Racial Context Research Articles

‘Frae Land o’ Lakes to land o’ Cakes’: curling, Scotland, Sweden, and historical undercurrents

ABSTRACT This article uses curling to explore the relationship between Scotland and Sweden during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A long-term formal and (after the Union of 1707) informal relationship existed between the nations, particularly with regard to the Thirty Years’ War and Jacobitism, both of which established a Scottish presence in Gothenburg. Curling entered Sweden through this pipeline in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, with Sweden's first known club, Bohuslän Curling Club (Bohuslänska Curlingklubben), formed at Uddevalla in 1852 by the Thorburn-Macfie family and associates; the family ran an industrial concern selling oats for horses powering London's expanding transport network. Curling remained confined to Uddevalla until the first Nordic Games (Nordiska Spelen) in 1901, whereby the sport became part of a programme emphasising elite ideas of sport. Later iterations of the Games would feature Scottish curlers. In the 1920s and 1930s, semi-regular trips were also arranged between Scotland and Sweden by the Royal Caledonian Curling Club (RCCC) and the Swedish Curling Union (Svensk Curlingförbundet); here, while the game was placed within a contemporary royalist, martial, and racial context by RCCC and public officials, reference points recalled the pre-Union relationship between the two nations as pertained to the Thirty Years’ War.

모범적인 소수민, 아시아계 미국 남성성, 그리고 『미국 출생 중국인』

This essay interrogates the model minority discourse and explores its counter-discourse in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). Paying special attention to the historical context of racialization of Asian American men in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this essay sets out to investigates how such literary characters as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan have developed American cultural biases against Asian American men. Pointing out that toxic racist narratives are intertwined with the model minority myth, this essay goes on to examine how Yang’s graphic novel challenges the model minority discourse of Asian American masculinity. American Born Chinese braids three different protagonists, each corresponding to a distinct narrative medium: the Monkey King (Chinse folklore), Jin (ethnic buildungsroman), and Danny/Chin-Kee (TV sitcom). My essay probes how all of the three stories examine the model minority myth and its attendant racialization of Asian American men. In doing so, I conclude that American Born Chinese asserts the conversion of the model minority into the “Asian American” as a new alternative discourse for Asian American men.

Chapter 5: Establishing Teacher Allies through Critical Multicultural Coursework

Background Contemporary dominant discourses surrounding (un)documented migration in the United States are commonly divided into two polarized frames: those immigrants who are hard workers seeking a better life, and others who are border-crossing criminals. For teachers in the Southeast, developing an understanding of immigrants becomes critically important as new demographic trends and anti-immigration rhetoric have resulted in the implementation of restrictive laws, policies, and practices. In this article, we move beyond pedagogical strategies that address students’ linguistic needs and explore what teachers know and say about immigration, along with what they know about undocumented and DACAmented students. Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which exposure to counternarratives of undocumented or DACAmented youth and families altered the frames in which teachers viewed immigration and undocumented and DACAmented immigrants. Research Design The researchers used qualitative methods to collect a series of narratives in the form of I-essays from 71 preservice teachers over four semesters. The narratives were then used as a tool of communication in exploring two research questions: (1) What were teachers’ perceptions of undocumented immigrants, given the racialized context in the Southeast? (2) How did counternarratives presented in multiple formats challenge the dominant essentialized view of undocumented immigrants? Narrative data from participants were analyzed using an inductive analysis approach. Findings The findings support how the use of critical conversations around immigration and exposure to the lives of youth and families through the use of film and narratives can support the development of teachers as undocumented allies. Conclusions We argue that preservice (ESL) teachers need to be knowledgeable about immigration laws, statuses, policies, and practices in order to be prepared to serve their students’ needs and to aid them in mapping out alternative routes/resources. For our participants, their views were challenged to reflect a deeper understanding of immigration, particularly around what it means to be an undocumented immigrant in an area of the United States that has experienced new immigrant growth. This study has significant implications for teacher preparation programs and further research.

White Racial Literacy and Racial Dexterity

AbstractThis essay presents racial literacy and racial dexterity as educational desiderata, especially for white students. Racial literacy is defined as the ability to recognize and interpret racial nuances in real social engagements. Racial dexterity is defined as the ability to engage successfully with diverse racial contexts. After defining racial literacy and racial dexterity, Kevin Harrelson analyzes these skills by contrasting them with racial naivety and racial anxiety. He argues that transitioning from naivety to literacy, and from anxiety to dexterity, requires treating cross‐racial interactions as key learning events.

The role of intersectionality in exploring the asymmetrical effects of demographic dissimiliarity on employees

By linking intersectionality to relational demography, this study examines the effects of different gender and racial contexts on overall satisfaction with job and organization among four employee groups in U.S. federal agencies: minority women, minority men, White women, and White men. As opposed to previous research that treated each demographic identity as an independent category, this study considers the intersection of privileged and marginalized identities to help illuminate varying organizational experiences among different employee groups. The analyses find that all four employee groups react negatively to an increased minority percentage and positively to an increased female percentage in their organizations. In general, Whites are affected by gender and racial dissimilarity to a greater extent than minorities. However, the extent to which gender and racial dissimilarity have significant impacts differs between Whites and minority women, but not between White women and minority men. This study discusses the implications of these findings and calls for a consideration of intersectionality in relational demography research.

White, Green futures

ABSTRACT Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritized communities of color are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of environmental crises and the solutions proposed to remedy them. The participation and subsequent erasure of non-White youth activists and organizers within environmental sustainability struggles, and their subsequent erasure in global media coverage on climate activism has complicated any neat hierarchy of single concerns facing humanity. How is it that White and Western climate activists come to be the faces of the global youth climate movement? This essay examines the salience of race to the education and framing of environmental and sustainability efforts. It suggests that the separation of environmental concerns from the socio-political (and thus racial) contexts that produce them not only further marginalizes the contributions of non-White activists and the communities that they represent, but also engenders a violently White, and thus narrow, vision of a global, Green future.

Racialized social class work: Making sense of inequality in South Africa during the COVID-19 lockdown

ABSTRACT COVID-19 lockdowns are happening in almost all societies across the globe, but in South Africa the lockdown is occurring in one of the most unequal societies in the world and in the socio-historic racial context of post-apartheid. Using this extreme context, we ask what the effects of the lockdown are on how people do class work, that is, make sense of and enact their privilege and inequality. Through interviews with diverse participants and using thematic analysis, we explored two main research questions: (1) Is the lockdown a social class shock event prompting class work? and (2) Does the class work prompted by the lockdown intersect with race such that class work takes different forms based on the race of the actor? We highlight the ways in which findings from our South African context may generalize to Africa and beyond, and end with practical suggestions for organizations, to continue the perspective-taking begun by pandemic lockdowns.

Reading with Minor Feelings: Racialized Emotions and Children’s (Non)agency in Judges 10–12

Abstract In this article, I read the story of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 10–12 within the contemporary context of racism and discrimination in the U.S. Particularly focusing on the affective and emotional dimensions of the lived experiences in racially/ethnically minoritized communities, I engage the biblical story with what poet and writer Cathy Park Hong calls, “minor feelings.” Reading the biblical narrative alongside Hong’s crudely personal—and yet pervasively common—accounts of Asian American racial trauma, I critically reflect on the notion of childhood agency, and suggest that the Western conception of agency neither reflects nor promotes the lives of the children in minority groups. In turn, I ask: What if we moved away from the traditional notions of agency and voice in our critical works, and, instead, turned towards emotions, sensations, and other embodied experiences as a site of interpretation, critique, and movement for social change?

The Digital Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Black Writing: Response to Genealogies of Black Modernity

Abstract This response to the forum on the nineteenth-century genealogies of Black modernity explores how nineteenth-century racial and publication contexts continue to shape the digital circulation and digital afterlife of authors. A born-digital publication of a work by George Moses Horton reveals how nineteenth-century racial paratexts re-emerge in metadata and algorithmic capitalism. When Horton is hailed by a data marketing company seeking to claim him as an asset, when his writing is routed through or claimed by white editors and (re)printers (myself included), and when his work is circulated in networks and spaces far beyond his own, the nineteenth-century conditions that structured Horton’s life and writing are revealed to shape his digital afterlife.

The Black Lives Matter Movement: A Call to Action for Couple and Family Therapists.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Local racial context, campaign messaging, and public political behavior: A congressional campaign field experiment

Local racial contexts influence public opinion and voting behaviors. This paper argues that differences in community racial demographics also change public political behavior and influence the effectiveness of different campaign appeals to change public political behaviors of white Americans. Using data from an experiment run by a congressional primary campaign, I examine the responses of white Republicans to display a yard sign of a white Republican running against a Latino Republican. Consistent with theories of racial threat, whites in Latino neighborhoods were more likely to be willing to post yard signs. Moreover, the results also show that the effectiveness of different campaign appeals varies by neighborhood racial context. These findings show that racial diversity affects the public political behaviors of white Americans and, more importantly, changes the effectiveness of different campaign appeals.

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

Stage Irish and Boorish Boers

Although Olive Schreiner features in most literary criticism as a champion of the disenfranchised, her portrayal of ethnic differences is inflected by transatlantic racial politics. The Irish and Boers in The Story of an African Farm conform to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of race and citizenship not only in southern Africa but also in the United States. Schreiner’s interest in Emerson and Carlyle, her dislike of rigid religious doctrines, and her vocal feminism account for the one-dimensionality of her Irish and Boer characters in her early work. This essay describes the enlarged geography of Bonaparte Blenkins – the influences that place the Irish–South African connections in Schreiner’s writing within, among other things, the context of racialization of the Irish in the late nineteenth-century United States.

The Steel Pan and Decolonizing Mental Health

The Steel Pan and Decolonizing Mental Health

Racial Context and Political Support for California School Taxes

ObjectiveTo determine how racial context influences school districts’ ability to raise taxes and whether it is mitigated by racial context.MethodPanel regression models are fit to a data set of 293 parcel tax measures and 967 California school districts from 1997 to 2010, including data on the racial composition of enrolled students, the district population, and the school board, with controls for features of the policy and the social, political, and economic context.ResultsSchool boards were least likely to propose new parcel taxes where there was a high percentage of Latinx students or a large gap between the percentage of white students and the percentage of white residents 65 and older. Once a tax was proposed, these and other measures of racial context had no measurable influence on the propensity of voters to approve it. Policy design influenced outcomes, but not by mitigating racial context.ConclusionRacial context affects whether school districts propose new taxes.

Hate in the Context of Oppression

Hate in the Context of Oppression

Unequal Displacement: Gentrification, Racial Stratification, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia

Drawing from sociological theory and research on residential mobility and neighborhood stratification, which primarily explain urban decline and persistent segregation, the authors propose a framework for examining residential displacement in the context of gentrification. Using this framework, this study assesses how gentrification shapes whether and where disadvantaged residents move, using a unique large-scale consumer credit database of residents in Philadelphia from 2002 to 2014. The authors find that gentrification’s consequences on the residential mobility patterns of financially disadvantaged residents are unequally distributed by the racial contexts in which gentrification is taking place. The authors argue that mechanisms of racial stratification that govern both the valuation of neighborhoods and neighborhood sorting patterns explain these differences. They also find that gentrification is indirectly displacing disadvantaged residents over time. Their analysis demonstrates how gentrification in the 21st century is fundamentally structured by racial stratification and reconfiguring the urban landscape and residential sorting in ways that exacerbate neighborhood inequality by race and class.

A Bioarchaeological Study of African American Health and Mortality in the Post-Emancipation U.S. South

After emancipation, most African Americans remained tethered to agricultural economies, while others migrated to cities seeking better opportunities. Although bioarchaeologists have made significant interventions in researching people of African descent, there are relatively few published comparative studies that address their morbidity and mortality after slavery. This study compares the bioarchaeological evidence for rural and urban southern United States populations to address disparities in health and longevity. It considers the biological effects of racism, including the health impacts of poverty, disease, and malnourishment. Although historians and demographers argue that urban life was especially detrimental to health, the results of this research suggest greater complexity in African American well-being. Whereas urban adults had higher midlife mortality and reduced longevity compared to their rural counterparts, both rural and urban children experienced poor health. Rural child mortality and morbidity varied significantly, suggesting differences in diet and disease exposure across rural communities. With regard to gender, rural and urban women died at younger ages than men. This disparity in mortality is partly attributed to black women's working and reproductive lives within the context of racism and gender inequality.

Review: Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes

Review: Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes

How the sheng became a harp

ABSTRACT In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instruments – including accordions, harmoniums, and parlour organs – became hugely popular throughout Europe. Although these instruments relied on a novel acoustical technology borrowed from an ancient Chinese mouth organ known in the West since the seventeenth century, instrument makers and music critics alike consistently described the sounds they produced using ideas native to a Romantic tradition of affective discourse around windblown strings and spiritual transcendence. This essay traces the European reception of free reeds and interrogates the conditions under which keyboard instruments based on a Chinese technology came to be heard as embodying the properties of a very different instrument: the Aeolian harp. Although various agendas collaborated in obscuring the East Asian origins of the free-reed technology, it seems highly probable that changing political and racial contexts – most notably around 1830 – directly affected the ways in which the reeds were both heard and understood. Studying the appropriation of free reeds by the West as well as the technology’s postcolonial afterlives, I argue, can help us better understand the conditions under which sound objects are assimilated or rejected in changing cultural settings.