Race Theory Research Articles

Engaging the Struggle for Decolonial Approaches to Teaching Community Psychology.

Community psychology's history has traditionally been described within the context of U.S. history, silencing contributions from people of color from the Americas, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. In a MA/PhD specialization in Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, Indigenous Psychologies, and Ecopsychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, we are attempting to steer into critical dialogues about modernity, coloniality, and decoloniality, closely examining our curriculum and pedagogy, including our approaches to fieldwork and research. Turning to Indigenous psychologists, decolonial and critical race theorists, and cultural workers within the U.S. and from the Global South, we are attempting to challenge coloniality in the social sciences, community psychology, and in our own thinking and teaching to unmask hegemonic assumptions and open space for decolonial theory and practice. In this paper, we explore ways in which we are working with our graduate students and faculty to co-construct a decolonial curriculum that integrates decoloniality so that knowledges from historically silenced locations, as well as anti-racist and other decolonial praxes can co-exist and thrive.

In search of our aunts’ gardens: Choreographic reconstruction, race and bodily transfer in Black Lōkəs

Abstract This article is an analysis of a Practice as Research (PaR) project titled Black Lōkəs. Black Lōkəs (2017) is an experimental reconstruction of Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975). This article investigates the possibility of race being used as a creative lens for dance reconstruction, a lens that does not privilege accuracy or fidelity in a traditional sense but seeks to mine the possibility of dance reconstruction as a generative act that moves beyond preservation politics. This article is composed of three connected but distinct sections, including a brief overview of performance studies’ and critical dance studies’ use of the ‘archive’ in performance; a review of Black Lōkəs (2017) by a dance practitioner who also works with the body as archive; and the methodological process and theoretical underpinnings of the creation of Black Lōkəs (2017). This article consults both critical race theorists and dance theorists who, in concert, suggest novel possibilities for and through dance reconstruction and the politics that surround the archival fever in dance making.

Transforming institutional racism at an Australian hospital.

Objectives The aims of this study were to: (1) examine institutional racism's role in creating health outcome discrepancies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; and (2) assess the management of institutional racism in an Australian hospital and health service (HHS). Methods A literature review informed consideration of institutional racism and the health outcome disparities it produces. Publicly available information, provided by an Australian HHS, was used to assess change in an Australian HHS in five key areas of institutional racism: inclusion in governance, policy implementation, service delivery, employment and financial accountability. These findings were compared with a 2014 case study. Results The literature concurs that outcome disparity is a defining characteristic of institutional racism, but there is contention about processes. Transformative change was detected in the areas of governance, service delivery and employment at an Australian HHS, but there was no change in financial accountability or policy implementation. Conclusions The health outcomes of some racial groups can be damaged by institutional racism. An external assessment tool can help hospitals and health services to change. What is known about the topic? Institutional racism theory is still developing. An external assessment tool to measure, monitor and report on institutional racism has been developed in Australia. What does this paper add? This study on institutional racism has useful propositions for healthcare organisations experiencing disparities in outcomes between racial groups. What are the implications for practitioners? The deleterious effects of institutional racism occur regardless of practitioner capability. The role for practitioners in ameliorating institutional racism is to recognise the key indicator of poorer health outcomes, and to then seek change within their hospital or healthcare organisation.

Arms race “in cyberspace” – A case study of Iran and Israel

The article focuses on the area of cyber security, specifically on the theory of arms race in cyberspace, which is applied to case study of Iran and Israel. The first part describes the evolution of arms race in conventional environment with link to cyberspace. In the second part, the article focuses on description of selected indicators that prove/disprove the arms race in cyberspace in the relationship between selected dyad. In conclusion, the summary presents not only the selected states but also debates the overall usability of the concept of arms race in cyberspace in its general use for further research.

Color Crit: Critical Race Theory and the History and Future of Colorism in the United States

Critical race theory teaches that racism and racial inequality are constants in American society that stand outside of the prejudices of individuals. It argues that structures and institutions are primarily responsible for the maintenance of racial inequality. However, critical race theorists have neglected to formally examine and theorize colorism, a primary offshoot of racial domination. Although studies of colorism have become increasingly common, they lack a unifying theoretical framework, opting to lean on ideas about prejudice and preference to explain the advantages lighter skinned, Black Americans are afforded relative to darker skinned Black Americans. In this study, I deploy a critical race framework to push back against preference as the only, or primary, mechanism facilitating skin tone stratification. Instead, I use historical Census data and regression analysis to explore the historical role of color-based marriage selection on concentrating economic advantage among lighter skinned Black Americans. I then discuss the policy and legal implications of developing a structural view of colorism and skin tone stratification in the United States and the broader implications for how we conceptualize race in this country.

In the shadow of occupation: Racism, shame and grief

ABSTRACTIn Freud’s seminal paper on mourning and melancholia, he distinguished between those who are able to mourn (i.e. relinquish their loved object or an idealised self) and those who become melancholic (i.e. forever lamenting the lost ‘object’). Freud also wrote of the ‘shadow of the object’ that denotes dark or hidden facets that could be considered around occupation. This paper adopts these theoretical perspectives in support of a deeper analysis of meaningful encounters that occurred within qualitative research studies with occupational therapy professionals and students. The authors describe researcher and participant moments of shame, loss, and grief in relation to encountering aspects of race and racism within their respective studies. Data were analysed utilising theories of intersubjectivity, critical feminist and race theory, and psychoanalysis within the qualitative research traditions of reflexivity. The paper proposes that the acknowledgement of the potential separation from or loss of the ‘other’ (research participant), of oneself (idealised researcher or professional) and/or the professional endeavour can allow for an authentic relationship and new learning to occur. The authors suggest that within a professional rhetoric of positive outcomes that can be achieved through empowerment and enablement, a shadow of a disavowal may be cast on complexity and complicity, which could prevent or limit the painful and necessary process of mourning to proceed. Our experience suggests that occupational science research and professional discussions which include stories of shame, grief and loss/failure can enable the development of ethically reflexive professionals who can learn from misunderstandings and their (inevitable) mistakes.

A “FolkBiology” of racial theory?Psychology and the historiography of 18th‐century race thought

AbstractHuman racial kinds have been disproven by genetic and anthropological analysis. A historiographical consensus has accordingly arisen over the last few decades which sees race thought and racism as historically specific inventions, the genesis of which occurred during or after the Enlightenment. At the same time, this historical narrative has achieved dominance, work in the field of psychology has argued essentialist, categorical thinking about human kinds to be an innate component of human psychology—perhaps with a root in an evolutionary “folk biology.” These two disciplines thus appear fundamentally at odds over the origins of racial thought. This article outlines the arguments for both models and offers some commentary on how future historical work might be interact with the psychological model as it looks back into the early modern period.

‘The salvational currents of emigration’: Racial theories and social disputes in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the ‘white race’ and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both ‘progress’ and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers’ racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism.

:Racial Theories in Social Science: A Systemic Racism Critique. Sean Elias and Joe R. Feagin. New Critical Viewpoints on Society Series. New York, NY, and London, UK: Routledge, 2016. xii + 295 pp. (Cloth US$175.00; Paper US$35.95; EBook US$25.17)

:<i>Racial Theories in Social Science: A Systemic Racism Critique</i>. Sean Elias and Joe R. Feagin. New Critical Viewpoints on Society Series. New York, NY, and London, UK: Routledge, 2016. xii + 295 pp. (Cloth US$175.00; Paper US$35.95; EBook US$25.17)

Populism, religion, and distorted communication

This paper addresses right-wing populist mobilization against Islam and Muslims. Taking up the example of the 2017 electoral campaigns of the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, it highlights that some right-wing parties phrase their rejection of Islam in a decidedly liberal and democratic language: They demand certain constraints for Muslim organizations and Muslim citizens; but rather than phrasing this as an illiberal infringement of Muslims’ rights, they justify these constraints as necessary for the defense of liberal democracy against an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian, and anti-democratic Islam. This begs the question how to distinguish a legitimate critical discourse on religion that should be welcomed in a democratic public sphere from discriminatory discourse veiled in a democratic language. The paper takes up four theoretical approaches to tackle this problem: the concept of right-wing populism as an ideology centered around a nativist notion of the people, Habermas’s normative political theory of religion in the public sphere, the concept of Islamophobia as prejudice, and the theory of anti-Muslim racism as hegemonic discourse. Each of these approaches contributes to the task of making a distinction between democratic criticism and veiled discriminatory discourse, but each of them has their shortcomings. Therefore, the paper suggests combining their strengths by unifying them under the Habermasian concept of systematically distorted communication. The paper ends with the hypothesis that present-day discursive negotiations around Islam in Germany take place under systematically distorted conditions of communication, producing discrimination and marginalization and that the populist mobilization of the Alternative for Germany builds on an exacerbates this distortion.

Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Drug Prosecutions and the Production of Black–White Racial Inequality

In this article, we empirically examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with racial inequality in federal caseload characteristics and outcomes. Building on theories that address the production of inequality in institutional settings, we hypothesize that U.S. Attorneys’ offices that are more proactive in charging defendants with crack, relative to other kinds of drugs, and relative to case strength and seriousness, will demonstrate higher rates of black–white racial inequality in case outcomes across the entire criminal caseload. Consistent with theories of institutional racism, our findings demonstrate that aggressive crack prosecutions at the district level are a strong predictor of black–white inequality in conviction rates across the entire criminal caseload, and a much more modest predictor of inequality in final sentence outcomes. We conclude by discussing the importance of organizational-level empirical analyses for more effectively uncovering the conditions under which inequality can and does flourish in legal settings, and suggest possible future lines of inquiry along these lines.

“A More Powerful Effect upon the Body”: Early Mormonism's Theory of Racial Redemption and American Religious Theories of Race

This paper examines Joseph Smith's construction of a racialized theology, which drew upon conceptions of Abrahamic lineage and the possibility of “racial redemption” for peoples of African descent through conversion to Mormonism. This ran against the grain of his Protestant and Catholic contemporaries’ religious understandings of race. He expanded upon earlier iterations of his ideas with the introduction of new rituals and liturgy related to LDS temples. Smith's wife may have invited a person of African descent to participate in this new liturgy before his murder in June 1844. The views he expressed about peoples of African descent before his death are inchoate, although high-ranking Mormons related to Smith seemed to have agreed with the possibility of racial redemption. After Smith's death, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders framed the LDS temple and priesthood restriction in terms of Smith's liturgy rather than any of Smith's varied teachings on race. This paper also argues that Mormonism's racial restriction arose from its roots in the sealing ritual rather than ecclesiological power structures. Mormonism's racial doctrine has often been described as a “priesthood ban,” referring to ecclesiastical authority. However, this discounts the religious contexts in which it arose and excludes the experiences of women and children, who were not allowed to participate in the endowment or sealing ordinances. This paper places Mormonism's temple liturgy at the front and center of the LDS Church's priesthood and temple restriction.

A place-based analysis of #BlackLivesMatter and counter-protest content on Twitter

The internet has become an integral part of social activism. The widespread nature of movements such as #OccupyWallStreet and #BlackLivesMatter on social media demonstrate the web’s efficacy in raising awareness on social issues. These movements often have their detractors, however, and online debate on racial protest in particular is often vigorous. While the #BlackLivesMatter movement has drawn considerable attention in sociological circles, little work has been conducted on how content manifests itself over space. In this article, I undertake a place-based approach to studying the factors driving #BlackLivesMatter and counter-protest content (e.g., #AllLivesMatter) through geolocated tweets in Louisiana and Texas Census Designated and Incorporated Places (i.e. cities). I find that the production of content meshes with color-blind racial theory and aligns with some offline processes, but perhaps not in the ways that one might expect. Percent black and percent Asian have a positive association with the production of both #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter content, while percent white and percent Hispanic have a negative association. The approach presented is novel in that it utilizes tweets with general location and information from users’ profile descriptions. The post hoc analysis demonstrates how bifurcating the data based on spatial and temporal characteristics can reveal subtle but, informative trends, yet results should be interpreted cautiously.

Experiencias de racismo desde la inmigración Haitiana y Africana en Brasil

Resumen El debate en torno de la racialización y la identidad siempre ha estado conformado por perspectivas muy diversas que otorgan al fenómeno migratorio un lugar fundamental a ser analizado. La construcción social del racismo en Brasil ha caminado lado a lado con la historia migratoria del país. Las nuevas olas migratorias del siglo XXI configuran un escenario en este país que nos provoca la reflexión, por ejemplo, sobre cómo los inmigrantes racialmente identificados perciben el racismo en Brasil, país que todavía se presenta en el exterior con el mito de la democracia racial. El presente artículo busca poner en diálogo los debates contemporáneos sobre las teorías de identidad y racismo con la actual inmigración racializada, mediante el análisis de artículos periodísticos y debates académicos.

Struggling with Our Racism: White Progressive Christians and Lacan

The article offers a psychological and pastoral assessment of white racism in white progressive Christian congregations, critiquing the tendency of such communities to engage structural racism while remaining silent about their own psychic investments in white supremacy. Through the psychoanalytic lens of Jacques Lacan and critical race theorists’ analysis of whiteness as the master signifier, the article engages the author’s own experiences with racism and anti-racist work in the classroom and in worship to offer ‘struggle’ as a redefinition of the pastoral task of healing in the context of unearthing white progressive racism. The article closes with liturgical and confessional routes to begin such a struggle.

Fraternity Membership and Negative Racial Attitudes Among U.S. College Students

Over the years, race-related incidents involving Greek letter organizations (GLOs), especially fraternities, continue to arise despite the ensuing controversy and negative media attention that inevitably follow such incidents. The present study examines whether there is an association between GLO membership and negative racial attitudes given a range of relevant psychological, sociological, and political theories about racial attitudes. Building on insights from microclass research on attitudinal structuring and drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen (N=2817), results of linear regression models indicate that GLO membership is associated with heightened negative racial attitudes, particularly among white male students. Moreover, a measure of racial group affiliation partially mediates this effect. This latter finding suggests that among the various racial attitude theories, group position theory may be better formulated to explain an association between GLO membership and negative racial attitudes, given its consideration of both in-group boundary formation and organizations. The results also support microclass processes and suggest future research to more clearly account for pre-occupational structuring that later feed into occupational processes.

U.S. Empire and the “Adaptive Education” Model: The Global Production of Race

Following World War I, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a large-scale commercial philanthropic endeavor called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. They specifically promoted the “adaptive education” model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. They relied upon the sociologist and educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, to advocate for the transnational development of the model. Juxtaposing Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater, the author finds that two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. According to Jones and Du Bois, why did the U.S. racial state decide to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention? Furthermore, can this dynamic be conceptualized within a theory of race that conceptualizes the U.S. racial state as a nation-state?

A racial triangle: physical anthropology and race theories between Germans, Jews and Poles

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a growing prominence of German racial sciences. This article documents how East Central European scholars responded to their potential marginalization within the scientific community due to German racial theories in the field of physical anthropology and the popularization of science. Three personalities represent a sample of this variety: Ludwik Gumplowicz, a Polish-Jewish sociologist; Mateusz Mieses, a Galician Jewish amateur anthropologist; and Jan Czekanowski, professor of anthropology and spiritus rector of the Lwów school of anthropology. All three cases illustrate the contradictions inscribed into the concept of transnationalism. To varying extents, they belonged to the German-speaking scientific community, through which they gained access to international science. Their reactions to anti-Jewish and anti-Slavic positions among the dominant racial theories of their time shines light on the tensions which were present within the academic community, as well as on the tensions that appeared between their own (semi-)professional status, self-perception and their group identities. The international communication and contacts came into conflict with the exclusionary philosophy of racial theories, thus perpetually challenging their transnational position. The responses of these actors sought to redefine spatial and methodological frameworks amid the dominant discourses. Each making attempts in their own way, they aimed at reversing what they perceived as aberrations of racial theories while persistently remaining within this discourse.

Race Revisited: Against a Cultural Construction bearing Significant Implications

More often than not, academics of African descent—from the continent, the diaspora, or other parts of the world—have been trained in Western and Middle Eastern-oriented disciplines that espouse the race paradigm. Imbued with race theory, they seek spiritual, social, and political solutions to critical race issues, in some cases unwittingly maintaining the cultural structure of the dominant group from which the construct arises. This article highlights the creation of race and race identity by European, Indo-Aryan (white), and Middle Eastern (Semitic) men and women, sanctified by religious ideals that advanced their societies and stigmatised Africans, based on the melanin content of their skin. In these cultural orientations, the blackest-skinned women, men, and children are devalued, debased, and demonised. Race is used as a cultural strategy for fabricating human history and distinctions, shaping thinking, behaviours, and exploits that continue to have deleterious, far-reaching consequences for dark-skinned people across the world. In the light of this critical dilemma, and from an Afrocentric perspective, this article interrogates whether Black academicians in non-African and African cultures can shed the cultural constraints of race as identity, and understand the development of cultural identity as the basis of more progressive ideas regarding humanity.

Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that “one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race.” Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional, and socioeconomic identities around hierarchical notions of Europe and the Balkans in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker's observation is still largely true for Southeast European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on “balkanism” or Milica Bakić-Hayden on “symbolic geographies” and “nesting orientalism” did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that “race” as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimized colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialized link between people and territory that Southeast European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialized hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilization and modernity. Southeast European studies' latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anticolonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this essay suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness, and modernity that remain part of the history of “Europe” as an idea even if, by the end of the twentieth century, they were silenced more often than voiced.