Racial Divisions Research Articles

Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking

Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking

To Return to St. Louis: Reading the Intimacies of the Heartland of U.S. Empire through “The Dogeater”

ABSTRACT This article revisits the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as a primal scene of Philippine subjection to U.S. imperialism with a queer Filipinx Midwestern sensibility. While the Filipinx-as-dogeater trope is ubiquitous, I argue that such a signification is regional in form. Reading the Fair’s legacy through white American author Jesse Lee Kercheval’s little-known short story “The Dogeater,” I illustrate the domestic routes of U.S. empire and challenge the idea of diasporic Filipinxs being out of place in regional narratives of nation. In so doing, I reimagine empire as a technology of forced intimacy rather than simply racial division.

Reproductive Slavery: Thirteenth Amendment Reflections on Abortion, Surrogacy, and Race Selection

This essay was solicited for a symposium on new directions in scholarship about the Thirteenth Amendment. It analyzes controversies over abortion, surrogacy, and race selection through the lens of reproductive slavery. I argue that abortion bans are vulnerable to Thirteenth Amendment challenge: namely, that criminalizing abortion access subjects women to “involuntary servitude.” Pregnancy and childbirth aren’t as coercive when a woman agrees in advance to carry a child for someone else. Surrogacy may not be voluntary in the meaningful sense that gives its performance moral force—but it's usually willed freely enough to carry constitutional force for Thirteenth Amendment purposes. Finally are reproductive mix-ups in which fertility patients end up with a baby of a different racial background. Negligence suits in these cases evoke the racial division and hierarchy that animate what the U.S. Supreme Court has called the “badges and incidents” of slavery. I analyze the Thirteenth Amendment implications for each of these three contexts in detail. I conclude with the following reflections: Appeals to reproductive slavery promise to break new ground across these unyielding landscapes. But that analogy can do more bad than good when it's enlisted to resolve hard moral questions by comparison to one of the few practices that almost everyone—even people who rarely see eye-to-eye—can agree is unequivocally evil. The enormity of slavery’s injustice was so plain, so profound, that modern comparisons struggle to escape its absolute wrongs. Imperfect metaphors risk insulting the memory of enslaved person and crowding out prospects for good-faith conversation and practical compromise.

Teaching difference: global citizenship education within an elite single-sex context

ABSTRACT This article employs the concept of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ to examine what students at an elite school in Australia are taught about working with and across difference through global citizenship education within a single-sex classroom model. The authors explore the ways in which larger social cohesion agendas are reinforced through the meanings and practices of global citizenship education to facilitate increased interactions between different groups around a set of shared values and common practices. The authors illustrate how this approach to global citizenship education and the school’s single-sex classroom model both maintain racial, ethnic and gendered divisions within the student body. Within this schooling context, students are not provided the kinds of instructional spaces that promote interdependence and habitual engagement necessary for productively working with and across difference.

“Loose production but great cause!!”: a response to the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno

ABSTRACTThe 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno is a nice case study of how interactions between the academy and American Indian tribes demonstrate the persistent challenges of bridging our nation's entrenched cultural and racial divisions. The unspoken tensions between our tribal communities and our country's corporate/government/higher education institutions continue to result in individual spokespeople having to account for and speak for the entire vastness of our Native American populations.

Connecting Physical and Racial Divides: The Alaska Highway

Connecting Physical and Racial Divides: The Alaska Highway

Journeying toward Transformative Teaching in the Age of Alternative Facts and Re-Ascendant Ethnic and Racial Prejudice

Background We are at a historical juncture that is punctuated by the rise of white nationalism, an exacerbation of racial divisions and tensions, an uptick in hate crimes, and bullying increasingly targeting immigrant youth, all of which, in the current political and cultural climate, have often been legitimized through a recourse to “alternative facts.” However, the current historical moment in the United States is also marked by a postmodern ethos, which is often taken up by the public in a fragmentary manner, highlighted by a general sense of incredulity regarding any form of knowledge. At the same time, the fuller, ethical context of postmodernism complicates how educators may pedagogically address and respond to the tensions and conflict that filter over into the university classroom from the social strife and injustices evident in the society at large. The ethical context of postmodernism warns against changing hearts and minds with a proliferation of the “right” facts assumed to be devoid of attachments of value. It also warns us to be vigilant against the foreclosures, reductions, and exclusions that occur when one draws on metanarratives and universals to mobilize against injustice. Purpose We explore what it means pedagogically, for teacher educators in predominantly white institutions, to be situated at a historical juncture that calls out for some form of social advocacy on their part to combat the rise in the politicization of truth and xenophobic and racist sentiment, but are simultaneously compelled to keep in mind the ethical lessons of postmodernism. Research Design We utilize critical phenomenological analysis intertwined with a narrative accounting of both authors’ classroom experiences as they attempt to engage college students at a predominantly white university with issues of racism, white privilege, and marginalization. We analyze and reflect on the mixed reactions of our students to a presentation on teaching in a diverse world, given by one of the authors to the other author's class of pre-service teachers. Conclusions/Recommendations For teaching that may facilitate white students’ ability to become reflective of their positionality as structured through whiteness and its attendant privileges, it is important to envision pedagogical work taking place within environments that can address not only students’ cognitive capacities but also the white body schema, which operates at a pre-reflective level. Educators may refrain from reducing white students to reified categories of whiteness by cultivating a disposition of wonder that may allow them to understand whiteness through the lens of emergent realities rather than substantive, ontological forces.

Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser

Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser

Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”

ABSTRACT This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video “This Is America,” artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of “appropriate” kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst’s own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

“Not a Figure in the Past”

AbstractThis article uses the racial divisions encouraged by European Zionism in early-state Israel among European and Middle Eastern Jews as a point of departure to explore racialization and gendering among Iraqi Jewish women during the years 1941–51 from a sociopolitical standpoint. Restricting itself to politics given this standpoint, a study of Jewish women’s participation in the illegal Zionist and Communist movements of Iraq reveals that racializations, rather than a single racialization, occurred—a racial reality no other scholarship provides for Iraq’s Jewish community. Because Jewish women participating in these movements contended with patriarchal organizing structures, it is necessary to set apart the racial logics palpable in their articulations. This argument rests on primary sources in the form of three memoirs from the Iraqi Jewish women Tikva Agassi, Shoshana Levy, and Shoshana Almoslino, as well as Zionist women’s letters, a biographical dictionary of Communist participation, and British Foreign Office documents.

The Limitations of Legalism and Identity Labels in Post-apartheid South Africa Africa

The roots of identity crisis in post-apartheid South Africa are embedded in systemic failures reflected in the design and content of various legal documents, including application forms for registering a birth, school or university entrance, acquiring an identity document, registering a marriage, employment, and a death. A key requirement in the forms is that individuals identify themselves, based on race, gender, and nationality. Consequently, the information collected through these forms reproduces racial divisions and recreates old identities of the apartheid and colonial past—namely Blackness, Whiteness, Nationalism, or Otherness. Many such identities; including gender, created through these legal documents are distorted, and, therefore, misrepresent the actual descriptions of who the individuals are. As a result, individuals are forced to identify themselves, based on laws passed during apartheid. This article explores the identity crisis in South Africa, where identity labelling seems to be particularly highly racialised and ethnicised as a result of the social classification of humans according to race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality, applied in the colonial and apartheid era. By conducting a meta-analysis of application forms for the registration forms for births, deaths, marriages, school and university entrance, as well as acquiring national identity documents, the article argues that the current legalistic identity imaginings in South Africa are anachronistic to the ways in which individuals might otherwise want to self-identify.

Bodies on the Line

In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the crisis of work and of care—of production and social reproduction—to new extremes. This summer, unemployment reached record levels. Essential workers were called on not only to tend to the sick, but to deliver groceries, collect trash, and drive buses—to perform tasks that have always been hard and undervalued, but now entail a health risk every time you clock on. Capitalist society depends on this essential work—carried out by nursing assistants, transportation workers, and caretakers—and its dangers are distributed unevenly, across divisions of race, class, and gender. For decades, socialist feminists have brought these realities to our attention; the pandemic has made their insights undeniable. For many, whether they are nurses in hospitals or parents trying to work full time while also educating children or caring for dependents, the labor of maintaining and sustaining life—paid and unpaid, public and private—is becoming too much to bear.

Contesting Constitutional Multi-Culturalism in Tanzania: The Trials of Christopher Mtikila

Conflicts over the permissible limits on speech that weaponizes racial, religious, and ethnic identities are a global phenomenon. Tanzania’s constitutional and legal debates over this matter are a microcosm of a global dialogue. Since the early years of independence, Tanzania has imposed constitutional and legal restrictions on speech that speech that espouses ethnic, religious, or racial divisions. These restrictions are the surviving portion of founder-President Julius Nyerere’s multi-faceted effort to construct a multi-cultural political environment. Tanzania’s early leaders were deeply aware that ethnic rivalries had come to cominate the political life of other countries in their region. They were determined that Tanzania should become and remain the non-Sudan, non-Rwanda, and non-Kenya of Eastern Arica. They did so by introducing constitutional and restrictions on ethnic political appears into the country’s constitution and electoral laws. Since independence, each iteration of the Tanzanian Constitution has forbidden the registration of political parties that base their electoral appeal on these forms of speech. Tanzania has also embedded these limitations in its electoral laws, which limit candidacy for electoral office, at both national and local levels, to candidates nominated by registered parties. These limitations have given rise to more than twenty years of constitutional litigation. This article presents a study of the key constitutional cases. The methodology of this article is a close examination of a series of trials in which Tanzania’s constitution and electoral laws have been subjected to litigation. Four trials are of utmost significance: two, before the Tanzanian High Court; one, before the Tanzania Court of Appeal, and one before the African Court of Human and People’s Rights. Despite adverse court rulings, Tanzania’s political leaders appear determined to retain the restrictive portions of their constitution and electoral system; these remain in place to the present time.

The Parent as Citizen: Multiracialism in Jane Lazarre’s "Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons"

The term “multiracialism” describes a paradigm shift in U.S. racial discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century, wherein a centuries-old taboo of miscegenation is reinterpreted as new democratizing potential for the nation at large. Expanding insights into the ways in which affirmations of White motherhood in public spheres have been central to the rise of multiracialism, this article investigates Jane Lazarre’s "Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness" (1996 / 2016) to highlight the publication of memoirs as one mode of asserting White parental ties to Black children. I argue that memoirists like Lazarre draw on the culturally resonant script of the American Puritan conversion narrative to articulate and valorize White mothering across the color line as a site of intimacy that enables anti-racist politicization: “I am no longer white. […] I am a person of color now” (Lazarre 135). My analysis scrutinizes the terms on which Lazarre mobilizes this experience as a didactic model for a shared connection between citizens across racial divides. In the process, I examine how the color line becomes imagined as the nation’s contemporary frontier and ask if Lazarre’s ambivalent rhetoric of conversion might further relate to her Jewish positionality as well as interracial heterosexuality in larger historical and affective dynamics of U.S. citizenship.

A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River by Amahia K. Mallea

Reviewed by: A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River by Amahia K. Mallea Brian Frehner (bio) A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River By Amahia K. Mallea. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. Pp. 358. The story of Kansas City's growth and its need for water have often been a story about racial and class inequality. The connection between water and inequality is so embedded in the city's history that public officials are, at this very moment, meeting to rename a fountain that serves as the centerpiece of a popular commercial district known as "the Plaza." The J. C. Nichols Memorial Fountain commemorates the man who built the district as the country's first automobile-friendly shopping mall and as the centerpiece of the suburban neighborhood sprawling southward where many white residents fled urbanization and Black Americans. Nichols is also widely known for creating stark racial divides in the city by instituting real estate covenants for the houses he built that effectively "redlined" neighborhoods, excluding Black Americans and Jews. In recent weeks, protestors have gathered next to Nichols Fountain to protest the death of a Black American man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police and to call for racial equality. Under its current name, the fountain has come to symbolize both the racist legacy of urban infrastructure and how inequality has marked the control of water in Kansas City, an idea at the center of this book. [End Page 1245] According to the author, Amahia Mallea, A River in the City of Fountains is about the "long-term intimate relationship" between Kansas City and the Missouri River and "about how intertwined the city and river" have been (p. 2). Although "intertwined," the Missouri River curiously "became invisible to Kansas Citians" even though it supplied water for drinking, fountains, and sewers (p. 1). Mallea never entirely elucidates the reasons for the river's invisibility, which would have made the book's central ideas clearer and easier to discern. Instead, she argues "what we have is a complex relationship in which the social matrix is constantly and inseparably interacting with the ecological system, and together they make the urban environment" (p. 2). Thus, it is the relationship between Kansas City and the Missouri River the author seeks to capture, much as Richard White has done in his book The Organic Machine. White explains that it is "the history of the relationship itself" around which he organizes his ideas, and Mallea strives to emulate this approach. The book's title does not fully express the broad scope of material covered, as the subject matter extends far beyond Kansas City and the Missouri River. Those who have never visited the Kansas City metropolitan area might not know that there are actually two urban centers named "Kansas City." The two cities are adjacent. One is in the state of Kansas and the other is in Missouri. The Kansas-Missouri state line divides the cities, as does a portion of the Missouri River. The Kaw River runs just south of Kansas City in Kansas and empties into the Missouri River near the state line where the two cities meet. Mallea's book is partly an exploration of how these political and geographical markers have complicated the broader metropolitan area's relationship with water over time, resulting in disparities among those who rely on these rivers. The book's ten chapters are grouped into three parts and cover a chronological timeframe running roughly from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. Part I examines the relationship between city and river in terms of flooding, drinking water, and sewage. Part II surveys the diverse constituents who relied on the Missouri River as well as the Kaw River in neighboring Kansas City, Kansas. Part III recounts efforts to manage the Missouri River as part of a broader regional plan, the 1951 flood, and public health values that increasingly informed the river's management. The book concludes with a chapter on recent efforts to remediate the river and some personal reflections by the author on her...

Never Silent Sights.

I share in this paper experiences and insights from my fieldwork in a local ethnic artist’s and media producer’s network in South-Mexico. As an attempt at transcultural collaboration, I took part in a nude photoshoot for a local photographer, as a subject also for his project. We swap and potentially subvert the common procedure, in which (visual) anthropologists produce knowledge and (audio-visual) representations about indigenous people, but not the other way around. Nevertheless, this event contributes also to my fieldwork and to my own ends. I discuss this photoshoot and some other works of the two artists involved, while contextualising this in relation to the local ethnographic context of a multi-ethnic society marked by a stark racial division and marginalisation. At the same time, this article draws on some selected perspectives of affect theory in the cultural studies (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018, Ahmed 2004), to point out how the debated visual productions articulate and disseminate decolonial affect. Next to other motivations, the local art and media community produces media specially to affect people and to impact the local affective atmosphere, to change an atmosphere of marginalisation and shame into an affirmative mood of cultural diversity, resistance and pride.

Taking Action: Writing To End White Supremacy

The subject of monuments and their historical value in the present, a topic of great debate both politically and culturally in recent years, has brought to the forefront how prevalent white supremacy is in contemporary society. This subject hit close to home for me and my students as the toppling of confederate statues in downtown Durham and Silent Sam on the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's campus—both results of protests against the rise of white nationalism—occurred just two hours north from our campus, the University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Known as the most diverse campus in the UNC system with nearly 60% of its undergraduate student population identifying as non-White, UNC-P has a rich history steeped in American Indian culture (its school was created by and for American Indians), and it was difficult to ignore how these two local events along with national news coverage of hate crimes and blackface rehashed racial divisions not only in the South, but across the country.

The inclusion of the term ‘color’ in any racial label is racist, is it not?

Through an examination of the term people of color, this conceptual paper illustrates how the use of historical racial labels in the US, supposedly aimed at denouncing racism, seems to reproduce that which the labels purport to condemn. With a primary focus on Blacks or African-Americans, this paper draws purely on a review and analysis of secondary information to argue that any antiracist agenda that utilizes terms that were associated with historical racism may well be reproducing the racist ideologies that justified slavery and Jim Crow laws. This paper calls for the elimination of the term people of color and related labels from popular usage for the following reasons: (1) the racialized representation of color in historical race relations, (2) the deleterious implications of color for contemporary interracial and intraracial relations, and (3) the misleading universalism and racial divisiveness in the term people of color. These issues are discussed following an introduction and a conceptual framework. The paper concludes with a recommendation of appropriate terms for racial identification.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Sometimes You Have to Bend Your Knees

Hard conversations are needed to move our country from the racially polarized position we currently find ourselves in. This Special edition of Social Work and Christianity is the result of the courage, tenacity and faith of a group of Christian Social Work professionals who engaged in the process of difficult conversations. As you read through the introduction and the articles presented in this edition, we are sure you will be intrigued and hopefully prompted to critically think about the need to engage in your own challenging conversations as a way to begin bridging the racial divide in our country. As co-editors of this special edition, we were challenged to deeply reflect on our indiviual life experiences, recognizing our differences as well as the things we had in common. We each struggled with our beliefs as they pertained to the level of racial division within our communities, churches and professions. We were honored to review the number of articles submitted, and contemplated how we would introduce this edition. Racial Reconciliation from a Christian perspective is a process we as Christian Social Workers must be engaged in to meet the command of our Christian faith "A new command I give you:Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another". John 13:34

The objective existence of race

There are currently two very different concepts of race in terms of negation and identity. The emergence of these different perspectives of race is related to its definition. Scholars who deny the existence of human races regard different races as being different species in biology. However, the ethnic problem is an academic issue that can be discussed and the concept of race is still used widely in social life. Race should not be confused with racism. All modern humans on Earth are the same species. Races are human populations with common genetic traits. The concept of race is not a biological concept of race, but a geographic concept of race. After the birth of modern humans, they dispersed and migrated to different parts of the world. The environment in different regions determined the genetic variation of the migration branches of each population. Gradually, different geographical species of modern humans were formed. This is what we are talking about when we speak of race. The divisions of race do not depend on only one trait, but on the comprehensive consideration of multiple traits. The academic community uses macroscopic morphological indices, such as skin color, hair color, eye color, nose shape, lip shape, head shape, facial shape, skin texture, earwax type, and blood type, to describe and classify human races. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms and gene copy number polymorphisms contribute to the formation of different races. Through the measurement and observation of the head and face morphological index and stature of the Mongolian, Northern Han, and Dai populations, this study found significant differences in the head and face characteristics between North Asian, East Asian, and South Asian types. The North Asian-type ethnic groups were found to have taller stature, a wider head, a narrower nose, and a thinner lip, while South Asian-type ethnic groups were of shorter stature, with wider noses and thicker lips. The head and facial features of the East Asian-type ethnic groups are between the North and South Asian-type ethnic groups. Scholars may deny the existence of human races or that races are different species, but they cannot deny the existence of different modern geographical races or their obvious morphological differences. Since the differences between races are geographic, the genomic differences between individual races are naturally small; thus, 99.9% of the DNA sequences from different races are identical. However, this difference of about 0.1% of DNA sequences leads to the division of races. Although the speed of integration between ethnic groups is currently increasing, the differences in traits between different races are still obvious. The main racial characteristics have not disappeared and the differences between races will persist for a long time. This study proposes that the concept of race is outdated and does not actually conform to its objective status.