pandemic times in China

In this introduction we explore how the effects of the outbreak of Covid-19 in January 2020 have challenged, undermined, and transformed the racialized privileges of various groups of white migrants in China. While whiteness can be an invisible hegemonic construction in Western societies, it becomes a highly visible minority status in China. We introduce the concept of “precarious whiteness” to flesh out the multi-layered tensions in the transnational circulation and reconfiguration of white privilege, particularly in China. The articles in this special issue focus on white migrants in four domains: transnational business and entrepreneurship, Chinese-foreign families, digital media platforms, and online English teaching. Together they foreground the highly contested and fragmented nature of white racial formation in a critical historical moment of Covid-19.

How the Flemings Became White: Race, Language, and Colonialism in the Making of Flanders

ABSTRACT When Belgium was founded in 1830 French was the de facto dominant and prestigious language while Dutch indexed inferiority. This article argues how the marginalization of Flemings, i.e. Belgian speakers of Dutch, can be understood as a form of racialization and how Flemish emancipation was also contingent on the Belgian colonial project and impacted perceived Flemish group interests as ‘white’. As participation in the colonial project entailed the promise of upward social mobility, the marginalized Flemings were disproportionally involved in the colony. In that process Dutch did not achieve the same prestigious status as French, but reached a social position at least superior to racialized colonized subjects. This article argues that the role of race and whiteness grounded in that colonial project is still apparent in contemporary Belgium, where political interests of Flemings are systematically framed in opposition to the interest of racialized citizens.

On the political theology of apartheid: a philosophical investigation

ABSTRACT This article aims to discuss the relation between political theology and apartheid critically. The relation is traced by reconsidering Carl Schmitt’s notion of political theology and the accompanying friend-enemy distinction within the South African context in dialogue with Achille Mbembe. The political theology of apartheid is accordingly analysed as the creation of a racial figure of enmity intertwined with a religious myth. Within this heuristic framework, the philosophical roots of the racial concept of the “K”-figure – as a figure of enmity – are outlined by delineating its foundations in the metaphysics of modernity with specific reference to the writings of Immanuel Kant. This concept is further considered regarding its intertwinement with the creation of the religious myth of justify Afrikaner Nationalism Volk as a chosen people of God, used to justify the Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid ideology. Finally, the opening of a space is sketched where the task of rethinking the political ontologically within a post-apartheid world may take place. The task that attempts to avoid a reconstitution of the political theology of apartheid in new figures of enmity, both religious and racial, while opening the possibility for the reparation of the dignity of those it was stolen from.

Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture

Dirge:Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture Tao Leigh Goffe (bio), Aparajita Bhandari (bio), Lydia Macklin Camel (bio), Delilah Griswold (bio), Leanna Humphrey (bio), Nusaibah Khan (bio), André Nascimento (bio), Chijioke Onah (bio), Rewa Phansalkar (bio), Marsha Taichman (bio), Chloe Tsui (bio), and Hanxue Wei (bio) There must be no idle mourning. —Shirley Graham Du Bois1 Collective mourning and mass burial are uneven territories of racial grief and grievances.2 The way societies honor the dead is often as much a celebration of life as an arena for singing communal sorrow songs. The landscape architecture of burial is always fraught and racialized because the afterlife is segregated not only by different death rites and rituals but by the epistemic violence that extends past death. The minor and melancholy key of Black life and mourning is connected to that of Indigenous life and mourning across the Western Hemisphere because of colonialism. The two are not mutually exclusive scales of relation because of the crimes of stolen life and stolen land, as well as the important fact that Afro-Indigenous peoples share the history of both ongoing events.3 The theft of the body and of the land is a terrain inflected by the asymmetric valuation and formation of race as it takes shape differently globally. Connecting the disparate geographies and grounds of burial in Upstate New York, the Caribbean, and New York City and a speculative environment in the far future, I produced the sound sculpture Dirge with twelve graduate and advanced students. A hemispheric hymn for the dead, this collective dirge takes multiple forms; the central component is a twenty-seven-minute experimental film. In five acts, we feature sonic and visual interpretations of the spatial poetics [End Page 463] of Black and Indigenous mourning across the hemisphere as a celebration of the livingness of both communities. Another component of the project is a podcast; and the third part is this essay, which forms a written guide articulating the collaborative process behind coproducing Dirge. Together we explored how unmarked graves of improper burial for people of color in the Americas are structured by the violent and accelerating dynamic of racial capitalism that unevenly distributes the risk of premature death, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us.4 The culmination of a Cornell University architecture seminar entitled "Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies" sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, this sound sculpture was produced as a creative offering in a time of crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.5 What sort of monument, we asked, could be built to celebrate life amid the harrowing stakes of mass death faced by Black and Indigenous peoples across space and time in the Western Hemisphere? As a collective of scholars and practitioners, how could we listen for the deafening din of state-sanctioned suffering with the riotous joy of Afro-Indigenous coalitions across space and time? Taking together the entanglement of the dispossession of Native sovereignty (stolen land) and African enslavement (stolen life) as foundational to a potential hemispheric politics of mourning, we decided sound would be a fitting medium for a funereal poetic sculpture. Sound sculptures take many forms, but most are intermedia time-based artforms that produce a soundtrack. The sonic register takes primacy and is often nondiegetic and nonlinear in its mode of composition. Under the frame of "metropolitan ecologies," I invited students to disrupt linear timescales and the binary between the urban-rural experiences. From a Black feminist perspective, I encouraged these students (several of whom are architects) to attend to the dark blueprints of race and space across the Americas. "Dark blueprints" is a phrase that Ben Platt, a member of the Dark Laboratory, my collective on race, ecology, and creative technology, used a couple years ago. I have not been able to forget it. Through literature, historical texts, theory, and film with special attention to the architecture of cities that might not be considered cities anymore, my students and I explored cemeteries as segmented cities of the dead. Hemispherically, from Brooklyn to Teotihuacán, we centered Indigenous architectures and infrastructures rooted in knowledge practices that Europeans depended on when they arrived with the aim of conquest. Black archaeologists such...

"Books About Race": Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century

This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the "authorized" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity.

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>

A photovoltaic light electric vehicle for project-based education in engineering

This article presents a project for the design, manufacture and evaluation of a light electric vehicle prototype whose only source of energy comes from a photovoltaic generator integrated in it, that is, it does not have batteries for energy storage. In its approach and development, a project-based learning model (PBL) has been followed, for which a group of students from different degrees of the Escuela de Ingenierías of the Universidad de Málaga has been formed, who have developed all the tasks involved in the realization of the prototype. The purpose of this prototype is to serve as a model for defining a new concept of student races on energy efficiency in mobility. To evaluate the performance of the prototype, tests have been carried out to characterize the energy consumption in different drive cycles and irradiance conditions and to obtain characteristics as limits of speed, acceleration and rising slope. Another long-term objective and, therefore, not included in this article is the evaluation of the technical training and complementary skills acquired by the students.

Indexing Whiteness to American Design

This essay argues that the Index of American Design helped transform understandings of White racial identity in the United States during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, Euro-Americans were seen less as a malignant horde of separate races and more as a benign collection of ethnicities that made up a unified White or “Caucasian” race. The Index of American Design, a Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project of 1936–1942 that produced thousands of illustrations documenting decorative arts before 1900, constructed a canon of American art around these White ethnic groups. The Index excluded most objects made by Native, African, and Asian Americans and instead sought out “folk art” produced by relatively isolated or archaic groups descended from European immigrants. By celebrating the diversity of White Americans and presenting their material culture as the basis for a unified American art, the Index of American Design helped codify White racial formation and its underpinning of American national identity.

In the Wilds of Black Sound

In this interview, curator and writer Anaïs Duplan speaks with 2022 Wave Farm artist-in-residence Johann Diedrick and 2021 artists-in-residence Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson and Sadie Woods on Black experimental documentarian practices, especially as they pertain to sound-based works and other inter- or post-disciplinary practices. Black soundings of speech and racialized forms of listening are ever-mutating invisible responses moving to and from societal biases. Diedrick, Robinson, and Woods discuss their past works along with the thematic undercurrents of those works, including racial bias in artificial intelligence and news reportage, the discipline and the language of science, and the mechanics of sounds. This interview is a part of research by Duplan toward a future publication detailing interdisciplinary experimental documentarian practices among practitioners.

Review: Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks

Review: <i>Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks</i>

Hate Speech Hashtag Classification on Twitter Using the Hybrid Classifier Method

Hate speech on social media, especially Twitter, often takes the form of racism, sexism, or political interests aimed at certain individuals or groups. These actions can trigger crime, riots, violence and even resistance to individuals or groups. Therefore, we need a process of classifying a tweet whether it is hate speech or not to reduce the abuse that occurs on Twitter. The technology used in the classification of hate speech that is most commonly used is neural networks that require user data and meta data. In previous studies, the Naïve Bayes (NB) method has been used using the bigram, unigram and feature selection features with an accuracy of 80-85%. The k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) method has also been used which has an accuracy of 70-85% on the clarification of hate speech by political figures. Meanwhile, the most widely used method is the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method with an accuracy of 70 to the highest 95%. To get a higher accuracy in the classification of hate speech, this study will perform a Hybrid Classifier on the Hate Speech Hashtag Classification process using a combination method of MLP, kNN, NB. The data used in this study are Twitter Tweets from November 2021 to June 2022 regarding trending hashtags. The average accuracy performance results obtained using MLP, kNN, NB were 72%, 63%,73% respectively. To improve the accuracy of the classification results of the three methods, a combination of methods using the Hybrid Classifier is carried out. Experimental results show Hybrid Classifier with voting method can increase accuracy up to 74%. It was found that the use of a hybrid can provide a better system performance than the 3 classifiers in its composition, namely kNN, NB and MLP

Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees

Abstract The introduction to this special issue argues that new work on borders and refugees does not simply serve as an urgent response to contemporary politics but requires an unsettling of core conceptions of nation and empire, citizenship and migrancy, and rights and rightlessness. Prioritizing the perspectives of exiles, migrants, and refugees entails new understandings of the relationship between mutating racial formations and international border regimes across past and present landscapes. Reading the refugee necessitates rethinking belonging in order to expand our political imagination beyond anodyne notions of multiculturalism or liminality. Such work undoes American Studies from the inside rather than institutionalizing a distinct sub-field of border studies. Recognizing that the border is everywhere, and is not limited to the construction of a wall or checkpoint, such study strives to undo the exceptionality of the border as a site to link the practices of surveillance, capture, and detention that operate there to similar practices within the domestic sphere. An attempt to grasp US literary history from the vantage of exiles, migrants, and refugees is not timely, but fundamentally belated—impossible to arrive at and long overdue.

Heavy lifting: authentic talent development and leadership obtainment for Black women state legislators

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to apply a novel intersectional framework, the heavy lifter theory, to leadership attainability in state legislatures. It is a logical and unique way to examine the gender ascription of Black women. This work helps to shed light on the political behavior of Black women, the institutional obstacles they face, and the lasting power of ancestral talent development.Design/methodology/approachOne way to examine this intersectional theory, as it relates to Black women and authentic talent development in a sociocultural context, is an examination of leadership attainment in state legislatures. The specific research question was: What is the probability that Black women will attain leadership in state legislatures in comparison to Black men and white women? This study used panel data that have individual-level data on state legislators from 2007 to 2014 and applied a logistic regression and a predictive probability.FindingsIntersectionality, measured as the interaction term between sex and race, increases the probability of Black women earning formal leadership positions in state legislatures. In addition, Black women attain leadership positions at higher rates than both Black men and white women.Originality/valueThis research presents a historical context by which to understand and examine the gendered nature of the ascription process of Black women. Specifically, their experience as a marginalized group burdened them with the duty of the heavy lifter. Although being the heavy lifter is a burden, this focus on Black women’s ability to thrive under constant discrimination in the form of racism and sexism should give scholars pause. In looking at Black women legislators’ ability to gain leadership, the heavy lifter identity can potentially be a vehicle through which Black women legislators can find a sense of purpose and both psychological and social strength to forge their own unexpected path.

The racial learning of Chinese international students in the US: a transnational perspective

ABSTRACT This article examines how Chinese international students develop a complex understanding of race and racism from a transnational perspective. Through semi-structured interviews and follow-up exchanges with 21 Chinese international undergraduates at a US public research university, the article argues that students’ racial learning was jointly shaped by their upbringing in mainland China and by racial encounters in the US. The findings reveal that Chinese students held contrastive views on race and racism before and after their arrival, due to the disjuncture between ideological impact in the home country and experiential exploration in the host country. Specifically, Chinese students’ lived experiences in the US dramatically shifted their conceptualization of race from a nationality-based identity to the phenotype-based imposed category of ‘Asian’. They also revised their understanding of racist practices from mostly violent and explicit to mostly subtle and implicit. This study contributes to the broader literature on transnational racialization.

Slavery, Law, and Race in England and its New World Empire

This paper responds to Holly Brewer's article “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire.” Brewer traces a process begun by Charles I, in collaboration with his appointed judges, to legalize the buying and selling of people in England and its Empire. Brewer's work is a much-needed reconstruction of the legal precedents that transformed people into chattel, enabling the business of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet race does not receive any engagement as a category of analysis. Missing is an account of the historical processes whereby laws about slavery contributed to racial formation. Although the global expansion of the British Empire coincided with a new emphasis on rule of law and equality before the law, bound labor and persistent questions of race, gender, status, age, nation, and boundary called attention to the contradictions embodied in Enlightenment thought and its proclaimed universal values.

Buckra: Whiteness and Porgy and Bess

Abstract Questions of race have been central to an understanding of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), yet the opera’s portrayal of whiteness remains an aspect hidden in plain sight. While focusing on a Black community living under Jim Crow segregation, the work also features five white characters—a Detective and two police officers, a Coroner, and a lawyer—whose actions affect the lives of the people of Catfish Row in three often overlooked sections of the opera. Through close readings of the score, literary antecedents, and recorded as well as live performances, this article examines the relational role that whiteness plays in the compositional architecture and production history of Porgy and Bess. To show how the opera’s complex social dynamics are embedded in its musical structure, I employ an interdisciplinary approach combining musicological analysis with critical race theory, which pinpoints racial formation as a key component of Gershwin’s score. The article’s central analysis of the score reveals nuanced portrayals of Jim Crow race relations, highlighted by both multilayered expressions of white supremacy and powerful moments of Black resistance. These nuances, however, depend on reading the opera in its complete state, yet the three Black/white exchanges are often heavily altered in performance. To further understand how staging these scenes can affect their meanings, I investigate several key productions from across the opera’s history. Concluding with the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019–20 production, I reflect that the depictions of police brutality, white supremacy, and Black resistance in Porgy and Bess are more painfully relevant today than ever before.