Racial Symbols Research Articles

Aping Blackness: Reading and Evaluating Racialized Images in Cartagena, Colombia

Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Blackness that caricature Afro-descendants as subservient, hypersexual and licentious, jovial, uninhibited and libertine, primitive (folklorized), and violent? This article bridges the literatures on the sociology of culture and cognition, racial signification, and frame theory to explore the various sociomental lenses and schemata that people use to perceive racial symbols and evaluate their legitimacy. It uses semi-structured and open-ended photo-elicitation interviews, primarily with residents of a largely-Afro-descendant community in Cartagena, Colombia, to systematically generate a collection of readings and evaluations of racialized imagery, resulting in an empirical example of the socio-optical construction of race within the Colombian cultural context. These readings and evaluations of external cultural primers such as photographs of racialized performance and ritual reveal (1) how a Colombian Atlantic Coastal “optical community” connects the signifiers and signifieds of Blackness; (2) that racial frames evoke three primary schemas (personal, spatiotemporal, and explicitly ideological), which interpreters use to decode and evaluate images; (3) that interpreters read the racial frames transmitted by cultural producers (e.g., performance artists and festival goers) via the visual language of racialized imagery as collectively credible and/or personally salient, and that this visual resonance is how the racialized imagery gain legitimacy and; (4) that personal experience, cultural knowledge, and social location account for variations in whether people consider racialized imagery credible and salient and, as such, legitimate forms of recognition.

A Critical Race Analysis of University Acts of Racial “Redress”: The Limited Potential of Racial Symbols

More historically White institutions of higher education are compelled to respond, in some way, to increased activism and awareness of continued legacies of racism and racial crises on campuses. The author suggests that how schools wrestle with their legacies of racism and/or respond to student demands to right racial wrongs on campus might be considered university acts of racial redress. Through a Critical Race Theory inspired chronicle, the author argues that seemingly positive university acts of racial redress such as policies, place un/naming, or public statements are, in fact, Racial Symbols that do little to change the material realities of racially marginalized people on campus.

Corona de sombra: historia, identidad y transformación en un teatro de máscaras

The plot of Corona de sombra by Rodolfo Usigli exhibits a circular trajectory: it begins and ends in an “invented” present for the visit of the historian Erasmo Ramirez to the former empress of Mexico Carlota Amalia a few hours before her death (Brussels, January 19, 1927). The complexity of the text is central: theater within the theater. Carlota and Maximiliano perform for “Juarez” (Ramirez) and the spectators. The interaction of Erasmo and Carlota, on the other hand, represents and builds another “story” for the benefit of the historian himself and the viewers/readers of the future. There are also problems of identity revealed throughout the text. In symbolic terms, Ramirez, with his historian mask, represents a mestizo, modern and young Mexico in search of a recent past (re)created in Europe by an old European woman of royal ancestry. The opposition of these racial symbols, spaces and times juxtaposed shows a conflictive history in constant reinterpretation and transformation.

Belongingness and the Harlem drummers

In this article, I analyze a recent conflict over drumming in a Harlem park to understand the ways in which cultural and racial symbols are employed in negotiations of space within cities. Specifically, I argue that racial belongingness—a racialized claim to space that exists outside of property rights and demarcated through iconography—can be used to both resist and facilitate gentrification in urban locales. The Harlem case illustrates how racial belongingness functions as a device that allows groups to contest power, representation, and access to public space across temporal, physical, and aural boundaries. Thus, I look closely at the city as a canvas and stage upon which passive forms of communication manifest in a racially and culturally coded fashion. Additionally, I argue that contemporary public space discourse is overly preoccupied with class, often neglecting the significance of race in the constitution and experience of urban space.

PERCEPTIONS OF RACE AND REGION IN THE BLACK REVERSE MIGRATION TO THE SOUTH

AbstractThis study examines how African Americans perceive and manage race and region as they migrate to the U.S. South—a region with a tenuous image of racial prejudice. The analysis is juxtaposed to literature that provides an inconsistent view of regional differences in prejudice. Some researchers argue that regional differences in levels of prejudice are now small, while other researchers argue that the South continues to be a place of much greater racial hostility. Guided by a spatial boundaries approach and using 127 narrative interviews with Black interregional migrants to Charlotte, North Carolina, results indicate that Black migrants focus less on levels of racial prejudice across regions and focus more on six dimensions of everyday racism they consider during migration. These dimensions include—the overtness/subtlety of prejudice, verbal and physical harassment, group economic opportunity, physical distance, racial symbols, and paternalism. Among these migrants, there is no consensus that the South is more or less racially hostile than other regions. They perceive most saliently that they are trading more subtle prejudice, higher levels of racial residential segregation, and greater constraints on Black economic opportunity in the North, for more overt prejudice, greater paternalism, and exposure to Confederate symbols in the South. Patterns also emerged in perceptions of regional boundaries based on class, motivation for moving, gender, and generation. Implications for theories of race and regionalism are discussed.

Ethnicity and race as ‘symbolic’: the use of ethnic and racial symbols in asserting a biracial identity

According to Waters (1990), most Americans have some choice in ethnic identity and the ability to practise symbolic ethnicity (Gans 1979). This choice, however, is available to whites only; black Americans have less choice because their ascribed race trumps any ethnic status. Drawing on interviews with forty black-white biracial adults, I ask: can ethnicity be optional for black Americans – in particular, for black-white biracial Americans who have been historically defined as black? Furthermore, can race, like ethnicity, be symbolic? I find that these biracial respondents frequently draw on white ethnic and racial symbols, not to identify as white or with a particular white ethnic group, but rather to highlight their white ancestries in order to identify as ‘biracial’. The functions of appropriating white symbols are explored.

Pale Face, Red Mask: Racial Ambiguity and the Imitation of “American Indian” Facial Expressions

Drawing on examples of white imitation, this article discusses the racialization of facial expression. Taking the white imitator Grey Owl as my principal example, I argue that the employment of facial expressions as racial symbols is beset by a tenacious ambiguity. The genesis of the stern yet fierce “Indian look” is discussed in the context of the employment and deployment of the “noble savage” within European primitivism and racism. The article concludes with an account of Grey Owl’s capacity to look “more Indian than an Indian” and his redemption as a hero of environmentalism.

Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles: Mike Davis as Nature Writer

Manuel Ocampo. UNTITLED (ETHNIC MAP OF LOS ANGELES). 1987. Acrylic paint on canvas. 66 1/2" x 59". Reprinted with permis­ sion of the artist. As an immigrant, Ocampo is especially attuned to the prejudice encountered by ethnic, religious, and gendered minorities, as can be seen in this image, a parody on the Thomas Guide, a street atlas contained in most cars in Southern California. The inclu­ sion of religious and racial symbols is indicative of Ocampo’s style. The addition of historical images links present bigotry to the past. F e a r a n d L o a t h in g in L o s A n g e l e s : M ik e D a v is a s N a t u r e W r it e r S C O T T H E R M A N S O N From the writings of Umberto Eco, Frederic Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard, theorists of the contemporary condition have learned to approach Los Angeles as the epitome of the postmodernist landscape. Its expanse of freeways, its media saturation, and its cosmopolitan web of capital reproduce exponentially the environment anticipated for the twenty-first century. Los Angeles is hyperreality, a city mirrored by its own media re-creation with images metastasizing across Southern California. It shimmers on the extreme horizon of America’s future. For theorists of all types, it provides a short vacation in the reductio ad absurdum of our American culture. With his two books about the spatial construction of Southern California, Mike Davis has become one of the preeminent chroniclers of Los Angeles. Ecology of Fear (1998) and City of Quartz (1990) together make a bold environmental reconnaissance of the contempo­ rary urban environment as it is epitomized in Los Angeles. Despite Davis’s concentration on a large metropolitan area, I want to make the case that he is a nature writer. Although his books may be radically dif­ ferent from what we might think of as nature writing, I argue that his subject matter is much the same: the interaction between humans and nature. However, he diverges as a nature writer in recognizing the lin­ guistic conundrums present in mapping reality onto a textual surface. For Davis, the governing theories underpinning the built landscape of Los Angeles are in direct contradiction to those that most accurately explain the natural ecology. By reevaluating the contradictions, eli­ sions, and mislabelings of “nature” in Southern California, Davis reveals that what we recognize as true about our environment is as much a product of language arising out of political, personal, and cul­ tural needs as it is an attempt to accurately reflect the environment. In analyzing Los Angeles, Davis repositions that city as the defining tem­ plate for urban ecology, and he forces a realignment of the categories we use to define nature. The idea of the city has not played a major role in the recent influx of green literary criticism. Not surprisingly, it is often reductively posi­ tioned as the counterpart to nature and rarely addressed directly by ecocritics . But Mike Davis’s books about Los Angeles are very much in 2 9 4 WAL 3 7 .3 FALL 2 0 0 2 keeping with the philosophical spirit of those nature writers so valued by most ecocritics and redefine those social categories central to our understanding of nature. City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear exhibit many of the qualities valued in such works as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) or Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986). All are spatially centered and rooted in the ecology of a specific area. They are all historically informed, representing the temporal processes that have led to the present landscape. They are lamentations as well as calls to arms, decrying the destruction of the physical place but also pinpointing the causes of destruction, often identifying names of those responsible. In short, they are books with a complex and sophisticated treatment of the environment. In the same way that Dillard and Lopez approach the Virginia countryside or the Arctic North, Davis treats Los Angeles as a natural ecology, a system operating under rules similar...

Black and white violence in Britain: The articulation of race in popular and criminal justice discourses

Through the theme of violence, this paper identifies how popular racial symbols in British society intersect with the way court cases are discerned and elucidated beyond the legal context of perception and interpretation. The intersection is illuminated through the racial dichotomy that underpins popular and criminal justice representations of 'acts of violence' by black 1 and white males. As a guide to a clearer insight into the role of the court in reproducing and sustaining racial images of violence, the paper firstly reflects on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry of 1998/9.

Race in Popular and Courtroom Discourse of Violence

In this paper the aim is to demonstrate how racial symbols popularised in society intersect with criminal justice discursive construction of a court case. Through the theme of violence, the paper illustrates the intersection by illuminating the racial dichotomy that underpins popular and criminal justice characterisation of ‘acts of violence’ by black and white males.

The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History

Essay The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History by Kevin Thornton For most of this century, public memory in the South has cherished the noble Lost Cause. The Confederate monument in Yazoo City, Mississippi, erected in 1909 by the local United Daughters of the Confederacy, tells the story in one sentence : "As at Thermopolyae, the greater glory was to the vanquished."1 To anyone conversant with ancient history, the Yazoo City monument proclaims that the men and women of the Confederacy fought for nothing less than the principle of liberty. Like the ancient Spartans who sacrificed themselves before Xerxes' army, these southerners courageously struggled against an overwhelming invasion to preserve a civilization. They did not falter once defeat was imminent . Indeed, their tenacity in the face of defeat ennobled them beyond victory; they won the greater triumph of embodying, to future generations, the causes of honor and home and patriotism. In 1909, the legacy remained that of the Confederacy in the South. And like the Confederate monument in Yazoo City, it was constructed entirely for whites. For many people today, the idea that white southerners fought for liberty in the Civil War seems perverse: The legacy of the Confederacy is not courage in the face of adversity but racism. "I have to tell you this vote is about race," said Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois in her widely quoted attack on the United Daughters of the Confederacy seal from the Senate floor. "It is about racial symbolism. It is about racial symbols, the racial past, and the single most painful episode in American history."2 As the idea of a noble Confederate past increasingly is challenged, in many people's minds it is being replaced with the idea that the Confederacy stood for racism. From this perspective, honoring the Confederacy is a racist act. The story represented by monuments and flags is wrong, both historically and morally, and deserves to be repudiated. Moreover, at some level, resistance to changing offensive public symbolism proves only that the same southern orthodoxy of 1909 exists still and that, in the end, African American opinion doesn't count. And yet a positive version of the Confederate past is deeply rooted in the public memory of the South and remains, especially for many white southerners, 234Southern Cultures a key element of southern identity. These people believe strongly that a southern heritage of bravery and idealism is real. They deeply resent the demand that Confederate symbolism be repudiated and construe the attack on the Confederate past as heavy-handed, politically correct moralizing that vilifies white southern identity. Most of all, they fear imposition of a new orthodoxy of southern apology , wherein anything southern is automatically assumed to be racist. They believe their opponents demand nothing less than a public culture that ritually denounces their ancestors as uniquely guilty—the Nazis of the American past. "A kind of inquisition is being waged against Southerners," asserts the literature of the Northeast Georgians for the Flag and Southern Heritage, "a psychological persecution that would have us renounce our forebears, our heritage, and our culture." The tract continues, "The battle of the Confederate flag is merely the opening wedge in a campaign to destroy all vestiges of respect for the traditional South, and our forebears."3 Two Views of Southern History In the increasingly shrill characterizations put forward by protesters and counterprotesters , there are two Souths, and behind these Souths, two versions of southern history. "Everybody knows what the Confederacy stands for," said Senator Moseley-Braun. But that is just the problem. While everybody knows what Confederate symbolism means, we know different, contradictory things. The heritage of nobility runs smack up against the legacy of racism. Arguments about Confederate symbolism have an interminable, circular quality because each side accuses the other, in essence, of being willfully ignorant of the most basic historical facts.4 But these arguments are not about facts. They are about meaning. Moreover , they are not only about the Confederate past, but about the continuing uses to which Confederate memory is put. These arguments offer conflicting versions , in other words, about what the Confederacy stood for and what the Confederacy stands for. In...

Tom Bradley's Defeat: The Impact of Racial Symbols on Political Campaigns

Tom Bradley's Defeat: The Impact of Racial Symbols on Political Campaigns