Racial Blindness Research Articles

Review: Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Review: <i>Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times</i>, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Earthly births

The aim of this article is straightforward: to present two clarifications of Hannah- Arendt’s seasoned political concept of natality and to conclude by positioning this new account of natality within the context of the climate crisis. In many ways, this concluding section, where natality is read as a form of historical emancipation, hinges on the degree to which I succeed in reframing existing conversations around natality. In the first instance I submit an ‘earthly reading’ of natality before turning to discuss the historical implications of this ‘re-earthed’ natality as enacting a form of weak messianism akin to that of Walter Benjamin. Rethinking natality in this way, I present an account of Arendt’s work as always already inclined towards the issues brought to light in the climate crisis. And so, while the forms of emancipation and redemption that I locate in natality may already be commonly read in natal actions, which break spontaneously into the world and recall the originality of appearance, I nevertheless contend that its political implications reach new grounds with the revisions that I offer in the body of my article. By way of conclusion, I join critical Anthropocene theorists in contending with the ‘slow violence’, ‘willed racial blindness’ and ‘crises of the imagination’ that the climate crisis elicits. This is the setting that sits behind my intervention into natality and, in turn, it is this setting that I suggest can be illuminated through the weak messianism of a ‘re-earthed’ natality. Arguing for Arendt’s latent consideration of the earth, I hope to expose the ruined fragments of the past that shape the present crisis and gesture towards their radical redemption. If I succeed in showing that natality can be used as a resource to rethink both the prehistory and the present of the climate crisis then I will have achieved a reorientation in thinking about Arendt’s politics. Which is merely to say that I will have revealed concerns for the earth as intrinsic to natal actions and, in turn, their appearance as messianic disruptions on the earth. Prompted by the need to think critically about the historical appearance of the climate crisis whilst retaining, at the same time, the injunction to think expansively about future action – that is, as not determined exclusively by the violence of the climate crisis – this article defends a reconsideration of natality as a form of critical historical intervention. Formulating this reconstruction is then ‘operationalised’ in the concluding section where I invoke its revolutionary force in remapping the history of the climate crisis.&#x0D;

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

Racial or Spatial Categorisations? A Focus on the French Setting

The hypothesis developed in the paper is that the relation between race and space, under-explored in philosophy, is a powerful theoretical instrument for understanding racial injustices and can be used to renew racial categorisation in a more critical, transformative manner. It argues that only constructivism, in its 'interactive constructionism' version (Hacking 1999), can make sense of both concepts in a relevant way for political theory, and provide a general critical frame to study the relation between both concepts, thereby replying to the powerful arguments of racial scepticism. After specifying what such a position entails for the 'race' concept, the paper argues that 'space', itself conceived in a constructionist perspective, is a core element of current referents of 'race' in our folk conceptions. It shows that France, despite its pretence of racial blindness, is not a counter-example, but rather reinforces the hypothesis. Hence, space should be more thoroughly reinvestigated at an epistemological and theoretical level in exploring our racial thinking.

Teaching Racial Literacy: Challenges and Contributions of Multiculturalism

Building on a critical post-colonial multicultural perspective and on whiteness studies that go beyond recognising cultural diversity towards challenging narratives that construct and exclude the other, the present article outlines impacts and challenges of the enactment of a recent Brazilian government educational law to combat racism in education, which makes it compulsory for schools to include black African history and culture in the curriculum. It analyses the underpinnings and the challenges within that policy. The article suggests that contradictory discourses, such as racial blindness, essentialisation of race identities, and the use of miscegenation as ‘evidence’ of racial democracy, are powerful lenses and cultural signifiers that have deeply polarised the way race has been addressed in Brazil. The study is relevant comparatively in that it provides illustrations of an official national anti-racist pedagogic experience taken as a case study, in the context of a highly inter-racial society, suggesting that anti-racist pedagogies are more likely to have positive impacts when they take into account cultural hybridisations and the provisionary nature of identity constructions.

Postwar Liberalism, Close Reading, and “You”: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The five hundred pages that intervene between the Prologue and Epilogue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) are explicitly concerned with the self-definition of a speaking (and writing) “I,” a ...

The Truth That Will Set Us All Free: An Uncertain History of Memorials to Indigenous Australians

Aborigines and other Australians have not met with amity. Memorials to the Aboriginal people of Australia are not common and some of the more prominent are regularly damaged. Eddies of past tempests slap disturbingly at modern day memorials thousands of kilometres and several generations removed from the eye of furious storms. This article traces a difficult story of what seems at first sight to be blind racism, at a second sight, a rampant colonialism, and at a more reflective third, perhaps, the economy of the pastoralist and the farmer in deadly disharmony to that of the hunter gatherer. Whatever the origins, the consequences of conflict endure for centuries.

Covert Racism in the USA and Globally

AbstractCovert racism, born out of imperialist needs to maximize profit at the expense of racialized others, stands shielded by institutions, culture, stereotypical assumptions, and tradition. Whereas overt racism assumed blatant and insidious forms, covert racism hides behind the façade of ‘politeness’, political correctness and expediency. Racially coded words and calls for racial blindness obfuscate the reality of this subtle, subversive, and often hidden form of racism. Covert racism, just like its twin overt racism, is neither innocent nor harmless. The scars of covert racism, often seen in terms of increased levels of disease, negative sanctions, inadequate information, and lost opportunities – serve to continually victimize racial nonelites.

Passing, Natural Selection, and Love's Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan

Camouflage is the blending of the animal into the pattern, the environment; it is a search for invisibility. . . .With men too, invisibility is an ever recurring desire. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa The trope of invisibility has provided a central motif in the literary representations of racial minorities. From Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), the metaphor of invisibility has come to symbolize the consequences of racial blindness; it is thus designed to alert us to the repercussions of social and legal exclusion in US history. Yet the nature of racial blindness—and its antidote, social visibility—has never been as simple as the binary terms imply. Involving a restless and often vexing interplay between perception and projection, recognition and disavowal, the values of racial visibility and invisibility can only emerge in relation to one another even as such appearance of meaning almost always immediately problematizes the signification against which it has defined itself. “White visibility,” for instance, relies on the invisibility and assumed normality of whiteness, while “black invisibility” acquires its shape precisely through its very visibility as difference. As I argue in “Ralph Ellison and the Politics of Melancholia,” the central conceit of invisibility in Invisible Man embodies not the opposition between seeing and not-seeing but a symptom of the dynamic of mutual projection structuring race relations in this country. Thus the rhetoric of “becoming visible” that has energized so much of progressive racial politics often elides the contradictions underpinning social visibility and remains ineffective in the face of the phenomenological, social, and psychic paradoxes inhering in what it means to be visible.