Racial Position Research Articles

Compelled to construct their narratives and writings around their racial identity, Iranian American writers such as Khakpour, Nafisi, Mirakhor, and Hakakian turn to African American activism, rhetoric, and literature to challenge their racialization. This racialization is problematized by Iranians’ perception of themselves as white and by the US official classification of Iranians as white, revealing a contradiction between the racialization act and the official designation. Seeking to resist their racial marginalization, these writers find the activism and literary expressions of James Baldwin appealing to their experience due to his racial transcendentalism, engagement with the immigration experience, and moderate critique of racial dynamics and power structures. This article focuses on the influence of Baldwin, rather than a broader range of African American writers, examining how his rhetorical strategies and racial politics are reflected in the essays, interviews, and critical writings of the aforementioned Iranian American authors. However, the broader historical context will be discussed to contextualize Baldwin’s appeal to them. Drawing on racial formation theory as a theoretical framework, the article explores how Baldwin serves as a rhetorical and literary model through which these writers articulate their ambiguous racial positioning. Baldwin’s work offers them a vocabulary through which they can articulate their ambiguous position in American racial discourse. This engagement with Baldwin is significant since it serves as a model for the kind of relationship that they may build with other marginalized groups, including African Americans, while also expressing their desire to redefine their place within US racial hierarchies.

ABSTRACT Within Colonial India, ‘half-caste’ Anglo-Indians were ridiculed as embodying a parody of Englishness. Post-colonial analyses, while highlighting the destabilizing impact of Anglo-Indians’ liminal racial positionality, continue to contextualize them as firmly located outside the boundaries of Whiteness. However, such understandings run the risk of perpetuating the normative power of Whiteness, by assuming a fixedness of Whiteness that does not exist. I argue that the existence of Anglo-Indian Others was fundamental to the colonial construction of race, with their presence shaping how racial purity was constituted as an exclusionary complex of characteristics, rooted in notions of ‘blood’, with Anglo-Indians differentiated from pure English through discriminatory perceptions of their speech and clothing. I further argue that this construction of Anglo-Indians facilitated the removal of poor, working-class British living in India from categorizations of pure Englishness. I demonstrate how conceptions of English racial purity developed, becoming elided with Whiteness by the late nineteenth century and with a classed English ideal transformed into the emergent colonial discourse of Whiteness.

Research on Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations in the United States has been shaped by a fundamental paradox: MENAs are statistically invisible in the administrative data infrastructure yet socially hypervisible in other domains. This review outlines key demographic characteristics of the MENA American population and argues that by addressing the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox through innovative research questions and methods, previous scholarship has advanced sociology in three areas: identity, racialization, and integration. As upcoming changes to federal race and ethnicity standards take effect, the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox may shift as sociologists more easily collect and analyze data about MENA Americans. However, this information may be misused, misinterpreted, or handled unethically without sufficient background context and responsibility to community members. Future research will require data disaggregation to explore intersectional and intragroup minority issues, examination of the evolving content and meaning of MENA panethnicity, and ongoing assessment of the MENA group's relative racial position.

We examined the racial positioning and stereotype content of the major racial/ethnic groups within the understudied context of Hawai‘i. Across two studies (Study 1: 185 participants, 64% women, 36% men, M age = 21.50 years, SD = 4.63; Study 2: 175 participants, 69 % women, 30% men, and 1% non-binary, M age = 20.79 years, SD = 4.16) we examine the social perceptions of six racial/ethnic groups in Hawai‘i: Japanese, Filipino, White, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Micronesian. We examined perceptions of socioeconomic status (SES), community status, and stereotype content (e.g., warmth and competence) toward these six groups. We found a reversal in typical warmth attributions to White and Japanese people, such that Japanese people were perceived as warm and high in both socioeconomic and community status, whereas White people were perceived as cold and low in community status. Micronesian people were perceived as low in both warmth and competence, whereas other groups were mixed in their stereotype content. These results shed light on the racial hierarchy and stereotypes of underrepresented groups in the literature, as well as highlight the importance of contextual (e.g., majority-minority context) considerations in social perception research.

ABSTRACT This themed issue is on the 2024 election and the politics of race. And it is also necessarily about the racial dynamics unfolding under the Trump administration at present. The questions addressed by the twelve authors in this volume include: What are the historical conditions that allowed a nativist, white supremacist political movement to go mainstream in the twenty-first century U.S.? How is racism embedded in American political institutions? How do people understand the connection between their racial positionality and their political interests? What are the relationships between emotions and politics and emotions and race? How are gendered projects and racial projects linked in contemporary U.S. political discourse? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organized left at this time? And what kinds of mobilization and resistance to racism in the Trump era are necessary and possible?

Abstract: Drawing from the oral histories and personal archives of Estrella Alamar (a former leading actor in the preservation and promotion of Filipino American history in Chicago), I showcase how she subverted assumptions about Asian American women’s (a)political and subservient identities to navigate white supremacist spaces and gain a deeper understanding of her own political identity as a Filipina American woman. Reframing Estrella’s self-described invisibility during the 1960s Civil Rights Era and integration movement as a politicized invisibility makes way for new representations of: (1) How Filipino/Filipino Americans navigated ambiguous racial positioning in twentieth-century Chicago in ways that both upheld and challenged racial hierarchies; (2) the quotidian yet deeply transformative ways that Asian American women engage in anti-racist political movement; and (3) the legacy of Chicago’s Filipino American community leaders who worked across and against racial lines. In doing so, I argue that Estrella’s memories of quietly combatting anti-Blackness in her classrooms, Catholic encounter groups, and interpersonal relationships during the 1960s and 1970s unveils the ‘smaller’ yet impactful ways one can assert a political identity and combat social injustice outside of mainstream activist communities, even if such efforts are rendered invisible by those very same groups.

In this article, I argue that Eurafricans’ invisibility in Zambia’s national census, history, and social framework is an echo of colonial whiteness stemming from the destructive legacy of illegitimacy perpetuated by British officials in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) during the colonial era (1924–64), which continues to the present day. This is evidenced by the absence of Eurafricans in the Zambia national censuses. This contribution calls for the British government to apologise to the Eurafrican community for the legacy of illegitimacy and intergenerational racial trauma it bestowed on the community. Zambia’s tribal ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistics’ census classification options prevent a comprehensive understanding of Zambia’s multi-racial history and the development of a hybrid space that embraces a ‘mixed-race’ Eurafrican (of European and African heritage) Zambian identity. Through an autoethnographic account of my Eurafrican uncle Aaron Milner, I reflect on Zambian Eurafricans’ historical racial positioning as ‘inferior interlopers’, which has contributed to their obscurity in Zambia’s national history and census. However, my reflection goes beyond Milner’s story in Zambia. It is my entryway to highlight how race and colonial whiteness interconnected and underpinned racial ideology in the wider British Empire, and to draw attention to its echoes in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts, including census terminology in Australia and Zambia and Western nations’ anti-Black immigration policies.

ABSTRACT Critiquing how critical whiteness studies (CWS) in US education has strayed towards a predominant focus on how white people understand their relationship to whiteness and away from understanding how whiteness oppresses People of Colour, Matias and Boucher articulated a Black whiteness studies approach to the critical study of whiteness that eschews white epistemological standpoints, engages the works of Scholars of Colour and expands beyond a focus on developing white people’s racial consciousness. However, their articulation of a Black whiteness studies falls short of addressing Black communities’ specific racial positioning, the unique ways Black people suffer under whiteness and the situated knowledges of Black communities. In this paper, I theorise at the intersections of CWS, endarkened feminisms and afropessimsim to extend Matias and Boucher’s work to propose an endarkened paradigm for critical studies of whiteness.

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.

ABSTRACT The presence of multiple racial groups was a key feature of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020. This study investigates racial positionalities embedded in expressions of digital allyship with BLM on Instagram by South Asians in the U.S.A. and the prospects for cross-racial solidarity for racial justice. Our computational network analysis of Instagram posts using variations of the hashtag #sa4bl over a six-month period reveals that South Asian activists, influencers and everyday users expressed allyship; however, they formed distinct Instagram communities signalling multiple constructions of allyship. Qualitative analysis indicates two distinct repertoires of allyship; one focussed on consciousness-raising within South Asian communities, and the other on direct expression of allyship with BLM. These repertoires point to the presence of both ethnic and racial positionalities in South Asian digital allyship, reflecting divergent interests based on intersecting identities. Our findings complicate recent evaluations of cross-racial allyship for racial justice amongst South Asian Americans.

ABSTRACT In the light of Trump-era American racial politics, Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky have adeptly rearticulated their racial positionings by navigating the intricate interplay of discourses on race. Through this process, they have challenged dominant U.S. discourses on race generated by the political dynamics since the 1970s, casting doubt upon the Whiteness of Middle Easterners. Despite their racial ambiguity between the U.S. Census and post-9/11 lived realities, Iranians in rural Kentucky not only feel that they belong in the U.S. but also lay claim to the mantle of Whiteness through context-specific strategies of deracialization crafted in the temporal and spatial milieu of rural Kentucky. This article sheds light on the contextual strategies Iranian Americans have employed to articulate, contest, and reproduce the dominant discourses to secure their racial positioning, capitalizing not only on their class privileges but also on some of their White-associated phenotypes, remnants of their perceived ‘Indo-European’ lineage.

Despite being the first Native American to author a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), John Rollin Ridge and his writings have long troubled scholars. Ridge’s focus on Mexican Americans, racist portrayal of California Indians, and embrace of US belonging refuse easy analysis within the single identity category-focused frameworks of Native studies and Chicanx studies, and his presence in gold rush California as a Cherokee settler complicates scholarly approaches to the racial history of California. This essay uses a historicized engagement with racial formation theory to reevaluate Ridge’s work, including his novel, newspaper article in The True Daily Delta, and Hesperian magazine articles. Diverging from prior scholarship that reads Ridge’s work through the lens of present-day racial categories, this study approaches racial categories as shifting, connected to structures of power, and imbricated with gender to understand how Ridge thought of himself in relation to both California Indians and Mexican Americans and how he tried to intervene into the American racial discourse. Ridge desired recognition and inclusion from the US settler state, and he used hegemonic notions of masculinity to make his case. This prompted him to distance himself from those unable to conform to standards of appropriate manhood. I contend that Ridge’s desire for recognition led him to suggest that his own Cherokee people were more closely related to Mexican Americans than to California Indians. The complexity of Ridge’s stance and racial positioning in California demonstrate the possibilities of a reading practice informed by a relational approach to racial formation.

ABSTRACT Over his lifetime (c. 1890–1954), the Algerian painter and administrator Azouaou Mammeri traced an impressive transcolonial geography that simultaneously revealed the limits and possibilities for colonised subjects to enact agency within a colonial system. Mammeri’s physical and figurative movements between Algeria, Morocco, and France, between ‘fine arts’ and ‘native arts’ worlds, and between colonised subject and colonial administrator also indicated a transgression of boundaries of identity, race, and power. This was something that contemporary French colonial officials and arts critics observed and commented upon, often with deep ambivalence: how to accommodate someone like Mammeri in ways that did not fundamentally trouble or upend the rigid and hierarchical categories of the French Empire? In this article, I take Mammeri’s mobility as a case study for liminal subjects who alternately challenged or were absorbed into colonial systems predicated on European supremacy, and consider the ways in which Mammeri’s agency, racial positioning, and personal ‘merit’ shaped the dynamic of his movements.

In 2005, composer John Zorn founded a music venue dedicated to ‘the experimental and avant-garde’ on New York’s Lower East Side, an area known for underground arts but long undergoing reinvestment. Music criticism and the social sciences have considered venues that cater to cutting-edge music, but they do not reflect recent studies that challenge a historiographic rift racialising these so-called jazz and non-jazz vanguards. Studies of art in urban areas, meanwhile, have shown how sites disrupt minority communities, but they largely assume race as a stable idea. This article bridges this gap by considering how New York’s avant-garde-experimental juncture mediates such accepted racialisations. My ethnography shows how artists and sites mythologise defunct venues as ‘central’ and ‘inclusive’ havens and craft an indeterminate racial positioning. I argue that by unsettling putative racialisations—through myth and memory—place making downtown makes space for navigating subjectivities that range from comfort with, to ambivalence about musical and historiographic blackness. I propose the potential of place to interpret how music sites dialogue with race. While definitively acknowledging limits of racial tropes, this approach also employs them strategically to locate meaning about the nature of interracial sociality.

Abstract This essay addresses the potency of the Indian queen in early modern English dramatic culture, addressing the emergence of the figure at a moment of national crisis: during the personal rule of Charles I and in relation to the contested queenship of Henrietta Maria. Applying an intersectional critical race lens, I examine Henrietta Maria's performance of Indamora in William Davenant's The Temple of Love, arguing for the beleaguered consort's deployment of the popular Indian queen as part of her quest for legitimacy as a French and Catholic queen of England. Indian imperial women, despite alterity in race, gender and religion, were established and often esteemed in English dramatic culture and therefore represented a uniquely valuable trope for Henrietta Maria to make use of. Most significantly, I argue, the Indian queen experienced racial privileging that saw her occupy a fluid racial position enabling her to pass and perform White in early modern English drama. Critical examinations of The Temple of Love have long centred neoplatonic readings while overlooking the implications of this royal performance of a racial other by an unpopular foreign consort during the restless period of personal rule. This essay seeks to address a notable gap in readings of this remarkable Caroline court masque while shining a light on an overlooked layer of complexity in early modern racecraft.

It’s All about the Toys!

Abstract Asian Americans are increasingly positioned at the center of current events, yet extant theories and approaches in social psychology (and social cognition specifically) may not adequately capture how Asian Americans are perceived and treated in the current American racial landscape. We propose three directions to propel social cognition research on Asian Americans. First, research emphasizes Asian Americans' perceived high status (e.g., the model minority stereotype) while often overlooking their perceived foreignness. The two‐dimensionalRacial Position Modelelucidates the consequences of being stereotyped as perpetual foreigners for Asian Americans and their relations with other racial and ethnic groups. Second, research and laypeople alike consider East Asian Americans to be the prototypical Asian Americans, thereby excluding subgroups such as South and Southeast Asian Americans. Considering theethnic diversityof Asian Americans challenges and extends existing social psychological theories. Lastly, much of psychological research approaches race in isolation without considering its intersection with other identities such as gender. Anintersectional frameworkoffers insights into how Asian Americans' gender and race overlap in our social cognition. More nuanced research on Asian Americans is needed to fully understand race relations in the 21st century and we hope these three interconnected directions can guide researchers who are interested in the topic.

We begin our review with research related to the racial formation and racial position of Asian Americans. How we define this fast-growing group and how it is situated in the broader racial landscape are critical to understanding its politics. We then turn to research on the history of Asian American civic engagement. These two research areas provide important context for the rest of the review, which covers three additional themes: ( a) political participation; ( b) partisanship, vote choice, and issue orientations; and ( c) political representation. The last section returns to the theme of racial position, including its role in contemporary Asian American activism and its centrality to future research in the field.

While Asian Americans have long been positioned as a deserving and productive racial foil to problematic and unworthy Black and Latinx communities, in recent years, they have been more frequently portrayed as actively politicized in opposition to other communities of color. Despite this portrayal in the media, social science research reveals a much more complicated portrait of Asian American racial positioning that explores how Asian Americans diversely navigate their racial in-betweenness, or what Leslie Bow calls racial interstitiality. Contributing to this research, this article analyzes how Korean Americans, as a racialized ethnic group, engage with Whiteness and their own racial position within co-ethnic community spaces. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography of a Korean language school and an ethnic supplementary academy (called hagwon) in the Chicago suburbs, the article argues that co-ethnic community spaces are active sites of racialization that both challenge and reproduce White dominance. In these spaces, Korean Americans forged counter-narratives for their children but simultaneously reified dominant narratives relating to Whiteness, anti-Blackness, and Asian Americans. The findings strengthen scholarly understandings of how Asian Americans understand their racial identities in relation to others, the role of community institutions in racialization, and how the damaging logics of White supremacy can seep into non-White spaces.

Abstract The new field of history of women's international thought is part of, and gives further impetus to, the ongoing reckoning of international relations (IR) with the centrality of race and gender to the discipline. Scholars continue to recuperate a long inheritance of international thinkers concerned with race relations, colonial administration, and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global political economies dependent on violent exploitation of peoples classified as inferior. This inheritance underscores that the politics of colonialism, war, humanitarianism, development, and decolonization have shaped and been shaped by processes of reinforcing and contesting racialized subject positions. Despite this, little attention has been paid to whiteness in histories of women's international thought. In this article, I recover the international thought of white British antislavery advocate and humanitarian Lady Kathleen Simon. I bring feminist and critical race scholarship to bear on Simon's writings and practice. Through her efforts to rouse a twentieth-century international abolitionist movement to emancipate those remaining enslaved in so-called backwards places, Simon played a consequential role in defending Ethiopia's occupation by fascist Italy from 1936 to 1941 and in arguing for continued European administration of Ethiopia after its liberation. In light of critiques of humanitarianism and of the role of white women in reproducing racial hierarchies in colonial and development contexts, I argue that recovery and analysis of the subject positions of historical women racialized as white is inextricable from the project of international intellectual history and from IR's continuing engagement with questions of gendered and racialized hierarchy and othering.