Racist Practices Research Articles

Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory

This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.

Black Women in White Institutional Spaces: The Invisible Labor Clause and The Inclusion Tax

The dual pandemics brought on by COVID-19 and racial violence has played a significant role in uncovering how systemic racism is deeply entrenched within white spaces in America. This article examines the experiences of Black women lawyers in elite law firms to demonstrate how white institutional spaces are racially organized with embedded colorblind racist practices that work to obscure the insidious perpetuation of white supremacy. Black women are required to perform added, unrecognized, and uncompensated labor to maintain their positions. This invisible labor manifests in the form of an inclusion tax that they must pay to be included in white spaces. This article discusses how being one of very few Black people in white spaces creates a myriad of issues that require significant invisible labor including navigating white narratives of affirmative action, negotiating how dominant white culture functions to normalize the white experience, and adherence to white normative standards.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Race for Profit is a landmark study of how structural racism transforms and reproduces disadvantages. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor tells a convincing story of race and capitalism in late twentieth-century urban American housing markets in transition. The book develops the theme of “predatory inclusion” of African-descended Americans in home ownership sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and financed by private lenders after the urban riots of the mid-1960s (p. 5, passim). One was Wilhelmina Gause of Philadelphia. A twenty-seven-year-old Black mother of three, she could not afford a house, yet a real estate agent said there were none for rent in the neighborhood. She saved the $500 down payment, signed the mortgage, and moved in to discover that a broken pipe leaked sewage into her basement, a wall leaked rain into her house, and a backyard drain was stopped up, flooding the yard. And Gause now owned the property. Her family's experience typifies the transition from redlining to predatory inclusion. Taylor wonders, “How could a house that appeared to be falling apart also be appraised by the FHA as having any value and then approved for a mortgage subsidy?” (p. 142).Race for Profit intervenes in a historiography of race, capitalism, and urban housing that includes Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017), Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017), Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996), and Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004), among many others. Before civil rights legislation including the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, legal discrimination excluded Black borrowers from loans, segregating urban spaces and trapping low-income homeowners, particularly Black and Latino residents, in enclaves of impoverished schools and services.Instead of exclusion, the HUD Act subsidized lenders, which encouraged them to lend to those who were traditionally excluded, particularly Black women who were heads of households. But in the shift from legal discrimination to predatory inclusion, brokers and lenders worked to sell substandard and unsafe housing to homebuyers who found themselves saddled with debt in a home they owned but could not safely live in. Black borrowers set up to fail lost their property at a moment in the 1960s and 1970s when urban areas became targets of renewal projects and other investment.Race for Profit explores how the change from exclusion to homeownership occurred. Taylor's narrative seamlessly weaves stories like that of the Gause family with Black women's organizing, policy-making, and an eagle-eyed view of the financial and regulatory landscape of the post-1968 housing market in urban cores. “The end of FHA redlining and the introduction of home finance into American cities created a new market for urban housing almost out of thin air,” Taylor argues, and yet like so many aspects of American capitalism, African Americans paid more for less and were blamed for systemic failures (p. 140).And the predation was the point, at least so far as the real estate industry was concerned. The system of federal subsidies benefited real estate brokers and lenders rather than homeowners, and policy makers tended to blame buyers rather than an interlocking system of predatory lending and deceptive real estate practices. The African American McCrudden family of Philadelphia bought their house soon after the HUD Act subsidized the $9,000 purchase. After they moved in, they realized it had major defects, including holes in the floors, which the broker who sold them the property said would be fixed but were not. In 1972 Carmel McCrudden testified that she was “tired of living in a half-built, torn apart house,” which was now her problem as the buyer (p. 205). Such deceptive practices sapped the incomes and time of predominantly Black borrowers while enriching brokers and lenders. Yes, the McCruddens were homeowners, but their living standards were not necessarily better than public housing. And now they had a mortgage and owned a property that could not easily be sold or rented out. In response, Carmel McCrudden helped organize the Concerned City-Wide Homeowners, a grassroots organization that brought the predatory practices to light and demanded policy responses, and failing that, launched class-action lawsuits.Race for Profit defies an optimistic narrative of civil rights and economics. Markets are not self-correcting and incorporate the values and assumptions of those who govern them. Taylor warns against market-based solutions to systemic racism since the real estate and lending industries that thrived on racist practices before 1968 adjusted to thrive on racist practices after 1968.

Locating Race in Mughal India

This article uses writings of the French traveler François Bernier (d. 1688) on race as an inroad into the question of locating race in Mughal India. I explore Mughal discourses of alterity through an examination of Persian writings from various genres composed during the long seventeenth century. In contrast to Bernier, these writings do not offer concepts equivalent to that of race. However, by invoking narratives of descent from Noah's son Ham, ideas of climatic and physiognomic humoralism, and the attribution of physical qualities or character traits to social groups, these works engage in practices of racialization while also at times undermining them.

Decolonization through Spoken Word Poetry: A Postcolonial Analysis of Emi Mahmoud and Safia Elhillo’s poetry

Hip Hop has been a cultural wave creating and modifying the revolution started in the 1970s by Black people against systemic oppression, and while it manifests itself as a commodified narrativization against racism, sexism and other equally troublesome oppressive ideologies, it becomes a site for change through ethnographic performativity. Spoken Word poets have used this tool to bring marginal narratives to the center and challenge the heteropatriarchal lens, misogynoir and racist practices all around the world. Spoken word poetry has not been researched analytically or theoretically much previously, and even when it was, the research and statistics were limited to the technical aspects of performance. This paper deals with the idea of culture being a site for performance, and simultaneously performance being the action that precedes stereotypes and false representations of marginalized cultures throughout the global north. The spoken word poets use the stage as a liminal space for a multiplicity of cultures to thrive, and challenge the oppressive tools, including that of language, clothing, and voice used by mainstream cultures to oppress the said communities, and normalize their own traditions and morals. The paper reveals the performative tactics used by spoken word poets in order to deinstitutionalize systems of power, and establish a counter narrative of their own as a form of revolution.

Being an intentional healer: cultural humility approach for African Americans.

The purpose of this commentary is to provide health professionals and educators with guiding questions to include into their practice to critically reflect on the care their African American patients receive. African American patients have historically experienced health disparities in comparison to non-African Americans. This dichotomy of care is embedded in racist ideologies and practices. A cultural humility approach is one way to inform the care of African American patients.

Facilitating Black identity and advocacy: creating cellphilms for reflecting on issues affecting Black students

Ethical facilitation is of paramount importance if educators are to address the issues that plague Black students. This paper presents an autoethnographic account of my experiences facilitating two cellphilm workshops with self-identified Black university students attending two universities in New Brunswick, Canada. Nestled within African-Canadian Feminist discourse, I explore my positionality as a Black international female student. I reflect on the ways my racial awareness and experiences led me to employ participatory arts-based methodologies to empower Black university students to vocalize their experiences and disrupt the hemogenic White dominance and anti-Black racism in academia. I describe being approached by a pair of White faculty members to facilitate two cellphilm workshops, engaging in pre-workshop planning and first cellphilm workshop, and the ways I engaged in ethical praxis to stimulate trust and create a supportive environment for participants. I next describe creating a cellphilm as a support mechanism in response to participants’ cellphilms. Finally, I examine post-production activities that took my facilitation and activism beyond cellphilm creation as I reflect on how I disseminated and capitalized on my various positions within the university to raise awareness of racist practices that exclude and marginalize Black students.

Silence is Not an Option: Oral History of Race in Youth Development Through the Words of Esteemed Black Scholars

The study of race has been silenced in many areas of science including youth development research. We present this commentary in response to an invitation to address the impact of racism on the field of youth development for the Journal of Youth Development. Through oral history narratives, the paper synthesizes an antiracist agenda from the perspectives of 6 Black scholars: Tabbye Chavous, Michael Cunningham, Davido Dupree, Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Stephanie Rowley, and Robert Sellers. The narratives depict each scholar’s perspective on race research that informs youth-serving programs and the study of race in research of children and adolescents, particularly Black children. We selected scholars based on their commitment to supporting research that helps children of color thrive, and who have in-depth knowledge about racist ideologies and practices that have persisted since the inception of the science of youth development. Each scholar offered thoughtful critiques regarding racially biased measures and methodologies, the problematic use of deficit-oriented language, and the challenges that scholars of color encounter with advancing in the field. While the scholars expressed a consensus that the field has struggled to name racism in research and practice, they share hope in the complexity of future race research and practice that centers culture and context in youth development studies and programs.

Black Ghosts of the Diasporic Memory in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

This article reads Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) as a novel that follows an African American family facing the ghosts of their past and present to resurrect buried stories that are unrelentingly interlocked with the legacy of slavery and the draconian racist practices of Jim Crow. I posit that the novel participates in the re-examination of the trope of the ghost as a healing asset that needs to be accommodated within the retrieval of memory work. Thus, the enactment of this African diasporic memory facilitates the encounter with their ghosts so that the family can start their healing processes and be provided with the tools and examples of how to keep on coming to terms together with and against the legacy of slavery and the present racist practices.

Your Race Sounds Familiar?

Your Face Sounds Familiar, a celebrity talent television format developed by the Dutch production company Endemol and first broadcast in Spain in 2011, has entertained audiences in more than forty countries with the sight of well-known professional musicians impersonating foreign and domestic stars through cross-gender drag and, on many national editions, cross-racial drag, with results that would widely be regarded as offensive blackface where this has already been extensively challenged as racist in public. In central/south-east Europe, however, blackface is sometimes justified by arguing that it cannot be a racist practice because these countries have not had the UK and USA’s history of colonialism and racial oppression. Through a study of the Croatian edition Tvoje lice zvuči poznato (2014–), where until 2020 blackface had rarely been publicly challenged, this paper explores how far a critical race studies lens towards blackface can also be applied there.

Composing an Anti-Racism and Social Justice Statement at a Rural Writing Center

This article describes the year-long collaborative composing process of a rural writing center seeking to develop an anti-racism and social justice statement. The author reflects on the way in which rural perspectives are often dismissed, often seen as provincial and hostile towards ideas that might be included in an anti-racism and social justice statement. The piece also connects theories of composing, fluidity, and identity to the writing of the statement and provides a detailed analysis of the lengthy, often challenging composing process used. The author finds that the collaborative composing process, more than the resulting statement, was significant to the ongoing dismantling of racist practices in the writing center and in training writing center consultants.

Telling Lies, Telling Tales and Telling (and Doing) the Truth: Racism, Moral Repair and the Case for Reparations

First, in the section ‘Telling Lies’, this article attempts to illustrate recent everyday racism. Racism has a history and takes many different forms. I describe a particular practice of racism (found in Britain, circa 1970), which relied, for its doctrine, on supposedly scientific assumptions about biology and breeding—and received a confirming fillip through the celebration of monarchy, empire and rose-tinted history. Second, in ‘Telling Tales’, the story of Zacchaeus is taken as exemplifying a form of moral repair in which telling and doing the truth are intimately related. Third, in ‘Telling and Doing the Truth’, I contend that telling and doing the truth in relation to racism requires not only a clear naming of racism’s lies but also the making of reparations, for the reason that the lies of racism subtended manifold injustices, of which Atlantic slavery and the exploitation of colonies are notable instances. I take the history of the West Indies as providing a clear case where moral repair is (over)due, and I consider the form that reparations might take.

The Embattled Creation of a Residents-Only Park

On November 2, 2020, after almost sixty years of restriction, the City of Palo Alto opened the gates of its Foothills Park to nonresidents. Prior to the lifting of the residency restriction, it was a crime for nonresidents of Palo Alto to enter this 1,400-acre park, a crime that carried possible jail time. Although the reason for this rule was initially rooted in local financial squabbles, the rule itself had racist consequences that were felt for decades after its passage. Thus, the history of Foothills Park’s residency restriction serves as a useful example of the insidious ways that past racist policies and practices can persist to the present day, largely invisible and thus easily dismissed by policymakers and the public alike. Examining the evolution of Palo Alto’s Foothills Park through a historical lens, and within the context of the 1960s and ’70s environmentalist movement, reveals the clear imprint of environmental racism and white privilege. Given the widespread economic disparity that shaped residential patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, the park’s residents-only rule effectively excluded people of color, the poor, and the working class. Though racially restrictive covenants may no longer be legally enforced today, relatively few people of color can afford to live in Palo Alto. Thus, despite the passage of many years, and despite repeal of Foothills Park’s residents-only restriction, the community’s historical residential patterns have perpetuated ongoing inequalities.

Black People vs. Educational Culprits Engaged in Our Systemic Mass Incarceration in the United States of America

ABSTRACT Eight culprits in the systematic mass incarceration of black people are interrogated in this fictitious courtroom proceeding. Each defendant is somehow involved in the ecosystem of schooling that ruins the lives of millions of black students and their families via racist discipline policies and practices. Accountability for the insufficient preparation of prospective teachers and school leaders, as well as the inadequacy of professional development experiences for educators who currently work in schools across the United States, are emphasized in questions posed to defendants in this trial. Some others who contribute to and sustain the school-to-prison pipeline are implicated in the closing argument.

Global gendered anti‐Black belonging and racial ideology

AbstractWe review theorizations of gendered anti‐Blackness and the scholarship on the politics of belonging. Bridging together this literature, we propose gendered anti‐Black non‐belonging as an alternative framework for addressing African descendant women's expressions and realities of belonging in the United States and Portugal. We select these two cases for their remarkably distinct—yet related—racial ideologies of the state. In the United States, colorblindness is the main ideology of the state whereas in Portugal anti‐racial ideology pervades. As we will highlight, the experiences of belonging among African descendant women in the United States and Portugal challenge the veracity of these racial ideologies which work to render gendered anti‐Black oppression invisible. In both cases, anti‐Black non‐belonging means that African descendant women are vulnerable to gendered state violence and racist practices impacting their individual and group belonging; as a result, the right for Black bodies to be in a particular place and space is constantly contested, and, often, violently regulated and disciplined. Yet, anti‐Black belonging is both a matter of oppression and resistance. African‐descendant women draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance. In doing so, as we will argue, they rewrite the national narrative of race, gender and belonging in Portugal and the United States.

Disclosing Racism, Awareness-Raising and Seeking Support: Korean Women Migrants’ Use of Online Cafés

ABSTRACT In recent years, Korean migrants to Australia have turned increasingly to digital culture as a space of information exchange, support, and belonging. The need for a space in which the ‘politics of listening’ [Dreher, T., 2009. Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice. Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 23 (4), 445–458] is made possible becomes even more crucial in face of continued exclusions and everyday practices of racism in contemporary multicultural Australia. This article discusses the use of popular online ‘cafés’ by Korean women migrants to Australia as means of negotiating experiences of racism and alienation. Analysing participation in three Korean online cafés, Missy Hoju, Missy Melbourne and Hoju Melbourne Gongdong Gumae, racism can be understood as holding a significant place in shaping in Korean women’s identities. As a profoundly affective experience, racism, both indirectly encountered and directly experienced, leaves longlasting affective impacts, shaping women’s sense of safety and belonging. We suggest the gendered intimacy of these cafés as online ‘intimate publics’ [Berlant, L. G., 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham. Durham: Duke University Press] allows for such painful experiences to be witnessed and heard, producing possibilities and practices of solidarity between Korean women migrants.

Race, Ethnicity, and Twenty‐First Century Rural Sociological Imaginings: A Special Issue Introduction*

AbstractThis article, which also serves as the introduction for this special guest‐edited issue, examines the history of Rural Sociology's scholarly engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity. We examine the historical patterns of how Rural Sociology has addressed race and ethnicity, and then present results from a meta‐analysis of empirical articles published between 1971 and 2020. Over time, the methodological approaches and scholarly focus of articles on race and ethnicity within Rural Sociology has gradually expanded to include more analyses of power and inequality using constructivist perspectives, and greater numbers of qualitative inquiries into the lived experiences of both white and nonwhite people. The articles featured in the special issue extend from Rural Sociology's growing attention to race and ethnicity. Together, they suggest the ways in which rural spaces are racially coded, how intersections with race and ethnicity exacerbate rural inequality, how the domination of people and the environment are co‐constituted, and how practices of racism are embedded within contextually specific ecologies. In drawing attention to these contributions, we suggest future directions for the discipline's engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity, while simultaneously suggesting the ways in which our own disciplinary racial reckoning remains incomplete.

Reforming the health care system to address structural racism

Reforming the health care system to address structural racism

PD03-05 THE ROLE OF UROLOGY PRACTICE ORGANIZATION AND RACIAL COMPOSITION ON PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENT DISPARITIES

You have accessJournal of UrologyHealth Services Research: Practice Patterns, Quality of Life and Shared Decision Making I (PD03)1 Sep 2021PD03-05 THE ROLE OF UROLOGY PRACTICE ORGANIZATION AND RACIAL COMPOSITION ON PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENT DISPARITIES Nnenaya A. Mmonu, Yongmei Qin, Samuel Kaufman, Mary Oerline, Christina Chapman, Brent K. Hollenbeck, and Ted A. Skolarus Nnenaya A. MmonuNnenaya A. Mmonu More articles by this author , Yongmei QinYongmei Qin More articles by this author , Samuel KaufmanSamuel Kaufman More articles by this author , Mary OerlineMary Oerline More articles by this author , Christina ChapmanChristina Chapman More articles by this author , Brent K. HollenbeckBrent K. Hollenbeck More articles by this author , and Ted A. SkolarusTed A. Skolarus More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000001967.05AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Though Black men have a higher risk of prostate cancer diagnosis and mortality, they are less likely to receive definitive treatment. Understanding the extent to which urology practice organization and racial composition might be associated with treatment patterns may lead to actionable insights to address disparities. METHODS: We identified Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with prostate cancer between January 2010 and December 2015, and followed them through 2016. We identified a primary urologist for each patient; urologists were assigned to practices based on their Tax Identification Number (TIN). Each patient was assigned a unique TIN based on their primary urologist. We grouped TINs into quartiles based on the proportion of Black patients in a urology practice, with increasing quartile number (1-4) representing increasing proportion of Black patients (0-100%). We used multivariable regression to identify treatment associations. RESULTS: We identified 54,443 patients with incident prostate cancer assigned to 4,194 practices. The majority of patients were White (87%) with 9% Black. We found wide variation in racial practice composition (Figure). Some practices were comprised of no Black patients, while others were comprised of nearly all Black patients. The highest quartile comprised 955 practices with an average of 20% Black patients. This quartile had the greatest degree of low socioeconomic status (43.1%), higher comorbidity, and the youngest age of incident prostate cancer (all p<0.01). Black patients had lower odds of definitive therapy (adjusted odds ratio (aOR)=0.87, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.81, 0.93). Patients with medium or high socioeconomic status also had higher odds of treatment (medium vs. low, aOR 1.09, 95% CI 1.04, 1.15; high vs. low, aOR 1.06, 95% CI 1.00, 1.12). Black patients underwent less surgery, more radiation, and cryotherapy than White patients. CONCLUSIONS: Though Black patients have higher diagnosis and mortality from prostate cancer, we found lower treatment rates despite Medicare insurance coverage. The associations of racial practice composition with treatment patterns and patient characteristics are reflective of the adverse effects of structural racism on prostate cancer disparities, and highlight the need for multilevel interventions to mitigate implications. Source of Funding: NIH © 2021 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 206Issue Supplement 3September 2021Page: e45-e46 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2021 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Nnenaya A. Mmonu More articles by this author Yongmei Qin More articles by this author Samuel Kaufman More articles by this author Mary Oerline More articles by this author Christina Chapman More articles by this author Brent K. Hollenbeck More articles by this author Ted A. Skolarus More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Loading ...

Equality data as immoral race politics: A case study of liberal, colour-blind, and antiracialist opposition to equality data in Sweden.

This study concerns discursive mobilisations of race and racism in theSwedish debate on equality data, in the case of a controversial statement made by a Swedish Green Party MP. In March 2019, female Muslim MP Leila Ali Elmi argued publicly for introducing equality data in Sweden, in opposition to prevailing colour-blind and antiracialist norms. Her statement was controversially formulated in terms of 'registering' people 'by race', leading to forceful criticism in the mainstream press and on social media, particularly on Twitter. In a material representing this criticism, we analyse discourse participants' argumentative strategies, focusing on mobilisations of race and racism as acts of subject positioning, performative of a moral identity. Participants positioned themselves as morally righteous, liberal antiracists by virtue of their own antiracialism (Goldberg, 2009, The threat of race. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ) and colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, Racism without racists. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MA), while constructing equality data as a racist practice, and as a threat to a liberal order. They also constructed advocates of equality data, and specifically Ali Elmi herself, as being irrational race ideologues, to be morally condemned for espousing a return to racial thinking comparable to that of German Nazism or scientific racism. The findings point to the exceptional status and character of what we call a colour-blind antiracialism in Sweden, and further show how far 'liberal arguments for illiberal ends' can go in reinforcing a moral status quo and counteracting antiracist reform.