Racial Visibility Research Articles

Screening race, streaming Frenchness: Women of colour on French Netflix

ABSTRACT This article builds on the emerging scholarship on Netflix productions and French series to analyse questions of racial visibility and feminine representation in two series: Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020) and Plan cœur/The Hook-Up Plan (Netflix, 2018–2022). The first section focuses on Dix pour cent’s Sofia Leprince, a mixed-race receptionist and aspiring actress, and the ways in which she serves to highlight the lack of Black actors in French cinema. The second section analyses Plan cœur’s Charlotte Ben Smires, a young woman at a career crossroads who offers a paradoxical perspective on the place of Maghrebi descendants in – and their relationship with – France. Overall, the authors examine how Dix pour cent and Plan cœur, two series featuring strong women of colour, navigate racial visibility in universalist French contexts. These series speak back to a striking historical absence of actors of colour – especially women – from French television screens, yet they are nonetheless circumscribed in persistent norms of republican universalism and thus racial colour-blindness. This article examines this paradox to determine whether these successful contemporary series can truly offer ‘narrative renewal’ within the confines of republican representation norms.

Introduction: the turn to racism and anti-racism in Latin America

ABSTRACT We are currently witnessing a turn to racism and anti-racism in Latin America. The recognition of racism is not new, but the attention and challenge to racism, in such an orchestrated way, is. What are the signals of such turn to racism and anti-racism? What are the overall lessons for Latin America and from Latin America to global antiracist efforts? This introduction looks at the arguments of the articles in this special issue to highlight how issues of racial visibility, naming racism, racial data, legal rights and recognition, entrepreneurship, mestizo identity, the possibilities of alliances, racially-aware struggles against class (and gendered) oppression, are key to understanding this turn. While we do not claim that these articles cover the full extent of this turn in Latin America, we suggest that analysing how this turn appears in Latin American opens useful ways of thinking about anti-racism more widely.

Constructing Racial Visibility: Biracial “Occupation Children” in the Third Reich, 1933–1937

Abstract In summer 1937, approximately four hundred to six hundred German descendants of Allied soldiers of color born in post-World War I Rhineland were forcedly sterilized. The Nazis vilified the children, referring to them as Rheinlandbastarde (“Rhineland bastards”). We still know relatively little about the fates of individual victims and the role of local perpetrators. This article uses anthropologist Wolfgang Abel’s 1933 study of biracial Besatzungskinder (“occupation children”) from Wiesbaden to shed fresh light on the interplay between local and national dynamics in the coming of the 1937 sterilization campaign. Drawing on many hitherto unexplored archival sources, the article traces the lives of several biracial children. The case of the Rhenish children shows that Nazi leaders worried that “racial difference” often was invisible. A key goal thus focused on constructing the children’s racial visibility. Officials, physicians, and teachers embedded in local communities often played a crucial role in ferreting out biracial children and marking them as racial “Others.” Simultaneously, the case of Wiesbaden suggests that instances where local actors contested important elements of ascriptions of racial “Otherness” to biracial Besatzungskinder may have hardened Nazi leaders’ resolve to pursue the children’s sterilizations outside existing legal norms and procedures.

“There’s Something Very Wrong with the System in This Country”: Multiracial Organizations and Their Responses to Racial Marginalization

Multiracial organizing since the 1980s has centered around the need to define and make visible the term multiracial (e.g., U.S. Census). In the contemporary era when multiple race populations are a growing and institutionally recognized demographic, how do multiracial organizations characterize and seek to combat collective experiences of racial marginalization? Here, we draw on in-depth interviews with officers from diverse multiracial organizations in the U.S. and Canada (N = 19) collected from 2017 through 2018 to examine this question. The findings revealed that multiracial individuals experience distinct forms of exclusion, which we call categorical invisibility, that target individuals who do not “fit” into established monoracial categories, and mixture as pathology, a less common frame but representing more overt forms of bias targeting those of mixed backgrounds. The lived impacts of these experiences prompt the expressed need for “safe” spaces from the psychosocial costs of categorical invisibility. Multiracial organizations, located mostly in the United States with one in Canada, engage in diverse community building and advocacy efforts to address these needs and, thus, represent critical sites of resistance to the trauma of racial (in)visibility. This work amplifies the need to center Critical Multiracial Theory to expose how monoracial paradigms as a central feature of White supremacy continue to shape the lives of multiracial people and expand our knowledge on how multiracial organizations shape the (re)negotiation of racial categories that challenge the racial status quo.

Runaway Slave Portraiture, Aesthetic Culture, and the Emergence of Racial Sense

Runaway slave newspaper advertisements constitute some of the earliest visual formulations of supposedly legible racial meaning in the Americas. Numbering in the thousands, these missing persons reports contain rare pre-photographic portrayals of self-emancipated individuals “seen” by a public. By reading the advertisements with and against the grain, this essay explores the logic of seeing in these early forms of racial profiling and speculates about how descriptive language makes race feel as if it is and ought to be visible and transparent to the beholder. Racial visibility was and is produced by the layers of abstraction undertaken to represent what could already be recognized as “racial” in public culture and affirms a perceptual experience I call racial sense. A theory of racial sense is developed in this essay by reading Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic philosophy alongside Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the human. This theory of racial sense challenges the distinction between aesthetics and science as staged by the modern project of the human.

The politics of whiteness and racial visibility

The politics of whiteness and racial visibility

The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

The Black FriendOn Being a Better White Person Frederick Joseph and Deborah Stevenson, Editor "More people than ever have had enough and are fighting back. I'm proud to be one of them." So says media activist Joseph in the preface to this meaty yet accessible, challenging yet enjoyable book addressed to white people trying do better at understanding race and racism. Here he reinvents the trope of the Black friend from being the token, permissive ornament of an otherwise white group to being "the person who is willing to speak the truth to the white people in their lives, to call them out when they do or say something hurtful, ignorant, or offensive." And that's what he does warmly, frankly, helpfully in chapters that cover topics such as the importance of racial visibility ("We Want You to See Race"), cultural appropriation ("This Isn't a Fad; This Is My Culture"), "passes" from ingroup friends ("We Don't Care What Your Black, Brown, or Asian Friend Said Was Okay"), and the need to move beyond allyship ("In the End: We Don't Need Allies; We Need Accomplices"). Most chapters include a dialogue between Joseph and a media creator or activist, providing an informed take from people such as YA author Angie Thomas, #OscarsSoWhite initiator April Reign, and Academy Award–winning Moonlight actor/writer Tarell Alvin McRaney. There's even high value in the copious end matter: "An Encyclopedia of Racism" explains terms and topics bolded in the main text that are often unknown to or misunderstood by white people; "People and Things to Know" includes individuals, books, and movies of note; "The Black Friend Playlist" includes a collection of Joseph's favorite tracks; source notes are also included, and a bibliography and index will be in the final volume. What makes the book sing is Joseph's lively, informal voice, including lots of direct address and quick asides, in a visually easygoing format. The preface contains a letter to his little brother, and there's an older brotherly, even paternal tone throughout as he dips into personal accounts, such as own experiences as a nerdy Black kid subject to repeated microaggressions, but also as an adult who makes his own missteps. The humor ranges from wry to satiric to just gleefully goofy, as when he's exhorting his young readers to check out beloved movies, TV shows, and music ("Just know that if we meet and you haven't listened to any Coltrane songs, we are going to have an issue!"). It's a vivid voice that cries out for an audiobook version, and Joseph is an immensely likable figure whose company readers will enjoy. That's a key quality when he takes on topics that may make his white audience uncomfortable, such as the weaponry of white women's tears or the need for accountability; he's built trust and camaraderie enough with his readers that they'll respond to his encouragement to examine themselves. He also offers them some concretely actionable steps: when assessing appropriation, for instance, consider [End Page 157] "Who is selling the thing I want to buy? Who gets paid if I buy it? If the money isn't going to the people whose culture is represented, walk away." Ultimately, though, his advocacy for antiracism action is both individual and societal, in a call that many will want to answer: "I'm asking you to protect one another and to learn from one another. I'm asking you to turn 'different' into the new normal, and to tell others to do the same." This is therefore a crucial current volume both for white kids who want to do better and POC kids who'd like a break from being the explainers. Ultimately, Joseph adroitly manages what in 2020 seems a vanishing skill: delivering a tough message in a way that inspires people to listen. (See p. 174 for publication information.) Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

What's visible is my race, what's invisible is my contribution: Understanding the effects of race and color-blind racial attitudes on the perceived impact of microaggressions toward Asians in the workplace

The study examined perceptions of racial workplace microaggressions against Asians. Microaggressions signal that the target's racial group is highly visible to the perpetrator. In this study, we examined the perceived negative effects associated with this type of heightened racial visibility, and whether these effects are equally discernable to all based on one's race and color-blindness. Asian and White participants were given a series of vignettes depicting different types of microaggressions, consisting of both blatant (microassault) and subtle forms (microinsult and microinvalidation). In addition, we examined a new form of subtle microaggression (overvalidation) that occurs when the perpetrator treats Asians in a seemingly positive way based on stereotypes about Asians (e.g. assigning predominantly quantitative tasks to Asians because they are perceived to be good at math). Results revealed that compared to Whites, Asians saw a smaller difference in negative effects between the blatant microassault and subtle overvalidation and microinsult conditions. Additionally, participants lower on color-blindness perceived a smaller difference in negative effects on the target between the microassault and all forms of subtle microaggressions. Finally, we found that color-blindness played a stronger role among Whites than Asians such that compared to Whites higher on color-blindness, Whites lower on color-blindness perceived a smaller difference in negative effects on the target between the microassault and subtle microaggressions. No such difference existed among Asians. Implications for raising awareness of the negative effects of subtle microaggressions that render Asians (in)visible in the workplace are discussed.

Latin American Immigrants' Adaptation Experiences in Korea: Cases of Migrant Workers with Professions in Culture and Entertainment Sectors

This paper explores the cultural adjustment experiences of Latin American migrating professionals in Korea. Two areas of studies on immigration are adopted to conceptualize the experiences of Latin American migrating professionals in Korea: transnationalism and racial reconstruction. I used qualitative interviews to examine Latin American migrating professionals' adjustment experiences in Korea. Latin American migrating professionals' experiences involving immigration to Korea are characterized by relatively short-term sojourns, isolation, and racial visibility in Korea. The result suggests that they use adaptation strategies to overcome isolation and to achieve the reformation of racial identity. This study will contribute to (1) theorizing transnationalism and the racial reconstruction of Latin American migrant workers, and (2) our understanding of Korean society’s readiness to receive immigrants, through examining Latin American migrating professionals’ experiences with Korean society and culture.

Sonic cultural citizenship through performance: CASA 0101’s production of Josefina López’s Detained in the Desert

ABSTRACTThis essay listens to aurality in conjunction with the visual classification of racialized bodies in neoliberal citizenship through what I term “sonic cultural citizenship.” Through a close listening to the 2010 production of Josefina López’s Detained in the Desert at CASA 0101, the essay amplifies racism as operating through affective performative dimensions, where citizenship is renegotiated and resisted through sonic performance. Detained centers the necessity of unhinging visual and sonic markers of citizenship for Latinx communities. It also evokes how sonic performance needs not only to decenter racial visibility in the Américas, but also to offer non-heteronormative frameworks of belonging.

The Invisibility of Race: A Pragmatic Approximation to the Concept

Our society is racially characterized by subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice. At the present time, people have adopted an attitude of racial denial, reinforcing an attitude of racial invisibility. This study is the first qualitative attempt to measure Franklin's paradigm, the invisible paradigm. Using data from the African- American study (N=2, 864), I examine the relation between race invisibility with discrimination, social recognition, and group affiliation. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) discrimination affects the individual's perception of race visibility, micro-aggression, and group affiliation; (2) social recognition is related to group affiliation and visibility; and (3) group affiliation mediates the relationship between discrimination and visibility. Results from the path analysis show that perceived discrimination has a negative and significant association with micro-aggression and visibility and a positive and significant association with group affiliation. Group affiliation mediated the relationship between discrimination and visibility. Social recognition, however, does not affect race visibility directly. Its effect is mediated through group affiliation. This study contributes to the social knowledge of the way discrimination affects minority ethnic groups' micro-aggression, group affiliation, and racial visibility.

Screening Shirtless AZN Men: The Full Frontal Power of Intimate Internet Industries

For the first heterosexual male porn star of Asian descent in the West, Keni Styles's tumblr project shows the full frontal power of the face so as to increase the representations of diverse Asian and Asian American male sexualities online. In his new video Look, I'm Azn!, filmmaker and scholar Nguyen Tan Hoang gathers the ways in which Asian men use online gay cruising sites such as grindr to play with the visibility of their racial identity in relation to the sexual practices and partners they desire. This article explores how Asian/American men use the Internet to register one's racial visibility and the particularity of one's desires to explode their usual ascription as asexual, passive, and undesirable.

It's Not Just Black and White

In this autoethnography, I offer a pedagogy of racial visibility. Drawing on my embodied experiences both in and outside of the classroom, I explore how I engage in dialogue with my students about theoretical and critical approaches toward understanding rhetorics of race in the United States. Specifically, as an embodied storyteller, I reflect upon my personal stories as a biracial Korean American woman and investigate the instabilities of racial identities, the taken-for-granted racial understandings, and racism and white privilege in America.

Skin Fashion: Josephine Baker and Dressing Race

Can we think of racialized skin as dress, as a form of fashion-consciousness? Instead of seeing this question as trivializing the history of denigrating corporeality attached to the raced subject, through a reading of Josephine Baker this paper argues for the importance of separating “skin” from a biological schema in order to consider its ability to reflect and activate different states of racialized consciousness and corporeality. Through a study of Baker’s intricate and performative relations to various fashionable surfaces—from modern buildings to modern dress to her own shimmering skin—this paper traces Baker’s spectacular invention of “skin-fashion” and its importance for how we think about style and racial visibility today.

In Defence of Culture? Racialised Sexual Violence and Agency in Legal and Judicial Narratives

There is a rich body of work in critical race and feminist theories that have criticised as Euro/Anglo-centric, and hence exclusionary, the liberal foundations of Western democratic legal systems. The basis of such critiques is that legal personhood is premised on an atomistic individual agent that purports to be neutral but in actuality reflects and maintains the hegemonic gendered and raced status quo privileging the white, middle to upper-class man to the exclusion of women and all racial and cultural Others. Some approaches, such as cultural defences in criminal law, have sought to address this via a recognition and incorporation of the difference of Other groups and their different moral norms, proclivities and circumstances. To illustrate, this discussion will draw on a cultural defence that was advanced in a series of group sexual violence cases that involved four Pakistani, Muslim brothers. While concluding that culture permeates the actions of all individuals, this article seeks to show how cultural recognition approaches in law often overlook the individual agency of those differentiated through their racial, ethnic and religious visibility. Instead of asserting the primacy of individual free will and a rational agent as the main driver of criminal behaviour cultural defences, in particular, appear to attribute criminal action to the morally aberrant traditions and practices of non-Western cultures. At the same time, such approaches to cultural recognition fail to acknowledge that culture, and not just the culture of Others, is necessarily the backdrop for all (group) sexual violence. With these points in mind, the paper ends with some suggestions for accommodating alternative narratives that seek to avoid the reductive scripts that currently appear to characterise legal and judicial musings on culture

Dyaspora All Up in the Mix: Jean-Ulrick Desert, Mapping Fragmented Archaeologies

Jean-Ulrick Desert’s artwork explores diasporic black postmodernity. A Berlinbased artist who has lived in the United States, Europe, and Haiti, Desert produces evocative and enigmatic work about the black diasporic experience. Participating in a visual lexicon that decodes the inevitability of fragmentation, Desert liberates himself from the constraints of working in any one medium or style. Using diverse artistic media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, he creates multidimensional spaces shaped by his formal education in architecture and his years as an exhibition designer. Personally coded narratives are intertwined with contemporary Western art practices rendered in provocative ways. Subtle strategies of pastiche anchor his earlier artworks and challenge the hackneyed nature of so-called identity politics. His recent use of self-presentation participates in the visual language of camp and sartorial play, incorporating elements that dare as well as elements that reveal truth. His satirical performance “actions,” photographs, multimedia installations, and ephemera ingeniously challenge notions of racial visibility and cultural authenticity. Desert’s “self-portrait” drawing series, L’ABCdaire de ma vie privee (The ABC’s of My Private Life) (2005), creates opportunities for the evocative exploration of race, cultural identity, belonging, and memory (see Color Plate 1). Images culled from his personal photo albums combine with simple letters and unassuming words in French, Kreyol, German, and English on fine paper lined with precisely spaced thin pencil and ink strokes that mimic the penmanship notebook pages he used as a child while living in Haiti. The plate for the letter B places us in Brooklyn, the mecca for Haitians. It is during this first part of his transnational migration that Desert realizes that he has become black and foreign; his frenchyness makes him exotic and othered. He does not feel oppressed; rather, he feels bewildered by these racial and national labels. While the images are embedded within the cultural specificity of the Haitian dyaspora, they resonate with the

Disrupting Nostalgic Scenes of Whiteness: Asian Immigrant Bridal Shops and Racial Visibility in the Ethnoburb

Disrupting Nostalgic Scenes of Whiteness: Asian Immigrant Bridal Shops and Racial Visibility in the Ethnoburb

Racial things, racial forms: objecthood in avant-garde Asian American poetry

In Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets various treatments of (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest objecthood and the racial question of objectification.By refashioning avant-garde investigations of things into questions about how American discourse visualizes race in and on the body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively the subject interiority and individual experience Things, Racial Forms also uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy.In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested Asian American studies and race American literature, Things, Racial Forms addresses readers interested contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.

Children as subjects with rights in EFL textbooks

This paper illustrates how a Colombian EFL textbooks’ series deals with the educational discourse of children as subjects with rights andthe new conception of childhood from a Rights Perspective, taking into account UNICEF’s conclusions on the current situation of children’srights in Colombia where children are being silenced, discriminated against, and exploited by social practices as such. Using Critical DiscourseAnalysis tools this paper identifies different discourse strategies related to an educational discourse of children as rights-bearing subjects.The results show three main discourse strategies that reveal the way EFL textbooks tend to portray children as members of society: genderand racial visibility, human being’s passivity, and value- system inclusion. Although the EFL textbooks address some of the principles thatsupport the educational discourse of children as subjects with rights, they still have the tendency to represent children as passive subjectsand non-right holders.

“Awakening a Dormant Appetite”: Captain McBane, Convict Labor, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

“Awakening a Dormant Appetite”: Captain McBane, Convict Labor, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition Gene I. Gorman (bio) Moments before a bloody battle erupts near the end of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the novel’s narrator notes a slight but critical change in the group of armed white men poised to attack a black-owned and -operated hospital. The Marrow of Tradition—Chesnutt’s fictional response to the 1898 Wilmington (NC) Race Riot1—is considered the writer’s “political masterpiece” (Sundquist 406), focusing on miscegenation, racial caste, violence, and, at its crisis moment, election fraud and intimidation in a southern port city. Concerned about their waning power, three white supremacists orchestrate a campaign of “no Negro domination” to reassert their control in the fictional city of Wellington. Their efforts culminate in widespread flight from the city and bloodshed in its streets. In the scene above, a group of black men led by Josh Green have garrisoned themselves in Dr. William Miller’s hospital, one of the most important institutions in the black community. Green and his followers have already seen a dozen other black men and women “dead in the streets of Wellington . . . slain in cold blood.” Now, the armed black men find themselves in a standoff with a group of armed whites. Just as the first shots are about to fly, the narrator points out that Captain George McBane is the only one of the three white [End Page 1] co-conspirators who has not “withdrawn from active participation in the rioting” (Marrow 196). McBane’s decision to remain in this violent scene long after the other white leaders have withdrawn sets him apart from the same white elites whose acceptance he so dearly desires. This and other moves in the novel by McBane, a former convict lessee who “had sprung from the poor white class” as a result of his lease (22), invite us to reflect on how race and class were interconnected in the U.S. South in the late nineteenth century. Because of the way Chesnutt narrates McBane’s various roles in the novel, a closer investigation of this seemingly minor character will supplement recent readings of this historically significant novel (e.g. Beleu and Cameron, Danielson, Friedman, Harrell, and Wagner). First, we see Chesnutt’s interpretation of the significance of convict labor in solidifying the region’s racial caste system after Reconstruction. Next, we begin to unravel just how Chesnutt interpreted the use and threat of chain gangs, and the criminal justice system more generally, to undermine attempts by poor whites and all blacks to pursue their common political and economic interests. At first glance, to be sure, McBane seems little more than an ancillary southern caricature—a man whose shirtfront is ablaze with “a showy diamond” while it is “plentifully stained with tobacco juice” (20). By stereotyping McBane, Chesnutt shows how more privileged white southerners farther removed from policing African Americans maintain their class and racial identity by inviting men of McBane’s lower, but rising class to do their bidding.2 And yet, in McBane, we also encounter a much more complex character, one tainted by his involvement with the convict-lease system in ways that actually undermine his white identity. Because The Marrow of Tradition is an intricate novel, most contemporary scholars tend to focus upon the two main narratives that structure the text, in which two intertwined southern families—the white Carterets and the black Millers—are bound by an act of miscegenation in their families’ shared past. This secret haunts the more sensational events of the book: the violent uprising and battle through the streets of Wellington, multiple life-and-death encounters involving children, a robbery and murder and subsequent failed attempt to lynch a trusted black servant, and all the intrigue that swirls around legal questions. In many ways, this approach to the novel is in spirit with recent historical and cultural work in southern studies that tends to focus on the elimination of racial visibility, relying heavily on the notion of spectacle. By racial visibility, I mean those instances in which racist attitudes and practices become [End Page 2] overt...