Racial Formation Research Articles

Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands

In this deeply researched provocative study of slavery in the Natchez district, Christian Pinnen, associate professor of history at Mississippi College, makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery in North America’s borderlands. Focusing on the Natchez District between the 1720s and 1820s, Pinnen explores the dynamics of making race in four different legal systems—the French, British, Spanish, and US. Throughout the book he puts complexion at the center of his analysis, exploring how Europeans in rival imperial systems worked out new theoretical conceptions of human phenotypes, tied the meaning of slavery and freedom to color and complexion, and by the early nineteenth century made skin type an “all-encompassing marker signifying slavery in territorial Natchez” (184). Over this century, as the region changed hands, each set of settlers had their own ideas of how race and slavery should function. Yet, rather than foregrounding the contestations between these definitions, Pinnen persuasively argues that the rise of chattel slavery in the US south built on and borrowed from the various Native and imperial actors that came before.Over seven chapters, Pinnen follows how slavery and complexion operated within each different imperial system with scrupulous detail, showing that “a uniform embrace of slavery did not lead to a uniform path to defining race or slavery” (10). The first chapter explores the interaction between three different forms of slavery: African, Native, and European (13). Examining the Natchez Revolt of 1729, Pinnen focuses on the failure of European colonizers to create a plantation economy in Natchez. The second chapter examines British colonialism in the region and identifies key developments that would later facilitate making a slave society. Focusing on the slave code disseminated from British West Florida, Pinnen shows how forms of patriarchy unique to the British imperial system, as well as emerging conceptions of race that connected it explicitly to complexion, laid a foundation for later colonizers. The next three chapters comprise the core of the book and explore Spanish colonialism in the Mississippi Valley. Tracing how forms of church hierarchy and colonial administration mediated the power enslavers had over their captives, Pinnen explores why Spanish settlers could not create a slave society on par with others in the Americas. These chapters together stand out for their originality and breadth of research. The final two chapters explore the rise of US hegemony. Pinnen shows how the return to patriarchal forms of hierarchy, and the end of institutional mediation, constrained avenues for manumission and resistance to human bondage. With the onset of cotton monoculture in the early nineteenth century, and the accretion of a century of shifting colonial definitions of race and slavery, US colonizers connected complexion and human bondage as never before in the Natchez District. The rise of US planation systems did not erase what rival empires built in the region, but promiscuously borrowed from them. The irresistible and important conclusion is that the rise of US planter hegemony was far from inevitable and can only partly be explained by looking within the borders of the United States.The research that sustains this sweeping narrative comes from repositories as diverse as the US National Archives, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, regional repositories across the US Gulf South, and local court records from Adams County, Mississippi. In particular, Pinnen’s use of court cases allows him to recover at least some voices of enslaved people, highlighting their agency to shape the societies that sanctioned their enslavement, and, some of the time, resist their bondage and challenge the connections between race and slavery.A few key studies have bridged the large literatures on slavery in North America and imperial expansion in borderlands, but the conversation between these two massive literatures is not well developed. As a result, Complexion of Empire deserves a wide readership, and can provide a model for other scholars to continue integrating scholarly conversations that too often remain separate.

The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

Most Black people in the United States now live in the suburbs. To some this may be surprising. Suburban development in the postwar period has usually been understood as a history of the formation of entirely white communities that segregated themselves spatially, legally, and socially with the aid of local and federal administrations from the majority-minority cities they often orbited. But the crabgrass frontier that suburban historian Kenneth Jackson described in the mid-1980s was always more porous than it appeared. To date, scholars of Black suburbanization since Jackson have focused primarily on the “complex role of race and class for Black people” in suburban spaces (p. 5). Books like Living with Racism (1996) and Black Picket Fences (1999) have demonstrated the extent to which Black Americans who made it through the wringer of social mobility in the United States experienced the social and economic benefits of suburbia unevenly and irregularly. For them, white picket fences and green lawns did not translate to the stereotypical expectations of class stability and safety. They also have examined the ways in which Black Americans negotiated racial identity, racism, and the culture of class in these spaces.Orly Clerge's ethnographic study, The New Noir, heads in a different direction. It takes into consideration the fact that “since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the flow of hundreds of thousands of Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa have transformed Black mobility and cultural geography” (p. 7). The New Noir expands our understanding of immigration, the Black middle class, and suburban culture through an exploration of the development of what Clerge has termed the “Black diasporic suburbs” (p. 2). To understand “the localized identities and practices of the Black middle class in the twenty-first century,” Clerge saliently argues that we must break the mold of the nation state and “use a more global and comparative perspective” that considers international histories of race, migration, and politics (p. 13). In doing so, Clerge reconfigures the boundaries of the literature on the Black middle class by exploring how diaspora and migration shaped the ways in which members of the transnational Black middle class in New York City negotiated racial identity and class formation.The introduction lays out the stakes of the book, particularly focusing on consumption practices and the culture of food. Clerge focuses on seemingly quotidian tasks and activities that provide a window into the “cultural worlds of [the] multiethnic Black middle class” (p. 5) A trip to the local store, she points out, “is an opportunity to see the multiplicity of regional and national culture that animate suburbia” (p. 3). The second and third chapters take the reader through the historiographies of migration and place through the lens of suburban placemaking and Black Atlantic world diasporas. They explore how cross-national racial formations and migrations shaped trans-geographical journeys of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans from slavery to the middle class.”Chapter 4 examines the cultural economies of the Black middle class and the importance of inter/intragroup differences created by successive waves of migration to make sense of the “structure and culture of class” in diasporic Black suburbs. The next chapter builds on the ideas of the previous one to examine the experiences of being a first-generation member of the Black middle class. Her interviewees articulated class origin stories of “downward, lateral, and upward mobility.” The final two chapters unpack the meanings of “race, nationality, and regionality” for the Black middle class through an exploration of how residents of these places, individually and collectively, understood and negotiated racial identity. Chapter 6 outlines Clerge's term “racial consciousness spectrum,” which is a “framework for categorizing interethnic and intraethnic racial identities and practices.” While sociologists often claim that middle-class Black immigrants “distance themselves from Black identities,” this chapter challenges that argument by analyzing the “diversity of definition and performances of Blackness” among residents of the diaspora suburbs. Chapter 7 investigates the “centrality of nationality and regionality in the lived experiences” of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans” in the workplace, neighborhood, and at home. Finally, the conclusion, “Mustard Seeds,” rehashes the main interventions of the book and provides a strong agenda for future researchers to look into how “suburban Black millennials,” both immigrants and those born in the states, negotiate race and class in the twenty-first century.

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Critical Discourse Analysis of Meghan Markle’s Identity in the Interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021

The current paper deals with a critical discourse analysis of the underlying ideology of Duchess Meghan Markle in her conversation with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 in one of the most important royal interviews since princess Diana’s Panorama interview in 1995. The paper starts with theoretical information about the concepts of identity, ideology, race and critical discourse analysis (CDA). The researcher analyzes three selected extracts from this conversation by using van Dijk’s (2004) framework to investigate how Meghan Markle tried to justify her ideas and persuade the audience by utilizing subtle ideological discourse structures in her speech.

Forging an Anti-Racist Praxis: Housing Discrimination against Ottoman Greek Immigrants in Early-Twentieth-Century Portland and Seattle

Whiteness provides its possessors with the privilege of homeownership without racial restrictions and obstructs black, brown, and Indigenous people. I examine that privilege for the Ottoman Greeks, an early-twentieth-century Southeastern European immigrant cohort to the United States. To conduct the examination, I analyze data from the Dictionary of Races or Peoples, the Segregated Seattle Project, and the Portland Restrictive Covenant Project. Racial formation theory and the concept of racial fluidity provide the framework for this study’s three main findings.1 First, housing discrimination impacted Ottoman Greeks less than other racialized groups. Second, Ottoman Greeks experienced this discrimination as racially fluid Greeks or Turks. Finally, Ottoman Greek housing discrimination occurred in elite white communities of Portland and Seattle. My findings illustrate an alternate knowledge of whiteness that, when harnessed by descendants of early-twentieth-century immigrants, can potentially lead them toward anti-racist political advocacy and activism.

New political ecologies of renewable energy

The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly just renewable energy transition. This theme issue underlines the many ways in which political ecology is well-positioned to lead critical and engaged scholarship in support of energy/climate justice. In this introduction and survey, we draw on new research collected here to reflect on political ecology's distinctive analytical capacities and forms of praxis for this task. We argue that the collection advances political ecology's intellectual and political purchase on renewable transition in several crucial ways. These include (1) Theorizing Renewables-Driven Land Transformations, (2) Advancing Industrial Political Ecologies of Renewables, (3) Locating Power within Technical and Artifactual Politics and (4) Generating Knowledge and Tools for Just Transitions. We conclude with reflections on further pressing concerns for the field: for example, rising debates over scale, ownership and accountability models within renewable energy justice and democracy movements and critical conversations growing around renewable energy's own extraction geographies and diverse forms of racialization.

The coloniality of labor: Migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in an Australian deindustrializing city

AbstractThis paper explores migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in Newcastle, a deindustrializing Australian city. Data for this paper were drawn from interviews conducted with young people who migrated to Australia as temporary and permanent residents. Drawing on concepts of coloniality, racialization, bodywork, and hidden labor, this paper demonstrates how, when looking for work, participants' names get attached to their racialized bodies—a situation which deems them as suitable or not for specific kinds of work. Their strategies of finding work differ according to their migration status; that is, temporary residents draw on their personal networks, whereas some permanent residents with full citizenship rights rely on social welfare support services to find work. However, irrespective of the different strategies used to find work, they all end up doing jobs that they described as “work which others do not wish to do.” I argue that these experiences re‐articulate the coloniality of labor because, as workers in these jobs, they play a crucial role in the economic transformation taking place in the city due to deindustrialization. This is not merely because they form part of the workforce responsible for working in unwanted jobs, but because they are also consumers of Newcastle's emerging welfare support and educational services sectors. The paper contributes to an understanding of how race shapes the labor market experiences of racialized youth in deindustrializing labor markets.

Race in public health dentistry: a critical review of the literature.

ABSTRACTOBJECTIVE To carry out a critical review of the literature on the use of race, color, and ethnicity in the field of public health dentistry.METHODS A literature search was conducted in MEDLINE via PubMed for articles published between 2014 and 2019. Using a data extraction form, we collected information on (1) bibliographic characteristics of the selected papers; (2) race, color, and ethnicity of the study participants and their sociodemographic profiles; and (3) the extent to which the original publications followed the recommendations by Kaplan and Bennett (2003) on the use of race, color, or ethnicity in biomedical research.RESULTS Our initial search identified 2,032 articles, 53 of which were selected for full-text examination and assessment following pre-established eligibility criteria. Around 60% (n = 32) of the included studies did not justify the use of race, color, or ethnicity in their analyses, and 9% (n = 5) took these variables as indicators of the participants’ genetic makeup. On the other hand, 68% (n = 36) of the reviewed papers considered race, color, and ethnicity as risk markers – not risk factors – for adverse oral health outcomes, whereas 80% (n = 42) adjusted racial/ethnic inequities for a range of socioeconomic and demographic factors in statistical models. Only one study (2%) explicitly took race, color, or ethnicity as a contextually dependent dimension of the participants’ identities.CONCLUSION Our findings indicate that research on oral health inequities is often based on reductionist and stigmatizing conceptions of race, color, or ethnicity. Such harmful misconceptions should be replaced with anti-racist narratives in order to effectively address racial oral health inequities.

The Transformation of Ethnic Relations in Malaysia

Ethnic relations in Malaysia have undergone a long history. It all began when the Melaka Malay Government was founded until today. Today, communities of various backgrounds, cultures and religions are the main characteristics of world countries. These pluralistic communities are perceived to have been burdened with all-too-common ethnic competitions and conflicts. In Malaysia, the concept of race is not used in understanding the relationship between people of various cultures. The concept adopted instead is the one characterising upon the culture, language, and religion. The Malay World had successfully constructed a pluralistic society through inter-group bonding that there was a cross-cultural relationship based on the permeable and umbrella ethnicity concepts. However, through the Divide and Rule Policy by the British colonials, it had changed the form of ethnic relations in the Malay World to the point that there was a distributed occupational form according to different ethnic groups. The structure of ethnic relations in Malaysia post-NEP was influenced by a very thin line of ethnic boundaries and their relationships based on non-ethnic considerations. Meanwhile, the analysis of the Post-14th General Election finds that there has a positive and negative scenario and situations created in terms of the ethnic relations in Malaysia. Thus, this article will analyse the transformation of ethnic relations in Malaysia since the Malay Sultanate Era in Melaka, the Era of Colonisation, the Post-New Economic Policy Era and the Post-14th General Election Era.

A Philosophical Critique: Is Race Real?

Race has been a prominent discourse in the contemporary world and academic discipline since the last few decades as it determines a variety of moral problems. In response to this discussion, race tends to emphasise a couple of philosophical aspects in favour of concepts and categories. The concept of race forms a debate in reality whilst racial taxonomy gives a physical system of division such as black, white, Asian, Native American, and so forth. Correspondingly, there have been remarkable problematic issues with regards to biological realism, antirealism or eliminativism alongside social constructivism. In addition, the particular term, race, predominantly embodies a pair of notions: it is a biological position, demarcated by observable physical characteristics in terms of certain ancestry and geographical territory - it is a historical moral perspective, which is construed by ancient societies. Therefore, by employing qualitative mode of enquiry, I attempt this research to defend the thesis that race is not real, and it could be an upshot of social constructivism. Then, I look forward to illuminating a few substantial findings: the central claims of antirealism or eliminativism, a critique of social constructivism along with a brief analysis of political and cultural constructionism. Notwithstanding these limited outcomes, this research suggests that further studies need to be carried out in order to explore the unreal nature of race.

Queer decisions: Racial matching among gay male intended parents.

How does race and location shape the reproductive decisions of gay men who are intended parents? In this article, we propose the concept of strategic racialization to characterize the ways in which gay male parents employ racial matching in their selection of egg donors and surrogates in the United States and United Kingdom. We argue that racial matching is a strategy of stigma management. This study draws upon interview data from 40 gay male couples who formed families through surrogacy. We find that pre-conception fathers seek racialized resemblance to reinforce kinship between themselves and their children. In California and England, gay men seeking donor eggs engage in racial matching, which reveals that the racialized biogenetic model of kinship remains dominant. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature on race and queer family formation.

The Monster Minority: John Yoo’s Multicultural Instruction and the “Torture Memos”

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States declared a war on terrorism that would come to rely on legal memoranda to justify the surveillance, detention, and torture of “terrorists” held at the Guantánamo Bay Military Prison. Analyzing the language of these 2002 “Torture Memos,” this article contends that the memos discursively produced not only the racial formation of the terrorist but also the emergent figure of the “monster minority,” embodied by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Yoo. Defined in this essay as a patriotic, individualistic, and exceptional racialized subject who works on behalf of counterterrorism, the monster minority plays a central role in the legal construction of the terrorist precisely because of his exemplary status within US society. While Asian American studies explains the formation of the model minority that accounts for Yoo as a beneficiary of elite multicultural education, and post-9/11 studies of U.S. imperialism elucidate the formation of the terrorist-as-monster, this essay puts these fields in conversation to establish how Yoo’s particular brand of Asian American masculinity consolidates both the racialized enemy and the racialized agent of the US security state.

‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies

ABSTRACT This article brings comparative race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and North/African studies together to investigate how local-historical conceptions of blackness intersect with contemporary border policing of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants. Defining race as a historically-contingent formation, I argue that blackness emerged at various periods in North African history (from the Islamic expansion to the present-day) to signify inferior social status and non-belonging, meanings that are shaped by the practices, discourses, and memories of slavery. This intervention connects critical studies on racialized border enforcement to other processes of social exclusions already at work within North African social space. It fills a critical gap in North African studies by providing a theoretically- and historically-grounded analysis of racial formation (and especially blackness) in the region that will have broad utility to scholars studying marginalisation and marginalised people’s political mobilisation at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.

Orania: A white homeland in post‐apartheid South Africa

AbstractThis paper employs the race formation theory to trace the historical origins of the idea of Orania, an exclusively White town in post‐apartheid South Africa. A key finding is that Orania is a historical product of the centuries‐old, racist idea of a White homeland in South Africa which is referred to as The Boer Republics in South African historiography. Throughout South African history, White separatist ideas have always served as the foundation for the Afrikaner White homeland narrative. This paper uses the concept of White identity politics to frame the discourse of the “vulnerable White minority” that White residents of Orania deploy to conceal their White separatist ideas under the aegis of culture. This article demonstrates that the practice of White identity politics in Orania offers learning opportunities for anti‐racist academics who research new forms of racism in the 21st century.

Antisemitism, racism, revolution

ABSTRACT In this essay, I respond to Alana Lentin, Yair Wallach, David Renton and Andrew Sloin, who have each written reviews of my book Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution for this symposium. Taken together, I suggest that their contributions raise important issues in the study of antisemitism past and present. In particular, their commentaries draw attention to the ever-pressing issue of the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of racism. Further, they touch on the importance of understanding the role of identity (in this case, Jewish identity) in political confrontations with antisemitism and in anti-racism more broadly. Finally, through a discussion of the work of Moishe Postone, I discuss the limits and possibilities of deploying theories of antisemitism across time and space in empirically driven historical sociology.

Equity-based CS Case Study: An Approach to Exploring White Teachers’ Conceptions of Race and Racism in a Professional Development Setting

Here, we present the results of a study of in-service teachers’ responses to equity-based case study vignettes focused on racialized classroom incidents. This study was conducted in the context of an ongoing research practice partnership aimed at integrating computer science concepts in elementary grades. Our work took place in a public school district that enrolls primarily students of color, while largely employing White teachers and administrators. Using a racial literacy framework [Guinier 2004 ], we conceptualized a continuum and developed codes to analyze teachers’ responses from racially liberal to racially literate. Our results describe a range of positions across the continuum, including those consistent with the racial liberalism viewpoint that expresses individualistic views of meritocracy and colorblindness that sometimes supports a deficit view of students, those that reside in the middle who validate equity work through minimal acknowledgment yet find ways to resist further engagement with race or equity, and those who express views consistent with racial literacy practices including student-centered perspectives, asset-orientations, and the willingness to engage race directly. Further, our results indicate that teachers may express contradictory views or views across the continuum. These findings point to the developmental nature of racial literacy and the difficulty of unlearning racist mindsets. We discuss the efficacy of our case study design: anonymized, locally derived vignettes, and our case study learning activity design: written reflections, small group dialogues, and whole group share-outs in supporting teacher reflection and learning. Finally, we demonstrate the special leadership role of teachers who are moving toward racial literacy.

Boas, Du Bois, Monagu and The Concept of Race

Boas, Du Bois, Monagu and The Concept of Race

The Formation of Territories Free of Transgenics: Race, Space, and Mobilisation in Colombia

AbstractThe transgenic expansion has situated land and territorial disputes at the centre of the transformations of the global agrifood system. Feminist critical scholarship has examined how states and multilateral organisations exercise top‐down power to promote extractivist agrarian models of development, showing how they have accelerated and intensified material and immaterial dispossession for already poor farmers across the world. In this article, I contribute to this growing body of inquiry by examining how racialisation is entangled with communities’ discourses and tactics to generate seed and agrarian counter‐territorialisation processes. I concentrate on the formation of Territories Free of Transgenics in Colombia among peasant and Indigenous communities. I show the possibilities for socio‐epistemic and territorial reconfiguration that they offer, as well as their limitations. I demonstrate the critical role that racial formations play in seed struggles and the reformation of agrifood systems from below and point out further spaces of inquiry.

Concepts and renderings of gender and race in Babytai Kamble’s ‘The Prison We Broke’

This Research Paper first evaluates the twin concepts of Gender and Race from multiple perspectives, particularly in the Indian context. Subsequently, it critiques the rendition of these concepts in the lives and works of Jyotiba Phule, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and their relentless attempts in forging Gender, Racial and Caste-related equality. Finally, the paper probes deep into the psychobiography of BabytaiKamble and critiques her unique autobiography ‘The Prisons We Broke’.

“Doomed by the Confusion in Their Design”: Racialized Urban Space, Redlining, and Monolithic Whiteness in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones

Abstract While Paule Marshall’s novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) has long been celebrated as a pivotal text in the canon of Caribbean American and African American women's literature, not enough attention has been paid to the material conditions underlying the coming-of-age story of her main protagonist, Selina Boyce. A close reading of the novel’s engagement with urban space—in particular with the changes that Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood undergoes in the late 1930s and early 1940s—reveals not only that the text contains an astute critique of American race formation at one of its most crucial moments, namely in the context of the New Deal’s policies of redlining and white flight, but also that Marshall ought to be considered as an early, but important, voice of both critical race theory and whiteness studies.