Popular Racism Research Articles

Slaying the Global Coolie Myth

“Contrary to stereotypes of docile and powerless coolies, Chinese in Anglo-American societies were real people who worked hard, adapted, and persisted” (232). So reads the caption to the final photo in Ngai’s magisterial work on global Chinese exclusion. It articulates the central theme of the book: that Chinese migrants had names, families, and communities of their own. In order to “slay the coolie myth,” Ngai examines it as a product of politics and history (xvii). By charting the links and connections between anti-Chinese debates in the United States, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai exposes the people and conditions that produced and upheld it. She skillfully charts how, in all three countries, the question of what to do with Chinese migrants was “fueled by popular racism, theorized by elite thinkers, and weaponized by politicians” (302). In tracing how the Chinese Question began in California and “circumnavigated the Anglo-American world,” Ngai demonstrates how debates over the ability of Chinese to enter and access rights in the world’s three “largest gold-producing regions”— the United States, Australia, and South Africa—were “an integral part” of the “global capitalist economy” that was emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2). The discovery of gold fueled the rise of U.S.-UK dominance; according to one statistic, the United States and Great Britain controlled eighty-eight percent of the world’s gold supply by 1904. Ravaged by the Opium Wars and unequal treaties, China engaged from a position of comparative weakness. Out of a convergence of economic dominance, colonial dispossession, and global racisms, the Chinese diaspora in the Anglo-American world was born. Questions of how to contain and control it arose immediately, and the coolie myth presented an answer.

Racing the nation: towards a theory of reproductive racism

In this challenging article, the author marries the notion of reproduction, both biological and social, to new forms of political and popular racism in Europe wherein the family and breeding to keep the nation white and ‘native’ are now centre stage. Whilst certain women’s reproductive capacities are being incentivised for nationalist ends, this goes alongside a rollback in reproductive rights as well as a series of exclusions aimed at those marked as demographic threats – migrants, Muslims and, increasingly, LGBTQ people. She demonstrates how migrant women, who are vilified as breeders who could threaten the purity of the nation, are essential to maintain the traditional nuclear family under capitalism, through caring for the young and old, but simultaneously denied their rights as workers and mothers. The focus on reproduction is now a key dividing line in European racism; something that feminists and anti-racists should now address. This, she argues is more than a matter of intersectionality, but a new racist avatar which she terms reproductive racism.

Policing Black Film: Racism, Black Resistance and the Applicational Dexterity of Race Relations inBabylon

The racial unrests permeating across Britain in the late 1970s resulted in a set of political agendas responding to racism to be brought into being though legislation, culminating in the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act. Crucial to such agendas were strategies for the prevention of black urban uprisings against state authority and the politicisation of black youths against racism. The emergence of politicised black British film during the late 1970s offered a crucial counter-hegemonic exploration and re-enactment of an extra-filmic reality of police violence and popular racism within the British body social. However, these texts were subjected to forms of political censorship through a number of state organisations who identified radical black cinema as a political threat with the potential to incite violent responses from black youths. This article will offer a detailed analysis of Babylon (1980) and seeks to investigate the ideological processes leading to its X certification and the moral panic located in its representations of black youths within the crisis of race vis-a-vis the political, social and cultural authority of race relations, situating Babylon’s controversial X certification as an exemplar of the ‘applicational dexterity’ of the race relations discipline.

Inventing aliens: immigration control, ‘xenophobia’ and racism in Japan

This paper, which examines a growing problem of popular racism in Japan against ethnic minorities, especially Koreans, is critical of the way in which it is often being passed off as xenophobia. The author argues that to confront the current racism means coming to terms with Japan’s colonial past and also the immigration control system which labels all ethnic minorities, including those born in Japan during and following imperial conquest, as ‘foreign’. Since 2009, ultra-right groups, especially the Zaitokukai, have spread popular racism on the internet and attacked people on the streets. In 2013, they began demonstrations in major cities. Activists, politicians and academics, who are worried about the growing racism, have launched counter movements and demanded that new legislation regarding hate speech should be passed. However, because of the way the problem is generally being framed in relation to the rights and status of foreigners in Japan, the authorities underestimate the seriousness of the situation and its historical genesis. Continuing to use the term xenophobia trivialises the issue, suggesting it only relates to minority groups temporarily resident in Japan.

Scientific racism, popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society

ABSTRACTScientific racism continued to be the guiding paradigm of the oldest scholarly association for the study of Gypsies well into the 1970s. It is important to acknowledge and analyse this when considering the continuing influence of racism on policy towards Roma.

Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness ed. by Rebecca Walker (review)

Reviewed by: Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness ed. by Rebecca Walker Stephanie Troutman (bio) Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness edited by Rebecca Walker. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012, 164 pp., $14.95 paper. Rebecca Walker’s edited collection Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness is an exploration of how a wide array of authors account for their lifestyles, self-definitions, and worldviews under the larger umbrella of what might be considered “Black identity.” Given the complexity of navigating and negotiating shifting subjectivities and multiple, varied, and complex Blacknesses in a “post-racial” society, the book is fresh, timely, and engaging. Feminist perspectives, including male voices on Black masculinity, as well as modes of writing and consciousness that foreground the personal, artistic, and the process of remembering that both embrace and challenge stereotypes, are found here. This collection, although short of “one thousand streams of Blackness,” does present at least seventeen (including Walker’s Introduction) compelling and provocative first-person essays about the contemporary Black experience. Academic in nature, this collection is inspired by an aesthetics of cool, if you will, that Walker recognized and admits being drawn to in a photo of President Barack Obama. This coolness—“distinctly Black”—prompted her to “want to know if that ineffable quality can be decoded, understood as the sum of its parts” (xiv, xv.) In her third-wave feminist fashion, Walker invites readers to “add your own elements to this collection” and to embrace “Hybridity. Fluidity. Harmonious dissonance” (xv). Each essay’s one-word title indicates an element in her intentionally incomplete encyclopedia of Black coolness. Essentially, the collection is varied in representation, perhaps to a fault: sometimes it lacks cohesion, the essays seemingly connected only in their abstract, individual uniqueness. Several essays focus on the role of music in the formation of Black cool; another group takes aim at childhood experiences shaped by social-class status, parental relationships, and institutional and popular racism. Another subset of essays hones in on being “different” or “not fitting” into dominant narratives of what Black identity is, does, and looks like—of being displaced within status quo but ultimately imagined Black communities. Overall, each interrogates or takes to task stereotypes and expectations about Black identity. As author/novelist Mat Johnson contends in his contribution “The Geek,” “African American identity was forged in an environment of the external violence of white supremacy. Everything African was belittled, devalued, demonized, disregarded. When the [End Page 195] Black middle class had a lesser role within African American self-definition, traits of underclass life were misconstrued as elements of Blackness itself” (15). Arguments like these represent major theoretical paradigm shifts in how and why popular notions of Blackness are narrow, negative, and, in some respects, uninformed. The book opens with dream hampton’s “Audacity” in which she discusses her refusal to allow herself to be raped by some neighborhood boys, while her brother stands by mute—an unwilling conspirator, paralyzed by fear. Her commitment to telling this story of her eighth-grade self is a complex one, tied to “survivor’s guilt,” since she was not “actually” raped (although she was targeted for sexual assault/sexual violence) and due to her inability (perhaps justified unwillingness?) to reconcile the contempt she holds for her brother and one of the would-be assailants. Interestingly, the attempted rape portion of the story is not the point: hampton’s self-discovery that “there’s nothing I fear too much to fight” is the moral. What makes this Black cool? The aspects of her narrative that elucidate her ability to share her understanding of others’ perceptions of and contempt for her: a smart, middle-class, light-skinned female who deserved to be “punished” for such “privileges.” Also in this essay, hampton displays her adeptness in connecting the incident to her demeanor and identity within a larger framework of race, gender, and class discourses from a feminist perspective, and to find strength to overcome all-too-familiar sexual-violation scripts, is a triumph—and that is Black cool. Also in a feminist voice, Esther Armah’s “The Posse” provides a moving, philosophically oriented account of the impact of trauma and the...

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Race is elsewhere: state-socialist ideology and the racialisation of Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia

Current literature sees expressions of popular racism in twentieth-century European state-socialist societies either as directly deriving from the official ideology of the state or else as happening despite it. This article argues that the ways in which Vietnamese workers were racialised in 1980s Czechoslovakia were neither directly derived from the state’s official ideology, nor did they arise in opposition to that ideology. Instead, it suggests that they are more usefully seen as reworkings of certain elements of the state’s official ideology. Most important among those elements were: the insistence that racism did not exist in Czechoslovakia; the centrality of ‘honest socialist work’; and the conception of the overseas foreign workers programme as a socialist civilising mission of sorts. In most cases, some or all of these notions worked in tandem, and, moreover, also built upon existing discourses in regard to the Roma.

Racisme anti-noir dans la musique populaire britannique (1880-1920)

The rapid expansion of the British Empire in the second half of the XIXth century was accompanied by a rise in the diffusion and the legitimacy of racist ideas in Britain. Intellectuals wrote of the “scientific” differences between the races, and racial hierarchies were generally accepted by educated people. What of the uneducated? Comic books and children’s magazines about the “heroes” of the British Empire certainly did not hesitate to use racist stereotypes abundantly. Popular racism against Black people served to legitimize the imperial project, but for most of this period was little aimed at a visible ethnic minority in Britain. Our article will aim at analysing the racist content of popular music in this period – both that of the extremely popular “minstrel shows”, where white performers disguised themselves as stereotypical black slaves for the purposes of entertainment, and the “coon songs” which were common in the music halls. We will trace the depiction of the Black Other as the mirror image of the Victorian and Edwardian respectable gentleman and lady, and how, while generally denigrated, the Black persona could also be desired or envied.

After Lawrence: racial violence and policing in the UK

As the UK celebrates the conviction of two men for the racist murder nineteen years ago of Stephen Lawrence, the author draws on research into racial violence being carried out by the Institute of Race Relations to show that violence is still at very high levels and is becoming dispersed to new areas. The Macpherson Report may have brought in changes to police practices, but violent, popular racism, encouraged by wider government policies, such as the war on terror, is still a national scandal.

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.

Accepting Prejudice and Valuing Freedom: Young Muslims and Everyday Multiculturalism in Hong Kong

This paper shows how the experiences of young Muslims in Hong Kong reveal an alternative account of multiculturalism to that which is often portrayed in works about young Muslims in the West. It presents the everyday multicultural experiences of young people as an important resource to understand the lived experience of ethnic and religious diversity. This discussion is framed by the experiences of a multiethnic sample of young Muslims in Hong Kong. Their experiences demonstrate a pragmatic negotiation of cultural difference and a disinterested acceptance of popular racism. These attitudes are argued as being an adaptation to the popular racism pervasive in Hong Kong culture. Despite the racism they experience, the young Muslims argue that they are safe and very free in the territory, a matter that influences the perception of the racism they encounter. The fact that Islam is not perceived as a threat in Hong Kong society provides an alternative understanding of young Muslims as minorities in the post 9/11 era. It is argued in conclusion that understanding what young Muslims value about life in Hong Kong enables us to recognise alternative representations of multiculturalism and to consider how a variety of different dynamics influence the everyday lives of religious and ethnic minorities as citizens in multicultural societies.

Race, Affect, and Emotion: Young People, Racism, and Graffiti in the Postcolonial English Suburbs

The majority of studies on young people, race, and racism have focused upon multiethnic inner-city areas. This can have the unintended effect of locating the ‘problem’ of race within the sites where ethnic minorities reside and upon their racially marked bodies. To disrupt this way of looking I attempt to turn the geography of racism ‘inside out’ by recognising the predominantly white English suburbs as a complex site of emotion where racist graffiti, violence, and social deprivation may preside. Here, it is suggested that a ‘global sense of place’ can be evoked through a postcolonial reading of the suburbs and used to unsettle the familiar emotional-laden landscapes of whiteness. Secondly, through ethnography with young people who self-identify as a Skinhead gang, I seek to provide a meaningful geography of racism that engages with emotion, bodily encounters, and events as they become charged with feeling and affect. Thirdly, the ethnography considers the practice of whiteness and white territoriality. In these encounters race and racism are approached as an event or happening that may be given material weight through inscriptions of racist graffiti, emotional sentiments regarding ideas of white suburban belonging, and physical manifestations of popular racism. I conclude that studies of race and racism need to better engage with the visceral way in which affect and emotion seep into the lives of young people and enable the idea of race to pass from immanence to emergence in daily encounters.

Prolegomena to Jesse Owens: American Ideas About Race and Olympic Races from the 1890s to the 1920s

In this era American discourses about race generally touted the superiority of people of European descent over all other groups in every aspect of human performance, intellectual, moral, and physical. A pervasive and popular scientific racism found support for its theories in results from athletic contests. Data from many Olympic sports, especially from track and field, were interpreted to support ideas of white supremacy. Allegedly scientific measurements of racial difference through Olympic sport became a popular endeavour in the US, and in other nations. By the end of the 1920s the performances of athletes of non-European descent began to raise questions about theories of European racial superiority. These speculations prepared the ground for Jesse Owens' performances at the 1936 Olympics to challenge existing paradigms regarding the racial dimensions of human performance.

Popular racism in corporate Europe

Popular racism in corporate Europe

Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative , and: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity , and: Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (review)

Reviewed by: Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative, and: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, and: Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject Vincent P. Pecora Bruce Henricksen . Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 201 pp. $34.95 cloth, $13.95 paper. Robert Hampson . Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 326 pp. No price given. Andrea White . Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 233 pp. No price given. Located at a cultural crossroads where European realism and imperialism collide head on, Joseph Conrad's novels have been central to debates over the meaning of modern literature for most of this century. That the arguments—and the monographs—continue to emerge with such enthusiasm is a fit topic for inquiry in its own right. For well over a decade now, from Said to Eagleton to Jameson to Achebe, Conrad's prominent position as the great demystifier of the imperial lie, popular racism, romantic adventure, and Victorian morality has become increasingly uncertain. Each of the three books under review here attempts a rescue operation of sorts, with varying degrees of qualification. None tells us anything radically new about Conrad's work—an inevitable risk in devoting yet one more book to so dense a field—but they all address important issues. As his title implies, Bruce Henricksen focuses on the relation between subjectivity and narrative voice, discussing five of Conrad's major novels: The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. Henricksen's approach derives from Bakhtin and Lyotard, in that the heteroglossia of non-authoritarian speech and the petits récits of non-authoritarian history are made to intersect in Conrad's prose. Henricksen also sees development from novel to novel: the "demise of romantic notions of the self" yields an increasingly decentered subject and, with Under Western Eyes, a rather redemptive "vision of the communal nature of selfhood and subjectivity." It is a familiar enough critical narrative—Western cultural hegemony is undone by a deconstructed subjectivity to produce a more open and giving community—that at times seems Procrustean. But Henricksen is admirably clear in explaining his theoretical tools and his readings of the novels are often insightful, especially as a challenge to critics, like Aaron Fogel, who stress the monologic drift of Conrad's storytelling. On the whole, however, I do not see the degree of "speech diversity" Henricksen sees in Conrad, and I have grave doubts about the way Henricksen relates devices like narrative voice to notions of community and society that he takes from Tönnies. In Nigger of the "Narcissus," for example, we are supposed to see eight different "internal accents" that "'appropriate' the narrative authority": voices in turn ethnocentric, literary, [End Page 171] paternal, idealizing, historical, moralizing, disciplinary, and liberal reformist (an implied reader). Discounting the last voice, which is "absent" in any case, it is difficult to understand how these "constitute a spectrum of subject positions" in the novel. Most readers would be hard pressed to distinguish one from the other—where does the "paternal" stop and the "moralizing" or "disciplinary" begin?—and even Henricksen must hedge occasionally by calling them "modulations" of one another. Things are even muddier when we turn to the traditional stylistic problem in Nigger of the "Narcissus": inconsistent point of view. Henricksen claims that "individualism and special interests" (that is, the capitalist Gesellschaft) are "suggested by the more individualistic tone of the 'they' narrator," whereas "older, communal claims" (the organic Gemeinschaft) are implied by the "we" voice; and that the "I" of the final pages reflects a conservative author trying vainly to write with sympathy about labor in a capitalist age. But the allegory, thin from the start, is also confusing. Henricksen later aligns the novel's "three-phased drift in point of view"—from omniscient (they) to a blend of omniscient and subjective (they and we) to fully individualized (I)—with an historical evolution that runs from the organic community to a transitional "balance" to a modern society riven by special interests...

The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.

“Keeping the Natives Under Control”: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions of Empire, 1920–1939

Scholars examining ethnic and racial barriers in twentieth-century societies have argued that they function to reinforce workplace inequalities, perpetuating a substratum of superexploited and disenfranchised workers for the benefit of capital. Debate continues as to whether the state, deliberately or inadvertently, willingly or unwillingly, has helped to reinforce these barriers. Locating the history of British state support for race segregation within this debate is an effort to move discussion away from the prevalent and unfocused emphasis on popular racism or “intolerance” to examine the material underpinnings of racial conflict.

Sri Lanka: the choice of two terrors

While a stalemate in the predominantly Tamil North and East of Sri Lanka continues despite Indian intervention on the government's behalf, in the Sinhala South death squads associated with the pseudo People's Liberation Front, the JVP, have been ruthlessly eliminating its opponents. The United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), having created and nurtured popular racism for over thirty years in order to get into power (through a ready-made Sinhalese majority of 70 per cent of the population), * would now like to draw back from the brink of another crippling civil war, this time in the South. But they are unable to do so because the JVP has taken up the Sinhala cause and pushed it to the point of social fascism through assassination and murder. Popular racism based on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism promoted in the schools and expressed in song, textbook and media served to fuel the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, 1981 and 1983, in which thousands were killed at the hands of street mobs. Some of the most violently anti- Tamil propaganda (deriving inspiration from mythical Sinhalese history) has emanated from the present government. Colonisation of Tamil areas by Sinhalese was justified on the pretext of protecting ancient Buddhist shrines. And it is an open secret that ministers hired their own hit squads in the 1983 pogrom. When, in a bid to end the unwinnable war with the Tamils, the UNP signed the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987, allowing Indian troops to operate on Sri Lankan soil, it alienated the very Sinhala nationalists it had itself fostered. And it was the JVP which capitalised on the resentment over India's interference in Sri Lanka's internal affairs. Accusing the UNP government (and other supporters of the Accord) of treachery, it enlarged and deepened popular racism into fanatical patriotism. But what has given the JVP terror tactics a hold over the population has been the steady erosion of democratic freedoms, on the one hand, and the self-abasement of the Left, on the other. Both the SLFP and UNP governments have postponed elections to stay in power, but the UNP went further and got itself re-elected en bloc on a phoney referendum to postpone elections. Local elections were never held under the SLFP and whatever elections took place under the UNP have either been rigged and/or carried out under conditions of massive intimidation. In the process, the political literacy that the country once boasted has been lost to the people and, with it, their will to resist. At the same time the collaborationist politics of the Left in the SLFP government of 1970-77 have not only served to decimate its own chances at the polls (it obtained not a single seat in the election of 1977) but also to leave the working-class movement defenceless. So that it was a simple matter for the UNP government to crush the general strike of 1980, imprison its leaders and throw 80, 000 workers permanently out of work. And it has been left to the JVP to pretend to take up the socialist mantle of the Left even as it devotes itself to the racist cause of the Right, and so win the support of the Sinhala-Buddhist people. In the final analysis the choice before the country is that of two terrors: that of the state or that of the JVP. Below we publish an analysis of the situation as at October 1988, put out by the underground Campaign for Social Democracy in the run up to the presidential elections.

Reviews

Popular racism and the ‘authoritarian state‘ Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1982. 324pp. Bibl. Ind. £5.95. French antisemitism in its social context Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience. Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) Rutherford‐Madison‐Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982. xviii + 812pp. £30.00. The subterranean world of a conspiracy theorist Richard M. Gilman, Behind World Revolution. The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster, Volume 1. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Insight Books, 1982. xii + 111pp. Bibl.