Racial Exclusion Research Articles

The spatiality of Collective Autoethnography: Praxis of care and (co)becoming

The increased use of autoethnography in geography has proved to be a valuable methodology to ground theory in practice. This approach provides the researcher-participant with resources to place their personal experiences in broader socio-spatial dynamics. As a group of three Latinas, we engaged with Collective Autoethnography (CAE) to explore our experiences with racial exclusion in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. By sharing our counter-stories, CAE helped us to engage in an ongoing process of (co) becoming, without essentialising our experiences. Taking the feminist ethics of care lens, we explore the politics embedded in implementing this methodology and its transformative potential. We start reflecting about the impact of our positionalities in our decision-making. Then, we discuss how the purposeful weaving of CAE with critical frameworks helped us unpack the nuances of our experiences and amplify our voices as ethnic minority migrants in Aotearoa. Finally, we explore how CAE, as a participatory approach, can inform the multiscalarity of embodied practices and inspire structural changes, which are particularly relevant when dealing with race and ethnicity. As we co-created a ‘care-full’ space throughout the research development, we suggest that CAE can also be a ‘place’ of solidarity and transformation.

Why Us Too? Japanese Views of Immigration and Racial Exclusion in Australia

This article examines the Japanese-Australian debates over immigration and racial exclusion over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By examining the development of collective national identity in Japan and by drawing on archival materials in Japan and Australia, including official correspondence between the two countries and policy-related primary source materials such as internal government correspondence and parliamentary debates, it shows how the local discourse on national identity in both Japan and Australia was an important factor in what would be Japan’s heated response to the issue of Japanese exclusion under the auspices of White Australia.

Religious influences on integration within U.S. refugee resettlement

ABSTRACT This study examines how religion influences integration among refugees resettling to Utah, in the western United States (U.S.). In-depth interviews were conducted with 88 refugees an average of 11 years post-resettlement. Qualitative analyses led to identification of key themes, including: 1) belief in a higher power guided integration and 2) religion influences services and relationships in Utah. Additional themes emerged regarding how religion informs integration over time, including: 3) religious conversion, 4) coping with racial exclusion, and 5) embracing religious pluralism. Findings have implications for incorporating attention to religious coping and religious freedom among displaced populations adapting to new environments.

The Diffusion of Exclusion: Medieval Expulsions of Jews

What social processes guide the spread of ethnic or racial exclusion? I investigate the diffusion of medieval expulsions of Jews among over 500 polities in the western Holy Roman Empire, 1385–1520 CE. For medieval governors, religious and material concerns were strong rationales against expulsion. Yet expulsions increase markedly in the 15th century. Did an expulsion by one government affect another government’s choices about expulsion? I appraise three common theories of policy diffusion: learning, social reinterpretation, and social structural and resource constraints. Statistical models provide evidence only for the latter two. While theological changes gave expulsion fresh political value, the adoption of expulsion followed political and economic incentives that were embedded in inter-city relationships of power and dependency. The results indicate that social influence, especially spatial proximity, cannot be assumed to accelerate ethnoracial extremism.

Whose sidewalk is it? Street vendors and the battle for San Diego’s foodscape

ABSTRACT Urban governments have become increasingly involved in gastrodevelopment, managing and monitoring foodscapes to stimulate growth. In that context, sidewalk vendors’ access to urban space has been fiercely debated in many cities. Stressing their informality, some argue that vendors activate public space, provide valuable services, and encourage entrepreneurship, while others emphasize the threats they pose to public safety, health, and competing businesses. This paper examines the motives behind San Diego’s restrictive sidewalk vending ordinance and assesses its impact on different types of vendors and neighborhoods across the city. Using mixed methods, including analyses of city records, census and online data, stakeholder interviews, and a 2022 survey of sidewalk and food truck vendors, we map the social geographies of street vending in San Diego and analyze their unevenness in the context of neoliberal urbanism, manifested in state-sanctioned gentrification, gastrodevelopment, increased policing of public space, and racial exclusion. Our findings show that instead of improving community food security and supporting immigrant microentrepreneurs, San Diego’s sidewalk vending ordinance privileges the demands of affluent and primarily white residents, resulting in an uneven street foodscape in which vending is mostly prohibited in exclusive areas, heavily managed in gentrifying areas, and merely tolerated in low-income areas.

The revenge of history: Indian indenture and its afterlife in South Africa

ABSTRACT The aftermath of the 150th anniversary in 2010 of the arrival of the first indentured migrants in Natal saw an explosion of family and community histories. While some academic historians question the credibility of such histories, carefully sifted and cross-referenced, they can provide a wealth of new information, allowing for deeper insights into indentured migration and Indian settlement in South Africa. Family histories help in building intergenerational histories that go beyond indenture. This expansion of the historical archive provides a fuller story of Indians who, for a large part of their existence, were written out of the history books or written in as a festering sore to be lanced from the South African body politic through mass repatriation. While digging deeper into individual family histories, the story is situated within the broader context of racist exclusion, showing how these boundaries were reinforced as much as they were challenged and trespassed.

Insurgent climate adaptation in Santiago de Cali: Resisting and reshaping flood-risk resettlements

Climate adaptation in Latin American cities involves navigating highly contested social and cultural terrains. In cities with black and indigenous communities they are confronted with challenges such as histories of racial exclusion and informal, self-built housing in high-risk areas. This study examines Project Plan Jarillón, a flood protection infrastructure project in Santiago de Cali which involves Latin America’s largest relocation project. Cali, home to a large Afro-Colombian population, is also one of Colombia’s fastest growing cities and the second largest reciever of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country. The study, based on 5 years of fieldwork including site visits and interviews, found the city’s failure to account for the segregation of black residents in high-risk areas has led to resistance, conflict and delays in the completion of the project. However, by forming an insurgent planning practice which draws from local culture and traditions of resistance, Afro-Colombian communities re-centered public debate on demands for racial and cultural recognition, and the right to decent housing. This insurgent planning is creating more democratic forms and approaches to climate adaptation in Cali at a pivotal moment in Colombia’s history as it negotiates a post-conflict process and positions itself as a global advocate for climate justice.

Disrupting Racism and Global Exclusion in Academic Publishing: Recommendations and Resources for Authors, Reviewers, and Editors

Scholars have been working through multiple avenues to address longstanding and entrenched patterns of global and racial exclusion in psychology and academia more generally. As part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s efforts to enhance inclusive excellence in its journals, the Anti Colorism/Eurocentrism in Methods and Practices (ACEMAP) task force worked to develop recommendations and resources to counteract racism and global exclusion in standard publication practices. In this paper, the task force describes a structure and process we developed for conducting committee work that centers marginalized perspectives while mitigating cultural taxation. We then describe our recommendations and openly accessible resources (e.g., resources for inclusive reviewing practices, writing about constraints on generalizability, drafting a globally inclusive demographic information survey, inclusive citation practices, and improving representation among editorial gatekeeping positions; recommendations and resource links are provided in Table 3). These recommendations and resources are both (a) tailored for a particular set of journals at a particular time and (b) useful as a foundation that can be continually adapted and improved for other journals and going forward. This paper provides concrete plans for readers looking to enhance inclusive excellence in their committee work, authorship, reviewing, and/or editing.

Mapping for connection, a life beyond mapping for control: lessons from ‘mapping-as-performance’ with Empatheatre in South Africa

This paper critically examines the intersections of Science, colonialism, and cartography in shaping perceptions of the ocean and its human-nature relationships. Drawing on Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (PCSTS) and Decolonial Theory, it scrutinizes historical mapping practices, revealing how they perpetuated ontological hierarchies and controlled narratives of the ocean. Through archival research spanning from the Revolution to colonial exploration, the paper exposes how maps framed the ocean as a controllable entity, obscuring socio-cultural dimensions of biodiversity. Focusing on a case study in Northern Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, the authors explore an Empatheatre mapping process, that challenges Western ontologies and promotes counter-hegemonic cartographic practices. Situating this within critical cartography and PCSTS literature, the paper reveals how colonial projects molded perceptions of oceanic space and influenced environmental governance. In the South African context, the ocean is haunted by a violent history of racial exclusion and ecological exploitation. Initiatives like Operation Phakisa’s Blue Economy plan underscore the tension between economic growth and ecological sustainability, leading to rapid coastal developments. Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) emerges as a tool to reconcile these interests, yet its implementation raises questions about inclusivity and community participation. Introducing the Empatheatre method, characterized by a ‘Call and Response’ approach, the paper invites local communities to co-create maps reflecting their concerns and relationships with the ocean. Through attentive listening and collaborative storytelling, Empatheatre challenges traditional consultation methods, prioritizing meaningful engagement and collective meaning-making. Mapping in this context is not merely a static representation but a dynamic process of collective thinking and relationality. By foregrounding the social, cultural, and ecological context, Empatheatre’s approach redefines the mapmaker-map relationship and empowers communities as active agents in shaping their narratives. The transformative potential of Empatheatre lies in its ability to shift power dynamics and foster empathy between diverse stakeholders. Through performative storytelling and visual representations, Empatheatre creates space for marginalized voices and alternative modes of knowledge transmission. In conclusion, this paper advocates for a decolonial approach to oceanic cartographies that acknowledges diverse ontologies and fosters inclusive governance structures.

Corporate Responsibility to Race as a Lens for Higher Education Public Relations

Universities face unique challenges when publicly (a)mending their complex histories, particularly around histories of racial exclusion and violence. We suggest that higher education institutions may use polyvocal expressions of public memory that blur epideictic and apologetic rhetorics, yet retain boundaries that serve institutional interests. We assess the case study of the memorial service for Dr. Autherine Lucy Foster at The University of Alabama in March 2022 through the lens of Corporate Responsibility to Race (CRR) drawing four implications that generate insights into the ways complex institutional voice balances risk. We seek to demonstrate how a critical public relations framework, infused with critical rhetorical approaches to public memory, holds value for a productive examination of attempts to amend hurtful pasts.

Appealing to the World: Du Bois and the Transnational Politics of Petition

As a mode of radical, anti-colonial politics, the petition and related genre of the appeal would seem to hold little promise. This paper uncovers the radical and transnational politics of petitioning in W. E. B. Du Bois's work with and against the United Nations in the 1940s. Examining a range of petitions beyond the more widely examined Appeal to the World (1947), this article argues that Du Bois subverts the familiar genre conventions of the petition and appeal. The effect is not an appeal to a higher political authority to correct domestic injustices but to contest the shape of the international order itself by highlighting the transnational connection between colonial domination and racial exclusion within the domestic jurisdiction of imperial nation-states and the racial hierarchies of the international order. Instead of leaving the authority of the international order defined by the primacy of the sovereign state system intact, Du Bois contests this authority by exposing how racial hierarchy and colonial rule cut against enshrined divisions between internal state sovereignty and international law. The essay closes by exploring how other anti-colonial figures in the twentieth century such as B. R. Ambedkar and Malcolm X similarly turned to the transnational politics of appeal.

Bystander Acknowledgment Mitigates the Psychological and Physiological Pain of Racial Discrimination for Black Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Racism increases pain sensitization and contributes to racialized pain inequities; however, research has not tested interventions targeting racism to reduce pain. In this study, we examined whether White bystanders can act to mitigate racism’s pain-sensitizing effects. To simulate racial exclusion in the laboratory, Black young adults (age 18–30; N = 92) were randomly assigned to be included or excluded by White players in a ball-tossing game (Cyberball). For half of the excluded participants, White bystanders acknowledged and apologized for the racial exclusion. Participants completed a cold pressor task to assess pain threshold, tolerance, and unpleasantness, and completed a survey assessing psychological needs (ie, belongingness, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and self-control). Participants who experienced racial exclusion reported significantly more threatened psychological needs and increased laboratory pain sensitization (ie, lower pain threshold and tolerance) than those who were included. However, when a White bystander acknowledged the racism, excluded participants reported higher levels of self-control, self-esteem, and decreased pain sensitization (pain threshold and tolerance) relative to excluded participants whose experience was not acknowledged. Our findings support that racism increased Black people’s pain sensitivity and provide initial evidence for White bystander acknowledgment as a health intervention. PerspectiveContinual exposure to racism likely contributes to inequities in pain sensitization. We demonstrate that acute exposure to mild racism increases acute pain sensitization. Results suggest that a bystander acknowledging witnessed racism can buffer the acute sensitizing effects of racism on pain, pointing to the potential of interpersonal interventions targeting racism. Trial RegistrationClinicaltrials.gov NCT06113926.

Racial discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa? The stories of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa

Dominant theoretical conversations on experiences of racial discrimination are focused on how Black and other non-White people perceive and experience racial discrimination in White majority racial systems; however, research is scant on experiences of racial discrimination of racial minorities in Black majority social systems. This paper addresses this lacuna by exploring perceived experiences of racial discrimination of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa, a racial minority in a Black majority country. Fourteen in-depth individual interviews were conducted with participants. Analysis of the interviews resulted in many interviewees claiming race-based discrimination in housing, employment, service delivery, political representation and education. A few participants, however, claimed that Black South Africans are also experiencing socioeconomic problems like Coloured South Africans. Racial discrimination theory and social exclusion theory are used as perspectives for the study. Based on the findings, I argue that the perceived experiences of racial discrimination of most of the participants of the study can be explained by three interrelated structural forces, namely legacies of historical racial exclusions, the neoliberal macro-economic order and government neglect.

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Controlling Images of Neighborhoods in Gentrification Coverage

Abstract Prior literature has largely used the concept of “controlling images” to explain how the news media and other institutions use racialized and gendered stereotypes to control marginalized groups. This article extends the concept of controlling images to neighborhoods using 583 newspaper articles about gentrification in San Francisco. Using qualitative and spatial analysis, I demonstrate how controlling images exist in media through representations, underrepresentations, and omissions in the form of three controlling images of neighborhoods: “The apolitical Asiantown” appears through the omission of Asian neighborhoods and Asian residents of other gentrifying neighborhoods, “the immigrant barrio” through the underrepresentation of Latinx residents and centering of White residents in Latinx neighborhoods, and “the violent ’hood” through the focus on issues of blight, crime, and violence in Black neighborhoods. The findings contribute to our understanding of how institutional racism operates not only through racist representations, but also through racist exclusions.

Citizenship and the American state: exploring the boundaries of legal racial exclusion

ABSTRACT Providing a compelling analysis of race, ethnicity, and culture, this manuscript unpacks the whiteness as citizenship model in the American context. This paper argues that citizenship rights have historically been dispensed to mean ‘whiteness’. That is, whiteness has been the definition of the ‘real American’ where racialized others are kept outside of the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Examining instances where individuals challenged whiteness in court, this manuscript deciphers how whiteness as a social classification excluded certain peoples based on their ‘racial fitness’ while including others as exemplary members. Likewise, this work also examines how territorial expansion altered notions of whiteness – especially in regard to Mexican Americans. Drawing reference to concepts such as the ‘Pocahontas Exception’, this work also examines how the whiteness as citizenship model allowed certain individuals with Native American ancestry to identify as ‘white’ while using the ‘one-drop rule’ to deem persons with African ancestry as ‘black’ thereby relegating them to second-class citizenship. As such, this manuscript argues that whiteness is endemic to the American democracy. Its connection is sealed through citizenship not only through the rights it grants but in the standing it confers.

Red Codes and Removal: Racial Exclusion and Indigenous Persistence in the Midwest

Abstract: The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Myaamia families who stayed behind used fee simple family reserves as a tool to combat ethnic cleansing. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession. Red Codes, akin to the more well-known Black Codes, reveal how state and local authorities designed laws to advance white supremacy. The appropriation and performance of Indigeneity grew out of the race-based legal regimes that defined the nineteenth-century Midwest.

Apartheid politics and ‘coloured’ identity in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990)

ABSTRACT This paper addresses apartheid political history and ‘coloured’ identity challenges in South African society. A textual analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (MSS, 1990) adheres to understanding ‘coloured’ identity struggle as an ‘Other’ and their racial marginality during apartheid. This research deeply studies race and identity theories with Frantz Fanon’s psychological notion of racism, decolonisation and the idea of cross-racial relations are important to analyse MSS. A textual study of MSS is significant for examining the impact of apartheid on ‘coloured’ characters. This research finds that ‘coloured’ community’s struggle and their racial consciousness of being other were political and psychological challenges during apartheid time. To put in a nutshell, apartheid stories are not individual representations but these are collectively representing the ‘coloured’ community's struggle in South Africa. Racial consciousness of being other was a form of racial exclusion so, a discussion on ‘coloured’ discourse becomes important to contextualise political history. The negligence of the ‘coloured’ issues during apartheid questioned the psychological development of ‘coloured’.

Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar

Abstract This article traces the bureaucratic bases of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Rohingya activists to elucidate the political struggles and competing archival logics surrounding their disenfranchisement and displacement. I explain a curious shift in the past decade in Myanmar’s approach to managing the Rohingya population, whereby longstanding strategies of legally-encoded racial exclusion gave way to moves to withhold and contract the state’s administrative reach: 1) the repudiation of the Rohingya category in the 2014 census; and 2) the dispossession of documents leading up to the 2015 elections. I develop the concept of “bureaucratic omission” to reveal an alternative mode by which the state’s symbolic power can be accumulated and exercised. In the wake of new claims-making pressures during Myanmar’s short-lived democratic opening, state officials nullified Rohingyas’ claims for recognition as citizens by depriving them of the material evidence to support these claims. In response, Rohingya activists invoked this same epistemic power of documents, leveraging archival sources and documentary vestiges to build their own historical counternarratives of indigenous belonging. By protagonizing stateless Rohingyas, I provide insight into top-down administrative efforts to un-make race and into how minorities can contest these omissions.

The racial disparity in the Major League Baseball draft, 1965–2001

Racism has been a central element in the history of Major League Baseball. And yet, there is an incredibly rich history of African American baseball in the United States encompassing the Negro Leagues and the celebrated era when rigid racial exclusions from Major League Baseball finally fell giving way in quick succession to the transformative arrival of Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron. African American participation on Major League Baseball rosters grew steadily in the decades after Jackie Robinson’s debut, but African American representation in Major League Baseball has precipitously declined in recent years. Within that context, this study explores whether African Americans have been subject to disparate treatment in the Major League Baseball draft. An analysis of more than 9000 selections in the Major League Baseball draft from 1965 to 2001 reveals a significant disparity based on race. Relative to White players, African American players were undervalued in the draft. This disparity is not rooted in the drafts of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Instead, major league teams began significantly undervaluing African American prospects in the 1990s. The implications of this pattern are particularly notable given baseball’s recent decision to shrink the draft to 20 rounds.