Race Frames Research Articles

The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France

Femonationalism, that is, the use of women’s rights rhetorics to further racial stigmatisation and promote nationalism, has been of growing interest to social scientists on European contexts. While previous studies have provided insights on the racialisation of sexism in gender equality policymaking, there is still a limited understanding of how policy frames in particular national contexts can either exacerbate or mitigate femonationalism in the making of anti-gender-based violence policy. In particular, how do frames on race and racism impact the framing of anti-street harassment policies and, by extension, the ability to prevent femonationalism? The article explores this issue by comparing the cases of France and Britain through empirical data with policymakers and activists intervening in policymaking against street harassment in France and Britain. Findings suggest that, even though French state actors claim their colour-blindness allows them to avoid a racist framing of the problem, it actually enables it. This in turn favours a racialised framing of street harassment and leads to an inability to address the potential risk of racial targeting in the criminalisation of street harassment. Conversely, the acknowledgment of racism in Britain favours an intersectional framing of street harassment and leads to greater consideration of the risk of racial targeting. By analysing how race repertoires unfold in policy pre-adoption phases, the article therefore suggests that nationally embedded assumptions about race have a significant impact on the framing of anti-gender-based violence policy and, in turn, on femonationalism.

Contradictory forces, facts and tendencies

ABSTRACT This article draws upon the ‘contradictory forces, facts and tendencies’ central to sociologist, historian, activist and cultural theorist W.E.B. Du Bois’ framing of race, and places them within a metaphysical and sociological analysis of exclusionary frameworks in contemporary Italy. Problematizing the formation of global black perspectives, this text intends to initiate an exchange that may foster the development of strategies, language and tools needed for the making of a new narrative in the Italian context, a narrative that cannot be realized without a profound reflection on the historical trajectory of cultural exchange between the African continent and the territory known as Italy extending back into antiquity. Drawing upon the dialogue initiated in the Young Gifted and Black Italia (Y.G.B.I.) Research Residency, a range of interviews carried out over the past decade and a half, and several research platforms developed by Black History Month Florence (B.H.M.F.), I hope to highlight the potential for collective approaches that have the potential to provide the scaffold for Italian specific meditations with transnational implications. Calling for multiplicities in relation to social and psychological understandings of displacements and states of post-displacement in Italy, this writing seeks a contextually grounded positionality that, however hindered by the chauvinism of nationalistic narrations of history, imply an inclusion that need not be validated. In so doing I intimate an Italian-ness that is as conscious of how it is framed through its own making, as it is aware of the framing devices applied from abroad.

Conceptualizing Race in the Leisure Studies Diversity Course

Diversity courses are integral to higher leisure education curricula and united by the following assumptions: (a) recreation programs involve encounters with “different” groups of people and (b) future professionals require a specialized set of knowledge and skills in order to manage those interactions. Although several scholars have critiqued these assumptions, those insights have not been applied to rethinking how the diversity course is taught. This article addresses that gap through an examination of how race is conceptualized and taught within the diversity course. Race is the focal point of this article because diversity initiatives most often focus on racial identity. Academics have often framed race as a relatively homogenous individual identity in the leisure studies diversity course. The purpose of acquiring knowledge about racial identity is to facilitate the students’ diversification of staff and users. However, this framing of race obscures the ways that diversification can expose the racialized other to new forms of violence and exploitation. I offer racial capitalism as a different framework through which race can be conceptualized and taught within the leisure studies diversity course. Racial capitalism encourages viewing race through intersecting relations of power, as a status created to maintain power and profit, and as deeply rooted in the past.

“Anti-Riot” or “Anti-Protest” Legislation? Black Lives Matter, News Framing, and the Protest Paradigm

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020, sparked widespread protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement throughout the summer of 2020. Subsequent news coverage of these protests prominently featured acts of civil disobedience even though almost all protests were peaceful. In turn, protest “violence” was picked up by conservative political elites as evidence to promote legislation to control protests and keep communities safe. Since summer 2020, eight states have passed such legislation with additional bills pending in 21 states, raising concerns that the legislation suppresses political expression. This paper brings together literature on free expression, the protest paradigm, and news framing to provide the basis for a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 379 news stories and editorials covering Florida’s HB1 protest legislation. Results reveal that the most frequent news frame was fighting crime, with relatively less attention to free expression, political strategy, and race frames. In addition, very little attention was paid to the legislation’s potential chilling effects suppressing constitutionally protected speech and assembly. These results indicate news media were deficient in providing the public with a sufficient assessment of the implications of protest legislation.

‘We’re talking about race!:’ communicative practices of chief diversity officers

ABSTRACT This research focused on the framing of race, diversity, equity, and inclusion through the communicative practices of chief diversity officers (CDOs) working in U.S. institutions of higher education. Grounded in applied communication scholarship and co-cultural theory (Orbe, 1996), this project investigated how CDOs frame their campus work, and employ communicative practices in formal and informal settings to design institutional policies and build campus support for their efforts. To explore how CDOs accomplish their institutional work, in-depth interviews (N = 25) were conducted with higher education CDOs. CDOs employed communicative practices that confirmed the practices identified by Orbe (1998a), and engaged in a nuanced practice of reflexive questioning. Communicative practices were all strategically employed by CDOs to advance conversations about race, diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to move campus constituents to action in support of institutional changes to language, policies, and practices.

Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity

Darryl Leroux’s Distorted Descent provides a fascinating glimpse into the broader colonial structural issues at play in what he calls the “race-shifting” or “self-Indigenization” phenomenon that has taken hold over the last decade or so in the United States and Canada. Leroux spends the majority of the book focused on white settlers of French descent in various communities across eastern Canada and the United States, breaking down the methods and justifications they use to craft a contemporary Indigenous identity. For the most part, Leroux’s focus is on white people who either claim Métis identity using genealogical methods that connect them to an Indigenous (usually First Nations) relative as far back as twelve generations or claim Indigeneity for a distant non-Indigenous relative. It is important that Leroux distinguishes between white settlers claiming Indigenous heritage when there is none to be found and Indigenous people struggling to reconnect to communities after US and Canadian assimilationist policies and institutions, such as the “sixties scoop” and residential/boarding schools, severed ties.Leroux’s intensive research into online French genealogy message boards yields a series of patterns through which white settlers make fraudulent claims to Indigeneity. Distorted Descent offers names for these patterns; for example, settlers using an Indigenous relative three hundred years in the past are manufacturing Indigeneity through “lineal” descent. Settlers attempting to claim Indigeneity by rewriting a distant settler relative as Indigenous do so through “aspirational” descent.Much of the book serves as a well-researched and astutely historical critique of settler focus on blood quantum and generational cut-offs as sole indicators of Indigeneity. It traces the ways in which settler concepts of genetics have been used to erase Indigeneity and claims to territory in both Canada and the United States. Importantly, blood quantum models of determining Indigeneity have served to undermine Indigenous systems of kinship, and this trend continues in the recent upswing in white claims to Indigenous identity. Leroux draws on the work of esteemed Métis scholars Chris Andersen and Brenda Macdougall, for example, to outline how settler ideas of Indigeneity have ignored structures of kinship and claiming in the Métis nation, actively threatening Métis sovereignty as a result.The crucial part of Leroux’s argument is not in his study and description of the phenomenon itself but in his framing of race shifting and the self-Indigenization movement as part of broader patriarchal white supremacist structures of colonial dispossession, even beyond Leroux’s identification of the roots of many of these so-called Indigenous groups in white supremacist organizations. In claiming a false Indigenous identity, many settlers have used their invented status to actively undermine and dispossess living Indigenous groups. Leroux brilliantly frames this as “[facilitating] white futurity in response to conventional reconciliation frameworks” (219). Leroux places this “new” phenomenon in context, thus presenting it as a continuation of centuries of colonial oppression—just with a different face.It is important to note that Leroux is not a historian—his roots in sociology and anthropology are clear in this book—but it is precisely the importance of a historical framing of many of the topics in Distorted Descent to which I would like to turn. While most of the book is dedicated to white settlers claiming Métis identity, there are sections where Leroux discusses settler claims to First Nations/Native American identities for similar purposes. The quick shift between two very different groups of Indigenous peoples at points throughout the book—the individuality of single nations aside—risks conflation of unique circumstances and historical and contemporary relationships with colonial power. Various nations and Indigenous groups have different practices of kinship and claiming that get lost in Leroux’s contemporary analysis of the issue and heavier focus on fake Métis claims without making the book solely about claims to Métis identity.While the book does talk about some differences between assimilation policies in the United States and Canada, it misses an opportunity to look at how historical differences between Indigenous relationships with US and Canadian settler states in place impact the kinds of rhetoric used to dispossess Indigenous peoples and how settler recognition—and de-recognition—are shaped by these contexts. These factors need to be considered when discussing issues of fake claims to Indigeneity, particularly in the northeastern United States, where there is a much longer history of colonial dispossession than in western regions. Indigenous nations like the Mashpee Wampanoag, for example, have continued to struggle for federal recognition in the face of a centuries-long attack on their sovereignty and claim to their home territory. While there are indeed white settlers taking advantage of this, the conversation is a great deal more nuanced than the scope of this book could address.Overall, Distorted Descent joins the ranks of important works, such as those of Kim Tallbear, about colonial attempts to control Indigeneity, and it will inform what will no doubt remain a robust and crucial conversation in this contemporary moment.

Media Framing of Race and Football in Colonial Nigeria: 1914 to 1950s

This paper examines 41 Nigerian newspaper articles, selected purposively, from 1914 to 1953. The newspapers identify racial framing of football under British colonial rule. Although there are studies of colonial football in Nigeria, few address its interaction with racialization. The articles are selected from three Nigerian newspapers – Nigeria Pioneer, The Times of Nigeria, and the West African Pilot. The earlier Nigerian newspapers – Nigeria Pioneer and The Times of Nigeria – were prominent in the use of thematic frames such as European racial superiority, football as cultural superiority, and Nigeria’s physical performers and expressionism. On the other hand, the West African Pilot, established much later by and for Nigeria’s indigenous interest under colonial rule, challenged those conceptions. The findings demonstrate that inter-racial competition under colonial rule in Nigeria was racialized in the media. In addition, it also shows that media ownership interest was critical in reporting football and race during the period.

An Antiracist Framework for Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Research.

* Abbreviations: AD — : atopic dermatitis FENO — : fractional exhaled nitric oxide Striking racial and ethnic disparities in childhood health conditions, such as prematurity, obesity, and asthma, have persisted despite decades of research focused on reducing these disparities. Although major advances in the treatment of chronic health conditions are difficult to achieve, an understanding of the underlying biology of disease has led to breakthroughs in the treatment of common childhood diseases such as asthma. It is notable, however, that despite the successes of biology-focused research, racial and ethnic disparities persist across many pediatric health conditions, suggesting that an exclusive focus on biology is a failed strategy for reducing these disparities. To make meaningful progress in improving minority health and disparities, the biomedical framework of health sciences must be recast so that it explicitly incorporates social context,1 which includes factors such as socioeconomic status, environmental exposures, access to high quality health care, and racism. Because the pediatric field has long understood that contextual factors have profound effects on health, it is best positioned to lead this recasting of health disparities research. Much health disparities research has been misguided in its framing of race and ethnicity as biological concepts, when socioeconomic and other contextual factors dwarf potential effects of innate biology.2–4 We have relied on a framework of biomedical research that tends to be uninterested in context and, instead, obsessed with using the latest technology to measure more easily quantifiable biological characteristics, which may not underpin differences in the expression of disease among populations. In addition, observed associations between biological measures and disease among racial or ethnic minority … Address correspondence to Elizabeth C. Matsui, MD, MHS, Departments of Population Health and Pediatrics, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, 1701 Trinity St, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: ematsui{at}utexas.edu

The Framing of Race: Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter Movement

This study analyzed two national newspapers to investigate how each framed race in coverage of Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from Feagin’s white racial frame as the framework for analysis, results show that the news coverage reflected an encompassing pro-white/anti-black master-frame that presented Black Americans as inadequate, lawless, criminal, threatening and at times biologically different. Some news stories contributed to the media’s conceptualization of race within a liberty-and-justice American myth paradigm. Conversely, whites were presented favorably as “protectors” and “virtuous.” Episodic news frames were discovered with highly-focused coverage on events that shifted attention away from the broader trend of racial profiling. These findings contributed to the understanding of the role of corporate media in reinforcing the framing of race. Emerging sub-frames are discussed.

Race, Culture and Liberation: African Anticolonial Thought and Practice in the Time of Decolonisation

This article explores the contribution of Amílcar Cabral and his fellow militants to debates over culture, race and liberation which took place among Africans and beyond during the mid-twentieth century. By the late 1950s African struggles for independence had reached a point of urgency. Alongside complex negotiations over political settlement and many wars of liberation across the continent, equally complex conversations took place about race, culture and African-ness, and the form and futures of national liberation. In their thought and practice the leading figures of the liberation movements fighting against Portuguese colonial rule made a significant contribution to these debates. The key contribution of this article is to situate the thought of Cabral in the collaborative relations of the liberation movements and in broader debates. This reveals how understandings of culture and the consciousness of African-ness come to be articulated in very different ways, ultimately transcending the framing of race and arriving at a more radical understanding of culture. The thought of Cabral and his colleagues is situated within the continental and global context with reference to three key moments and sites of debate in Havana and Dakar in 1966 and Algiers in 1969.

Encountering the Metropole: Stuart Hall, Race, (Un)Belonging, and Identity in Canada: Exploring the African Caribbean Immigration Experience

ABSTRACT The period between 1965 and 2001 witnessed a dramatic population movement of Black people into lands currently called Canada. Over 500,000 Caribbean people arrived as “landed immigrants” during this period, bringing the total Black population to over one million by 2016. Motivated by economic and political upheavals, thousands of African Caribbean immigrants left their homes in search of a better life. This large inflow of Black immigrants altered the Canadian political and cultural landscapes and ultimately changed the face of Southwestern Ontario. Using data collected from our research project on African Caribbean people in Canada, we examine the lived experiences of this Black immigrant population. This paper utilizes Stuart Hall’s framing of race, representation, (un)belonging, and identity to explore the particularities of African Caribbean immigration experiences in Canada; we show that Blackness, Black identity, and belonging in Canada are not fixed in their meaning, but rather represent a contested terrain.

Islamophobia in the National Health Service: an ethnography of institutional racism in PREVENT's counter-radicalisation policy.

In 2015, the UK government made its counter-radicalisation policy a statutory duty for all National Health Service (NHS) staff. Staff are now tasked to identify and report individuals they suspect may be vulnerable to radicalisation. Prevent training employs a combination of psychological and ideological frames to convey the meaning of radicalisation to healthcare staff, but studies have shown that the threat of terrorism is racialised as well. The guiding question of our ethnography is: how is counter-radicalisation training understood and practiced by healthcare professionals? A frame analysis draws upon 2years of ethnographic fieldwork, which includes participant observation in Prevent training and NHS staff interviews. This article demonstrates how Prevent engages in performative colour-blindness - the active recognition and dismissal of the race frame which associates racialised Muslims with the threat of terrorism. It concludes with a discussion of institutional racism in the NHS - how racialised policies like Prevent impact the minutia of clinical interactions; how the pretence of a 'post-racial' society obscures institutional racism; how psychologisation is integral to the performance of colour-blindness; and why it is difficult to address the racism associated with colourblind policies which purport to address the threat of the Far-Right.

Population Demography, Ancestry, and the Biological Concept of Race

For more than 50 years, biological anthropology has argued against the use of the biological race concept. Despite such efforts, aspects of the concept remain in circulation within society and within the discipline itself. As commonly articulated, anthropology's rejection of the biological race concept lacks an evolutionarily based explanatory grounding. Biological patterns of variation in living humans do not map onto commonly utilized categorizations of race, but this knowledge does not explain why human evolution has not produced such structures. This article attempts to offer one such explanation by constructing a biocultural framing of race around ancestry. By examining ancestry through two related lenses, genealogical and genetic, it is shown that the coherence of race as a biological concept has been disrupted by demographic changes in our recent evolutionary past. The biological construction of race is invalid not because it is impossible but because evolutionary forces have actively worked against such patterns in our evolutionary past.

The 2013 Steubenville Rape Case: An Examination of Framing in Newspapers and User-generated Content

Using the lens of medium theory, this content analysis explored the framing of the Steubenville rape case in newspapers and blogs before, during and immediately following the trial. Our findings indicate newspapers focused on social media’s role in documenting the rape and the trial of the two assailants. Blog posts, on the other hand, focused on rape victims’ rights and social media’s role in bringing the case to justice. Of the 78 newspaper articles and blog posts coded, medium type did not make a significant difference in the framing of perpetrators and the actual act of rape. However, there was a significant difference in how the media types framed the case in general. This is a noteworthy finding, as it appears that newspapers were colorblind in their coverage and not as prone to use race frames as indicated in previous studies. Conversely, blog posts offered a platform for discussing issues that were omitted in mainstream media such as women’s rights, rape myths and the need for rape awareness/prevention programs for parents and youth.

Silencing Racism: Remembering and Forgetting Race and Racism in 11th-Grade U.S. History Classes

BackgroundThe continuing significance of race in U.S. society and culture begs the question of what role history and social studies education can and should play in preparing students to critically and constructively address race and racism in contemporary U.S. society and culture. However, research on history and social studies curriculum and practice continues to demonstrate significant problems in meaningfully including and representing race, racism, and racial violence in U.S. history, underscoring the need for additional research to improve how we address race and racism in history and social studies education.PurposeI examined how teachers’ understandings of race and racism, which informed their use of curricular materials, and the content, focus, and framing of race and racism in the formal curriculum shaped the inclusion and representation of race and racism in the enacted U.S. history curriculum in their classes.Research DesignQualitative methods were used to study U.S. history instruction in three teachers’ classes at a suburban high school. This included daily observations in each teacher's class over a 7-month period, observation of weekly teacher planning meetings, individual interviews with teachers and group interviews with students, and collection of all curricular materials, and samples of student work.FindingsRace and racism were addressed in lessons on U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s in a U.S. foreign policy unit and in a civil rights unit that focused on the civil rights movement. In both units race remained an elusive concept, for example referencing skin color but also culture and nationality, and racism was represented as shared beliefs in the superiority of whites over nonwhites. However, during the civil rights unit, the representation of racism as an individual psychological phenomenon of prejudice and stereotyping came to be privileged over other representations and, coupled with ambiguous understandings of race, this enabled the decoupling of race from representations of racism. Additionally, race was eventually forgotten in accounts of civil rights movement events as teachers’ use of the formal curriculum deflected attention away from discussions of race and racism.ConclusionsMore robust understandings of race as a process of racialization and representations of racism as structural and systemic would assist teachers in presenting a continuous history of racism in the United States that would better outfit students to constructively engage racism in the present.

“Black Children Are an Endangered Species”: Examining Racial Framing in Social Movements

ABSTRACTThe “Endangered Species” anti-abortion billboard controversy in Atlanta in 2010 gained international attention and sparked lengthy discussion about the causes and consequences of black women’s abortion rates and abortion in general. While abortion is typically presented as gendered phenomenon, race and class dimensions influence the contours of support and opposition to the issue. This case provides a unique opportunity to consider black social movements as black people led both sides of the billboard controversy and engaged particular authentic discourses. This article builds on the research on race frames to illuminate the (micro) processes of racial framing, the social movement organizations’ implicit and explicit deployments of race in claims making. By examining how both sides engaged participants, opponents, and media, this article demonstrates how racial framing is an important tool for minority social movements with implications for other social movements and policy.

Race, self-interest and privilege amongst students at elite U.S. and U.K. universities

ABSTRACTWarikoo’s The Diversity Bargain describes the findings of research which explores how students at elite universities in the U.S. and the U.K. conceptualize race in relation to the admissions process and their experiences on campus. This is an important study, which reveals differences in the degree of comfort and caution displayed by white students in their framing of race. There are three areas worthy of further exploration: the subjective positioning of the author herself as she engages and responds to the research findings; the advantages of affording a richer theoretical framework to the analysis and, finally, the similarities between Warikoo’s notion of a diversity bargain and Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence. These are explored in turn.

Evaluation and the Framing of Race

Racial framing can have strong effects on programs, policies, and even evaluations. Racial framing developed as a justification for the exploitation of minorities and has been a primary causal factor in the persistence of racism. By being aware of its pattern, structure, origins, and how racial framing generates effects, we can significantly reduce its influence, thus enhancing the rigor of our studies by controlling for a potential bias that’s often covert. Stories play a critical role in framing and reframing processes. They constitute a key part of the vocabulary of action.

Metaphors for the War (or Race) against Climate Change

ABSTRACTDespite overwhelming scientific consensus, millions of Americans fail to view climate change as a pressing threat. How can we address this disconnect between science and public opinion? In the present study, we investigated the role of metaphorical framing in shaping attitudes toward climate change. Participants read a brief article that metaphorically described US efforts to reduce carbon emissions as a war or race against climate change, or non-metaphorically described it as the issue of climate change. We further manipulated whether these emission-reduction goals emphasized the relatively near or distant future. We found that, compared to the race frame, the war metaphor made people perceive more urgency and risk surrounding climate change and express a greater willingness to increase conservation behavior, irrespective of the time horizon. Those who read the non-metaphorical report tended to respond in between these two extremes. We discuss the implications of these findings for climate communications.

Race and the refusal to name racism: consumption, identity and choice in the <i>Celebrity Big Brother</i> House

The centrality of consumption in the resolution of the ‘race row’ in the Celebrity Big Brother(CBB) House 2007 characterizes ‘the consumption politics of race’ engendered in response to ‘racism lite’ (adopting Mary Riddell’s term) - forms of racial harm articulated in normative frames specific to the entertainment industry. The regulatory response to racism litewas premised on a radical and post-modern framing of race and racial harm. When compared with the responses to racism outside the CBB House, this framing reveals a cautionary tale. The recognition of racism liteis confined to a market defined framework that attributes responsibility with a view to furthering economic agendas of dominant market actors. The danger is that this dominance can (as was the case with the ‘race row’ in the CBB House) henceforth define the terms on which racism is debated in contemporary society.