This paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007–9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage-markets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgage-finance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers. This paper shows (...) that the emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Thus, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the financial expropriation of the working class by financial capital. The crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis – that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative. (shrink)

This paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007–9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage-markets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgage-finance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers. This paper shows (...) that the emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Thus, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the financial expropriation of the working class by financial capital. The crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis – that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative. (shrink)

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat (...) wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism. (shrink)

During the 1970s, both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks in Soviet Central Asia compared their plight to that of the Palestinians. The Stalin regime deported both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands to dispersed settlements in Central Asia. The similarities between the Soviet policies of expelling and permanently excluding the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands and similar Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are not entirely coincidental. The Zionists based their mass expulsion of Palestinians (...) in 1948 and subsequent prohibition on allowing them to return to their homes in part on the Soviet model. The similarities between the two instances of ethnic cleansing are due in large part to this conscious emulation of Stalin's methods by the Zionists. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of whether there is something morally defective with someone who sexually prefers members of a particular race or ethnic group (or someone who does not sexually desire or prefer members of a particular race or ethnic group). People with such “racial desires” are often viewed as racists, but virtually no sustained arguments have been given in support of this view. The paper reconstructs three possible arguments—those based in discrimination, exclusion, and stereotypes—that might support (...) the charge of racism. It argues that none is convincing. It further argues that only in some cases are people with racial desires racist, but that in those cases their racism is not because of their sexual desires. (shrink)

Adam Hochman has recently argued for comprehensive anti-realism about race against social kind theories of race. He points out that sceptics, often taken as archetypical anti-realists, may admit race in certain circumstances even if they are eliminativists about race. To be comprehensively anti-realist about races, which also means rejecting all ‘race talk’, he suggests that racial formation theory should be abandoned in favour of interactive constructionism. Interactive constructionism argues for the reality of racialized individuals and racialized groups to the (...) exclusion of realism about races. Its supplementation of comprehensive anti-realism is meant to give us the ability to account for all relevant phenomena of interest surrounding the question of race without having to admit that races are real in any sense. I argue that although Hochman’s interactive constructionism succeeds in establishing the existence of racialized individuals and groups, it does not do so to the exclusion of realism about social races. Furthermore, I show that his comprehensive anti-realism, even when it is supplemented with interactive constructionism, is inadequate to deal with all relevant phenomena of interest surrounding the question of race. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how racial prejudice and selective, usually inarticulate, racial discrimination influenced attempts to conduct an objective examination of charges of cruelty in the training and exhibition of performing animals in Britain in the early twentieth century. As the debate intensified, and following the appointment of a parliamentary Select Committee, one explanation often given by both sides for shortcomings in the treatment of performing animals was the alleged cruelty particularly or exclusively attributable to the “alien (...) enemy,” “foreigners,” and distinct racial groups. The Committee faced the problem of assessing attributions of real cruelty as opposed to unproven charges that may have resulted from irrational, emotive, or strategic prejudice. This paper examines the context in which such charges were made, and the degree to which they might have been introduced or resorted to in order to serve the prejudices or interests of each side in the controversy. (shrink)

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism. CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the (...) institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection. (shrink)

In Racial Prescriptions, Jonathan Xavier Inda offers a critical and timely analysis of the making of BiDil, the first drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Sibille Merz speaks to him about the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism, the legacies of scientific racism and the molecularization of biopolitics in the genomic age.

Since at least 2008 linguists and philosophers of language have started paying more serious attention to issues concerning the meaning or use of racial epithets and slurs. In an influential article published in The Journal of Philosophy, for instance, Christopher Hom (2008) offered a semantic account of racial epithets called Combinatorial Externalism (CE) that advanced a novel argument for the exclusion of certain epithets from freedom of speech protection under the First Amendment (p. 435). Also in more (...) recent work, “The Expressive Meaning of Racial Epithets: Towards A Non-Unitary Account of Expressive Meaning,” Diane Blakemore (2013) offered an alternative pragmatic account of racial epithets rooted in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory. Adam Croom (2008) has also discussed epithets before in prior work, through a consideration of a paradigmatic racial epithet directed towards Native Americans, but then moved on in subsequent work to focus on developing a more nuanced account of paradigmatic slurring terms instead (Croom 2010; Croom 2011; Croom 2012; Croom 2013; Croom 2014a; Croom 2014b; Croom under review). So the purpose of this article is to return to and extend the previous account of racial epithets provided by Croom (2008) through a consideration of another paradigmatic racial epithet, but this time one directed towards Asian Americans instead of Native Americans. Here I also offer a novel suggestion for how to differentiate between epithets and slurs, offering new insight into how epithets and slurs are both similar and different. A sample list of over 100 other racial epithets that can be accounted for by the kind of analysis presented here is provided in Croom (2008, p. 44-45). (shrink)

This article confronts the problems of establishing normative restrictive claims for delegitimizing conduct and attitudes of cultural appropriation. Using C. Thi Nguyen’s and Matthew Strhol’s intimacy account (IA) as a background, I offer an alternative of cultural adoption relying upon Alain Locke’s value theory and philosophical pluralism. The phenomenon of cultural adoption I propose develops some insights from Nguyen’s and Strohl’s IA, while critiquing their framework’s perceived limitations. By adding loyalty and intensity to the prerogatives of intimacy, the hope is (...) that a more nuanced approach to the ethical concerns of cultural adoption will be achieved. My contention is that Locke’s notions of a racial sense or kinship feeling provides stronger grounds for establishing an ethics of the passerby or what I will call non-intimate encounters. Next, I will argue that the interpersonal relations of groups cannot be interpreted as simple, but only as complex wholes. Instead of monoliths and exclusive binaries, we have to recognize variation within groups and learn to think in what Albert Murray calls “mulatto,” or a culture of novel hybrids. In the final section, I argue that Locke’s philosophy, broadly construed, operates as a contraceptive knowledge against the growing imperial apathy of populists and absolutists. We should work to abandon forms of political and epistemological violence by rejecting these forms of cultural abuse. It is my grand contention that human groups express in their differences a uniqueness that makes us distrust or admire and like each other. (shrink)

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization, a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven (...) management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education. (shrink)

In this article we investigate how Latino immigrant farmers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States navigate United States Department of Agriculture programs, which necessitate standardizing farming practices and an acceptance of bureaucracy for participation. We show how Latino immigrant farmers’ agrarian norms and practices are at odds with the state’s requirement for agrarian standardization. This interview-based study builds on existing historical analyses of farmers of color in the United States, and the ways in which their farming practices and (...) racialized identities are often unseen by and illegible to the state. This disjuncture leads to the increased racial exclusion of immigrant farmers from USDA opportunities. Such exclusions impede the transition to a “new era of civil rights,” as has been proclaimed by USDA leadership. Although efforts to address institutionalized racism on a national level may be genuine, they have failed to acknowledge this schism between rural Latino immigrants and the state, thereby inhibiting a meaningful transition in the fields, and continuing a legacy of unequal access to agrarian opportunities for non-white immigrant farmers. (shrink)

This essay puts in conversation some of Seyla Benhabib’s insights about exiled, stateless and migrant populations with ongoing discussions in critical race theory about the racial exclusions of indigenous populations and populations of colour not only in the foundations of Western modern states but also in their contemporary functioning today. The essay locates these exclusions not only in the failures of states but also in their proper functioning, that is, in their very design and constitutive structures, focusing for this (...) purpose on what is described as constitutive exclusions. The essay argues that the relationship between legal agency and social and political agency needs further articulation within Benhabib’s jurisgenerative politics in order to properly address constitutive exclusions. (shrink)

When life-saving medical resources are scarce and not everyone can be saved, is the only relevant goal saving the most lives? Or can other factors be considered, at least as tiebreakers, such as how early in life the people we don't save will die or how much future life they are likely to lose? This commentary defends a multiprinciple allocation approach that considers objectives in addition to saving more lives, including preventing early death and preventing harm in the form of (...) lost future life. Particularly compared to an arbitrary, coin-flip tiebreaker, this multiprinciple approach more effectively prevents harm, prioritizes the worst-off, mitigates socioeconomic and racial health disparities, and tracks public values regarding allocation under scarcity—and is legally sound. -/- . (shrink)

Because they are right under our nose, taken-for-granted, and essential to every person everywhere, personal names have often eluded the theoretical and analytical scrutiny they deserve. To what extent do naming practices exemplify or parallel the biopolitics of bodily inscriptions and markings such as tattoos, birthmarks, and presumed racial signatures? To what extent do names represent “technologies of the self” in the broadest sense, as both means of domination and empowerment, facilitating collective surveillance and subjugation, and the individual fashioning (...) of identity and subjectivity? Partly drawing upon indigenous contexts in the North American Arctic, this commentary discusses personal names and genealogies in relation to other technologies of belonging. Practices of naming, it is argued, are not only key elements of identification and personhood, embodied in the biosocial habitus much like other biomarkers, also they situate people in genealogies, social networks, and states. Clashes, I suggest, between different traditions and practices of naming, especially in the context of slavery and empires, illuminate with striking clarity the relevance of names as technologies of exclusion, subjugation, and belonging. (shrink)

Much of the literature on public space focuses on physical inclusion and exclusion rather than social inclusion or exclusion. In this paper, the implications of this are considered in the context of two monuments, The Volunteers/Les Bénévoles, and The Emigrant, located outside the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These monuments, while perhaps designed to celebrate Canadian multiculturalism, can be read instead as signaling Canada’s enduring commitment to white supremacy, Eurocentricity and colonization, when (...) viewed through the eyes of racialized immigrants. Thus the “public space” becomes exclusionary. In the context in which the monuments are situated, the racial subtext cannot be ignored. This article purports that images, text and placement, regardless of intention, have significant implications on public space and public demeanor. (shrink)

The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the `nursing profession' in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways in which a rudimentary welfare state and a large informal economy have created the demand for les infirmières exclusives and for `quasi-nurses'. The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate this informal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant women themselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their (...) deskilling, exploitation, marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that these processes take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicity and class, as sexism intersects with different forms of `othering' and racialization processes in the destination country. The position of these women is also located in terms of ethnic and national boundaries. (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)

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps (...) some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of (...) imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how both the presentation and limitation of visual choices in massively multiplayer online role‐playing games (MMORPG) avatar creation interfaces tends to exclude or favor different real life social groups.Design/methodology/approachA novel method combining both quantitative and critical analysis of the syntagmatic‐paradigmatic structure of MMORPG avatar creation interfaces is used to inform the findings of this study.FindingsThis study concludes that as cultural interfaces, current fantasy themed MMORPGs remediate socially exclusive values both from fantasy literature (...) and from their own game lore. The socially exclusive values deal largely with extreme and immutable racial and sexual dimorphism.Research limitations/implicationsInterfaces which present users with color palettes and/or smooth slider‐based body modifiers do not lend themselves well to this method of analysis. In addition to this, only a handful of the popular MMORPGs are analyzed within the body of this work.Practical implicationsThis paper demonstrates that MMORPG players and designers need to be more aware about how they are constructing and embedding social values in their worlds. Avatars are critical conduits for online social dynamics and embedding socially exclusive values may transfer negative ideologies from old media to new.Originality/valueThis paper offers one of the earliest critiques of embedded values in avatar creation interfaces of MMORPGs. The paper aims to begin discussion on an overlooked area of now popular media that has not received any critical attention regarding its embedded messages of social inclusiveness or exclusiveness. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage part d’un paradoxe apparent : la coexistence, dans la Cuba de la fin du xixe siècle, de mécanismes d’exclusion raciale et d’un discours inclusif, élément clé d’un nationalisme cubain a-racial et construit sur la fraternité raciale, prôné par le héros national José Martí. En effet, les luttes anticoloniales et l’émancipation des esclaves ont favorisé la consolidation idéologique de cet a-racialisme (racelessness), qui s’est effectuée au prix d’un silence racial, impliquant que tou...

En las condiciones actuales, la exclusión por el color y el origen no pertenece al pasado. El pensamiento advertido y crítico mantiene su mirada sobre el tema de las razas, con perspectivas y enfoques nuevos. Sin embargo, en el pensamiento caribeño hay una curada historia de argumentos que ha dejado sin alas a valores de antaño, establecidos por la dominación colonial, para deshacer sus trampas y romper los universales de la �cultura universal�. El presente texto pretende hacer un recorrido por (...) la obra principal de los pensadores del área que han cuestionado el tema racial, uno de los más importantes de toda reflexión insular, sin apegos a tradiciones académicas disciplinares estrechas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Max Nordau, Madison Grant, and Racialized Theories of IdeologyJohannes Hendrikus BurgersRecently, Jonathan Spiro has undertaken the Herculean task of recovering the ghost of the conservationist and anti-immigrant racist Madison Grant from a very limited archival record. Spiro’s biography is an invaluable resource that covers, in as much detail as possible, Grant’s life and thought. Although largely forgotten now, in the first half of the twentieth century Grant was a (...) leading figure in the eugenics movement that sterilized thousands of people deemed unfit to reproduce. He was also a prominent advocate of immigration restriction, and he helped southern racists ban miscegenation.1 Like other scholars before him, Spiro argues that Grant arrived at many of his views through the work of such racial scientists as Arthur de Gobineau, Francis Galton, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.2 While he and other scholars are certainly correct in drawing such a lineage, one unlikely and hitherto unexplored parallel to Grant’s thought specifically, and American eugenics in general, was that of Hungarian cultural critic and later Zionist leader, Max Nordau. By elucidating their intellectual kinship, this paper seeks to reveal the extent to which early twentieth-century transatlantic racial discourse involved widely different actors who were at times unknowingly espousing quite similar racial views for entirely different ends. [End Page 119]The reasons why Nordau’s name has not appeared in relation to Grant are several. First, there is a lack of biographical material on Madison Grant: much of his personal correspondence was purloined or destroyed.3 Consequently, evidence that Grant had been influenced by or even read Nordau is largely circumstantial and inferential, and cannot be verified through archival documentation. Secondly, despite a recent Nordau renaissance,4 and notwithstanding certain key publications, he still remains a somewhat marginal figure in the narrative of late nineteenth century history, especially in the American context.5 Thirdly, and more importantly, after the death of Theodore Herzl, Nordau became the most prominent leader of the Zionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Certainly, someone as committed to Jewish advancement and Jewish emigration to America as Nordau, was hardly likely to share similar racial views with a white supremacist, anti-immigration propagandist, and vicious anti-Semite like Grant. In fact, the only indirect textual connection between the two thinkers is the verbatim use of one of Nordau’s articles by Grant’s racist disciple Lothrop Stoddard; a connection that has only been explored very briefly in a footnote by Nordau biographer Meir Ben-Horin.6 Otherwise, there has been no attempt to see these two thinkers in the same context. Hence, contrary to current scholarly opinion about both writers, this paper will show that they both operated within the same racial framework. While making no claim here of a direct causal relationship between Nordau and Grant, I do contend that during this period there is enough intellectual crosspollination of racial theories to create a significant, not merely coincidental, overlap of ideas. Simplifying early twentieth-century racial thinking into two distinct camps of non-racists and racists is conceptually flawed, even if, as in this case, the ostensible disparities could not be greater.The idea Nordau helped introduce to America, and the idea Grant used later, was that there was a hereditary link between race and ideology. Both believed a person’s racial makeup directly influenced their political ideology. Grant and other anti-immigration nativists used this logic to justify the [End Page 120] exclusion of non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners. Unhealthy, degenerate, foreign bodies presented a danger to the body politic, not just because they were not as productive as the white “Nordics” and therefore caused a drain on the system, but, more significantly, because their inferior type made them susceptible to radical anti-American ideologies like socialism and anarchism. Accordingly, their degeneracy was both an economic strain and a political danger to post-World War I America. The tragic irony is that Nordau’s contribution to the late nineteenth-century racial science was intended to combat increasingly virulent European anti-Semitism. Instead, it ended up in the hands of anti-Semitic propagandists. In fact, at the time that Nordau was urging Jews... (shrink)

This is partly a verbal question, depending on the meaning of the word ‘caste’. I propose to assume that if we say that a State is a caste State we imply at least two things: that its members are divided into mutually exclusive endogamous classes, and that no one may be transferred from one class to another—unless possibly to a lower class. The State which Plato describes in the Republic satisfies the first of these conditions. Dr. Popper, who believes that (...) it is a caste State, maintains that it also satisfies the second. In addition he contends that the original basis of the class division is racial. My object in the notes which follow is to argue that both these contentions are false. (shrink)

This article describes how admissions auditions at schools of music may demonstrate and participate in what critical race theorist, Gloria Ladson-Billings, calls the full social funding of race. Julia Eklund Koza argues that the construction of musical difference, which is an effect of power and is accomplished by the materialization of styles of music, plays a role in the systemic inclusion or exclusion of people whose bodies have already been raced through a similar process of sorting and ordering. Focusing (...) on the equity implications of an access conundrum that is making many public colleges and universities more exclusionary, Koza advocates listening for Whiteness in admissions processes, not to affirm it, but to recognize its institutional presence, understand its technologies, and defund it. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have documented the racial disparities of mass incarceration. In this paper we argue that, although retributivism and deterrence theory appear to be race-neutral, in the contemporary U.S. context these seemingly contrary theories function jointly to rationalize racial inequities in the criminal justice system. When people of color are culturally associated with criminality, they are perceived as both irresponsible and hyperresponsible, a paradox that reflects their status as what Charles Mills calls subpersons. Following from this (...) paradox, criminality is understood as an atemporal characteristic of people of color, such that they are conceived as pre-criminals, criminals, or post-criminals. In Frantz Fanon’s account, overdetermination expresses this exclusion of people of color from full agency by capturing them within a rigid, immutable essence, which then controls the social meaning of their actions. The backward-looking quality of retribution and the forward-looking quality of deterrence then treat people of color as more deserving of punishment (and more severe punishment) and as threats to the social order who have to be restrained. We should read the racialization of mass incarceration as a symptom of how precariously people of color participate in the social contract and as reflections of how theories of punishment have been racially deployed. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce Bell’s work to philosophical audiences while also presenting his work for consideration within our contemporary discussions of race and racism. Bell’s contributions to our understanding of race have gone largely unnoticed, and that those who consider themselves philosophers of race are unfamiliar with the contributions of the intellectual father of Critical Race Theory is not only a failure of intellectual scholarship, but it is also a missed opportunity to take seriously the claims of a legal, (...) political, and philosophical titan. The first section of this paper seeks to present Bell’s paradigm of racial realism and its constituent components. The second section explores what has led to Bell’s near complete exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, and philosophy of race specifically. The third section addresses the contributions that Bell’s theories can make to our contemporary discussions of race within the discipline of philosophy. (shrink)

More than half of the Roma population in Slovakia lives in spaces that are segregated or separated from dominant non-Roma communities. The socio-spatial marginalization of Roma is both generated and reinforced through open and discrete social processes and measures largely orchestrated by local governments, enabled by an ineffective state; and reinforced by the general socio-economic policy framework. This article builds on extensive field research on predominantly Roma-occupied spaces (i.e., ‘settlements’) in Slovakia and focuses on the nature and function of Roma (...) segregation and separation in Slovakia from an ecological socio-political, and economic standpoint. Based on Loi’c Wacquant’s work on ethno-racial segregation and the concept of environmental justice, we discuss social and environmental discrimination as one of the constituent elements in understanding Roma socio-spatial marginalization and its functions, and employ the neologism, ‘hyper-osada’ as a tool to conceptually and analytically investigate the; new impetus and recent trajectory of Roma segregation and separation. (shrink)

"In her essay "Choosing the Margin," bell hooks draws attention to the way uncritical celebrations of difference and otherness often act as an alibi for progressive politics. The recent proliferation of discourses on alterity, particularly with the growth of Levinas studies, makes hooks's critique all the more relevant for ethical and political theory today. To what extent has this emphasis on alterity affected the dynamics of philosophical and political life? Does it fall into the trap that hooks identifies here as (...) a mask with which privileged subjects present themselves as critical thinkers, while failing to listen to the diverse voices of concrete others gathered under the rubric of "the Other"? It is one thing to affirm one's infinite responsibility for the Other, and quite another thing to make good on that responsibility in specific contexts, especially in a political landscape where some faces are more visible than others, and some voices more likely to be heard. Unless we can flesh out Levinas's ethical project with a political project of resisting oppression, his ethics risks a level of abstraction that covers over its own blind spots. And unless we can distinguish rigorously between otherness as a sign of political exclusion and otherness as a source of ethical command, we risk repeating the conflation of certain others with a position of weakness and victimhood, where "we" can feel responsible for "them" without having to listen to anyone but ourselves.". (shrink)

The words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ have become so overused that they nowconstitute obstacles to understanding and interracial dialogue about racial matters. Insteadof the current practice of referring to virtually anything that goes wrong or amiss withrespect to race as ‘racism,’ we should recognize a much broader moral vocabulary forcharacterizing racial ills – racial insensitivity, racial ignorance, racial injustice, racialdiscomfort, racial exclusion. At the same time, we should fix on a definition of ‘racism’ thatis (...) continuous with its historical usage, and avoids conceptual inflation. I suggest two basic,and distinct, forms of racism that meet this condition – antipathy racism and inferiorizingracism. We should also recognize that not all racially objectionable actions are done froma racist motive, and that not all racial stereotypes are racist. (shrink)

This Article examines how the legal subjectivity of the migrant subject is intimately connected to the construction of the citizenship subject and how both have been products of the colonial encounter. Deploying the lens of postcolonialism, I argue that the migrant is addressed through a spectrum of legal rules based on normative criteria reminiscent of the colonial encounter. These criteria reinscribe citizenship within dominant racial, sexual, and cultural norms as well as claims of civilizational superiority. That which does not (...) fall within the boundaries of citizenship is regarded as outcast, an "Other," and subject to restraint, persecution, censorship, social stigma, incarceration, and even annihilation. The discussion draws examples from recent judicial decisions in the context of postcolonial India, dealing with migrant bar dancers and migrant Muslims, highlighting the deep and lasting impact of the colonial encounter and the imperial imagination on understandings and constructions of citizenship in the contemporary period. The cases further illustrate how notions of "global" or "world" citizen, unbound by territory or the nation-state, are unable to account for the complex and contradictory understandings of citizenship that have emerged from within a postcolonial context. The arguments force us to inquire into the role of citizenship, its relevance or meaninglessness in the lives of the migrant once its exclusionary potential has been exposed. (shrink)

This article is a microlevel discussion of indigenous/white relations at an Australian feminist refuge. It argues that the organization and practices of the refuge, including those which were specifically ‘feminist’ and those purporting to be anti-racist, reproduced a pattern of institutional racism which privileged and naturalized ‘whiteness’, white feminism and white women, and perpetuated the racial disadvantage of Aboriginal women, including continuing accountability to white colonizing women, loss of employment and economic security and contingent rather than guaranteed access to (...) appropriate domestic violence crisis services. The article focuses on three interrelated concepts which were fundamental to the white women's construction and legitimation of their positions in the events: ‘sisterhood’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘the good feminist worker’. (shrink)

in their book American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, contemporary philosophers Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt identify "living in a context of difference" as the central philosophical issue in the history of the United States. They credit W. E. B. Du Bois with having identified racial difference as one particular version of this general issue: "Du Bois once declared that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the problem of the coexistence of (...) differences that figure in our existence as members of communities". For McKenna and Pratt, this continues to be the central philosophical problem in the United States, and perhaps globally, today: "From the... (shrink)

Here are two widely held positions on the ethics of dating: First, people are generally morally justified in excluding people they don’t find attractive from their dating pool. Second, people are not justified in maintaining a dating pool that is racially exclusive, even on grounds like attraction. In this paper, we demonstrate how these positions are consistent. To do so we differentiate our attitudes in dating and our dating behavior. Then we show how existing criticisms of racialized attitudes in dating (...) are incomplete as practical criticisms of our behavior. Finally, we give our account of the moral reasons whites have to change their dating preferences when they exclude people of color. In doing so, we supplement existing discussions of race-based discrimination in dating. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the philosophy of the Pan-African conferences 1900–1945 and situates Pan-Africanism in a European context. It presents Pan-Africanism as part of European history and realities and as a conceptual framework for the African diaspora in Europe. It calls for reframing European histories and realities in ways that are neither racially exclusive nor nationalistic.

In this essay I develop W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to demonstrate the limitations of Kant’s and Rawls’s models of self-respect. I argue that neither Kant nor Rawls can explain what self-respect and resistance to oppression warrants under the conditions of violent and systematic racial exclusion. I defend Du Bois’s proposal of voluntary black self-segregation during the Jim Crow era and explain why Du Bois believes that the black American community has a moral right to assert (...) its self-respect by mitigating exposure to racial violence and animus in a white-controlled polity. (shrink)

The South African labor market is characterized by a high degree of inflexibility and complexity which poses significant challenges for both indigenes and migrants looking to be integrated into the labor market. These challenges are likely to be more poignant for international migrants as they face additional barriers owing to a chronically high employment rate, xenophobic sentiments, and racial exclusion. For female tied migrants, gender bias, expressed through migration policies and legislation, adds yet another layer of complexity to (...) long-term aspirations of settling in South Africa. How well tied migrants fare in the South African labor market is an important matter for consideration. Using an intersectional approach and the theory of governmentality, this study sought to deconstruct the labor market subjectivities of tied migrants in South Africa. This paper used a qualitative approach, with a narrative and interpretivist research paradigm, on female tied migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa who either accompanied their husbands or followed them to South Africa in a process of family reunification. Although 13 interviews were carried out in total, as part of a broader study, the narratives of six participants were included in this study, to zone in on labor market experiences. The study found that despite their high human capital, tied migrants are not likely to be well integrated into the South African labor market. Their inequality in the South African labor market was attributed to their gender, ethnicity, race, migrant status and locality and various intersections thereof through which they are subjected to informality, immobility and precarity. (shrink)

The work of Julian Herman Lewis helps to expose the underlying racial organization of laboratory normality in early twentieth-century medicine. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lewis launched a critique of prevailing racial theory, as he established an academic career in pathology at the University of Chicago. As one of the small number of black research physicians at the time, Lewis met barriers to his work that eventually derailed his career. Although his research fell short of its goals, his (...) work continues to provide a key insight into medical laboratory standards as they became institutionalized in Lewis’s field of clinical pathology. By avoiding attributions of race and following prevailing practices of racial exclusion, medical laboratories quietly reasserted social norms in the formation of laboratory normality. An examination of Lewis’s critiques and his research sharpens questions about the development of the concept of “normal” in the human sciences and a related tendency in twentieth-century medicine to conflate difference with pathology. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet it illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought. It memorializes a tragedy central to his turn from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion. Its rhetoric also exemplifies a broader tension in his writings, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses. In its normalizing rhetorical mode, which dominates, the (...) elegy depicts an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household—potentially eliciting white readers’ sympathetic identification, but failing to displace the gendered and classed logic of racial exclusion. Its moments of transgressive rhetoric complicate or refuse such identification, celebrating Burghardt’s racial impurity and invoking a lineage of black maternal ambivalence. Though each is vexed and ephemeral, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal countervailing impulses that Du Bois would articulate in later writings. (shrink)

In December 2010, the governor of Mississippi suspended the dual life sentences of two African American sisters who had been imprisoned for sixteen years on an extraordinary condition: that Gladys Scott donate a kidney to her ailing sister Jamie Scott. The Scott Sisters’ case is a highly unusual one, yet it is a revealing site for inquiry into US biopolitics more broadly. Close attention to the conditional release and its context demands a broader frame than traditional bioethics and helps to (...) push science and technology studies analysis of race past its conventional focus on genetics. This article draws on the Scott Sisters’ case as a site for interrogating the US context of racialized mass incarceration and kin-oriented and consumerist valorization of organ donation. Tensions between racialized exclusions, the promise of consumerist freedom, and the lack of expectations of the state are foundational to a distinctly American biological citizenship. By putting the Scott Sisters’ case into conversation with broader arguments about incarceration as a site of racialization and STS literatures of organ transplantation and of biological citizenship in diverse geographical sites, this article seeks to articulate some of the racialized contours of biopolitics in the United States. (shrink)

Scientific socialism as developed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the world's largest workers' party, and the Second International, basically a creation of German socialists, viewed utopianism as empirically unverifiable. The publication, wide circulation, and enormous success in Germany of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward therefore posed a strong challenge to the leaders of the SPD, Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, and it attracted their criticism on several occasions. Such high-level condemnations of Bellamy call for an explanation. The SPD, freshly (...) out of illegality in 1890, scored a decisive victory over Bismarck, and the party's big electoral gains led to utopian hopes among the rank and file. In this expectant milieu, Looking Backward was interpreted as a model for immediate action. However, socialist leaders saw it differently. Kautsky and Bebel reasoned that the immediatism of the American utopia flagrantly violated the ineluctable tendencies of history, recklessly rushed historical destiny, and put the achievements of the socialists at risk. It was not without irony that Kautsky found the absence of utopianism one of the SPD's greatest accomplishments. It was into this utopian vacuum that right-wing futuristic blueprints increasingly moved, portraying Caesaristic leadership, interclass harmony, world power, and racial exclusivity to a rapidly expanding audience. By rejecting future gazing, as exemplified by their rebuff of Looking Backward, socialist leaders failed to wage an extended cultural campaign for hegemonic influence over sectors other than the working class. Their claim that they essentially had no ideals to realize and their adherence to the strategy of fatalistic waiting for the collapse of capitalism came at a high price, as their inaction in face of and even support of colonialism and World War I would reveal. (shrink)

Scientific socialism as developed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the world's largest workers' party, and the Second International, basically a creation of German socialists, viewed utopianism as empirically unverifiable. The publication, wide circulation, and enormous success in Germany of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward therefore posed a strong challenge to the leaders of the SPD, Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, and it attracted their criticism on several occasions. Such high-level condemnations of Bellamy call for an explanation. The SPD, freshly (...) out of illegality in 1890, scored a decisive victory over Bismarck, and the party's big electoral gains led to utopian hopes among the rank and file. In this expectant milieu, Looking Backward was interpreted as a model for immediate action. However, socialist leaders saw it differently. Kautsky and Bebel reasoned that the immediatism of the American utopia flagrantly violated the ineluctable tendencies of history, recklessly rushed historical destiny, and put the achievements of the socialists at risk. It was not without irony that Kautsky found the absence of utopianism one of the SPD's greatest accomplishments. It was into this utopian vacuum that right-wing futuristic blueprints increasingly moved, portraying Caesaristic leadership, interclass harmony, world power, and racial exclusivity to a rapidly expanding audience. By rejecting future gazing, as exemplified by their rebuff of Looking Backward, socialist leaders failed to wage an extended cultural campaign for hegemonic influence over sectors other than the working class. Their claim that they essentially had no ideals to realize and their adherence to the strategy of fatalistic waiting for the collapse of capitalism came at a high price, as their inaction in face of and even support of colonialism and World War I would reveal. (shrink)

Beginning with Fanon’s challenge to the universality of the project of ontology, this paper considers whether and how Merleau-Ponty’s early and late thinking may yield a response. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to the materiality of the body is intended as a limit on the scope of ontology. As I argue, however, Merleau-Ponty’s early concept of ‘one’s own body’ suggests an “ontological equality” that would be shared among all embodied beings; implicitly, this early approach risks reinforcing Fanon’s concern that ontology (...) is indifferent to embodied experiences of racial exclusion and oppression. Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology of the flesh, by contrast, entails a more radically differential structure of the body that troubles the notion of equality in principle, suggesting an ontology that could be more attentive to the fundamental grounds of systemic oppression.Cet article examine si, et de quelle manière, la réflexion de Merleau-Ponty peut répondre au défi lancé par Fanon à l’universalité du projet ontologique. La revendication initiale que fait Merleau-Ponty de la matérialité du corps est considérée comme une limite du champ de l’ontologie. Pourtant, comme je voudrais le montrer, la première conception merleau-pontienne du corps propre suggère une « égalité ontologique » qui devrait être commune pour tous les êtres incarnés ; implicitement, cette première approche risque de renforcer l’inquiétude de Fanon au sujet de l’indifférence de l’ontologie envers les expériences incarnées de l’exclusion raciale et de l’oppression. L’ontologie de la chair merleau-pontienne, au contraire, implique une structure du corps radicalement différentielle qui bouleverse la notion du principe d’égalité, en suggérant une ontologie qui pourrait être plus attentive aux fondements du système d’oppression.Questo articolo prende le mosse dalla sfida di Fanon all’universalità del progetto dell’ontologia ed esamina se e come il pensiero del primo e dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty possa fornirvi una risposta. A prima vista, il richiamo di Merleau-Ponty alla materialità del corpo viene inteso come un limite all’orizzonte dell’ontologia. Tuttavia, come mi propongo di sostenere, il concetto di “corpo proprio” nel primo Merleau-Ponty suggerisce un’“uguaglianza ontologica” che sarebbe condivisa da tutti gli esseri incarnati. Implicitamente, questa posizione rischia di rinforzare la preoccupazione di Fanon rispetto al fatto che l’ontologia sia indifferente alle esperienze incarnate di esclusione e oppressione razziali. L’ontologia della carne dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty, al contrario, implica una più radicale struttura differenziale del corpo, che complica la nozione di un’uguaglianza di principio e che suggerisce un’ontologia potenzialmente più attenta ai fondamenti dell’oppressione sistematica. (shrink)

This article concentrates on the rapid growth of trafficking in women from Eastern and Central Europe who end up working in the sex industry in Athens. Such movement of people is constituted around global networks of female labour. The social processes and mechanisms that produce and reproduce the somatic and social exploitation of female migrants caught in the web of the sex industry are analysed. These processes are responsible for a continuation and accentuation of women’s loss of power to represent (...) their interests, to seek viable economic alternatives. The living and working spaces of these women rest upon their isolation and individuation and total control of their everyday activities. Ethnicity, age and racialized exclusions all intersect with sexist relations and practices within Greek society and the ethnic communities under study. The interplay of these processes operates differently within different ethnic groups of women to produce different outcomes. (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

This article theorises the contemporary convergence of neoliberal and fascist principles by examining the thought of political actors in the 1930s and 1940s who were active in both neoliberal and fascist organisations. I suggest that a sympathy for fascism formed a minor but significant strand of early neoliberal thought, and that unpacking the logics that led particular thinkers and political actors to believe that fascism was compatible with neoliberalism can shed light on the contemporary political moment. Based on my reading (...) of early ‘neoliberal fascists’, I theorise three points of convergence. The first was a belief that socialism had to be opposed by all possible means, including violence and the repression of popular democracy. The second was a racialized understanding of the underpinnings of the market economy, leading to an acceptance of the necessity of racial exclusion. Thirdly, both fascist and neoliberal thinkers believed that patriarchy was a necessary feature for the reproduction of capitalism, and hence that traditional gender roles had to be preserved against pressures for social change. In theorising this convergence, I also gesture to how the overlap of neoliberalism and fascism can be witnessed in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the libertarian Mises Institute. (shrink)

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.