Narratives Of Race Research Articles

Untangling anti-Indian narratives in the 2019 Bolivian crisis: violence, anxiety and discourse

ABSTRACT The 2005 arrival of Evo Morales to power came with high expectations about the increased participation of indigenous people in the country’s social and political life. However, the violence perpetrated against urban indigenous people allied to MAS from the moment Morales stepped down has shone a light on the volatile nature of unresolved racial tensions in Bolivia. This article centers on the rapid escalation of anti-Indian racism during the 2019 electoral crisis and ensuing political conflict and the weight of anti-Indian racial narratives at the heart of the violence. Through an analysis of archives and data collected during the conflict through mediated approaches , this paper examines the 2019 crisis, focusing on the surge in anti-Indian violence, and briefly discusses pre-crisis anti-racist efforts by the MAS administration. Then, it reflects on the idea of the ‘savage Indian’ and racial regimes that produced key ‘discursive formations’ that continue to polarize Bolivia. It then critically assesses the ideology of mestizaje’s racial role in the crisis, positioning it within a broader anti-Indian narrative that confines Indianness to the past while hindering acknowledgement, reconciliation, and healing from racial trauma.

Decoding Anti-Blackness in Children’s Literature

This dissertation critically examines the representation of Black authors and themes within the John Newbery Medal canon from its inception in 1922 to 2023. It explores how this literary award has mirrored or challenged societal perceptions of race, particularly in children’s literature. Utilizing a thematic content analysis methodology, the study investigates the works of the six Black authors who have won the Newbery Medal, using a priori coding to critically examine the racial narratives, themes, and authorial diversity presented in these titles. Despite the noted increase in diversity within children’s literature, this research identifies a persistent underrepresentation of Black authors and Black cultural themes in Newbery Medal recipients. The study highlights a significant gap in racial inclusivity, with a mere six Black authors receiving the Newbery Medal in over a century. This underrepresentation is not only a marker of racial disparity but also reflects broader systemic biases within the literary and publishing industries. This dissertation engages with theories from critical race theory and critical librarianship to interrogate the structural barriers that sustain this racial homogeneity. In examining the implications of these findings, the research advocates for a more equitable literary landscape, emphasizing the need for librarians, educators, and publishers to foster inclusivity in children’s literature. The ultimate aim is to ensure that young readers encounter a more representative spectrum of narratives that celebrate racial diversity and promote inclusiveness.

Digital Racism and Antiracism Toward Asian and Muslim Communities During the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Australian Experience

Australia witnessed a substantial degree of racism toward Asian and Muslim communities during the Covid-19 pandemic, much of which was shared and amplified on social media. However, while a growing body of national and international literature has illuminated the problem of racism during significant crisis events, limited studies have addressed how these narratives are both produced and resisted in online spaces. In this paper, I present the findings of a Thematic Content Analysis of how Asian and Muslim communities were constructed on Twitter/X during Australia's 2020–2021 lockdowns. Drawing on the literature surrounding Networked Counterpublics—and analyzed through a Systemic Racism lens—findings illuminate how publics used Twitter/X as a space to both legitimize and contest racist narratives relating to the pandemic, further demonstrating the power of social media as a vehicle for the amplification and resistance of racism during a significant global crisis.

Black racial identity and engagement during Black Lives Matter 2020: The role of age and multiracial status.

The social category of race plays an important role in how people navigate their identities and social worlds, especially in societies where racial injustice is salient. The present study considers the racial identity experiences of Multiracial and monoracial Black adults in the United States during a race-salient moment: the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Using survey data collected in the fall of 2020, our study seeks to understand racial identity and activism experiences among age-diverse monoracial and Multiracial Black people during BLM 2020. Participants were 183 Black adults in the United States (73 Multiracial, 110 monoracial). Regressions were conducted to examine (a) how identity exploration and commitment differed by age and by Multiracial status during a time of heightened racial salience, and (b) how identity exploration and commitment was associated with BLM engagement. We found that Multiracial and monoracial individuals engage with racial identity differently across age groups, reflecting their different relationships with dominant societal narratives of race. We also found positive associations between racial identity and BLM engagement regardless of participants' Multiracial status or age. While our findings did underscore several commonalities across Multiracial and monoracial Black people, they also indicated a need to revisit the relevance of established (mono)racial identity development models for Multiracial individuals, especially outside of adolescence and young adulthood. Revisiting previous models is critical to engage with the m(ai)cro process of racial identity and how the cultural context of anti-Blackness and monoracism shapes individual development across the life course. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The haunting melody of loss in the racist imagination

This article aims to explore the appeal of racist narratives and how they are used in populist politics to manipulate and exploit, leading to a rise in xenophobia and race hate crimes. Beneath the surface of the rhetoric is a predictable constellation of thoughts and feelings that create a racist imagination whose emotional atmosphere is melancholic and potentially murderous. The entangling of grief with racism is exploited through political messaging which aims to create false narratives of hope that attempt to bring to life a regressive fantasy of a return to an idealised past, into the material reality of the present by racialising others and treating them with impunity. I consider the extent to which we can learn about the challenges of engaging with these forces by turning to the experience of working clinically with these states of mind to translate a psychoanalytic sensibility to the political, one that is sensitive to the complexity and conflation of race, class and biography.

The Toxic Mix of Multiculturalism and Medicine: The Credentialing and Professional-Entry Experience for Persons of African Descent

This essay is based on a case study of international medical graduates (IMGs) in Canada who migrated from sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter examines how narratives of race are situated and deployed in the field of medicine and can produce some aversive social–psychological landscapes in the credentialing and the professional-entry process as it relates to persons of African descent. It will show that, often without predetermination or intent, professionals of African descent in Canada are highly susceptible to implicit racial associations and implicit racial stereotyping in relation to evaluations of character, credentials, and culture. The article exposes some of the critical intersections of common experience, such as: (a) cultural deficit bias—Whiteness as an institutionalized cultural capital attribute; (b) confirmation bias—reaching a negative conclusion and working backwards to find evidence to support it; (c) repurposed sub-Saharan Blackness stereotypes—binary forms of techno-scamming and fraud; and (d) biased deception judgement—where the accuracy of deception judgements deteriorates when made across cultures. These social psychological phenomena result in significantly disproportionate returns on their foreign education and labour market experience for Black medical professionals that require decisive efforts in changing the narratives.

Yellow Techno-Peril: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and anti-Chinese racial rhetoric in the US–China AI arms race

The rhetoric of an ‘AI arms race’ between the United States and China has become increasingly prominent over the past 5 years, despite warnings that it is unnecessarily polarising and undermines safe and ethical artificial intelligence (AI) development. However, existing critiques of the AI arms race narrative engage only sparingly with the racialised dimensions of this discourse. In this article, I draw on the rich theoretical insights of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies to show how the AI arms race narrative is deeply racialised in two key ways. First, I show how the rhetoric of an AI arms race builds upon the myth of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the West and the East. This civilisational rhetoric constitutes China and the United States as distinct and mutually opposed cultural entities, thus foreclosing the possibility of more peaceful and cooperative alternatives to the AI arms race. Second, I demonstrate how the US–China AI arms race specifically draws on previous racialised configurations of anti-Asian sentiment, such as techno-Orientalism and the Yellow Peril. I coin the term Yellow Techno-Peril to connote how older European and Americans fears of being overrun or controlled by China are reproduced in the AI arms race. I close by offering recommendations to key stakeholders such as policymakers, decisionmakers, journalists and media organisations as to how they can mitigate and avoid the racialised rhetoric of an AI arms race between the United States and China.

Each one, teach one: Critical history as counterstories, antiracist affordances, and cues for belonging.

Recently, there have been several calls for psychologists to dismantle systemic racism within the field (e.g., Buchanan et al., 2021; Dupree & Boykin, 2021; Wilcox et al., 2022). In this article, we discuss why incorporating critical histories into psychology curricula can be beneficial to this effort. We focus on three potential pathways: critical histories provide counterstories that challenge racist narratives, critical histories promote contexts that encourage antiracism practices (antiracist affordances), and critical histories can signal identity safety and belonging. To adequately integrate critical histories into psychology curricula, we make three recommendations. First, create and support a departmental curriculum that engages critical histories in the field of psychology at the undergraduate and graduate level (we offer some example topics and readings). Second, based on our own training experiences, we recommend that psychology graduate programs facilitate opportunities to take interdisciplinary courses that cover the history of race and racism in domestic and/or global contexts. Finally, we recommend funding research and supporting student projects that produce critical histories in psychology to expand the knowledge base of our field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Blackness in the Black Legend: How narratives of race and slavery in the Amistad affair shaped anti-Hispanicism and "American Exceptionalism"

Abstract: This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative.

Workshop Notes: Identifying Racial Narratives

Workshop Notes: Identifying Racial Narratives

(Re)setting the racial narrative: Antiblackness and educational censorship

Antiblackness is a persistent feature of American society with continued implications for the experiences, outcomes, and well-being of Black communities. In the wake of widespread protests against antiblack police brutality and heightened awareness of racial injustices in 2020, federal, state, and local political actors swiftly began a concerted effort to maintain the illusion of racial progress within the United States. These efforts, which we identify as manifestations of what Carol Anderson (2016) describes as White rage, have taken the form of educational censorship policies that have been successfully enacted in at least 18 states. This study interrogates the policy development process of two such censorship policies in Texas and North Dakota. Drawing on Black critical theory and insights from critical policy analysis, we demonstrate the ways that antiblackness was made legible in the policy development process and conclude with recommendations for combatting the further spread of antiblack educational censorship.

Transnational Queer Materialism

The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.

Facebook Framing of the First Female U.S. Vice President: An Intersectional Approach to Analyzing Memes Depicting Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris made political history in 2020 when she was elected vice president of the United States. Our study employs intersectionality to shed light on how people framed Harris in Facebook memes during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign and 2021 Inauguration. While gender and racial pride were strong in many of the memes, our analysis identified both racist and sexist characterizations that built on historical stereotypes of Black women. Harris was the subject of a variety of sexist and racist attacks with Facebook posts/memes framing her using tropes, such as “Jezebel” and “Tragic Mulatto.” Our intersectional analysis of the framing of political candidates provides a rationale for the continued assessment of memes for their ability to promote and spread historical stereotypes and racist narratives. The continued framing of Black women based on both gender and race is an indication society has made little progress in its representations of the group.

Black Fathers Matter: Messages of Hope in Black Father-Themed Instagram Memes

Using a Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Framing Theory as a lens, this study extends the literature on media representations through an examination of the framing and tone toward Black fathers illustrated in Instagram memes in 2022. Study findings indicate that Instagram offers a means for individuals to share positive messages about this marginalized group. Social media was used to offer messages of hope that framed Black fathers positively, often referencing the Black Lives Matter movement to encourage individuals to recognize the value of Black men in the lives of children and families. Memes offered counter-narratives to the traditional racist narratives that have plagued Black men historically. The findings of this study are important for advancing future research in this area and underscoring the powerful role of social media in shifting narratives about Black fathers.

Archaeology in 2022: Counter‐myths for hopeful futures

AbstractArchaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat retrograde and racist narratives that remain pervasive in the public sphere. At the same time, the field has a deep‐seated conservative bastion toward which many scholars retreat, arguing for an “objective” past that is free of political implications or interpretive ambiguity. As anarchist archaeologists, we see the myth of the objective past as one of many interconnected myths that have provided the basis for an archaeology that reifies and proliferates the current social order. We deconstruct myths relating to capitalist and colonialist ideologies of “human nature,” the assumed inevitability of the current order, and fatalistic commitment to dystopian or utopian futures. As alternatives, we present counter‐myths that emphasize the contingent and political nature of archaeological praxis, the creative and collaborative foundation of communities, the alternative orders that archaeology uncovers, and the role of a hopeful past for constructing the possibilities of different futures.

Online hate speech on social media in Portugal: extremism or structural racism?

ABSTRACT This paper analyses online racial hate speeches in Portugal. The theory underpinning this research challenges the idea that racism is an epiphenomenon in European and Portuguese history. Beginning with a theoretical framework which conceives racism as a historically constructed system of power and privilege, we argue that its structural nature paved the way for the consolidation and normalisation of openly racist discourses. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that the nature of racist narratives can only be understood from a theoretical conceptualisation which problematises the Portuguese colonial past and its current continuities. In this research, a critical analysis of discourses produced and reproduced on social media, namely Facebook and Twitter, was carried out. From a comparative analysis of the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea that this health crisis coincided with a shift of the dominant racist narratives is thus challenged.

Racialization, colonialism, and imperialism: a critical autoethnography on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context.

Migration has been identified as a priority area for policy responses by both the federal and provincial/territorial governments yet, much of our knowledge about migration is not premised on addressing current xenophobic and racist narratives about migrants. The purpose of this research is an interrogation of Canada's colonialism, imperialism, and racialization, which produce specific oppressive policies and practices that have impacted my family. This research is premised on the understanding that in the space between what is known about migration in Canada and what is not, a great deal of narrative and interpretive work is done that makes assumptions about migrants, specifically forcibly displaced people from the Global South. Through a critical autoethnography focused on my lived experiences as a descendant of forcibly displaced Chinese-Vietnamese people living in a settler colonial nation state, this study critiques to what extent these assumptions are founded, and to what extent they represent a socio-political climate in which migration is set out as particular problems requiring a legal and policing solution. In particular, my analysis centers anti-colonialism and anti-racism, shifting to resistance to systemic violence and liberation, while considering the discursive and on-the-ground effects of racist, colonial, and imperial policies and practice. Set against the backdrop of the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, and racism across all levels of government and academia, and the general public, the results of this study produce a counter-narrative focused on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context, which is both timely and urgent.

Rhetorical Dance of Belonging: Chamaole Narratives of Race, Indigeneity, and Identity from Guam

Rhetorical Dance of Belonging: Chamaole Narratives of Race, Indigeneity, and Identity from Guam

A Victorian taste of Italy: Situating the “Italian-Swiss Colony” in California wine culture

The article focuses on Andrea Sbarboro's (1839–1923) Italian-Swiss Colony of Asti in Sonoma County and the success of his winemaking company created in 1881. By exploring the relationship between the symbolic space of the vineyard (which I refer to as a ‘winescape’) and the predominant racial narratives of the time in California, I argue that Sbarboro created an Italian space in which Italian Americans could be recognized as ‘white.’ Sbarboro's representations of winemaking as a tradition rooted in Greek/Roman civilization appealed to a Victorian cultural elite that intended to project a Classical and imperialist aesthetic into California. Even today, it is still possible to find in Sonoma and Napa Valley Italian American winemakers that link their business to a similar aesthetic with the unintended result of excising from the landscape non-white contributions to the history of winemaking in California.

Infertile Exclusions

Women of color are more likely to experience infertility compared to white women. Despite this likelihood, infertility continues to be associated with whiteness. This study examines the historical and modern influences of the hyperfertility narrative, a pervasive master narrative linking race and reproduction. Studying Instagram posts about infertility and race, McCann argues that women of color have had to fight for their very inclusion within infertility identities, illustrating the continued rhetorical salience that dominant narratives of race and reproductive enforce within support-seeking environments like Instagram. Specifically, this study demonstrates how WOCr rhetors counter hyperfertility by co-constructingnew counternarratives that frame experiences of infertility through experiences with race and racism. These counternarratives involve three empowerment strategies: witnessing, visual counterstorying, and attribution. By studying how marginalized rhetors counter hyperfertility narratives, the study illustrates a kind of invitational knowledge-building that occurs within histories of race and reproduction. Overall, this work pushes scholars and practitioners in reproductive care to acknowledge how racial identities, and perhaps personhood itself, is de/valued around and through reproductive abilities.