Processes Of Racial Formation Research Articles

Black newspapers and the Black public sphere: The utility of cartoons in the context of World War II

Black newspapers have historically played an important role within the African American community, reaching preeminence during the World War II era. Embodied in the Double V Campaign, they sought victories for democracy both at home and abroad. In analyzing two different types of cartoons—etiquette cartoons and political cartoons—present within a local Black newspaper during the war and post-war period, this analysis illustrates how World War II-era Black newspapers informed racial formation processes at multiple levels by targeting structural inequalities and advising interpersonal behavior. Specifically, these cartoons prescribed behaviors for public conduct, child rearing, and gender/sexual relations upheld by respectability politics. Such esthetic and discursive mechanisms illuminate the structural and ideological terrains constituting the Black counterpublic as well as guideposts for challenging and navigating the dominant racial discourse.

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>

"Books About Race": Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century

This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the "authorized" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity.

The Push for Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions: Highlighting the Perspectives of Student Activists

ABSTRACT This paper documents the involvement of students who advocated for what eventually became the federal designation for Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs). Through interviews with 12 student activists, we document students’ motivations for mobilizing, as well as the challenges they encountered. Students identified motivations such as gaining additional resources, seeking recognition through the legislation, and fostering proactive approaches to activism. Challenges included motivating their peers beyond immediate self-interest and the overshadowing of individual subgroup concerns within the broader Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We comment on the ways in which the push for AANAPISIs represents a racial project within a broader process of racial formation, and highlight both the possibilities and limitations of student advocacy.

The sedimentation of whiteness as landscape

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the axioms of a “just recovery” was to redevelop the city’s historic high ground. While the call to limit the city’s footprint problematized low-lying geographies, the majority of which were Black, it ignored Lakeview, a low-lying, predominantly white neighborhood devastated by Katrina. Despite its vulnerability to flooding, Lakeview has thrived in the years following Katrina. Property values are rising and public and private investments are rolling in. Lakeview’s unquestioned future and its (re)valorization in the wake of the storm speak to how racial regimes of property have informed the reconstruction of the city and to the role that urban planning plays in constructing and valorizing landscapes of whiteness. This paper interrogates the ongoing lives of whiteness, asking how whiteness operates as an invisible substrate within planning and property regimes. Utilizing the concept of sedimentation, it explores how planning takes part in concretizing racial formation processes and suggests that the project of sustaining white geographies lays bare deeper questions about the ways that planning enacts multi-scaled, racialized regimes of property. This article excavates the emergence of Lakeview from the backswamps of a delta city to examine the unquestioned valorizations of whiteness as a landscape.

“The Price of Disaster”: The Charter School Authorization Process in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Charter schools because of their entanglements with privatization remain one of the most publicly contested and controversial educational reform initiatives. Charter schools, in theory, are to balance autonomy and accountability in order to provide students with innovative learning environments and increased achievement on traditional academic measures. The governance of charter schools and the vision espoused in the charter application are central in determining the organization and operation of charter schools. As such, connected to charter schools are the actors that envision them and the processes and policies that enable them. Utilizing the case of post-Katrina New Orleans, I examine the charter authorization process, an understudied aspect of charter school policy. Understood as an objective, colorblind process in mainstream policy articulations, the authorization process regulates entry into educational markets. This paper applies a Critical Race Theory analysis to the authorization process. I argue the charter school authorization process is a foundational gatekeeping mechanism that structures charter markets. In so doing, the charter school authorization process is embedded within and constitutive of on-going processes of racial formation and racialized power solidification. Moreover, I argue mainstream policy articulations situate the charter school authorization process as an accountability mechanism that is neutral, benign, and objective; such articulations distort and distract from the racial antagonisms upon which neoliberal reform projects are built.

Introduction

Introduction Liette Gidlow, Section Guest Editor (bio) As the debate over ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to enfranchise American women intensified after the Great War, both suffragists and antisuffragists believed that a great deal was at stake. Suffrage proponents promised that, armed with the ballot, women would tackle the great social issues of the day and usher in a new era of progress and peace. Antisuffragists, by contrast, worried that suffrage would damage women's elevated moral stature and threaten the very stability of life in the home. Now, in 2020, historians have the opportunity to reconsider those predictions using a century's worth of evidence. A hundred years out, what difference did the Nineteenth Amendment make? The Nineteenth Amendment is popularly celebrated for enfranchising half the population overnight and fulfilling the American promise of democracy. Two narratives, distinct but entwined, promote this perspective. In one version, aptly termed "the master narrative" by the historian Nancy Hewitt, the woman suffrage struggle started with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls in 1848 and, after much struggle and sacrifice, succeeded with the ratification of the Anthony Amendment in 1920.1 In an alternative interpretation, the Nineteenth Amendment completed the American democratic project of suffrage expansion, a project that began in the early national period when states repealed freeholder restrictions and when a growing economy expanded property ownership and rendered them moot. The march toward full inclusion continued during the period of "Jacksonian democracy" when states granted "universal" suffrage to white men; traversed the color line with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870; and concluded in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment brought women into the ranks of the voting public. Many historians, however, question both the framing and the tenor of these interpretations. They argue instead, for example, that woman suffrage was but one of many demands made by mid-nineteenth-century women's rights reformers, and often not their top priority; or that many aspects of women's lives and politics persisted across "the great divide" of 1920, emphasizing continuity, not change; or that electoral politics was but one tool women used to bring change to their communities. Some scholars [End Page 11] stress that alternative strategies, like labor mobilization and community organizing, sometimes yielded tangible results when voting did not or that some women, in particular African American women in the Jim Crow South, found that after ratification they still could not vote. Others further argue frankly that, on policy grounds, the Nineteenth Amendment was a bust: the voter turnout for women in the 1920s was low, the suffrage coalition splintered, and the newly enfranchised women failed to push through a fresh wave of progressive reform. In these interpretations, not much changed after women got the vote. The suffrage amendment—highly anticipated and hotly debated—landed with a thud.2 In this forum, women's history scholars with diverse areas of expertise navigate between a triumphalist narrative of progress and a dispirited narrative of failure. These essays, although varied in approach, share three common threads. First, they recognize the intersectional identities of the women whose stories they tell and offer interpretations that reflect these complexities. Second, they extend the field of vision both backward and forward in time—backward to recall a sense of contingency for historical actors who could not know that a federal woman suffrage amendment would be adopted, and forward to identify consequences of the amendment that may have taken decades to develop. Third, they interrogate the boundaries of the nation by considering internal "borders" created by processes of racial formation and settler colonialism, spaces that were incorporated into the nation but governed by what the political scientist Partha Chatterjee called "the rule of colonial difference."3 The authors in this forum also make the case that the significance of woman suffrage was not limited to women themselves. They illustrate how the question of women's right to vote was deeply implicated in the politics of white supremacy both before and after ratification. They highlight tensions that the amendment raised for women who, drawing on multiple sources of identity and affiliation, identified as members of communities instead of, or as well as, rights-bearing individuals. Individually and...

A Lighter Shade of Brown? Racial Formation and Gentrification in Latino Los Angeles

AbstractConventional gentrification literature has meaningfully demonstrated how economic inequality is perpetuated in urban settings, but there has been a limited understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Drawing from participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography in the barrio of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that were collected over five years, this study examines how gentrification functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain uneven development along racial lines. Examining the ways that racial formation processes unfurl at the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of place in race-making. This study finds new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and significant portions of the Mexican American population as “honorary white.” Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this landscape fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification processes which have increased racial, political, and economic inequality.

Distantly reading race in the contemporary ‘postrace’ novel

ABSTRACT Inspired by recent computationally assisted close readings undertaken by critics including Ryan Cordell, Paul Fleming, Michael Gavin, Matthew Jockers, Andrew Piper, Hoyt Long, Richard So, and Ted Underwood, this essay devises an account of Colson Whitehead’s genre-bending zombie thriller Zone One (2011) based on visualisations of the text’s lexical patterns, arguing that such an approach yields explanatory purchase on the relation between Zone One’s genre-fiction surface (i.e. its zombie plot and predominantly race-free lexicon) and what the majority of the novel’s critics have intuited to be its literary-allegorical core (i.e. the novel’s latent race-conscious ideological programme). Mobilising a low-tech, small-scale computational approach to Zone One’s distribution of explicit and implicit racial signifiers, I argue that attention to the novel’s patterns of form and language reveals a racial grammar lurking beneath its chiefly unmarked lexicon. Through its careful distribution of racialising terms, Zone One, I suggest, embodies a ‘viral’ intertextuality keyed to processes of racial formation occurring beneath the discourse of ‘postraciality’ and within the hidden technical registers of the networked global economy.

The ‘Park’ as Racial Practice: Constructing Whiteness on Safari in Tanzania

Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari ever since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness.

Raced Repetition: Perpetual Paralysis or Paradoxical Promise?

This article engages with key contemporary questions about the extent to which the obstinacy of racial formation processes, as well as the apparent global resurgence of raced thinking, represent a paralysis of the global anti-racist project or signal an important analytic opportunity for revitalising critical race scholarship and anti-racist praxis. To this end, it is incumbent upon critical race scholars and practitioners to take stock of their historical, current and future contributions to addressing the vexing nature of race and racism. The article mobilises three main illustrative arguments in this regard. First, we have to deploy our analytic tools more thoughtfully and robustly in the service of understanding the current historical period in which race seems to have an infinite elasticity globally as such analyses have a great deal to offer us in thinking through the contemporary relationships between race, materiality, histories, politics and populism. Second, writing from South Africa, the article focuses on the historically racialised nature of the social formation as an exemplar of how the deployment of race and resistance to it did not simply reflect an unprocessed repetition compulsion of the raced binary over time but actually represented incremental gains for a productively antagonistic and adversarial anti-racist political project. Third, the article also surfaces alternative ways of approaching the question of race today, by examining elements of the post-race paradigm, raced embodiment and affectivity, and more diverse conceptions of what it means to be human as part of the anti-racist project. The article concludes that thoughtful analyses of the histories of anti-racist praxis, contemporary manifestations of race and racism, and an openness to new approaches to addressing the histories and continued legacies of race are paradoxically promising and hopeful in a seemingly despairing time when race thinking seems to be on the ascension once more.

The Dependent Origination of Whiteness

The Buddhist teachings on dependent origination describe how the process of rebirth—also known as becoming—is caused by a deluded consciousness feeding on a person’s body and mind, as well as on external objects of craving and aversion. The process of racial formation that turns European American bodies into white people who feed off of the land, labor, and life force of people of color can be seen as an example of dependent origination. This article argues that whiteness is a deeply rooted existential experience in the bodies and minds of European Americans that serves as a firewall against perpetrator guilt and trauma; it also explains why the threat white people perceive in demographic shifts triggers an existential fear of annihilation. The Buddhist teachings in this article correspond with the concepts of racial formation and racial project articulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and the concept of the possessive investment in whiteness articulated by George Lipsitz. The article then uses the Buddhist antiracist lens formed from these connections to analyze past and present white supremacist behavior in the United States, as well as past and present antiracist behavior in the United States, paying particular attention to Martin Luther King’s involvement in the Chicago Freedom Movement. Although not the primary focus of this article, connections are also made between the Buddhist elements of this analysis and clinical trauma therapy in order to ground this discussion in a secular, empirical, trauma-informed context.

Mujeres afrocostarricenses y multiculturalismo tardío: reforma de la constitución de la República (blanca) de Costa Rica

Se analiza el escenario de la reforma del artículo 1 de la Constitución Política de Costa Rica para reconocer el carácter pluriétnico y multicultural de la nación, a partir de sus protagonistas y tiempos de aprobación. Por un lado, se plantea la relación entre los procesos de formación racial y la tardanza en el multiculturalismo constitucional. Por el otro, se identifican los desafíos y estrategias de mujeres afrocostarricenses para enmarcar dicha reforma en términos de justicia social.

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Food justice racial projects: fighting racial neoliberalism from the Bay to the Big Apple

Food justice scholarship utilizing racial formation theory has largely analyzed race and racism within the conventional food system and the food movement, leaving under-examined the political projects of food justice organizations to realize racial equity. This article recovers the dialectical spirit of racial formation theory, that of oppression and resistance, and interjects a distinct focus on activism in the context of racial neoliberalism to investigate two food justice organizations, ‘Planting Justice’ and ‘East New York Farms!’ These organizations reveal through their work some of the heterogeneity of food and urban agriculture related race-making practices, namely antiracist racial projects that challenge racial and economic inequities. We show how these projects intervene in the system of mass incarceration, reclaim land for cultural reproduction, and build racial and class solidarity. We argue that the food justice movement, which is comprised of many racial projects, contributes to setting in motion emancipatory racial formation processes. In closing, the article reflects on the possible range of food justice racial projects, how these antiracist projects might work to transform race relations, and some of the limitations that food justice activists might encounter resisting racial neoliberalism.

Transcolonial Racial Formation

The author examines the process of racial knowledge creation within the context of U.S. empire and its military occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948. The author uses a postcolonial sociohistorical approach to analyze archival sources authored by U.S. military occupation administrators, advisers, and journalists. The author argues that the U.S. military occupation was in practice colonialism, and that the United States pulled racial knowledge gained through previous colonial experiences and from British and Japanese empires to construct the racial script of the “Irish of the Orient.” Through this script, the United States justified the need for a military occupation by reading Koreans through colonial constructions of Irish drunkenness and joviality as well as Filipino immaturity. Conversely, the script signaled the potential of Koreans to eventually become democratic subjects. Through the metaphor of the “Irish of the Orient,” the author finds that the racial formation of Koreans during the U.S. military occupation exemplified the relational, nonlinear, and transcolonial process of racial formation.

Race Making in a Penal Institution.

This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal institution. Drawing on 135 days of ethnographic data collected as an inmate in a Southern California county jail system, the author argues that inmates are subjected to two mutually constitutive racial projects--one institutional and the other microinteractional. Operating in symbiosis within a narrative of risk management, these racial projects increase (rather than decrease) incidents of intraracial violence and the potential for interracial violence. These findings have implications for understanding the process of racialization and evaluating the effectiveness of penal management strategies.

Introduction: Operationalizing Food Justice and Sustainability

Social scientists often use the term operationalize mean defining a variable in a precise way so that it can be properly measured. This form of the word means that we take a variable and make it empirically useful. I hope do something slightly different, but perhaps related, with the terminology of food and sustainability for this special issue of Theory in Action. What I want do is make the terms theoretically useful-at least in the context of this special issue and, perhaps, in larger discussions about food (sustainability has likely, at this point, become enough of a populist mush that I don't really have the same hopes for having any impact with it).Let me begin with food justice. I don't want go into a detailed history of concepts of or the oft-used and incredibly stretched and broad notion of that attracts so many scholars, nonprofits, liberals, corporations, radicals, politicians, and progressives contemporarily (one might consider, however, if all of these various actors are for a thing called justice, just how much meaning the term can have if it isn't operationalized-made theoretically useful-in a given context). On one hand, justice is the language we inherited talk about concepts of individual and social goods often rooted in classical liberal ideas bound up with conceptions of an unspoken social contract that balances freedom and equality under formal legal instruments guaranteed by the state-ostensibly guarding us against a war of each against each (Rousseau 1947; Hobbes 1991; Rawls 1971). On the other hand, and certainly pertinent the contents of this special issue, one might consider the many criticisms of those approaches justice-and the classical liberal, capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and statist frameworks from which they arise-from feminists (see e.g. Pateman 1988) anti-racists (see e.g. Mills 1997) left libertarians (see especially Perlman 1983) and, of course, Marx's (1977) blistering critique of political economy. It could be argued that making understandings of food useful requires some baselines with a deep and abiding respect for a certain range of disagreement (for an excellent discussion, and one attempt at doing just this, see DePuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011).I do think we can trace some baseline agreements from recent scholarship and organizing around food justice. For example, in Alkon and Agyeman's (2011) excellent collection one finds a number of authors and activists arguing for conceptions of food by looking critically at racism, class exploitation, and sexism in institutionalized contexts surrounding contemporary food systems. In this collection, consumers of food and agricultural producers of food are both looked at through a critical lens. Similarly, Gottlieb and Joshi (2012: 5) look at contemporary food systems by, likewise, locating them in the historical context of various relations of inequality, looking for ways open up.. .pathways for social and political action.This gives us a good start for defining food as both a negative project-one that rejects structured inequalities-as well as a positive project-one that seeks to transform where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, accessed, and eaten (Gottlieb and Joshi 2012: 5). A good beginning, then, might be utilizing the feminist concept of intersectionality, recognizing the intersections of multiple and overlapping relations of domination as they relate the food system. But that can only be a beginning. While intersectionality gives us a good start for analyzing the ways that multiple identities shape our social lives and affect our life chances, if one is not careful, it can be easy overlook relations of inequality that do not necessarily arise from identities (see Rogue and Volcano 2012). Minkoff-Zem, Peluso, Sowerwine, and Getz (2011), for example, point the case of Hmong refugees in California, who were victims of the latent effects of legislation intended protect agricultural workers, but which dismpted their cultural practices of farming-both because of processes of racial formation in state policy and because of their social locations as governed social subjects under the state. …

Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations

Over the past 25 years, since the publication of Omi &amp; Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, the statement that race is socially constructed has become a truism in sociological circles. Yet many struggle to describe exactly what the claim means. This review brings together empirical literature on the social construction of race from different levels of analysis to highlight the variety of approaches to studying racial formation processes. For example, macro-level scholarship often focuses on the creation of racial categories, micro-level studies examine who comes to occupy these categories, and meso-level research captures the effects of institutional and social context. Each of these levels of analysis has yielded important contributions to our understanding of the social construction of race, yet there is little conversation across boundaries. Scholarship that bridges methodological and disciplinary divides is needed to continue to advance the racial formation perspective and demonstrate its broader relevance.

Bodily “Touch” and Racial Formation in Milton Murayama's ALL I ASKING FOR IS MY BODY

Milton Murayama's All I Asking for Is My Body depicts the complex process of racial formation of the Nisei (second-generation Japanese immigrants in the United States) sons of the Oyama family in H...