Racial Exceptionalism Research Articles

The Chilean exception: racial homogeneity, mestizaje and eugenic nationalism

ABSTRACTScholarship on race in Latin America has overwhelmingly characterized racial mixture as a unique feature of the political and social landscape there. Studies of eugenics in Latin America especially highlight the relative pragmatism regarding race mixing in contrast to eugenics elsewhere. However, an acceptance of race mixing did not preclude the persistence of racial hierarchy among Latin American racial theorists. Examining the development of eugenics in Chile, this article reveals how notions of racial plasticity existed alongside that of racial superiority. Specifically, it contends that Chilean racial exceptionalism in the early twentieth century was predicated on the idea that some types of racial mixture were better than others. Conveniently for Chileans, their mostly indigenous and European ancestry was one such preferred combination. Yet, racial mixing was only desirable insofar as it resulted in a homogeneous national population. This combination of ideas functioned much like white supremacy in other parts of the world. Using historical texts, popular and medical periodicals, and visual images produced between 1900 and 1950, this paper will demonstrate how race science in Chile reconciled the nation’s history of racial mixture with its claims to racial homogeneity and superiority relative to the rest of Latin America.

R. Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism

None

Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by Kim Park Nelson

Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by Kim Park Nelson

Koreans, Americans, or Korean-Americans: Transnational Adoptees as Invisible Asians, a Book Review

The book, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, explores the personal narratives and histories of adult adoptees who were born between 1949 and 1983 and who were adopted from Korea by White parents. Using oral history ethnography, Nelson (2016) seeks to correct, complicate, and contribute to current discussions about transnational adoptions. In this book review, the author provides an overview, a personal reflection, and recommendations for potential audiences of this book.

Exceptionalism with Non-Validation: The Social Inconsistencies of Being Mixed Race in Australia

ABSTRACTThis paper uses Australia as an example to view how state and social acceptance of mixedness influences a mixed race individual’s life and their access to a validated identity. The study is a critical view of history’s influence on modernity, which uses a data from a larger study to exemplify critical mixed race theories. Data were gathered through interviews with six mixed race individuals in Melbourne, Australia. The study found that mixedness has been problematised in salient points in Australian history, and this has resulted in a lack of appropriate terminology to accurately identify race and fully understand mixed race. Due to this, individuals in the study were afforded honorary whiteness and racial exceptionalism due to their association with whiteness and the desire of the onlooker to allocate a singular racial identity. While such exceptionalism can provide social favours, it simultaneously denies them access to their mixed race identity which leads to a superficial engagement with their ‘otherness’ and an inability to feel national belonging. The study argues that this is damaging to the individual, and calls upon the Australian state to honestly engage with racial plurality for the benefit of mixed race Australians.

Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that “one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race.” Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional, and socioeconomic identities around hierarchical notions of Europe and the Balkans in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker's observation is still largely true for Southeast European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on “balkanism” or Milica Bakić-Hayden on “symbolic geographies” and “nesting orientalism” did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that “race” as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimized colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialized link between people and territory that Southeast European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialized hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilization and modernity. Southeast European studies' latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anticolonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this essay suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness, and modernity that remain part of the history of “Europe” as an idea even if, by the end of the twentieth century, they were silenced more often than voiced.

Inside and Outside Perspectives: A Review of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences and Racial Exceptionalism

The following is a review of the book Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences and Racial Exceptionalism, written by Kim Park Nelson. In the book, the author used ethnography and collected oral histories, and critical race theory and a post-colonial approach were employed as theoretical frameworks. In particular, as not only an insider (an adoptee) but an outsider (a researcher), she maintained a well-balanced view in describing vivid lived experiences of Korean adoptees and diverse sociocultural environments that impacted them. This book would be a great guide for novice qualitative researchers who want to be ethnographers and study minorities in U.S. society.

“Why Did the White Woman Cross the Street?”: Cultural Countermeasures against Affective Forms of Racism

This article outlines the distinct logics that govern embodied, affective forms of anti-Black racism in order to theorize cultural countermeasures that disrupt them. I argue that attempting to dismantle affective forms of racism by creating “positive” representations of Black people is an ineffective strategy in the long term. This approach tends to amplify investments in racial exceptionalism, fetishism, and restrictive conditions of acceptability, ultimately leaving Eurocentric epistemological and ontological frameworks intact. Instead, I consider cultural methodologies and epistemological frames that allow the complexities of Black ontology to thrive and proliferate. I examine Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the ways it uses Black epistemological frames and methods that hold the potential to diminish affective forms of racism.

Rev. of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by KIM PARK NELSON

Rev. of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by KIM PARK NELSON

Introduction: The Residues of Korean Adoption

Adoption & Culture Vol. 6, Issue 2 (2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University Introduction: The Residues of Korean Adoption KIMBERLY McKEE WHAT WAS believed to be a remedy to provide care for children in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War finds itself a continued and much-critiqued practice in the twenty-first century. International adoption from South Korea is frequently cited as paving the way for other adoption programs that move children into ostensibly better homes and families than their families of origins. Yet, as adoptees speak out and reflect on their experiences, it became clear this was not and is not the case. And this pertains not only to instances of adoptions from Korea to Australia , North America, or Europe; Korean transnational adoption maps to adoption generally. At the same time, ideas about adoption have shifted to acknowledge the complexity of existing in the messiness of what it means to separate parents from children and the impact of those separations on both parties. This particular shift centers the biological family—a unit historically overlooked or pathologized in mainstream discussions of both international and domestic adoption. The special issue arose following “The Ends of Adoption: A Symposium on Transnational Korean Adoption” held at the University of California-Irvine on May 13, 2017. The symposium drew inspiration from Kim Park Nelson’s Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism , which features the accounts of more than sixty Korean adoptees, making it one of the most comprehensive texts featuring Korean adoptees speaking about their lived realities. In her conclusion, Park Nelson provocatively queries what will happen if Korea ceases to send children abroad for adoption. This includes grappling with the legacy of sending children for more than sixty years to North America, Australia, and Europe and the potentialities and new futures when Korean adoptees assert their agency in public discourse on transnational adoption. 268 ADOPTION & CULTURE 6.2 To begin this special issue is an essay from Park Nelson featuring an excerpt from her book, as it served as an impetus for raising the possibility of Korean adoption’s end and what is at stake when we make such a speculative leap. Interested in contemplating the ends of Korean adoption, Eleana J. Kim and James Kyung-Jin Lee co-organized the symposium to listen to the voices of scholars, adoptees, activists, and allies. Featuring a keynote speech by Pastor Kim Do-hyun—a long-time activist engaged in adoption-related advocacy in South Korea—the event consisted of three panels and ended with a screening and panel discussion of the documentary film, Resilience (2009). The discussion explored issues ranging from birthmother activism in South Korea and adoptees’ engagement in campaigns for retroactive citizenship in the United States, to the ways at-home DNA test kits are reshaping notions of adoptee kinship and what happens when adoptees critique mainstream society’s understanding of adoption . I approached the co-organizers about generating a special issue based on the symposium as a method of sharing the knowledges produced there to a broader audience invested in critical adoption studies. Special issue contributors push against the grain of dominant notions of Korean adoption and require readers to rethink their preconceived concepts of what ideas and information adoptees, birth mothers, and allies currently engage. The Ends of Adoption symposium occurred a decade after the first International Korean Adoption Studies Symposium (ISKAS) was held in Seoul, South Korea, on July 31, 2007. That symposium occurred the day before the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) gathering—a weeklong convergence of more than three hundred Korean adoptees who were raised across the globe. In its first iteration, ISKAS reflected Korean adoption studies claiming space as a subfield in adoption studies. Kim Park Nelson, Eleana J. Kim, and Lene Myong crafted a daylong event capturing the groundbreaking scholarship being completed by scholars on a range of topics including reunion with birth parents, the importance of racial mirrors, and the racialization of adoptees in their adoptive countries. ISKAS’s fifth iteration will be held in the summer of 2019. Because of this work, the field of Korean adoption studies changed. No longer is the subject of Korean...

A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation:La Morocha Argentinain the Latin American Racial Context, c. 1900–2015

Fil: Adamovsky, Ezequiel Agustin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina

From bounce to the mainstream: Hip hop representations of post-Katrina New Orleans in music, film and television

Abstract Kanye West’s biting off-script comments about George W. Bush during the televised NBC benefit, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, are probably the most remembered contribution by a hip hop artist to post-Katrina critiques of racism. Beyond Kanye’s pointed remarks, other well-established rappers (including Mos Def, Jay-Z, Public Enemy, Lil Wayne and Juvenile) quickly employed hip hop music to speak out in sociopolitical protests against the overt neglect of New Orleans’s poor black residents. In recent popular television and film representations, hip hop continues to play a significant role in how we remember the effects of Katrina. In the 2008 documentary film, Trouble the Water, Kimberly Rivers Roberts’s hip hop lyrics affirm a sense of survivorship, shared and created through music. Similarly, in its second season (2011), David Simon’s HBO television series Treme explores the role of hip hop in post-Katrina recovery processes through a storyline centred on local bounce music. Some scholars argue that post-Katrina hip hop responses can be viewed as ‘disaster tourism’, or as upholding stereotypes about New Orleans as a space of either violent criminal activity or utopian racial exceptionalism. However, this article suggests that through rap music, Trouble the Water, and Treme, listeners and viewers are exposed to the complexity, diversity and lasting impact of a city (New Orleans) and a musical genre (rap), both of which are often accused of ‘selling out’, ‘watering down’ or profiting from what were once deemed authentic black music communities.

Translation, Race, and Ideology in Oriki Orixá

In the midst of an influential career writing on Brazilian cultural production, the sociologist-turned-political marketer Antonio Risério publishes Oriki Orixá, a book of Portuguese re-translations of Yoruba oriki poetry (1996, reprinted 2013). Understanding translation as a partial and ideologically-motivated act of representation, the current article situates Oriki Orixá within an ideology of race in Brazil. I take into account textual and paratextual materials including the book’s introduction by Augusto de Campos; the editorial promotion of the work; its circulation within a literary network; and the highly mediated histories of the source poems. Oriki Orixá simultaneously promises a universal poetic “invention” and an ethnographic “recuperation” of a foreign text. Ultimately, the white author frames his translation as an affective encounter with an African literary tradition. This encounter participates in—and reinforces—a discourse of racial exceptionalism in which an abstract celebration of African-European contact occludes continuing histories of domination and inequality.

From Tragic Mulatta to Grotesque Racial Horror: Epic/Exceptionalism and Larsen’s Quicksand

This article re-examines Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), a major Harlem Renaissance and African-American literary canon novel, against the tendency to focus on it as a tragic mulatta story. Instead, I argue that Larsen—like African-American authors dating back to Charles W. Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins of the turn-of-the-century—challenged the trans-Atlantic racial exceptionalism by using a far more expansive critical lens that recognized a different mode of being. This being, defined by the literary category of the grotesque (popular in the 1920s and 1930s), recognizes ancient (African) times and a biomorphic mode in which humans, animals, and nature overlapped ontologically. The unique aspect of this article is that it reveals how Larsen also taps Danish literature as part of her critique of normative modern modes of thought, esthetics, politics, and spirituality. Ultimately, Larsen uses Quicksand to expose Western myths, including the stork myth, as deleterious to the more ancient myths that she excavates.

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America

ABSTRACT: To explore “racial exception” as a force of Asian American subject formation, Chambers-Letson moves nimbly across examples drawn from everyday life and transnational geopolitics, tying evidence from visual, legal, sonic, and theatrical sources in discrete case studies.

The Racial Exceptionalism of Barack Obama

Since Barack Obama appeared on the political scene, questions regarding the authenticity of his blackness have remained at the forefront because of his mixed race parentage and nontraditional upbringing. These factors proved to be variously a political asset and liability as his blackness was often framed as scary to white voters who were essential to his electoral coalition. We argue that in order for whites to trust Obama politically, they divorced him from his black identity making him the “racial exception,” which made him more palatable. This, in part, was influenced by the deracialized electoral strategies deployed by Barack Obama. Still, we find race influences evaluations of Barack Obama differently by blacks and whites. Relying on data from the Pew Research Center, we find evidence that Barack Obama’s racial identity is more ambiguous for whites and evaluations of his favorability, values, and tenor of his opposition to fall along racial lines in significant ways despite the rhetoric of a post-racial America.

Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas

Background: Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data with both types of measures have not been available to explicitly test this contrast. Objective: We use novel, recently released data from the U.S. and 18 Latin American countries to describe household income inequality across the region by perceived skin color and racial self-identification, and examine which measure better captures racial disparities in each national context. Results: We document color and racial hierarchies across the Americas, revealing some unexpected patterns. White advantage and indigenous disadvantage are fairly consistent features, whereas blacks at times have higher mean incomes than other racial populations. Income inequality can best be understood in some countries using racial categories alone, in others using skin color; in a few countries, including the U.S., a combination of skin color and self-identified race best explains income variation. Conclusions: These results complicate theoretical debates about U.S. racial exceptionalism and methodological debates about how best to measure race. Rather than supporting one measure over another, our cross-national analysis underscores race‟s multidimensionality. The variation in patterns of inequality also defies common comparisons between the U.S. on the one hand and a singular Latin America on the other.

‘… Latin America without the downside’: racial exceptionalism and global tourism in Costa Rica

In this paper I address how the ideology of Costa Rican exceptionalism and whiteness has maintained racial inequality with the growth of global tourism. Whereas scholars of whiteness in Latin America typically ignore how the ideology has supported racial inequality in structural forms, I explore how discursive racial discourses influence how structural inequality practices in the tourism industry take form. I examine the narratives and symbols from public and private Costa Rican tourism actors who use Costa Rica's racial ideology of exceptionalism and whiteness to position the nation's cultural wealth. Two narratives to define Costa Rica are promoted: (1) environmental uniqueness; and (2) rural democracy traditions. These narratives support white inclusionary and black exclusionary practices in tourism economic activity. Because Costa Rica is perceived as ‘white’ and represents a ‘white habitus’, it distinguishes itself as a ‘democratic’ and ‘safe’ place to visit, while negatively racialized Afro-Costa Rican locations in the southern Atlantic coast are framed as ‘dangerous’ or ‘different’ and non-representative of the exceptional characteristics.

Beyond the racial exceptionalism of the Japanese internment

Assessing the significance of race in shaping American political history has long confronted the challenge of overcoming exceptionalist assumptions that have isolated and contained the racial dimen...

Gilded Ages and Gilded Archaeologies of American Exceptionalism

Archaeology’s ties to an interest in America’s natural and cultural resources, enshrined in the Antiquities Act of 1906, can be tied to the development of the presumed entitlements associated with gilded age-era conceptions of America’s cultural and racial exceptionalism. Archaeology, historic preservation, and related interests in the materiality of America’s past were in fact among the mechanisms used to legitimize America’s global emergence in the modern era. Considering elite ideas about race and a fear of “race suicide” as well as the rise of the environmental conservation and the historic house movement, this paper argues that archaeology and related pursuits of historic materiality have been regularly deployed to enforce Anglo-Saxon racial values. Explicitly formed in the historical context of mass-immigration, this dynamic is explored in a discussion of two archaeological sites in Jamaica, Queens connected to gilded-age discourse on Americanization.