New Forms Of Racism Research Articles

The Rise of Islamophobia in India: Violation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom of Indian Muslims

This article examines Islamophobia in India and its impact on the human rights and basic liberties of Indian Muslims. Islamophobia is a new form of racism that has grown out of xenophobia, negative profiling, and stereotyping of Muslims. This article focuses upon the current state of Islamophobia, basic liberties, hate speech, discrimination, and violence against Muslims. These acts of prejudice, animosity, and violence against Muslim communities are major infringements on their human rights and a violation of their religious freedom. The BJP has been promoting a number of evil anti-Muslim policies, including discriminatory citizenship laws, the lynching of Muslims on suspicion of consuming or transporting beef and a ban on communal prayers. We conclude that the institutionalisation of Islamophobia through new laws and policies have a negative impact on Muslims’ human rights and religious freedom in India. Similarly, the media in India also promotes Islamophobia.

Unsettling Discourses of Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice: Moving from Theoretical Debates to Interrogating and Transforming Praxis

Abstract Cultural competence is one of the most debated concepts in social work. Whilst some scholars view it as a central tenet of social work theory, practice and education, others critique it as a new form of racism and even encourage its abandonment in social work. Amidst this fierce debate, this article attempts to answer the following question: How do we become entrapped by our own thinking when it comes to fostering or critiquing cultural competence and related constructs as well as understanding their embodiment in everyday social work practice? Using a post-structural lens, especially Foucault’s work on the ‘Order of Things’ in society, this article interrogates discourses and praxis in cross-cultural social work practice (CCSWP). After briefly examining the pervasive concepts of cultural competence, cultural humility and structural competence currently in circulation, this article elaborates upon debated discourses and interrogates the praxis underlying CCSWP. Instead of descending into semantic and theoretical debates and promoting one dogmatism above others, it is essential to assume a position of ongoing interrogation and critique of the pervasive discourses and praxis of cultural competence and alternative concepts. Doing so can promote reflective CCSWP and create the possibility for transformative change in social work practice.

South African Higher Education as Mutating Plantation: Critical Reflections on Navigating a Racialized Space

In 1994, South Africa’s political governance changed from being a White minority-controlled apartheid state to a democracy—a relatively peaceful transition underpinned by a social cohesion and reconciliation ideology, namely, that all (both perpetrators and the oppressed) were victims requiring healing in the new proverbial “rainbow nation.” Reconciling racial fractures, anti-Blackness and unevenness of the higher education landscape, however, remains elusive. In this paper, we engage narrative inquiry to reflect as academics of color on our experiences in the last two and a half decades, of negotiating a mutating higher education space still haunted by residual racial hegemony and anti-Blackness in almost every sphere of the fraternity. We draw on Grosfoguel’s Fanonian-inspired constructs, namely, the “zones of being and non-being” and his conception of racism as beyond mere color racism but as a “dehumanization related to the materiality of domination.” We argue that color racism as it relates to the traditional apartheid plantation model has morphed into a neoliberal plantation in the higher education space with new colonial masters (managerial elites in the zone of being) and that Black students and Black academics continue to experience the university as alien as they assimilate hegemonic western Eurocentric culture and epistemology. We consider how we might stand in the cracks, look through and prise open such cracks in agentic contemplation of a resistance to emerging new forms of racism and anti-Blackness that present in South African higher education and how we might respond to student activism (the #RhodesMustFall movement) that calls for curriculum transformation and decolonization. An agenda at risk of subversion by the neoliberal grand narrative.

Letter to the Editor: Are Reparations a New Form of Racism?

Letter to the Editor: Are Reparations a New Form of Racism?

Inospitalidade e Estranhamento do Outro: A Discriminação do Mercado

Considering Michel Foucault’s two main courses on the general theme of biopolitics, namely, Il faut défendre la société (1997; 1999), a course for the academic year of 1976, and La naissance de la biopolitique (2004; 2008), taught by his turn in 1978/1979, I intend to consider that we are experiencing a new form of racism, this time no longer a state type, as already considered by Foucault, but a type of racism provoked and economically fomented, therefore, a market racism. Racism whose traces must be sought not exactly in economic theories, but among the historical agents par excellence of the market, that is, entrepreneurs in the exercise of their businesses. For this, I will focus, for the moment, on presenting market racism from the perspective of German business during the Third Reich, in Germany.

Anti-Racist Racism: Trauma, Traumatism, Traumatophilia.

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed but a cause of becoming? And what if the tenet that trauma may be worked through is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell?Introduction of the concept of traumatophobia invites readers to rethink the relationship of psychoanalysis to healing or repair, and to become attentive, instead, to what subjects do with trauma (traumatophilia). Traumatophilia involves a revivification of trauma, and that is easily confused with compulsive repetition or destructiveness. Traumatophobia, however, also courts psychic energies that can be psychically transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed. Careful consideration of a controversial sexual fetish (race play) shows how belated efforts of psychoanalysis to attend to racial trauma have generated new forms of racism: treating the Black unconscious not as a transformative and dynamic force but as housing only repressed representational contents. Considering race play instead through traumatophilia allows a race player's actions to be mined not for unconscious motives or for what past traumata, symbolized or unformulated, those motives carry, but to track their effects. Traumatophilic repetitions, it is argued, deliver traumatisms that may (or may not) be transformational. Questions of ethics are thus central to this paper's thinking, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology. Because traumatophobia preserves the world order (and thus white logics), readers are urged to consider the metapsychology of traumatophilia.

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.

Racism Detection by Analyzing Differential Opinions Through Sentiment Analysis of Tweets Using Stacked Ensemble GCR-NN Model

With social media’s dominating role in the socio-political landscape, several existing and new forms of racism took place on social media. Racism has emerged on social media in different forms, both hidden and open, hidden with the use of memes and open as the racist remarks using fake identities to incite hatred, violence, and social instability. Although often associated with ethnicity, racism is now thriving based on color, origin, language, cultures, and most importantly religion. Social media opinions and remarks provocating racial differences have been regarded as a serious threat to social, political, and cultural stability and have threatened the peace of different countries. Consequently, social media being the leading source of racist opinions dissemination should be monitored and racism remarks should be detected and blocked timely. This study aims at detecting Tweets that contain racist text by performing the sentiment analysis of Tweets. Owing to the superior performance of deep learning, a stacked ensemble deep learning model is assembled by combining gated recurrent unit (GRU), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and recurrent neural networks RNN, called, Gated Convolutional Recurrent- Neural Networks (GCR-NN). GRU is on the top in the GCR-NN model to extract the suitable and prominent features from raw text, CNN extracts important features for RNN to make accurate predictions. Obviously, several experiments are conducted to investigate and analyze the performance of the proposed GCR-NN within the scope of machine learning and deep learning models indicating the superior performance of GCR-NN with increased 0.98 accuracy. The proposed GCR-NN model can detect 97% of the tweets that contain racist comments.

<em>Candomblé</em>, intolleranza e razzismo ai tempi di Bolsonaro: La storia si ripete?

I seguaci del culto afro-brasiliano del candomblé si sentono oggi più che mai minacciati da vari pericoli, in particolare dall’aggressività delle chiese evangeliche. Il contributo pone alcune domande e formula alcune ipotesi da approfondire. È lecito chiamare in causa, per la situazione attuale, l’affiorare di nuove forme di razzismo? Il razzismo brasiliano, questa è l’ipotesi di ricerca, per il suo carattere fluido e ubiquo, interconnesso ad altri meccanismi di oppressione, assume anche l’aspetto di razzismo religioso? Se è vero poi che il candomblé si è trasformato da religione etnica a religione universale bisognerebbe opporsi o no alla reiterata percezione che si possa identificare un rapporto vincolante tra religione ed etnia? E, ancora, che ruolo svolgono le attuali contingenze socio-politiche, dovute al legame - mai ufficialmente dichiarato - del presidente Jair Bolsonaro e della sua famiglia al fondamentalismo evangelico, che si presenta come grande rivale e persecutore del culto afro-brasiliano? Senza entrare nel merito del dibattito politico, per il quale non si posseggono gli strumenti interpretativi, cercherò quindi di illustrare, nel corso del report, su quali linee di ricerca sto lavorando e su quali interrogativi, formulando alcune ipotesi appena abbozzate che vorrei condividere e quindi approfondire.

The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism

Though the origins of neoliberalism, design, and racism are situated at disparate moments in time, these systems support, reproduce, and reify one another in the United States today. Some contemporary design practices – especially Design Thinking – tend to simultaneously compound and conceal the oppressive effects of both neoliberalization and racism. Rarely does design proactively seek to unsettle racism from its own operations or the larger set of power hierarchies, which it upholds. This essay documents how neoliberalization has pushed design, capitalism, and racism to converge in formative ways; it interrogates the role of innovation in binding these systems together and producing new forms of racism and design; and it articulates how design reinscribes racism into its operations by dissecting elements of visual language, problem-framing, and empathy as a design sensibility in Moneythink’s IDEO.org-designed app for teens. This essay concludes by calling for an approach to social design that forces a reckoning with racism.

A Matter of Principle? On the Relationship Between Racial Resentment and Ideology

Though most scholars of race and politics agree that old-fashioned racism largely gave way to a new symbolic form of racism over the course of the last half century, there is still disagreement about how to best empirically capture this new form of racism. Racial resentment, perhaps the most popular operationalization of symbolic racism, has been criticized for its overlap with liberal-conservative ideology. Critics argue that racially prejudiced responses to the items that compose the racial resentment scale are observationally equivalent to the responses that conservatives would provide. In this manuscript, I examine the racial resentment scale for differential item functioning (DIF) by level of adherence to ideological principles using the 1992, 2004, and 2016 American National Election Studies. I find that responses to some of the racial resentment items are, indeed, affected by ideology. However, the problem is largely confined to 2016 and more egregious with respect to ideological self-identifications than adherence to ideological principles. Moreover, even after correcting for DIF, the racial resentment scale serves as a strong predictor of attitudes about racial issues.

Mapping perceptions of Islamophobia in the San Francisco Bay Area, California

ABSTRACT Recent debates in social and cultural geography on the inclusionary/exclusionary nature of space have brought our attention to the ‘everywhere different’ nature of racism across cities. Among these debates have been calls to interrogate the socio-spatial dimensions of new forms of racism, like Islamophobia as they evolve. This paper draws on the findings of an online survey conducted from September 2016 to April 2017 with young Muslim American residents of the Bay Area, California. It provides empirical material on the way young Muslims map ‘the geography of Islamophobia’ across this region to uncover how the racialization of Muslims has translated into perceptions of racism across city spaces. The findings indicate that Islamophobia occurs in various public spheres, particularly on public transport and in airports. There is a spatial concentration of Islamophobic spaces in the Bay Area, focussed in the North and Outer-East Bay regions – relatively rural parts of the region with a less significant Muslim population. Conversely, areas with larger Muslim populations were associated with lower levels of perceived Islamophobia. This paper highlights the need for more localised, socio-spatial engagements in racism that capture the evolving nature of the American racisms, and how they are spatialised across cities.

Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Cristin Ellis

 Reviews proves to be a liberating, democratic experience; for all of Jude’s frustrated sense of exclusion from the hallowed walls of Christminster, Hardy’s curious, motivated autodidacts can think with more creativity and agility than Angel Clare’s blinkered and modish brothers. Cordner concludes by noting the closeness of the education of the child Virginia Stephen to that of Austen or Browning at the beginning of the century. An outsider by gender, an insider by family and connection, Woolf explores in e Pargiters and e Years further narratives of frustrated longing for educational development. is can resonate even for those who successfully become insiders, such as Girton student Anna Macleod, who, in , achieves a room of her own that is of limited potential in an environment that is far from inspiring. D U S J. J Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By C E. New York: Fordham University Press. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman is an invigorating contribution to scholarship, which opens crucial lines of communication between contemporary posthumanism and nineteenth-century US and African American literary studies. In lively, accessible prose, Ellis uncovers a previously neglected strain of anti-slavery materialism in three nineteenth-century American authors: Frederick Douglass, Henry David oreau, and Walt Whitman, each of whom, she dely demonstrates, is a posthumanist ‘avant la lettre’ (p. ). Yet Ellis goes beyond simply demonstrating the existence of prior materialist ontologies. Emphasizing tensions arising between these authors’ well-known liberal, progressive commitments and the decidedly illiberal tendencies of the materialist turn their thinking took in response to the rise of biological race science, Ellis builds towards a reassessment of contemporary posthumanist thinking. She critiques the prevailing gross neglect of race by most twenty-first-century posthumanist theorists, and also offers constructive suggestions for more fruitful exchanges between social justice (specifically anti-racist work) and materialism. e book begins by reframing antebellum debates over the humanity of the enslaved . As the popularity of Josiah Wedgewood’s ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ anti-slavery medallion would suggest, from the eighteenth century to the present day the fight against slavery (then) and racism (now) has oen been misunderstood as a fight for recognition of enslaved and black people’s humanity. Recognition, Ellis argues, presumes a liberal, universal understanding of the human, or precisely the view that was ‘increasingly destabilized by the rise of biological discourse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the new forms of racism that surged out of this empirical turn’ (p. ). Pushing past a recognition framework, here and throughout the book, Ellis notes a persistent slippage between empiricism and ethics when questions of the human being arise: ‘to refer the question of the MLR, .,   Black body’s humanity to science is to presume [. . .] that human being is ultimately defined by corporeal (material or empirically demonstrable) as opposed to moral features’ (p. ). Because debates about black humanity formed a crucial vector in biological science’s new investment in classifying ‘the human’ more broadly, Ellis turns to Douglass, oreau, and Whitman at key moments leading up to the Civil War when each fights fire with fire, responding to racial science by constructing anti-racist materialisms. ese central chapters are each exquisitely developed through detailed readings of major and minor texts, including Douglass’s address ‘e Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ and his only work of fiction, e Heroic Slave; oreau’s Journal, Wild Fruits, and e Dispersion of Seeds; and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. By reading each author in relation to the various materialist sciences of their time, and by keeping faith with, rather than glossing over, the productive friction emerging from frameworks for the human that are anti-racist (ethical) as well as materialist (empirical), Ellis offers fresh insights into these highly canonical authors. e book’s final chapter works conceptually, acknowledging that if race is the major occlusion that antebellum posthumanism reveals within contemporary posthumanism, a direct examination of the technologies of racialization has led certain black theorists (notably Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers) towards similar calls for rethinking the category of the human as imagined by liberal...

Quiet Refusals: Androids as Others in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This study intends to show how science fiction literature in general and Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in particular can be read as a symptom of the postmodern era we live in. Taking as the main clues the ideas of the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who combines Marxism with the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, as well as his account of “postmodernism,” the study discusses how, contrary to what capitalism dubs a “post-ideological” era, we are more than ever dominated by ideology through its cynical function. It further examines (through such Lacanian concepts as fantasy, desire, objet petit a, and jouissance) the way late capitalistic ideology functions in Dick’s narrative, and discusses how the multiculturalist society prompts new forms of racism through abstract universalization which only accounts for and tolerates the other as long as they appear within the confines of that formal abstraction. Finally, it looks into how ideologies as such can be subverted from the Real point within the symbolic.

Attitudes toward Immigrants, Beliefs about Causes of Poverty and Effects of Perspective-Taking.

The present work presents three studies that investigate the relationship between causal attributions of poverty in Africa, attitudes towards African immigrants and perspective-taking. The objective of preliminary study (N = 54) was to collect information to adapt the Perceived Causes of Third World Poverty Scale (Hine & Montiel, 1999), in the Spanish adaptation by Betancor et al. (2002) to Spanish adolescents. The Study 1 (N = 102) explores the factorial structure of the teenager questionnaire adaptation and to test the relationship with Modern Racism Scale (McConahay, 1986). Correlational analysis reflects the existence of a central element in the new forms of racism: Victim blaming through Personal Attributions of Poverty. The objective of Study 2 (N = 62) was to determine whether empathic induction through empathic perspective-taking (Batson et al., 1997) can ameliorate the individual's attributions of poverty concerning African immigrants among majority group members. However, the opposite effect was found, empathy induction increased Personal Attributions of poverty (η2 = .10). This effect was moderated by Modern Racism, simple slope test indicates t(52) = 2.49, p < .01, higher prejudiced participants increased Personal Attribution of poverty after empathic induction, blaming the victims for their situation.

Managing Subjectivity: Neoliberalism, Human Capital and Empowerment

In this paper, I suggest that, even more than the state, capitalist enterprise is the most influential institution of neoliberalism, both for the effect it conveys in terms of management in public institutions (New Public Management) and its influence on the subjectivity of neoliberal individuals. However, one could stress, from the perspective of economic theory of the firm, the neoliberal transformations of the capitalist enterprises itself. Two transformations that are taking place from the 1980s seem particularly important. The first is the firm’s transformation in a “nexus of contracts” as claimed by the agency theory of Jensen and Meckling that describe and enable the current financialization of the economy. The second is the transformation of organisations in a “nexus of skills” as claimed by the cognitive paradigm of the firm that apply to the company economic reasoning in terms of “human capital”. I then examine the effects on neoliberal subjectivation of these two major changes, from the labour point of view. First, the neoliberal subject imagines, describes and manages itself as the subject of investment in “human capital”. Second, the disappearance of traditional employment contract corresponds to the emergence and intensification of another form of contract, the “psychological contract”, which tends to become a major form of relationship-employed but also a model for relationships between individuals. Finally, lifelong learning is becoming the major form of empowerment of employees, but also a “lifestyle” based on the appreciation of one’s own human capital and the infinite task of perfecting oneself to match up our “skills portfolio” with the labour market. These transformations of neoliberal subjectivity have costs that can be summarised by the widespread phenomena of burn out, but also the birth of a new form of racism, based on “quality” of human capital (skills, abilities, capabilities).

Platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an Australian race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube

ABSTRACTThis article proposes the concept ‘platformed racism’ as a new form of racism derived from the culture of social media platforms ‒ their design, technical affordances, business models and policies ‒ and the specific cultures of use associated with them. Platformed racism has dual meanings: first, it evokes platforms as amplifiers and manufacturers of racist discourse and second, it describes the modes of platform governance that reproduce (but that can also address) social inequalities. The national and medium specificity of platformed racism requires nuanced investigation. As a first step, I examined platformed racism through a particular national race-based controversy, the booing of the Australian Football League Indigenous star Adam Goodes, as it was mediated by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Second, by using an issue mapping approach to social media analysis, I followed the different actors, themes and objects involved in this controversy to account for the medium specificity of platforms. Platformed racism unfolded in the Adam Goodes controversy as the entanglement between users’ practices to disguise and amplify racist humour and abuse, and the contribution of platforms’ features and algorithms in the circulation of overt and covert hate speech. In addition, the distributed nature of platforms’ editorial practices ‒ which involve their technical infrastructure, policies, moderators and users’ curation of content ‒ obscured the scope and type of this abuse. The paper shows that the concept of platformed racism challenges the discourse of neutrality that characterises social media platforms’ self-representations, and opens new theoretical terrain to engage with their material politics.

Cuerpo humano en el capitalismo: blanquitud, racismo y genocidio

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo exponer el tema de la <em>blanquitud </em>en la obra de Bolívar Echeverría y mostrar la relación de la <em>blanquitud </em>con el origen, desarrollo y expansión del capitalismo. El trabajo hace un análisis sobre la nueva forma de racismo que nace con la <em>blanquitud </em>y sostiene que se trata de una forma de genocidio practicada cotidianamente en el mundo actual. El tema de la <em>blanquitud </em>se enriquece con las propuestas de pensadores como Frantz Fanon y Peter McLaren.

The mirage of “Rainbowism” within the nightmare of #MustFall campaigns. Exploring the penetrating hermeneutics of compassionate being-with against the background of decolonising activism and xenophobic suspicion

Decolonising activism in South African is currently oscillating between social disillusionment (disillusionment about the ability to create a new South Africa by means of Constitutional Justice after twenty-two years of hope for a better life for all) and existential pain (internalised anger resulting from experiences of rejection and humiliating oppression). #MustFall campaigns have become vehicles for the expression of unarticulated feelings of inferiority, suppressed anger and cultural exclusion. It also reveals signs of new forms of racism and increasing exponents of black-white polarisation and xenophobic suspicion. The latter should not be interpreted merely in terms of local modes of radicalization and upcoming modes of political populism, but also against the background of new, global forms of “fear for the other” as expressed in the refugee paranoia and migrant crisis. It becomes a burning pastoral question for communities of faith how to penetrate the bottom line of a possible political cul de sac and cultural intolerance. The question is posed: What is meant by an ecclesial approach within the bleak situation of no-solution-at-all? Instead of a pessimistic retrotopia (back to the past) (Zygmunt Bauman) or an optimistic utopia (the pursuit of happiness in affluent societal projections), the perichoresis of compassionate being-with is explored within the theological parameters of oiktirmos, rḥm, ḥnn and pathē. It is argued that a pastoral mode of hospitable presence should be implied in order to penetrate the danger of a complete xenophobic deadlock in civil society.

On Seeing and Not Seeing Racism

On Seeing and Not Seeing Racism Jennifer L. Pierce (bio) The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality without Racism. By Nancy DiTomaso. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. 431 pages. $42.50 (paper). Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind. By Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 268 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). How Racism Takes Place. By George Lipsitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. 310 pages. $28.95 (paper). Seeing Race in Modern America. By Matthew Pratt Guterl. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 224 pages. $34.95 (cloth). What is especially insidious about racism in the contemporary United States is its stealth. In our post–civil rights era, the visibly racist Jim Crow formulation of “whites only” has come to be replaced by a new form of racism, one that the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has described as “color-blind.”1 In his argument, this modern form of racism enables whites to ignore group-based racial inequality by denying responsibility for the structural causes of racism and, ultimately, reproducing racial inequality. Indeed, as study after study finds, most white Americans espouse color blindness, yet race continues to determine where most Americans live, what schools their children attend, how much money they make, how much wealth they accumulate, whom they hire and promote at work, and whom they might marry.2 Why do so many white Americans insist that they are color-blind when in fact their choices about everything from the neighborhoods they choose to live in to the people they marry reflect racial preferences? The four books discussed here take up this question, some more explicitly than others, and provide new ways of thinking about the disjuncture between what white Americans say about racism and what they do. Though each book focuses on a different set of racial practices to make their arguments, they all [End Page 1155] raise important questions in American studies about the meaning of race, whiteness, and color-blind racism. In doing so, they all shed light on how we see and do not see race. As scholars of race have long argued, “biological race” is often understood as visually obvious; racial categories such as black, white, or Asian are assumed to be something we can see. The critical race theorist Osagie Obasogie’s book, Blinded by Sight, brilliantly upends this notion by adopting a novel methodological strategy: he interviews people who have been blind from birth. His research demonstrates that, far from being unaware of race, “blind people are uniquely capable of discussing the social practices that give visual cues associated with race an obvious feel.” In his argument, “these are the same social forces that give visual understandings of race their coherency to the sighted, yet remain hidden due to sighted individuals’ overemphasis on visual fields. It is in this sense that sighted people are blinded by their sight” (81). Put another way, the blind can discern the social practices that produce their visual understandings of race more effectively than sighted individuals, who take these practices for granted. In Obasogie’s argument, family, friends, and social institutions all serve important socializing functions in teaching the blind about the visual aspects of race and its attendant social practices and meanings. For example, one of his respondents, Maurice, explained that he first became aware of race as a young boy when a neighbor used a racial slur to denigrate a domestic worker. He had never heard the word before, so he asked his mother what it meant. His mother was furious and told him never to repeat the word. Meanwhile, another neighbor, visiting at the time, whom Maurice described as having “an unusual voice,” said, “nobody ever told you that that’s the name some people call me?” (83). It was through this exchange Maurice discovered this neighbor was black. This incident introduced him not only to the notion of visual race (i.e., as black or white) but to the pejorative meanings and practices associated with blackness. As Obasogie points out, “Being able to identify society’s poor treatment of racial minorities and recognizing that this pejorative attitude is rooted in visual...