Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh and (...) Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the ideologies that emerge when disability and LGBTQ rights advocates' ubiquitous calls for visibility collide. I argue that contemporary visibility politics encourage the production of post-racial and post-spatial ideologies. In demanding visibility, disability and LGBTQ rights advocates ignore, ironically, visible markers of difference and assume that being “out, loud, and proud” is desirable trans-geographically. I bring together disability studies and queer rural studies—fields that have engaged in remarkably little dialogue—to analyze activist calls for LGBTQ and (...) disability visibility. The discourses evident in such calls transcend movements and virtual spaces and emerge as some of the LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest whom I interviewed discuss their relations to LGBTQ sexuality and disability. I analyze several cases to illustrate how visibility discourses compel the erasure of material bodies, and in the process, render certain experiences obsolete. I close by considering how my critique of visibility discourses might influence critical discussions of identity politics more broadly. (shrink)

This book explores the problematic relationship between reconciliation and the continuance of violence and oppression. Frankowski engages with contemporary issues in philosophy of race, African American philosophy, and critical race theory in connection with German idealism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism.

Ethnicity and racial identity formation are elements of our social world. In recent years, there has been numerous works on ethnicity and race. Both concepts are controversial in different disciplines. The controversies around these concepts have been heated up by scholars who have devoted their time to the discourse of ethnicity and race, and to understand the ascription of both concepts. Ethnicity and race have been causes of conflict, prejudice and discrimination among various ethnic and racial groups around the world. (...) Thus, this paper is an attempt to discuss and critically reflect about race, ethnicity and a post-racial/ethnic future in line with Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s idea of the post-racial future. (shrink)

Silver medalist for the IPPY award for Current Events in 2016! _Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams_ is a moral call, a harkening and quickening of the spirit, a demand for recognition for those whose voices are whispered. Julius Bailey straddles the fence of social-science research and philosophy, using empirical data and current affairs to direct his empathy-laced discourse. He turns his eye to President Obama and his critics, racism, income inequality, poverty, and xenophobia, guided by a prophetic thread that calls (...) like-minded visionaries and progressives to action. The book is an honest look at the current state of our professed city on a hill and the destruction left on the darker sides of town. (shrink)

Here, the claim that Middle Eastern persons are racialized is a response to complexities that define the United States ; namely, the language of race is seen as antiquated or misleading, and thus it fails to capture MENA American experiences, leading some to call for different terminology. The author argues that we should call social-political violence committed against MENA people racism because to name it otherwise is to ground the experience in an incomplete description which affords lighter moral responsibility and (...) omits historical conflict. The article first elaborates the problem of racial conflict in the US and the specific problem of MENA racialization. It then responds with a historical argument that emphasizes key genealogical markers in the co-emergence of orientalism, colonialism, and racialization. The article closes by contrasting the idea of race with competing terms to defend its use on descriptive and normative grounds. (shrink)

The Myth of Post-Racial America provides a history of race and racism in the United States.

Ethnicity and racial identity formation are elements of our social world. In recent years, there has been numerous works on ethnicity and race. Both concepts are controversial in different disciplines. The controversies around these concepts have been heated up by scholars who have devoted their time to the discourse of ethnicity and race, and to understand the ascription of both concepts. Ethnicity and race have been causes of conflict, prejudice and discrimination among various ethnic and racial groups around the world. (...) Thus, this paper is an attempt to discuss and critically reflect about race, ethnicity and a post-racial/ethnic future in line with Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s idea of the post-racial future. (shrink)

I critically examine the eliminativist theories of race or racism, and the behavioral theory of racism, which provide the theoretical foundation, respectively, for the nominalist and substantive conceptualizations of the idea of a post-racial era. The eliminativist theories seek to eliminate the concepts of “race” or “racism” from our discourse. Such elimination indicates a nominalist sense of the idea of a post-racial era. The behavioral theory of racism argues that racism must be manifested in obviously harmful actions. And because such (...) harmful actions are not prevalent today, this implies that we are in a post-racial era in a substantive sense. I conceptualize some subtle forms of racism that are prevalent today, which cannot be captured by the behavioral theory, but can best be captured by doxastic theories of racism. I conceptualize a substantive idea of a post-racial era, and then argue based on such conceptualization, that we are not in a post-racial era because subtle forms of racism are still prevalent today. (shrink)

This article investigates the critical potential of a contemporary dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017-), a U.S. television series adapted from a popular novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1985). The text is widely understood as a feminist intervention that speaks to ongoing struggles against gender oppression, but in this article I consider the invitations that the show offers its viewers in treating race the way that it does, and consider what it means to refuse these invitations in pursuit of (...) a critical feminist understanding of authority, legal subjectivity, and violence. Drawing on the recent turn to genre, my reading focuses on how whiteness is reproduced through this cinematic text and its inculcation of particular ways of seeing, modes of identification and attachment. The Handmaid’s Tale’s post-racial aesthetic means that its thematic engagement with gender, sexuality and resistance actively disavows national and international histories of racist state violence and white supremacy. Its problematic feminism is thus uniquely instructive for understanding how whiteness is reproduced in contemporary (neo)liberal configurations of legal subjectivity and state authority. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the color line that is (...) meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that this hostility takes the form of a specious embracement of law and lawfulness. “Illegal” in this sense not only captures the actions of those who enter the United States through clandestine or informal means, but, in light of the history of immigration and citizen- ship law, the term operates as a racial trope that designates non-white status, thus marginalizing and alienating certain immigrants from ongoing nation-formation processes. I explain the source for anti-immigrant hostility in the United States, which I take to be connected to the longevity of white normativity as the basis for American identity. I then critically assess how the idea of national belonging is crucial to the perpetuation of white-ways-of-being, especially when citizenship has historically been a venue for the embodiment of racial and even colonial privilege. I conclude by posing several questions about the nature of racial identities and racism that suggest new avenues for further research on racial embodiment in a “postracial” era. pp. 65–90. (shrink)

Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. This edited volume looks at RBF from the perspectives of graduate students, middle level academics, and chief diversity officers at major institutions of learning.

Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. This edited volume looks at RBF from the perspectives of graduate students, middle level academics, and chief diversity officers at major institutions of learning.

This article argues that the University of Cape Town's decision to downgrade the relevance of race in student admissions set off a series of events and discourses that culminated in the “Rhodes Must Fall” protest movement. While the protest movement was ostensibly about the removal of Cecil John Rhodes's statue from the grounds of the university grounds, the campaign galvanized other sectors of the Black community on campus to demand transformation of the curriculum and the hiring of Black professors. The (...) ensuing racial fault lines among students, members of staff, and the administration debunked the notion that class mattered more than race in South African politics. This article argues for an approach that views race as a set of historical experiences that should be reflected in the curriculum and the hiring of more Black professors at UCT and other predominantly white universities. (shrink)

The absence of colonial and post-colonial examinations of the conflict-ravaged Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) – a Bangladesh’s distant fringe– warranted me to explore how colonial legacy facilitated the post-colonial statist approach and majoritarian Bengali supremacists’ tendencies to exploit and subjugate the distinct CHT culture. This reconnaissance endeavour finds that the history of extortion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT)indigenous peoples is a suitable example of racism victims, and thus it examines in the light of the colonial and post-colonial discourses. This (...) explorative study – based on secondary sources of data – finds the very ideas of racism practices, especially identity politics, demographic politics, and women’s subjugation, are prevalent in this postcolonial (and internally colonised) terrain. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#71-72; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2022 P 61-77. (shrink)

The quest for liberation of all South Africans from past racial divides since the inception of democratic government has been prioritised for more than 24 years now. Although this is an ongoing process and some achievements have been made to this end, it is yet evident that the impact of racism and apartheid still influence many lives both in and outside the churches. The Gereformeerde Kerke in South Africa is amongst the churches that officially removed the barriers of apartheid to (...) have one united church. The relevant question would be to ask if relatively good progress had been made towards uniting these churches. This article intends to unveil evidence in the form of case studies that reconciliation and unity are still a journey which the members of the mentioned church should embark on. There are members of some congregations under this church who are still held within the culture of separation and hence they make it difficult to unify the church. The foundation for reconciliation had been laid down, but the challenge is now to build unity upon it. Despite some racial signs still visible in some churches, this article concerns itself in looking a place where unity, peace and reconciliation are expected to be at the top of the agenda. The article attempts to propose some strategies towards unity within the GKSA. Practical case studies will be consulted to indicate the existence of the challenge of racism in the GKSA, despite efforts to eradicate it from government and other stakeholders concerned. (shrink)

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...) constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era. (shrink)

Less than thirty years ago, South Africa still had laws strictly prohibiting “interracial” intimacy. In this study, participants shared stories of living in Cape Town with a partner of a different “race” and invoked spatial metaphors, of boundaries and border crossing, describing their experiences in cartographical, “landscaped” language. This article reflects on how these metaphors relate to deeper social dynamics that shape the lives of those in “race”—trangressing relationships, and their own sense of agency in managing the correlative inner landscape. (...) We suggest that these relationships are symbolic sites where society performs processes of ongoing racialization. (shrink)

This commentary uses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that new technoscientific processes are instituting an ‘end to race’ as a provocation to discuss the epistemological transformation of race in algorithmic culture. We situate Gilroy’s provocation within the context of an abolitionist agenda against racial-thinking, underscoring the relationship between his post-race polemic and a post-visual discourse. We then discuss the challenges of studying race within regimes of computation, which rely on structures that are, for the most part, opaque; in particular, modes of (...) classification that operate through proxies and abstractions and that figure racialized bodies not as single, coherent subjects, but as shifting clusters of data. We argue that in this new regime, race emerges as an epiphenomenon of processes of classifying and sorting – what we call ‘racial formations as data formations’. This discussion is significant because it raises new theoretical, methodological and political questions for scholars of media and critical algorithmic studies. It asks: how are we supposed to think, to identify and to confront race and racialisation when they vanish into algorithmic systems that are beyond our perception? What becomes of racial formations in post-visual regimes? (shrink)

The former South African first black President’s vision aimed to unite and fight racial tensions and inequalities by introducing and envisioning a South Africa for all who live in it. However, twenty-five years later, the post-apartheid South Africa is riddled with cancerous ills such as racial inequality, racism, and failure to bridge the gap between the poor and the rich. This paper will attest to the notion that the 1994 rainbow nation ideology is dead because racial inequality is still a (...) norm, and that the implication of the negotiated settlement has preserved racial inequality and its core racist foundations. The ideology of the “rainbow nation” has failed to erode racial inequality in South Africa. It has failed to close the gap between the poor and the rich and most importantly, the “rainbow nation” ideology has shown that it was a one-sided concord dependent on whose privilege matters most and not a collective view to addressing racial inequality. Black South Africans have, therefore, continued to bear the brunt of poverty, unemployment and inequality compared to white South fricans. I argue that the “rainbow nation” has failed to address racial inequality and build the imperative ideology of sameness and togetherness. I will employ a standard method of applied analytical philosophy to perform this task, which is grounded in critical conceptual analysis and systematic rational argumentation. (shrink)

A recent development in philosophical scholarship on reparations for black chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation is reliance upon social science in normative arguments for reparations. Although there are certainly positive things to be said in favor of an empirically informed normative argument for black reparations, given the depth of empirical disagreement about the causes of persistent racial inequalities, and the ethos of 'post-racial' America, the strongest normative argument for reparations may be one that goes through irrespective of how we (...) ultimately explain the causes of racial inequalities. By illuminating the interplay between normative political philosophy and social scientific explanations of racial inequality in the prevailing corrective justice argument for black reparations, I shall explain why an alternative normative argument, which is not tethered to a particular empirical explanation of racial inequality, may be more appealing. (shrink)

This article is book review of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in the Post-Genomic Age by Jonathan Kahn.

At the time of its publication in 2016, Edward K. Chan's The Racial Horizon of Utopia entered a field that included relatively few full-length studies of race in speculative fiction or science fiction, and even fewer of race in utopian literature. Ground-breaking in that respect and offering a compelling examination of race within utopian novels of the 1970s through 1990s, Chan's book makes a vital contribution to the field of utopian studies.Chan notes a shift in focus in post-1970s utopian fiction (...) away from delineating the workings of an imagined utopian society and toward shaping what he refers to as "the Subject of Utopia". In conjunction with this, he identifies this period as characterized by "the... (shrink)

This paper investigates continuities and changes in the definition of sickle cell disease in 1950s Brazil, taking into account that diseases have a history and are recognized as such according to the knowledge and perceptions available in a certain historical period and specific location. In the post-war era, new diagnostic tools, inheritance theories and, in particular, discussions on the concepts of race and racial relations, both nationally and internationally, were changing previous racialist and racist views. Nonetheless, the Brazilian medical interpretations (...) of sickle cell disease continued to racialize it and even use deep-rooted racist formulations to explain its symptoms or the existence of the disease. It is argued that the celebration of racial mixture and racial democracy might have concealed racist presumptions biasing the study of sickle cell disease. Although race as a biological concept gradually gave way to other genetic expressions, in Brazilian medical papers on sickle cell disease, race continued to influence the interpretation of the disease, along with the persistence of concepts of heredity through blood mixture. (shrink)

This paper investigates continuities and changes in the definition of sickle cell disease in 1950s Brazil, taking into account that diseases have a history and are recognized as such according to the knowledge and perceptions available in a certain historical period and specific location. In the post-war era, new diagnostic tools, inheritance theories and, in particular, discussions on the concepts of race and racial relations, both nationally and internationally, were changing previous racialist and racist views. Nonetheless, the Brazilian medical interpretations (...) of sickle cell disease continued to racialize it and even use deep-rooted racist formulations to explain its symptoms or the existence of the disease. It is argued that the celebration of racial mixture and racial democracy might have concealed racist presumptions biasing the study of sickle cell disease. Although race as a biological concept gradually gave way to other genetic expressions, in Brazilian medical papers on sickle cell disease, race continued to influence the interpretation of the disease, along with the persistence of concepts of heredity through blood mixture. (shrink)

The former South African first black President’s vision aimed to unite and fight racial tensions and inequalities by introducing and envisioning a South Africa for all who live in it. However, twenty-five years later, the post-apartheid South Africa is riddled with cancerous ills such as racial inequality, racism, and failure to bridge the gap between the poor and the rich. This paper will attest to the notion that the 1994 rainbow nation ideology is dead because racial inequality is still a (...) norm, and that the implication of the negotiated settlement has preserved racial inequality and its core racist foundations. The ideology of the “rainbow nation” has failed to erode racial inequality in South Africa. It has failed to close the gap between the poor and the rich and most importantly, the “rainbow nation” ideology has shown that it was a one-sided concord dependent on whose privilege matters most and not a collective view to addressing racial inequality. Black South Africans have, therefore, continued to bear the brunt of poverty, unemployment and inequality compared to white South Africans. I argue that the “rainbow nation” has failed to address racial inequality and build the imperative ideology of sameness and togetherness. I will employ a standard method of applied analytical philosophy to perform this task, which is grounded in critical conceptual analysis and systematic rational argumentation. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractIn the post-Trayvon Martin era of racial terror against Black people in the U.S., many scholars frame contemporary anti-Black racial violence in the U.S. as an injustice primarily experienced by Black men and boys. This framing, however, fails to capture the deeply entrenched reality of Black violability. Black violability encapsulates the lived and historical experiences of Black people with state-initiated and state-sanctioned violence. This essay argues for a herstorical approach, which renders visible Black women and girls, trans*, genderqueer, and queer (...) people as victims of anti-Black racial terror. (shrink)

This article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand, and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racism is treated as an individual attitude born of (...) prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. (shrink)

Following tropes of light and dark in Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, the article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as a truth-teller. Against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s works on truth-telling, the article theorizes feminist modes of truth-telling. It scrutinizes truth-making in politics while unearthing the andro-centrism in truth-telling. Under the impression of post-truth rhetoric in recent populist landscapes, the article argues for a feminist and intersectional articulation of truth-telling to disclose the gendered (...) and racialized power relations in contemporary masculinist populism. (shrink)

The historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has focused predominantly on the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and on the Anglo-American research community. By way of contrast, this article highlights the history of the concept of race from a thus far unexplored angle: from Swiss research centres and their global interconnections with racial researchers around the world. The article investigates how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed during the post-war years. It analyses what (...) resources could be mobilised that enabled researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research or even to expand them and link them to new contexts. From this perspective, the article looks at the dynamics, openness, and contingency of the European post-war period, which was less stable, anti-racist, and spiritually renewed than retrospective success stories often suggest. The pronounced internationality of Swiss racial science and its close entanglement with the booming field of human genetics in the early 1950s point to the ambiguities of the period’s political and scientific development. I argue that the impact of post-war anti-racism on science was more limited than is frequently assumed: it did not drain the market for racial knowledge on a continent that clung to imperialism and was still shaped by racist violence. Only from the mid 1950s onwards did a series of unforeseen events and contingent shifts curtail the importance of the race concept in various sectors of the human sciences. (shrink)

White liberals like to claim that they live in a post-racial society. Furthermore, they believe that most people do not sympathize with the far-right. However, it is not racism fueling right-wing extremism in North America and Western Europe but the dominant ideology, liberalism. Consequently, Slavoj Žižek argues that racism is a problem concerning “objective violence,” which he further breaks down into “symbolic violence” and “systemic violence.” These primarily target minority groups. Thus, “objective violence” best explains the West’s problematic views of (...) Muslims and Islam since it supports what Edward Said refers to as “Orientalism” and reproduces racist depictions of racialized communities. These are incredibly harmful since the West still perceives the Orient and its residents as violent, strange, and backward. These Orientalist attitudes ultimately lead to discrimination against Muslims and Arabs. Furthermore, this ideology naturalizes and legitimizes capitalist social relations while concealing racialization processes. (shrink)

The postsecular turn within feminist theory refers to a renewed attention to religion within feminist scholarship. However, rather than conceptualizing the postsecular as a new moment within feminist theorizing that breaks with a previous trend of secular feminism, this article stresses that it is important to recognize the long history of coexistence and contestations between religious and secular feminist approaches. In this article, the different reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth are examined to elucidate and reflect on the (...) complicated relationship of the religious and the secular within feminist scholarship. Three different types of feminist theoretical engagement with the story of Sojourner Truth are examined and contrasted: the implicitly secular use of the story of Sojourner Truth in black feminist scholarship and theorizing of intersectionality, the explicitly religious interpretations found in the work of feminist and womanist theologians, and the deconstructive reading by Donna Haraway. In discussing and comparing these different engagements with the story of Sojourner Truth, it is stressed that the boundaries between the religious and the secular are perhaps less clear-cut than initially imagined, and that a dialogue between secular and religious feminist approaches is very fruitful. The article closes by examining how the complex intersections of gender, religion and race in the story of Sojourner Truth can be connected to the contemporary theorizing on the racialization of religion within critical race scholarship. (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope and significance (...) of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

This volume brings together essays that reflect on ontological and moral dilemmas regarding Jewish identity and race. The reflections offered here take place in the context of post-Holocaust transformations and pay special attention to the double processes of the deracialization of Jews qua Jews and the recasting of Jews both in reracialized and in other terms. As a result, the essays bring together and create intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race and help stretch the limits of as (...) well as fill in some of the gaps in each. (shrink)

The presidential election of 2007 that sworn in Barack Obama as president of the United States of America heightened the idea that rightly, or wrongly, suggests the world has become post-racialised. I will explain how the notion of post-raciality is a distraction to the demands of racial diversity in the twenty-first century. I use the conversational thinking as an alternative method to show how the possibility of both nuances in the form of racial conflict/diversity can subsist. The difference I envisage (...) is that between highly melanated Africans and European Americans. Here, I argue that dialogue is still the most preferred option in racial conflict. However, the dialogue I propose is not a promise akin to the post-racialised, but a relationship that can exist in the midst of conflict, while at the same time acknowledging difference. (shrink)

Although it has been shown that immersive virtual reality can be used to induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body , information on whether this changes implicit interpersonal attitudes is meager. Here we demonstrate that embodiment of light-skinned participants in a dark-skinned VB significantly reduced implicit racial bias against dark-skinned people, in contrast to embodiment in light-skinned, purple-skinned or with no VB. 60 females participated in this between-groups experiment, with a VB substituting their own, with full-body visuomotor synchrony, reflected (...) also in a virtual mirror. A racial Implicit Association Test was administered at least three days prior to the experiment, and immediately after the IVR exposure. The change from pre- to post-experience IAT scores suggests that the dark-skinned embodied condition decreased implicit racial bias more than the other conditions. Thus, embodiment may change negative interpersonal attitudes and thus represent a powerful tool for exploring such fundamental psychological and societal phenomena. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses the growing literature in critical race studies, which holds that racism is permanent or incurable, and that by adopting this pessimistic view of racism, we can enact improved and healthier racialized lives. I argue that the focus on curing anti-Black racism, and the failure to do so in the civil rights era and its aftermath has left people of all races, to varying degrees, stuck in pessimistic states of racialized anger, resentment, guilt, and shame. These pessimistic (...) states have brought about an additional level of oppression for targets of racialized oppression. I call it “meta-oppression,” and it is the oppression of being oppressed. I argue that this oppression has exacerbated the effects of the social disease of racism, and it has literally affected the physiologies of many African Americans. This article provides a diagnosis of these existential and physiological states of meta-oppression and a clarification of its characteristics. This diagnosis is an initial step in a larger project of formulating and enacting effective treatments for it. I then argue that meta-oppression is a helpful diagnostic tool for clarifying the characteristics and ramifications on Blacks of US systemic racism during the post–civil rights movement period. I aim to establish meta-oppression as an existential and physiological condition that requires attention so as to expand the social imaginations of people of color and to allow us to engage in more systemic joyful affirmations of our racialized lives while still living within racist conditions. (shrink)

In this post‐9/11 era marked by religious and ethnic conflicts and the rise of cultural intolerance, ambiguities arising from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism jeopardize the delivery of culturally safe nursing care to non‐Western populations. This new social reality requires nurses to develop a heightened awareness of health issues pertaining to racism and ethnocentrism to provide culturally safe care to non‐Western immigrants or refugees. Through the lens of post‐colonial feminism, this paper explores the challenge of providing culturally (...) safe nursing care in the context of the post‐9/11 in Canadian healthcare settings. A critical appraisal of the literature demonstrates that post‐colonial feminism, despite some limitations, remains a valuable theoretical perspective to apply in cultural nursing research and develop culturally safe nursing practice. Post‐colonial feminism offers the analytical lens to understand how health, social and cultural context, race and gender intersect to impact on non‐Western populations’ health. However, an uncritical application of post‐colonial feminism may not serve racialized men's and women's interests because of its essentialist risk. Post‐colonial feminism must expand its epistemological assumptions to integrate Taylor's concept of identity and recognition and Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and unfinalizability to explore non‐Western populations’ health issues and the context of nursing practice. This would strengthen the theoretical adequacy of post‐colonial feminist approaches in unveiling the process of racialization that arises from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism in Western healthcare settings. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be (...) de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

Racial divisions, polarisation and tensions are on the rise in South Africa today. A democratic dream of a rainbow nation remains just a dream with racism continuing to raise its ugly head in the democratic South Africa, to the detriment of the rainbow dream of a united South Africa. This article seeks to probe whether South Africans should continue to sing the song of racial reconciliation in the light of the continued racial tensions and post-colonial and post-apartheid legacies and stereotypes (...) that continue to manifest in our private and public spaces. Based on an examination of the decoloniality project, Africanisation and Reformation, through literature study, the article calls for the decoloniality of faith in an effort to craft a vision for a non-racial society. This vision not only takes the importance of the redeeming memories of the 500 years of Reformation seriously, but also the notion of Africanisation and, in particular, the use of the African value systems in shaping and reconstructing a non-racial South Africa. This article taps into the resourcefulness of the Reformed faith in South Africa, as articulated in the theologies of Snyman, Tshaka and Botha, and applies them to South African discourses of decoloniality. (shrink)

Intrigued by the so-called “rebellion of the poor,” this paper traces back the current South African concern with popular protest to its reconfiguration during the last years of the apartheid order. Focusing on the discourse around grassroots resistance in the mid- to late-1980s, I begin by showing how, in juxtaposition to an ideal notion of civil society, popular mobilization had been largely delegitimized and the emancipatory politics of ungovernability recast as antidemocratic by the first few years of the post-apartheid regime. (...) In deploying particular notions of violence and culture, this discursive shift, I suggest, fed into reconstructing the ungovernable subject as the racial other of the new South Africa’s citizenry. The second part of the paper mobilizes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism to draw parallels between this process and the liberal effort to resolve the potentially conflicting principles of governing the economic subject and the subject of rights within the realm of civil society. Finally, via the postcolonial critique of liberal notions of civility and their rootedness in racial thinking, I suggest that civil society secures the governability of the population through rendering the potentially disruptive freedom of the people as the excess freedom of the racialized other. (shrink)

In this article, we present a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the online discussion board posts of a group of elementary educators as they discussed their interpretations of four historical timelines that presented different – sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory – information about the goals of the Lewis & Clark expedition and its effects on Native populations. This activity was one part of a virtual professional development course on anti-racist critical literacy pedagogy for K-8 teachers, which was structured around three (...) key concepts: 1) considering multiple perspectives can disrupt common understandings of texts; 2) issues of power determine what is present and absent in the stories authors tell; and 3) texts are social constructions that can be deconstructed and reconstructed. The teachers featured in this article worked in the same urban district and throughout their discussion, we found that they perpetuated discourses of Whiteness while simultaneously attempting to disrupt them. However, we also found discursive reconstructive potential in the ways one teacher responded to her assumptions being interrupted by a course facilitator, as well as the value of using CDA to examine teacher language. Our findings point to further directions for teacher educators working to foster racial and critical literacy. (shrink)

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a (...) large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets. (shrink)