Racial Formation Research Articles

RACISM AGAINST INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND AFRO-DESCENDANTS IN SWEDEN, BRAZIL, AND MEXICO

This article explores how racism and stigmatizing discourses and practices are articulated and normalized in colonizer and colonized countries. The research compares the cases of Sweden, Brazil, and Mexico from a combination of frameworks -- the Critical Race Theory (Walton, 2019; Ansley, 1997), the neo-Marxist concept of institutional racism and racialization (Cole, 2016 and 2020), and a decolonial framework and methodology (Fanon, 1968; Tynan and Bishop, 2022). Racism has been structural and systemic in Latin American societies since colonization when religious and royal authorities legitimated Indigenous and African slavery in the colonies. After independence, modern free republics converted religious legitimation of racism in pseudoscientific Eugenics and the invention of human races and racism continue oppressing Indigenous and African descendants. Currently structural racism continues to be the normal behavior in Western societies, not an exception. The objective of this research is to identify and compare racism reveled in behaviors and the speeches behind them in two colonized societies – Brazil and Mexico – and Sweden, a colonizing society. The question orienting the comparative research is how and in which ways racism and stigmatizing discourses and practices are articulated and normalized in colonizer and colonized countries. Understanding the main persistent trends in these societies on eugenic somatic characteristics such as hair type, body part sizes (e.g. head), as well as other collective social and religious symbols, behaviors, attitudes and cultural customs, used as discriminatory markers. The qualitative methodology includes 69 interviews and six focus groups in the three countries. Results were analyzed form a critical reflexivity about how colonialism and eugenics impact the lived experiences and realities of both groups in colonized and colonizer countries, through historic and current practices. racism has the same routes of functioning, structuring unequal relationships, distortions in the perception of the other, marginalization and suffering.

A Decolonial Agenda for EU Migration and Asylum Law

Abstract This article seeks to advance a decolonial research agenda in EU migration and asylum law, arguing that there is significant scope for further development within existing scholarship. It offers some theoretical tools grounded in postcolonial and decolonial literature, contending that a decolonial project for EU migration and asylum law should critically engage with the enduring epistemic foundations of colonial unequal mobilities and treatment. These include the ‘sedentary bias’ and the ‘cheap labour’ bias, as well as the ways in which these have been shaped by race, gender, class, and other epistemic formations. Building on these insights, the article outlines potential avenues for further research, especially in relation to the EU Schengen regime, the externalisation of EU borders, the construction of the ‘economic migrant’ and the Common European Asylum system.

Kerncurriculum und Migrationsgesellschaft. Zur Bedeutung von Migration in der Erziehungswissenschaft als Disziplin und in einer professionsorientierten Lehre

The relationship between migration and education is integrated into multiple discourses within educational science: the discussion surrounding learners’ “migration background” in performance comparisons; the incorporation of migration knowledge within post-colonial epistemologies; and the conceptualization of racism within the context of anti-feminism. Including this dimension in the core curriculum is innovative as it moves away from a pedagogical framework focused on adaptation and assimilation instead of addressing the educational conditions shaped by a migration society. This approach emphasizes that engaging with post-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-Semitic content is not merely a trend, but a crucial element in a core curriculum aimed at fostering professional development.

Racial Injustice Against Blacks in the American Society as Represented in Wright’s Native Son

Racial injustice refers to the unfair treatment of a specific race in a community, which disadvantages one race. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the social consequences of systemic racism and identify the various types of racial injustices experienced by Black people in the 1930s, as depicted in Wright's Native Son. Qualitative and descriptive methods, as well as Lucien Goldmann's Genetic Structuralism methods, were used. The results showed various forms of racism, including prejudice, negative stereotypes, segregation, and social isolation. These types of injustice have had a severe impact on African Americans, as seen through the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who represented the constant state of fear, uncertainty, and frustration inflicted upon Black people. By uncovering the different kinds of racial injustice, this study emphasized the importance of societal reflection and action in eliminating long-standing racial biases and injustices.

Perspectives of Canadian Youth on Islamophobic Hate Speech on Social Media

Background: Recent high-profile cases of Islamophobia online raise questions about how youth view and understand Islamophobic hate speech on social media. Analysis: In this study, we interviewed 25 respondents who identify as Muslim and have experienced hate speech on social media and 25 respondents from mainstream Canadian youth who are active users of social media. We also arranged a partially mediated online multilogue between the respondents on religion-induced hate speech, especially Islamophobia in Canada. Conclusions and implications: While both groups agreed on the harmful impacts of unmoderated hate speech online, they disagreed on the definition of Islamophobia as the systematic oppression of Muslims and held conflicting views on Islamophobia as a form of racism.

Bio-Social Race as a Socially Salient Conception of Race

In this paper I argue that a Bio-Social conception of “race” is a socially salient conception within the United States. This conception is “socially salient” in the sense that is demonstrative of public understanding and public use of the race concept within context of the United States and its member institutions. This conception is “Bio-Social” in the sense that a set of biological and social properties form the necessary conditions for “race” and “racial group membership.” I explain that these biological and social properties are the social interpretation of ancestral relations to geographically and culturally specified groups.

Kant's conception of race and modern political science

Racial issues remained for a long time one of the marginal topics in political thought. However, in the last few decades racial questions have become a topic of discussion in political science. Modern debates about race in political science are quite multifaceted and concern both practical and theoretical issues. In this regard, participants in discussions often turn to the of thinkers of the past. Much of this research focuses on the specific issue of Kant's concept of race, which is often used as a pretext to label Kant as a ‘racist’ thinker. Why is it that Kant's concept of race has become so important for contemporary discussions of race in political science? Could the characterizing of Kant as a ‘racist’ have a negative impact on the perception of his political philosophy? Answering these questions is the purpose of this paper.

The fastest 24-hour ultramarathoners are from Eastern Europe

Ultramarathon running is of increasing popularity, where the time-limited 24-hour run is one of the most popular events. Although we have a high scientific knowledge about different topics for this specific race format, we do not know where the best 24-hour runners originate from and where the fastest races are held. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the origin of these runners and the fastest race locations. A machine learning model based on the XG Boost algorithm was built to predict running speed based on the athlete´s age, gender, country of origin and the country where the race takes place. Model explainability tools were used to investigate how each independent variable would influence the predicted running speed. A sample of 171,358 race records from 63,514 unique runners from 73 countries participating in 24-hour races held in 57 countries between 1807 and 2022 was analyzed. Most of the athletes originated from the USA, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia, Australia, Austria, and Canada. Tunisian athletes achieved the fastest average running speed, followed by runners from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Island, Croatia, Slovenia, and Israel. Regarding the country of the event, the ranking looks quite similar to the participation by the athlete, suggesting a high correlation between the country of origin and the country of the event. The fastest 24-hour races are recorded in Israel, Romania, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, and Taiwan. On average, men were 0.4 km/h faster than women, and the fastest runners belonged to age groups 35–39, 40–44, and 45–49 years. In summary, the 24-hour race format is spread over the world, and the fastest athletes mainly originate from Eastern Europe, while the fastest races were organized in European and Asian countries.

Racial Capitalism in an Ethnic Minority Border Region

Abstract In the social, historical, and political context of Xi Jinping’s China, particular forms of racialization and racial capitalism have emerged in Altay Prefecture, the homeland of ethnic Kazakhs on China’s northwest border. This study examines the husbandry industry in Altay Prefecture to elucidate how Xi’s China has built a mode of racial capitalism through the management of Kazakh land, ethnicity, and culture. Within the framework of a case study, I employ document collection and participant observation methods to gather data that are then interpreted through critical policy analysis. The research shows that Kazakhs have been racialized based on their mobile pastoral traditions, enslaved in the “debt economy,” and exploited through husbandry policies and programs. The particular ways in which husbandry has been restructured and assimilated into Chinese industrial production chains exploit and reproduce the Kazakh-Han hierarchy and segregation. This close look at racial capitalism in Altay sheds light on the operations of Xi’s ecological civilization and war on poverty policies in an ethnic minority border region and discusses how they align with the broader geopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Chinatown, part five? ‘Capitalism with Asian values’ in Vancouver commentary on Elvin Wyly's ‘Regarding the Pain of (Indigenous) Others’

In this commentary on Elvin Wyly’s ‘Regarding the Pain of (Indigenous) Others’, I comment on the absent ontology of Asian subjectivities in urban studies of neoliberal global cities. Wyly’s account of neoliberal Vancouver hellscapes frames racial formations and narratives of dispossession as formed by capital. Asian subjectivities, I argue in this commentary, are also flattened by narratives of capital into purely economic subjects, but what Wyly’s reading of Vancouver opens up, I also hope to show, is the possibility of tracing the complex life stories of Asian capitalist characters in Vancouver’s neoliberal hellscape. In this way, Wyly avoids the trap of the previous urban studies entries in the post-Chinatown ilk, where global cities are depicted as being shaped by capital with the complexity of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, but ironically have neither ‘Asian’ nor ‘Chinese’ characters in them that are subjectively complex. Paying attention to complex Asian subjectivities in neoliberal cities allows for further questioning of the relationship between race and capital in contemporary urban studies.

Guest Editor's Introduction—Expansive Trajectories: Remapping Transnationalism in the Global China Era

This introductory article reflects critically on the history of Chinese transnationalism studies in relation to intensifying cross-border engagements by PR Chinese state and nonstate actors today. Revisiting 1990s scholarship on Chinese transnationalism(s), it argues that the global China concept helps us attend to the significant impacts of China’s economic and geopolitical rise on earlier patterns of transborder cultural flows, hence to the ways that new patterns can be interpreted. The article considers the continuities and tensions the seven articles in this issue elucidate between state-led transnationalism “from above” and the myriad forms of transnationalism “from below” instantiated in the lived experiences of ordinary people. From an ethnographic perspective, this issue considers a wide range of transnational movements affecting cultural life within and beyond the PRC, investigating how these intensified transborder flows are reconfiguring social identities this century. Three core themes emerge: the often unpredictable responses to state initiatives by Chinese people living transnational lives; the transnationalization of class reproduction for both working-class and middle-class subjects as a consequence of new cross-border flows; and the revitalization of old forms of racism and the emergence of new ones as a result of evolving transnational mobilities of Chinese media, people, and capital today.

Early developmental insights into the social construction of race.

The way that societies assign people to racial categories has far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences. One framework for establishing racial boundaries is based on ancestry, which historically has been leveraged to create rigid racial categories, particularly with respect to being categorized as white. A second framework is based on skin tone, which can vary within families and across the lifespan, and is thus more likely to blur racial boundaries. The persistence of these distinct cultural beliefs about race requires that they be transmitted to each new generation, but there have been few cross-cultural studies on their development during childhood. Participants (5- to 12-year-old children, N = 123) were from the United States, in which the ancestry model has been more prevalent, or from Brazil, in which the skin tone model has been more prevalent. In both countries, 5- to 7-year-olds endorsed the belief that skin tone determines race, for example, by assigning biological siblings with differing skin tones to different racial categories. However, racial concepts diverged among the 10- to 12-year-olds, with children from the United States shifting toward a classification based on ancestry and children in Brazil endorsing a classification based on skin tone even more strongly with age. These differing conceptions were especially evident with reference to white racial categorization: Older children from Brazil persisted in classifying lighter skinned people as white when they had African ancestry, unlike older children from the United States. These findings provide important insights into the developmental and cultural influences on racial classification systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Protection of racism from the anti-racism movement: taking colorblindness racial discrimination as an example

After the emergence of many great anti-racism movements, the supporters of traditional racism have significantly decreased. However, racism, or more precisely, liberal racism, including its specific form - color-blind racism, has replaced traditional racism and still exists in large numbers in society. Racism seems to have found new ways of survival in anti-racism concepts such as liberal racism and color blindness. To analyze the new forms of racism that exist in today’s society, this article takes colorblindness racism as the analytical object. Starting from the dual role of color blindness in the anti-racism movement, it points out that a large number of new forms of racism are prevalent under the guise of anti-racism, revealing the challenges and limitations faced in current anti-racism activities in order to provide assistance for future anti-racism work.

Gendering Empire: A Historiographical Exploration

In her landmark work in feminist theory The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues how gender is a totalising, transformative social experience. In this essay, I will argue that this total construction of power and identity finds resonance the colonial project. As alluded to in Franz Fanon’s vision of decolonisation, colonialism wholly moulds and creates individuals. The link is established in using gender as a category of historical analysis for empires, where the principal analytical prism is a Foucauldian dispersion of power, in which power emanates through knowledge-fields, discourse and social relations rather than through simple, unmasked, top-down imposition. Two strands emerge: the genealogy of power and the reproduction of power. The former traces how gender has contributed to moulding, naturalising and essentialising colonial hierarchies, while the latter addresses how historical writing itself illuminates or occludes narratives, agencies and subjectivities, in turn creating new meanings. However, gender as a category of historical analysis is useful for historians of empire, contingent upon the adoption of an intersectional approach that does not posit gender as primary to other axes of oppression. Furthermore, the consciousness of its inessentiality – particularly that of the binary – is necessary to avoid perpetuating Eurocentrism and its specific demarcation of the concepts of gender and race.

The Fear of Critical Race Methodologies

AbstractCritical race methodologies (CRM), which prioritise the experiences and knowledge of racialised peoples, have become a useful tool to identify and acknowledge racialised power relations in all aspects of the research process. However, engaging with these methodologies requires researchers to not only move away from western scientific research methodologies, which have historically excluded the knowledges and lived experiences of racialised peoples, but confront the legacy of methodological Whiteness. To explore this further, this article takes a self-reflexive account on why International Non-Governmental Organisations [(I)NGOs], who have a long history of (re)producing harmful images of racialised peoples, fear the adoption of CRM based on this tension. Drawing on Bantu Steve Biko’s and Lewis Gordon’s conceptualisation of racism, fear and Black Consciousness, this paper argues that CRM should not be seen as an attack on methodological Whiteness, but an opportunity to advocate for a sector-wide introspection on the methodological choices which not only centre on the inclusion of marginalised voices, but recognise the need for a redistribution of power to challenge prevailing hierarchies within (I)NGOs.

The International and the Local Worker: Understanding Multi-layered Processes of Racialisation in International Development Organisations

AbstractThis article seeks to examine how institutional hierarchies relate to processes of racialisation in development organisations that are multiracial. Complementing and building on existing literature focussed on race and development it shows how processes of racialisation help to produce and legitimate distinctions between local and international development professionals. It argues these divides cannot always be neatly mapped onto phenotype but are related to processes of racialisation tied to knowledge and class and this, in turn, helps to produce inequalities—power imbalances, pay differences and differential access to organisational benefits—between development workers. Therefore, while forms of racism and their material impacts shape the experiences of international staff of colour, there is another layer of racialisation at play that cannot be explained through existing racial categories but that draws on colonial ideas of epistemic superiority to create specific forms of racialisation within development organisations.

Conceptualizations of ‘race’: surveys of Polish academics on the race concept

AbstractRecent studies suggest that race is no longer viewed as a biological category by most anthropologists in the United States, but less empirical work has been carried out in other countries. In this study, we engaged the Polish academic community in anthropology (biological and cultural) and biology by conducting surveys to assess how its members approach and conceptualize race in these disciplines. We surveyed participants (a total of 270 respondents) on their views on the existence of races (i.e. whether humans may be subdivided into biological races), whether race is a concept that is needed in science, what the term ‘race’ should symbolize, and whether the respondents were familiar with the term ‘social race’. The results demonstrate that although the view on the reality of races is still generally shared by the majority of the studied academic community, an awareness of the non‐existence of races in our species has emerged among a group of biological anthropologists. Both biologists and cultural anthropologists in Poland associated race mostly with a category of biological classification, while for biological anthropologists, race primarily symbolized a relic of the past. The article emphasizes the importance of becoming acquainted with the debate over race in academic discourse as well as the role of education in shaping attitudes towards race.

Sprinting to success?: F1 fans’ excitement towards change in sport competition formats

ABSTRACT Driven by an increasing digitalised consumption of leisure, and consumer preferences evolving to favour speed and immediate gratification during consumption, new shorter formats of sport competitions are being introduced. Since 2021 Formula One have been discussing complementing their traditional race format, with alternative shorter formats to re-ignite the excitement of their fans. In this study, we explore the proclaimed excitement of fans towards the three different proposed formats of F1 races through a large-scale survey (N = 2,107), showing in fact negative effects that proposed format changes have on F1 fans’ anticipated excitement. What emerges instead is the importance of the length of fandom in influencing fans’ receptivity to format changes, rather than the generation in which they belong, stressing thus the significance of intra rather than inter-generational exploration of fandom.

Racial Boundaries in Europe in the Eighteenth Century: A Historiographic Perspective

The historiography of race in Europe is almost silent about the hardening of racial boundaries in the eighteenth century. Most of the literature on the concept of race in the twenty-first century states that in the eighteenth century, Europe became increasingly obsessed with racial categories, but these writings do not explore the reasons that made this possible. This paper seeks to examine the literature to address this conundrum. I contend that together with gender and sex, race became a category for building social hierarchies when Europe increasingly became urbanized and cosmopolitan with a considerable non-European population in the eighteenth century. Science was used to create racial lines and to deepen sexual differences even in the wake of calls for equality for all.

A-321 Rethinking the Role of Race in Prenatal AFP Screening for Open Neural Tube Defects

Abstract Background The quantification of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in maternal serum is commonly used in prenatal screening to estimate the risk of fetal open neural tube defects (ONTDs). This involves comparing a patient’s measured AFP concentration to the median AFP for women of similar gestational age and weight, reported in AFP multiples of the median (MoM). Current guidelines recommend establishing population medians separately grouped by patients’ race, based on historical reports documenting differences in median AFP concentrations across different populations. We aimed to reevaluate this practice of race based ONTD risk stratification given the limited and questionable historical evidence as well as the small observed differences in AFP concentrations in our practice and in a recent report. Methods We collected maternal serum AFP screening data for patients between 12/30/19 and 2/9/24. Informed by the statistical methods used for clinical risk stratification, we developed two log-linear multiple variable regression models for estimating AFP: gestational age (GA), weight, and interaction terms (Model 1) and Model 1 predictors, race, and interaction terms (Model 2). AFP MoMs were calculated by dividing the measured AFP concentration by the model-estimated AFP. Results We analyzed maternal ONTD screening for 7,702 patients with singleton pregnancies. The current clinical process uses race and ethnicity as documented in the electronic health record, which was categorized as Black (N = 2,360), White (N = 3,734), Hispanic (N = 209), Asian (N = 641), and Other (N = 758). The addition of race in Model 2 included statistically significant predictors (p < 0.001) for Black (β = 0.2), Asian (β = 0.05), and Black:weight interaction (β = -5.9 x 10-4). Between Model 1 and Model 2, the mean change in AFP MoMs was -0.05, +0.03, 0.0, -0.02, and +0.01 for Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, and Other patients, respectively. 95% of Black patients had a change < 0.12 in AFP MoM and > 99% of all other patients had a change < 0.1. Using the clinical interpretative threshold, 56 (0.7%) results were considered elevated in both models, 4 (0.05%) elevated in Model 1 only (3 Black, 1 Other), and 4 (0.05%) elevated in Model 2 only (3 White, 1 Hispanic). Chart review of the 8 discordant interpretations showed small changes in MoMs (mean absolute difference = 0.09) and no cases of ONTDs. Conclusions In our health system’s population, maternal race appears to have a small statistically significant association with maternal AFP concentration, even after adjustment for weight and maternal GA. However, preliminary analyses indicate that this difference has a small impact on the clinical interpretation of these studies, with most patients classified similarly when race is not accounted for in the calculation. Further investigation is needed to clarify whether this small impact on estimation of risk warrants the continued inclusion of race in NTD screening, as well as whether other clinical, social, or community factors available for inclusion in this clinical risk stratification model would be better predictors than the poorly defined and discriminatory concept of race.