Racial Markers Research Articles

From ethnicization to ethnicism: Transformations of the legal and political subject of blackness in Colombia

In Colombia, since 1900s, some Afro-descendant populations are classified as an ethnic group, akin to indigenous communities. This classification has included, especially within the Comisión de la Verdad report, to recognize Afro-descendants as ethnic people, a view widely shared among activists, scholars, and NGOs. The process of ethnicization, distinct from race, involves traditionalizing and communalizing these populations from the Pacific region. Recent shifts have involved racialized ethnicism, combining racial markers with cultural traditionalized differences under a regime of victimhood, reflecting complex, overlapping transformations rather than straightforward successions. This article analyzes these evolving legal and political conceptions of blackness over the past three decades, highlighting the nuanced shifts in state policies and imaginaries.

Racism and sexism: markers of authority-based oppression

Authoritarianism is generally understood as a form of government characterized by blind and absolute obedience to an authority that places itself in the position of unquestionable leader. On this ideological basis, inequalities are perceived and understood as organic and natural. In light of this, racism and sexism are understood as markers of authoritarian oppression. After all, both are based on colonialism and the idea that there are naturally inferior beings to the detriment of others who hold privileges and power. This article, based on a Narrative Literature Review, sought to show that racism and sexism are markers of authoritarian oppression by studying authoritarianism, racism, sexism and coloniality in a relational way. It is concluded that racism and sexism are consequences of coloniality and that they not only have authoritarian bases, but are in themselves typical practices of authoritarianism. The markers of race and gender have been carefully elaborated as essential differences in order to maintain an unequal structure that privileges the white, male and heterosexual elite.

Experimental evidence on how implicit racial bias affects risk preferences

ABSTRACT We ask how human behavior changes when racial discrimination is costly and when choices are risky. By asking N = 4,944 participants in Germany to form a soccer team in a series of online experiments, we measure decision-making in an accessible way. Higher costs of discrimination can reduce disparities, but we show that these costs can also trigger implicit racial bias: participants who received an additional financial incentive to select more skilled soccer players outperformed nonincentivized participants and differentiated less based on skin color. However, when confronted with risky choices in a lottery, incentivized participants are more likely to gamble to avoid players with a darker skin color. That is, racial (minority) markers alter the risk preferences of people when their decisions carry costly consequences. This implicit racial bias may partly explain why members of visible minority groups are regularly discriminated against in real-world competitive markets.

Structural Racism in Sweden: Framing Attitudes towards Immigrants through the Diversity Barometer Study (2005–2022)

This article presents a theoretical framework for analysing the findings derived from the Diversity Barometer, a longitudinal study that collected data on immigration and diversity-related topics in Swedish society from 2005 to 2022. This article examines attitudes towards immigrants and migration in Sweden and how the historical context of Swedish race relations and structural racism shapes these attitudes. Specifically, the article focuses on attitudes regarding immigrants’ social rights and responsibilities, workplace diversity, cultural diversity, and spatial segregation. Our findings and analysis demonstrate how structural racism manifests itself through attitudes towards individuals with immigrant backgrounds in Sweden. Research has also revealed the pervasive nature of racial discrimination across various aspects of Swedish society, contributing to a divided society based on racial markers. However, the findings also show complexity in how Swedes’ attitudes toward immigrants are to be understood when they do not follow a simple horizontal division between Swedes and immigrants. Instead, it appears as an intricate vertical division where immigrants, their culture and their labour are accepted, albeit in a subordinate manner.

The narrative practices of hostile environments: the story of the nation-as-family and the story of security

This article contributes to research into the importance of storytelling in asylum practice by examining the narratives used to promote and justify Hostile Environment policies. The two narrative practices identified are the “story of the nation-as-family”, which defines national belonging predominantly by markers of race and ethnicity, and the “story of security”, whereby racialized refugees are framed as potential threats to the nation's socio-economic stability. The former propagates a notion of consanguinity that works to exclude and silence people seeking asylum from non-European nations. The latter sees the rhetoric of a “clash of civilisations” so central to the “War on Terror” taken up in policy debates about climate-induced migration. An analysis of the way in which these stories are staged and critiqued in the writing of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Stephen Collis reveals how they elide the relationship between forced migration and the history of European colonialism. In exploring this elision, this article insists on the significance of literary texts as spaces where monocultural conceptions of belonging can be confronted, and where understanding Europe's colonial past is established as an integral part of hearing the stories of refugees in the present.

ANÁLISE CRÍTICA DOS IMPACTOS DA LEI 11.343/06 NOS RUMOS DO ENCARCERAMENTO NO BRASIL

The Drug Law currently in force in Brazil, dated 2006, brought important differences between the legal dealings that should be used with drug users and spies who trade with them. The legislation in force, however, receives criticism for granting a certain degree of discretion to legal operators to make such a distinction, and is identified as one of the determining factors for the large increase in incarceration rates that Brazil has been experiencing in recent decades. This article intends to analyze statistical data regarding the prison population and analyze them in the light of Law nº 11.343/06; in addition to analyzing the points of distinction between the Drug Law in force and the old one, as well as the markers of race and gender in the application of this legislation.

The Hidden Face of the Moon: Unveiling the Minutiae of a Black Woman’s Experience on the Streets

The homeless population is mostly male. When it comes to the female presence, especially when considering the markers of race, gender and class, the invisibility and delegitimization are even more insidious. The aim of this article is to identify the singularities of a black woman living on the streets and to understand them based on the relationships she establishes with the territory. The method used was the case study of a homeless black woman, constructed through body map storytelling. Thematic analysis of the empirical content was used in the light of decolonial criticism. Luna, the protagonist of the story, reveals in her narratives, the multiple dimensions of the presence of the female body on the street, the process of taking care of oneself and the other, considering the intrinsic relationships with the territory, with the use of drugs and with the male figure. Thus, unveiling society’s views in relation to the place of invisibility of these women and creating strategies to face the colonial, racist and patriarchal logic of valuing knowledge is what Luna makes explicit with her trajectory of struggle, survival, and resilience on the streets.

코로나19 팬데믹과 아시아라는 스타일

The anti-Asian racism that has manifested during the coronavirus pandemic recalls the long history of Asian racialization. It recalls the ways in which Asians have been imagined as a doubled figure to bear both racial otherness and historical transformation. The anti-Asian racism also hearkens back to the liminal space inhabited by the Asian body, a precarious position between human and inhuman. The Asian body exists as a sign, not an entity, on which a series of epidermal racial markers appear and onto which all the anxieties around the virus are projected in the displaced form of hate. As an anthropomorphized form for this pandemic’s complex relation to human life, the Asiatic figure becomes a synecdoche for the unprecedented crisis in its retention of these old racial markers. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) stages this blurred line in the category of race between discrimination (difference) and indiscrimination (identity) through the adventure of a “tiny” Asian girl, Fan. Analyzing the way in which Lee delves into Fan’s unique animacy, this paper argues that On Such a Full Sea stylizes the figure of Asia in two ways. First, the writer coordinates, both in the text’s form and content, the unique feature of Asian racialization in which the Asiatic figure is imagined as an emblem of crisis. Second, through Fan’s movement and its impact upon other characters, Lee also renders the style as a mode of response to affective disturbances of the present and thereby shapes Fan as an embodiment of the crisis style.

The Feminine Condition and Women's Sexual and Reproductive Health in Brazil and France.

IntroductionElements mark the reality of reading the female body in symbolic constructions and social symbols in the exercise of their reproductive health. The study aims to identify elements that characterize the female condition while analyzing the reproductive health of Brazilian and French women.Materials and MethodsA qualitative, multicenter, international study was conducted in Brazil and in France between 2016 and 2019. Data were produced through the use of semi-structured scripts. Focus group discussions and individual interviews were conducted with women who gave birth, hetero-female couples who lived the experience of gestation and birth of a baby, and professionals of maternal and childcare services or members of the associations concerned with the health of mothers and babies. It was guided by the theoretical-methodological framework of institutional analysis in line with the French Institutional Socioclinics.ResultsSexual and reproductive health in the realities researched in Brazil and France are sometimes close and sometimes far apart. In what involves the Brazilian health system, abortion is criminalized and often performed illegally. Furthermore, pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period are highly medicalized. In addition, childbirth is not assured as an experience for a woman and her family. This aspect is confirmed by high numbers of cesarean sections performed or by maternal and infant mortality indicators. The French health system prioritizes vaginal deliveries and seems to assure more autonomy to women, but at the same time, it is worn out by the logic of profit, the efficiency of actions, and the rationalization of practices. In association with these, there are other intrinsic elements in the functioning of the institution that delineates the format of each country: notion of women's rights, violence against women, and discussion regarding the oppression markers of race, gender, sexuality, and social class.ConclusionsBoth countries reveal aspects related to the social role of women's bodies. The established logic reflects in the decision to have children, motherhood, women's autonomy over their own bodies, and in the core values linked to the termination of pregnancy and the professional practices developed in prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum.

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Afro Hair in the Time of Slavery

Treatment of European and African hair radically differed in the time of slavery: the former sentimentally preserved in mourning jewelry and keepsakes, the latter shaved off in preparation for the slave-ship hold. This essay considers some examples of how hair functioned as a racial marker. While hair texture was used to establish boundaries between races, hair styling emerged a site of racial contamination where these boundaries threatened to dissolve as white people "frizzled" their hair to make it curly, while Black people shaped their Afro hair so as to mimic the aristocratic hairstyles of white Europeans.

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES AND YOUTH

The struggle against social inequalities in Brazil has been the center of analysis in several areas of knowledge. Scholars, public managers, researchers, and public policymakers strive to diagnose and implement measures to reduce inequalities in the Brazilian context. Among the multiple forms of manifestation of such inequalities, the social markers of gender, race, and social class are the most investigated. However, color or race occupies a central space in most of the debates given the process of the socio-historical constitution of Brazil. In this debate, besides the aspects that are related to the Brazilian development process characteristics, whose dynamics have produced erasures and silencing throughout the country's history, black youth are among those included. As a consequence, the partial inclusion of the black, brown, or indigenous populations in this process has translated into higher levels of economic and social vulnerability, with greater incidence in some communities. The present reflection analyzes the impact of the social racial marker among the black Brazilian youth. The bibliographical-investigative methodological procedure is used.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Color of Classicism

Reflecting on the role of color as a racial marker in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s writings on Greek antiquity, this article argues that the author’s modernist displacement of classicism is at the same time a conflicted reckoning with Europe’s racialized primal scene. Analyzing the 1903 tragedy Elektra as well as later writings on his Greek journey, I show how Hofmannsthal’s re-articulation of Germany’s fictive kinship with the ancient Greeks also re-writes the racial imaginaries that have colored this figure of the ‘beginning’ since the 18th century. Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the ancient Greeks serves me as a prism through which I trace how the discourse on the Greek ‘beginning’ of European culture was also a discourse about racial difference. Reading Elektra in relation to contemporaneous discourses on blood, kinship, and purity, I argue that the play reflects on how meaning is attributed to a body, reproducing but also interrogating a set of deeply ingrained images from Europe’s colonial archive. Hofmannsthal’s writings about his Greek journey, by contrast, are an attempt at recuperating the phantasy of a (racially) pure origin, while also bearing the mark of the author’s encounter with a racial hybridity he decided to excise from his text years after the journey.

Functional Genomics and Comparative Lineage-Specific Region Analyses Reveal Novel Insights into Race Divergence in Verticillium dahliae.

ABSTRACTVerticillium dahliae is a widespread soilborne fungus that causes Verticillium wilt on numerous economically important plant species. In tomato, until now, three races have been characterized based on the response of differential cultivars to V. dahliae, but the genetic basis of race divergence in V. dahliae remains undetermined. To investigate the genetic basis of race divergence, we sequenced the genomes of two race 2 strains and four race 3 strains for comparative analyses with two known race 1 genomes. The genetic basis of race divergence was described by the pathogenicity-related genes among the three races, orthologue analyses, and genomic structural variations. Global comparative genomics showed that chromosomal rearrangements are not the only source of race divergence and that race 3 should be split into two genotypes based on orthologue clustering. Lineage-specific regions (LSRs), frequently observed between genomes of the three races, encode several predicted secreted proteins that potentially function as suppressors of immunity triggered by known effectors. These likely contribute to the virulence of the three races. Two genes in particular that can act as markers for race 2 and race 3 (VdR2e and VdR3e, respectively) contribute to virulence on tomato, and the latter acts as an avirulence factor of race 3. We elucidated the genetic basis of race divergence through global comparative genomics and identified secreted proteins in LSRs that could potentially play critical roles in the differential virulence among the races in V. dahliae.IMPORTANCE Deciphering the gene-for-gene relationships during host-pathogen interactions is the basis of modern plant resistance breeding. In the Verticillium dahliae-tomato pathosystem, two races (races 1 and 2) and their corresponding avirulence (Avr) genes have been identified, but strains that lack these two Avr genes exist in nature. In this system, race 3 has been described, but the corresponding Avr gene has not been identified. We de novo-sequenced genomes of six strains and identified secreted proteins within the lineage-specific regions (LSRs) distributed among the genomes of the three races that could potentially function as manipulators of host immunity. One of the LSR genes, VdR3e, was confirmed as the Avr gene for race 3. The results indicate that differences in transcriptional regulation may contribute to race differentiation. This is the first study to describe these differences and elucidate roles of secreted proteins in LSRs that play roles in race differentiation.

At the Margins of Time and Place

At the Margins of Time and Place

Signs of difference

AbstractShylock and Othello are the characters in the Shakespearean oeuvre with the clearest racial markers. However one interprets the ethnic characteristics of ‘the Moor’—as a light‐skinned Arab or as a darker ‘African’—he seems to be a character marked by clear racial distinctions vis‐à‐vis the other figures. Shylock also has an iconographic history of racial marking. In this paper I shall examine how both figures can be read as tokens of ethnic or racial anxiety. Shakespeare’s African play is one of the works seldom performed in the contemporary German repertoire system. The Merchant of Venice is more frequently performed but poses different problems in terms of visual representation. It will be argued that German director’s theatre, with its love of experimentation and above all bold metaphoric images, is uncomfortable with the metonymic representation implied by ethnic casting. The discussion draws on Othello and The Merchant of Venice in productions by Fritz Kortner, Peter Zadek, George Tabori and Luk Perceval. Whereas Kortner, Zadek and Tabori stage the alterity figures in a mode of hypertrophic blackness or Jewish stereotyping bordering on (or indeed transgressing) overt racism, Perceval’s Othello is white and the alterity conflict seems to be one of age and gender not race.

Black Millwall: memories of football and neighbourhood in South London

ABSTRACT This paper argues that ‘doing’ football – as in playing, watching, talking about – constitutes a social field that cuts across otherwise racially coded urban landscapes. Where most work on fan cultures explore social practices and rituals inside that sacred space, the stadium, the focus here is on the interweaving of ‘doing football’ with the wider socio-cultural fabric incorporating neighbourhood spaces and stadiums. Expanding on Les Back’s notion of localised cultural spaces, oral histories of black Millwall fans will be used to critically engage with the popular perception of Millwall as a ‘racist club’. It is argued that the use of racial markers at The Den is used to target the opposition, whereas black Millwall supporters are accepted as contingent insiders.

Fear of a Black City: Gender and Postracial Sovereignty in Death Wish (2018)

This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth’s film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism’s white masculinity.

“It Doesn’t Matter Who Sees Them”: A Case Study of an Effective White Educator Working in a Multicultural Urban High School

This instrumental case study research identifies the beliefs and behaviors of a highly effective white educator working in a multicultural urban school. By triangulating interviews, classroom observations and the analysis of artifacts provided by the teacher, this study identifies the essential beliefs and behaviors that make a white educator a highly effective practitioner and highly respected educator both within his school site and in the broader school community. The case study identifies that the educator’s ability to create safety, inclusion, consistency, and high expectations in his classroom functioned to connect him to a population of students who do not share his same racial or economic markers. The purpose of this case study is to identify the essential beliefs and behaviors of a white educator working in a multicultural urban high school in order to use his experience and practice as a way to educate and inform white educators seeking to work in diverse schools across the nation.

Dylan Goes Electric

Within the study of rock music, religion appears as a racial marker or a biographical attribute. The concept of religion, and its co-produced opposite, the secular, needs critical analysis in popular music studies. To inaugurate this work this article returns to the moment in singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s career that is most unmarked by religion, namely his appearance with an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s going electric became, through subsequent years of narrative attention, a secularizing event. “Secularizing event” is a phrase coined to capture how certain epochal moments become transforming symbols of divestment; here, a commitment writ into rock criticism as one in which rock emerged by giving up something that had been holding it back. Through a study of this 1965 moment, as well as the history of electrification that preceded it and its subsequent commentarial reception, the unreflective secular of rock criticism is exposed.