Racialized Subjects Research Articles

Color-blind Aesthetics in Manuel Muñoz: Reading Race in Form and Feeling

When ratified in May of 2010, Arizona’s House Bill 2281—colloquially known as the Anti-Ethnic Studies Act—sparked larger debates surrounding the importance of ethnic studies in the classroom and beyond. The law prohibited, among other things, the teaching of courses or classes that “promote resentment to a certain race or class of people,” that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals” (State of Arizona 1). Riddled with contradictions and reminiscent of ongoing attacks on critical race theory today, the act exemplifies the belief that the disappearance of representations of race disappears the problem of race altogether. Even though the Anti-Ethnic Studies Act was overturned in 2017, it remains a notable attempt to usher Arizona into a color-blind future. Reading the Anti-Ethnic Studies Act and its intended target—Latinx literature—affords me the opportunity to examine how legal and literary texts negotiate the conditions of race under color-blindness, with an eye to their impacts on notions of gender and sexuality. While color-blindness first entered the lexicon of US liberalism in Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling, more recently it “co-opts the moral force of the civil rights movement, deploying that power to attack racial remediation and simultaneously defend embedded racism,” as critical race scholar Ian Haney López writes (817). “[U]nder colorblindness,” Haney López continues, “race is only skin color; it is not a categorical system constructed over a long history of group-based exploitation. Racism is any and every use of race; it has nothing to do with the imposition or defense of racial hierarchy” (824). The impacts of this dominant social form on Latinx letters raise a series of representational and interpretative questions. What forms do race and racism take in the literature of a color-blind present? What happens to racialized subjects—the ones whose narrativized consciousnesses mapped and shaped Latinx literatures—when the language of racism disappears? How and where do we read for the anti-racist ethos that has sustained a Latinx literary tradition?

For the Record: Muzio Costanzo, ‘Franciscus Etiopem’, and Paris Bordon’s Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages

ABSTRACT The Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages, painted a sixteenth-century portrait by the Venetian artist Paris Bordone, has been of great interest to art and cultural historians studying the depiction of Black subjects in early modern portrait art, because it is the earliest known work to depict a Black page attending a White male subject. It influenced the development of a distinct European portrait type in which aristocratic white sitters were represented with enslaved Black attendants in which their unequal power relations underscored by the rigid hierarchies of their proximities. Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal observe that the result of this motif is ‘the paradoxical presence and erasure of the enslaved subject in portraiture’ as material subjects that are seen but not acknowledged. Such a voluntary ‘erasure’ of what is clearly present also applies to the ways we have read archival documents about enslaved people from the point of view of the colonizer. Here, I re-read both the painting and the documents to restore the identities of both the main soldier subject and his Black slave, Francisco of Ethiopia, by drawing attention to our encoded methods of reading racialized subjects in the gallery and in the archive.

To Be is to Dream is to Be Free

Malone talks back to the legacy of exploitation of Black slave labor and the system of racial subjugation and sexual political economy that places demands on the Black female body, themes that are found in Alison Saar’s artwork entitled Cotton Eater II (2014).

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country.

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country Brianna Theobald (bio) Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives.1 It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women.2 It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction. This is the vantage point from which I have been assessing the consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and from which I approach this forum. A Native-centered historical analysis underscores the limitations of a narrow scholarly or political focus on the now overturned Roe v. Wade and the question of abortion’s legality, a point long emphasized by Indigenous women, women of color, and working-class [End Page 39] women. As Indigenous Women Rising founder Rae Lorenzo (Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana) recently argued, “Roe v. Wade has never been a reality for Native people.”3 Nor, one might add, has Roe ever been enough to meet Native people’s needs, as they have faced countless other obstacles in the pursuit of abortion access, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy. And yet, as Native attorneys and reproductive activists powerfully argued in an amicus brief submitted for the defendants in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe portends particularly harmful consequences for Native peoples.4 While in tension, these realities—that Roe was illusory in the lives of many Native people and that its repeal carries particular burdens and dangers—reflect the duality of federal control and neglect that the sociologist Barbara Gurr has identified in the provision of “imperialist medicine.”5 They speak to the need for robust reproductive justice agendas that attend to settler colonialism in the past and present and imagine vibrant Indigenous futures.6 Native reproductive agendas have long been informed by the exigencies of Native women’s struggle to have children and Native families’ struggle to raise them in safe, healthy, and culturally centered environments without undue external intervention.7 For centuries, Native peoples have endured the efforts of policy makers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and missionaries to assimilate them into U.S. society, a thankfully unsuccessful yet nonetheless destructive attempt to eliminate Native cultures and dissolve tribal nations. The education of Native children was a cornerstone of federal assimilation efforts. Well into the twentieth century, authorities removed Native children from their homes and communities to carry out this education, an intentional effort to destabilize children’s ties to their families and homelands. Authorities justified these actions [End Page 40] in part on allegations of Native maternal apathy or incapacity.8 Such stereotypes existed alongside and buttressed self-serving tropes regarding Indigenous promiscuity and domestic deficiency, even as colonization rendered Native women vulnerable to sexual violence.9 Colonial surveil-lance of and intervention in Indigenous home and family life rested on racist assumptions about the need for “moral uplift” of individuals and communities. Health and healing, too, were sites of assimilationist intervention in Indian Country. The reservation system that federal officials embraced following the Civil War produced a cascade of public health disasters. Native nations faced land dispossession, a forced sedentary lifestyle, malnutrition due to government neglect, and economic underdevelopment. These conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, and infant mortality and maternal morbidity rates reached alarming heights in many locations. The federal government further hindered communities...

Critical reflection to develop transformative consciousness of racial differences

ABSTRACT Aspiring educational leaders must understand their own culture and the cultures of others to lead schools effectively and realise equitable outcomes for traditionally marginalised students. To explore the potential for professional learning to affect students’ frames of reference regarding cultural interactions, we analysed self-reflection papers from graduate students within an educational leadership preparation programme at a US public university. We investigated sociocultural distortions of race and ethnicity when students reflected on their first-hand (direct contact and conversations) and second-hand (news reports and stories) encounters with people who are phenotypically different from themselves. The course included readings, discourse, and reflective journaling about racial interactions. We utilised Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning to understand how students developed self-awareness and progressed through stages of intercultural competence and sensitivity. Most participants progressed through developmental stages of intercultural sensitivity, and many moved from ethnocentric to ethnorelative stances. Findings indicate the importance of purposely designing learning experiences that allow aspiring leaders to critically self-reflect on topics of race and equity prior to assuming formal leadership positions.

Review: Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru, by María Elena García

Review: <i>Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru</i>, by María Elena García

Publisher's note to “Culture and psychedelic psychotherapy: Ethnic and racial themes from three black women therapists”

Publisher's note to “Culture and psychedelic psychotherapy: Ethnic and racial themes from three black women therapists”

Privileged but not in Power: How Asian American Tech Workers use Racial Strategies to Deflect and Confront Race and Racism

Research on tech workers has often focused on racial inequalities within the industry but has failed to seriously consider Asian American professionals as racialized subjects. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by centering Asian Americans as workers whose racial identity impacts their career trajectory and professional experiences in the high-tech industry. Based on 57 interviews with Asian American tech professionals, I find that Asian Americans use four main racial strategies to deflect or confront racism in the workplace Three of these racial strategies—racial maneuvering, essentializing, distancing— intentionally remove Asian Americans from the glare of racism. The fourth racial strategy, dissenting, acknowledges racism; workers using this racial strategy are often so frustrated by the white power structure of the high-tech industry that they find no other choice but to leave mainstream organizations. Several of these racial strategies are reinforced by local racial politics and the historical influence of Asian immigrant workers that helped shape both Silicon Valley and Asian American culture in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Do mesmo jeito que existe cachorro branco e preto”: uma análise acerca das intersecções entre raça e saúde

Abstract This paper reflects on the Family Health Strategy (ESF) workers’ understanding of racial relationships and health intersections. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ESF teams’ professionals in the State of Pernambuco, Brazil, whose data were analyzed in light of the discussions that focused on the racial theme. The results point to discrepancies between different health models in the daily routine, race/skin color invisibility in training and professional work, and whiteness as a structuring element of race relationships. The study reaffirms the need for Public Health to focus on the intersection between the issue of race/skin color and healthcare relationships and invest in the training of professionals regarding race discussions.

"The same way as there are black and white dogs": an analysis of the intersections between race and health.

This paper reflects on the Family Health Strategy (ESF) workers' understanding of racial relationships and health intersections. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ESF teams' professionals in the State of Pernambuco, Brazil, whose data were analyzed in light of the discussions that focused on the racial theme. The results point to discrepancies between different health models in the daily routine, race/skin color invisibility in training and professional work, and whiteness as a structuring element of race relationships. The study reaffirms the need for Public Health to focus on the intersection between the issue of race/skin color and healthcare relationships and invest in the training of professionals regarding race discussions.

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

Abstract: It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism," as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.

Contested Autonomy: Black Denominational Debates in the Early Jim Crow Era

AbstractAs Black church leaders decried the arrival of Jim Crow segregation, many also celebrated the racial independence of their churches. They touted advancements such as women's ordination as examples of what Black churches could do when freed from white control. Other Black ministers defended remaining in majority-white denominations as a way to abolish the color line. This article argues that scholars miss much about Black religious history if we assume that Black churches’ resistance to racial subjugation started with a settled and uncontested racial autonomy. On the contrary, Black churches throughout the nineteenth century kept open a lively forum about the virtues and vices of such autonomy. Interracial cooperation often undermined Black autonomy, and Black Christians debated which better countered racial caste. To track the heated debates over racial independence and interracial cooperation within and between Black churches, this article analyzes Black newspapers, sermons, church minutes, and letters, mostly among Black Methodists but also among Black Baptists and Presbyterians throughout the late nineteenth century. It focuses on particular debates surrounding women's ordination, attempts to unite Methodists, and conflicts over Baptist education.

Asian Americans and the battle against Affirmative Action: opposition to race-based admissions as neoliberal racial subjectivity performance

ABSTRACT Through a critical discourse analysis of three Asian American organizations’ rhetoric around race and education, we explore the activism of Asian Americans working against affirmative action and other race-based educational policies. We examine the way these groups engage ideological discourses regarding race, civil rights, and the freedom to compete in their fight to protect Asian Americans’ access to elite educational institutions. Drawing on the scholarship on neoliberal educational policy and neoliberal racialization, we argue that the organizational activism of Asian American opponents of affirmative action embodies the intersection of neoliberal approaches to education and neoliberal conceptions of race and racialization. Thus, we consider that Asian American anti-affirmative activists are neoliberal racialized subjects who view education, particularly higher education, as a private good that should go to the most successful student/consumer. They embrace and repurpose the language of civil rights to fight for their individual rights as educational consumers.

Enslaved Ecopoetics:

Scholars, such as Kimberly Ruffin and Katherine Lynes, reconsider American environmental poetry that excludes African American ecopoetic traditions of the antebellum period. According to Ruffin, in order to reconstruct and enhance our sense of ecopoetry, we must reevaluate the black tradition of nature poetry, exemplifying the contemporary approaches to slavery in the USA and elsewhere. Likewise, Lyne’s “reclamation ecopoetics” attends to the history of dangers, despite centuries of methodical and organized exploitation, that human groups bring to the black human subjects as well as to non-human nature. Building on this scholarship, I focus on the nature poems of George Moses Horton (1797- 1883), the life-long enslaved poet, that highlight the inseparable unity of nature and humans. Horton’s poetry deployed nature to prove both the humanity and the intellectuality of the enslaved. My study traces a history of American enslaved ecopoetics that requires us to think of the enslaved human subjects as individuals whose nature poetry hinges on the dangers of subjection and exploitation of chattel slavery. My essay resituates Horton, the black bard of North Carolina, in the nineteenth-century American paradigm, analyzing his poetry and his racial subjugation from an ecocritical perspective.

Hate Up to My Couch: Psychoanalysis, Community, Poverty and the Role of Hatred

This article is based on the author's experience working as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia's barrio in the 1990s, which led her to meditate on the psychology of racism, segregation, and other forms of intolerance of difference and otherness. The author argues that no analyst can be immune to the cultural context in which they work and that the simple fact that psychoanalysis is not available to the poor constitutes a form of racism. It further argues that psychoanalysis, thanks to its power of actualizing otherness in the context of analytic treatment, can reveal its emancipatory potential with populations marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. In the second part, the article turns to the recent concept of Afro-pessimism as developed by Frank Wilderson III (2020) in connection with racism. For Wilderson, the curse of slavery has not been lifted, placing racialized subjects in a social death, a deathliness that saturates Black life. In an attempt to traverse this racist fantasy, the article concludes with a discussion of Toni Morrison's meditation on the invention of otherness, rethought from a Lacanian angle.

Freedom to Play, Learn, Live, and Thrive: A Youth-Serving Professional Call to Action to Address Firearm Violence

Every day 28 youth in the United States die from firearm violence [1]. Racial inequity in firearm violence is stark and longstanding [1]. Protecting youth requires tackling root causes of violence, including structural oppression, racism, poverty, and systemic divestment in communities, and addressing how firearms have been and continue to be used as tools of racial subjugation. School shootings and mass shootings often promote a national dialogue about firearm safety and account for a small proportion of firearm-related deaths.

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

Damned Ecologies

AbstractThis article uses a queer ecocritical methodology to analyze constructions of the environment and subjectivity in American spiritual warfare demonologies (discourses about the reality and activity of demons) published in 2008–18. There has been a surge in critical research on evangelical climate skepticism, the ecological thought of far-right movements, and the growing influence of Christian nationalism and charismatic evangelicalism on the US political landscape. Spiritual warfare, which constructs reality as a battle between divine and demonic forces, is a key part of this landscape. This article shows how spiritual warfare demonology operates as a tool for the construction of entwined social, political, and environmental ecologies, combining notions of deviant nature and deviant culture. Such ecologies both reinforce and destabilize biopolitical hierarchies that enshrine a normative (white, settler, cisheteropatriarchal) model of the human over both other (racialized, queered) humans and the nonhuman world. Critically rereading spiritual warfare demonologies through queer ecology, the article shows that such texts frame the fights against climate change and for queer and racialized subjects as prongs of a demonic assault on the futurity of white Christian America. Such texts reveal spiritual warfare demonology to rest on an ecological ultimatum: that nature will be normative or it will not be at all.

Educating pre-service school librarians about race, racism, and whiteness

The racial makeup of the field of school librarianship is overwhelmingly white, standing in stark contrast to the racial demographics of today’s K-12 student population in our nation. Studies of white educators working with racially minoritized students show many detrimental effects, including deficits-based thinking and lowered academic expectations, highlighting how vital it is that pre-service school librarians learn about topics of race, racism, and the effects of whiteness in their school library preparation programs. Set within a framework of Critical whiteness Studies, my doctoral research investigates the structural and individual factors that influence the ways that today’s pre-service school librarians are taught about topics of race, racism, and whiteness. My methodology includes interviews with school library program coordinators, course instructors, current school librarianship students, and recent graduates of school library programs, as well as document analysis of course syllabi, educator preparation standards, and other relevant texts.

Listening to Echoes: Racial Violence in Contemporary Art History

Taking its cues from recent scholarship on the crisis of anti-Black violence, this essay revisits a constellation of art world events related to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King: Anna Deavere Smith’s 1993 performance Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one-woman play about the riots sparked when King’s attackers were acquitted; the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which included the amateur videotape of the beating that had featured prominently in news coverage and during the trial; and a roundtable discussion about the Biennial that appeared in the journal October. Using the concept of the echo as a figure for a temporal “ongoingness,” I argue that racial disparity exists within art historical and art critical assumptions about time. By virtue of the echoic nature of police violence against African Americans, racialized subjects often have a different relationship to past-ness than white subjects, and thus the capacity to mark events as historical is a privilege to which not all subjects have equal access. Similarly, the ability to deploy the category of the contemporary in positive ways is differentially distributed. Inspired by Darby English’s suggestion that we listen for what “fights meaning” in works of contemporary art by and about African Americans, the essay harkens to the repetitions of the echo to reveal the ways in which time itself is racialized.