Racial Hierarchy Research Articles

RACISMO X NEGRO NA GESTÃO PÚBLICA

The presence of black people in public administration is a crucial and complex issue that is intertwined with the history of racism in Brazil. The fight for more black representation in spaces of power is a direct confrontation with the racist structures that permeate our society. The slave system, which lasted for centuries in Brazil, left deep marks on society, establishing racial hierarchies that persist to this day. For more than three centuries, slavery denied black people citizenship and any kind of political participation. This historical legacy perpetuates inequalities and prejudices, affecting the Brazilian social structure to this day. This article, through bibliographical research, seeks to understand the relationship between racism and low black representation in the Brazilian political system, analyzing how racism contributes directly to the under-representation of black people in other spheres of power and social prestige. However, this study only reinforces how fundamental it is to tackle structural racism so that, through affirmative policies, the inclusion of black people in Brazilian society can take place in a more equal way in the context of public management, enabling institutions to be more diverse and plural.

White Americans who perceive themselves to be “last place” in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism

Economic inequality and alt-right extremism have reached historic highs in the U.S. We propose that high economic inequality may uphold stereotypes that white people are wealthy which may lead some white Americans to feel in the precarious position of falling behind their racial group’s high status. For white Americans who also feel that they are being passed in status by People of Color, such perceptions may make ideologies that aim to benefit white people particularly appealing. Across two studies (Pilot: N = 465; Study 1: N = 1,449), using representative quota sampling of non-Hispanic, white Americans, we combine a measure of subjective status with latent profile analysis to identify white Americans who feel they are in “Last Place” (i.e., falling behind most white, Black, Asian, and Latinx Americans). Controlling for objective status, white Americans in this “Last Place” profile were most likely to support alt-right ideology, politicians, and events.

Colonial Genealogies of Pluralism: Consociation as Disavowal in Contemporary Democratic Theory

This article reframes understandings of pluralism in democratic theory by showing that the management of late and post-colonial identitarian conflict was integral to its incorporation into twentieth-century political science. It does so by reconstructing the central but underexamined place of theories of consociational democracy in efforts to reform South Africa’s apartheid constitution in the 1970s and 80s. Consociational democratic theory offered such promising resources for apartheid reform, it contends, because it entwined (a) a conception of social pluralism that redescribed apartheid’s racial hierarchy as identitarian difference with (b) a conception of institutional pluralism that curtailed the most transformative possibilities of decolonization through universal suffrage. Recovering pluralism’s colonial genealogies clarifies the conditions under which the recognition of identitarian diversity can function as a disavowal of racial domination, positioning democratic theory as an adjunct to projects of neo-colonial order.

Race and authenticity in Argentine comics, 1950s–1970s: Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and white settlers on the frontier

ABSTRACT This article analyses several Argentine comics published between the 1950s and 1970s that depict the racialised hinterlands of state expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether set in Argentina or the US, these comics are often celebrated as works that dismantle traditional dichotomies found in comics (e.g. white heroes vs. Indigenous villains). Referring to their use of the archive, of more nuanced Indigenous characters, and even of narratives constructed from “an Indigenous worldview”, comics creators are seen to disrupt stereotypical depictions of race. Positioning the works within a history of race in Argentina and political struggles over its rural interior, I unpack the creators’ claims to “authenticity” to set out an alternative reading of Indigeneity, mestizaje, and whiteness in these comics. I argue that this corpus ultimately preserves existing racial hierarchies by promoting figures of whiteness who support white settlerism in the name of modernisation and progress.

Slavery as a Cultural Legacy: Abdulrazzak Gurnah’s Paradise as a Case Study

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania (then the Sultanate of Zanzibar). He moved to the UK as a refugee in the 1960s after the Zanzibar Revolution. The vulnerability of slavery has been discussed by many writers. This paper is going to investigate slavery in Gurnah’s novel Paradise1994, particularly in the lives of the protagonist, Yusuf. This paper aims to follow the journey of Yusuf, a young man who is forced into servitude after his father pawns him. Through Yusuf’s experiences, Gurnah delves into how slavery has become a cultural legacy, shaping identities, relationships, and aspects of society. The paper will identify how the characters’ experiences are shaped by their ancestors’ history of slavery. It will also explore how the novel depicts the social, economic, and psychological impacts of slavery on the characters and their communities especially the loss of agency which can lead to feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness. The paper also shows Social Marginalization as a stigma associated with slavery. Individuals are treated differently based on their ancestry. Yusuf’s experiences illustrate how racial and social hierarchies can be perpetuated through cultural legacies.

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Toward a Networked Racial Analysis of White Parents in Education Policy and Research

Education policy research on White parent opportunity hoarding overlooks whiteness studies and focuses on individual-level behaviors. In this article, we advance a racial network analysis of White parent collectives to better understand how White parents reinforce racial hierarchies in schools.

Partisan (A) Symmetries in Hardball: Mass Level Support of Hardball Equivalent Across Party and Race

Constitutional hardball is when partisan actors engage in legal tactics that violate democratic norms for political advantage. The Republican Party seems to have engaged in hardball more than the Democratic Party in recent years, which is surprising as both parties should be similarly incentivized to use hardball. This asymmetry in elite behavior could reflect differences in what each parties’ coalitions tolerate. For example, non-white voters might oppose hardball tactics more than white voters for reasons such as hardball historically being used to enforce racial hierarchies. If true, that could constrain on Democratic elites’ actions more Republican elites due to Democrats’ more racially diverse base. I draw on a long line of research on partisanship and group interest to argue instead that both white and non-white voters of both parties should be similarly disposed towards hardball. This article then marshals data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) and original surveys to test that argument. In support of my hypotheses, I find white and non-white members of both parties have similar levels of support and similar motivations for hardball. Political elites are likely free to engage in undemocratic acts such as hardball with little fear of backlash from their supporters.

The New (White) Normal: Human Anatomy and the Naturalisation of White Bodies in British University Teaching, 1860–1910

Summary The discipline of human anatomy has often been overlooked in histories of race science in favour of comparative anatomy, anthropology, ethnography and statistics. However, understanding the historical relationship between human anatomy and race science is particularly important because of the discipline’s central role, unlike its sister disciplines, in medical education. This article begins to redress this oversight, demonstrating that human anatomy played a key role in the development of nineteenth-century race science in Britain. This article considers three main elements of ideas about racial anatomical difference: the language of racial hierarchy, anatomists’ location of racial difference within the body and the perpetuation of these ideas over time. In so doing, I argue that research into racial difference was demonstrably anatomical during the late nineteenth century, playing a key role in British anatomists’ discipline-building processes, and that these ideas were present within the classroom, influencing generations of medical students.

“She Feels not Half What We Feel”: Oriental Affect Aliens and the Unhappy Queers in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Lily Briscoe’s and Elizabeth Dalloway’s “Chinese eyes” has drawn critical attention, but the lack of affective expressiveness in these characters needs further examination. Borrowing Xine Yao’s term “unfeeling,” this essay explores the relationship between Woolf’s use of Oriental imagery and disaffection. It argues that Woolf’s depiction of Oriental unaffectedness critiques Victorian patriarchal conventions and their constructed notions of happiness. However, in doing so, Woolf simultaneously perpetuates the stereotype of Oriental inscrutability. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness and her concept of the “unhappy queer,” this essay first examines Elizabeth’s restrained affective expressiveness, suggesting that Woolf’s characterization challenges the white sentimentality linked to the heterosexual definition of happiness in the late Victorian era. Yet, through the lens of Yao’s analysis of Oriental alienness, the essay contends that Woolf’s narrative still subscribes to Orientalism. Likewise, Lily Briscoe’s negotiation of her capacity for sympathy—especially in contrast to Mrs. Ramsay—highlights Woolf’s critique of patriarchal norms. However, Lily’s artistic vision is ultimately realised through her alignment with the Western affective economy, suggesting the author’s acknowledgement of sympathy and affectability as universal concepts—yet ones that are underpinned by a racial hierarchy.

Polyvocality as a communicative strategy in Korean–Black business interactions

ABSTRACT This research analyzes and explains the use of multiple voices in a beauty supply store as an intercultural communication process that plays a particular role in adjusting the participants’ relationships. This study explores the alternation of language between the Korean American business owner and his Black neighbors to meet the following research objectives: (a) to examine how a store owner uses polyvocality to mitigate tension, (b) to investigate how his interlocutors react to his shift in language, and (c) to explore how the voicing of these “figures of personhood” represents the negotiation of their relationships. I argue that the participants in these particular intercultural interactions employ various discursive strategies to build rapport and avoid conflicts. However, despite their long-term and personal relationships and the application of multiple voices, sources of conflict such as racial hierarchy and socioeconomic disparities remain unresolved.

Against the White Racial Imaginary: Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) makes legible what neoliberalism has obscured – the ongoing, even the intensification of, white supremacy’s organization of social space. This essay shows how Rankine illuminates an American landscape forged in history, steeped in memory and invested with symbolic meaning to argue that it is, fundamentally, constructed by and entangled with white supremacy. Rankine reworks pastoral lyric imagery and documentary photography to situate contemporary anti-black violence within a longer history of white terror. She defamiliarizes the language of reportage to critique documentary strategies of visual evidence that reinscribe racial hierarchies through reliance upon an unmarked white gaze. In place of individual testimony, documentary evidence and bounded lyric subjectivity, Rankine gathers an assembly of voices, employing rhetorical strategies that resist the violence of neoliberal individuation.

하드보일드 추리소설의 인종적 변용—월터 모즐리의 이지 롤린스 연작을 중심으로

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.

Pelo negro y dramaturgia: sentir, pensar y politizar el pelo negro mediante dos piezas cortas de teatro

This article explores the significance of black hair as a symbol of creativity, imagination, culture, and identity. It emphasizes that black hair, like performing arts, is political, as it deconstructs hegemonic beauty standards that have historically marginalized Blackness. The article highlights how colonial structures have used black hair to reinforce racism, exclusion, and inequality. The focus of the article is on the research and creative process that led to the development of two short theater pieces: Alisado and Gloria, Lola, Margarita, and Luis, written by Pablo Tatés Anangonó. These works use black hair as a starting point to explore intercultural themes and reflect on racial discrimination. In the introduction, the significance of hair in daily life and on stage as a tool for constructing stories and characters is emphasized. Hair is seen as continually processed through cultural practices, which bestow meaning and value upon it. The theoretical framework delves into concepts related to plot, dramaturgy, and the thematic concerns of the plays. Black hair is examined as a physical attribute historically used to identify Black individuals, and how colonialism has employed this to establish racial hierarchies and differences. The analysis connects these ideas to artistic and aesthetic theories that link art with social and political dimensions. The methodology employed is research in the arts, addressing and visualizing issues of personal and cultural significance. Autonarrative methods from various paradigms are employed, linking personal experience with cultural context, and testimonies of racism and discrimination related to black hair are collected. In the discussion, the theater pieces Alisado and Gloria, Lola, Margarita, and Luis are examined from different perspectives, showing the importance of black hair in colonial history and its commodification in modern times. The influence of capitalism on this commodification is addressed, and the plays spark reflections on racism and oppression. The conclusion underscores the importance of using performing arts as a research methodology to produce knowledge and foster reflections on significant social and cultural issues. The plays presented in academic events, referenced in this article, were well-received and provoked valuable discussions on black hair and its meaning in contemporary society.

On Science Fiction, Heritage Architecture and Other Demons

This conversation with Moira Crone was inspired by her science fiction novel The Not Yet. The interview opens with a question regarding the capacity of architectural heritage to carry past and present values, as well as our stories, and help us make sense of the world. With an emphasis on the historic French quarter in New Orleans, Crone explains why the preservation of the city’s most famous neighborhood was necessary for the plot and how in reality this preservation takes place. She discusses the difficult and cruel history of plantation homes in Louisiana, as well as moments in which the strict racial hierarchies broke down, creating possibilities for different ways of co-existence among its inhabitants. Crone unpacks her ideas about archetypical architectural spaces like the theater, and the subversive role it can play in contemporary or imaginative societies. The interview concludes with a discussion about science fiction’s connections to architectural thinking and the author’s creative process.

From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness

ABSTRACT This article traces how Caribbean nations become Black by virtue of their relationship to colonialism, capitalism and their linkages with race. First, it outlines how colonization linked race, labour and Blackness, and draws connections to the racialization of Caribbean nations under neoliberalism. Second, it argues for how those processes in turn generate racial tropes that mark certain nations as Black. Using Haiti and Jamaica in comparison, this article suggests that Caribbean nations and their migrants become racialized as Black in ways that both insert them within the U.S. racial hierarchy and situates them within a larger context of global Blackness.

Black Lives in Limbo: Liberian Refugees, Migrant Justice, and the Narration of Antiblack U.S. Border Politics

The Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities, especially undocumented people, produced major policy reversals on temporary humanitarian relief programs, such as the termination of Deferred Enforced Departure (DED). While these policies have had wide-reaching impacts across communities of color, within the broader immigration debate, the experiences of Black migrants have often been overlooked. This paper asks the following questions: How did extremist policies impact Black migrants under the Trump administration? What vulnerabilities did these policies produce or exacerbate? What do these efforts tell us about the “turn” toward authoritarianism in U.S. politics? Applying antiblackness as a theoretical framework, this paper conducts a content analysis of media outlets to examine the impact of extremist policies on Liberian DED beneficiaries. The ramifications of these policies intensified pre-existing antiblack dynamics of belonging and exclusion within the state by reinforcing racial hierarchies, producing social exclusion and vulnerability to state violence, and maintaining constrained access to citizenship. In assessing the many ways that antiblack racism manifests for citizens and non-citizens alike, we can extend our understanding of migrant justice, racial justice, and anti-imperialism as interdependent struggles in the face of rising authoritarianism.

Police’s attribution of racial inequality in the criminal justice system: a case of non-binary color-blindness

ABSTRACT This study critically examines how police officers attribute racial disparities within the US criminal justice system. For this inquiry, the study used in-depth interviews with 65 police officers from 4 police departments in a midwestern county. The findings revealed that 17 of these police officers invoked structural explanations to account for racial disparities prevalent in the US. However, this apparent racial awareness prompted them to underscore the pervasiveness of racism beyond the realms of criminal justice. Consequently, they attributed racial inequities within the criminal justice system to structural racism entrenched in non-criminal justice institutions, thereby rationalizing the current policing institution. This finding highlights the efficacy of a non-binary notion of color-blind ideology to elucidate the flexible and adaptable cultural frameworks that sustain racial hierarchies. Moreover, it enriches the scholarship on racialized organizations, occupations, and work by discussing the ideological limits of change in fostering racial equity within an occupation.

‘Racialised nudity’ in social work education: critical reflections on cross-cultural pedagogies

ABSTRACT Fostering cross-cultural learning is an important component in social work education in Australia. However, cross-cultural learning competencies are often criticized for lacking meaningful engagement with effective decolonial processes. Drawing on a postcolonial perspective, this paper offers a theoretical critique of pedagogical practices that create, sustain, and reinforce racial hierarchy in cross-cultural learning. These practices are discussed within the notions of tokenistic inclusion and racialized nudity that illustrate deficit models of cultural engagement. The paper is underpinned by the argument that a broadly defined and uncritically designed cross-cultural teaching and learning experience runs the risk of perpetuating white supremacy and dominance in social work education. By critiquing tokenistic cross-cultural pedagogical practices, this paper advocates for a re-orientation of social work education where a decolonial approach to knowledge production is embraced within curriculum design with a prioritized focus on the intersection of whiteness and racism.

Race in place: scales of difference along the Balkan Route of migration

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic examination of race, racialization, and racism among members of a Muslim post-Yugoslav population who have not emigrated – who stayed “in place” – but whose location just outside EU borders has brought people from outside Europe to their community as illegalized migrants along the Balkan Route to the EU. Residents of Bihać and the northwest region of Bosnia–Herzegovina make sense of how racial hierarchies position both them and the migrants, and in turn how racism functions in their society, through overlapping and simultaneously imagined global, regional, and local scales. Distancing from racism based on Bosnia’s specific positioning was common, while local racializing hierarchies such as those that inferiorize the Roma were often understood through frameworks of ethnicity. This made possible a simultaneous identification with “Europe” and whiteness and a distancing from racial thinking and racism as a problem of the “west” even through divergent stances towards migrants.

Non-Western Scholars, Bourgeois Virtues, and the International Scientific Community in the Age of Empire, 1870–1920

AbstractHistorians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves – through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress – from the more useless, ‘frivolous’ learning of aristocrats, women, or, indeed, native ‘informants’ in the colonies. This article examines the case of scholars from outside northern Europe and North America – Japanese literati, creole intellectuals, and Lebanese scholars – who managed to participate in the period’s Western scientific networks as peers. It holds that these men were able to establish epistemic credibility not because their lower rung in a political and racial hierarchy was ever irrelevant, but because their status as upper-middle-class professionals and their bourgeois habitus – their ‘civility’, and ‘manners’ – in some measure made up for it. The article reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes the mechanisms of epistemic inclusion and its limits in the period: the functioning of an academic community that was – in many, rather significant ways – also a social world.