Racial Position Research Articles

Remaining in the wake: towards an endarkened paradigm for critical studies of whiteness

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.

하드보일드 추리소설의 인종적 변용—월터 모즐리의 이지 롤린스 연작을 중심으로

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.

#SouthAsians4BlackLives: racial positionality in digital allyship and the prospects for cross-racial solidarity for racial justice in the USA

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.

Racialization and claiming Whiteness among Iranian Americans in Kentucky

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.

Dividing the Indian Race

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.

From Kabylia to Marrakech: art, orientalism, and the transcolonial career of Azouaou Mammeri

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.

Improvising Myth and Memory Downtown: Music Venues, Race, and the Potential of Place

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.

Racecraft and the Indian Queen in The Temple of Love (1635)

AbstractThis 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!

It’s All about the Toys!

Positioning Asian Americans in social cognition

AbstractAsian 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.

Asian Americans and the Politics of the Twenty-First Century

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.

“Asians Are the Least Troublemaker”: Navigating Racial In-betweenness in Korean American Community-based Spaces

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.

Recovering Racial Positioning in “White” Women's International Thought: Lady Kathleen Simon's International Abolitionist Crusade, 1927–1955

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.

Educational Perspectives of Unpacking Racial Representations in Picturebooks about Korean Immigrant Children

This study explores racial representations in picturebooks about newly arrived Korean immigrant children in the U.S. The study, framed within critical pedagogy, deals with visual images in the stories, focusing on Korean immigrant child protagonists’ identity construction particularly in the U.S. school context. Utilizing critical content analysis as a methodological tool for analyzing visual images in the picturebooks, the study questions racial positioning of Korean and/or Asian peers surrounding the Korean immigrant children’s socialization and their identity construction in the stories. From a critical perspective, the study unravels the lack of diverse racial representations, pointing out that Whiteness and White saviorism are implicitly embedded in the racial positioning of Korean immigrant children. Based on the findings of this analysis, the paper calls for language and/or culture educators to be sufficiently equipped with a critical pedagogical approach to the issues of challenging White normality and internalized oppression in the U.S. so that they can provide students with a space to become multi-cultural democratic citizens in the future. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Low-income Asians living in the United States: a scoping review on challenges, factors, strength, and social work implication

ABSTRACT Despite model minority stereotypes, low-income U.S. Asians experience difficulties derived from poverty and their racial positionality. We conducted scoping review to systematically understand and synthesize the current literature on young low-income U.S. Asians. From 22 studies, five categories of challenges emerged including perceived discrimination. Factors associated with current challenges and strengths of young low-income U.S. Asians, and implications for social work are also examined. This work disputes model minority stereotypes and highlights the heterogeneity of the group. Fragmented scholarly understanding on U.S. Asians is also discussed.

Working Hard for Whiteness: How White Women Make Meaning of Social Class to Avoid White Complicity

College-educated white women across social classes support and uphold racism. Using narrative methods in a secondary analysis, we, as two white women, explored how white non-trans women make meaning of social class using the revised model of multiple dimensions of identity (RMMDI; Abes et al., 2007) as positioned within the context of white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy (hooks, 1994) and higher education. Findings were framed by white ignorance (Mills, 2007) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). We found that white women used class to distance themselves from whiteness and white supremacy in two ways. First, they projected race and class onto elite spaces that they simultaneously desired entry to and distance from. Second, they avoided critical reflection on their racial positioning and identity by constructing a pliable class identity. Both distancing strategies demonstrate "moves to innocence" (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012) away from white complicity, a process that the institutional environment largely facilitated and supported. Such an approach advances understandings of intrapersonal student development by examining how white women use social class to avoid addressing their racial domination and maintain false innocence (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012). We discuss research and practice implications.

White Habitus Among Polish White Female Converts to Islam

AbstractThis article addresses the question of how the racial habitus of Polish White female converts (PWFCs) to Islam is performed in different social settings. We draw from in-depth interviews with 35 PWFCs living in Poland and the United Kingdom. While the notion of habitus has been used to analyze socialization into Islam, racial habitus has not been analyzed in relation to White converts to Islam. We argue that White habitus is an important concept that elucidates racial positioning among White converts in multiracial Muslim settings. Whiteness, often indexed in the data as “Europeanness,” is foundational for the PWFC identity. Furthermore, we extend the understanding of how Whiteness operates in Eastern Europe through the analysis of the White habitus among those who occupy non-normative places in racial and religious hierarchies. Thus, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on decentering Whiteness in Eastern Europe.

Acknowledging Anti-Blackness, Overlooking Anti-Asian Racism: Missed Developmental Opportunities for Chinese American Youth.

This paper explores the pathways and barriers to critical consciousness development for Chinese American youth. Thirty‐five interviews conducted in 2020 with high‐school‐aged students in Chicago were analyzed to better understand young people’s experiences developing an understanding of anti‐Asian racism and anti‐Blackness. Results indicated that participants overwhelmingly engaged in sustained conversations about Black Lives Matter and/or made efforts to address anti‐Blackness within their families, but engaged in limited conversations about anti‐Asian racism. Furthermore, conversations at home and school often failed to contextualize anti‐Asian racism, specifically in relation to the experiences of other oppressed groups. Findings highlight a need for research on and practice with Chinese American adolescents to recognize the unique racial positioning of Asian Americans under White supremacy.

Interrogating the ‘White-Leaning’ Thesis of White–Asian Multiracials

The study of multiracial people in the United States has typically focused on the experiences of Black–White racially-mixed individuals. In this article, we review and analyze the theoretical and evidence base for the White-leaning characterization of Asian–White multiracials. Historically, Asian Americans have been positioned as a “racial middle” group in relation to White and Black Americans. In line with this perceived racial position, Asian–White multiracials have been generally characterized as being more White than Black–White multiracials, as well as “leaning White” in terms of self-identification. While there is growing recognition of the variability of experiences among Black–White multiracials, the depiction of Asian multiracials as White-leaning—though based on limited empirical evidence—continues to be prominent, revealing the tendency to view Asian–White individuals through a “White racial frame.” The racial identifications and experiences of Asian–White multiracials are far more complex than such a view suggests. We argue for the need to advance studies on Asian mixed-race people to accurately capture their racial positioning within a system of White supremacy, including the diversity of their identifications, political views, and racialized experiences.

A Theory of Racialized Cultural Capital

Bourdieu developed cultural capital theory to explain the upper class’ exclusive cultivation of skills, knowledge, and dispositions (i.e., cultural capital) that yield institutional advantages. Fundamental to this conceptualization is the idea that cultural capital itself is classed—not racialized—and that what constitutes cultural capital is broadly the same for every individual irrespective of one’s racial position. I draw from the sociology of race to develop a reconceptualization of cultural capital as fundamentally racialized. Using the illustrative case of “Pursuit”—a white‐led organization created in the 1960s to select nonwhite children for integrating white schools—I then theorize about the racial dimensions of cultural capital. I find evidence that Pursuit selected for nonwhite students deemed nonthreatening to the dominant racial group. Thus, I maintain that qualities associated with appearing nonthreatening function as cultural capital for nonwhite students in this field. Accordingly, I theorize that (1) what constitutes cultural capital may vary by the racial position of the holder of cultural capital and (2) those who are dominant in the racial hierarchy contribute to determining what constitutes cultural capital for those they dominate according to their own interests. As it is taken for granted that cultural capital is fundamentally classed, it should be equally understood and applied that cultural capital is fundamentally racialized.