Critical Race Scholars Research Articles

The Racial Carcerality of Migration Governance

ABSTRACTBringing migration governance literature into conversation with carceral studies, this article offers a conceptual framework to account for the interconnectedness between migration governance in the global North and the racial logics of carcerality. It argues that criminalization, incarceration, detention, and deportation, converging as a carceral industrial complex, should be viewed in historically specific contexts as modes of racist exclusion that fulfill racial projects. The article first considers critical race scholarship on nation‐state formation to trace the historical and contemporary manifestations of racial exclusion within immigration legislation. Next, the article traces the carceral nature of migration and border governance, focussing particular attention to its expansion into the orbit of families and communities, to suggest that carceral migration governance crystalizes a set of power relations implicated in the reproduction of global racial ordering. To illustrate this argument, the final section engages the carceral migration racial governance framework through the empirical vantage point of ‘the family’ to advance an understanding of the work that carceral migration does for racial ordering and the production of disposable (family) life to those ends.

“New food cultures” and the absent food citizen: immigrants in urban food policy discourse

AbstractMulticultural cities in the Global North are rapidly developing and releasing urban food policies that outline municipal visions of sustainable food systems. In turn, these policies shape conceptions of food citizenship in the city. While these policies largely absorb activities previously associated with “alternative” food systems, little is known about how they respond to critical food and race scholars who have noted that these food practices and spaces have historically marginalized immigrants. A critical discourse analysis of 22 urban food policies from Global North cities reveals that most policies do not meaningfully consider immigrant foodscapes, foodways, and food-related labour. Many promote hegemonic and/or ethno-nationalistic understandings of “healthy” and “sustainable” food without recognizing immigrants’ food-related knowledge and skills. Policies largely fail to connect the topic of immigrant labour with goals like shortening supply chains, subject immigrant neighbourhoods to stigmatizing health discourses, and lack acknowledgement of the barriers immigrants may face to participating in sustainable food systems. Relatedly, policy discourses articulate forms of food citizenship that emphasize individual obligations over rights related to food. This jeopardizes the potential for immigrants to be seen as belonging to dominant political urban food communities and benefitting from the symbolic and material rewards associated with them.

Good Muslims, good citizens? An intersectional approach to Muslims’ everyday (hidden) resistance tactics in Belgium

ABSTRACT This paper explores Muslim participants’ political endeavours, aiming to tackle their marginalization in a secular racialized environment. Drawing on critical race scholarship (Du Bois), resistance studies (de Certeau, Scott) and lived experiences captured by in-depth interviews with Muslims in Belgium, I focus on everyday hidden resistance tactics enacted by my research subjects to challenge the status quo. I find my research participants aiming to counter racialization through everyday (hidden) practices such as reversing the Muslim gaze, modelling their religious behaviour as a form of da’wa and building up a counterpower to achieve recognition as citizen. Second, this study shows the salience of Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness – or Muslim participants seeing themselves through the eyes of the dominant group – shaping subordinate forms of political resistance.

Multiple Consciousness and Philosophical Method

AbstractSophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality adopts a provocative philosophical methodology: centring the experiences of victims of discrimination, and the basic contours of anti-discrimination law, in developing an account of wrongful discrimination. If, however, we take seriously sceptical accounts of law developed within feminist and critical race scholarship, we begin to see a tension within Moreau's methodological dyad: if victims of discrimination often experience discrimination law as hostile and disbelieving, how can both be treated as authoritative? This contribution will explore this tension as it emerges in Faces of Inequality, in light of Mari Matsuda's theory of “multiple consciousness.”

Imperial algorithms: Contemporary manifestations of racism and colonialism.

In this special issue, we invited contributions that critically examined issues of imperialism, colonialism, power, justice, etc. to expand the canon of anticolonial scholarship and critical scholarship in community psychology. Our two objectives were: (1) to build on the canon of anticolonial and critical race scholarship to cultivate an empirical and theoretical body of work and conceptual frameworks about racism and colonialism within the field of community psychology and (2) to unpack the different manifestations of racism in society from the lens of community psychology and reflect on the implications of these varied forms of injustice in the contemporary moment. Rooted in African epistemology and methodology (Martin, 2012), we find the concept of the algorithm to serve as a potent metaphor for the ways in which these oppressive structures operate given the prevalence of algorithms in our daily lives and the algorithm is symbolic of the information age and predictive powers that seem to govern society beyond conscious control. In this sense, imperial algorithms are these structures, patterns, processes, and procedures that perpetuate imperialism. These imperial algorithms manifest as neo-colonialism, surveillance, social engineering, carcerality, reality warping of contemporary racism, health disparities exacerbated by COVID-19, and environmental grids of oppression.

A non-ideal approach to slurs

Philosophers of language are increasingly engaging with derogatory terms or slurs. Only few theorists take such language as a starting point for addressing puzzles in philosophy of language with little connection to our real-world problems. This paper aims to show that the political nature of derogatory language use calls for non-ideal theorising as we find it in the work of feminist and critical race scholars. Most contemporary theories of slurs, so I argue, fall short on some desiderata associated with a non-ideal approach. They neglect crucial linguistic or political aspects of morally and politically significant meaning. I argue that a two-stage project is necessary to understand the perniciousness of slurs: accounting for the derogatory content of derogatory terms in general and, additionally, explaining the communicative function of slurs more specifically. I end by showing how inferentialism is well-suited to account for the content of derogatory terms whilst allowing for further explanations of the communicative functions of slurs.

Reproducing whiteness? A critical race analysis of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ process for drafting the framework for secondary religious education

This article draws on critical race theory and social reproduction theory to analyze the process resulting in the curriculum framework for secondary, Catholic, religious education in the US. This document, promulgated by Church leaders, has impacted millions of US Catholic high school students. Recent calls for racial justice, within and outside of the Catholic Church, invite inquiry into whether this framework is impacting all students equally. This article explores two key questions: Whose knowledge mattered in the creation of the Framework? Was the Framework constructed so as to support the creation of a culturally-sustaining religion curriculum for all students? This analysis demonstrates why the Framework may be problematic for Students of Color and suggests Catholic leaders and educators must learn more from critical race scholars and education researchers if they are to enhance the quality of this and future pedagogical resources for religious instruction. Recommendations are made for addressing the issues raised.

Teaching about white nationalism: critical pedagogy about patriotism, law and the state

ABSTRACT White nationalism has persisted in the United States, and in other settler-colonial locales, as a powerful expression of racial authority and capacity for inflicting harm. This paper stems from and reflects on the authors’ experiences of developing and delivering pedagogy about white nationalism and right-wing populism. As such, it is intended to support and catalyse curriculum development and dialogue between educators across disciplines who possess a commitment to anti-racist teaching about the political right. The analysis centred in this discussion particularly engages the relationship between white nationalist movements, patriotic mobilisation, and state power. In this regard, it is also intended to speak to critical race scholars with an interest in the role of law in sustaining and reconstituting white supremacist public engagement and discourse.

Conceptualizing possibilities for Black boys through the educational continuum

This article conceptualizes “possibilities” as a challenge to the ways that Black boys are constructed and arrested through their engagement in educational spaces. Critical race scholars have deployed counter-stories to disrupt deficit framing of Black boys by discussing their possibilities, promise, and potential. Similarly, we weave these insights and analyses of Black boys’ lives to identify how multiple possibilities contribute to Black boys’ thriving in education. The seven dimensions of the Possibilities Framework include dreaming (related to aspirations and fantasy), caring (e.g., cared for and cared about), belonging (related to mattering and feeling connected), enjoying (related to joy), agency (their actions and autonomy), protecting (feeling safe), and affirming (related to being valued). Each of these dimensions can inform pedagogy and praxis and empower Black boys and young men in educational settings.

“Do our diversities count?” Collaborative reflections on dwelling in academe’s intersectional shadowlands

The promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives has become routine within Anglophone universities in the Global North. However, critical race scholars have demonstrated that these well-intentioned policies are often formulated in ways that transact empty performatives, where discussions of racism are deemed too challenging. Moreover, the dynamics of social class are often missing from university diversity regimes. Using autoethnography as methodology, we suggest that the practices of “border crossings” of intersectional academics can help track the multidirectional impacts of institutional diversity and inclusion discourses within Australian universities. As class and race intermix, we operate in a metaphorical “shadowland”; our border criss-crossings and places of dwelling highlight the blurriness of privileged and marginalised identities, with some minoritised statuses seemingly too visible while others are obscured. Despite this, and albeit brought into being through largely unrewarded emotional labour, our emphasis is on demonstrating how intersectional subjects’ dialoguing in academe is a form of quiet resistance, offering hope for creating new becomings.

Recovering Racial Positioning in “White” Women's International Thought: Lady Kathleen Simon's International Abolitionist Crusade, 1927–1955

Abstract The new field of history of women's international thought is part of, and gives further impetus to, the ongoing reckoning of international relations (IR) with the centrality of race and gender to the discipline. Scholars continue to recuperate a long inheritance of international thinkers concerned with race relations, colonial administration, and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global political economies dependent on violent exploitation of peoples classified as inferior. This inheritance underscores that the politics of colonialism, war, humanitarianism, development, and decolonization have shaped and been shaped by processes of reinforcing and contesting racialized subject positions. Despite this, little attention has been paid to whiteness in histories of women's international thought. In this article, I recover the international thought of white British antislavery advocate and humanitarian Lady Kathleen Simon. I bring feminist and critical race scholarship to bear on Simon's writings and practice. Through her efforts to rouse a twentieth-century international abolitionist movement to emancipate those remaining enslaved in so-called backwards places, Simon played a consequential role in defending Ethiopia's occupation by fascist Italy from 1936 to 1941 and in arguing for continued European administration of Ethiopia after its liberation. In light of critiques of humanitarianism and of the role of white women in reproducing racial hierarchies in colonial and development contexts, I argue that recovery and analysis of the subject positions of historical women racialized as white is inextricable from the project of international intellectual history and from IR's continuing engagement with questions of gendered and racialized hierarchy and othering.

Review of “The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory”

Since former President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order banning critical race theory, the scholarship has been at the center of an international moral panic. Right-wing American, British, and French commentators invented a conspiracy theory version of critical race scholarship (Marxism! Black supremacy!). Once constructed, conspiracists blamed critical race theory for several alleged social ills, including making white kids uncomfortable and destroying nationalist sentiment. Although the acute stage of this moral panic may be receding, critical race theory’s reputation as a body of scholarship aimed at diagnosing and curing racial inequality is tarnished. Scholars concerned about racial inequality—for intellectual and ethical reasons—should be worried, as it will likely take time to reverse the damage. Answering objections from academic and lay opponents of critical race theory, Ali Meghji’s The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory shows what recovering from this moral panic will look like. Contra academic detractors who claim that critical race theory does not provide a coherent analytical framework, Meghji contextualizes the development of critical race theory in legal studies in relation to the broader set of critical theories of race and racism that were bubbling up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The theoretical imprimatur of these currents runs deep, as these intellectual movements were part of a long lineage of radical thought from racially marginalized scholars such as Oliver Cromwell Cox, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Joyce Ladner. For lay readers (and I’m sure this book will draw interested non-specialists), Meghji provides an accessible overview showing critical race theory’s explanatory power across the social sciences.

Minding the Gap an Introduction to Empirical Critical Race Scholarship and Complexity Science (With Resources on Agent-based Modeling)

Minding the Gap an Introduction to Empirical Critical Race Scholarship and Complexity Science (With Resources on Agent-based Modeling)

2. Rupturing the Black-White Binary

Abstract The “binary” language in Black-White binary discourse is reductive, and as such, is potentially antagonistic to the project of racial solidarity needed to divine racial justice. Such language reads as exclusionary of non-Black people of color who are indeed impacted by white supremacy and the structural racism that establishes and preserves it. Building from calls by critical race scholars to specify understanding of racial suffering (e.g., LatCrit, TribalCrit, BlackCrit, etc.), this essay argues that a Black-White relations intellectual frame substantially enhances critical race education research analyses. In other words, comprehending the political function of blackness to catalyze production of whiteness is essential to better discerning how hierarchies of racial power are (re)produced. Moreover, “mourning” is offered in the paper as a site for both lamenting the enduring consequence(s) of white supremacy, as well as for discerning possibility for an emancipated future in higher education and beyond.

“Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice

Abstract In intersectionality studies, debates about the additive versus constitutive nature of intersectionality are long-established. This article attempts to intervene in these conversations by examining how additive, “diversity within” intersectionality works in practice. Across feminist academia, advocacy, and policymaking, there is a widely held perception that among the nongovernmental organizations constituted around identity-based inequalities (feminist, racial justice, migrants, disability, and LGBTQI+ rights), it is the feminist sector that best advocates for and attempts to practice intersectionality. This is related to the appropriation of Black feminist theories of intersectionality which emerged from grassroots activism and Critical Race scholarship as “feminist” theory, wherein feminist is always-already constructed as white. Drawing on empirical research with equality organizations working with disabled women and trans women in England and Scotland, this article suggests that the opposite is true: the additive intersectionality practiced by the white-led feminist sector serves to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities.

Call for Ofrendas

Call for Ofrendas Michelle Habell-Pallán (bio) Collective Ofrenda Practices: Remembering Our Beloved Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez Please contribute your cherished memories of Betita to a digital ofrenda that will be shared on https://elizabethbetitamartinez.squarespace.com. Our digital ofrenda for our beloved Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez follows the communal ofrenda tradition. We invite all to contribute your own heartfelt ofrenda to our online altar composed in honor of Betita's extraordinary life. Please email an image of your ofrenda to infobetitamartínez@gmail.com so that we can upload it to https://elizabethbetitamartinez.squarespace.com. East Los Angeles Altarista Elder Ofelia Esparza has taught us that an ofrenda can be in many forms as long as it is given from the heart. It can be in the form of an altar, a song, a poem, a podcast, a dance, a meal, the sharing of a memory or whatever moves you. There are no hard and set rules for ofrenda making as long as it is heartfelt. We provide resources here, but please do not feel constrained by them. [End Page 1051] Michelle Habell-Pallán Michelle Habell-Pallán Michelle Habell-Pallán is professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington. She directs the Certificate for Public Critical Race Scholarship and codirects Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive. She is the author of American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music (University of Washington Press, 2017) and "'Girl in a Coma' Tweets Chicanafuturism: Decolonial Visions, Social Media, and Archivista Praxis" (2017) and received the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public and the 2021 UW Award for the Advancement of Learning Communities. Copyright © 2022 The American Studies Association

“Imagine an Ignorance That Fights Back”: Honoring Charles Mills, Our Inheritance and Charge

Critical race scholars lost a true comrade with the passing of renowned philosopher, Charles Wade Mills, on September 20, 2021. Along with his larger corpus, Mills’ landmark text, The Racial Contract, remains a beacon to scholar-activists across many disciplines, sociology included. Here, I reflect personally and sociologically on our inheritance from Mills’ incredible legacy. Beyond core concepts that will (and should) live on in sociologists’ work, Mills’ life and practice impart invaluable lessons. These include attuning to one’s embodiment and pleasure, using mainstream tools for radical ends, and recognizing the need for transdisciplinarity in ongoing resistance to white supremacy.

Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick

Reviewed by: Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick Dr. Ellen A. Ahlness DEAR SCIENCE AND OTHER STORIES. By Katherine McKittrick. Durham: Duke University Press. 2021. In a period containing newfound drives to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion across a breadth of academic fields, Dear Science and Other Stories comes as a confirmation of how DEI-centered scholarship can excel. McKittrick begins the book with a concrete, parsimonious explanation of the text’s mission: to center black creatives and think through how they attend to science in their work. Creatives, in this context, bridges what is too-often considered ‘academically gray,’ considering the work of poets, musicians, and visual artists broadly. The goal of uplifting the field of black, critical race, indigeneity, and anticolonial methodologies is undoubtedly met as McKittrick seeks to articulate and advance the value of Black Studies within and outside formally academic spaces. Critical indigeneity and race scholars in particular will get much from McKittrick’s elevation of storytelling as it contributes to—and disseminates—theory-building. Indeed, McKittrick begins the text with a musing on Wynter’s theorization that humans are truly homo narrans, a storytelling species. This centering of storytelling persists into the second and third chapters, where McKittrick challenges current practices in citation and methodology. The critique of citations as tools reproducing power relationships in knowledge systems (affecting the very process of conclusion-drawing) is something that has gained a deeper foothold in the humanities and social sciences than the hard sciences; consequently, the practical suggestions and literal restructuring of chapters that McKittrick undertakes demonstrates the importance of rethinking producers of knowledge in a concrete way. Her footnotes, in a very real sense, are just as much a part of the stories she tells as the later content. Readers finish each section with a sense that McKittrick is not telling stories in a vacuum: she is facilitating conversations between the authors she cites. As McKittrick continues her discussion on methodology, readers settle into a fuller awareness of what it means to practice ‘rebellious methodological work.’ In one form, this means adjusting one’s reading practice as a way to ‘unlearn’ racist, ableist, and sexist discipline conventions. A result of these adjustments can be the personal redevelopment of what it means to know—prompting, at its core, a challenge to the absolute Western view of what science is, or is not. McKittrick’s work consistently advances a central theme of storytelling as she seamlessly weaves together theory, literature, music, poetry, personal observation, [End Page 75] and stream-of-consciousness-like thought processes; each is like a character in a novel that comes to interact with one another, ultimately learning and growing from their interactions. She introduces examples such as the electronic-duo Drexciya (52), the story The Kick Drum is the Fault (122), and the work of Dionne Brand (63) to illustrate Afrocentric anti-colonial work that embodies the narrative nature of analysis and scholarly experimentation. In concluding Dear Science and Other Stories, McKittrick pens a short letter to ‘Science,’ a summarization of her entire project. This letter also serves to remind readers that just like storytelling is an inherently community-based activity requiring tellers and listeners, scholarship—just like any important work worth doing—is a successful effort only when it is collaborative and community-minded. [End Page 76] Dr. Ellen A. Ahlness Department of Veterans Affairs, Seattle Copyright © 2022 Mid-America American Studies Association

Legal Rights for Whose Nature?

In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60 U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community’s right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights.

Portraits for change: Refusal politics and liberatory futures

We analyze viewers' experiences and understandings of an installation of portraits featuring vendors who sell Seattle’s Real Change street newspaper. In doing so, we argue that Real Change is enacting a complex politics of refusal and explore this in relation to future political lives of Real Change activism. We explore political possibilities for the transformation of urban life opened by the politics the exhibit expresses. We analyze the exhibit goals, representational strategies and viewer responses, exploring the complex politics Real Change is enacting to ensure vendor survival and anti-poverty activism. We argue that the white liberal visual regime (WLVR) ensures continued comfort of white privileged viewers, guaranteeing that their normatively white liberal understanding of impoverishment remains relatively untroubled. We explore disruptions of cultural norms that were possible within the WLVR as well as the limits of these disruptions. Drawing on critical race scholars we theorize visual fields as racially saturated, bolstering white comfort and white supremacy. While our argument begins from an art exhibit, it extends far beyond the politics of art. We analyze viewers’ responses to pose questions about whether/how these visual politics open pathways toward more profound re-learning of racialized relations that produce propertied personhood, racialized dispossession and premature death.