Social Construction Of Race Research Articles

A Theory of Racialized Organizations

Organizational theory scholars typically see organizations as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have largely neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race. The theory developed in this article bridges these subfields, arguing that organizations are racial structures—cognitive schemas connecting organizational rules to social and material resources. I begin with the proposition that race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Next, I develop four tenets: (1) racialized organizations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized. I argue that racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through—and changed by—organizations. Seeing race as constitutive of organizations helps us better understand the formation and everyday functioning of organizations. Incorporating organizations into a structural theory of racial inequality can help us better understand stability, change, and the institutionalization of racial inequality. I conclude with an overview of internal and external sources of organizational change and a discussion of how the theory of racialized organizations may set the agenda for future research.

El “nuevo racismo” desde la lente de la “migración silenciosa”: la adopción interracial en España

The increase in international adoptions of minors (quiet migration) all over Spain has coincided in time with the rise of immigration. The links between these two phenomena give rise to a hybrid line of research focused on the racial experiences shared by both the adopted population and the immigrant population. A comparative analysis of data coming from three public opinion research sources reveals: (a) the presence of “racism without race” within Spanish society, even though phenotypic differences play a determining role in the social construction of race; and (b) a low “racial awareness” amongst interracial adoptive parents, which leads them to reproduce the ideology of “color-blind racism.”

Metaphorically ‘Taking a Knee’: Pausing, Reflecting, Acting

Many of us want to engage in public application of our academic work, to not just understand the world, but to take part in addressing issues we investigate. Perhaps the metaphor of ‘taking a knee’ can be useful as we consider for ourselves, individually and collectively, how to do this work. Specifically, this paper considers the metaphorical meanings of ‘taking a knee’ to pause, reflect and consider ways to engage. The work of Ibram Kendi suggests that we look to how the economic, political and cultural self interest of powerful groups of people shape public life—including laws, policies and social norms to further their own self interests. In particular, this work considers the issue of the social construction of race in protests at sporting events during the national anthem and public responses to those events, finding as Kendi would predict, both progress toward racial equality and the advancement and evolution of racist ideas. Lastly, this investigation extends Kendi’s work by examining Title IX and athlete sexual assault, through firm scholarly research, as an example of both progress toward equality and also re-entrenchment of sexism and sexist ideologies, at the same time, by following the trail of self-interest.

The Racial Unconsciousness of the Parisian Public Theatre: Borders and Demotions in Francophone Contemporary Drama

This article analyses the impact of France’s colonial heritage on French and Parisian public theatre. Theatrical programming corresponds to an imaginary still structured by a cultural and social construction of race that reflects the past of the “Grande Nation.” Three different plays by Ivorian dramatist Koffi Kwahulé are examined, each depicting situations of demotion experienced by French citizens of foreign origin. I argue that the way French public theatre is structured and administered today mirrors, to a certain extent, real situations of tension reflecting the disparities between the “centres” (symbols of power and homogeneity) and the “peripheries” (socio-economic and cultural spaces of relegation structured by a racial imaginary). I also analyse the concept of the border as a geographic, economic, and sociocultural paradigm, allowing us to understand, in the French and francophone contexts, what unites and divides – or more accurately, how francophone writers and French writers of foreign origin can still be condemned in the twenty-first century to a sort of exile from metropolitan Paris, the capital of a Jacobin state.

Race and the Epigenetics of Memory

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions.

Prophets and Profits of Racial Science

In this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again.

THE ETHNIC DIMENSIONS IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS*

This article draws on work in the social construction of race and ethnicity to explain why racial/ethnic divisions are so often axes of domination and why these divisions are central to social movements. Racial/ethnic groups are constructed in political processes that are intertwined with state formation and social movements. Processes of state formation and collective action create racial/ethnic groups, define majorities and minorities, and create racial/ethnic structures of domination. Physical and social segregation in tandem with intergenerational inheritance creates network cliquing that reinforces group boundaries, group differences, and group interests. Movements by members of dominant racial/ethnic majorities differ from movements by members of subordinate racial/ethnic minorities in key ways, including access to democratic processes for achieving group goals, experience of repression, need for allies, identity construction, processes of consciousness raising, and bases of mobilization. These “ethnic dimensions” matter for all social movements.

A Conceptual Falsetto: Re-imagining Black Childhood Via One Girl’s Exploration of Prince

A young Prince scoffed at a single story of identity, i.e., dominant social constructions of race, class, gender, and youth associated with inadequacy and confinement. Inspired by Prince, this autoethnography introduces a conceptual falsetto framework (CFF). Like Prince’s falsetto which resists the constraints of his tenor voice, CFF resists the tenor of a single story of Black childhood—it goes higher. CFF calls Black scholars to (re)imagine Black childhood into ideologies of love (Delgado 1995 in The Rodrigo Chronicles; Dumas and Nelson, 86(1), 27–47, 2016; Duncan, 8(1), 85–104, 2002), by using reflexive practices to write about one’s own childhood on multiple tracks. Identifying and examining the social/cultural and political material of their childhoods, Black scholars can produce new ideas and approaches to research on Black childhood more generally—swelling a new discourse on Black childhood from the margins of society into the public discourse. “Many feminist writers advocate starting research from one’s own experience… using personal knowledge to help them in the research process” (Ellis 2004:48). I illustrate CFF by analyzing my childhood journal (1986–1988) which examines and emulates Prince’s artistry. Findings reveal Black childhoods are spent resisting, creating symbolic universes, being in relationship, bonding around intellectuality and abstract ideas—choosing to love something and being in pursuit of it.

Review: Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity, by Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden. Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016, 144 pp., 21 color and 26 b/w illus. $20, ISBN 9781941332139 “Identity is passe.” It was 2002, and the words stung. As an undergraduate applying to doctoral programs, I was searching for the vocabulary I needed to talk about the issues in design that were important to me. Identity, I determined, was one of them. The words came from a senior scholar I respected at a program I was pursuing, and suddenly what I envisioned as my academic trajectory seemed trivial and faddish. However, in the current political climate, with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges , the recent campaign of the first female candidate of a major party for the U.S. presidency, increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, and the continued visibility of grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter and the 2017 Women's March on Washington, it has become clear that identity is anything but passe. Mario Gooden takes on the issue of identity in architecture and wrestles with the notion of subjectivity throughout Dark Space . For him, how design contends with, reflects, directs, and responds to individual and collective identities—historical, present, and future—is an issue of utmost concern. The centering of identity—viewed through the lens of investigating subjectivity—within this design discourse is both paramount and timely. This book is one of only a few texts that deal with the history, theory, and criticism of the question of an African American architectural tradition.1 Most texts that emphasize race in relation to design are concerned with the historical consequences of inequity in the social construction of race, and how it has affected individuals and communities.2 Other texts address the interpretation of race, either in museum and monument design or in historic preservation.3 Finally, some texts strive to recognize the contribution of individual African American architects in an attempt to elevate their status and, perhaps, even make …

The Social Construction of Race in Brazil: A Postcolonial Ethnographic Account of Race in Afro‐Brazilian Families

The Social Construction of Race in Brazil: A Postcolonial Ethnographic Account of Race in Afro‐Brazilian Families

Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti and US Culture 1898–1940 by Shannon Rose Riley

Reviewed by: Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti and US Culture 1898–1940 by Shannon Rose Riley Katherine Ford Riley, Shannon Rose. Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti and US Culture 1898–1940. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiii, 273 pp. Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti and US Culture 1898–1940 by Shannon Rose Riley examines the strategic importance of Cuba and Haiti in performance culture in the United States and in the construction of the definition of empire during the pivotal years of 1898–1940, though the implications continue to reverberate today. The book examines performance and culture produced within the United States that used imagery or topics from Haiti and Cuba, thus underlining the importance that [End Page 262] these two island nations played in the construction of empire and race within the United States. Riley explains how US intervention in Haiti and Cuba facilitated their introduction into conversations on empire and race. Riley begins her study in 1898, the pivotal year when Cuba (along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines) passed from a colony of Spain to the United States, and ends with 1940, since this is when, she argues, racial categories consolidated into a dichotomy of white and black. Performing Race and Erasure furthers the ongoing conversations around performance studies and race, arguing for cross-conversations between Caribbean and US scholarship. After the initial chapter that outlines the argument of the book, Riley’s Performing Race and Erasure is divided into six chapters that look at performances in the United States on and around events from Cuba and Haiti. Each chapter focuses attention on a different set of plays and performances organized around pivotal events or movements from Cuba and Haiti, though these chapters could perhaps have been condensed to find connections. A short conclusion closes the book by examining implications of the palimpsest of race today within the United States, understanding how the past remains in the present. Performing Race and Erasure is an important work that explores the roots of cultural and social constructions of race within the United States that were and are in conversation with the nations of Cuba and Haiti. As the author examines in these pages, we continue today evidence of images and cultural texts that expose the past with which we need to contend in the present and the future. Furthermore, as Riley does with Performing Race and Erasure, we need to acknowledge more the historical and current social and cultural connections between the United States and nations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Riley’s book is an important contribution to this vital conversation, underlining the fluidity of performance culture across political and national borders. Scholars on all sides of these borders will benefit from the insights presented in Riley’s Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti and US Culture 1898–1940. [End Page 263] Katherine Ford East Carolina University Copyright © 2018 The Center of Latin American Studies

How Do English-speaking Caribbean Immigrants in Toronto Find Jobs?: Exploring the Relevance of Social Networks

INTRODUCTION This paper draws from a doctoral dissertation that examined factors beyond human capital that influenced labour market outcomes for immigrants to Toronto from Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. The majority of Canada's immigrants from these three countries live in Toronto. In addition, these immigrants are primarily racialized individuals who possess strong English language skills and high levels of education, training and work experience, but have experienced higher unemployment rates and lower incomes than the Canadian-born population (Colin 2007; James 2009; Preston et al. 2010). The key argument is that for English-speaking Caribbean immigrants, social networks are as important, if not more so, as human capital, for securing meaningful employment in Toronto. Canada's immigration policy seeks to attract immigrants on the basis of their human capital, but largely ignores the demand side factors that relate to how immigrants actually find jobs and does not adequately address factors that allow high-skilled immigrants to find work. The study is based on critical policy research, an inter-disciplinary approach to research that has many dimensions, but this paper is primarily focused on critical race. Critical race theorists investigate notions of race, blackness, and whiteness in the production of societal biases. Traditional critical race theory is focused on an analysis of the social construction of race and racism, and the manner in which people of colour are ordered and constrained in society (Trevino, Harris and Wallace 2008). In the Canadian context, emphasis is placed on examining the manner in which structural and institutional arrangements operate at a disadvantage to racialized groups. Critical race theory, therefore, offers useful insights in how discrimination comes to be structured into Canada's labour market (Galabuzi 2006; James 2009; James, Plaza and Jansen 1999). A number of researchers have expressed concern that Canada's employers may be discriminating against immigrants on the basis of race (Aylward 1999; Block and Galabuzi 2011; Teelucksingh and Galabuzi 2007; Warner 2006). Others have documented that Canada's visible minority immigrants earn lower incomes and have higher unemployment rates than other immigrants and the native-born (Block and Galabuzi 2011; Cardozo and Pendakur 2008; Gilmore 2008; Pendakur and Pendakur 2011; Reitz 2001, 2007). Quantitative studies have also established that poor labour market outcomes for racialized immigrants are linked to racial and gender discrimination (Pendakur and Pendakur 1998; Pendakur and Pendakur 2011). Though not the focus of this study, there are also lessons to be learned from the labour market experiences of Canada's seasonal agricultural workers, live-in caregivers and other temporary foreign workers who have experienced wage discrimination and abusive recruitment practices (Faraday 2014; Satzewich 1991; Tilson 2009). Experimental studies have also found evidence of discrimination, in that resumes from applicants with non-English sounding last names are often excluded at early stages of the job application process (Henry and Ginzberg 1985; Oreopoulos 2011). Qualitative studies of the experiences of nurses in Ontario also found that African-Canadian nurses experienced racism, sexism and classism (Das Gupta 1996; Hagey et al. 2001). Many of Canada's Caribbean immigrants have reported experiences of discrimination in the labour market, which they believe have affected their labour market outcomes (Colin 2007; James 2009; Preston et al. 2010). In each census period from 1996 to 2006, immigrants from the Caribbean experienced higher unemployment rates and lower incomes than the Canadian-born population (Colin 2007). This is the context from which the study examined the lived-experience of English-speaking Caribbean immigrants in Toronto, focusing in part on the obstacles they faced and highlighting the relevance of social networks to their job search. …

Introduction to Special Section: “Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements”

Introduction to Special Section: “Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements”

Taking the risk to engage in race talk: professional development in elementary schools

ABSTRACTDeveloping public education where every child has the right to learn requires that teachers pay attention to and engage in race talk – open discussion about race, social construction of race, and racism. While it is clear that children engage and reflect critically about these aspects of race even at a young age, teachers rarely engage in race talk with them. In this study, an African-American preservice teacher and a White teacher educator explore how African-American, Polynesian, and White in-service teachers, participating in Courageous Conversations professional development, address or avoid race talk in their elementary schools through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and what risks they take when they do. Findings, through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, demonstrate that (1) racism was observed and/or experienced by all teachers in elementary schools; (2) lived racial experiences impacted teachers’ approach to conversations about race; (3) creating an open space was crucial for race conversations; (4) Courageous Conversations provided a ‘new language’ to talk about race; and (5) administrative support facilitated more attention to race. Findings indicate the road to greater equity in schools requires more professional development about race talk in elementary schools.

Why I Write So Many Books About Race

I relate how my life has intersected with my work in philosophy, both before and after a twenty-year absence from academia. Motivations for engaging in Philosophy of Race may be different from other projects because the subject itself is urgent and the philosopher may be a person of color. I describe the development of my own writing in this subfield, from ontological issues in the philosophy of science to moral issues in political philosophy and cultural criticism. The first addressed the biological reality of human racial taxonomy and the second has been about the inadequacy of treatments of race in the history of philosophy and injustice in contemporary social constructions of race.

Teaching Diversity

This article is targeted to faculty teaching race and ethnicity, racism, diversity, and multicultural courses. Many students equate race with skin color. The premise of this article is that to teach students about the social construction of race, teachers must first know enough science to teach students that race is not biological. This article examines the biology of race by showing how advances in DNA sequencing led to genetics research that supports arguments that race is not biological. DNA comparisons show that all human populations living today are one species that came from Africa. The article explains the migration of humans out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and how they populated Australia, then Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The article shows how recent research maps the timing of the migration and admixture of specific population groups into Europe and India. The article shows how a mutation in one nucleotide can result in a trait like blue eyes, or Hemoglobin S (which confers resistance to malaria), which can be subject to evolution through natural selection. DNA comparisons show how natural selection shaped the genetics of human skin color to adapt to less UV light in the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia. The article shows that there is no relation between skin color or other “racial” characteristics and complex traits like intelligence. The science in this article will help teachers explain that as race is not biological, race is socially constructed and culturally enacted.

Being black in a white skin: Beliefs and stereotypes around albinism at a South African university.

Background: Partly because of the legacy of apartheid, and despite being a constitutional democracy, South Africa continues to be a deeply divided society, particularly along racial lines. In this context many people with albinism do not fit neatly into black and white categories and are likely to experience social discrimination and marginalisation.Objectives: The study endeavoured to explore the beliefs and practices regarding albinism within a South African university, and the availability of support services.Method: The research was located within an interpretive qualitative paradigm and was framed within the theories of stigma, discrimination and ‘othering’. Interviews were conducted with five students with albinism and 10 students without albinism.Results: Findings confirmed the existence of myths and stereotypes regarding albinism. Students with albinism tended to exclude themselves from the rest of the student community to avoid discrimination and stereotypes around their condition.Conclusion: People with albinism can teach us about social constructions of race, colour and relations between minority groups and the majority culture. Results have implications for schools, disability units at universities, and albinism societies in terms of opening up channels of communication between people with albinism and the general public and fostering knowledge and awareness thereof.

History for Moguls

There is the rage to decentre the nation state. There is the rage to decentre individuals, and with it, biography. There is the rage to decenter Europe in world history, a topic I tackle in my most recent book, Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture. There is the rage to decenter biology as an explanation of human behavior and show instead the social construction of race, gender and sexual orientation. Finally there is the rage to decenter humans and to show instead the agency of nature. Big History is a more recent arrival that reveals human history as a final and very brief stage of history. It is the ultimate effort to the decentering of humans. Scholarship is judged by a series of rubrics: Is the language gender neutral? Has the language and topic avoided Euro-centrism? Does the treatment of the historical sources give voice to the underprivileged, or to indigenous? Does the narrative make assumptions about biological differences between groups? Does it make assumptions about the to modernize, or about civilization versus undeveloped or savage? These questions pose the possibility of professional success or destruction. There is no space for honest discussion or difference of opinion. Teachers and mentors stamp impressionable students with these top-down imperatives.

Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race-Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race-class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race-class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race-class works both “top-down” and “ground-up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race-class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working-class residents.

Conjuring difference, concealing inequality: a brief tour of Racecraft

The “social construction of race” is an oft-invoked academic truism. As a heuristic, the constructivist principle is at times assumed rather than demonstrated, exclaimed rather than put to work in the difficult task of showing how, by whom, under what conditions, and to what ends symbolic categories are made real in the lives of individuals and in the workings of institutions alike. The expression, nevertheless, offers a potent challenge to a visual economy that purports everyone “has” a race that can be read off of or in to the body. With their new book, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields (hereafter FF) take the reader back to first principles, revealing the many ways racial vision and division haunt social life in the United States. They insist that scholars, and survey researchers in particular, relinquish the idea of “race relations” that can be discerned by studying individuals’ attitudes about others. The question of how others are continuously made and re-made via custom, law, and scholarly suppositions is the focus of Racecraft. In this way, the text contributes to a vigorous re-evaluation of the role of sociology in inadvertently deepening static conceptions of groupness through our foundational concepts and methods. “Racecraft,” the authors argue, is first and foremost an ongoing set of social practices that continuously misconstrue racism for race. The former is a function of power and inequality whereas the latter is purportedly grounded in biology and culture. By focusing on the inherent qualities of groups, whether residing in genes or values, the analyst loses sight of the larger context in which those differences are conjured in the first place. Conjured, because in the same way that witches need not exist for people to feel the effects of witchcraft, so too with race—genetic differences between racial groups need not actually exist for such claims to exercise political and social effects. Racecraft is the process by which scholarship and public discourse focuses on genes, IQ, or criminal propensity as explanations for patterns of hypertension, high school Theor Soc (2014) 43:683–688 DOI 10.1007/s11186-014-9238-z