Racial Hierarchy Research Articles

Writing sensitively: defining sensitivity in the literary sphere

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the concept of ‘sensitivity’ in creative writing. While the term appears to be relatively straightforward, the methods writers use to write sensitively differ: some may simply consider the feelings of the group represented, while others may engage with interviews or employ the use of a sensitivity reader. This paper uses complexity theory and critical race and whiteness scholarship to define and theorise how sensitivity is used within the current publishing landscape. It argues that, while writing sensitivity can offer greater opportunities for representation on the page, it can also further reinforce racial hierarchies already present within the publishing industry.

She Shuts Her English Channel in Her Brain: Racial and Linguistic Ordering during Kindergarten Practicums

During their kindergarten placements, teacher candidates are learning to teach with young children who may be experiencing linguistic and racial hierarchies in a formal institutional setting for the first time. The purpose of this research is to understand how teacher candidates make sense of the socially constructed boundaries of language and race in their practicum placements in kindergarten classrooms. In our critically informed inquiry, we draw on translanguaging and LangCrit to understand the process of language teaching and learning in kindergarten classrooms. The three teacher candidates in this article, Yu, Fie, and Charlotte, took a required course on supporting multilingual students in the mainstream classroom as part of their requirement to become Primary/Junior (K–6) teachers and were interviewed on their experiences with multilingual children during their practicums. Four major themes were found in the data: language hierarchies during practicums, subverting language hierarchies, translanguaging with families, and racialized experiences of speaking Mandarin. Much more than other grade-level placements, kindergarten placements were spaces where the candidates witnessed communication break down, with families and children refusing to speak English.

Pursuing Racial Order and Social Progress: Violence, Afrophobia and “Religious Racism” in Brazil

Abstract This article explores “religious racism,” or discrimination against devotees of African-derived religions in Brazil, as a broader pattern of structural racism rooted in racialized religious alterity, Afrophobia, and the epistemic divide between religion and nonreligion. The term religious racism has been proposed by some devotees and anti-racist activists to emphasize that Afro-Brazilian religions are uniquely targeted in ways other non-Christian religions are not. Unlike religious intolerance, the term religious racism explicitly connects discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religions to colonization, color or racial hierarchy, and anti-Black prejudice. This article clarifies the ideological groundings of religious racism that encourage Neo-Pentecostal extremists to pursue “order and progress,” as the national motto suggests, through physical violence.

World‐Making Through a Feminist Abolitionist Lens in a STEAM Middle School Program

ABSTRACTThe maker movement propagated throughout educational spaces alongside promises that technological and design literacies could be harnessed to shape equitable social futures. However, researchers have highlighted the ways makerspaces can reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and class. This paper builds on research that seeks to support girls' making through broader sociopolitical and ethical commitments. We consider what an everyday pedagogy of feminist abolition looked like in a makerspace, with a focus on how educators responded to emergent social needs within and across gender lines. Our data sources (extensive field notes, audio–video recordings, photographs, and student interviews) are drawn from Hubspace, a 6‐week summer program serving Black, Latine/x, and South Asian middle school youth and grounded in expansive forms of storytelling, coding, engineering, music, writing, and art. In closely analyzing routine forms of educator reflection alongside the design decisions, pedagogical moves and forms of student sense‐making they supported, we found that student and educator sociopolitical learning emerged together to build what became possible in the culture of the space over time. Across three cases, we show how such pedagogies offered lived models and creative languages for practicing restorative and just social relationships. Each of the cases tell the story of different moments when gender became important to the ways participants were working to recognize and desettle received terms of thought and generate alternate forms of thinking, living, and relating, or the making of new stories and worlds.

Built on Women’s Bodies: An Author’s Response

Across the twentieth century, police were the enforcers of public space, determining which women would be targeted as problems to solve. Sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities—was considered a marginal and degraded use of public resources, maligned by officers and residents alike. And yet, amid the recurring crises of legitimacy for police during the scandalous enforcement of Prohibition and the social uprisings of the 1960s, the contested practice of sexual policing was also central to the legitimization and legalization of police power. The Streets Belong to Us is a spatial history of the development of urban police regimes as embattled authorities fought to seize and consolidate power. But embedded in that work is an argument that the formation of police power—like the formation of cities themselves—cannot be understood without accounting for gender and the interlocking hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality that make gender meaningful. Focusing on sexual policing, the most historically gendered arena of law enforcement, from Prohibition in segregated Jim Crow to the rise of broken windows policing in the gentrifying 1980s, I argue that police power and the modern city were built on women’s bodies.

Mysticism and Black feminist resistance in the Vida of Úrsula de Jesús

ABSTRACT Úrsula de Jesús’s Vida puts her life story in dialogue with a broader Afrodiasporic feminist tradition and community. Úrsula’s discourse articulates her liberation through eloquent rage, defined by Brittney Cooper as Black women’s refusal to be relegated to an inferior position. Though imitatio is a common trope among Christian mystics, Úrsula uses the trope to represent her positionality as a moral authority because of her Blackness. In doing so Úrsula refuses to accept the inherent anti-Blackness of prevailing arguments that erase the possibility that she could be fully human because of her Blackness. As she repeats and inverts hegemonic interpretations of Christian doctrine, Úrsula achieves a nuanced critique of racial hierarchies. This paper highlights how Úrsula’s depiction of her suffering as a donada and her work as a healer is a Black feminist discourse that calls for a reimagining of racial hierarchies. Úrsula sustains a Black feminist critique in her discussion of suffering she faced individually and as part of a broader Afrodiasporic community, Black feminist imitatio and a rhetoric of healing rage that effects change within a system designed to deny Black women’s humanity.

Female Chinese transracial adoptees' racial awakening amid dual racial pandemics.

2020 was marked by two racial pandemics-COVID-19-related attacks against Asians and the police brutality against Blacks that spurred the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement-calling attention to racial privilege and oppression in American society. The present study explores female Chinese transracial adoptees' unique lived experiences during this racially salient moment. A phenomenological approach captured how 20 female Chinese transracial adoptees navigated and made sense of the dual racial pandemics and the subsequent impact on their racial awareness, identity development, and advocacy. Data were collected using semistructured individual Zoom interviews and coded using phenomenological analysis. Findings suggest the dual pandemics acted as catalysts for female Chinese transracial adoptees' racial consciousness and reevaluation of their positionality within the racial hierarchy. Three core themes emerged: female transracial adoptees' new self-understanding as racial beings; their perspective on their place within the White-Black dichotomy; and their role in promoting racial justice. Our findings contribute to the literature by highlighting the complexities of female Chinese transracial adoptees' racialized selves as children of color who have been raised in White families; their motivations to foster racial justice; and their ability to facilitate race talk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Reproductive Justice, Race, and the Prescience of the Past

The question of control—over bodies, knowledge, narrative, and nation—interweaves throughout Dana Medoro’s Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion and Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Medoro focuses on discourses of life and women’s (non)reproductive sexuality in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. She establishes that the two authors were deeply skeptical of medicolegal definitions of life that created racial and economic hierarchies; through focal characters and indirect, playful prose, they critique discourses of life that valued some lives over others in the creation of Anglo-American nationalism. Tavera investigates late-nineteenth-century woman-authored medical fiction as directly engaging many of the same concepts Medoro explores. (P)rescription Narratives calls attention to the ways that Comstock-era censorship colluded with race science, medicine, and the law to limit women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. It demonstrates literature’s agential capacities as the writers it addresses explicitly refute and redirect objectifying narratives. Combined, these texts show that questions of what “counts” as life, and by what (and whose) paradigms those lives can be lived, are hardly theoretical musings. Rather, they determine, systemically and corporeally, “life’s legibility and reproduction … in the name of American citizenship” (Medoro 19). These texts, in other words, are highly relevant and important as literary and cultural scholarship, making a powerful argument for the study of the humanities. But they are also important because they document the subversive and agential power of the written word to discern, document, and possibly heal—to affect change for today and the future.

The invention of race and the persistence of racial hierarchy: White privilege, White supremacy, and White colorblindness

AbstractGiven the long history of contention over the meaning of race and the continued discomfort about what role it plays in the structure of inequality, I endeavor to clarify the origins of the association of race with skin color and other physical features by briefly discussing the historical record by which race became codified in law. My focus is the U.S. and specifically Colonial Virginia, where the codification of racial categories in law was especially consequential. I also discuss the existence of a racial hierarchy in which Whites are dominant and Nonwhites of various types are subordinate. I argue that the continued existence of this racial hierarchy not only has a legacy from the past, but it is reproduced in the present and continues to have major effects on the life chances of those thought of as belonging to different racial groups. I also discuss the elasticity, ambiguity, and contested nature of racial classifications, as well as the internal differentiation among those thought to belong to the same racial groups and the changes and variations over time that are continually remaking the meaning of race. Because of the political significance of race, I also clarify the meaning of key concepts that have been receiving recent attention: White privilege, White supremacy, and White colorblindness. Finally, I discuss race as a process rather than as a classification and briefly discuss how Whites and men can become allies, advocates, and activists in support of social justice.

“Our Colored and Indian Charges Furnish So Much Amusement for Us”: Catholicism, Assimilation, and the Racial Hierarchy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1883–1918

ABSTRACT While the history of White reformers’ attempts at assimilation has been studied in the American West and South, their role in the American Northeast still remains largely unexplored. This article examines the role of Catholic missionaries in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These White missionaries worked with students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as well as African Americans at St. Katharine’s Select School. By comparing and contrasting Catholic work with these two ethnic groups, this article examines the racial hierarchy within the assimilation process at the turn of the twentieth century.

‘English in taste, Indian in blood’: caste hegemony in the making of British international legal thought

Abstract In this article, I argue that caste was a central factor in the development of British international legal thought in the subcontinent. Specifically, I contend that British international legal thought entrenched caste hegemony into the broader racial civilisation hierarchy of international law in the nineteenth century.

Africans in China, Western/White Supremacy and the Ambivalence of Chinese Racial Identity

Abstract This article seeks to provide further insights into understanding the construction of Chinese identity by bringing the West/white into the picture of Afro-Sino racial relationships. It contends that the Chinese have internalized Western/white superiority through a long historical process, starting with the Western invasion in the 19th century and continuing with the construction of the contemporary historical narrative of the “century of humiliation.” This internalization and its ramifications can be observed in Chinese public discourses as well as diplomatic practices. Together with Western/white superiority, the Chinese also adopted a social Darwinist, competitive world view, using Western modernity as the yardstick by which to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy. Chinese racism against Africans is thus a projection of a harsh self-judgement. Unlike white supremacy in Western racial thinking, “Chinese supremacy” is often coupled with an inferiority complex.

The Transit Fix—Border Externalization and the Interplay of Capital and Race in the Transit “Migration” State

Abstract What happens after border externalization? States and regional organizations of the Global North increasingly engage in transnational migration management that seeks to prevent potential irregular migration beyond their territory. Despite the impressive financial and political resources the involved actors mobilize to reach this goal, little is known about the effects of this strategy on their target states and populations. This paper conceptualizes border externalization as a spatial intervention that absorbs contingent migrant flows into an interplay of capital and race. It argues that the immobilization and differential integration produced through externalization can serve as a spatial fix for labor shortages in transit “migration” states. This differential integration disempowers the targeted migrant population and aggravates racial antagonisms. Hence, border externalization is not just a (by-)product of racist ideology and policy, but also intensifies racial hierarchies in the space it intervenes into. The paper studies this through the case of the “EU-Turkey Deal” and Turkey’s Syrian refugee population, building on document analysis and primary interview data with industry representatives, farmers, NGO workers, and government officials. On a theoretical level, the paper thereby contributes to the recent trend that reinserts the border into global processes of racialized capital accumulation.

Racial Feudalism

Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.

Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even when they are racially diverse. Taking the recent attacks against critical race theory as a backdrop, I argue that educational institutions not only contribute to educational inequity but also socialize people into relations of racial domination and subordination through organizational practices and individual actions. In the article’s conclusion, I highlight my efforts to disrupt these patterns and work toward the creation of more liberatory education spaces.

Bourbon, Black and White: Bourbon and Race in America, 1935-1975

ABSTRACT This article explores the cultural history of bourbon in the United States between the 1930s and the 1970s through the lenses of race, politics, and consumerism. Several related trends pushed bourbon’s cultural history in new directions during this time. Like many popular consumer products, Americans endowed bourbon with complex meanings that reflected imagined, contested notions of history and racial identities and hierarchies. As Black and white Americans bought, sold, drank, and talked about bourbon, they also grappled with racial conflict and social change. Distillers crafted new appeals to Black Americans to spur sales. Mass consumerism grew in importance as an arena of activism after the Second World War. Black activists targeted the bourbon industry in their ongoing fight against commercial racism and segregation. Bourbon became a touchstone in the politics of civil rights. Black and white commentators invoked contrasting bourbon symbolism and tropes in their civil rights rhetoric. These trends and dialogues flavored the meanings that Americans consumed as they drank bourbon. All the while, bourbon whiskey became a staple of the upwardly mobile, consumption-driven lifestyles of the middle and professional classes, regardless of their racial identities. To tell these stories, the article relies on bourbon-related advertising, journalism, and commentary in the Black and white presses, corporate market research materials and correspondence, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) archival records.

In Translation: Gabriel Navarro, Latina/o Film Critic

ABSTRACT: Gabriel Navarro (1894–1950) was critic and entertainment editor for La Prensa (San Antonio) and La Opinión (Los Angeles) during the 1920s and 1930s. In an extensive body of film reviews, columns, and film-related fiction, Navarro considered questions of fandom, stardom, representation, and the racial hierarchies that structured the US film industry. He offered his readers behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood, advocated for Mexican immigrant audiences and talent, and argued for culturally sensitive representation. Navarro's work opens new ways of thinking about Latino/a/es in US film history and offers new perspectives on the historical relationships between mainstream media and marginalized audiences.

Racialized Emotions as Maps and Compasses for Students of Color Navigating a Predominantly White University

Students of color in predominantly White institutions (PWI’s) encounter racial microaggressions, the often subtle, but powerful, offensive experiences that are steeped in racism and occur in the course of everyday life. They also experience racial microaffirmations—moments where their racial identities or racialized realities are affirmed, validated, supported, or protected. We employ sociologist Bonilla-Silva’s concept of racialized emotions to analyze 16 student narratives describing racial microaggressions and racial microaffirmations; Bonilla-Silva defines racialized emotions as those that arise specifically within one’s racial hierarchy and shape one’s experiences within it. We find that racialized emotions are like navigational tools. Like maps, they allow students to understand the terrain of racial interaction. Like compasses, they help students find their way through said terrain in a predominantly White, often racist, institution. This article makes a distinctive contribution by exploring the relationship between racialized emotions and racial microaggressions and microaffirmations within a higher education context.

“Sorry If I Offended”: The Art of Nonapology, Racism, and White Supremacy in Sport

Despite perceived postracial ideologies of American sport, players, coaches, fans, and media have been complicit in reaffirming racial hierarchies through racist microaggressions and remarks. Such racist violations are commonly exposed in the current moment of widespread social media engagement and social justice activism. Subsequently, many violators issue apologies—often employing the conjunction “if”—which hinges the apology on the condition of the targeted group taking offense. We call these conditional apologies nonapology apologies and argue that they fall within a racializing apologia framework, devaluing and questioning the place of those offended in American society and sport, and reinforcing White supremacy. In this paper, we examine apology statements by sports figures and explore the implications of nonapology apologies.

Making way for memes in the social science classroom: How generational media preferences may impact discussions of racial inequities

AbstractThis pilot study analyzes student responses to two political cartoons which satirize racism in varying national contexts. Eight moderated focus groups viewed political cartoons then shared reactions via survey and discussion. We found that participants responded negatively to a French cartoon which they perceived endorsed racist attitudes. Participants had more positive responses to an American cartoon which they perceived to “punch up” at the racial hierarchy. A third, unanticipated set of findings relates to participants' spontaneous feedback that though they welcomed the use of popular comedy in teaching, political cartoons felt less engaging than other media formats. This left us with a new question to explore in a future second phase of our project: How can instructors consider generational differences regarding media preferences when selecting popular comedy materials for use in classroom discussions of racism? We speculate that memes, rather than political cartoons, may provide a more effective springboard for discussion. We plan to incorporate memes in the second phase of this project, a cross‐national study regarding the use of popular comedy materials as springboards to classroom discussions about racism.