Racial Discourse Research Articles

Claiming Space to (Re)generate: The Impact of Critical Race Professional Development on Teacher Educators of Color

As educational systems are confronted with attacks under the guise of “Critical Race Theory bans”, teacher educators of Color navigate the contradictions of preparing teacher candidates to be culturally sustaining within a suppression of racial discourses. For many teacher educators of Color, who are often tasked to carry out the social and racial justice work of teacher education programs, they are experiencing an exacerbated racial harm. In this article, we explore how a racial-affinity critical race professional development (CRPD) space for teacher educators of Color committed to racial justice serves as a space of support, healing, and regeneration amidst systemic racism and protections to white comfort in teacher education. Weaving together three counterstories from participants in the CRPD, we examine how this space supports teacher educators in recentering communities of Color knowledge systems and ways of being to sustain themselves and reclaim teacher education. These counterstories also offer implications for teacher education to address the ways in which it supports and maintains white comfort and the need for a restorative framework for addressing past and ongoing racial harm.

(UN) COVERING KARACHI: THE CREATION OF A BRITISH VISUAL LANGUAGE IN SINDH

Karachi, a city of 14000 people, was evolving as an important port for strategic geopolitical reasons and increasing trade at the time of the British conquest in 1843. However, it was not equipped with the infrastructure — such as an all-weather port — required for its continued economic progress. The fort town had a Chabutra (Custom House), shrines, temples, and caravanserais interspersed among the large havelis and houses of Hindu merchants and government functionaries. Neither the fort nor the Chabutra survived British colonial rule in Sindh. In fact, in keeping with their plans for the city, the British demolished these structures fairly early on in their rule of Sindh. The subsequent establishment of British institutions and political infrastructure was reinforced by the construction of buildings and monuments that looked distinctly European in style. This was not only because of the architectural styles employed in these buildings but also in the choice of ornamentation. For example, by patronizing artisans that were well versed in stone engravings and sculpture making, the British shifted attention away from the art of traditional frescoes, painting, and glazed tiles. This paper explores how the Occident imported architectural and visual cultural styles and forms into their colonies to create an entirely new visual language for their colonized subjects in South Asia. It argues that this was done deliberately to ensure political legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects as well as to highlight their own cultural superiority. The lack of native creative expression and the emergence of the modernist movement eventually led to their disappearance from structures built after Independence. This was a colonial project deeply entrenched in discourses of racism and inequality. Keywords: Colonial Architecture, Hegemony, Tradition, Architectural Movements, Colonialism

Whitewashing American Exceptionalism: Racialized Subject-Positioning and US Foreign Policy

Abstracts American exceptionalism is enjoying a revival of scholarly interest amid new approaches to studying foreign policy narratives and unease regarding how US policymakers will manage a less unipolar international system. That revival coincides temporally, though not yet substantively, with growing attention to racialized dynamics and Eurocentrism within international relations. This article examines how core strands of American exceptionalism—the prevailing narrative framing of US foreign policy—reflect a whitewashed understanding of US foreign policy that can best be understood as the product of racialized subject-positioning that saturated its historical development. After conceptualizing American exceptionalism, it develops a theoretical framework to capture how racialized subject-positioning stratifies understandings of a nation’s role in the world. It proceeds to investigate how this process shaped the development of American exceptionalism in line with epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence, producing exceptionalist narratives that neglect non-white populations as meaningful others in the construction of US national identity and that negate US interactions with those groups as relevant evidence that might undercut its exceptionalism. These whitewashing effects remained embedded even as overtly racist discourse became delegitimized, posing enduring obstacles for US diplomacy today.

Redlining, greenlining: Discourses of race and nature in Home Owners Loan Corporation neighborhood appraisals

Studies drawing correlations between Home Owners Loan Corporation “redlining” maps and present-day environmental outcomes have raised public attention about the role of systemic racial discrimination in producing uneven outcomes in the urban environment. In this analysis, we draw on a novel data source—narrative descriptions of neighborhood characteristics included in the area descriptions that accompanied City Survey maps—to explore the mechanisms that historically link HOLC maps and disparate environmental quality. Focusing on nine mid-sized cities in the Midwest, we draw on a combined inductive and deductive coding approach to consider how perceived urban environmental quality and neighborhood racial demographics shaped assessments of neighborhood value and risk. In doing so, we illustrate the ways in which nature, class, and race were already coupled at the time of the HOLC City Survey. The area descriptions in the HOLC City Survey illustrate the ways in which this coupling became codified and reinforced over time through housing and environmental policies, the impacts of which we still struggle to disrupt today.

Laughing about race in “colorblind” France: Racial stereotypes in French television comedy

This article examines the portrayal of race in two iconic French television series, H and Platane, exploring how they negotiate racial stereotypes within the context of France's purportedly colorblind society. Through a comparative analysis, we analyze the comedic strategies employed by these shows, drawing on humor theory to elucidate the dynamics of superiority and relief in laughter. While H often reinforces racial stereotypes under the guise of criticizing racist speech, Platane adopts a more nuanced approach, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of racial discourse. By contextualizing these representations within France's sociopolitical landscape, we demonstrate the evolving nature of race talk in French television and its implications for broader societal attitudes. This study underscores the significance of television comedy as a space for both reflecting and potentially challenging cultural norms surrounding race and identity.

"To Suggest the Sound": Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt's Long Fiction

Abstract: Charles W. Chesnutt constructs the sound of whiteness in The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition by situating character language within emerging frameworks of racial "impressibility." House explores the lives of two siblings, John and Rena, whose racial passing Chesnutt registers, in part, through the siblings' language practices. Marrow , on the other hand, introduces a different type of "passing" character, the cruel Colonel McBane, whose speech patterns Chesnutt associates with, and uses to critique, anti-black violence perpetrated by the "po' white" class. Both novels critique the color line by participating in the popular nineteenth-century racial discourse of sentimental biopower and impressibility, as identified by Kyla Schuller. In the biopower regime Schuller describes, racial hierarchies rest on differing capacities of bodies to absorb sensations and stimuli and adapt. In Marrow and House , these capacities are underscored through language metaphor and linguistic characterization, part of Chesnutt's complex, longstanding inquiry into the relationship between language and race.

Othering and Low Status Framing of Immigrant Cuisines in US Restaurant Reviews and Large Language Models

Identifying implicit attitudes toward food can help mitigate social prejudice due to food’s pervasive role as a marker of ethnic identity. Stereotypes about food are representational harms that may contribute to racialized discourse and negatively impact economic outcomes for restaurants. Understanding the presence of representational harms in online corpora in particular is important, given the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) for text generation and their tendency to reproduce attitudes in their training data. Through careful linguistic analyses, we evaluate social theories about attitudes toward immigrant cuisine in a large-scale study of framing differences in 2.1M English language Yelp reviews. Controlling for factors such as restaurant price and neighborhood racial diversity, we find that immigrant cuisines are more likely to be othered using socially constructed frames of authenticity (e.g., authentic, traditional), and that non-European cuisines (e.g., Indian, Mexican) in particular are described as more exotic compared to European ones (e.g., French). We also find that non-European cuisines are more likely to be described as cheap and dirty, even after controlling for price, and even among the most expensive restaurants. Finally, we show that reviews generated by LLMs reproduce similar framing tendencies, pointing to the downstream retention of these representational harms. Our results corroborate social theories of gastronomic stereotyping, revealing racialized evaluative processes and linguistic strategies through which they manifest.

Η ποικιλομορφία και η πολυλειτουργικότητα του ρατσισμού σε άρθρα μεταναστευτικής εφημερίδας

Contemporary western nation-states are built on national and racist discourses and values which are not easily contested by majority members and may affect the discourse and behaviors of minority members as well, even though the latter suffer from the discriminatory consequences of such discourses and values. Research has shown that minority members do not always resist national/racist pressures but often succumb to them, thus accepting majority values and perceiving themselves as Others, namely as majority members usually perceive them. In this context, the present study attempts to explore ways of detecting minority members’ (in the present case, migrants’) internalized racism (Pyke, 2010). The critical analyses performed on two newspaper articles written by young female migrants living in Greece aim to show that, in their effort to adjust themselves to the Greek linguacultural context and to form ties with majority members, the authors reproduce racist views and values usually attested among members of the Greek majority. Given that these articles are published in a newspaper of left wing, antiracist, and pro-migrant orientation, the co-existence of racist and antiracist meanings and values in the same texts blurs the boundaries between racism and antiracism. This renders the texts examined here instances of liquid racism (Weaver, 2016), namely an ambiguous form of racism giving rise to opposing (i.e. racist and antiracist) interpretations and further entrenching the hegemony of racist discourse.

Singing Blackness

In this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip-hop productions. Rap and hip-hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip-hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that oversexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black people in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuumin the production of approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue[What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consistency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter-Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish-speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro-Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of society. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, but they also create a transversal Afro-Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study, so, represents an opportunity to shift a US-centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living and understanding the African diaspora in other geographies.

One rotten apple or a rotten tree: football leaders’ perceptions of racism in European football

ABSTRACT Despite efforts by key stakeholders to address racial discrimination in international football, racially charged behaviour persists, particularly in the European context. To explore this phenomenon, our paper employs Critical Race Theory as a central framework and links empirical research to racism and inclusion while keeping institutional football and policy concerns at the forefront of its investigation. Primary questions underlining the study concern practices and actors that enable or sustain exclusionary practices in the football industry. To better understand the nature of racial discourse among football leaders and how it potentially facilitates or acts as a barrier to inclusion in football, qualitative interviews were conducted with leaders from eight European countries. The interviews revealed conflicting tensions in the football industry. Tensions between corporatized football practices and equality policymaking, discrepancies in views on discriminatory actions and their connections to larger structural issues and resistance to change from predominantly White, male leadership.

A Reappropriation of the Joseph Story in Genesis 39 and Surah 12 for Contemporary Race-Discourse

The death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement agents in 2020 and the racial tensions that followed it have again reignited the contentious debate about racism and society’s inability to find an enduring solution. This article is a novel effort to situate the debate in an interreligious context and contribute meaningfully to the search for a solution. Drawing from the Joseph and Potiphar’s wife story in Genesis 39 and Surah 12 of the holy Qur’an, the article shows the intersections of this patriarchal material with the axes of identity and marginality. Drawing from the multiple junctures of this intersectionality that include race, ethnicity, identity, and microaggressions, the article identifies in the scriptural texts seven resonances of contemporary racism that are often ignored or poorly understood in race discourse. Taking into consideration some meaningful solutions suggested by legal luminaries and behavioral scientists in their respective fields, the article augments these with a religious solution, pointing in the direction of a true penitential spirit, like the one demonstrated by Potiphar’s wife in the Qur’an. The suggestion is that a genuine turnaround (conversion) is also in the spirit of the ecclesial repentance that was practiced in the early church before some medieval abuses crept in. The article concludes that human agencies aside, ultimately it is God’s ability to bring good out of evil, the way God did with Joseph, that can bring an enduring solution to victims of racism.

Epistemic and ontological shifts in the making: (re)defining the episteme of Puerto Rico’s education at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, conceptualizing the Puerto Rican child and the Puerto Rican citizen took on discourses of difference that were steeped in Progressive Era rationalities about eugenics that embodied normalized beliefs about “ability” and “fitness” traveling between the United States and Puerto Rico. These epistemic and ontological shifts in the making were not only about developing the intellectual strengths of Puerto Rican students; they were also about creating a particular “type” of student for US statehood. Discourses of race, intelligence, hygiene and morality were incorporated into the languaging of the Senate Bill 2254 Committee Hearings. These discourses of difference were also part of the rationale for enacting and marking difference under Puerto Rico’s new school laws. Moreover, these discursive formations circulating in Puerto Rican education and society created a set of principles of regulation and observation that was used to rationalize biological determinants for citizenship. Central to deciding Puerto Rico’s legal, political and educational future was the scrutiny of the moral, intellectual, racial, hygienic, economic and educational conditions of Puerto Rican students.

Driving in Cars with Noise

Driving in Cars with Noise

“Too Clean, Too White”: Resistance to the Racial Politics of Hygiene in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Abstract The central characters of Helena María Viramontes’s 1996 novel about Mexican American farm workers, Under the Feet of Jesus, are plagued by dirt and grime wherever they go. Subsequently, these characters frequently face racial discourses of hygiene—popular forms of communication (advertisements, public health education, etc.) that associate cleanliness with whiteness and wealth, and dirtiness with poverty and nonwhite identity. Through their encounters with dirt, cleaning products, and racial discourses of hygiene, Viramontes’s characters demonstrate how ideas about cleanliness inform US racial formation. In particular, the novel’s engagement with the American ideals of white cleanliness foisted on the central teenage farm worker, Estrella, and her family reveals how personal hygiene is weaponized as a tool of neoliberalism to obscure the material conditions of laborers and the systemic environmental racism they face. In the novel, individual hygiene is presented, most often by white or white-coded characters, as the path toward environmental, racial, and economic justice in ways that distract from the structural roots of the environmental injustices nonwhite farm workers face daily. Through white color imagery and active engagement with dirty materiality, Under the Feet of Jesus challenges racial discourses of hygiene and demonstrates systemic and restorative ways of thinking about public health and the value of communal care.

Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity and/as Black Consciousness

ABSTRACT This article explores the political implications of the intersection of African Political Theology and critical race discourse. Its main argument is that, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology highlights that moral and political subjectivity in the context of a necropolitical postcolonial Africa is a result of the intersection of a complex set of practices linked to oneself, others, the state, and G/god. Moreover, in its concern with political well-being, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology further highlights the black racial identity of its adherents as part of its ideological participation in the broader project of black emancipation. Such a centering of race not only de-abstracts African Political Theology and its Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. This centering is important to foreground also because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent.

The racial and ethnic socialisation continuum: racial oppression and resistance in Latinx families

ABSTRACT Research on racial and ethnic socialisation of Latinxs has focused on ethnic socialisation while under-examining the racial discourses and ideologies that Latinxs use when discussing racial and ethnic identity and stratification in their families. This study draws on 65 interviews with predominantly U.S.-born Latinxs. Using the theoretical framework of racial formation, I develop the racial and ethnic socialisation (RES) continuum to conceptualise the content of racial discourses present in Latinx families that reflect a range of racial ideologies. There are five discursive styles that fall into three general types of racial ideologies: (1) maintenance of hierarchies, (2) lack of direct discussions about race and ethnicity, and (3) anti-racist and feminist socialisation, but with flaws. The RES continuum contributes to research on racialisation by developing the processes of how structural racism unfolds in Latinx families through racial discourses and racial and ethnic socialisation.

The trope of the Native American in nineteenth-century British and American accounts of South East Asia

ABSTRACT The nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of Western colonial power and influence across both mainland and maritime South East Asia, along with the publication of a growing number of books about the region and its peoples by Western scholars, travellers and colonial administrators. This was also a time when pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference were rife and deemed respectable in Western academic and political circles. This article looks at how some British and American authors were inclined to examine South East Asians through the lens of racial theory, and how in the course of doing so were also inclined to compare some South East Asian ethnic groups to the natives of America. In the course of doing so, Native Americans were invariably seen and cast as a homogenous racial group that was then located at the bottom of a hierarchy that differentiated between superior and inferior races. The repeated deployment of the trope of the Native American, as the embodiment of inferiority and savagery, was an instance of racial stereotypes being instrumentalized at a global level as part of a new pan-Atlantic Anglo-American discourse of race and racial difference.

Franco-Americans and Racial Discourse in Historical Perspective

French Canadian immigrants to the United States and their Franco-American descendants faced discrimination and marginalization due to their religious faith, their language, and their customs. From the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, they occupied an ambiguous place in the country’s ethnic and racial landscape. Their uncertain status resulted from their dual identity as a people of Western European descent and as North American settlers whose racial belonging was contested. Steering through that ambiguity and seeking a full-fledged whiteness, Franco-Americans at times accepted the racial litmus tests established by the dominant Anglo-Saxon group, not least by distancing themselves from East Asian migrants, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples.

Dividing the Indian Race

Despite being the first Native American to author a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), John Rollin Ridge and his writings have long troubled scholars. Ridge’s focus on Mexican Americans, racist portrayal of California Indians, and embrace of US belonging refuse easy analysis within the single identity category-focused frameworks of Native studies and Chicanx studies, and his presence in gold rush California as a Cherokee settler complicates scholarly approaches to the racial history of California. This essay uses a historicized engagement with racial formation theory to reevaluate Ridge’s work, including his novel, newspaper article in The True Daily Delta, and Hesperian magazine articles. Diverging from prior scholarship that reads Ridge’s work through the lens of present-day racial categories, this study approaches racial categories as shifting, connected to structures of power, and imbricated with gender to understand how Ridge thought of himself in relation to both California Indians and Mexican Americans and how he tried to intervene into the American racial discourse. Ridge desired recognition and inclusion from the US settler state, and he used hegemonic notions of masculinity to make his case. This prompted him to distance himself from those unable to conform to standards of appropriate manhood. I contend that Ridge’s desire for recognition led him to suggest that his own Cherokee people were more closely related to Mexican Americans than to California Indians. The complexity of Ridge’s stance and racial positioning in California demonstrate the possibilities of a reading practice informed by a relational approach to racial formation.

Please take her as your wife

Abstract This article investigates linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Satoru Noda’s popular televised Japanese anime Golden Kamuy (GK). The study employs multimodal analysis, focusing on content, context, characters, and perspectives related to the deployment of the Ainu language using the perspectives of raciolinguistics, coloniality, and intersectionality, to examine GK’s representations of Ainu regarding two Japanese national discourses on race: the current discourse of “ethnic harmony” (or multiculturalism) and Ainu as a dying race, popularized in the early 20th century. It argues that GK unintentionally constructs a sanitized Ainu-Japanese relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, GK reproduces Ainu as a dying race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Ainu co-protagonist and her monolingual grandmother. The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.