Critical Race Scholars Research Articles

Property Lawfare: Historical Racism and Present Islamophobia in Anti-Mosque Activism

This chapter concerns itself with the use of the law, legal institutions, and processes in anti-mosque activism and litigation to advance an social and political agenda that seeks to marginalize, if not expel, Islam and Muslims from mainstream America. It argues that even though anti-mosque activists who seek redress in courts most often lose, they “win by losing”— a phenomenon well theorized by law and social movement scholars. In other words, the strategy of litigating a narrow legal issue is not so much about winning the lawsuit but about using the courts to introduce social and political claims that further an Islamophobic agenda. Regardless of the legal outcome, anti-Muslim groups achieve significant results: their use of the law results in political consolidation of the anti-mosque movement, it keeps alive questions about Islam and Muslims’ ability to “belong” in the U.S., it demonstrates the willingness to fight for a dominant racial ordering that excludes minorities from some neighborhoods, and it forces the internalization of both social and material costs by the Muslim communities that go well beyond the costs of litigation. As critical race scholars and critical theorists have long argued, law itself is a political and indeterminate instrument. The “law is a central, if not the most central, participant in the broader project of Islamophobia.” Khaled Beydoun theorizes that Islamophobia from a legal perspective can be understood as three intersecting dimensions—private, structural, and dialectical. This chapter demonstrates this very intersectionality as it appears in anti-mosque activism. It analyzes how the private Islamophobia of community members can become galvanized into community action and through the use of the structures of the state (zoning commissions and courts) reinforce dialectical Islamophobia signaling that Muslims must explain, apologize for, and justify their actions even where those actions are entirely uncontroversial for other groups.

Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts

Racism is a historically specific structure of modern global power which generates hierarchies of the human and affirms White supremacy. This has far-reaching material and epistemological consequences in the present, one of which is the production and naturalisation of White-racialised subject positions in academic discourse. This article develops a framework for analysing Whiteness through subject-positioning, synthesising insights from critical race scholarship that seek to dismantle its epistemological tendencies. This framework identifies White subject-positioning as patterned by interlocking epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence. The article then interrogates how these epistemological tendencies produce limitations and contradictions in international theory through an analysis of three seminal and canonical texts: Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984) and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999). It shows that these epistemologies produce contradictions and weaknesses within the texts by systematically severing the analysis of the international system and the ‘West’ from its actual imperial conditions of possibility. The article outlines pathways for overcoming these limitations and suggests that continued inattention to the epistemological consequences of race for International Relations (IR) theory is intellectually unsustainable.

‘While I knew I was raced, I didn’t think much of it’: the need for racial literacy in decolonising classrooms

ABSTRACT International recognition of racial literacy is growing as a field of postcolonial scholarship but has yet to gain momentum in Australia. In this article, we argue for the need to develop a racial literacy approach for Australian contexts and draw on a qualitative study which engaged with university students who participated in the subject Racial Literacy: Indigeneity and Whiteness delivered at an Australian university. The experiences of these students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, reveal the classroom to be reflective of broader tensions that manifest in relation to race as a topic and can be a critical space for racial literacy and decolonising education. We argue here that the application of racial literacy is required to address the significant anomaly that exists between critical race scholarship, common understandings of race, colonisation and the practices and impacts of racism. We contend that to develop a racial literacy approach, which does not perpetuate the limits of critical race studies, the role of race in Indigenous dispossession and the ongoing legacies of colonisation must consistently be foundational.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Facebook: Updating Identity Economics

Scholars and news media generally name Facebook’s two central problems: that its data collection practices are a threat to user privacy, and that stricter regulations are required to prevent “bad actor” from spreading hate and disinformation. However separating these two concerns—personal data collection and bad actors—overlooks the way that one generates the other. First, this article builds on critical race scholarship to examine how identity politics are historically distorted and commodified into profitable vigilance and intolerance, in what I call a transition from identity politics, to personal identity economics. Facebook’s Ad Manager, for example, reveals how personal identities are itemized as advertising assets, which are cultivated through deeper, more trenchant identity politics. Second, this article theorizes about what makes such staunch, intolerant identity politics addictive. Drawing on Max Weber’s theories of the Protestant Ethic, this article explores how Facebook activism thrives on deep-rooted Christian paradigms of dogma, virtue, redemption, and piety. As dogmatic personal identity economics spread across the globe, they testify to how Facebook’s business model manufactures bad actors.

A hit dog will holler: challenging Szetela’s claim of epistemological insiderism

ABSTRACTAdam Szetela defends critiques of the Black Lives Matter movement by claiming epistemological insiderism as an oppressive agent that dissuades democratic exchange and emancipatory scholarship. As an approach to understanding race-based social movements in the United States, Szetela fails to acknowledge the centrality of white logic guiding his analysis. Thus, I challenge Szetela in suggesting that to claim epistemological insiderism as a mechanism by Black scholars “attack” those who disagree is a claim to the historical domination of white supremacy in sociology. As this symposium demonstrates, the usage of epistemological insiderism is an investment in protecting and reifying whiteness in social movement literature, as well as a broader disciplinary trend invested in the retrenchment of critical race and gender scholarship.

'And then Comes Life': The Intersection of Race, Poverty, and Disability in HBO's, 'The Wire'

Despite its low ratings and lack of Emmys or Golden Globes, HBO’s groundbreaking show, The Wire, has caught and kept the attention of critics, academics, and others interested in urban life. Though the show has disappeared off the airways, it is now becoming part of the academic landscape through conferences, panels, books, and courses. The article will be the first to examine The Wire, from a legal perspective. I focus upon The Wire’s lack of attention to disability. Injury abounds in The Wire. Police officers are shot, suspects are beaten, and drug addicts overdose. Despite the onslaught of injury, disability is an underdeveloped part of the world of The Wire. The Wire is not alone in its failure to adequately examine the intersection of race, poverty, and disability, but it is a helpful lens through which to examine the neglect of poor people with disabilities and disabled people of color with disabilities. The article will open new avenues in a longstanding debate concerning appropriate policy and legal interventions for the urban poor, link together disability studies with critical race studies, and illustrate the use of an artistic medium to convey complex policy and legal ideas. The article will be of substantial utility for the growing number of scholars who teach classes on The Wire, critical race scholars, disability law scholars, and poverty law scholars.

A Preliminary Study Interrogating the Cataloging and Classification Schemes of a K-12 Book Discovery Platform through a Critical Race Theory Lens

AbstractThis article presents the results of a preliminary study to examine the cataloging and classification schemes and ideological factors that play out in book discovery platforms for children’s and young adult books. Using Critical Race Theory and a Rapid Contextual Design approach to exploring the curatorial behaviors of school librarians when searching for diverse books, the study offers design ideas for retooling discovery platforms in ways that bridge the cultural disconnect that young adults from historically marginalized racial backgrounds experience in their libraries. The article concludes that in order for school librarians to find, recommend and teach about books that reflect race, equity and inclusion themes, they need more sophisticated and user-centered features that reflect critical race and multicultural analytic frameworks. This includes the need for a common vocabulary around issues of race, equity and inclusion that can simultaneously cut through the ambiguity of social tagging and yet subvert the status quo of entrenched liberalism and/or racially biased ideologies embedded in traditional classification schemes and hierarchies, such as those used in Library of Congress subject headings. The findings further suggest that school librarians would benefit from enhanced education and training in the intersections of cataloging, classification and critical race scholarship.

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives

Introduction:Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives Steven Swarbrick (bio) and Karen Raber (bio) But all that talk about the post-human, the non-human, the inhuman and the problem of lumping allhumans into the Anthropocene provides a way of sustainingthe human as a problem. What if the humanwere an effect of its own delusions of self-erasure? —Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols1 Renaissance literature contains many afterlives. Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, ends with the Prince of Denmark's impossibly pseudo-posthumous "Horatio, I am dead," whereas the play's ghostly beginning, "Who's there?," blurs the distinction between this life and the next (5.2.340, 1.1.1).2 The play's gravedigger asks about Christian burial, whereas Hamlet himself considers a thoroughly materialist afterlife, in which the body is recycled among the Earth's various elements. As this brief example suggests, the concept of Renaissance afterlives raises a series of important questions about time and agency: When does the "after" of an afterlife begin, and where does the agency for transmission to a future moment reside? The question of the afterlife as a religious proposition in early modern thought and writing is, of course, ubiquitous. But the ethics and politics of life on Earth do not arise only out of religious doctrine. From Giordano Bruno to Margaret Cavendish, monist and vitalist theories shaped debates on the proper relationship between human and nonhuman life; these theories resonate for many current scholars with the turn to the "posthuman" in our own literary-philosophical moment.3 For scholars working in the environmental humanities, the turn to the posthuman signifies in various ways the "afterlife" of the human, itself a response to the destabilizing pressures of climate change, toxic ecologies, biotechnology, and species extinction on many levels. In an era in which the distinction between human and posthuman has lost much of its force, environmental scholars have begun to theorize the afterlife of the human [End Page 313] as "intra-active" (Barad), "compositional" (Latour), "companionate" (Haraway), "vibrant" and "affective" (Bennett), and "trans-corporeal" (Alaimo).4 Still others have begun to question the very category of life, suggesting that we have always already been "after life" (Thacker), "postlife" (Colebrook), or living/unliving, like a zombie or virus (Serres).5 Do these entanglements suggest the death of the human, its survival in other forms, or both? And what do we mean by death or survival? How do terms like "sustainability," "composting," or "recycling" enable different visions of the afterlife? This special issue attempts to answer these questions by focusing our attention on the afterlives of the Renaissance. We treat "afterlives" as a contronym, a word so contradictory that it undoes its own future: on the one hand, "afterlife" suggests a life after death, but it also signals the end of life. Both senses of the word, afterlife and after life, or survival and extinction, mingle inextricably in the literature of the Renaissance, as we've seen already with Hamlet's postmortem address. Although the scholarship on Renaissance posthumanism has flourished in recent years, this work tends to focus solely on the first definition of afterlives, emphasizing what is lively or animate in the early modern text. But as feminist, queer, disability, and critical race scholars have pointed out, terms such as "life" and "animacy" can also be violently exclusionary, since what is deemed "alive" may very well encode the same racist, ableist, and colonial ideologies that have historically shaped Western ideas of the human as white, patriarchal, and masculine (we return to this point at the end of our introduction).6 This special issue provides the occasion to meditate on the second definition of afterlives. We are interested in lives gone askew and in forms of un/living that disjoin the present, like Hamlet's ghost. In short, we theorize the posthuman as a problem, precisely a problem of time and materiality, and one that puts pressure on the logic of pre and post.7 The Renaissance afterlives gathered in this collection challenge readers to dwell in the ecologically precarious, at times unlivable, spaces shaped by inequalities directly impacting the Earth system. For...

Private Selves as Public Property: Black Women’s Self-Making in the Contemporary Moment

The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical works of Black enslaved, postbellum, queer, and transgender contemporaries to show how Black women have resisted the fungibility of their bodies through processes of self-formation and self-reclamation. The author also relies on the theoretical works of critical race, queer, and feminist scholars to frame how that resistance—whether in the form of sexual freedom, reproductive choice, or independence from traditional systems of labor—represents a critical site of possibility for understanding Black women’s social and political life worlds today.

A Divergence of Interests: Critical Race Theory and White Privilege Pedagogy

Background/ContextInformed by the increasing racial disparity between the nation's predominantly White teaching force and the growing number of students of color in K–12 schools, along with the well-documented struggles that White teachers have in exploring race and racial identity, the authors critique the use of White privilege pedagogy as a strategy for promoting antiracist dispositions in White pre-service teachers.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyBy deploying several concepts central to critical race theory, as well as critiques that note the shortcomings of past attempts at racial reform (Brown v. Board of Education, Voting Rights Act), the authors investigate the effectiveness of White privilege pedagogy within the teacher education setting.Research DesignTo construct our conceptual critique of White privilege pedagogy within teacher education, we reviewed the extant literature that discussed the range of shortcomings to this pedagogical approach. To create a more historical and structural critique, we demonstrated how the tenets of White privilege pedagogy conflicted with key principles of critical race theory and with lessons from past racial remedies. We contend that White privilege pedagogy arises from a racial liberalist worldview and requires an untenable convergence of interests that limits its long-term impact. We parallel our critiques of White privilege pedagogy with arguments used by critical race scholars to explain the limited impact of previous efforts at racial reform.Conclusions/RecommendationsThe authors urge teacher educators to move away from the individualized and over-essentialized representations of racism inherent to White privilege pedagogy in favor of historical, structural, and intersectional discussions of race, racism, and the construction of White privilege.

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit

This article argues that focusing on intra-European inequalities is key to a deeper understanding of the Brexit process, as the impacts of the Brexit process on core–periphery inequalities within Europe and on intra-European migrations remain under-researched topics. Focusing on sociology, this article provides a critical analysis of the burgeoning literature on Brexit, highlighting the centrality of methodological nationalism and its critique by critical race scholars. We expand the latter’s critique, providing a different solution to the national framing of the debate. Drawing on world-system theory and post-Bourdieusian social theory, we explore the role that Britain played in legitimising core–periphery inequalities in Europe and social hierarchies between West and East, and North and South, European populations. We highlight the UK’s influence over EU supranational policies and its association, among non-UK EU citizens, with a ‘meritocracy narrative’ that shapes patterns and meanings of intra-European migration. We further explore how inequalities of nation, class, race and gender make EU citizens unequally positioned to access the promises of this narrative. Overall, the article argues that a focus on intra-European inequalities is essential to an understanding of how Britain contributed to the unequal Europe it aims to leave, and how EU citizens’ unequal migrations make Brexit an asymmetrical process.

Racial inquiries: law and the political visibility of racism in the Air India inquiry

ABSTRACT Critical race scholarship has effectively documented how the legal institutions of liberal democratic states figure as both mechanisms of systemic racism and avenues of redress against these forms of power. This article offers new insights into the racial effects of these legal institutions by examining the epistemic dynamics of a Canadian public inquiry that was tasked with investigating why state institutions failed to prevent and successfully prosecute the bombings of two Air India flights, which investigators attributed to Sikh nationalist groups operating in Canada. Through a discourse analysis of documents generated during the inquiry, I track how its complex epistemic dynamics precluded recognition of the racial effects of Canadian state institutions. Approaching the inquiry as an instrument of juridical knowledge production and mechanism of political accountability, this article tracks the contingent processes through which liberal epistemologies of race are validated by state actors to extend race’s systemic conditions of existence.

The Racialization of the African-American and Asian-American Citizen: A Comparative Legal Analysis


 
 
 The perception of racial tensions in North American settler countries has historically been focused on the Black/White relationship, as has much of the theoretical legal discourse surrounding the concept of “race”. Accordingly, the scope of much critical race scholarship has been restricted such that it rarely acknowledges the racial tensions that persist between different racially-excluded minorities. This paper hopes to expand and integrate the examination of Black and Asian-American racialization that critical race scholars have previously revealed. It will do this by historicizing the respective contours of Black and Asian-American racialization processes through legislation and landmark court cases in a neo-colonial context. The defining features of racialization which have culminated in the ultimate divergence of each group’s racialization will be compared and contrasted. This divergence sees the differential labeling of Asian-Americans as the ‘model minority’ while Blacks continue to be subjugated by modern modalities of exclusionary systems of control. The consequences of this divergence in relation to preserving existing racial and social hierarchies will be discussed in the final sections of this paper.
 
 

The Anthropology of Education and Contributions to Critical Race Studies

ABSTRACTThis essay is a response to Jonathan Warren and Michelle Kleisath's “The Roots of US Anthropology's Race Problem: Whiteness, Ethnicity and Ethnography.” In this essay, I engage with critiques about anthropology’s position on the periphery of critical race studies. The discipline’s lack of attention to racism and critical race scholarship stands in some contrast to the subfield of anthropology of education with its explicit antiracist mission and goals. I suggest educational anthropologists are more explicit about promoting research that details the workings of racism and fosters racial literacy because of at least two reasons – as a subsection of anthropology, educational anthropology is more closely aligned with if not squarely located in the field of education, and it benefits from critical anthropological methods and sensibilities. I address each of these reasons and conclude with thoughts about educational anthropologists’ contribution to critical race studies.

Gendering the Arab-Jew: Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat

Gendering the Arab-Jew:Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat Shir Alon (bio) Setting out to write an essay about cultural theorist Ella Shohat's influence on Jewish Studies over the past 30 years, I couldn't help but wonder (perhaps a bit maliciously) what Shohat, who debuted in academia with an unprecedented study of Israeli cinema from a postcolonial feminist perspective,1 would say about the recent, so-called Jewish Studies film Footnote (2011). Given that it centers on quarrels between Jewish philologists, Footnote was a surprising success both in Israel and at international festivals, even nominated for an Academy Award.2 No doubt its depiction of the relationship between two generations of Talmud scholars, father and son, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem struck a (local and international) chord. Armed with a theatrical soundtrack and humorous voice-over, the film narrates contemporary Jewish Studies as an Oedipal struggle between Ashkenazi men over official recognition, embodied in the Israel Prize. Women are assigned supportive roles as wives and mothers (alas, they occasionally dare not to be supportive enough!). One scene in particular seems to give a knowing wink to the viewing Jewish scholar, as the soundtrack gives way to a squabble, overheard at a cocktail party, about Daniel Boyarin's feminized Jewish man.3 Nevertheless, the pleasure is somewhat bitter if that scholar happens to be a woman, since Boyarin is employed merely to enforce the story of Jewish modernity as a story of masculinity. Whether it is a masculinity gained or lost depends on what flavor of masculinity you favor, but what is certain is that women remain irrelevant to it.4 [End Page 57] It is only fitting that the plot of the film rises and falls on a dramatic philological inquiry into the word metsudah, "fortress," since it presents Jewish Studies as a bastion of white men surrounded by resolute gatekeepers. Women, Mizrahi Jews, or Jerusalem's Palestinians are absent from the university citadel on the hill. What we do see, again and again, are the expressionless security guards standing at every door, profiling those attempting to enter. These guards, ubiquitous in Israeli public spaces since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, are the one visual reference in the film to Israel's ongoing regime of separation. To anyone working in the field of Jewish Studies, the film's image of the discipline is clearly anachronistic: the walls of the fortress have been breached (though not toppled). Work done over the past 40 years has introduced both new research approaches and new objects of study, in dynamic exchange with critical gender, race, and ethnic studies, as well as vital criticism of Jewish Studies' commitment to a Zionist telos. Ella Shohat's writing, taking place at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and critical race scholarship, directly and indirectly inspired many of these changes. The recent publication of an anthology of her collected writing spanning the past 30 years provides an occasion to assess her influence on the field.5 It seems instructive to position Shohat's intervention alongside Boyarin's, since both have utilized postcolonial and feminist theoretical tools to present foundational and resonant challenges to Jewish Studies: both engage with Jewish identity against its immediate context—Christianity in Boyarin's case and Arab/Muslim culture in the case of Shohat; both associate Zionism, albeit in different ways, with a kind of colonial mimicry, an effort to whiten and westernize the Jew, with destructive psychological effects; and both identify gendered mechanisms of orientalization, demonstrating that the effeminate Jew and the effeminate oriental share the burden of the European gaze. Yet, there is also an important difference between the two: whereas Boyarin is invested in identifying Jewish difference (and therefore an ethical-political Jewish essence),6 Shohat strives to multiply Jewish histories and challenge the paradigms that partition Jews from Arabs, East from West, and modernity from tradition, and in this manner she threatens to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish Studies and its coherent object of research.7 This is one possible reason why Shohat and Boyarin's interventions rarely interact in American scholarship. Critical seminars...

From the Border to the Core: A Thickening Military-Police Assemblage

Militarization on the US–Mexico border has intensified in America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, while America’s War on Drugs has escalated militarization in America’s urban core. This infusion of military weapons and tactics along the border and within America’s urban core produces devastating effects on communities of color. Yet, to date, few critical race scholars attend to the Wars on Terror and on Drugs as two sides of the same coin. This article serves as a bridge between US–Mexico border studies and critical race studies vis-à-vis a theorization of a thickening military-police assemblage birthed by the War on Drugs, and intensified by the War on Terror. To delineate this assemblage, we respond to two key questions: how and to what degree has the US–Mexico border served as a staging ground for US (para)military and surveillance strategies at home and abroad? and how do discourses on America’s urban core compare and contrast with those on its southern border? We draw upon the cases of Esequiel Hernández, Jr. and Michael Brown, two teenagers whose lives were taken by this assemblage, to frame these questions. Our analysis reveals material, symbolic, and affective links between America’s militarization on the southwest border and within its urban core.

(Re)theorizing hybridity for the study of identity and difference

AbstractThis paper revisits the construct of hybridity as conceptualized in postcolonial theory and its application within and beyond the field of critical social psychology. Hybridity emerged in postcolonial theory as an alternative to racial/racist purisms, questioning “natural” and complete definitions of identity and instead suggesting movement and mediation as central to identity‐making. The objectives of this paper are twofold: First, I trace the genealogy of hybridity discourse from its origins as a critique of cultural imperialism, to its explicit and implicit invocations serving projects of assimilation and nation‐building. Second, building on the work of critical race scholars, critical social psychologists, and Caribbean feminist scholars who emphasize the role of power in the production of difference, I anchor my analysis of the malleability of hybridity in traveling notions of Indo‐Caribbean identity from the Caribbean region to the U.S. More broadly, I illuminate the tensions involved in reclaiming multiple notions of origin and organizing transnational commitments.

Silence, Power, and Inequality: An Intersectional Approach to Sexual Violence

Sexual violence reproduces inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, ability status, citizenship status, and nationality. Yet its study has been relegated to the margins of our discipline, with consequences for knowledge about the reproduction of social inequality. We begin with an overview of key insights about sexual violence elaborated by feminists, critical race scholars, and activists. This research leads us to conceptualize sexual violence as a mechanism of inequality that is made more effective by the silencing of its usage. We trace legal and cultural contestations over the definition of sexual violence in the United States. We consider the challenges of narrating sexual violence and review how the narrow focus on gender by some anti–sexual violence activism fails women of color and other marginalized groups. We conclude by interrogating the sociological silence on sexual violence.

Decolonial sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois's foundational theoretical and methodological contributions

AbstractDecolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.

A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness

Twenty years after Bonilla-Silva developed the analytic components of a structural race perspective and called for “comparative work on racialization in various societies,” U.S.-centric race theory continues to be mostly rooted in a U.S. focus. What is missing is a framework that explores race and racism as a modern global project that takes shape differently in diverse structural and ideological forms across all geographies but is based in global white supremacy. Drawing from Bonilla-Silva’s national racialized social systems approach, global South scholars, and critical race scholars in the world-systems tradition, the author advances a global critical race and racism framework that highlights two main areas: (1) core components that include the “state,” “economy,” “institutions,” and “discourses” and “representations,” as divided by “racist structure” and “racist ideology” and shaped by the “history” of and current forms of transnational racialization and contemporary “global” linkages, and (2) the production of deep and malleable global whiteness. With this framework, both the permanence and flexibility of racism across the globe can be seen, in all its overt, invisible, and insidious forms, that ultimately sustains global white supremacy in the twenty-first century.