Critique Of Racism Research Articles

Politische Bekenntnisse und kritische Wissenschaft

Abstract Political Commitments and Critical Science. On the Relationship between Critique of Racism and Critique of Science Theoretical development and critique in educational studies are based on communicative presuppositions of rational argumentation and self-critical reflection, which are questioned by recent theoretical approaches with regard to moral partisanship and political positioning. On the basis of a case study of an empirical research project, the different possible outcomes of a racism-critical and a scientifically distanced interpretation are discussed.

The limits of criminal justice reform: an analysis of elite rhetoric in four cities

Abstract As the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in 2020, many emphasized that carceral spaces were hotspots for the virus, leaving Black and Brown people especially vulnerable to infection. In combination with other critiques of racism in the carceral state, these observations created pressure to decarcerate, especially on the political left. How did political elites discuss the carceral state in this changed atmosphere? To answer this question, we analyze rhetoric in public statements across four liberal metropolitan areas during the spring and summer of 2020. In these statements, we find a long-standing discourse of racially paternalist penal welfarism, retrofitted to pandemic times and accompanied by a distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” criminals. Accommodating portrayals of incarcerated people as vulnerable to COVID-19 and in desperate need of care, this pattern of rhetoric positioned the carceral state as a protector in order to justify continued incarceration.

“The Fierce Urgency of Now”: The Example of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The year 2023 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington that featured civil rights leader, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This article focuses on King’s critique of racism, poverty, and militarism, and his commitment to justice, love, and hope.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Global Sociology and the Anti-racist Struggle for Democracy in Cuba (1931–1941)

AbstractDuring the 1930s and 1940s, W. E. B. Du Bois was not only interested in European colonialism in Africa, but he also approached the racial situation in the Americas, particularly Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba. In this article, I examine how Du Bois engaged strategically in a critique of racism in Cuba and the United States. I analyze how Du Bois discussed the Cuban color line as linked to colonial dispossession and explore the formation of the anti-colonial critique within global sociology. Du Bois’s letters, manuscripts, and field notes during his first visit to Cuba in 1941 reveal how, to a large extent, Du Bois shared the prevailing vision of Cuba as a society free from racism. Although Du Bois only partially captured how racism worked in Cuba, he constantly affirmed how the analysis of the Cuban color line implies dealing with the analysis of American imperialism. Thus, Du Bois’s approach to Cuba was fundamental in two senses. First, it led him to consider the contradictions between cultural integration and social and economic equality in a setting other than the United States. Second, Du Bois developed the fundamental place assigned to the critique of U.S. imperialism within global sociology. At the same time, Du Bois’s connection with Cuba elaborates the understanding of Du Bois’s global sociology.

Digital games and the category of auteur: The case of Muriel Tramis

This article demonstrates how one can distinguish a digital game auteur based on works conceived by Martinican designer Muriel Tramis. Eight games (M.wilo, Freedom, Emmanuelle, Geisha, Fascination, Gobliiins, Lost in Time and Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth) have been selected to extract the characteristic features of Tramis’s contributions. The research results identify four leading features: sophisticated puzzles, subversion of pornography, critique of racism and colonialism and the extensive use of authorial signatures. By engaging with the work of Tramis, the author of this article hopes to spark further academic interest in rediscovering the output of non-canonical (female) designers outside the trans-Pacific circle.

Mirror Mirror

Oyeyemi's critique of racism in the United States focuses on the visual binary between whiteness and blackness, which she shows working in multiple ways to warp and distort relationships. In the Whitman family, children are valued (or not valued) according to how their skin color registers on a scale determined by white superiority. Oyeyemi's approach to racism takes the circuitous route of retelling the fairy tale of “Little Snow White,” thus calling into her own narrative a foundational text of Western cultural aesthetics which links beauty to whiteness. (Snow White, whose skin is “white as snow,” is “fairest in the land.”) Rather than narrate a new version of the fairy tale, Oyeyemi separates out its elements – magic mirror, evil stepmother, and beautiful white stepdaughter – and develops each into a new thematic configuration. My analysis focuses on the subtle ways that Oyeyemi's reshaping of mirror, evil stepmother, and innocent beautiful young girl exposes the harms to children inflicted by allegiance to a (false) structure of visible difference between white skin and black skin.

How Racisms Works – And how It Doesn’t Work: Why a Totalizing Understanding of Racism Is Insufficient for Theory and Research

This article calls for a differentiated discussion of different forms of discrimination and racism. The reason for this is that a totalizing understanding of racism, which claims a comprehensive racist structuring of society, fails to recognize the complexity and contradictory nature of social conditions and relations. In connection with this, the question must be raised whether a critique of racism that claims for itself the position of a radical critique of contemporary societies is more appropriately to be understood as an expression of a social transformation in which racism is no longer suitable as an ideological basis for the production and legitimation of economic inequalities and political power relations.

The Book of Evidence: Iconotext in John Banville’s Ekphrastic Novel

The Book of Evidence (1989) is one of John Banville’s ekphrastic novels which are typical of verbal representation of visual representation. This paper aims to explore the intersemiotic transposition of literature and visual images by analyzing the way in which the two forms of signs interweave and the novel’s themes combine with the verbal representation of visual images. It is argued that the derogative verbal representations of laborers and women, as the protagonist’s perceptual images, denote the verbal/visual social coding and power relationship between the ekphrastic speaking subject and the mute semiotic other. Paintings to which ekphrastic texts are alluded to demonstrate the narrator’s displacement of colonial inborn superiority and racism towards the subordinated other. Verbal representations of pubs and drinkers vividly present the pregnant moment, moment of stopped actions displayed in paintings. The implications of verbal representations function as “a speaking speech” and evoke the power-dominated colonial history and critique its consequences of the overall inequality in Ireland between the 1980s and 1990s, identity hybridity and alcoholism in a new social order which resembles that of the colonized one. By comparing the narrative verbal representations of the woman in the portrait with the descriptive verbal representations of the maid, the paper probes into the protagonist’s inability to see others in real life and the denial of others’ alterity. In virtue of the language’s arbitrariness and freedom in conveying emotions and ideas, the ekphrastic narrative texts interpret and comment on the iconic woman’s portrait, which “envoices” the mute object and parodies the disregard for innocent lives and alienation resulting from long-term colonial violent conflicts between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. Critique of racism, alcoholism and violence in post-war Ireland is conveyed by integrating visual images’ highly ambiguous and socio-political implications into the texts, which makes the novel an iconotext where intersemiotic transposition occurs.

Blackness and food resilience: black culinary epistemologies, the slow food movement and racial justice

ABSTRACT In this paper, I develop a concept that I call black culinary epistemologies. I argue that the cookbooks of Bryant Terry, African American chef and food justice activist, are an archive for black culinary epistemologies. I define black culinary epistemologies as the culinary knowledge produced by black cooks, chefs, and food preparers that build upon the black radical tradition, reframe black foods and black consumption, and participate in life-making practices in death-producing spaces. Terry builds upon this archive through his cookbooks and food activism. Black culinary epistemologies have numerous impacts: First, they demonstrate that black cooks, chefs and food preparers engage food as a critique of racism and inequities. Secondly, black culinary epistemologies highlight the ways in which black communities participate in alternative food practices. This contests the notion that “slow foods” is an idea of European origin and that black bodies only consume unhealthy foods. Finally, black culinary epistemologies demonstrate how food is a site through which black communities have produced vitality and empowerment. Through a cultural studies analysis, I argue that Terry’s four cookbooks and food activism are sites that recuperate black culinary epistemologies. This paper brings together literature in cultural studies, food studies, and critical race studies.

“THERE IS QUEER INEQUITY, BUT I PICK TO BE HAPPY”

AbstractAs racialized and gendered structures, organizations can reinforce complex inequalities, especially with regard to emotional labor. While the literature on emotional labor is established, little is known about how race and sexual orientation shape feeling rule enforcement. Interviewing staff at university LGBTQ resource centers, we argue that feeling rules have a sexual orientation-based dimension and are experienced and enforced differently based on race. White LGBTQ staff find that they can express anger strategically to bring awareness to issues of race, but do not confront racism in their work for fear of alienating other Whites, which they believe would harm their center. LGBTQ staff of color experience organizational consequences for their anger, which is directed toward the racism they and students of color experience in the university. Lacking the credential of Whiteness (Ray 2019), staff of color find they cannot reach the benchmark set by Whites’ enthusiastic performance of emotional labor. These feeling rules operate in service of what James M. Thomas (2018) calls diversity regimes, which are performances of a benign commitment to racial equality, that retrench racial inequality by failing to redistribute resources along racial lines. By sanctioning anger toward the university—as an institution that reproduces racism—feeling rules have organizational consequences: Whites can advance through compliance and enthusiasm; staff of color are terminated or denied opportunities; and critiques of racism are silenced. While created to address diversity, LGBTQ centers are purposely not structurally positioned to radically shift resources in a way to combat racism, and feeling rules maintain these arrangements while allowing universities to claim a commitment to equality. These findings hold implications for broader concerns of racism, sexual orientation, and inequality within work organizations, especially manifestations of worker control within diversity work.

The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch

In this article, I argue that William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch engages in a “perverse aesthetics” that is analogous to Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology. The novel’s main themes of consumption and control are directly related to the Anthropocene’s twin disasters of global warming and mass extinction, and the trope for addiction, junk, reveals Burroughs’ deep analysis of the political and social forces that attempt to control life, what Burroughs calls biocontrol. By placing the novel’s obsession with hanging/lynching in the context of dark ecology, its critique of racism can also be seen as a critique of speciesism.

Funny “haha” or Funny because I’m Black? Assessing Viewers’ Reactions to Chappelle’s Show

ABSTRACT For years, Dave Chappelle has maintained that the reason he walked away from his eponymous show, and a $50 million dollar contract, was his realization that people were laughing at him, not with him. This study uses online survey data (N = 156) with an embedded media manipulation to quantitatively examine whether or not viewers accurately perceived the persuasive intent of Chappelle’s brand of racial satire and, subsequently, whether or not viewers perceived Chappelle’s statements about race as serious. The data offer empirical support for Chappelle’s concerns, suggesting viewers’ who held more stereotypical perceptions of African Americans were less likely to perceive Chappelle’s critique of racism as serious. These results reinforce the double-edged nature of racial satire.

Arranging the Chairs in the Beloved Community: The Politics, Problems, and Prospects of Multi-Racial Congregations in 1 Corinthians and Today

If racism is America’s original sin, it is also one of America’s most pressing contemporary problems. Indeed, Edwards’ recent research suggests that even intentionally multi-racial congregations often reproduce and reinforce white hegemony rather than undermine it. In this article, I first bring Edwards’ sociological research into dialogue with the theological critiques of racism within the ecclesia raised by Jennings and Sanders. I then offer a theological interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:17–12:26 from the social location of American multi-racial churches subject to and complicit with racism for the purpose of those churches’ missional embodiment of an alternative politics. I argue that Paul critiques the church for gathering in ways more Corinthian than Christian. The solution is for the church to rearrange its communal life together in line with the eschatological ‘logic of the cross’. Such a cruciform community affords greater honor within the ecclesia precisely to those who lack it in the broader culture. In the concluding section, I consider how contemporary multi-racial churches might live out this ‘militant, reconciling ecclesiology’ today.

#Sippingtea: Two Black Female Literacy Scholars Sharing Counter-Stories to Redefine Our Roles in the Academy

Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins’s Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women’s language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house “sipping tea,” sharing stories about their joint triumphs and challenges with teaching through equity-based pedagogies. The article takes its political and poetical inspiration from this dialogic performance placed in the center of the article. The dialogue is meant to enliven and represent the Afrocentric feminist discourse patterns that undergird our relationships with one another as Black sister scholars as well as our relationships to our classroom teaching and research. We offer discussions of literacy research and theory, personal experience/ethos, linguistic knowledge, and critique of racism. Our article has implications for strengthening the academy’s understanding of Black female bodies/language in White university spaces still hell-bent on not welcoming/employing either.

Katherine Dunham’s Chicago stage: crossing to Caribbean négritude

ABSTRACTKatherine Dunham’s 1959 memoir, A Touch of Innocence, offers a remarkable opportunity to understand urban space — a crucial location of modernist experimentation — through the kinesthetic training, experience, and awareness of a dancer. If Dunham was redefining herself, her memoir rewrote urban space through the dancer/choreographer’s kinesthetic awareness of gendered and racialized embodiment. After two decades of stagecraft that was shaped by and participated in Caribbean négritude, Dunham’s memoir experimented with a choreography of urban space to produce a powerful critique of racism and female endangerment. She remapped Chicago through the movement vocabulary she had acquired by the time of her “retreat.” Thus her memoir stages her childhood experience through north-south circuits that become inner circles for other movements: the Great Migration north that reconfigured Chicago’s race relations, and Dunham’s movement south to the Caribbean for alternative dance forms and versions of négritude. Dunham’s memoir offers an opportunity to consider how dance, Chicago, the Caribbean, and black femininity become entangled in complex ways at specific historical locations, giving rise, in this case, to a powerful movement vocabulary and transformative geography.

The Politics of the Diagram as Graphic Narrative: Chris Ware and Chad McCail

The Politics of the Diagram as Graphic Narrative:Chris Ware and Chad McCail Jesse Cohn (bio) Within the field of indie comics, politics are most visible–and most closely scrutinized–in the nonfictional genres of graphic journalism (e.g., Joe Sacco's Palestine), history (e.g., Art Spiegelman's Maus), and autobiography (e.g., Alison Bechdel's Fun Home). Discussion of these tends to foreground questions of representation and identification; apart from them, as in the film criticism of the Screen era, a certain formalism predominates. Here, the unselfconscious narration of concrete facts and experiences supposedly typifying works such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons may be taken as a shortcoming, a failure to "lay bare the devices" and to foreground the medium, whereas a preoccupation with the possibilities of form is sometimes taken to have radical political significance in itself. For Daniel Worden, thus, formal experimentation suggests a break with the given, an "assertion of the comics form's ability to defamiliarize, rather than concretize and repeat, genre conventions and social norms," thereby "help[ing] us to think about and envision a better world" (Worden, "Politics of Comics" 69-70). Critical treatment of the works of American comics creator Chris Ware (b. Omaha, 1967) tends to take just this position. This praise of Ware's political radicalism might come as a surprise to those for whom one of his distinctions is his disinterest in politics (Dycus 127). It would be difficult to characterize Ware as any kind of engagé artist, let alone a radical. Ware's first comics outing, a dystopian graphic novel called Floyd Farland, Citizen of the Future (1987), which he has since disavowed, was about as political as Ware ever got, but even here, the gestures are primarily sardonic. His most directly political gestures, "disseminated between strips and often written in a tiny type," are almost literally marginal to his work–a series of sarcastic barbs, crammed into the "paratext[ual]" spaces of mock advertisements in his ACME Novelty Library series, aimed at the excesses of American jingoism and racism. Under the front cover of Acme Novelty Library #10 (1998), for instance, [End Page 33] we find a roughly 2-inch-wide advertisement for "Atomic Weapons" (alongside similarly-sized ads for "Childhood" and "Irony"): "Fun new technology actually allows you to burn up millions of people in enormous balls of flame who bother you […] Great at picnics, genocides" (3). Here, the blandly upbeat language of marketing highlights the casual cruelty of nuclear war–but only for whoever has taken the time to squint at this seemingly decorative detail in the front matter of the book before flipping the page. Even the full-page ad for "Juan Tanamo" ("Whether you're employing strict sensory deprivation, techniques of sexual disgrace, or just piling people into big human pyramids, leave your robust, richly coffee-colored prisoners with the security detail for a minute or two and take a moment to… relax") is relegated to a back page of ACME Novelty Library #19. Paolo Simonetti notes that Ware himself has described these "fake ads" as "throwaway" gestures, regarding them as "about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot" (Simonetti 293; qtd. in Simonetti 293). By contrast, the political commitments of the rather less well-known Scottish artist Chad McCail (b. Manchester, 1961) are highly visible in his works–veritable anti-despotic symphonies. Unlike Ware's often vanishingly small panels, McCail's 8-foot-tall prints, often mounted on billboards or the sides of entire buildings, often literally serve as advertising for an anti-authoritarian vision, even when sequestered in the more rarefied space of art galleries (Baetens; McCail and Sinclair 1-3; Luke). Where critiques of racism or sexism are presented obliquely in Ware's works, McCail's present a forthrightly anarchist denunciation of hierarchy, domination, and oppression (O'Brien, Fuller).1 Where Ware's works foster a "cult of difficulty," as Martha Kuhlmann and David M. Ball note, characterized by the modernist canons of "irony, self-reflexivity, [and] Brechtian alienation" (Miller 6), McCail, rejecting the elitist insularity of the art world, creates populist works that "show...

The Apocalyptic Baldwin

Raoul Peck's Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro sheds light on what prompted him to abandon his earlier hope for racial harmony. We might also ask why this refusal so resonates today. I Am Not Your Negro and Get Out come five years after the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, a period during which movements like Black Lives Matter have propelled racism to the forefront of American public discourse. It is against this backdrop that Baldwin has increasingly become the subject of renewed interest—and it is his later, more radical critiques of racism that offer the most insight into contemporary struggles.

“[T]he Ludicrous Transition of Gender and Sentiment”: Chinese Labor in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley”

Ambrose Bierce’s first published short story, “The Haunted Valley” (1871), draws on prevailing stereotypes of Chinese immigrants in the United States as figures of sexual and gender deviance. The story depicts a central but absent figure, Ah Wee, as both prostitute and sodomite, confounding distinctions between man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, laborer/prostitute, and white/Chinese. However, in its attempts to counter anti-Chinese hostility, “The Haunted Valley” inverts the logic of representations of Chinese sexuality as contagious perversion threatening the nation. The story portrays the maintenance of the boundaries of racial difference, rather than racial difference itself, as perverting proper gender and sexual identities and bonds between white men. It critiques anti-Chinese hostility as a ruse of white labor to hide its own transgressions and as a symptom of, rather than solution for, the degradation of white masculinity. The critique of racism relies on a generic one, a critique of sentiment and of the feminizing effects of sentimental narratives, and affirms and reinforces a shared heteronormative masculinity as an alternative to shared political action.

Foucault y el concepto biológico de raza: entre el poder y la ciencia.

En este artículo examinamos el concepto biológico de raza en el plano filosófico y en el plano científico. Primero nos ocuparemos de la crítica de Michel Foucault al racismo desde la bio-política y, en un segundo gran apartado, recorreremos la historia de la ciencia para mostrar si el racismo biológico cuenta con algún tipo de fundamentación científica. El resultado general más importante es que el concepto biológico de raza deriva de la lucha de poder entre las sociedades y sus individuos, que optaron por subordinar la ciencia para preservar su hegemonía político-racial.

‘To break asunder along the lesions of race’. The Critical Race Theory of W.E.B. Du Bois

In addition to its beginnings within legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is intimately aligned with the long tradition of African American social critique, which sought to interrogate the intractable nature of racism and White supremacy. Within this intellectual tradition, the works of W.E.B. Du Bois are of critical significance. Du Bois’ critique of racism, in addition to his theories of education, anticipate many key aspects of CRT. Additionally, Du Bois illuminates fruitful spaces that are of great relevance to contemporary scholars engaged in a critical analysis of race and racism in their global and domestic contexts, within both education and the broader society.