While the mainstreaming of the far right is attracting growing scholarly interest based on its contemporary relevance, the role that far-right self-representation strategies play in this process has seen limited engagement. In this article, we argue that far-right actors employ a post-fascist logic to bring their ideas closer to the mainstream. This logic rests on a dual message, whereby they attempt to outwardly distance themselves from fascism while at the same time recontextualising fascist ideas. To explore these dynamics, we use (...) a mixed-methods approach to discourse analysis to examine far-right social media posts during the 2022 Italian general election. Taking all Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts during the official campaigning period from the party and leader accounts of Lega per Salvini Premier and Fratelli d’Italia, we explored articulations of the post-fascist dyad within this context. Our findings underscore how both far-right parties ridiculed accusations of fascism and depicted themselves as ‘centre-right’, yet they commonly used fascist dog-whistles and violent anti-immigration discourse to construct a broader conspiracy narrative and portray themselves as Italy's saviour. While Italy proves a paradigmatic case, this research has wider implications for the need to explore the relationship between self-representation and mainstreaming. (shrink)

Reprinted with modification and permission from Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. The phenomenon of medical overtesting in general, and specifically in the emergency room, is well-known and regarded as harmful to both the patient and the healthcare system. Although the implications of this problem raise myriad ethical concerns, this chapter explores the extent to which overtesting might mitigate race-based health inequalities. Given that medical malpractice and error greatly increase when the patients belong to a racial minority, it is no surprise (...) that the mortality rate similarly increases in proportion to white patients. For these populations, an environment that emphasizes medical overtesting may well be the desirable medical environment until care evens out among races and ethnicities; additionally, efforts to lower overtesting in conjunction with a high rate of racist medical mythology may cause harm by lower testing when it is actually warranted. Furthermore, medical overtesting may help to assuage racial distrust. This paper ultimately concludes that an environment of medical overtesting may be less pernicious than the alternative. (shrink)

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely (...) available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty. (shrink)

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the "body politics" of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as "constantinian" entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as "racelessness," by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopolitical alternative to the nation–state's (...) politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of "nonviolent violence." Thus, Hauerwas must do something that he has been reluctant to do. He must talk about race and racism more directly, specifying how his ecclesiological theopolitics resists such forms of violence; more importantly, he must demonstrate how actual ecclesial congregations instantiate such resistance. In short, to be truly nonviolent, Hauerwas's body politics must become a politics of bodies. (shrink)

In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and (...) unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially José Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work. (shrink)

This essay explores how academics know when they are looking at something called “race.” Given that the term has an uneven history, there is some disagreement about when the concept fully emerged, and social scientists often now argue that race is implicitly at issue in public discourses, even if it does not appear overtly. I argue that there are significant continuities that allow us to recognize when race is at work; these are linked to “nature” and to colonial histories and (...) categories. This is not a static definition, because nature and colonially derived categories themselves change over time and take on new forms. (shrink)

A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis (...) reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line. (shrink)

This article uses Peirce's Critical Common-sensism to conduct social critical inquiry into racism and “colorblindness” in the U.S. I argue that “colorblindness” discourse - in its sincere, but naïve form - is an enactment of paper-doubt, where racist common-sense beliefs are supposedly eradicated, but still function unintentionally. I offer a Peircean challenge to the common dismissal of people of color's testimony regarding the prevalence of racism. Since people of color experience racism-based secondness often not experienced by whites, their testimony must (...) be embraced as indispensable to the elimination of racist belief-habits. (shrink)

A significant part of hegemonic masculinity is proving one’s heterosexuality though sexual experiences. Peer pressure to conform is particularly acute for adolescent boys and young men. We analyze interviews with 87 boys in middle school, high school, and college about how their masculinity goals and subsequent achievement of those goals influence their navigation of pressure to engage in sexual relations with girls and women to “prove” themselves. Our findings show that, while boys and young men recognize dominant notions of hegemonic (...) masculinity, most do not subscribe to those uncritically. Rather, they struggle to balance personal ideas about masculinity with consistent pressure from others to demonstrate their heterosexuality. As a result, they employ various strategies to negotiate such pressures, including avoidance, acceptance, and outright rejection of this particular expectation. These strategies, however, ultimately contribute to a broader gender culture among adolescents in which expectations and privileges associated with hegemonic masculinity that dominate U.S. culture remain largely unchallenged. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the interpretive readings that teenagers from a high socio-economic class offer for one of the most popular reality programs in Israel: Big Brother. The findings of the study demonstrate how the youth completely focused on the ‘ethnic other' in Israel. The dominant interpretations of the participants suggested open use of accounts affiliated with Orientalist discourse. The findings of the study also show that to explain the Orientalist accounts, the youth made dominant use of the neoliberal discourse. The (...) discussion section offers some thoughts on this discursive alliance between the Orientalist and neoliberal discourse. (shrink)

We argue that claims of racial progress rest upon untenable teleological assumptions founded in Enlightenment discourse. We examine the theoretical and methodological focus on progress and its historical roots. We argue research should examine the concrete mechanisms that produce racial stability and change, and we offer three alternative frameworks for interpreting longitudinal racial data and phenomena. The first sees racism as a “fundamental cause,” arguing that race remains a “master category” of social differentiation. The second builds on Glenn’s “settler colonialism (...) as structure” framework to describe race relations as a mutually constituted and place-based system of resource allocation. The third framework draws attention to racialized agency. (shrink)

The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around “racial health disparities” in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire (...) reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists’ political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

We must critically rethink race and genetics in the context of the new genetic breakthroughs and haplotype mapping. We must avoid the slippery slope of turning socially constructed racial categories into genetic realities. It is a potentially dangerous arena given the history of racialized science in the United States and globally. Indeed, the new advances must be viewed in the context of a long history of racial inequality, continuing into the current period. This is more than a question of how (...) carefully we use categories of analysis such as race. Justice and equity must be core to our considerations. There is a community stake in this work that must be seriously considered and included in decision making. A progressive and critical analysis is in order. (shrink)

Despite myths of color-blindness in the Netherlands, Black women are marginalized by mainstream expectations of racial and cultural homogeneity. I use Amsterdam Black Women as a case study to illustrate the lived experiences of women affected by this exclusion. In this space, women freely critique Dutch society through mundane moments of truth-telling, venting, and joking, which enable individual problems to rise to a community level. I explore how subtle configurations of Black feminist organizing can be key sites of healing, experimentation, (...) and political engagement. This research complicates how we understand experiences of misogynoir when race consciousness is blended in a transnational context and how Amsterdam Black Women has made possible the refusal of Dutch norms that require members to accept their oppression silently and support false narratives of progressiveness and color-blindness. (shrink)

The scientific validity of racial categories has been the subject of debate among population geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and physical anthropologists for several decades. After World War II, the rejection of eugenics, which had supported sterilization laws and other destructive programs in the United States, generated a compelling critique of the biological basis of race. The classification of human beings into distinct biological “races” is a relatively recent invention propped up by deeply flawed evidence and historically providing the foundation of racist (...) ideology and inequities of power. Social scientists’ conclusion that race is socially constructed was confirmed by genomic studies of human variation, including the Human Genome Project, showing high levels of genetic similarity within the human species. Some scholars came to believe that the science of human genetic diversity would replace race as the preeminent means of grouping people for scientific purposes. (shrink)

Public discourse on race-specific medicine typically erects a wall between the scientific use of race as a biological category and the ideological battle over race as a social identity. Scientists often address the potential for these therapeutics to reinforce a damaging understanding of “race” with precautions for using them rather than questioning their very development. For example, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, an associate professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, states, “We do see racial differences (...) between populations and shouldn’t just close our eyes. Unfortunately, race is a politically charged topic, and there will be evildoers. But the fear should not outweigh the benefit of looking.” Although it is recognized that ideology influences thesocialmeaning of race, it is usually assumed that there is a separate, prior scientific understanding of race that is not contaminated by politics. (shrink)

Public discourse on race-specific medicine typically erects a wall between the scientific use of race as a biological category and the ideological battle over race as a social identity. Scientists often address the potential for these therapeutics to reinforce a damaging understanding of “race” with precautions for using them rather than questioning their very development. For example, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, an associate professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, states, “We do see racial differences (...) between populations and shouldn’t just close our eyes. Unfortunately, race is a politically charged topic, and there will be evildoers. But the fear should not outweigh the benefit of looking.” Although it is recognized that ideology influences thesocialmeaning of race, it is usually assumed that there is a separate, prior scientific understanding of race that is not contaminated by politics. (shrink)

The article builds on a recent literature that has sought to underscore the relevance of Bourdieu’s field theory for historical-sociological analysis. It draws attention to symbolic revolutions, a concept that has been given short shrift in this literature and even in Bourdieu’s own expositions of his field-theoretical apparatus. The article argues that symbolic revolutions denote a universal mechanism of field-internal change which extends and complements a conceptual battery of mostly structural universals of fields. In a synoptic reading of Bourdieu’s field-theoretical (...) work, the article fleshes out an ideal type of symbolic revolutions, with special regard to its dialectical features. It adds further analytical purchase to the concept by highlighting continuities and parallels with the work of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Mannheim. Finally, it argues that more recent studies by other authors on transformations in the psychiatric field, the field of social and human sciences, and the political field are in fact discussing instances of symbolic revolutions. It thus shows how the concept can help identify common properties among highly heterogeneous phenomena, opening up new avenues for historical-sociological investigations that can more systematically relate the general and the particular. (shrink)

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society’s (...) resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. (shrink)

Despite constituting one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, most white Christian ethicists and theologians fail to engage the issue of white supremacy in their work. As one of the most influential and prolific Christian ethicists of the past half‐century, Stanley Hauerwas represents this tendency, and provides specific reasons for his silence. This essay analyzes those reasons, and argues that a commitment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s understandings of tradition and narrative frames his view on race and prevents his (...) engagement of racism. It then highlights the ways this reflects the broader trends of silence, abstraction, and colorblindness among white Christian ethicists when it comes to the issue. Identifying these failures, the essay concludes by suggesting that Hauerwas’s first published essay in 1969, on Black Power, provides resources for theologically engaging the problems of white supremacy today. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic research within refugee-serving institutions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this paper examines the relationship between physicians and the knowledge they produce and consume about caring for refugees from around the world. I explore the “seething presence” of race in refugee medicine, a domain of medical practice whose entanglement with racial ideology and practice has been underexamined. I consider how knowledge about refugees from different groups—whether racially laden designations like “Asian” or “African” or national markers like Congolese or Burmese—circulates in (...) clinical spaces as health-care teams diagnose and treat refugees using standards of “evidence-based” medicine. Assessing the primary literatures that refugee health-care providers use to justify varying care plans, I argue that race, while often unmentioned, structures the practice of refugee medicine. Additionally, the implicit use of race as an analytic, not racism or economic injustice, often disguises the impact of structural racism and inequality in refugee health disparities. I end with some reflections on how we might conduct a more just practice of refugee health care—and by extension, health care more generally—by shifting our gaze from the particularities of seemingly obvious cultural difference to social structure. (shrink)

In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a fire-breathing monster with three heads: one of a lion, one of a horned goat, and one of a powerful dragon. Of similar construction is the presence of three structures in US society, whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism, which are overwhelmingly represented, valued, and espoused when examining areas of progress, i.e., family income, poverty rates, high school and college graduation rates, and home ownership. This modern American three-headed beast controls, manipulates, and permeates all aspects of (...) US society irrespective of class, culture, or gender. Using critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, this critically interpretive parable draws from the ways in which whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism function in social, cultural, economic, and educational spheres. The parable tells the story of Sue Libertad and analyzes how this metaphorical Chimera, despite its ubiquity, silently permeates all aspects of her life. Not until a tragic outbreak occurs, does the hegemony of this chimera erodes and Sue. (shrink)

Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lacuna by (...) bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, it draws on the phenomenon of white ignorance, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk, on which the interests of one's epistemic community partly determine whether a belief‐forming procedure is epistemically risky. (shrink)

This article draws upon data collected as part of a 25-year longitudinal analysis of televised coverage of women’s sports to provide a window into how sexism operates during a postfeminist sociohistorical moment. As the gender order has shifted to incorporate girls’ and women’s movement into the masculine realm of sports, coverage of women’s sports has shifted away from overtly denigrating coverage in 1989 to ostensibly respectful but lackluster coverage in 2014. To theorize this shift, we introduce the concept of “gender-bland (...) sexism,” a contemporary gender framework that superficially extends the principles of merit to women in sports. Televised news and highlight shows frame women in uninspired ways, making women’s athletic accomplishments appear lackluster compared to those of men’s. Because this “bland” language normalizes a hierarchy between men’s and women’s sports while simultaneously avoiding charges of overt sexism, this article contributes to gender theory by illuminating how women can be marginalized in male-dominated, male-controlled settings via individualized merit-based assessments of talent. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that self-respect constitutes an important value, and further, serves as an important basis for equality. I also argue that under conditions of inequality-producing segregation, voluntary separation in schooling may be more likely to provide the resources necessary for self respect. Accordingly, I defend a prima facie case of voluntary separation for stigmatized minorities when equality – as equal status and treatment – is not an option under either the terms of integration or involuntary segregation.

That the issue of racism is a pressing social concern which requires serious and detailed attention is, for ethnomethodology, not a first principle from which its own inquiry is launched but rather a matter to be considered in light of how mundane actors (both professional and lay) treat that very topic. This paper explores how the assumption of an ontological distinction between social structure and individual agency is integral to the intelligibility of racism as formulated in scholarly accounts. In particular, (...) I explore how recent scholarly treatments of racism pose as problematic the diverse formulations of racial identity assembled through the deployment of various measures, and then seek to adjudicate upon the resulting inconsistency with an analytic heuristic that assumes an underlying or foundational source for the various expressions it seeks to resolve. Further, I explore examples of analytic work that makes use of first-person accounts of racially significant episodes and experiences as a means to document the formulation of the events and actions those accounts describe in terms that warrant a reading informed by the assumption of the structure-agency distinction. I relate the corroborative work that takes place in the research relationships between students and teachers with ethnomethodology’s own project to explore how the efficaciousness of analytic readings of racism entail the pervasive assumption of the structure-agency distinction in order to be rendered them with the sense they have for the various participants involved. (shrink)

This article makes an argument that using the term race and considering structural racial discrimination as such and the impacts on it of European colonialism are needed for Sweden’s observance of universal human rights. This argument is contrary to the view of the Swedish state and challenges an image of Sweden as a champion for universal human rights without any colonial history or racial problems of its own.

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina girls’ adherence (...) to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop an understanding-based argument for an explicitly political specification of the concept of race. It is argued that a specification of race in terms of hierarchical social positions is best equipped to guide causal reasoning about racial inequality in the public sphere. Furthermore, the article provides evidence that biological and cultural specifications of race mislead public reasoning by encouraging confusions between correlates and causes of racial inequality. The article concludes with a more general (...) case for incorporating empirical evidence about public reasoning into philosophical debates about competing specifications of the concept of race. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A (...) case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

Fifty years after Loving v. Virginia, oppositional attitudes toward interracial relationships are still advanced by religious institutions in the United States. Extant social science literature characterizes these attitudes as generated largely by Evangelical and Christian nationalist traditions where members harbor negative attitudes toward interracial relationships. Hidden behind this characterization are the significant, but less obvious ways in which non-Evangelical denominations construct and disseminate similar attitudes. Through discourse analysis and digital interviews with LDS women of color, this study uses the Church (...) of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an entry point for examining intermarriage discourses in other faith traditions. Findings highlight that LDS messaging about interracial relationships shifted over time, integrating multiple racial frames in ways that expanded the scope of LDS racism with especially harsh implications for LDS women of color. Broader theoretical implications for the study of race, gender, and religion are discussed. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze how science is discursively attached to certain parts of the world and certain “kinds of people,” i.e., how scientific knowledge is culturally connected to the West and to whiteness. In focus is how the power technology of coloniality organizes scientific content in textbooks as well as how science students are met in the classroom. The empirical data consist of Swedish science textbooks. The analysis is guided by three questions: if and how the colonial history of (...) science is described in Swedish textbooks; how history of science is described; how the global South is represented. The analysis focuses on both what is said and what is unsaid, recurrent narratives, and cultural silences. To discuss how coloniality is organizing the idea of science eduation in terms of the science learner, previous studies are considered. The concepts of power/knowledge, epistemic violence, and coloniality are used to analyze how notions of scientific rationality and modernity are deeply entangled with a colonial way of seeing the world. The analysis shows that the colonial legacy of science and technology is not present in the textbooks. More evident is the talk about science as development. I claim that discourses on scientific development block out stories problematizing the violence done in the name of science. Furthermore, drawing on earlier classroom studies, I examine how the power of coloniality organize how students of color are met and taught, e.g., they are seen as in need of moral fostering rather than as scientific literate persons. (shrink)

Previous research on gender and political leadership has narrowly defined gender consciousness, failing to account for the broader commitments, concerns, and loyalties held by women of color. In this article, the author calls for an intersectional approach to analyzing the gender consciousness of political leaders. She presents findings from four months of participant observation in a Latina candidate’s campaign for city council. The author finds that the campaign presented an intersectional consciousness in the candidate’s messages, using gendered discourses to frame (...) her commitment to issues of greatest concern to Hispanic and low-income communities. The campaign’s mobilization efforts targeted both women and Hispanics, but focused most of its resources into courting the vote of middle- and upper-class white women. Contrary to recent claims that intersectionality has outlived its usefulness as an analytic tool, the author argues that intersectionality remains an underutilized and much-needed framework for helping to close gaps in the understanding of political life. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe report the findings of an experimental study that tested the contributions of semiotic and critical discourse studies on immigration. Two-way analyses of variance were conducted to examine the effects of immigration terminology on measures of attribution and empathy. Our experiment revealed a statistically significant difference in attribution. Participants who received a narrative prompt with the term ‘illegal immigrant’ evaluated the character's situation with internal attribution, and thus deserving of any negative outcomes, such as racial profiling, deportation, and separation from (...) one's family. This finding is consistent with studies that have reported the concrete effects of immigrant labels on public opinion and policy, as migrants become scapegoats for macro-structural forces. Our experiment did not reveal an effect on empathy, demonstrating the complicated symbolic and material effects produced by immigration discourse. (shrink)

This essay brings Critical Whiteness Studies into liberationist Christian ethics in order to analyze white Protestant responses to the 1969 Black Manifesto, which demanded reparations from white churches. The essay's primary argument is that the absence of a sense of white moral agency among white Protestants manifested itself in behaviors and rhetoric that ensured whiteness went unacknowledged, which caused Protestant responses to the Manifesto to fail. A related argument is that white behavior and rhetoric were particularly dramatic because of the (...) call for reparations. Reparations assume that race is a material relationship in which there has been a perpetrator and a victim, rendering the acknowledgment of white agency unavoidable. This essay thus analyzes several ways in which whites can be seen turning away from white selves, turning a scrutinizing gaze instead to Black selves and, in the process, absenting white agency from the work of racial justice. (shrink)

Integrating a historical perspective into studies of prejudicial attitudes facilitates the interpretation of paradoxical findings of the kind cited in the target article. History also encourages research to move beyond the study of prejudice and to consider institutional and structural forces that maintain social inequities. Multilevel approaches can study these factors in both field and laboratory studies.

The following case study utilizes in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation data in order to examine how color-blindness operates in a diverse Christian fraternity. The color-blind ideology functions in two distinct ways: to authenticate the fraternity’s collective religious identity as an inclusive Christian community and to obscure within-group racial inequalities reproduced through tokenizing racist jokes aimed at its non-white members. Color-blind statements allow members to attribute their organization’s racial diversity to their accepting religious doctrine, while also making problems of race (...) within the organization difficult to address. This article provides a theoretical contribution by highlighting the dire implications of ignoring race in diverse religious groups, particularly problematic within the “edgy” joking subculture of Christian fraternities. (shrink)

Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritized communities of color are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of environmental crises and the solutions proposed to remedy them. The participation and subsequent erasure of non-White youth activists and organizers within environmental sustainability struggles, and their subsequent erasure in global media coverage on climate activism has complicated any neat hierarchy of single concerns facing humanity. How is it that White and Western climate activists come to be the faces of the global youth (...) climate movement? This essay examines the salience of race to the education and framing of environmental and sustainability efforts. It suggests that the separation of environmental concerns from the socio-political (and thus racial) contexts that produce them not only further marginalizes the contributions of non-White activists and the communities that they represent, but also engenders a violently White, and thus narrow, vision of a global, Green future. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)