Racial Project Research Articles

The ‘Park’ as Racial Practice: Constructing Whiteness on Safari in Tanzania

Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari ever since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness.

The Ummah racial project: Arab satellite television, Islamic movements, and the construction of Spanish Moroccan identity

ABSTRACT This article explores how non-western, transnational racial ideologies impact Muslim minority identity negotiation and construction in contemporary Spain. It argues that Spanish Moroccans are increasingly racialized towards a Arab-Muslim identity through two transnational scapes, international Islamic movements and Arabic satellite television. These scapes co-opt and mobilize the concept of the Ummah, a traditional Islamic legal prescription that traditionally emphasizes the primacy of Muslim identity and community. In co-opting the Ummah, these scapes reinforce ideological affinities to an Arabized version of Islam that racializes the ethnically diverse Spanish Moroccan community towards a Arab-Muslim first identity. This study contributes to the study of race in the global system by seeking to understand the identity formation of Spanish Muslim minorities in the context of larger non-European, transnational racial ideologies.

Reproducing the national family: kinship claims, development discourse and migrant caregivers in Palestine/Israel

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/Israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel’s ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/Israel, delineating how gendered constructions of the Jewish-Israeli woman uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the ‘kinship trope’, characterizes them as ‘one of the family’, obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as ‘one big family’. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state’s racial nation-building project.

The erasures of racism in education and international development: re-reading the ‘global learning crisis’

ABSTRACT Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the sector’s historical links to systems of racial domination, but also the current ways in which the field is implicated in producing unequal outcomes along racial lines. The authors present a re-reading of the ‘global learning crisis’ – as the dominant discourse of contemporary educational development – to demonstrate how the framing of the ‘crisis’ and the responses it engenders and legitimises operate as a ‘racial project’. The paper offers theoretical and methodological resources with which to interrogate the field’s entanglements in systems of racial domination and challenge its erasures of racism.

Success in Closing the Socio-Economic Gap, But Still a Long Way to Go: Urban Aboriginal Disadvantage, Trauma, and Racism in the Australian City of Newcastle

The research presented in this article is based on a four-year place-based qualitative case study of Aboriginal success in addressing Aboriginal disadvantage in the Australian city of Newcastle. The article presents extracts from in-depth interviews with Aboriginal people working on a day-to-day basis with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people experiencing disadvantage in this city. Interviewees define Indigenous disadvantage in a way that differs considerably from how it is defined in mainstream policy circles. They describe Indigenous disadvantage as being grounded in the histories of social exclusion from Australian society, rather than merely a contemporary phenomenon related socio-economic factors (i.e., lack of educational and employment opportunities). They indicated that it was (a) closely tied to Aboriginal experiences of displacement and trauma; (b) not just a material problem but a historical and social structural problem; and (c) unique to each community. For instance, urban Indigenous disadvantage is distinct from Indigenous disadvantage in remote areas. This supports the claims of Indigenous sociologist Maggie Walter (2009). In doing so, the article more strongly aligns with a critique of a neo-liberal racial project, which defines Indigenous disadvantage within an individualistic framework of individual rights and in terms of socio-economic gaps, from the voices of Aboriginal representatives.

“They hate me now but where was everyone when I needed them?”: Mass incarceration, projective identification, and social work praxis

Mass incarceration has been thoroughly explored as a racial, social, and economic project. A psychoanalytic lens makes visible another dimension: the ways in which the dehumanization and criminalization of certain members of society forces them to function as repositories for the unbearable aspects of our otherwise shared humanity. In this article, I take a psychodynamic social work perspective and explore how the creation and maintenance of traumatogenic conditions, and the criminalization of the adaptations that people make to them, enables the logic of mass incarceration by taking a problem in the environment—one that implicates the collective—and relocates it inside the individual—as a person to be punished. Applying the concept of projective identification to these social-level dynamics, I argue that mass incarceration serves an important psychological function for society related to anxieties about racial and economic inequality and, as such, we continue to invest in mass incarceration despite its failure. I discuss its implications for social work praxis, emphasizing the need for both meaningful thought and effective action. I take an interdisciplinary approach and rely on psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, and critical race studies in the hope of making clear the pernicious hold that mass incarceration has on the United States, and the work we must do as a collective to wrest ourselves from it.

Adolescence, Blackness, and the Politics of Respectability in Monster and The Hate U Give

Adolescence, Blackness, and the Politics of Respectability in Monster and The Hate U Give Gabrielle Owen (bio) The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider You see, black people, black resistance, and black organizing, has changed the landscape of what is politically possible. Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it The Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter. —Alicia Garza, “Why Black Lives Matter” Though categories of age are often assumed to be universal and shared across multiple categories of difference, they are often conceptually deployed to maintain those very categories of difference. Many scholars have recognized the degree to which black and brown children are excluded from the conditions of dependency, protection, and innocence imagined to belong to the category child.1 Alongside childhood, the category of adolescence presupposes universality even while it does the work of differentiating and naturalizing racial hierarchies. In this sense, adolescence, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, is a fundamentally racial category. Claudia [End Page 236] Castañeda explains how nineteenth-century racial science posited that white and black children had the same levels of intelligence and capability only to reassert adolescence as the moment of racial differentiation when development presumably stagnated in non-white bodies (37). The so-called father of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, imagined adolescence as a racial category that replicated the evolutionary development of humankind, one in which the proper environment, guidance, and control were necessary to reach the “higher and more completely human traits” he correlated with the norms of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth (1: xiii). Like Sylvia Wynter’s deconstruction of the universal “Man” of Western thought as a narrow and exclusionary view of being human, the category of adolescence requires scrutiny and disassembling for the ways it works to uphold Western notions of human development foundational to the construction of antiblackness. Categories of age have been central to the formation of racial and hierarchical frameworks since at least the nineteenth century. Castañeda shows how the child in nineteenth-century science was “used to establish hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality as ‘facts’ of the natural human body” (9). Robin Bernstein argues that “childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects” supporting both white supremacist and antiracist objectives (3). And Crista DeLuzio observes that “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notions of gender, race, and class figured into the scientific production of adolescence as a ‘universal,’ ‘developmental’ category that privileged maleness, whiteness, and middle-class status as its normative characteristics” (5). These normative characteristics operate as if they are synonymous with the arrival at adulthood, marking minoritized populations including women, people of color, and those who are queer, trans, neurodiverse, and/or disabled as regressive and subordinate according to a universalized conception of human development. As a normalizing and regulatory concept, adolescence continues to produce the logic of these social hierarchies today. When young people occupy normative categories and roles, they are imagined to be on their way to maturity and thus on their way to social recognition of their personhood and right to civic participation. Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams comments on this phenomenon with regard to Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, young white men who, even after committing mass murder, left the media and the predominantly white community of Littleton, Colorado in disbelief: “Still their teachers and classmates continue to protest that they were...

Licensing Citizenship: Anti-Blackness, Identification Documents, and Transgender Studies

This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are embedded in anti-Black criminalization projects. In addition, African Americans protested racial designations on driver’s licenses, correctly anticipating that licenses would take on extraordinary status as a racialized identification document. Therefore, when transgender people argue against gender designations on driver’s licenses and other identification papers, they build off work begun by Black activists in the 1930s. Without making a fallacious analogy between race and gender, this essay argues that transgender theories of administrative violence must be rearticulated in light of the anti-Black origins of these commonplace identification documents, a rearticulation that trans and antiracist activists have already begun.

Immigration policy and belonging in the Argentine ‘racial state’

ABSTRACT From its very formation, the Argentine state sought to become a beacon of white, European civilization, understanding migration to be a central means toward achieving this aspirational racial project. This objective is etched into the country’s first constitution as well as institutional memories of the national immigration office, where state bureaucrats reaffirm their desire to welcome Europeans and reject ‘all human races that could introduce a different seed.’ While scholars have argued that twenty-first century discourses and immigration policies in Argentina signal important disruptions to the racial project of Argentine whiteness, this article explores the ‘stickiness’ of the aspirational racial project as it pertains to migration. It does so through in-depth analysis of a ‘moral panic’ that took place after a 2016 motorcycle theft in Buenos Aires. The incident became popularly known as ‘El Crimen de Brian,’ and culminated in immigration policy change. Through analysis of media narratives and state speech surrounding this crime, I argue that the consequences of ‘El Crimen de Brian’ dually expose the limits of human-rights based immigration policies when they are undergirded by exclusionary conceptions of citizenship and national belonging, as well as the fragile citizenship of those who are marked as external to dominant national projects. Through discussion of the Argentine case, this article bridges conversations regarding race, nationhood and migration and discussions about the securitization of migration.

Deflective Whiteness: White Rhetoric and Racial Fabrication

This article focuses on the ways that minority identity politics are co-opted, decontextualized, and used by those invested in white supremacy and white identity politics to further their own racial project in seemingly benign, everyday cross-media discourse. This pattern of discourse, which the author terms “deflective whiteness,” deflects the fear, discomfort, and aggression that those invested in white supremacy feel when confronted with systemic racism and inequity. This fear and discomfort are transposed onto individuals linked with identity-based social movements, who are then faulted for causing a social disruption. The vantage point of deflective whiteness deliberately avoids recognizing the mission or goals of the social movement, and the resulting decontextualized chastisement is categorized as “common sense.” In the process, the original protest against white supremacy and its effects is ignored and overshadowed by a colorblind critique of those invested in identity politics as weak, unpatriotic, and naïve.

A Precarious Confluence: Neoliberalism, Race, and Water Insecurity

Three very different field sites—First Nations communities in Canada, water charities in the Global South, and the US cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan—point to the increasing precariousness of water access for historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and people of color around the globe. This multi-sited ethnography underscores a common theme: power and racism lie deep in the core of today’s global water crisis. These cases reveal the concrete mechanisms, strategies, and interconnections that are galvanized by the economic, political, and racial projects of neoliberalism. In this sense neoliberalism is not only downsizing democracy but also creating both the material and ideological forces for a new form of discrimination in the provision of drinking water around the globe. These cases suggest that contemporary notions of environmental and social justice will largely hinge on how we come to think about water in the twenty-first century.

The Dependent Origination of Whiteness

The Buddhist teachings on dependent origination describe how the process of rebirth—also known as becoming—is caused by a deluded consciousness feeding on a person’s body and mind, as well as on external objects of craving and aversion. The process of racial formation that turns European American bodies into white people who feed off of the land, labor, and life force of people of color can be seen as an example of dependent origination. This article argues that whiteness is a deeply rooted existential experience in the bodies and minds of European Americans that serves as a firewall against perpetrator guilt and trauma; it also explains why the threat white people perceive in demographic shifts triggers an existential fear of annihilation. The Buddhist teachings in this article correspond with the concepts of racial formation and racial project articulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and the concept of the possessive investment in whiteness articulated by George Lipsitz. The article then uses the Buddhist antiracist lens formed from these connections to analyze past and present white supremacist behavior in the United States, as well as past and present antiracist behavior in the United States, paying particular attention to Martin Luther King’s involvement in the Chicago Freedom Movement. Although not the primary focus of this article, connections are also made between the Buddhist elements of this analysis and clinical trauma therapy in order to ground this discussion in a secular, empirical, trauma-informed context.

Are French people white?: Towards an understanding of whiteness in Republican France

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic research of France’s North African second-generation, I bring together literatures on racial formation, whiteness, and race and racism in Europe to discuss how whiteness operates in French society. I discuss how respondents must navigate a supposedly colorblind society in which whiteness is default. Because these individuals are racialized as non-white, they are not seen as French by others. I discuss how they wrestle with definitions of French identity as white and full belonging in French society as centered on whiteness. I argue that salience of whiteness is part of France’s racial project in which differences among individuals are marked without explicit state-sanctioned racial and ethnic categories. This has implications for considering how whiteness is crucial to understanding European identity more broadly, including through the rise of the Far-Right, the recent Brexit and Leave campaigns, and anti-immigration sentiment throughout Western Europe.

The social life of DNA: racial reconciliation and institutional morality after the genome.

This 2017 British Journal of Sociology Lecture builds upon ideas developed in The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Nelson 2016). I argue that one of the more significant developments of the postgenomic era is the circulation of DNA analysis outside of the life sciences, especially commercial applications such as direct-to-consumer genealogical testing. These tests are increasingly taken up in 'reconciliation projects' - endeavours in which DNA analysis is put to the use of repairing the past, including a recently launched attempt in the United States to locate descendants of enslaved persons sold by the Jesuit stewards of Georgetown College in order to bolster that institution's finances. With this reconciliation project, genetic genealogy has become a vehicle for a form of social repair, and most particularly, the reuniting of 'lost' kin. This use of genetic genealogy takes place against the backdrop of an expanding, national inquiry into ties between education and slavery. In the process, the legacy of racial slavery is rendered both contemporary and proximate, despite a 'colour-blind' racial project that aims to negate the significance of this history and its coeval development with US higher education. Elite educational institutions such as Georgetown that elect to excavate these histories are soon after faced with the choice of how to respond, on campus and beyond, to revelations of entanglements between edification and bondage. However imperfectly, colleges and universities are among the few institutional settings where the contested issue of structural racism (and remedies to it) may be aired. It is in these fraught debates that the exercise of 'institutional morality' can take shape; organizations engage in practices that articulate institutional values and are faced with a choice of symbolic and distributional responses.

Uses and abuses of culture: mestizaje in the era of multiculturalism

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse how intercultural ideas, practices and policies inform Mexico’s current racial formation, and how racial categories and meanings are shaped under neoliberalism and the politics of recognition. I argue that the uncritical use of cultural and ethnic differences as the central focus of interculturalism reifies and reproduces the preoccupation with culture and ethnic differences characteristic of the racial project of mestizaje that held sway for most of the twentieth century. This focus on difference has silenced a much-needed discussion about how neither interculturalism nor multiculturalism has changed existing racial hierarchies and privileges nor curtailed the effects of racism and racial injustice on indigenous people and their communities.

Review of Race Scholarship and the War on Terror

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship. The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project.

Prioritized: That ghetto dude from Malvern

Malvern, a neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, was turned into a designated area for affordable housing during its transformation into a modern community in the late 20thcentury. Any positive connotation that was once attached to ‘affordable housing’ as an idyllic space for hard-working residents quickly disappeared, however, and Malvern has repeatedly been labeled one of Toronto’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, in dire need of improvement. In this essay, I borrow from Omi and Winant (2015) to argue that the neighbourhood of Malvern is a racial project – that is, Malvern’s representations assign meaning to race, created not only through racist and classist planning, but also through the ways that Malvern is shared in the larger public, through media representations of Malvern, and the complex experiences and realities of its residents. Populated almost entirely by visible minorities, the mapping of criminal deviance alongside racialized individuals has ensured that Malvern and its residents continue to be marred by stigma and stereotypes, leaving residents feeling conflicted with internalized and arguably perverse understandings of themselves, and without the necessary support that disadvantaged neighbourhoods should receive. Today, Malvern is the product of purposeful, structural violence, with the people of Malvern perceived as lacking the civility to maintain the ideal space that was created for them. Using the work of Henri Lefebvre, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the way that Malvern was conceived and perceived to exist and the way that it continues to be lived as a racial project. Malvern, like other inner-city neighbourhoods in North America, has remained at a disadvantage since its inception. In this essay, I explore how the perception of Malvern came to be and how first-hand experiences within Malvern’s borders differ from those which are negatively portrayed in the media.

Us Colonial Governance of Superstition and Fanaticism in the Philippines

AbstractThis article examines howuscolonial officials understood and utilized the categories of superstition, fanaticism, and religion during the occupation of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. I adapt Jason Josephson-Storm’s model of the trinary to explore the colonial politics of these categories. I focus on ideas about Filipino supernatural charms, typically referred to asanting anting. Civil administrators like ethnologist Dean Worcester and officers of the Philippine Constabulary blamed these charms for superstitious credulity and fanatical resistance againstusrule. As such, beliefs, practices, and communities categorized as superstitious or fanatical were targeted strategically for reformation or elimination. I argue that ideas about superstition, religion, and fanaticism were key parts ofuswar and policy, often serving racial projects of governance. Pursuing this line of inquiry allows scholars to see the material stakes of the category of religion and its proximate others.

Whiteness at Work

How do courts understand Whiteness in Title VII litigation? This Article argues that one fruitful site for such examination is same-race discrimination cases between Whites. Such cases offer a peek into what enables regimes of Whiteness and White supremacy in the workplace, and the way in which Whiteness is theorized within Title VII adjudication. Intra-White discrimination cases may range from associational discrimination cases to cases involving discrimination against poor rural Whites, often referred to as “White trash.” While intragroup discrimination is acknowledged in sex-discrimination cases and race-discrimination cases within racial minority groups, same-race discrimination between Whites is currently an under-theorized phenomenon. This Article maps current cases dealing with racial discrimination between Whites, arguing that these cases suffer from under-theorization stemming from courts’ tendency to de-racialize Whiteness and see White people as ‘not being of any race.’ This tendency has led to a limited doctrine of same-race discrimination between Whites, affording it recognition only when racial minorities are involved. Acknowledging Whiteness as a racial project— the product of White supremacy—may enable courts to better theorize intra-White discrimination. Such possible theorization is developed via the stereotype doctrine. Accordingly, same-race discrimination and/or harassment between Whites is often a result of Whites policing other Whites to conform to stereotypes and expectations regarding Whiteness, i.e., how White people should act or with whom they may associate. Recognizing dynamics of intra-White racialization and the racial work behind Whiteness, this Article concludes, is aligned with Title VII’s antisubordination goals, as it is in the interest of racial minorities as well.

Race and the Aesthetics of Frivolity in the Work of Count François G. de Cisneros

This article analyzes the somatic and racial semiotics of aristocratic dandyism in the travel chronicles of a forgotten Cuban modernista named Francisco García Cisneros. Focusing on the transatlantic and inter-American dimensions of Cisneros's identity reconfiguration in New York in the late 1890s—when he changed his name to Count François G. de Cisneros—, this article argues that behind Cisneros's seemingly innocuous aesthetic of frivolity resides a twofold racial project. On the one hand, being in New York allows Cisneros to circumvent Cuban and Latin American affiliations and perform a Latin sense of self that casts its dismissive, monocled gaze towards the United States, which he critiques as a miscegenated race. At the same time, the politics of posing, passing, and authenticity inform the floating significations and elitist consumption of Latin blanqueamiento in Cuba, where Cisneros's representations of global Otherness camouflage Afro-Cuban agency during the early Cuban Republic.