Racial Violence Research Articles

Innovative Pedagogy Through Big Data and ArcGIS: Perspectives on the Collaboration Among First-Generation Students, Nonprofits, and Open Data in Los Angeles

This article focuses on the innovative teaching practices using big data that arose from a 4-year collaboration between faculty, first-generation students at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), and local communities. The aim of the National Science Foundation–funded Big Data Project at CSULA was to engage students and faculty in using big data to tackle social issues such as racial violence, poverty, environmental inequalities, urban ecology, and structural barriers in Los Angeles, while preserving the cultural richness of the communities in East Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Once a year, faculty members applied to the program to incorporate data projects into their courses, received training, adapted their curricula, and worked with nonprofits. Our experience showed that the students who participated in this semester-long, hands-on learning experience exceeded the learning objectives of the program and specific courses. They were key contributors in generating new insights using big data, fostering meaningful dialogue, and creating research and scholarship opportunities that positively impacted their communities.

Giving Form to Refugee Memory: Ann Le’s Embody Wallpaper Portraits

Abstract In Vietnamese American artist Ann Le’s 2012 Embody Wallpaper Portraits series, wallpaper designs of repeating collaged and silhouetted documentary Vietnam War photographs cover the skin and faces of the artist’s own family portraits. The bodies of these haunting and preserved figures serve as sites of forged encounter between public and private photographic archives and commemoration. This article considers two works from this series, titled Mother Refuge and Re Education Graduation, which examine motherhood and the nation-state of the United States as sites that (un)make refuge(es) and question the relationship between re-education camps in Vietnam and the US education system as sites of indoctrination respectively. Theorizing collage as an art practice that prompts a relational analysis of the different war events, I argue that by suturing together seemingly disparate histories, memories, places, and photographs, Le makes visible and invisible the gendered and racial violence that sustains US imperial projects.

A Case for Naming Racial Violence

In the United States, scholarship concerning race has been the target of politicized criticism. This derision lacks concern for the matters of life and death at the center of racial scholarship, which necessarily includes histories of massacres, lynching, genocide, and extrajudicial killings in the young story of the United States alone. This article centers on the matter of trauma and presents it as an influential aspect of Black life in the United States. A principal aim is foregrounding the testimony of men who survived a 1947 massacre of imprisoned Black men near Brunswick, Georgia. The writing also makes a case for valuing studies that consider lived experiences of acute racial violence and the traumas that unstably emanate from it.

Truth, Racial Healing, And Transformation:

The public policy process in the United States has strong status quo biases that frustrate efforts to adopt policies focused on racial justice and social equity. On occasion, a policy window opens and the chance for real change increases greatly. This article is a case study focused on advocacy for a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Commission during an open policy window that occurred in 2020 related to brutal police violence (readers should know in advance that traumatic events covered in this article include descriptions of racial violence). The findings are drawn primarily from original interviews with advocates for the Commission, providing an outsider’s perspective on this political process.

Harmful arrangements: Ethnography at the National Institute and racial violence in Washington, D.C., 1842–1864

ABSTRACT In 1842, the National Institute for the Promotion of Science installed an eclectic collection of natural science and cultural treasures in the United States Patent Office, a fire-proof building in Washington D.C. Inventories, institutional records, and periodicals indicate that the initial curator of the National Institute, the natural scientist Charles Pickering, arranged display cases at the U.S.’s first national museum according to his ethnographic division of racial types. Pickering’s system remained mostly intact until the galleries closed at the onset of the Civil War. As pro-slavery violence grew increasingly intense, the government-sponsored National Institute presented a narrative of progress that was embroiled in racial politics. The violent context that surrounded prominent objects in federal collections, such as the Declaration of Independence and Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at Princeton (1779), should be remembered as a significant moment in museum and U.S. history as well as a potential measure of change since the antebellum installation.

Sabine F. Cadeau. More than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1-108-83768-2. Hardback, $99.99, 273 pages.

Sabine F. Cadeau. <i>More than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands</i>. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1-108-83768-2. Hardback, $99.99, 273 pages.

Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali

Perceptions of Africa as a non-racial space are belied by cases such as Mali. This article explores how racial arguments were deployed by black returnees in Bamako after their repatriation from Libya. Race, racialization processes, and racial violence were one of the cornerstones of French colonization in Mali, and then of the post-colonial state. Mali had a complex relationship with its northern neighbour Libya, for many decades a destination for Malian migrants. The fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 created new problems, as both black Malian migrant workers and Tuareg ex-combatants were returned to the country. Both experienced, in different ways, the effects of a migration regime, influenced by European Union programmes. This article shows how racial categories and migration politics intersect in Mali, becoming mutually constituent and interrelated, and leaving various actors, institutions, processes, histories, and multiple scales entangled with each other.

The Implicated Reader: Second-Person Address in Novels of US Imperialism

ABSTRACT: This essay explores how literature can help reckon with past and present political violence by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with narrative theory and formalist criticism, the essay conceptualizes what I call an implicated reader , a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. In order to develop and demonstrate my theoretical framework of the implicated reader, I analyze three twenty-first-century novels depicting diferent legacies of US imperialism: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine (2002), representing the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), portraying post-9/11 racial violence; and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), depicting legacies of Indigenous genocide and dispossession. I examine how these novels use distinct forms of second-person address—either characterized or uncharacterized , and internal or external —to invite readers to identify with the narratee evoked as an implicated subject. The essay ultimately suggests that rather than facilitating the reader’s identification and empathy with victimized subjects, some works of literature challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than sufers from political violence.

Direitos Humanos, Antirracismo e Ações Afirmativas no Brasil: Algumas reflexões

Abstract This article sets out to provide an analysis of the relationship between human rights, public policies and ethnic-racial inequality in Brazil from a contemporary perspective. Public policies have emerged as an effective means of achieving human rights and citizenship for historically discriminated social groupings in a society like Brazil’s marked by enduring structural and structuring inequalities. The article specifically addresses the racial violence perpetrated against the black population in the country, who still endure the legacy of a colonial past. A central point highlighted is that the agency and interactions of the black population have had a positive impact by destabilizing social relations characterized by racism. In this sense, anti-racist actions are central factors in the promotion of Afro-reparatory policies, one of the motivating reasons for the interest in studying affirmative actions for black people.

The Rise or Decline of Social Acceptance? Perspective from U.S. Presidential Elections, 2012 to 2020

Recent acts of racial violence, the growing visibility of nationalized white power movements, and a drift toward a number of more restrictive laws and Supreme Court rulings have raised troubling questions about the significance and influence of social acceptance in the United States. Focusing on voters and elections, an important strain of scholarship has argued that declining acceptance of minority groups and marginalized communities contributed to the political rise of Donald Trump and his 2016 election to the presidency. However, the argument that low levels of social acceptance benefited Republican candidates is premised on a basic yet untested assumption: that social acceptance has decreased over the time period covered by the past several elections. In this study, we offer a new and systematic evaluation of this assumption through an analysis of change in the level of social acceptance within the American electorate and its political influence from the 2012 through 2020 elections. The analysis focuses on key target groups that include racial minorities, women, immigrants, and gay and lesbian individuals. We find that voters adopted more supportive and inclusive positions toward these marginalized social groups, resulting in a substantial increase in social acceptance over time. Contrasting further with much of the commentary regarding the rise of Donald Trump, our analysis indicates that these trends in social acceptance served to hurt Trump and to help his Democratic opponents. Supplemental analyses find little evidence that social desirability influences the measures of social acceptance or their estimated influence on voter choice.

The Bewildering Affect of Representative Democracy: Sheppard Lee's "Confusion of Characters, Propensities, and Associations"

Abstract: This essay examines how Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee (1836) uses the political affect of "democratic confusion" to detail the potentials and pitfalls of representation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Bird's novel describes the journeys of Sheppard Lee, a man who discovers he can move his consciousness into corpses and reanimate them. Instead of focusing solely on Lee, the novel uses the conceit of metempsychosis to depict Lee's transformation into six other characters, adapting Ancient Greek definitions of "character" that stressed the concept's exemplifying power. Yet with each transformation, Lee experiences bafflement, and these states of confusion provide an analogy to the political representation of a variegated constituency by an official. For Bird, representation depends on what Alexis de Tocqueville called a "confused clamour"; indeed, personifying voters could not occur without it. At the same time, this article charts out Bird's limitations for this vision of a prolific, if complicated, democracy. The novel ultimately contends that representatives could not comprehend voters without this affective state, even as Bird curtails its productive nature along racial lines. By the ending of the novel, private bewilderment moves into the public domain in a scene of mass racial violence that clarifies the tension Bird identifies in democratic confusion.

“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe”

Abstract This essay investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo Cafe” offers critical insights into the dialectical operations of the bio-necropolitical order of power in which the exposure to harm, injury, and death (that is, precarity) of racialized segments of the population serve to foster and secure the lives of those considered politically and, thus, ontologically relevant. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the story offer key insights into the specific ways in which necro-elasticity constitutes both spatial and temporal dispossession. Such dispossession, especially in its temporal configuration, points to the flattening of historical consciousness, what I refer to as “non-contextualization,” that ultimately underwrites the ideological conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of individual and collective innocence and, thus, impunity.

Teaching about racial violence in a place of historical trauma

PurposeThe authors describe an original unit plan that draws from local and national concerns for truthful history education about the history of racial violence in the United States. The unit plan contextualizes one impetus for truth and reconciliation in a community with a history of anti-Black violence.Design/methodology/approachThe participants partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative to pilot the unit in their district’s new African American History course. The unit drew on historical research and cultural memory to situate local history within a broader context of racism and violence.FindingsThe teachers identified eight goals for the unit so that students could understand racialized violence, acknowledge racism as the lived experience of many of their students, and participate in a collaborative learning environment with productive discussions. Speaking from their own experiences with racism, and creating opportunities for students to do the same, the teachers aided the community in voicing long-silenced memories.Research limitations/implicationsBesides bridging some of the gaps between local, regional, and national histories, more research is needed to further examine historical trauma and its implications for both the past and present, in order to amplify and humanize experiences of racism. Additional research is a critical step in developing more thoughtful, empathic and holistic discussions of history and racism at the local level.Practical implicationsIn the wake of the recent past, the authors have learned that teaching about the history of racial violence can be enhanced and empowered by reference to relevant current events. The resurgence of racially charged language and violence over the past few years makes this goal more urgent than ever. This unit gives practical guidance to teachers who face this challenge.Social implicationsThe sociopolitical reality of historical trauma and racism must be confronted, and proximity to key events is important in conveying the urgency of racial violence and the need for history education that addresses it. Teachers are making difficult decisions about their options for teaching about race, and they are understandably concerned about any perceived missteps. Nonetheless, inclusive, truthful history education is an appropriate and essential response to narratives of exclusion and silence as the authors help students to develop deliberative skills concerning difficult topics such as racial violence. Teachers and students, together, can do the crucial work of remembering.Originality/valueThe stripping away of narrative agency, identity and history can cover up stories about the stripping away of life and dignity. In the unit plan, the authors recognize truth and reconciliation—especially in the education of people who have relatively little exposure to topics of race and racism—as elemental to a restorative stance against racism.

Black Genius Flexin’: The Radical Potential of a Dreams Assessment in Participatory Research

The devastation of COVID-19 and racial violence in 2020 suffocated the dream potential of Black families in North Carolina. That same year, Village of Wisdom (VOW) received rapid funding and leveraged this funding to support an inaugural group of five self-identified Black mothers, aka “mommas,” to serve as Parent Researchers. These mommas, trained in participatory research, would embark upon a project to understand the needs of Black students, their parents, and teachers during COVID-19 and challenges associated with remote learning. The Dreams Assessment then emerged as a communal assessment to activate the dream potentials of the mommas, VOW, and spark a movement of amplifying Black parent wisdom as co-authors of research, co-designers, and creators. This paper uses storytelling to reflect on conducting the Dreams Assessment from the perspective of those Black mommas and the “other” mothers and centers communal weaving through shared discoveries and lessons learned. The authors offer the Dreams Assessment as a radical and reimagined participatory research approach from a community-driven and liberatory lens.

Emancipating from (Colonial) Genealogies of the Techno-social Networks or Reversing Power Relations by Turning the Predator into Prey in Jordan Peele’s Nope

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man.

Racial Prejudice and the Fear of the other in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

This study focuses on the Racist Theory in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, a play that revealed how racial prejudice and fear impacted people's lifestyles in 1964. A modern stage and racial thinking interact to initialise the understanding of races and turn towards individual experiences. Baraka’s Dutchman focuses on the culture within white supremacy that has historically marginalised all other races by representing possible outcomes. This paper studies the work of Lula, who destroys the clay to symbolise the savage destruction of the white man for the cultural identity of black people. Furthermore, it displays the continuation of racial violence that has been rampant since the 1960s. This study registers racial thinking and modern stage interactions, and in doing so, the researcher has adopted a secondary qualitative data collection method. The entire process of this study has been conducted based on information collected from existing resources. Thus, this study is especially applicable for readers since it connects with prejudice and fear. Analysing several types of elements in racial prejudice based on Racist Theory, the result helps to provide a transparent viewpoint.

Fragmentation of Hope through Tiny Acts of Bureaucratic Cruelty - Another Kind of War on Afghan People Seeking Asylum in Sweden

This article analyzes the micro-powers of Swedish “cruel” and “non-cruel” bureaucrats using various logics of control, “tiny acts” enacted with pens, computers, and imposed assignments to condition asylum-seeking peoples’ lives and fragment their hope. Based on interviews with asylum-seeking Afghans and observations of their meetings with authorities, I argue that the bureaucratic treatment of Afghans in Sweden is a form of state-sanctioned racist violence and “departheid” executed to exclude discredited people from the welfare state. The article draws attention to a rapid downhill slide regarding asylum rights in Sweden since 2015 and the harm caused to asylum-seeking people.

Storying Our Mourning and Resistance Through Teaching: Black Women Surviving (and Thriving In) White Spaces

This critical duoethnography explores the experiences of two pre-tenured Black women faculty navigating their varied emotions teaching cultural awareness-building courses at predominantly White institutions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial violence. The authors draw upon Dillard and Bell’s (2011) nkwaethnography to share the stories of ‘we’ instead of the ‘singular self’ and present the data as two composite narratives. Authors use Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 1989, 1990) to make-meaning of their experiences and they highlight two themes: (1) teaching and mourning at the margins and (2) calculated resistance. Implications for Black women faculty who teach cultural awareness-building courses and higher education administration are provided.

“My representation is performative”: Black Women's Reflection of Academia Through Collaborative Autoethnographic Poetic Inquiry

In the midst of Covid-19 and increased anti-Black racial violence, Black women faculty continue to search for a sense of wholeness in academic institutions founded upon seemingly well-intentioned ideologies of justice and belonging. Grounded in endarkened feminist epistemology, this collaborative autoethnographic poetic inquiry explores how two Black women early career scholars navigated their first years as faculty during dual pandemics and situate their experiences in the context of other Black women in the academy. Through sister talks and found lyric poetry, they illuminate four distinct yet interrelated themes within their conversations: (1) the difference between performance and authenticity; (2) the evasiveness of belonging; (3) exploitation and tokenization; and (4) institutional policing of their narratives. Institutional recommendations are discussed to support the retention of early-career Black women faculty pursuing holistic, authentic academic homeplaces that honor their endarkened intellectual, emotional, and spiritual identities.

Popular knowledge as popular power: struggle and strategy of the Emancipa popular education movement in Brazil

ABSTRACT This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a ‘circle of culture’. It delves into how popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power, narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the Emancipa movement in their pursuit of democratizing Brazilian universities. The discussion is set within the context of Latin American structural inequalities and the issue of educational exclusion in Brazil. It emphasizes the vital role of contesting culture and knowledge as part of the movement’s fight against social injustices perpetuated by peripheral capitalism, including racist violence and gender oppression. The paper adopts emancipatory pedagogy as the method to empower and mobilize grassroots efforts in this transformative endeavour.