Nature Of Racism Research Articles

TERF Intimate Publics

This article asks: how does trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERFism) function to create an intimate public that generates a sense of belonging along gendered and racialized lines? Drawing from Judith Butler, I use “fascism” as a conceptual frame while analyzing online images and sentiments of a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) who belongs to an Australian anti-gender Facebook group. I argue that TERF intimate publics are constituted by feelings of loss and resentment which become alleviated through claiming legitimacy along a “natural” gendered and racialized hierarchy of human worth, through demanding a return of one’s “sex-based rights,” and through a commitment to victimhood. Generating pride in a perceived endangered identity, this article finds that TERF intimate publics uphold the regulatory norms of cis-heteronormativity and whiteness. This analysis reveals that they offer a space for racist nationalism rooted in cis-hetero-misogyny, a crucial finding as TERFism gains traction in the current political moment.

Beyond the Demands of Integration: African Refugee Resettlement in Contemporary Multicultural Australia

This paper uses the example of negatively racialised refugees from the African continent to reiterate the racialised nature of migrant and refugee experiences in Australia. This is a context that remains deeply influenced by a violent history of British colonisation and racist migration laws, including the restrictive White Australia Policy (1901–1973). Drawing on the authors’ research and personal experiences of working with, and navigating, the Australian resettlement system this article examines the racialised violences inherent in expectations of ‘integration’ for (former) African refugees in a settler colonial country. This paper proffers a principle level re-imagining of refugee resettlement in Australia that challenges patriarchal white sovereignty. It proposes a meaningful consideration of resettlement practices that are community-led, localised, relational and that recognise the agency of refugees who settle in Australia. This paper disrupts dominant tropes of refugees as perpetually vulnerable and deficit, by centering the agency, needs and expectations of a good life as it is lived in community, rather than dictated by the state.

Border & rule: global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism

Border & rule: global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism

Book review: Considering climate change and collective action in border and rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism

Book review: Considering climate change and collective action in border and rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism

Urban inequality, the housing crisis and deteriorating water access in US cities

The housing unaffordability and cost-of-living crisis is affecting millions of people in US cities, yet the implications for urban dwellers’ well-being and social reproduction remain less clear. This Article presents a longitudinal analysis of household access to running water—a vital component of social infrastructure—in the 50 largest US cities since 1970. The results indicate that water access has worsened in an increasing number and typology of US cities since the 2008 global financial crash, disproportionately affecting households of color in 12 of the 15 largest cities. We provide evidence to suggest that a ‘reproductive squeeze’—systemic, compounding pressures on households’ capacity to reproduce themselves on a daily and societal basis—is forcing urban households into more precarious living arrangements, including housing without running water. We analyze the case study of Portland (Oregon) to illustrate the racialized nature of the reproductive squeeze under a housing crisis. Our insights reveal that plumbing poverty—a lack of household running water—is expanding in scope and severity to a broader array of US cities, raising doubts about equitable progress towards Sustainable Development Goals for clean water and sanitation for all (SDG 6) and sustainable cities (SDG 11) in an increasingly urbanized United States.

Attending to Race in Teacher Well-Being Interventions: A Systematic Review and Recommendations

Many teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs, struggle with feeling effective at work, experience high levels of stress and burnout, and report higher levels of depressive symptoms than the average adult. Moreover, growing evidence shows that teachers’ professional experiences are racialized, resulting in well-being disparities between White teachers and Teachers of Color (TOC). In this article, we use a novel AI-assisted tool to review existing research on interventions ( N = 89) geared to improve teacher well-being, with a specific focus on whether and to what extent researchers acknowledge or discuss the racialized nature of teachers’ professional experiences. Grounded in a theory of schools as racialized organizations, we (a) review the most common intervention strategies for improving teacher well-being and (b) document the extent to which teacher well-being interventions address race or racism in their designs and analyses. Consistent with past work, we find that the vast majority of interventions to improve teacher well-being aim to equip teachers with psychological tools (mindfulness, coping strategies, compassion training) to navigate their professional experiences. However, only half of the studies reviewed here report the racial demographics of their samples, and only four consider how their interventions might differentially impact TOC versus White teachers. We discuss the reasons for and implications of this omission from the teacher well-being literature and provide recommendations for researchers to contend with the racialized nature of teacher well-being in research.

Racial Attitudes and Views of Disaster

As disasters become more frequent and costly, understanding attitudes toward government disaster policy becomes critically important. Scholars have explored the racialized nature of specific disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. But studies of general disaster policy preferences have not attended much to race, focusing instead on dimensions like partisanship and perceived deservingness. We use two original national surveys to assess the role of racial attitudes and ethnoracial identification on support for disaster spending. We find that racial attitudes are among the most powerful predictors of disaster spending preferences. They also strongly condition support for racially-targeted reasons justifying disaster spending. We also find that support for disaster spending is highest among Black Americans and lowest among Whites. Racial attitudes account for much of this racial gap, and strongly predict preferences even with controls for political attitudes, experience with disaster, and demographics. Our findings hold across question wordings and time. Racial attitudes are important in understanding general preferences about disaster policy, beyond responses to the specific racialized disasters on which scholars of race and disaster have focused.

IT’S ALWAYS ALREADY TOO LATE FOR WHITE MEN

The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world was alive, provided an unexpected philosophical foundation for the animism that attributes legal and ontological personhood to the corporation, an imitation of life. The transcendental reification of nature, recently evident in Avatar’s fantasies that one could merge with an impersonally conscious nature, turns out to be coterminous with the reification of corporate personhood, and both with the co-option of (fantasies of) white male individuality. The history of the corporation is also the history of the new world: its colonization was facilitated by joint-stock companies. After native populations were subjugated or exterminated, they took on symbolic roles in the colonizing cultures, and the animistic nature with which they are identified has been personified in ways that are transferred to the corporation. As white men began to feel isolated in society, they imagined they could regain connection with a racialized nature; but they could never have access to their conjectured (and ultimately virtual) aboriginal cultures. Transcendentalism also laid the groundwork for merger with the corporation, the dominant manifestation of contemporary capitalist ontology.

Beyond George Floyd: Assessing sentiments on police fund reallocation and its intersection with race and racial resentment

In the context of several controversial police-involved deaths over the past several years, discussion has mounted about the reallocation of funds from policing to other crime prevention services. Given the racialized nature of public opinion, we drew upon conflict theory and theories of racial animus/resentment to explore the relationship between racial identity, racial resentment, and support for reallocation, as well as concerns if funding were reallocated. Relying on survey data from a national sample of US adults in the summer immediately following George Floyd's murder, we found that Black respondents were less supportive of reallocating funds than White respondents and expressed concerns about increases in crime and increases in riots if funds were reallocated. These sentiments seemed to be tied to fear of crime. Also, respondents reporting more racial animus were less supportive of reallocating funds, as well as expressed concerns with access to services and increased crime and riots. The findings suggested that attitudes around police funding are racialized, as well as provided support for the overpolicing-underpolicing paradox. A policy of reallocation of funds would need to address concerns around public safety.

Ethnic Identity and Violence in Urban Spaces: Looking Through the Lens of ‘Cultural Conditioning’

In the recent past, the episodes of violence against the Northeast migrants in major metropolitan cities have raised debates on the racial nature of such violence and have drawn scholarly attention. This article maps the experiences of differential treatment and violence among the Northeast migrants in the national capital city and looks into the consequences of such experiences and strategies to cope with various challenges in daily life. It critically examines the experiences through the sociocultural dynamics of the local societies within the city where the ethnic migrants live. It considers the experiential accounts of a sample of 130 Northeast migrants from different urban local cultures in the national capital of India. Data on lived experiences and various perspectives of the Northeast migrants are collected using a mixed-method approach. The article reveals that ethnic identity plays a role in everyday experiences with some sorts of disadvantages. The ‘construction of otherness’ is found to have a disproportionate impact on their day-to-day life. However, there have been perceived positive changes in the ‘perceptual distance’ and inter-group behaviours. Given that most of the experiences of differential treatment and violence among Northeast migrants are located within the context of the local societies in the city and they have everyday encounters for social acceptance, the article argues that the inter-group relationships are exceedingly shaped by the sociocultural orientations of the people in local societies. The article asserts that understanding the violence against a migrant ethnic minority in cosmopolitan cities cannot undermine the role of social and cultural boundaries of urban local societies.

Descendants of the dragon: racialized mixed Chineseness in immigrant China

ABSTRACT Following China’s rise as an economic powerhouse, the country’s immigrant population has quickly increased and diversified, leading to an increase in romantic relationships between foreign and Chinese citizens. This article analyzes the racialization of belonging and citizenship of Chinese nationals born into Chinese-foreign families living in China. Drawing on data gathered through analyzing online debates and media reports, supplemented by interviews and fieldwork observations, the article investigates how discussions about the identity of vloggers, pop stars, and athletes of mixed Chinese-foreign descent shed light on rising Chinese racial nationalism at a time when China has become a destination for international migration and a new frontier for racial knowledge production. We argue that this process is characterized by a tension between China’s emergence as an immigrant society and the hardening boundaries of its national identity.

Contra the divestment campaign

ABSTRACT This article argues that universities should not merely reject but publicly denounce demands to divest from Israel, whether those demands are general or more targeted. It does so first by exposing the fundamentally racist nature of the divestment demands, then subsequently examines several recent university precedents to extract some dozen content-neutral arguments against divestment. If anything, for moral, humanitarian, financial, and most of all academic reasons universities should be investing in, not divesting from, Israel. In this light, anti-Israel activism can be seen as attempting to hijack the university to promote its own, ultimately genocidal agenda, and hence must be vigorously denounced.

Mapping black geographies

AbstractThis paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic—I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.

Tudor Ghosts in Black Shirts: The British Union of Fascists, Nazi Germany and the Quest for Musical Greatness in Britain

Abstract The United Kingdom has for centuries suffered the reputation of an ‘unmusical nation’ that could not produce a great composer or compete with the rich musical cultures of Germany, Italy or Russia. In the 1930s, members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) who worked in the musical professions began to challenge and reject this long-standing stereotype. These self-described Blackshirts hoped to achieve a ‘rebirth’ of British classical music under the leadership of Oswald Mosley and expel racially impure ‘alien’ performers from Britain’s houses of culture. As British fascists conceived and debated these plans, the example of Nazi Germany loomed large in their imaginations. BUF Blackshirts professed admiration for Joseph Goebbels’s campaigns against ‘degenerate’ music and imitated the Nazi Party’s völkisch criticisms of jazz, modern art and consumerism. Especially intriguing to Mosley’s followers was the Nazi cult of Richard Wagner, which offered a compelling illustration of how a hypothetical fascist Britain might revere a historical composer as an emblem of racial nationalism. The Third Reich’s glorification of Wagner prompted debate within the BUF about which figure, or figures, could fulfil such a role in Britain, with two schools of thought predominating: either the late Victorian generation of composers or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tudor masters. If Nazi cultural policy was a source of inspiration for British fascists, it was equally one of intimidation and self-doubt, reviving insecurities that the British people were a ‘musically inferior race’ unable to produce a composer rivalling Wagner’s genius.

Shifting systems of racial inequity: Applying critical race psychology to advance racial justice

AbstractSince the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a renewed and more mainstream attention to systemic racism emerged. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has permeated the larger public discourse around race more than ever before. Yet, social, scientific, and political backlash intended to silence conversations about the systemic and power‐driven nature of racism have also characterized these years. 30+ years have passed since CRT's introduction as a critical analysis of how the legal system fails minoritized groups; 20+ years have passed since CRT's introduction into the social psychological field. Although psychology provides a strong foundation for the CRT tenets, incorporating CRT into the field of psychology has lagged behind many other fields (e.g., sociology, education). In two installments, this special issue (re)introduces psychological researchers to CRT and Psychological Critical Race Theory (PCRT), underscores CRT's importance and limitations in the context of psychological research, features novel applications and directions in CRT, and addresses the current political climate of opposition to discussions of CRT. This second installment looks outward highlighting psychological research applying (P)CRT frameworks to advance racial justice. We conclude with reflections on the history of CRT and PCRT and the shifts necessary in our scholarship‐activism to dismantle systems of racial oppression.

Structurally unjust: how lay beliefs about racism relate to responses to racial inequality in the criminal legal system

Racial inequality has been a persistent component of American society since its inception. The present research investigates how lay beliefs about the nature of racism—as primarily caused by prejudiced individuals or, rather, to structural factors (i.e., policies, institutional practices) that disadvantage members of marginalized racial groups—predict reactions to evidence of racial inequality in the criminal legal system (Studies 1–3). Specifically, the current research suggests that holding a more structural (vs. interpersonal) view of racism predicts a greater tendency to perceive racial inequality in criminal legal outcomes. Moreover, White Americans' lay beliefs regarding racism, coupled with their general degree of preference for societal hierarchy, predict support for policies that would impact disparities in the U.S. prison population. Together, this work suggests that an appreciation of structural racism plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to racial inequality.

“It’s an Old White Boys’ Club:” Faculty of Color’s Perceptions of Policy Engagement

Scholars of color remain underrepresented in policymaking contexts, and the absence of their expertise in policy processes can have significant consequences for society. In this study, we examine motivations for and perceived barriers to engagement in public policymaking among faculty of color. Using an institutional logics framework and interviews with 20 tenure-stream faculty of color at 20 research universities, we identify three main themes that elucidate their perceptions of public policy engagement: (1) the network-driven, racialized nature of public policymaking spaces; (2) communal motivations and perceived benefits of public policy engagement; and (3) the double-edged sword of engaging with public policymaking.

Race, gender, and Occidentalism in global reactionary discourses

Abstract This article seeks to deepen understanding of the global politics of reactionary discursive formations, which at the current conjuncture increasingly coalesce around self-victimising articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as ‘elitist’ in Western core contexts or ‘Western’ in postcolonial spaces. Drawing on insights from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on racial entanglements, masculinism, and Occidentalism, I argue that racialised and gendered imaginations about an emasculated and overly multiracial West and, relatedly, renewed East/West binaries enable reactionary discourses in both Western societies and elsewhere through adaptable mechanisms of mediating between the international and the domestic. I then extend an analysis of global racial entanglements and gendered East/West binaries to Chinese anti-baizuo discourse from both online nationalists and dissident intellectuals, which provides a prime example of how grammars of global reactionary discourse are localised in different political projects and ideological constellations. It demonstrates how reactionary imaginations of the West are instrumental for animating narratives of racial-civilisational hierarchy and masculinist notions of politics and society hostile to egalitarian and emancipatory ideals in a ‘non-Western’ context. Moreover, by highlighting overlaps and divergence in the refashioning of dualistic constructs in American and Chinese ‘anti-woke’ narratives, I show that reactionary discourses operate not only across the geopolitical divide, but also through it, invoked by opposing political forces sharing ethnonationalist and masculinist logics in processes of mutual othering to perpetuate antagonistic identities. The article contributes to the intersection between critical research on the global right and postcolonial International Relations (IR).

You as a stylistic vector of otherness: from self-ascription to enactment in Kincaid (1988), Adichie (2009) and Azumah Nelson (2021)

Abstract Based on a theoretical pragmatic model (Sorlin, Sandrine. 2022. The stylistics of ‘you’. Second-person pronoun and its pragmatic effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this article compares the use of the second-person pronoun in three different narratives written by Black writers: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, A Small Place (1988), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel Open Water (2021). It highlights how the racial nature and assumed universality of you is exposed in the texts and argues that the pronoun works as a powerful vector of otherness, bringing the (white Western) reader to experience racism in most intimate terms. The three texts propose varied stylistic constellations that draw on the flexibility of the pronoun in terms of potential reference, entailing different positionings of audiences, going from “self-ascription” (Wechsler, Stephen. 2010. What ‘I’ and ‘you’ mean to each other: Person indexicals, self-ascription, and theory of mind. Language 86(2). 332–365) to “enactment” (Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The experientiality of narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter; Popova, Yanna B. 2015. Stories, meaning and experience: Narrativity and enaction. London & New York: Routledge). The article also evidences how the inter/intra-personal pronoun triggers a blurring of traditional stylistic and narratorial labels and lines. Lastly, from an enactive perspective that sees reading as an intersubjective participatory act where meaning emerges in the very interaction between a teller and a reader, this article sees communicating as an act of coordination based on the metaphor, communicating is dancing, inspired by Azumah Nelson’s rhythmic novel.

An Insurgent Mood: Lorraine Hansberry on the Politics of Home

This article takes as its starting point a 1961 conversation between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, where the latter first posed the question that would recur in Baldwin’s writings in the following years: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” Although the phrase is often associated with Baldwin, who mostly used it as a metaphor for the racist nation, most famously in The Fire Next Time (1963), this article shows how Hansberry’s analysis of many African Americans’ skepticism toward integration into a “burning house” was situated in a global context of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist struggle. Writing within networks of Black internationalist feminists and presenting a multivalent and relational account of home, Hansberry revealed household labor and relations of intimacy to be central to the making and maintenance of empire, racism, and capitalism, as well as their contestation through acts and affects of insurgency.