Understandings Of Race Research Articles

Rethinking the Coloniality of Race: Blood Purity and the Politics of Periodization

The coloniality of power stands as a major framework for theorizing race within the context of Latin America, providing an influential account of the origin of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Without abandoning the task of theorizing the ways in which race functions in Latin America, this article asks: what is obscured by an insistence on 1492 as the moment when race emerged, and what different understandings of race can be made available by connecting the colonization of the Americas to a different set of temporal and spatial referents? Specifically, I develop a “prismatic” approach to analyze the impact of fifteenth-century Iberian blood purity statutes on the development of race without positing these as the new, singular origin of race. This article thus suggests an alternative genealogy of racialization while providing a critical engagement with the coloniality of power’s account of race.

Making moral and economic inferior others: Everyday racialization of Asian migrants in South Korea

Recent studies have explored racialization among groups with subtle or no phenotypical differences; however, a crucial connection to racial capitalism remains unexplored. This article investigates the everyday racialization of migrants in Wongok-dong, a multicultural neighbourhood in South Korea, using narratives gathered from research participants through interviews, participant observations, and group discussions. Specifically, the study examines how Asian migrants, including ethnic Korean return migrants, are racialized attached to negative meanings such as fly-tipping, backward, and poor in host Korean residents’ narratives. Furthermore, the study scrutinizes the influence of the hierarchical worldview of ‘seonjinguk’ (developed/advanced country) and ‘hujinguk’ (underdeveloped/backward country) on the host Korean residents’ perceptions, reinforcing the Korean residents’ feeling of superiority over Asian migrants. In analyzing the Koreans’ narratives within the broader political-economic context of Asian labour migration, the author argues that Asian migrants are viewed as morally and economically inferior by the host Koreans in everyday discourse. By linking Asian labour migration as a facet of racial capitalism and developmental worldview and ordinary people’s perceptions of Asian migrants in Korea, this research deepens our understanding of racialization ‘beyond colour and the West’ and its ties to the broader discursive and political economic system.

Josephine Butler in Paris: Sex and Race in the Early Campaign to Abolish Regulated Prostitution, 1870–1880

Abstract: During the 1870s, Josephine Butler brought her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts to Paris, the birthplace of regulated prostitution. While in Paris, Butler and her allies refined their arguments against regulated prostitution using the Paris morals police as their primary example. As they did so, these activists came to increasingly radical conclusions about the danger of police power more generally. However, the French context not only pushed Butler toward greater skepticism regarding the police but also to an increasingly racialized understanding of that danger. In order to play to French natalist fears, Butler argued that reducing police power over female prostitutes was necessary to preserve European racial health.

Discursive Violence Analysis: Epistemological Advances in Qualitative Research

This article outlines a new methodological approach, Discursive Violence Analysis (DVA). Discursive Violence Analysis is a qualitative methodology that is the conceptual convergence of Foucauldian and Fairclough Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Critical Legal Studies that operationalizes systemic oppression. This conceptual framework expands the existing repository of qualitative methodology that recalibrates how researchers identify, qualify, and interpret various disparate discursive social practices as evidence of racism. The DVA frames how scholars interrogate racism and how racism is institutionalized and codified within education and networking social systems. This article aims to provoke an inclusive and empirical engagement on ways to reimagine epistemology within education scholarship—suggesting that ways of knowing racism and understanding racism have experiential origins. Discursive Violence Analysis is an alternative qualitative means of identifying and describing the fundamental sophistications of discourses that steer, normalize, and legitimize racism. This article begins with a researcher reflexivity that foregrounds my journey toward developing DVA—briefly revisiting my experience as a doctoral candidate. Secondly, this article transitions into a “how-to” guide, mapping the conceptual and methodological process. And lastly, this article ends by explaining the critical assumptions of DVA and research queries for emerging scholars.

A LatCrit Analysis of Latina Collegians’ Recollections of Racism in Educational Spaces

ABSTRACT Often noted in educational scholarship is Latinx/a/o students’ experiences of racism that they encounter from peers, faculty, and staff within college contexts. Less discussed, however, are the persistent long-term effects of everyday, racist messages on Latinx/a/o students they received in PreK–12 years and how these forms of marginalization in turn affect how they navigate through college. Using a narrative methodological approach and Latino critical race theory as a framework, we centered the experiences of 12 Latina college students to investigate this question. Findings revealed how these Latinas’ experiences of racism in PreK–12 were shaped by interactions involving family, relying upon their mothers’ teachings in the process. However, when they transitioned to college, their understandings of racism as previously informed by their mothers evolved and became more complex. We then provide implications for practice.

From dematerialising race to distorting decoloniality: development-as-imperialism and Hindu supremacy

This article explores how race in international development currently operates globally. It is not simply a discursive legacy of colonialism but also inextricably embedded in contemporary processes of imperialist extraction and accumulation, which the architecture of development both legitimises and extends. The article argues for deeper engagement with Marxist thinkers located in the Global South in contemporary theorisations of race in development. In the context of multiple anti-racist and decolonial movements globally, many mainstream development actors are claiming to engage with questions of racism within their organisations. This is explored through an analysis of several texts produced by the British Overseas Network for Development (Bond), a large network of organisations working on international development in Britain, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2020. While contradictions within these texts evidently reflect internal contestations over understandings of racism and anti-racism, they ultimately propose the adoption of diversity-based ‘solutions’ to racism and coloniality in development. These are analysed in the context of a long line of initiatives to relegitimise colonialism and development in order to sustain racialised structures of global capital accumulation. The essentialisation inherent in these approaches facilitates the appropriation of notions of decoloniality by forces of Brahmanical Hindu supremacism in India, which are closely tied to racialised and racialising global corporate capital. The second part of the article explores these processes, highlights the synergies between anti-caste and anti-racist thinking about capital and labour, and argues that Hindu supremacism incorporates, is sustained and strengthened by, and in turn feeds global supremacist ideologies.

Epistemic exclusion: A theory for understanding racism in faculty research evaluations.

Despite institutional efforts, growth in the number of faculty of color has largely plateaued, limiting research innovation and other benefits of diversity. In this article, we seek to understand structural barriers to faculty equity by (a) detailing a theory of epistemic exclusion within academia and (b) applying the theory of epistemic exclusion to the specific context of faculty departmental reviews of scholarly research (e.g., annual review, promotion and tenure review). Epistemic exclusion is a form of scholarly devaluation that is rooted in disciplinary biases about the qualities of rigorous research and identity-based biases about the competence of marginalized group members. These biases work in tandem to systemically and disproportionately exclude marginalized scholars (e.g., people of color, women) from the academy. In the context of faculty departmental reviews, epistemic exclusion can happen in formal systems of evaluation through criteria, metric, and application exclusion. It can also occur informally during interpersonal interactions and communications through legitimacy, contribution, and comprehension exclusion. In this article, we detail each of these types of exclusion, how they may interact with each other, and their consequences. We assert that epistemic exclusion threatens the diversification of academia and offer suggestions for equitable evaluation practices and reducing epistemic exclusion within higher education broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Where Did Hegel Go Wrong on Race?

AbstractWhere exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of Hegel's system. The textual placement of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race.

Racism in the “colony”: Towards appreciating race fluidity and racialization in social psychology of racism

AbstractRace is a significant means through which individuals and groups relate to each other. A problematic instance of its significance is colonialism and all the destruction it brought with it. In this paper, I explore how knowledge about race and racism from settings that were erstwhile colonized can enrich current understandings and approaches to studying race and racism in social psychology. I advance the possibility of mutual learning and sharing of theoretical and methodological practices for researchers who examine race and racism in colonizing or settler‐colonial settings and those in erstwhile colonized settings. I do so by first, locating the centrality of Whiteness for the very development of race categories and the shaping of psychology as a discipline. Second, I discuss how race and racism are examined in (primarily) Euro‐American contexts, with a focus on engagement with Whiteness by Critical Race Psychologists and social constructionist researchers. Third, I outline alternative ways of engaging with race and race categories identified in erstwhile colonized places. I end with how this latter informs our understandings of race and racism, and possibilities for mutual learning.

RHETORICAL LISTENING AS A PEDAGOGICAL TOOL IN HIGHER EDUCATION: EXPLORING THE BLACK PETE DEBATE IN FLANDERS

ABSTRACT Discussing issues around race and racism often leads to unproductive stances such as defensiveness, denial, guilt, blame, or dysfunctional silence. Effectively addressing these stances is crucial for productive debate and action toward racial understanding and the undoing of racism. While numerous scholarship and professional development programs focus on critical and anti-racist pedagogies in higher education to tackle these unproductive stances, overcoming dichotomous thinking (i.e., “us” versus “them”) and shifting the focus from individual stances to more systemic perspectives remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this article proposes the implementation of “rhetorical listening” as a powerful pedagogical tool that generates new vocabularies and facilitates personal and social transformation. The article explores how rhetorical listening can be conceptualized and operationalized as a pedagogical tool in a cultural studies course, specifically encouraging students to reposition themselves when engaging with societal issues related to race, such as the Black Pete debate in Flanders.

By Medical Students, for Medical Students: A Narrative Medicine Antiracism Program.

Medical schools have sought to incorporate concepts of race and racism in their curricula to facilitate students' abilities to grapple with healthcare disparities in the United States; however, these efforts frequently fail to address implicit bias or equip students with cultural humility, reflective capacity, and interpersonal skills required to navigate racialized systems in healthcare. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate an antiracism narrative medicine (NM) program designed by and for preclinical medical students. Preclinical medical students at a single center were eligible to participate from June-July 2021. Program evaluation included a postprogram qualitative interview and electronic survey. The semistructured interview included questions about program experience, lessons learned, and perspectives on antiracism curricula in medical education. Interviews were qualitatively analyzed using open and axial coding. Survey data were analyzed with descriptive statistics. A total of 30 students registered. All (100%) respondents reported "somewhat true" or "very true" in the postprogram survey when asked about their ability to reflect on their own racial identity, racial identity of others, and influence of their racial identity on their future role as a healthcare worker through the program. Qualitative analysis revealed 3 themes: (1) curricular engagement; (2) racism and antiracism in medicine; and (3) group experience. Subthemes included: meaningful theoretical content; multimodal works and unique perspectives; race, identity, and intersectionality; deeper diversity, equity, and inclusion engagement; reconstructive visions; future oriented work; close reading and writing build confidence in discomfort; community and support system; and authentic space among peer learners. This virtual, peer-facilitated antiracism NM program provided an engaging and challenging experience for participants. Postprogram interviews revealed the program deepened students' understanding of racism, promoted self-reflection and community building, and propagated reconstructive visions for continuing antiracism work.

Embedded Classed and Raced Academic Capitalism in an Innovative “Solution” to College Costs: Income Share Agreements at two Public AAU Research Universities

College affordability concerns have led to new “solutions’’ for financing college costs, such as income share agreements (ISAs). Drawing on a racialized understanding of academic capitalism, we explore the intersection of higher education, markets, and the state in how ISAs are marketed by two public universities. We find ISAs are advertised as market-based solutions, framing universities as altruistic problem-solvers and students as philanthropic investors. Yet, we also find that institutions’ website promotion of ISAs is raced and classed, targeting current “traditional,” White, upper-middle class students. Finally, we compare institutional narratives to federal guidance regarding ISAs, revealing further blurring between the public sector and private marketplace.

Feeling the Threat of Race in Education: Exploring the Cultural Politics of Emotions in CRT-Ban Political Discourses

Recent attacks on critical race theory (CRT) aim to limit discussion and understanding of race (and its intersection with class, gender, and power). Racial dialogues can be uncomfortable for those who benefit from power, suggesting that resistance to CRT or any discussion of race and power in education is rooted in emotions. This study examines the role of racialized emotions in public policy discourse that surrounds CRT bans in education that have been proposed, and in many cases, passed across the United States. Focusing on four early-adopting states of the bans, the findings reveal how emotionalities of whiteness are tacitly endorsed, invited, and animated within racialized politics, as well as how these emotionalities might be disrupted.

“Not Just Made for My Pure Entertainment”: Social Justice Movies as Tools for Fueling Consciousness, Conversations, Change

Social justice movies can offer nuanced depictions of causes affecting a society. Following the murder of George Floyd, issues surrounding racial inequality once again rose to the fore and captured widespread attention. With a recognition of this, we undertook a study to understand viewers’ perceptions of social justice movies that center on racial injustice against the Black community and the influence these movies have on audiences’ understanding of racism. Our results reveal that social justice movies fulfill a crucial function of allowing people to reflect on social injustice, especially as there are limited “formal” opportunities to learn about racial inequality. Additionally, in spite of fictional and real-life accounts of racial injustice, respondents are hopeful–though that hope is tempered–that truly, there will be equal rights among both Black and White people in the U.S.

‘Real National Work’: The Politics of Nazi Race Science in Upper Silesia, 1934–1942

Abstract This article analyses the political and scientific controversy surrounding a race science project undertaken by the anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt under National Socialism. Beginning in 1934, Eickstedt and his team of assistants conducted a series of racial studies on the population of Upper Silesia, a contested borderland in East Prussia. Motivated by a nationalist desire to counter the work of Polish anthropologists in the region, Eickstedt argued that the population of Upper Silesia belonged predominantly to the so-called ‘Nordic race’ and that the territory was thus fundamentally German. Nazi officials, however, viewed the Silesian studies with alarm, since the results also appeared to show that people in the area were a racial mixture and that the ‘Nordic race’ made up less than 40 per cent of the population in some locales. They worried that Eickstedt’s studies could undermine Germany’s territorial claims in the region and threaten national unity. The ensuing controversy presents a case in which the anthropological concept of ‘race’, rather than serving its usual role in Nazi thinking as the biological underpinning of the Volk (or people), threatened to undermine its coherence. The reaction to Eickstedt’s Silesian studies demonstrates a lack of consensus on race within the Nazi system, suggesting that understandings of race in Nazi Germany were neither as coherent nor as uniform as the paradigm of the ‘racial state’ has assumed.

Which History and Social Science Concepts Should Inform Health Professions Education?

Teaching and learning patient advocacy in academic health centers requires critical engagement with social, political, and cultural conceptions of racial difference. This article considers understandings of race and racism typically drawn upon in health care and suggests which historical and social science-based approaches should be used in health professions teaching and learning.

Teorias em Psicologia Social: Explicações Intraindividuais na Análise do Racismo no Brasil

Abstract This article analyses four classic intra-individual theories in social psychology: Authoritarian Personality, Closed Mind Hypothesis, Social Dominance, and Aversive Racism. The article aims to answer three questions: (1) how classical and modern theories of psychology have explained racism over the years; (2) to what extent such theories have been used to understand racism/racial prejudice in Brazil; and (3) what are the possibilities and limitations of their use? The methodology consisted of describing the postulates of the theories, searching CAPES-Periódicos for their frequency and type of use, and analysing their potential to ‘fit’ or ‘not fit’ for understanding racism in Brazil. The results found suggest that they are rarely used, could be employed to analyse Brazilian racism, and can make important contributions to broadening the debate and understanding of the phenomenon, with the necessary contextual adjustments. These findings are discussed based on the social psychology of racism.

Formação de psicólogos no Estado do Piauí - discutindo as questões raciais do Brasil

Abstract Objective The aim of this discussion was to present how racial issues are treated with in some higher education courses in Psychology in the state of Piauí, Brazil. Method Our methodology involved qualitative analysis of the texts of the institutional curricular documents of these programs. We discussed the implications arising from the racial theme from a historical perspective, from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, a period in which psychology was debating the Brazilian racial issue, as it was developing as an independent science, a situation in which the influence of other sciences, such as medicine, allowed psychological knowledge to be used to validate theories that were intended to defend scientific racism. Results The results of the analysis showed that the issue of race is not explicitly addressed in these courses. Conclusion Our conclusions indicate that we still need to overcome the challenge of understanding racism as a serious problem whose consequences affect society as a whole and that the discussion of these curricular absences is irrefutably relevant for the training of psychologists in a state like Piauí where 76.5% of the population is made up of Brazilians of African descent.

The Digital Contestation of Racialized Nationhood in Russia

This article offers an account of how digital-media communication enables the negotiation of nationhood from the bottom up. It explains how conservative understandings of national belonging can be challenged and co-constructed in the process of public communication over a given discursive event. Using a discourse-historical approach and multimodal critical discourse analysis focused on Manizha’s performance on the Eurovision Song Contest, the author shows the role of race, gender, citizenship, and origins for the construction of a sense of national belonging in the Russian Federation right on the eve of the full-scale war with Ukraine. The author argues that despite the commonly shared racialized understanding of Russian nationhood and the state-imposed conservative values that shape it, there was a dynamic toward a more inclusive understanding of national belonging that was advanced by some popular celebrities and picked up, bottom-up, by minority groups and liberal-minded RUnetizens.

Teaching Racial Reckoning: The CRT Panic as a Challenge and an Answer

Regular media coverage and social media discussion about Black Lives Matter, prison abolition, racialized police violence, and voter disenfranchisement mean that students arrive to our classes already primed to discuss and reckon with questions of racial justice and racial oppression and privilege. At the same time, we have also observed a groundswell of white Americans mobilizing in defense of white supremacy. Although this reckoning has been long in the making, recent successes of a violent and increasingly mainstream political movement have created new challenges for instructors teaching about racism. In this teaching note, I reflect on an experience with students who completed a “knowledge assessment survey” and how this was leveraged into a productive conversation about Critical Race Theory (CRT). More broadly, I suggest that discussion of politicized topics poses some challenges, but also presents opportunities for demonstrating the importance of critical race perspectives and prompts students to reflect on how their understandings of race are derived from their social worlds.