Racial Oppression Research Articles

Racism and Capitalism: A Contingent or Necessary Relationship?

Abstract Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh and Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism.

Systemic Discrimination Exposing Chaos Among African Families in Their Eyes were Watching God

Families of African Americans were purposefully maintained fragmented to support the culture of slavery. They overcame institutional prejudice, legal segregation, and poverty in order to maintain their loose construction. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, African American families are subjected to systematic discrimination that creates chaos and internal hatred by encouraging racial preference, affirmative action, targeted citizenship, personal bias, gender inequality, and other issues. This research sheds light on this issue. Systemic discrimination in this research refers to institutional inequity, prevailing intolerance, marginalization, and rejection of a person/character based on membership in a certain group. These concepts in the chosen novel have been examined using theoretical framework produced by Critical Race Theory. The novel's textual analysis indicates that systematic prejudice aids in the transfer of racial oppression from the individual to the institution of marriage and family life functioning in society. The study also demonstrates the negative consequences of institutionalized inequality on marriage and family structures, which destabilize communities and present African American families as weak and loosely knit.

Internalized Racial Oppression in Teresa Ann Willis’ Like A Tree Without Roots

Internalized racial oppression is a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary phenomenon that plagues many ethnic groups in America. However, little attention has been given to this race-based issue. The aim of this research paper is to highlight internalized racial oppression as a socio-psychological phenomenon in the novel of the African American writer Teresa Ann Willis’ Like A Tree Without Roots which is a story of suffering as well as of healing. In this young adult fiction, the protagonist is subjected to an internalized set of values that creates its own cycle of victimization leading to feelings of self-hatred, self-doubt and disrespect for her race and herself. An integral part of this culture is the White standards of beauty. The paper unravels the severe psychological effects of the internalization of Western beauty standards on the identity formation of African American teen girls. The paper focuses on oppression theory in relation to sociology and psychology to analyze the novel understudy. In addition, Liberatory/critical consciousness will be tackled as a concept in the educational system that proves to be highly important to fully comprehend this phenomenon of internalized racial oppression.

Practices of radical digital care: towards autonomous queer migration

ABSTRACT Digital connectivity of queer migrants on the move to Europe plays a crucial role in confronting border regimes, heteronormativity and racist oppression. ICTs at the disposal of queer migrants interrupt the material politics of silence and violence. However, digital technology also implies serious hazards. Queer migrants use digital space to empower themselves, to build networks, and to trace, reach and create safer spaces of care. This paper conceptualises how care is materialised in self-organised actions and horizontal relationships that question power regimes and commodification practices while introducing the notion of radical digital care. Digital spaces of (radical) care constitute safe spaces of compassion where people can be heard and believed. They act as points of reference for queer people seeking recognition and care. Moreover, queer migration constitutes constant shifting between subject and care positions that redefine the notion of home and safety and the material ordering of migration itself. Based on a qualitative study of ten semi-structured interviews with solidarians and migrants, this paper reveals how the appropriation of digital media by queer migrants re-arranges the material politics of the borderland by contesting border technologies, and through radical care, allows communities to live through hardship, fear, and abuse.

Health, hospital(ity) and hegemony: Artistic agencies of two women weavers at Ceza, 1962

Art history has yet to accord recognition to two women for their pivotal roles at a small tapestry-weaving project at Ceza Mission Hospital in rural South Africa in 1962. As I argue below, it was largely the agencies of Allina Ndebele from rural KwaZulu-Natal and Ulla Gowenius from Sweden that laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into a renowned tapestry centre at Rorke's Drift. Although representations depicted Ceza as idyllic, the women pursued this venture in what was a coercive environment, in which a rural black community was marginalised not merely by disease, but forms of power that included racial oppression, doctrine, patriarchy, social convention and biomedicine. This account recovers details of Ndebele and Gowenius's inventive interactions and accords subjectivity to convalescent weavers disenfranchised by modalities of social control, in turn disrupting homogenising notions of this pedagogic milieu as a duality of empowered trainers and those directed by them. Exposing the conditions in which the project was fostered, I situate the venture in a context of mid-century Swedish philanthropy, interrogating previous representations of Ceza as an outcome of benign modernity and the project as the fruits of foreign expertise.

Assumptions of immigration status: A moderated mediation analysis of racial microaggressions and internalization impacting latinx and asian college students.

Racial oppression in the United States has changed many forms post-2016 elections, including anti-immigrant sentiments towards highly visible immigrant communities, such as Latinx and Asian people. The weaponization of immigration status against Latinx and Asian people in the U.S. has increased drastically post-2016 and equity researchers have responded with scholarship primarily addressing the systemic and macro levels of these oppressive behaviors. Less is known during this period about the shifts of everyday racism-related attacks - such as racial microaggressions. Racial microaggressions are daily stressors that can severely impact the targets' well-being and people of color often engage in coping strategies to disarm and neutralize these stressors. The internalization of these degrading and stereotypical messages is a common coping strategy with people of color adopting these negative images into their self-view. Using a sample (N = 436) collected in the Fall of 2020, we unpack the relationships between immigration status microaggressions, psychological distress, and internalization among Latinx and Asian college students. We compared the frequencies of immigration status microaggressions and psychological distress between Latinx and Asian respondents. We used a conditional (moderated mediation) process model to explore possible significant interactions. Our findings suggested that Latinx, compared to Asian students, significantly reported more experiences of immigration status microaggressions and psychological distress. A mediation analysis showed that internalizing coping strategies partially mediated the relationship between immigration status microaggressions and poor well-being. Finally, a moderated mediation model's results highlighted that being Latinx moderated the positive relationship between immigration status microaggressions and psychological distress through internalization.

Lay theories about collective power in the context of racial oppression

AbstractSocial psychological research has generally assumed that oppressed groups are powerless because they often have less control over resources and outcomes and power is usually defined as dominance or influence and control. We juxtapose this theoretical assumption with lay beliefs about the ingroup's collective power expressed in semi‐structured interviews among Black Americans (N = 28). Thematic analysis revealed that participants’ beliefs about ingroup power varied: whereas some participants perceived that the ingroup lacked power, others believed that the ingroup did have power, or the potential to gain it. These beliefs were based on distinct lay theories about collective power, conceptualized at different levels of analysis: the intragroup level (power as community resilience, enhancing ingroup solidarity), intergroup level (power as resistance against oppression, building coalitions between groups) and structural level (power as relative control over resources). We discuss the theoretical and methodological contributions and implications for research on collective power.

The Rock Musical: From Creation to Curation (2015–2020)

In a post-#Me-Too/Black Lives Matter landscape, the gender- and race-politics of the Golden Age of rock have increasingly come under interrogation. Hip-hop challenging rock’s long-standing hegemony constitutes a sociological as well as a musical shift, with a production such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock (2015) perhaps seeming hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton from the same year. This article’s close and contextualized readings of four post-Hamilton jukebox rock musicals debate two principal issues. First, the extent to which the jukebox musical is fit for purpose: creative enough to repurpose rock’s cultural patrimony for an enriching night in the theatre. Second, how and why the curation practices of the rock musical reproduce or challenge the intersectional vectors of gendered and racial oppression, which render the genre problematic.

Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr

Reviewed by: Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr Mary Rizzo Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. Performance and American Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 301. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0684-3; cloth, $89.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0682-9.) What was the affective register of the civil rights movement? From the joyful singing of freedom songs to the palpable anger of Anne Moody’s memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), civil rights activists felt their movement as much as they intellectualized or strategized about it. In the ambitious and generative Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. asserts that scholars have ignored a key affect of the civil rights movement—patience. As he argues, historically when Black Americans have been told to be patient—defined as bearing suffering with equanimity—it has supported white supremacy. Time becomes a key framework through which to understand a movement defined by competing calls for “freedom now” and, as Nina Simone contemptuously sang, “go slow” (pp. 9, 114). Fleming suggests that we can apprehend the workings of Black patience through Black performance, particularly the time-based medium of theater. Focusing on the “‘classical’ phase” of the civil rights movement (1954–1965), he suggests that “black theatre in the Civil Rights Movement forwarded and energized the Black Radical Tradition—not by attaching itself to communism per se, but by working to disassemble the modern structures of racial time and racial affect that energize the violent cultures of black patience” (pp. 22, 24). Through analysis of theater and performance in the civil rights movement, we see not only the functioning of Black patience but also the depiction of its other, a “fugitive affect” that “strain[s] against the affective protocols of black patience” (p. 33). Fleming examines these ideas through chapters on famous and forgotten cultural productions. Chapter 1 focuses on the little-remembered centennial [End Page 389] commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, which included a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, an exhibition in Chicago, and a performance of a musical drama by Duke Ellington. The temporal and geographic meanings of the Free Southern Theater’s performances throughout the rural South are the subject of chapter 2. Amiri Baraka’s “black queer trilogy” of plays is the core of the next chapter, which examines the meaning of queerness and an eroticized Black body in the movement (p. 171). Chapter 4 turns to the performance of fugitive affect in Black plays that center “white impatience” rather than Black patience (p. 183). The book concludes with a chapter that parallels the public civil rights performances of sit-ins and jail-ins with theater pieces that depict these movement tactics on stage, a kind of doubled performance. Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. Black patience is a tool of racial oppression by forever putting freedom in the future (Fleming offers a critique of Afro-futurism as counterintuitively functioning similarly). His work urges historians to think about time beyond our usual mantra of change over time to consider how time structured how activists saw themselves and their movement. Some historians may be troubled by Fleming’s definition of radicalism. While scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Peniel E. Joseph argue that radicalism in the movement was related to labor organizing and leftist political movements, Fleming sees radicalism in theatrical and other performances that “fostered different ways of seeing, feeling, and ultimately of being black, posing a formidable challenge to the violent enterprise of black patience” (p. 24). There is little discussion here of the direct outcomes of these performances on policy. Instead, the emphasis is on how performance reveals counterhegemonic ideas within the Black artistic community...

Hobbesian Diffidence, Second-Order Discrimination, and Racial Profiling

Abstract Taking Hobbesian logic as my starting point, I argue that Hobbesian diffidence, one of the causes of quarrel in the state of nature, does not disappear once the citizens enter civil society. Rather, diffidence is merely contained by the sovereign. Following Alice Ristroph, I argue that diffidence comes to shape what citizens demand of the state/sovereign in the criminal law. However, I show that Ristroph does not fully appreciate that the concept of diffidence is a racialized one, and as such, race underlies how the citizens understand their own diffidence, what citizens demand of the sovereign, and how they demand it. Further, because diffidence itself is racialized, criminal law need not make explicit appeals to race. Once racialized diffidence becomes embedded in the criminal law, it remains there regardless of any conscious racial animus. I show that racial profiling is a prime example of how this racialized diffidence manifests. Thus, I present Hobbesian diffidence as a framework from which to understand racial oppression. This paper is primarily an application of Hobbes to contemporary issues rather than an exegesis and analysis of Hobbes’s views.

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Imagining the End of Racism through Summer Camps

In response to worldwide protests for racial justice in 2020 and 2021, Dustin et al. (2021) called on recreation professionals to eradicate racial oppression. The focus of the present commentary is on the tools through which such an eradication might be carried out within summer camps. In particular, this essay builds on the work of Mariame Kaba (2020) and the generations of activists of color before her (e.g., Kelley, 2002) to assert that imagination is essential to any effort to end racism in summer camps. Three areas to which our imagination might be applied are presented: the benefits of summer camp, the shift from I to we, and the courage to experiment and fail.

Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker

Reviewed by: Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Benton-Walker, Terry J. Blood Debts. Tor Teen, 2023 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250825926 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250825933 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Still reeling from their father’s sudden death, twins Clement and Cristina Trudeau are actually relieved to discover their ailing mother has been hexed—at least after they remove the spell, they can nurse her back to health. More troubling, however, is the likelihood that their entire family is the target of some nefarious plan, and in a New Orleans scarred by battling magical families, struggles between magic users and nonmagical people, and continued racial oppression of Black families, such as Clement and Cristina’s, the suspect list of who might be responsible is long. The estranged siblings must come together to track down clues and figure out if their recent tragedies have anything to do with a decades-old event that led to the lynching of their grandparents and the displacement of the Trudeaus from New Orleans’ magical Generational Council. Soapy melodrama and overwrought exposition unfortunately eclipse what is an otherwise fascinating world ruled by complicated magic and even more complicated people. Narration shifts between Clem and Cris, both grieving a personal loss as they navigate the traumatic secrets of both their family and community history cloaked in secrets; while both siblings are sympathetic, they tend to get mired in self-pity, stalling the narrative and muddying their voices. More successful are the third-person chapters focused on the power struggle among the magical and nonmagical groups in the city and how the past informs the current toxic dynamics. A final showdown between an army of undead and the queenly villain brings some much-needed action, and readers can hope that the cliffhanger ending will lead to a sequel that more fully explores the world and its forces for good and ill. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Developing Antiracist Research to Address Racial/Ethnic Health and Socioeconomic Inequities: Conceptual Frameworks That Guide Equity

The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who have been historically marginalized and oppressed. Race is a fundamental determinant of many outcomes that are prioritized by the field. Social work’s commitment to social justice and efforts to advance racial equity in critical areas such as socioeconomics and health are especially salient at this social and political moment in history. To meaningfully advance equity, social work researchers and practitioners must account for and explicitly address legacies of racism. To this end, this paper proposes that social work researchers consider the use of two theoretical frameworks—fundamental cause theory and critical race theory—that provide a conceptual framing of racism and socioeconomic status, which may be used to guide research and practice efforts to disrupt systems of racial oppression.

Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray

Reviewed by: Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray Jennifer Carr Gray, Margaret E. Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French. UP of Wales, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78683-860-5. Pp. 257. Visual culture is increasingly ubiquitous, suffusing everything from entertainment to political rights claims staked in visibility. Meanwhile, gender studies and its disciplinary tributaries have couched our understanding of gender in terms of performativity and display, further reinforcing visuality's primacy in daily life. Against this backdrop, Stolen Limelight explores how twentieth-century French and Francophone fictions have harnessed readerly fluency in viewing practices through their narrative framings of gender, with Gray's analysis hinging on scenes of slippage, when seemingly legible instances of gendered display cede to a destabilizing hypervisibility. Gray foregrounds literary representations of excessive, even monstrous gendered display, productively complicating the tendency to conflate visibility and agency, and to reduce dynamics of spectatorship to the stable binary of observer and observed. Rather, she suggests, textual scenes of gendered display can displace both subject and object of the gaze—whether these positions are embedded in the narrative or embodied by readers—sowing epistemological doubt in their wake. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, art history, museum studies, and film theory, Gray attends to the effects of this "visuality of text" (6) in a corpus that spans the twentieth century and multiple geographies, resolutely canonical authors and lesser-studied ones. Stolen Limelight is divided into two sections of three chapters each that focus, respectively, on culminating scenes of corporeal display in Colette's Le blé en herbe, Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy, and André Gide's La porte étroite, then on more abstract narrative strategies of display in François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, Sébastien Japrisot's Piège pour Cendrillon, and Marguerite Duras's dual renderings of the same narrative: L'Amant and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Gray acknowledges the disparate contexts that produced these fictions (and subsequent film adaptations) while teasing out their shared investment in a dynamic of display-as-displacement that is inextricable from gender politics. Incidentally, this dynamic is echoed in Gray's analytical moves, which effect their own displacements by insisting that previous scholarship has looked in the wrong places, focused on the wrong things. For instance, in the chapter on Piège pour Cendrillon, Gray identifies generic subtexts—namely, the feminine-coded love story and fairy tale—that surreptitiously displace the novel's obvious engagement with detective fiction. Reprising Shoshana Felman's analysis of Japrisot's text, Gray contends that Felman's investment in Piège pour Cendrillon's undoing of detective genre conventions neglects the love story between women that is the narrative's foundational impetus. Gray's readings of Oyono and Duras likewise refocus critical attention, in this case on gendered displays whose stakes are heightened [End Page 274] by colonial contexts of racial oppression. These chapters highlight the risks of dissonance attendant to thematically uniting a disparate corpus, as Gray's instructive insistence on racialized gendering in Oyono's text is seemingly diluted by her interpretation of L'Amant's Chinese lover as a mother-surrogate whose feminization enacts a salvatory displacement of maternal madness, its potential imbrication in racist logics addressed only glancingly. Still, Stolen Limelight consistently offers engaging models of creative close reading that will appeal to literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary analyses' capacity to locate "trans-versal connections" (177) among apparently dissimilar texts. [End Page 275] Jennifer Carr Wellesley College (MA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Construct Women’s Subjectivity during the Quest-Gender Writing in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

<p>Since its publication in 1966, Pynchon’s <em>The Crying of Lot 49 </em>has aroused widespread concerns and discussions in both China and abroad. This book being regarded as the pioneer work of the post-modernism and masterpiece of black humour, relevant research serves to figure out its post-modern features from uncertainty, entropy, linguistic games to narrative traps. The present study is concerned about politics, history, law, religion, race, and racial oppression contained in the novel, as well as the author’s innovation of the quest mode, while ignoring how the heroine Oedipa strove to construct her subjectivity during her quest for the secret of Tristero System. This paper will focus on gender writing in <em>The Crying of Lot 49 </em>with the assistance of feminist criticism, Jacques Lacan’s psychological analysis as well as the concept of cultural hegemony by Antonio Gramsci, which together point out that the main achievement of Oedipa’s seemingly absurd quest is to break away from the constraints of patriarchy and gradually construct her own subjectivity as a woman.</p>

An intersectional framework for anti-racist pedagogy in uncertain times

ABSTRACT Anti-racism is an imperative for those committed to a world and planet free of the manifestations of racial oppression. This correspondence between two critical women teacher educators illustrates ideologically aligned ‘work friends’ theorising anti-racist pedagogy in the context of heightened sociopolitical uncertainty. We explore creative possibilities for uncertainty-oriented anti-racist pedagogy vis-à-vis the aims of inquiry-based, social justice teacher preparation. We co-develop pedagogical insights using an anti-racist intersectional frame as an analytical lens for re-viewing teaching artefacts, reflecting on lived experiences, and posing probing questions. Eschewing feigning pedagogical mastery, we employ the epistolary form to reflexively interrogate the nexus of anti-racism, pedagogy, uncertainty, and teacher education. This exchange contributes (a) an intersectional framework for the practice of antiracist pedagogy, and (b) a model for the emergent, dialogic process of letter writing as a tool for critical collaborative teacher inquiry.

W. E. B. Du Bois and Ambedkar: Revisiting the Intellectual Historical Analysis of their Views on Race and Caste

Du Bois and Ambedkar, both intellectually sound personalities, challenged the established institutions of oppression of race and caste. Their intellectual and social legacies continue to have an impact on academia and society today. Their new interpretations of history changed the course of generations. This paper, using an intellectual historical method, attempts to revisit and analyse the issues of “race” and “caste” and the relevance of interpretations by both intellectuals. This paper is majorly divided into four parts, with the first one trying to explain the intellectual historical method, its problems in implementation, and its relevance to such an issue; the second one trying to excavate their conceptual perceptions of “race” and “caste.” The third part discusses the perception of both scholars on the driving forces behind these issues, and the last part discusses the concise history of their struggle towards establishing an egalitarian society.

Black Ethnographic Activists: Exploring Robert Park, Scientific Racism, The Chicago School, and FBI Files Through the Black Sociological Experience of Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier

Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier were successful Black sociologists from the 1920s to 1960s, working in an age of scientific racism and eugenics, who battled racial oppression, racist discrimination, and surveillance under the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both struggled within and against the assimilationist paradigm, yet their ethnographic and critical insights speak out today with continuing relevance in the fight against practical and institutional racial injustice. This study selectively examines Johnson and Frazier's academic careers as forgotten ethnographer activists who have been largely excluded from the dominant narrative of the Chicago School of Sociology. This article argues Robert Park offered opportunities to these Black scholars although the white university system exclusively directed their work towards race studies. Furthermore, the white discipline of sociology failed to recognize Johnson and Frazier's critical ethnographic studies as part of interactionism.

Re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value

Racism and anti-racism have received widespread attention in academic debates and public discourse. Having universal features, racism manifests differently nationally and locally, and has been met with diverse anti-racism efforts. Despite historical achievements of struggles against racial oppression, racism endures, and continues to evolve and adapt, posing challenges to racial justice and equity. Parallel to this, anti-racism scholarship and action have evolved over the past decade, targeting an increasing number of arenas of everyday life. However, the place of anti-racism within organisations remains overwhelmingly peripheral and often tokenistic. This article draws attention to this and argues for re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value. We critically evaluate current anti-racism practices, and call for broader, holistic, committed and well-funded anti-racism approaches within organisations. We then argue why establishing anti-racism as a core organisational value may help in addressing systemic/structural racism. JEL Classification: J15, J71, M14, Z13