Racial Divisions Research Articles

Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice

Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice

Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

AbstractThis article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

Decolonising lifelong education: learning from J. Krishnamurti

ABSTRACT Jiddu Krishnamurti was a contemporary of the first non-European Nobel Laureate from Asia, Rabindranath Tagore. Their educational ideas and practices of reform were deeply informed by their own troubled experiences of schooling within the highly mechanised industrial model of education imported from colonial England. Both were school dropouts and devoted their adult life to building their own schools for holistic child and community development. Krishnamurti specifically focused on learning as a process of becoming a free-thinking individual outside of all kinds of social conditioning. Lifelong learning is a quest for freeing the self from social conditioning for societal transformation according to him. In this paper, we engage with the writings of J. Krishnamurti as an intrinsic quest for lifelong learning about the inner ‘self’ devoid of any conditioning based on national, racial, religious, ethnic, and other social divides, which trigger war and destruction. This paper presents Krishnamurti’s conception of lifelong learning intrinsically driven by a call for awakening wisdom, i.e. the intelligence to realise the interrelated nature of life on earth. This paper argues that according to Krishnamurti’s lived experience and writings, the whole movement of life is learning about ‘self’ and its integral relationship with other humans and Nature.

The Democratization of Educational Care: Spatial Imaginaries, Demographic Change, and Black Families Continued Educational Advocacy

ABSTRACT Too often, Black families’ educational agency has been marginalized in discourse on racial and spatial divides in US education. Indeed, Black families have persistently employed a range of tactics to access and create the educational resources their children deserve. Drawing from scholarship on spatial imaginaries, in this article, I track how Black families have developed democratic and communal outlooks on place-based resources such as public schools. I identify what I term democratization of educational care, or how some Black families’ educational advocacy for their own children broadly benefit all students. To demonstrate these dynamics, I share how Black families’ educational advocacy in a demographically changing suburb of Detroit, Michigan, uplifted the needs of their children, while also seeking to address larger systemic inequities. Implications suggest how school leaders can learn from the positioned knowledge and advocacy of Black families to foster educational equity and care in demographically changing school systems.

The Spatial Structure and Local Experience of Residential Segregation

This study examines the extent to which road connectivity and physical barriers—such as highways, railroad tracks, and waterways—structure spatial patterns of racial and ethnic residential segregation and shape how segregation is locally experienced by residents. Our focus is on physical barriers that are also social boundaries—features of the built environment that reduce physical connectivity and mark a social boundary between geographic areas. We measure residential segregation with attention to the proximity and road connectivity between locations, which allows us to identify areas where physical barriers mark a social boundary between geographic areas with different racial and ethnic compositions. Our approach integrates ethnographic observation of three such areas in Houston, Texas, to investigate residents' perceptions and local experience of social and spatial division. The results reveal that physical barriers are associated with heightened levels of ethnoracial segregation, and residents experience the barriers as symbolic markers of perceived distinctions between groups and physical impediments to social connection. Although barriers like highways, railroad tracks, and bayous are not inherently harbingers of ethnoracial segregation, our study demonstrates that physical barriers can provide the infrastructure for social boundaries and facilitate durable neighborhood racial divisions.

The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife

Geographical scholarship has, since the late 1990s, shown how infrastructure was central to the making of urban modernity and the metabolic transformation of socio-natures. Meanwhile, the work of Latin American scholars including Aníbal Quijano and Maria Lugones has focussed attention on the imbrications between modernity and coloniality, in particular through the international racial division of labour. Moving between these ideas, I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife. Finally, I explore how the coloniality of infrastructure directs our attention to race, labour and finance.

Myth and popular culture: Brough’s Victorian Burlesque Medea as a heterotopic cultural space

ABSTRACT While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political matters. Based on Brough’s political mindset, this paper reads his classical burlesque using a heterotopic perspective to analyse its potential to discuss Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions, even if it did it using music, puns, anachronisms and vulgar jokes.

Book Review: Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, UK/USA: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Geraldine Heng delves into the sensitive topic of race with knowledge, experience and understanding. She divides her grand overview—507 pages on this “enormous and immensely complex” (p. 2) subject—of the invention of the concept of race in the European Middle Ages in seven chapters, all well documented and highly intriguing. Race has been and will remain a difficult, debatable and disturbing notion as it has a profound and pervasive impact on our daily interactions as human beings. While many of us celebrate diversity and embrace the idea of people being part of one human race, we cannot think away the concept of racial division. And so, it is important to question where it comes from, how it has evolved and where it will lead us. History, as my parents, who are both historians, would say is one of the ways—if not THE way—to understand contemporary issues, mindful too of the fact that “race is not as easily recognizable for those who inhabit a majority race” (p. 1). Heng takes us back to the European Middle Ages, to premodernity, in order to give us an insight on how certain stereotypes and misunderstandings started. It is not necessary here to remind us how much race and all its, mostly, negative aspects has had diverse and often scary consequences. We just have to think of the cruelties meted out to many Black, Asian and other ‘racial’ groups throughout the world.

Out of Place

Abstract Because hotels are a microcosm of society, they offer a useful case study to explore social inequalities, including racial divisions. This article examines the experiences of African-Jamaican hotel workers and guests from independence in 1962 till the present to demonstrate the salience of Jamaica’s race and color relations. It argues that hotel workers and guests at times challenged the racialized practices that they experienced but more often refrained from doing so because of their socialization into a long-standing ethos of “Black is nuh good” and exposure to a nationalist ideology that projected a vision of racial harmony. The article also shows that through their responses to claims of racial discrimination in hotels, a variety of stakeholders, including tourist organizations, failed to challenge the island’s racial hierarchy which placed Whites on top, light-skinned Jamaicans in the middle, and dark-skinned Jamaicans at the bottom.

Making the Contemporary Art Market More Inclusive

While there is extensive scholarship about how the art world devises, secures, and furthers, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, “distinction,” in this article I connect the Bourdieuian notion of taste to the luxury act of collecting art in the twenty-first century. I contend that collecting art is a luxury experience that bifurcates class and racial divides. The very act of collecting is a cultural mechanism that furthers socio-economic division through a form of cultural gatekeeping that restricts access to the privileged few. This article initially looks at a group of mostly white collectors, individuals who come to the art world with privilege and capital that fosters possibilities and access, and then considers a group of Black collectors, individuals who may have the financial assets to purchase art yet do so to further a sense of pride, respect, joy, and what Christina Sharpe describes as a form of “wake work” within the Black community. Even though art collecting is an elitist activity predicated on financial resources and in-network expertise, a cohort of Black art collectors has attempted to break down the barriers around access that have delimited the art world. I assess these efforts to challenge exclusivity. I argue that a great deal of the cultural work that segregates race and class, through the machinations of collecting, occurs because of specific attitudes that keep resources within privileged realms as a result of restrictive practices, actions that define luxury consumption.

Racial Divisions and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Southern State Courts

The US criminal justice system is exceptionally punitive. We test whether racial heterogeneity is one cause, exploiting cross-jurisdiction variation in punishment severity in four Southern states. We estimate the causal effect of jurisdiction on arrest outcomes using a fixed effects model that incorporates extensive charge and defendant controls. We validate our estimates using defendants charged in multiple jurisdictions. Consistent with a model of ingroup bias in electorate preferences, the relationship between local severity and Black population share follows an inverted U-shape. Within states, defendants are 27–54 percent more likely to be incarcerated in “peak” heterogeneous jurisdictions than in homogeneous jurisdictions. We estimate that confinement rates and race-based confinement rate gaps would fall by 15 percent if all jurisdictions adopted the severity of homogeneous jurisdictions within their state. (JEL H76, J15, K42)

The Value of Education Between Two African American Male Populations in a Rural Southern Community

This study identified perceptions of education by low performing and college track African American males in a rural town in Southern Kentucky. Through the lens of Critical Race Theory and Symbolic Interactionism, the researchers explored how 16 young men value a secondary and postsecondary education. Selected by their administrator at two high schools, the males were identified as college track or low performing. The findings revealed that both groups identify racial relations as a barrier to educational achievement; however, college track males believed education would assist in overcoming racial divides. Additional findings highlight a difference in perception based upon the presence of a male role model, the home environment, and the felt need for survival. Based on the findings, recommendations include model programs and collaborations among societal groups within the young age; a need for male social programs that foster and encourage positivity throughout a young male’s life; and the need for local resources to assist and encourage young African American males to pursue a postsecondary education.

Racialized geographies of housing financialization

Financial violence is racial violence: geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the death-dealing abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems. Rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, producing life-giving geographies of housing requires bringing collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.

Experiencing the Civil Rights Movement Together: How Two Schools Bridged the Racial and Cultural Divide

This study explores an innovative Civil Rights program, one that brings together students from two Midwestern high schools, a majority Black public charter school and a majority white Jewish private suburban school. Students participating in this program culminate their study of the Civil Rights Movement by boarding a chartered bus and traveling together for eight days through the Deep South. During the eight-day journey, students visit seminal Civil Rights locations and learn about the Civil Rights Movement first-hand. This unique experiential learning opportunity resulted in students gaining valuable knowledge about the Civil Rights Movement, but it also challenged students in ways that they did not anticipate as tensions emerged regarding differences in cultural backgrounds and experiences. Ultimately, these rather unexpected challenges resulted in students learning about themselves and each other.

Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa

In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.

Crack and Criminal Justice in Canton, Ohio, 1987–1999: “The Drug Problem has Created a Monster”

AbstractThe rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s propelled the war on drugs. The experience of Canton, Ohio, shows how the response to crack solidified mass incarceration. A declining industrial city of 84,000 people in northeast Ohio with deep-seated racial divides, it was overwhelmed by aggressive, enterprising crack dealers from outside the city. In response, politicians and residents united behind the strategy of incessant arrests and drastic prison sentences. The law-enforcement offensive worsened conditions while pursuing African Americans at blatantly disproportionate rates, but few people engaged in reframing the drug problem. Instead, a punitive citizenry positioned punishment as the principal remedy. The emergency foreclosed on more comprehensive assessments of the city’s tribulations, while the criminal justice system emerged as the paramount institution.

Unintended Consequences: the U.S. Postal Service Conundrum of Service, Business, Labor, and Politics

This paper examines the 2020 turmoil surrounding the U.S. Postal Service—a crisis not seen since roughly 209,000 employees struck its predecessor the U.S. Post Office Department in March 1970, which led to passage of the Postal Reorganization Act that summer and the inauguration of the USPS in July 1971. The 2020 conflict was not merely rooted in the economic disaster following the COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact stretches back to the 2009 postal financial crisis. I argue that these crises are an unintended consequence of the compromise formation of the USPS as a hybrid government agency/business. Debates over whether public or private postal service too often leave out conflict over the rights of postal labor. The origins of that debate lie in the former USPOD’s management of labor using “business methods” that included authoritarian discipline, contingent workers to cut costs, and creating racial divisions among employees.

Examining the Relationship Between Resources and the Likelihood to Participate in Formal Volunteering in Post-apartheid South Africa

We examine the relationship between likelihood to volunteer and a range of human capital, social capital, religious capital and ubuntu variables in South Africa seven years after the official end of apartheid. Using the 2001 World Values Survey we find that education is positively associated with volunteering, but employment has a negative association with volunteering when including controls for wealth and income. Religiosity has a strong positive association with volunteering and a broad base, cutting across the socio-economic and racial divides. This suggest that religious congregations in collaboration with other sectors could be a vehicle to increase access to volunteer opportunities for those who lack the status to take part in other volunteering activities.

Affirming or contesting white innocence? Anti-racism frames in grassroots activists’ accounts

ABSTRACT Although anti-racism is recognized as a heterogeneous phenomenon, there are few studies that provide analytical tools to grasp the differences between anti-racisms in more detail. This study contributes to the analytical discussion on anti-racism through an analysis of grassroots activists’ views on their anti-racism. The data, interviews with 46 grassroots anti-racist activists based in Finland, is explored through a frame analysis. This article argues that meaning-making on racism and anti-racism is tied to conceptions of racial space. The argument is presented through an empirical typology of three anti-racist frames: defence, recognition and redistribution. Distinguishing between the defence, recognition, and redistribution frames enables an understanding of how anti-racisms assume a supposedly “race-neutral” space of white innocence and contest distinct dimensions of racial divides.

Joseph V. Simone: In Memoriam (1935–2021)

![][1] He was a poet. A prodigious writer. A giant in the world of pediatric oncology. Those of us in the field of cancer research, as well as patients around the globe, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Joseph “Joe” Simone. A first-generation American who was born amid the