Understandings Of Race Research Articles

Negotiating race in stand-up comedy: interpretations of ‘single story’ narratives

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how narratives of personal experiences among audience members in Midwestern comedy clubs shape their receptivity to the racial discourses deployed by stand-up comedians. Conducting a Midwest-based ethnography of comedy clubs located across three states, I collected data through a variety of methods, which included: live stand-up performance observations; interviews of comedians and audience members from the same shows to better situate their respective strategies and reactions; and audience surveys. My analysis reveals how the subtlety and art of stand-up performance styles combine with the pleasurable medium of humor to alternately reinscribe, challenge, or proudly celebrate audience understandings of race. The accounts shared by comedians and audience members at these clubs demonstrate the potential for stereotype humor – contingent on presentation styles and audience experiences – to foster ethnic solidarity or complicate racial-behavioral associations through repeated encounters with comedians who either indirectly challenge or actively critique familiar types.

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

“There Ain’t No White People Here”

In this article, the author uses the critical race theoretical construct of master narrative to explore historical and ideological assumptions about the Civil Rights Movement held by two Black youth in an urban community. Master narrative is defined as the dominant social mythologies that mute, erase, and neutralize features of racial struggle. Through a synthesis of literature by critical race theorists and critical social historians, the author outlines four themes present in master narratives about the Movement, and illustrates how each theme functions to reinforce ideologies of White supremacy. Through counterstory, the author examines ways in which these themes seem to constrain participants’ understandings of race, racism, and racial struggle. The author concludes posing questions to encourage urban social studies educators to think deeply about their historical content knowledge, curriculum, and classroom practices, and restating the need for continued exploration into the implications of master narrative in Black, urban students’ understandings of history and their contemporary conditions.

‘If an apple is a foreign apple you have to wash it very carefully’: Youth discourses on racism

This study offers a critique of the questions used in anti-racism discourse and education. It discusses the dangers of asking whether a person or group is racist and the possible consequences such questions could have on people’s discourses and attitudes. Reactions or responses to the questions can vary from anger, defence of self against other, denial of racism and/or a strong far-right nationalistic feeling. The questions examined in this study were used in a workshop about racism in Finnish upper secondary schools. Our main interest lies in examining how questions produce or affect discourses, particularly the kinds of discourses that arise as the students reflect and respond to these questions in small groups. By analysing these discourses, we are able to get an insight into how students construct an understanding of racism vis-à-vis the issues of nationality, family, self and others. Our findings are suggestive of the fact that students’ understanding of racism is often limited to individual acts of racism rather than an understanding of racism as a system of oppression. The article calls for the need to reassess the questions used in anti-racism discourse or education that do not necessarily lead to progressive discourse on the issue of racism. We also call for teachers using these questions to closely follow up how students interpret and discuss the topic of racism.

Is there a post-racism? On David Theo Goldberg’s conjunctural analysis of the post-racial

ABSTRACTI comment on David Theo Goldberg’s Are We all Postracial Yet? by interpreting it as a programmatic essay towards a new conjunctural analysis of a globalizing racism, and as an emerging globalizing dialogue against racism. In the spirit of Goldberg’s book I relate these two modes of critical engagement in order to open a global perspective through which a relational understanding of racism can be formulated with respect to two neoliberal contexts, continental Europe and the United States. To this end I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar and in particular his early consideration of ‘neo-racism’.

On the elephant in the room: toward a generative politics of place on race in academic discourse

In our conceptual essay, we draw on an exchange between a White scholar and a group of panelists on Critical Race Theory at an international conference. Taking up this exchange as our point of departure, we work in dialectical and multidimensional ways between the essentialized politics of place on race and critical anti-essentializing foundations in recent Critical Race Feminism and Critical White Studies’ literatures. Working the dialectics and multidimensionality of the place that race makes in academic discourse, we recognize and ethically work through the essentialized politics of place in advancing anti-essentializing understandings of race. In articulating these anti-essentializing understandings, our conceptual essay drives at the notion of a generative politics of place on race in academic discourse. A generative politics of place holds essentialized realities and anti-essentializing foundations of race in dialectical and multidimensional tension for teaching, learning, and discussing race in local, national, and international contexts.

“I Thought We Were Over This Problem”: Explorations of Race in/through Literature Inquiry

ABSTRACTThis article examines classroom practices that draw upon students' understandings of race and equity as they engage in critical literature inquiry to explore issues of power in our society. Our research team, comprising a fifth-grade classroom teacher, a doctoral candidate, and a university professor, analyzed students' written and digital projects to better understand what new skills, strategies, and meaning-making opportunities emerge when race is centralized in the curriculum. We documented the various ways students were able to voice their thoughts through multimodal learning in an elementary language arts classroom.

Post What? The Liminality of Multi-Racial Identity

This article, “Post What? The Liminality of Multi-Racial Identity,” argues that the successes and failures of 21st-century satire reveal the myth of post-raciality while simultaneously dismissing racial essentialism. I focus on three critical moments: the commercial success of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, a text and forthcoming television show that examines the shifting self-identities of mixed-race individuals; the inability of a potential love interest on the television series, Louie, to accept a black woman as the ex-wife of the titular protagonist’s phenotypically white daughters; and Barack Obama’s self-designation as “black” on the census shortly after his election. I argue that the widespread reach of these instances, coupled with audience engagement and response, underscores the ways that the public realm frames a contemporary understanding of race as both meaningful and absurd.

Teaching to Transform? Addressing Race and Racism in the Teaching of Clinical Social Work Practice

ABSTRACTFaculty members are key stakeholders to support social work students’ learning about race and racism in practice and to promote the professional standards established by the field. This qualitative study examines how 15 clinical social work faculty members teaching advanced practice in the Northeast conceptualize and incorporate their understanding of race and racism in their teaching. An analysis of participants’ responses to a case vignette suggests clinical social work faculty members view race primarily as an individual ethnic or cultural identity and lack conceptual, historical, and sociological knowledge about racism and its links to other forms of oppression. This study suggests that additional faculty development opportunities and institutional support are needed to encourage faculty efforts to address race and racism.

‘Race’ and HIV vulnerability in a transnational context: the case of Chinese immigrants to Canada

Although immigrants’ sustained connections with their homelands are well documented, so far we know little about how ‘race’ – in particular, conceptions of race back home – influences the HIV vulnerability of racialised immigrants to Western countries. Drawing on data from a multi-sited, qualitative study of Chinese immigrants to Canada, this paper presents a contextualised understanding of the impacts of race on HIV risk faced by these individuals in a transnational context. Data were collected from four study sites in Canada and China as part of a study investigating the relationship between HIV risk and transnationalism. Although race appears to have bearing on their risk perceptions and sexual practices, immigrants’ understandings of race are not necessarily consistent with dominant discourses of race in Canada, but are also mediated by their racial habitus developed in China. Findings reveal the complex power dynamics – not just power asymmetries but also power fluidity – around race from a transnational perspective and thus challenge the assumed dichotomy of dominance and subordination underpinning traditional explanations of the relationship between race and HIV risk. In the context of transnationalism, researchers should go beyond a nation-bound concept of society (i.e. the host society) and take into account the simultaneous influence of both host and home countries on immigrant health.

Neighborhood stigma and the sporting lives of young people in public housing

This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in ‘Redcrest’, a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, community mapping, go-alongs) collected over eight months with 14 young people. This paper also offers a critique of Robert Sampson’s work on neighborhood effects and draws on the theoretical insights and urban scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, Loic Wacquant, and the work of postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, who further understandings of racism as a spatial relation. At the center of this research are narratives that highlight that public housing projects, negative stigma notwithstanding, can be good places to live. The results highlight the various contradictions and tensions experienced by young people living in Redcrest, specifically their experiences with neighborhood stigma, racism and Islamophobia, and how this impacts their sporting lives.

Monstrosity and the Majority

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

They Were Here First: American Indian Tribes, Race, and the Constitutional Minimum

In American law, Native nations (denominated in the Constitution and elsewhere as “tribes”) are sovereigns with a direct relationship with the federal government. Tribes’ governmental status situates them differently from other minority groups for many legal purposes, including equal protection analysis. Under current equal protection doctrine, classifications that further the federal government’s unique relationship with tribes and their members are not subject to heightened scrutiny. Yet this deferential approach has been subject to recent criticism and is currently being challenged in pending cases. Swept up in the larger drift toward colorblind or race-neutral understandings of the Constitution, courts and commentators question the distinction between tribes’ political and racial status, and urge courts to strike down child welfare and gaming laws that benefit tribes. Yet tribes (as collectives) must trace their heritage to peoples who preceded European/American settlement in order to establish the political relationship with the federal government. Tribes, in order to be recognized as such under the Constitution, therefore must, as an initial definitional matter, consist of people tied together by something akin to lineage. Descent and ancestry (often conflated with the socio-legal category of “race,”) are the difference between legitimate federal recognition of tribal status and unauthorized and unconstitutional acts by Congress. Congress, in other words, cannot establish a government-to-government relationship with just any group of people. Tribes are treated differently from other groups due to their ties to the indigenous peoples of North America, and federal courts should not use that constitutional distinction against tribes in a misguided effort to eradicate all traces of things currently sounding in “race.”The argument advanced here might be seen as a form of American Indian law exceptionalism. Yet it is consistent with racial formation theory’s project of understanding race as a construction that serves, creates, and perpetuates legalized subordination, and that also shapes daily social conceptions and interactions. Racial formation theory calls for multiple accounts of racialization depending on the social and economic purposes served by each groups’ subordination. On the remedial side, racial formation theory therefore necessarily anticipates what we might think of as multiple exceptionalisms. Reversing policies that aimed to eliminate Native people from the continent, and the racialized understanding of Indians that drove them, requires maintaining the political status of tribes as separate sovereigns, not destroying it in the name of an ahistorical conception of “race” neutrality.

Introduction to the Special Forum on the Charleston Massacre of 2015

Introduction to the Special Forum on the Charleston Massacre of 2015 Hilda E. Kurtz Nine African American church-goers were massacred in the basement of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. This act of racial violence extended and deepened a national debate over the ongoing effects of racial violence on the social fabric of the United States. Rage and anguish over the tragedy abound, as the local community, writers, bloggers, scholars, activists and countless others share insights on how and why such a thing could happen in 2015, and how such tragedy might catalyze positive social change. One relatively immediate response was the revival of political debate over the display of the Confederate battle flag, and its subsequent removal from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol (not once but twice, see Eaves, below). These predominantly symbolic events have the potential to distract public debate from the deep-seated problem of enduring racial bias in American society, but also warrant careful consideration in their own right. New to the helm of Southeastern Geographer, we asked ourselves, what can geographers do to shed light on the massacre and its aftermath? What tools do geographers have with which to ‘make sense’ of such murderous expression of white supremacy? What do geographers have to say about the many possible aftermaths of this tragedy, some enacted, some in progress, others only imagined to date? With this Special Forum in Southeastern Geographer, our intent is to create a(nother) space within academic geographic circles for the important and difficult conversations that are essential to racial understanding and reconciliation. Conversations such as these will not be without missteps, but it is crucially important to continue and deepen geographers’ critical engagement with the racial violence on which the United States was founded and continues to operate. In that spirit, we invited seven geographers at six universities to share their own reactions to and reflections on the Charleston Massacre in a special forum in this issue of Southeastern Geographer. Each of the essays in the Special Forum suggests, either explicitly or implicitly, that it is unproductive to view the carnage in Mother Emanuel as an aberration; indeed none comment on the mental state of the [End Page 6] perpetrator. As historian Heather Richardson noted in an essay for “We’re History,” That a white terrorist murdered an African American politician and African American bystanders in a black church, using language straight out of Reconstruction, is not an accident. It reflects the vital intersection of American politics, race, and religion since 1866. Implicitly starting from the same premise, the geographers contributing to this forum consider the intersection of American politics, race, and religion, with attention to past, present and future transformations of symbolic, economic and cultural landscapes. These essays draw on different positionalities and bodies of thought to reflect on tensions between memory, erasure, and transformation—of places of worship, of the cultural and economic landscapes in which they figure, and of the basis of U.S. society in racial violence. Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood argue for the need to develop relational understandings of the past and the ways in which it shapes the present. The removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol is an important step, they argue, but one that should be encompassed within a long and difficult process of ‘memory work’ that comes to terms with racial violence and its vestiges in the landscape. The next three essays consider the spatial and spiritual geographies of different theological perspectives on racial difference and reconciliation, each in their own way highlighting the central role of religion in the events under consideration. Priscilla McCutcheon invokes spiritual geographies and transformative landscapes to reflect on the significance of Black Church(es) as spaces of uplift that are simultaneously targets of violence. Drawing on a rich array of writers and thinkers, she offers an avowal of black liberation theory as a pivot of radical social change. LaToya Eaves also engages with the potential of transformative landscapes (although without using that term as such), in a reflection on queering redemption. She draws on Black liberation...

Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins (review)

Reviewed by: Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins Ian Neary (bio) Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. By Joseph D. Hankins. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2014. xxii, 277 pages. $65.00, cloth; $29.95, paper; $29.95, E-book. It is no longer the case that most buraku communities have a connection with either the leather industry or meat production, and some historians argue that it never was, but nevertheless many Japanese and those non-Japanese who know something about buraku mondai assume there was and still is a close connection. While there has been more work published by a wide range of social scientists and historians on issues of status discrimination in Japan over the last five years, none of it has turned its attention to the leather industry. This book goes some way to filing that gap and uses a discussion of that industry as a starting point for an examination of a wide range of issues facing burakumin and policymaking in Japan in the twenty-first century, many of them previously undiscussed in the English-language material on the topic. Joseph Hankins is a trained anthropologist who clearly originally intended to focus on language use, gender, and sexuality in Japan but ended up researching buraku mondai. Nevertheless, he makes good use of his sensitivity to language use as one of the tools for his research. He explains the intellectual background to his research project, also taking us through the times and places of his fieldwork. He spent a year and a half, 2005–7, in Tokyo as an intern with the International Movement Against Discrimination and Racism (IMADR, a UN-recognized organization that is the international face of the Buraku Liberation League [BLL]). Later he worked as an apprentice in a tanning factory in north Tokyo. He also participated in events sponsored by both the BLL and IMADR and took part in trips from Japan to India by burakumin visiting Dalits. All of this activity he describes economically, effectively, and reflexively. What is particular to his account is the way he interrogates and explicates each situation, the circumstances, and the participants he is describing within “two transitional conditions of political argument and economic practice” and within the particular context of Japan in the early twenty-first century beginning to think of itself as a “multicultural nation-state in spite of itself” (p. 240). [End Page 178] In all of this, he is strong on description and his reflexive anthropological analysis seems to this nonanthropologist both exemplary and thought provoking. He is rather less reliable or informative, however, on some aspects of what he is describing. So, for example, although he provides a very rich description of everyday life in the Tokyo tannery where he spent six months, we do not find out very much about the state of the Japanese leather industry today or how it has fared since (say) 1945. Or perhaps what little he does give us left this reader wanting to learn more. No doubt he would respond that that is not the book he set out to write and that such questions reflect my interests, not his. Still, as the title seems to suggest that it will tell us something about leather making in Japan, it would seem not unreasonable at least to alert readers early on about what his book will not do. In a similar vein, we can only find a very brief description of the formation and evolution of Japan’s policies toward multiculturalism. Provocatively Hankins defines what he considers multiculturalism as a “form of governance,” although I was not always clear exactly what he meant by that. Again, given that it is a key word in the title of his book, we are perhaps entitled to expect a little more about the content and timing of the relevant policies. I was also concerned by some of the errors that crept into his description of dōwa policy. On page 112 we are told that a 1965 report produced by “a BLL deliberative council” repudiated “a racial understanding of its situation.” A little later that, “The Dōwakai was tasked with...

Opening Borders: African Americans and Latinos Through the Lens of Immigration

African-American and Latino voter turnout during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections hit record numbers. Polls show that the immigration debate influenced Latino voter turnout and preference. Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s voiced support of comprehensive immigration reform strengthened his lead among Latino voters in 2008 and, once in office, his executive policy of granting temporary protection to DREAMers solidified his lead among Latino voters in 2012. Both elections showed the power that minority groups can exert when they vote in support of the same candidate. If the demographic changes continue as currently estimated, African Americans and Latinos will contribute in large part to the making of the United States into a “majority-minority” nation and will play an increasingly important role in local and national politics. Therefore, it is important for Americans to become more inclusive of all minority groups and to expand discussions of race relations beyond the Black-White paradigm and discussions about immigration beyond the Latino-White paradigm. As the polarized reactions to the Zimmerman verdict showed, there is much work to be done as the people of the United States continue the project of forming “a more perfect Union.” Honest assessments of how individuals and groups interact are crucial to opening borders and encouraging exchanges beyond socially constructed boundaries, like race, and racialized politics. African Americans and Latinos often compete with each other for political representation and other resources. In addition, the political consideration of immigration law and policy includes a racial dimension that is often camouflaged, but denial and silence about this reality do nothing to move the country forward. Therefore, immigration provides an opportunity to examine race relations and the potential for inter-group coalitions between African Americans and Latinos. For this reason, this Article also explores, through the lens of immigration, the role that race may play in the attitudes of African Americans and Latinos toward each other. One of the goals of this Article is to spark a candid dialogue that promotes a better understanding of race and its impact on interactions between African Americans and Latinos in the United States.

“Black blokes who spoke like East-Enders”: Nation, race and hooliganism in Cass Pennant’s Cass

Cass Pennant’s autobiography Cass revolves around his days as one of the top men of West Ham’s ill-reputed InterCity Firm (ICF). As a narrative that spans over 40 years, it intertwines Pennant’s personal account with the rise and fall of hooliganism in Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Pennant was born in East London and fostered by a white, working-class family; his narrative is a detailed introspective description of his progress from his beginnings as a black hooligan to his eventual self-perception as a black Jamaican. This article analyses the manner in which Pennant assimilates, conceptualizes and instrumentalizes his blackness for different purposes throughout his life journey, and how, looking back, he comes to terms with his shifting understanding of race as an inherent part of the progress of his Bildungsroman. It concludes with a discussion of the ways in which Pennant’s final acceptance of his transatlantic heritage ties his work to other black British narratives written at the turn of the millennium, and places it within a cultural endeavour to re-imagine Britain as a multicultural space and experience.

‘Your focus on race is narrow and exclusive:’ the derailment of anti-racist work through discourses of intersectionality and diversity

In this article, we argue that discourses of “diversity” and “intersectionality” can undermine efforts to address racism, protect white privilege, and marginalize people of color. To illustrate how, we present an ethnographic account of student, staff, and faculty efforts to infuse campus culture at a small liberal arts college with an anti-racist pedagogy in response to a string of racist events on campus. Despite intentions, some community members put forward intersectional arguments and calls for “diversity” in ways that re-centered whiteness and situated discussions about race as exclusionary dialogues that victimized white subjects. These discourses also subsumed the experience of racism into a generalized and ostensibly universal experience of marginalization. We argue that this reflects the growing dominance of understanding racism as something that white subjects experience as much as people of color, which has emerged alongside a discourse of “diversity” that compels a focus on individualized difference rather than structural inequity.

The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North by Douglas A. Jones (review)

Reviewed by: The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North by Douglas A. Jones Derrick R. Spires (bio) The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North douglas a. jones, jr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014 232 pp. Douglas Jones’s Captive Stage offers a deceptively simple argument: “legislative bodies and common (white) Americans relied on the underlying premises and institutional practices of slavery to create a world of race-based inequities, proscriptions, and violence that legitimated” and sustained the notion that free black northerners were, as Frederick Douglass famously phrased it, “slaves to the community” (1). This claim in itself is not new. Jones’s opening reference to Douglass, for instance, builds on Joanne Pope Melish’s central premise about gradual emancipation in Disowning Slavery (1998). Yet Captive Stage innovates in how it reconstructs antebellum popular performance cultures through Jones’s rich archive of plays, convention proceedings, broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, memoirs, newspaper reports, and visual arts. Performance matters here in ways different from literature, law, or politics, because, as Jones observes early in the study, performance culture reflected and disseminated more directly “commonsense” understandings of race—the proverbial iceberg—that informed [End Page 200] northern racialism. From “Bobalition” broadsides to P. T. Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth (advertised as “the Nurse of Gen. George Washington”), the proslavery imagination “chart[s] out a chaotic ideological terrain that” eschewed chattel slavery and was typically anticolonizationist even as it constrained black freedom through proslavery logic (8–9). Jones deftly incorporates performance studies, print culture, history, and literary studies from an interdisciplinary array of scholars including Antonio Gramsci, Jay Fliegelman, Harry J. Elam, Jr., and John Ernest to outline the “spectatorial habits” of an antebellum “theatocracy” in which theater producers and theatergoers collectively imagined a “black state of exception” (22, 107). Here, Jones adopts Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception to describe free African Americans’ liminal status as (materially and psychically) central to US citizenship but also excluded from it, at once ensured a (useful) place within the nation and at the same time represented as always outside it. On the stage, the black state of exception manifested through black characters’ wistfulness about enslavement (despite speaking the language of freedom) in post-Revolutionary plays like John Murdock’s The Triumph of Love (1794) and through submissive free black characters who “despite their freedom … remain servants to” and dependent on white oversight in antebellum temperance melodramas like Harry Seymour’s Aunt Dinah’s Pledge (first staged in 1850) (132). More subtly, Jones follows the proslavery imagination’s development through the slow fuzzing of William “Billy” Lee’s image in portraits of George Washington. Jones follows renderings of Lee, who Washington bought in 1768, from 1780s neoclassical battlefield paintings, where Lee appears distinctive as Washington’s “companion,” to 1790s parlor portraits, where “Billy Lee stands” as a nondescript servant “in waiting” (105). For Jones, these aesthetic changes resonate politically: “not only were black people incapable of producing satisfactory forms of classically informed art and inquiry, but also they lacked the intellectual and physical ideals worthy of aesthetic treatment” (105–06). Methodologically, limning the depths of early national performance as Jones does means attending to the performances themselves, their means and modes of production, their reception (popular and critical), and the interplay between the three. Throughout, Captive Stage emphasizes the intentionality behind the proslavery imagination’s proliferation: their “producers not only hoped the figure of the submissive and virtuous African [End Page 201] (American) would help rectify the villainies of white society; they also wished that figure might serve as a model of free black subjectivity” (125). Pointedly, Jones notes Seymour’s characterizations in Aunt Dinah were a “matter of authorial and spectatorial choice, because in [Mary] Chellis’ novel Edgar [a central black character] speaks more like his white counterparts” (127). Elsewhere, Jones reads Barnum’s buying and selling slaves as banal business in The Adventures of an Adventurer (1841) in order to probe the “slave buyer’s gaze” informing Barnum’s shows and audience expectations (94). Captive Stage’s theoretical sophistication and depth of research also shine as Jones critiques previous scholarship on blackface minstrelsy...

Islamophobia as a Racism

The distinction between xenophobia and racism is sometimes used to deny that Islamophobia is a racism. I challenge this strategy by tracing that distinction back to the formation of the term racism by Franz Boas, Julian Huxley, and Ashley Montagu, that culminated in the UNESCO Statement on Race in 1950. By showing the connection between their understanding of racism and the deployment in this context of further distinctions, such as that between race and religion, or that between nature and culture, and by recalling the ideological purpose the use of these distinctions were intended to serve, I deploy a genealogical approach to show that Islamophobia is a racism. Racism cannot be identified through the use of analytically established distinctions when what is at issue is the discriminatory behavior which is at its heart. Antiracism needs to learn to be as flexible in its thinking as racism appears to be.