Racial Politics Research Articles

Compelled to construct their narratives and writings around their racial identity, Iranian American writers such as Khakpour, Nafisi, Mirakhor, and Hakakian turn to African American activism, rhetoric, and literature to challenge their racialization. This racialization is problematized by Iranians’ perception of themselves as white and by the US official classification of Iranians as white, revealing a contradiction between the racialization act and the official designation. Seeking to resist their racial marginalization, these writers find the activism and literary expressions of James Baldwin appealing to their experience due to his racial transcendentalism, engagement with the immigration experience, and moderate critique of racial dynamics and power structures. This article focuses on the influence of Baldwin, rather than a broader range of African American writers, examining how his rhetorical strategies and racial politics are reflected in the essays, interviews, and critical writings of the aforementioned Iranian American authors. However, the broader historical context will be discussed to contextualize Baldwin’s appeal to them. Drawing on racial formation theory as a theoretical framework, the article explores how Baldwin serves as a rhetorical and literary model through which these writers articulate their ambiguous racial positioning. Baldwin’s work offers them a vocabulary through which they can articulate their ambiguous position in American racial discourse. This engagement with Baldwin is significant since it serves as a model for the kind of relationship that they may build with other marginalized groups, including African Americans, while also expressing their desire to redefine their place within US racial hierarchies.

ABSTRACT In this paper I attempt to improve the theorization I advanced in “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation” (1997) by accounting for what makes the structure work “for real”. To make the structure visible, I do the following three things. First, I explain how once racial structures sediment in history, each racial regime operates mostly though white normativity transmitted through the process of racial habituation. Second, albeit most analysts stress the role of highly racist actors in maintaining racial structures, I contend they mainly work through the actions and inactions of RWF (regular White folks). Third, I discuss various factors that account for the emergence of non-RWF and suggest these actors might be important in the struggle for racial justice. I conclude by highlighting some important unfinished theoretical business and end making a few observations on the difficulties and possibilities of developing progressive racial politics.

ABSTRACT Scholars of African American religious history who access traditional archives to narrate Black women’s religious experiences ought not neglect the pertinent material sources available in the photographic archive. In this article, I consider how vernacular photography found in R. C. Hickman’s photographic archive uncovers important nuances of Black church respectability politics in Dallas, TX from the 1940s to 1960s. Though vernacular photography is a complicated source of historical knowledge, I argue that one of Hickman’s photographs in particular puts what Tamura Lomax calls “feminine-ism” on display. By situating this photo within discourse on religion and racial politics in the desegregation era, this article models how scholars can explore photographic archives to fill gaps in African American women’s religious history. Thus, this article prompts scholars of African American religious history to embrace the photograph as a significant material source and, thereby, become scholarly witnesses of Black women’s religious lives.

ABSTRACT A historically devastating series of climatic events in September 2017 transformed lives in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. The impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria ruptured the functionality of lifeways in unprecedented forms. The events also characterize the longest disaster response muddle in the history of the United States. This focused case study investigates the ways that individuals navigate their island food system in a post-disaster context. It explores the political, social and economic circumstances which inform various experiences of food insecurity, hunger, gendered vulnerabilities, disability and the role that layered structural inequity plays in producing unequal access to food. Based on news media, photographic analysis and in-depth interviews conducted with those who lived through both hurricanes, an evidence-informed intersectional analysis is produced. Scaffolding the research conceptually through an intersectionality and Afro-diasporic futures epistemology, this paper contributes a geographical and feminist analysis to the study of disasters in relation to food insecurity. Markedly, people living with disabilities and women participants reported increased challenges to disaster recovery and resilience. Parents were found to be the most food insecure. Research findings show that gender, race, disability and income play a pivotal role in shaping food access and long-term wellbeing in post-disaster contexts.

The racial politics of visibility and equity in genome-editing therapies for sickle cell disease.

<p>This article is a book review of <em data-start="425" data-end="501">Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic</em> by Jen Rose Smith, published by Duke University Press in 2025 (ISBN: 978-1-4780-3177-2). The review, authored by Jacqueline Stagner, summarises the main themes of the book, including the relationships between glaciers, race, indigeneity, and colonial politics in the Arctic. The text outlines how the work engages with history, science, Indigenous knowledge, and climate change.</p>

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways that a group of middle-school-aged Hispanic boys appropriated, deployed, and mobilized racial identities to accomplish specific social purposes in the context of an out-of-school educational equity program. Using ethnographic participant observation and taking a raciolinguistic approach to identity, this analysis demonstrates how these youth used the ideological structure of racial category as a semiotic resource to negotiate peer membership and contest traditional power configurations. This article concludes by highlighting how schools and other educational contexts function as key sites of racialization while also emphasizing racial identity as a sociopolitical process of action rather than an individual attribute.

ABSTRACT This paper examines Nikki Haley’s use of her Sikh-to-Christian identity as a strategic political tool through a critical analysis of existing literature and media coverage. Although much has been written about her, scholarly analyses often overlook how she uses her identity, especially her race and religion, to advance her political career. This paper looks at how her narrative of a model minority perpetuates stereotypes and overlooks the systemic discrimination faced by Sikh immigrants in the United States. By exploring her political discourse and its impact, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions about race, religion, and representation in contemporary politics.

This essay argues that while most scholars in this area treat music as an example of race, racial embodiment, and racial politics, this "example" model inaccurately treats each area (race, music, and sometimes gender) as a distinct discourse. If what is at stake in defining what constitutes music and what constitutes race is fundamentally the same issue "” the determination of the relationship between raced, colonized, or resonating bodies and the social forces which operate in, through, and on these bodies"” then the relationship between raced and resonating bodies is not so much exemplary or representative as it is what I call "coincident." While Angela Davis"™ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) explicitly examines the coincidence of gender, race, and class as it is "expressed" in the music of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, it also implicitly begins to draw out the coincidence of gender, race, and class with the discourses and practices which came to constitute "the blues." Thus, I turn to this text as an instance of how the "example" model is transformed into a coincidental or conjectural model of the relationships among race, class, gender, and music. I have adopted the term "coincidence" to describe the relationships among race, gender, and music because it is a more accurate metaphor than the widely used and critiqued language of intersectionality.

Several states and a presidential executive order have attempted to put formal restrictions on the teaching of racist forces in American history. A classic example of academic work highlighting racist historical forces—and target of a book ban—is Du Bois's seminal Black Reconstruction , which includes descriptions of historical processes that ironically (though not unrelatedly) provide insight into modern support for these knowledge criminalization efforts. Du Bois famously discusses a divide between White and Black laborers, describing a historically specific circumstance in which White laborers, while paid relatively low wages, received a bonus wage of sorts for being White. After the fall of Jim Crow in the Civil Rights Era, the benefits of the “wages of whiteness” became less visible. Rather than producing class solidarity, racial boundary-making persisted, resulting in a new circumstance in which many working-class White Americans simultaneously felt they deserved the privileges implicitly promised based on their racialization while simultaneously resenting what they perceived as a failure to receive those symbolic wages. This feeling was accelerated by the symbolically important election of Barack Obama as president and by the rise of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement. To explore this, we wrote a successful proposal to the American National Election Studies to include public opinion questions about the teaching of racial knowledge in schools. Our results reveal that White Americans are more opposed to schools teaching about racism than Black Americans, but that the opposition is highest at the intersection Du Bois draws our attention to: economically insecure White Americans. Opposition is also high among those possessing the modern racist views that the knowledge gained from learning about racism would challenge. The results have implications for understanding many dimensions of current racial politics and speak to strategies for achieving racial justice and addressing economic inequalities.

Abstract This paper documents the application of private property logics to social housing in Hungary. It achieves this through a discourse analysis of public media and various district government newsletters published between 1994 and 2000 in the lead‐up to the passage of anti‐squatting legislation known as Lex Juharos. As I aim to demonstrate, the dehumanisation of Roma through anti‐squatting discourse was crucial in the expansion of private property logics to the social housing system. Drawing on recent scholarship at the intersection of racial capitalism and critical property studies, I develop the concept of racial governmentality to account for the shifting norms of proprietorship germane to the Hungarian context that condition the citizen‐subject to the racialised violence of displacement necessary for the functioning of a capitalist housing market. As I show, the state mobilised multiple racial governmentalities, namely the dog‐whistle and surveillance, to facilitate social housing's commodification.

Despite being stigmatised and racialised during the latter half of the twentieth century, the ‘inner city’ in London and quartier populaire in Paris also became known for resistance, conviviality and possibility. These aspects are now being remembered in varied public forms, from murals to museums, archives to monuments. This article has two aims. First, to outline examples of curatorial activism and the heritagisation of feminism/s and women’s histories in Brixton, London and la Goutte d’Or, Paris, using qualitative data. Second, to compare and critically analyse how these examples differently contribute to feminist praxis and a more democratic, egalitarian public culture in cities. Our argument is that the inner city is becoming an important site for curatorial activism and the heritagisation of black and Maghrebi women’s histories and intersectional feminisms. Whilst these interventions expand the urban public sphere and constitute a claim to narrate and represent the history of the city, they are also entangled with ambivalences of control related to governance, culture-led urban regeneration, location and permanence. As such, we identify a plurality of heritage gazes, ranging from those that are true to the curatorial activism of feminists; to a gaze premised upon a more general valorisation of the authenticity of the inner city; from heritage gazes that promote diversity but not racial identities and/or politics; to communities who refute the very proposition of Western metropolitan heritage.

This paper examines Wyndham Lewis’s critical engagement with race politics in his 1939 polemical texts The Hitler Cult and The Jews, Are They Human?, with particular focus on the themes of Aryanism and anti-Semitism. Written at the height of Nazi influence, Lewis’s works reflect a complex interaction with the racial ideologies of the period. In The Hitler Cult, Lewis analyzes the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, shedding light on how the doctrine of Aryan supremacy was employed to legitimize a radical reordering of society and the conceptualization of a “new human.” In The Jews, Are They Human?, Lewis turns his attention to the pervasive anti-Semitism of the era, interrogating the prejudices that underpinned Nazi rhetoric and policy. This paper explores how Lewis, through irony and critical distance, exposes the contradictions and dangers embedded in fascist racial doctrines.

Racial equity is the state at which a person's race does not determine how they are treated, or their opportunities, resources, or outcomes. It entails the continuous process of identifying and removing policies, practices, and structures that create and sustain racial disparities. Some local governments that had not previously developed equity programs pledged to address racial inequity during the pandemic in response to COVID-19 disparities and calls for racial justice. Understanding cities' approach to addressing inequities is important for measuring progress and developing effective strategies. From May to August 2023, we implemented topic and regression modeling approaches to assess how the 200 largest cities in the USA were planning to implement strategies to address racial inequity. Of the 200 cities, 75 (37.5%) had equity offices, departments, initiatives, or divisions; 19.5% and 9.5% had equity and racial equity plans, respectively. Overall, cities with a combination of a Democratic governor and mayor had the most equity offices or departments (39 cities; 19.50%), followed by Republican governors and Democratic mayors (19 cities; 9.50%), which aligned with previous research on political affiliation of leaders and policy priorities. The geographic region where a city was located also impacted equity plans, though less than one might expect given typical conceptions of the political affiliations in different areas of the country. Highly populated cities were more likely to have a stronger equity emphasis. Cities focused on equity in housing, economic well-being and/or workforce, environment, infrastructure, safety, health, education, civic engagement, and criminal justice and/or policing. While some cities recognized the importance of developing equity plans and offices, their approaches differed. However, to be effective, plans to address racial inequities must be accompanied by implementation and approaches to measure, analyze, and assess progress. Our findings can inform plans and strategies to advance racial equity.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the “It’s okay to be white” campaign, a trolling campaign that unfolded on 4chan and Twitter in early November 2017, and its relationship with white supremacism and racial neoliberalism. The first part of the article demonstrates how the campaign used an approach based in a combination of memetic and trolling strategies, and professional promotional practices, to reach its target audiences. The second part of the article analyses the ideological dimensions of the campaign and its relationship with racial neoliberalism. The campaign’s underlying ideological strategies, I argue, are at one level consistent with those of “color-blind racism” and the “antiracial” ideologies of racial neoliberalism that mobilise “racism without race”, to neutralise discussions of disadvantage experienced by racial minorities. At the same time, the campaign seeks to disrupt and supersede the antiracial ideologies of racial neoliberalism with an openly white supremacist race politics that re-emphasises biological difference.

ABSTRACT In this article, we make three contributions to our understanding of place-based Confederate commemoration. First, we demonstrate that neighborhoods are a widespread yet understudied site of Confederate commemoration through an inventory of 297 southern United States neighborhoods commemorating the Confederacy (NCCs) with neighborhood or street names. Second, informed by critical toponomy, we use 2020 U.S. Census data to test two hypotheses regarding the relationship between Confederate commemoration and neighborhood racial composition: (a) NCCs house larger proportions of white residents than do other neighborhoods; and (b) NCC populations are more likely to surpass the 85% white threshold with which we define white spaces. Sociologists apply the term white space to social settings such as overwhelmingly white neighborhoods in which whiteness is normalized, and Black people are marginalized. Findings vary by geographical context. Outside metropolitan areas, Census data support both hypotheses. Within metropolises’ urban cores, however, the hypotheses’ directionality is reversed: Black residents comprise larger percentages of NCCs than of other neighborhoods. Third, to gain perspective on these divergent findings, we present selected case studies of neighborhood origins and their demographic trajectories. These vignettes suggest ways that Confederate commemoration intersects with race and racial politics in the ongoing negotiation of community identity.

ABSTRACT This themed issue is on the 2024 election and the politics of race. And it is also necessarily about the racial dynamics unfolding under the Trump administration at present. The questions addressed by the twelve authors in this volume include: What are the historical conditions that allowed a nativist, white supremacist political movement to go mainstream in the twenty-first century U.S.? How is racism embedded in American political institutions? How do people understand the connection between their racial positionality and their political interests? What are the relationships between emotions and politics and emotions and race? How are gendered projects and racial projects linked in contemporary U.S. political discourse? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organized left at this time? And what kinds of mobilization and resistance to racism in the Trump era are necessary and possible?

Understanding the politics of race in relation to a social marker like disability can provide a more nuanced perspective to understand the lived experiences of individuals within intersecting oppressive structures. While progress has been made in recognising the rights and privileges of black disabled people, the socio-political landscape has been layered with exclusions, and the deployment of necropolitics by the white, able-bodied individuals reduces them to bare life (zoē) and, in extreme cases, results in their death. The films The Green Mile and Just Mercy expound on the ostracization of John Coffey and Herbert Richardson, who are members of specific ethnic groups and are disabled. These characters face systematic oppression primarily due to their race, which, combined with their disability, renders them expendable and hinders their ability to thrive. Informed by the social model of disability and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, this paper argues that the black disabled characters are highly vulnerable to state-inflicted violence that sometimes culminates in their demise.

This article explores and contextualizes the short-lived magazine Black Sports (1971-1978) as an example of what the radical sports activist Harry Edwards called Black sports reporting. It identifies three interrelated themes that typified the magazine’s Black sports reportage and the sociopolitical and commercial goals that drove it. First, and most generally, Black Sports critiqued the white-controlled sports establishment and exposed its various forms of racism. Second, the magazine celebrated significant Black sports figures from the past who had been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented. Third, Black Sports linked its anti-racist activism to Black entrepreneurialism and suggested that business success provided the most effective way for African Americans to achieve social enfranchisement. The obscure and heretofore unexamined magazine sheds light on the history and racial politics of sports media during the 1970s and enriches understandings of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in sport, media, and culture.

This article positions Angelina Jolie’s performance as Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) next to Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro’s unsanctioned Cambodian classical dance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 to interrogate the museum’s display of looted artifacts. Cheam-Shapiro’s barefoot dancing in front of the stolen Cambodian god statues, which triggered the museum’s security, deploys performance as a critique of the archaeological fantasies of Lara Croft. Through a comparative framework, the author dissects the two women’s performances via three dimensions: their respective racial and gender politics, their relation to stolen objects, and the disparate modes of their media distributions. In conversation with women of color feminist perspectives, the article interrogates the collusion between Western museums and art dealers like Douglas Latchford, who smuggled many of Cambodia’s cultural objects during the period of the Khmer Rouge genocide. By such analyses, the article employs the politics of Third World solidarity against the colonial looting ethos of white Western museums.