Racial Hostility Research Articles

Hiding in plain sight: Black women speak on racist patriarchy and Black patriarchy in unmarked and marked spaces on campus

Black undergraduate women who attend a HPWI are impacted by racist patriarchy and Black patriarchy. To examine patriarchies across campus, I explored unmarked spaces on campus which are generic, white spaces; and racially marked spaces, such as the Black Student Center. To better understand how racist patriarchy and Black patriarchy shape Black women’s college experiences, I utilized qualitative methods and an ethnography to center their experiences of discrimination and marginalization. Using a critical race feminism framework, I interviewed 25 Black undergraduate women who attended a state-flagship university in the Mid-Southern region of the US and conducted ethnographic fieldwork on campus. The findings show that Black women experienced overt racial hostility from white males in unmarked spaces on campus, while also experiencing objectification and social subordination from Black men in marked spaces. My findings demonstrate that HPWI’s are patriarchal structures that create gendered racial violence against Black women.

Give you some color: Chinese language teachers’ encounters of race and racialization in American K–12 schools

AbstractThis study investigates issues related to race and racialization among Chinese language teachers in US primary and secondary (K–12) schools. Although race is an increasingly important topic in the field of language education, the published research continues to be dominated by the teaching and learning of English as a second language. Set mostly in 2021, when there was a widespread surge of anti‐Asian violence, this mixed‐methods project directs our attention to the experience of Chinese language teachers in a particular moment. We focus on interviews and journal data collected from 27 Chinese teachers, who were selected as a representative sample from the 221 participants who completed our national survey. The themes that emerged in our data highlight the intersectionality among language, nation, ethnicity, and race in Chinese language teachers’ professional work. While some teachers reported racial hostility during the COVID‐19 crisis, others described language‐ and culture‐based exclusion as a part of their everyday struggle that predated the pandemic. Moreover, as the teachers described these challenges also as opportunities for racially inclusive language pedagogies, the findings here dovetail with the ongoing discussion on antiracist possibilities in and through language teaching.

Healing Through Activism: Transformative Solidarity in a Japanese American Anti-Racism Movement

In the eight decades since World War II, Japanese Americans have come to understand what Black, Brown, and Indigenous groups in the United States have long understood: that the harm inflicted by exclusion, imprisonment, and family separation is not temporary. Trauma still lingers in survivors of American concentration camps as well as in their descendants. Moreover, the fractures created within and between identity groups by exploitative power structures have inhibited allyship across divisions of race, ethnicity, faith, nationality, and more. This article introduces Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots organization at the helm of the anti-racist movement that has caught fire among Japanese Americans nationally. Bearing the scars of past racial oppression, Tsuru for Solidarity combines nonviolent direct action, cross-community organizing, and Healing Circles for Change to advocate for currently targeted immigrant, asylum-seeking, Black, and Indigenous groups. Transformative Solidarity is a concept presented through the lens of Mohanty’s Feminist Solidarity framework (2003), in reference to the healing that Tsuru for Solidarity members have experienced by way of cross-community coalition building. Tsuru for Solidarity’s healing-through-activism approach is a promising model for transformative change in the current contexts of both amplified racial hostility and unprecedented cross-racial mobilization.

The Transit Fix—Border Externalization and the Interplay of Capital and Race in the Transit “Migration” State

Abstract What happens after border externalization? States and regional organizations of the Global North increasingly engage in transnational migration management that seeks to prevent potential irregular migration beyond their territory. Despite the impressive financial and political resources the involved actors mobilize to reach this goal, little is known about the effects of this strategy on their target states and populations. This paper conceptualizes border externalization as a spatial intervention that absorbs contingent migrant flows into an interplay of capital and race. It argues that the immobilization and differential integration produced through externalization can serve as a spatial fix for labor shortages in transit “migration” states. This differential integration disempowers the targeted migrant population and aggravates racial antagonisms. Hence, border externalization is not just a (by-)product of racist ideology and policy, but also intensifies racial hierarchies in the space it intervenes into. The paper studies this through the case of the “EU-Turkey Deal” and Turkey’s Syrian refugee population, building on document analysis and primary interview data with industry representatives, farmers, NGO workers, and government officials. On a theoretical level, the paper thereby contributes to the recent trend that reinserts the border into global processes of racialized capital accumulation.

The Forgotten Generation: The Bridge Generation in Comparison to Manong/Manang-Generation Filipino Americans

Abstract: The Bridge Generation of Filipino Americans, born to the Manong/Manang Generation of Filipino emigrants in the 1920s and 30s, is understudied. The integration experiences of this Bridge Generation are distinct from their parents, the Manong/Manang Generation. These patterns of Filipino integration into American society may reflect the Bridge generations' childhood experience of American racial hostility. Using US census data, we investigate educational attainment and economic outcomes to demonstrate key trends in Bridge Generation integration into American society. We show Bridge Generation women earned less on average than all other Filipina women. Using logistic regression, we show that these early second-generation Filipinos of either gender were the least likely to attain college degrees among all Filipino Americans.

"How great a good was Luria's having lived": Promoting the Moor of Sicily in Robert Brwoning's Luria (1846)

In an attempt to find a possible alternative to imperial orientalism, this essay brings to the forefront Robert Browning's Luria: A Tragedy (1846) as a case study exemplifying irregularity, volatility, and discontinuity in Western discursivity. Drawing upon critics such as Dennis Porter, Kathryn Tidreck, John Mackenzie, Robert Irwin, and Ali Behdad, who take history, context, the author's experience, and socio-cultural particularities as factors defining the heterogeneity of orientalism, I argue that Luria sharply deviates from hegemonic orientalism in a way that perfectly fits with Browning's mysticism and disengagement from politics. Away from stereotypical dogmatism, the play promotes its Moor on stage both militarily and morally and employs diverse strategies to delegitimize racial antagonism and refute clichéd statements about the Moor.

From ‘Butcher and Bolt’ to ‘Bugsplat’: Race, Counterinsurgency, and International Politics

Beginning in the early 2000s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan revived interest among security studies scholars in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare. Yet most studies of COIN in mainstream security studies have not explored the role of race, despite the fact that the principles of COIN warfare were developed during the colonial period when racialized visions dominated world politics. We argue that mainstream security scholars tend to overlook race for two interconnected reasons: first, they treat race as an emotional and interpersonal phenomenon, and second, they assume that racial hostility will manifest in intense and indiscriminate violence. We argue instead that race should be understood as a particular kind of social ontology, one that places human communities into socially reductionist hierarchies based on assumed bio-cultural traits. We then examine how different kinds of racial ontologies were used in the colonial period to develop different kinds of COIN doctrines, whether punitive or paternalistic in character. We demonstrate how these different racialized COIN frameworks informed state practices on the battlefield through a comparative illustration of two COIN campaigns: Britain on the “North-West frontier” of India in the late nineteenth century and the United States along the “Af-Pak border” in the early twenty-first century.

Between the witness and the observer: what ethnography can learn from James Baldwin.

What is the role of the ethnographer during a time of increased racial hostility, political mobilization to keep racial minorities "in their place," and commitments to revisionist interpretations of the country's past and projected future? While the traditional, classic ethnographic approach would recommend that the researcher should avoid taking a stance on so-called political matters and merely observe them, I argue that that position is insufficient to address the issues that people are currently facing. Ethnography can, and should, do more. Therefore, this essay argues that the role of the ethnographer should be oriented toward what the late author James Baldwin calls the witness. The witness is different from the observer because it rejects a positivistic orientation toward ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes spectatorship to remain "scientific." To be a witness is to transgress traditional epistemological understandings of ethnography that ignores how the researcher's position within the racial system shapes how one knows and does not know, what one sees and does not see, and how one imagines freedom and justice. Ethnographers can learn from Baldwin's method because it provides a rich vocabulary to describe the inequality that research participants encounter while in the field and embraces the possibility of an apocalyptic future, which is a future that is not guaranteed if we continue to seek neutrality. In this article, I detail three lessons that we can learn from Baldwin's method and status position as the witness: (1) Connecting empire to the global racial order via the international outsider; (2) Paying one's dues as a within-nation outsider; and (3) Representing the wretched as a within-community outsider. These lessons are instructive for ethnographers because they provide a lens to understand classic ethnographies of the past, while not wallowing in the doldrums of present arrangements, and challenges future research to ground reality as it is rather than what it "should" be.

Donna Awatere on Whiteness in New Zealand: Theoretical Contributions and Contemporary Relevance

In June 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern designated the US-based neo-fascist groups The Base and the Proud Boys as terrorist organisations. This designation marks one of the few times white supremacy entered the national political discourse in New Zealand. Discourses of whiteness are mostly theorised in the North American context. However, Donna Awatere’s 1984 examination of White Cultural Imperialism (WCI) in her book Māori Sovereignty advanced an analysis of whiteness in New Zealand that has received limited scholarly attention and is essentially unexplored. This paper reintroduces Awatere’s conceptualisation of WCI. It offers core tenets of WCI and theoretical insights into contemporary discussions of white supremacy that move beyond the focus of individuals and groups to a broader national framework of New Zealand. Two interrelated features of WCI, as defined by Awatere, are the minimisation and normalisation of whiteness and white racial hostility – inherent features that maintain, protect, and reproduce the white institutionalised body as the primary beneficiary of Western European domination that will always thwart Indigenous sovereignty and equality. This paper concludes that Awatere’s articulation of WCI links whiteness in the New Zealand context to the broader network of global white supremacy that offers insight into contemporary criminal justice scholarship.

Chinese Statecraft and Indigenous Affairs in Chinese Australian Newspapers, 1894–1912

This article will explore how Chinese-language newspapers published in Australia between 1894 and 1912 engaged with Indigenous affairs, and in doing so, articulated Chinese perspectives on settler colonial governance. The rising racial hostility against the Chinese at that time rendered them sympathetic and empathetic towards the plight of Indigenous people. Chinese editors and journalists not only demonstrated that Indigenous affairs were intertwined with Chinese concerns, but also addressed the centrality of Indigenous matters in settler colonial governance, both ethically and administratively. By drawing on traditional Chinese principles and practice of statecraft, these newspapers attempted to remonstrate with the authorities about statecraft, benevolent governance, and political legitimacy.

Experiences and constructions of womanhood and motherhood among Spanish Roma women

Roma women face multiple inequalities at the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class. Framed by Romani feminism, studies have explored Roma women’s own perspectives and experiences, drawing attention to the diversity within this group and the specificities of their social position due to the complex forms of discrimination they face. Drawing on interviews with Spanish Roma women, this article contributes to and extends this strand of research by exploring Roma women’s experiences and constructions of womanhood and motherhood. We found the construction of womanhood to be focused on the effective management of responsibilities, particularly caring and household tasks. Moreover, Roma women defined motherhood as a valued experience for them and their communities. A homemaker position was associated with mattering, something, we argue, which needs to be understood in the context of racial hostility, exclusion, and precarity in which Roma women live.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

“I wanted satisfaction and I got it”: Women, Homicide, and Capital Punishment in Jim Crow Florida

This article provides the first full study of capital and non-capital homicides committed by women in Florida in the interwar years and their treatment in the maturing Jim Crow criminal legal system of an active execution state. Over ninety percent of convicted female killers were African American, who were dramatically over-represented in homicide arrests and prosecutions. Unusually, two white women were sentenced to death in 1926 and 1927 in a period of political transformation, socio-economic dislocation, racial antagonism, and rising white lawbreaking. The capital conviction of an African American woman in 1929 created further unanticipated penal and clemency dilemmas for Florida governors, legal professionals, and pardon board members. The intersections of gender, race, class, violence, and punishment are explored through three main questions: Which women were accused and convicted of murder and manslaughter in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s and who were their victims? Why were these three women sentenced to death? What kinds of punishments and clemency did female killers receive? As the distinctive features of each capital murder case were often very similar to those resulting in prison terms or even acquittals, this state case study affirms that gendered capital punishment in the early twentieth century southern United States was defined largely by contingency and chance.

Racial Resentment and the Death Penalty

AbstractWe explore the annual number of death sentences imposed on black and white offenders within each US state from 1989 through 2017, with particular attention to the impact of aggregate levels of racial resentment. Controlling for general ideological conservatism, homicides, population size, violent crime, institutional and partisan factors, and the inertial nature of death sentencing behavior, we find that racial hostility translates directly into more death sentences, particularly for black offenders. Racial resentment itself reflects each state’s history of racial strife; we show powerful indirect effects of a history of lynching and of racial population shares. These effects are mediated through contemporaneous levels of racial resentment. Our findings raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the ultimate punishment, as they show its deep historical and contemporary connection to white racial hostility toward blacks.

A Catcher's Mask: Vincent Nava, Mexican Americans, and the Question of Race in Early Baseball

Abstract When Vincent Nava became the first Mexican American to play professional baseball in the United States in 1882, it forced the sport to reckon with the place of individuals who did not fit neatly into the Black/white color line it had recently imposed, questioning if an ethnically Latin player should participate in a profession designated by and for white men. For Nava and his team, baseball became a way to experiment with whiteness and its corresponding characteristics of masculinity, social mobility, and identity. Nava's experiences mirrored those of many other Mexican Americans in their pursuit of equality and whiteness as a strategy to deter racial hostilities and to gain access to segregated spaces. Nava's attempts to circumnavigate the color line and the continuous negotiation of his identity within the sport provide critical insights to help deepen our understanding of the fluidity of the race-making process, how non-white populations resisted oppression, and how sports can enrich those conversations.

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Neither Black Nor White: Colonial Myths, Irish Women, and Chinese Men’s Quest for Respectability

Settler colonies such as those in Australia during the nineteenth century were rife with myths. One myth in particular bears witness to a complex matrix of colonial relations, in which race and gender intersected in the definition of who could be counted as a “respectable” member of the settler population. “Neither black nor white,” the Chinese were invariably disliked by Aboriginal peoples. The present essay takes this myth of racial antagonism as the starting point for an analysis that disentangles the discursive strategies that white settlers adopted to assuage anxieties concerning their identity from the practices that Chinese migrants adopted to uphold their right to settle (in) Victoria. To do so, this essay first charts the liberal, British, imperial order that enabled the mass migration of Chinese men to Victoria, and then maps the counter discourses that were mobilized against the unbridled movement of those men. Second, it examines the measures that were taken to curtail Chinese arrivals (1854–1863) and, by using gender as heuristic, it deconstructs the concomitant myth that the Chinese were “sojourners.” Last, by approaching settler colonialism as a regime that capitalizes upon the aspirations of oppressed groups, this essay illustrates the ways in which ordinary Chinese men turned their characterization as passive recipients of violence into respectability by contraposing themselves against a third racialised and gendered population group: Irish women.

Dismissing the Staff: Domestic Servants and a Historic House in Dunedin, New Zealand

Whilst house museums are a relatively recent phenomenon in New Zealand, they nevertheless form an integral part not only of the history of New Zealand museums but also of New Zealand culture. As such, their present organisation reflects public historical consciousness in terms of perceptions and values that we have held and continue to hold. This article focuses on Olveston, a historic house in Dunedin,[i] as a case study of popular engagement with the past, and argues that a broader analysis of early twentieth-century social structure is required—one that includes the role of domestic servants in the household. It complements and supplements recent historical scholarship on house museums which argues that a more authentic and inclusive interpretation of the social relationship between employers and their servants—including class and racial antagonism—would lead to a greater connection with visitors.[ii] Initially, I will examine the pertinent literature on house museums in general and their servants in particular, as well as questions facing historic houses, moving finally to a detailed descriptive analysis of servants in Olveston.

Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in the Wooster Group's The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" A Record Album Interpretation

This essay is a critical narrative of an experience of listening to the Wooster Group’s The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation (2017). The performance is a verbatim recitation of a 1965 ethnographic recording by Bruce Jackson of African American men toasting and singing works songs just before Texas prisons were desegregated. African American actors on stage hear the album through earpieces and re-perform songs and toasts in real time as the LP plays on a turntable visible (but mostly inaudible) to the audience. Their interpretation “transmits” the album to an audience. The essay, continuing that work of transduction, draws from the psychoanalytic notion of “free association” in order to think through the possibilities and limitations of listening across race and gender. It argues that association is a reciprocal way of listening and making theatre. It is also a way of working through history (recorded and unrecorded) in the face of intractable frameworks of racial antagonism in the United States. The essay assembles and “associates” photographs, songs, and excerpts of interviews with the show’s makers, as well as pairing concepts from the literature of listening and the archive of Black sonic performance.

Chewing Revenge or Becoming Socially Desirable? Anger Rumination in Refugees and Immigrants Experiencing Racial Hostility: Latin-Americans in Spain.

This paper explores how real scenarios of racial hostility and discrimination trigger anger rumination tendencies in refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants (hereafter RASI). Undergoing discrimination often leads to the development of negative thoughts and behaviors, and to a loss of meaning and self-worth. This could make young RASI particularly vulnerable to being recruited and exploited by extremist groups as they search for identity. We developed a picture-elicitation instrument (the PEI) to provide professionals with a tool that could identify groups of RASI according to their reactions to discrimination scenarios and explore how racial hostility might influence withdrawal levels. The tool was applied with the Anger Rumination Scale (ARS_19) to 509 RASI of Latin American origin living in Spain. Four categories were identified, according to how RASI processed anger when observing discrimination scenarios: “Social desirability”, “Chewing”, “Grudge”, and “Vengeful”. Further analyses showed that the youngest (18–29) fell under the “Grudge” and “Vengeful” categories and revealed more despair and social isolation. This study makes a positive contribution by being the first to investigate the problem of anger rumination in RASI undergoing racial hostility. Moreover, it equips professionals with two tools that, once validated, may help plan and implement strategies to reduce the impact of hostility on both RASI and their host societies.