Questions Of Race Research Articles

A Comparative Study of Race and Caste with Reference to W. E. B. Dubois and B. R. Ambedkar

African Americans are the people of African descent who were brought to America as slaves. Earlier, they were also called as Negroes, later blacks, (with hyphen) African Americans and now the African Americans. Like the African Americans, Dalit or ex-untouchable is group of humanity in India who were oppressed by the social slavery of Brahmanism. They were oppressed just because they were born in the lower caste. Racism and casteism are to the two social evils that suppressed the African Americans in America and Dalits in India. One would notice an attempt of comparison between the bitter experience of African Americans and Dalits. This article sustains the literary corpus of the margins. I have chosen Du Bois and Ambedkar for comparative discourse with their respective question of Race in America and Caste in India particular. I strongly argue that Ambedkar has been got influenced by Dubois.

Becoming (Non)-White by U.S. Standards: Recategorization in the 2020 Census Race Question

Becoming (Non)-White by U.S. Standards: Recategorization in the 2020 Census Race Question

Introduction: Comics, Conscience and Gender

This editorial introduces this double-length Special Issue, which collects proceedings from an open call for submissions held after the thirteenth iteration of the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference held in July 2022 at the Lexicon Library and Cultural Centre, Dún Laoghaire, just outside Dublin, supported by Bournemouth University’s Women’s Academic Network, the Institute of Art, Design and Technology and the Creative Futures Academy. This event examined how contemporary challenges to conscience, ethics and responsibility prompt us to think about comics texts and representations, as well as considering how to approach or rethink debates and conflicts within comics studies itself. It summarizes the Special Issue content and identifies key themes that emerge in relation to discourses of gender and sexuality, including queer politics, questions of intersectionality and race, and the multivalent concept of the monstrous.

Decolonizing the Race Debate about North Africa

This essay discusses the discourse of race and racism as a “new zone” of theory grounded in orientalist claims about discovery and saving. It shows how this discourse centers slavery as an ultimate lens through which to understand the race question in the North Africa. The essay asks these questions: why have race and migration in North Africa and the Middle East become such an active zone of theory? Which concepts and frameworks dominate the scholarly debates, and with what political effects? These are consequential questions that the Moroccan case can help answer. A decolonial ethics should begin with the vibrant debates already taking place in Morocco. Moroccans’ engagement with the question of race preceded its discovery as a new field for generating expertise by Western-based scholars and journalists.

Kant's conception of race and modern political science

Racial issues remained for a long time one of the marginal topics in political thought. However, in the last few decades racial questions have become a topic of discussion in political science. Modern debates about race in political science are quite multifaceted and concern both practical and theoretical issues. In this regard, participants in discussions often turn to the of thinkers of the past. Much of this research focuses on the specific issue of Kant's concept of race, which is often used as a pretext to label Kant as a ‘racist’ thinker. Why is it that Kant's concept of race has become so important for contemporary discussions of race in political science? Could the characterizing of Kant as a ‘racist’ have a negative impact on the perception of his political philosophy? Answering these questions is the purpose of this paper.

The racialisation of AIDS in Denmark: Tabloid media scandals of sex, race and contagion

In 1992, a Danish tabloid newspaper published the picture, name and address of a Black man on its front page under the title ‘He is the AIDS killer’. The outing marked the beginning of a controversial public scandal in Denmark directly leading to the introduction of a new law criminalising HIV in 1994. Centring questions of race and nationality in connection with HIV/AIDS, we examine in what ways the discursive framing of this, and two other public scandals, became tools of interpellation calling into existence ‘problematic’ and ‘dangerous’ groups like the racialised immigrant. Drawing on theories of race and racialisation through the work of Michel Foucault and Alexander G. Weheliye, we understand racism as structurally constituted within biopower and the violent expulsion of racialised people as a form of structural racism integrated in the state apparatus. Thinking about race in this way allows us to investigate how the figure of the racialised immigrant is represented vis-à-vis a racialised regime of representation as well as within a specific economy of fear and white paranoia. Our analysis shows that the racialisation of AIDS in Denmark, through which the control and disciplining of racialised bodies were made possible, worked in tandem with the cultural production of a national health crisis narrative that – put together – enabled, produced and pushed for particular political reactions and interventions culminating with the passing of the HIV Act in 1994.

The child as epistemic figure: (im)possibilities for gender and racial justice in a secondary classroom

ABSTRACT Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography inquiring into how students and teachers read, wrote, and talked about gender and sexual diversity at a Midwestern U.S. high school, this article presents two illustrative ethnographic cases from a co-taught sophomore humanities course (grade 10) combining English language arts and social studies, cases featuring students writing about the child as an epistemic figure. The implications of this argument suggest the importance of educators questioning rather than naturalizing ageist power relations through their pedagogical techniques and curricular representations, which in turn can challenge or reify broader age-based epistemic injustices undergirding anti-trans and racist legislation and policy in and beyond the United States.

Why robot embodiment matters: questions of disability, race and intersectionality in the design of social robots

A growing minority of those with disabilities are people of color (POC), with, for example, autism diagnosis rates now higher for children of color than for white children in the...

‘You're not supposed to be gay, you're black’: Analysing race and LGBTQ+ youth identity through an intersectional lens

AbstractIn this article, I build upon calls for an intersectional approach in sociocultural linguistic research – particularly in the context of language, gender and sexuality – which attends robustly to the question of race. Through the analysis of four moments of discourse between young LGBTQ+ people, I show how their queer positionality is informed and shaped by their experience as white or racialised youths. In doing so, I demonstrate the intra‐categorical nature of identity and the benefits of a ‘thick’ analytical approach which pays close attention to individual speakers’ positionalities. Furthermore, I argue for sociocultural linguistic research which honours the origins of intersectionality theory by accounting explicitly for the role of systemic racism and white privilege on speakers’ identity constructions.

Caste, gender, race: Signposts of a feminist anti-caste approach

This commentary responds to the essay by Suraj Yengde titled ‘Race and Caste in the Making of US Sociology’, picks up a few threads in Yengde’s argument and attempts to unravel them in the interests of deepening this conversation on an issue that has returned to the foreground of global sociology and anthropology. Given the thin and tenuous disciplinary separations between sociology and social anthropology in India, especially evident in studies on caste, this commentary straddles these two disciplines in the Indian context and points to some interesting disciplinary intersections in the American context. Specifically, Yengde’s discussion of questions of caste, race and class is extended to look at Indian and diasporic contexts to speak to the specific intersections of caste, race, gender, class, region and temporality in contexts of caste formation drawing on the work of Joan Mencher and Gail Omvedt, among others.

Thinking the Other: From Terra Australis Incognita to Terra Nullius

At the end of the 18th century, when Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, recommended Botany Bay in Australia as an “advantageous” site to establish a new British penal colony, he did so with the knowledge that the east coast of the country was inhabited by Indigenous Australians, having traveled to the South Continent with Lieutenant James Cook. As a naturalist and imperial botanist on board the Endeavour, Banks’s primary duty had been to identify and classify Australian flora and fauna. Yet, the multiple observations that he made based on his interactions with Aboriginal people also contributed to establish his influence in scientific and political circles at the turn of the 19th century. Banks’s ethnographic accounts recorded in his Endeavour Journal shed light on his mind-set and convictions during his time in Australia as well as his impressions that later played their part in making him the greatest proponent of settlement in New South Wales and motivating the decision to colonize the country. In a time when exploration records significantly shaped the perceptions of the public about human nature and the beliefs and theories of the scientific community on questions of race and otherness, the writings of Joseph Banks offer a window into science and history in the making. As the scientific exploration of distant lands progressively gave way to political and economic interests, the transition from geographical othering to racial othering in the representation of Indigenous Australians turned Terra Australis Incognita into terra nullius.

University s/cyborgs widening undergraduate access

ABSTRACT This study sought to examine questions of race in higher education widening access policy and practice in England. I was keen on seeking perceptions and stories of those who do work in this area, raising awareness of higher education opportunities to youth and families from marginalised communities. Sixteen widening access university practitioners from across the country were interviewed to share their perspectives on how their work may be intertwined with race. An unveiling of hope emerged from their stories with an awareness of constraints operating in a racialised academy. Their accounts revealed the extent of their agency, their own discretion to conduct anti-racist work. This paper concludes with an offering of hope, having reworked theoretical idea of scyborg to something new. The s/cyborg, introduced in this paper, signifies the importance of the interplay of agency and structure towards grasping a sociological understanding of hope for anti-racist change.

Hypersexualisation and racialised erotic capital in sex work

Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 March 2021 in Atlanta, USA by a 21-year-old White man who sought to eliminate ‘temptation’ for a sex addiction he claimed to experience. This mass killing compelled public discussion about the hypersexualisation of Asian women in White, Western contexts and the risks faced by Asian women in ‘intimate labour’. This occurred alongside a dialogical shift towards sex worker rights in public and media discourses, yet these public dialogues appeared to occur alongside each other, rather than in interaction with each other. In between these dialogues remained questions about the legacies of hypersexualisation and what this means for Asian women in sex work, an industry that resists convenient understandings of desire and power and where hypersexuality may be simultaneously contested and deployed. This article bridges these dialogues to explore how a sex worker rights framework can engage with questions of race, hypersexualisation and erotic capital for Asian women in sex work. This is followed by an analysis of responses to hypersexualisation within Asian diasporic communities, and the implications for a more inclusive sex worker rights movement.

From dematerialising race to distorting decoloniality: development-as-imperialism and Hindu supremacy

This article explores how race in international development currently operates globally. It is not simply a discursive legacy of colonialism but also inextricably embedded in contemporary processes of imperialist extraction and accumulation, which the architecture of development both legitimises and extends. The article argues for deeper engagement with Marxist thinkers located in the Global South in contemporary theorisations of race in development. In the context of multiple anti-racist and decolonial movements globally, many mainstream development actors are claiming to engage with questions of racism within their organisations. This is explored through an analysis of several texts produced by the British Overseas Network for Development (Bond), a large network of organisations working on international development in Britain, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2020. While contradictions within these texts evidently reflect internal contestations over understandings of racism and anti-racism, they ultimately propose the adoption of diversity-based ‘solutions’ to racism and coloniality in development. These are analysed in the context of a long line of initiatives to relegitimise colonialism and development in order to sustain racialised structures of global capital accumulation. The essentialisation inherent in these approaches facilitates the appropriation of notions of decoloniality by forces of Brahmanical Hindu supremacism in India, which are closely tied to racialised and racialising global corporate capital. The second part of the article explores these processes, highlights the synergies between anti-caste and anti-racist thinking about capital and labour, and argues that Hindu supremacism incorporates, is sustained and strengthened by, and in turn feeds global supremacist ideologies.

Darwin and the White Shipwrecked Sailor: Beyond Blending Inheritance and the Jenkin Myth.

This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin's anonymous review of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in the North British Review in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin's theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of "blending inheritance" and the "swamping" of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin's text. They were later read into Jenkin's text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin's effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin's "able review" was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin's review. "Blending inheritance" is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton's typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin's review. The problems raised by the review were not so much "blending inheritance" and "swamping" but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion.

Ibn Khaldun’s Labor Theory of Value and the Question of Race

In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.

AMBER Alert: An Ironic Antidote to “Missing White Girl Syndrome”?

“Missing White Girl Syndrome” (MWGS) has been coined in critique of news media coverage favoritism of victims fitting that description. The AMBER Alert child recovery system was in fact inspired by the abduction and murder of a missing white girl, and some have argued its issuance decisions reflect MWGS. We examine this question using secondary data, including the annual AMBER Alert reports provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), and the National Crime Information Center (NCIS). We compared the demographics of victims from official AMBER Alert data (NCMEC) with cross-comparable demographics from the two official missing persons data sources to test for potential main-effect bias favoring whites or girls. A fourth dataset derived from media accounts of AMBER Alerts is used to test for any potential interaction effect of issuance preference for white girls. Overwhelmingly the findings suggest AMBER Alert issuance decisions do not reflect MWGS. Thus, we argue the system has the potential to function as an ironic “antidote” to MWGS by virtue of the identities of the children for whom it is routinely deployed. However, we qualify by acknowledging limitations with available data, and that the “black box” of AMBER Alert issuance decisions remains unstudied, leaving open the question of race and/or gender bias occurring at that point. Policy discourse and future research implications are discussed.

Francophone materialist feminism, the missing link: Towards a Marxist feminism that accounts for the interlockedness of sex, race and class

This article discusses the Marxist-Feminist Theses III and VIII. It is based on the ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective that has been developed at the end of the 1970s by Colette Guillaumin (with the concept of ‘sexage’), Monique Wittig (with the concept of ‘straight mind’), Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy and other members of the Nouvelles Questions Féministes journal’s board. The article first presents this theorization, which is too unknown to many English-speaking theorists. It then shows how ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective fully demonstrated that ‘sex’ was a structural social relation as much as class is (Gender relations are relations of production). The article also analyses how this theoretical perspective enables us to pay a deep attention to the ‘race question’. Therefore, it appears as the missing link that can help bridging at least two important theoretical and political gaps: first, between Marxist feminism and lesbian theory, and, second, between Black feminism and Marxist feminism.

Between Stereotypes and Hermeneutic Quest

G. Jung’s alleged racism with regard to indigenous populations and, by extension, people of color and, specifically, Africans and native Americans, is much debated. The present contribution is based largely on Jung’s writings, some of which are unpublished. Jung’s considerationsoften deriving from his travels in North Africa and New Mexicoseem sometimes to imply the psychic inferiority of certain populations in comparison with the alleged civilized “white man.” To establish context, the essay cites passages from Jung’s published works (including his fear of “going black”), the discussion of the “racial question” among his contemporaries, and secondary literature. It then turns to statements from Jung’s unpublished manuscript “African Journey” (ca. 1925–26) for fresh insights into his views on his “primitive psychology.” On the one hand, Jung’s psychological approach failed to fully account for the social, economic, and historical aspects inherent to cultural differences. Moreover, he followed the widespread notion equating the primitive, the child, and the mentally ill. On the other hand, Jung’s understanding of “primitiveness” appears to be intrinsically linked to a critical approach to the alleged superiority of the “civilized man.” I argue that some passages from his unpublished manuscript “African Journey” demonstrate Jung’s conviction that the Western white man must recover a sense of the sacred and the experience of the numinosum, which the so-called primitive still retains. I discuss this complex and somewhat paradoxical view alongside an epistemologically problematic connotation inherent both to Jung’s empirical approach and his conception of the collective unconscious.

Race and International Organizations

Abstract While International Relations scholarship has increasingly addressed questions of race, the literature on international organizations (IOs) has been slower to do so. In particular, it has neglected how race functions within IO workforces. Building on sociological theories of racialized organizations, we develop the concept of racialized IOs. Like domestic organizations, racialized IOs are characterized by enhanced or inhibited agency of racial groups, racialized distribution of resources, credentialing of whiteness, and decoupling of formal rules and informal practices along racial lines. However, there are also two important differences. First, since IOs rely on member states for resources, their secretariats need to accommodate powerful white-majority countries (macro-level pressures). Second, since IO workforces are diverse, their employees may bring a range of racial stereotypes that exist in their societies into their professional practice (micro-level pressures). Using the case of UN peacekeeping, we demonstrate how the four features of racialized organizations operate in light of these macro- and micro-level pressures. We show that locally hired peacekeeping staff face constraints on exercising agency; that non-white peacekeepers perform more dangerous jobs than their white counterparts; that whiteness serves as a proxy for desirable skills while non-white peacekeepers’ knowledge is devalued; and that peacekeepers from white-majority countries receive special treatment or deviate from UN-wide procedures.