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"Race and Racism"
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The sellout
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality -- the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the \"agrarian ghetto\" of Dickens -- on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles -- the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: \"I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake.\" Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident -- the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins -- he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court. -- Provided by publisher.
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Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School
This article provides the first excavation of the foundational role of racist thought in securitization theory. We demonstrate that Copenhagen School securitization theory is structured not only by Eurocentrism but also by civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack racism. Classic securitization theory advances a conceptualization of ‘normal politics’ as reasoned, civilized dialogue, and securitization as a potential regression into a racially coded uncivilized ‘state of nature’. It justifies this through a civilizationist history of the world that privileges Europe as the apex of civilized ‘desecuritization’, sanitizing its violent (settler-) colonial projects and the racial violence of normal liberal politics. It then constructs a methodologically and normatively white framework that uses speech act theory to locate ‘progress’ towards normal politics and desecuritization in Europe, making becoming like Europe a moral imperative. Using ostensibly neutral terms, securitization theory prioritizes order over justice, positioning the securitization theorist as the defender of (white) ‘civilized politics’ against (racialized) ‘primal anarchy’. Antiblackness is a crucial building-block in this conceptual edifice: securitization theory finds ‘primal anarchy’ especially in ‘Africa’, casting it as an irrationally oversecuritized foil to ‘civilized politics’. We conclude by discussing whether the theory, or even just the concept of securitization, can be recuperated from these racist foundations.
Journal Article
Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We show that Stormfront posters exert much more energy repairing individuals’ bad news than using it to exclude or attack them. Their repair strategies combine anti-scientific, counter-knowledge attacks on the legitimacy of GATs and quasi-scientific reinterpretations of GATs in terms of white nationalist histories. However, beyond individual identity repair they also reinterpret the racial boundaries and hierarchies of white nationalism in terms of the relationships GATs make visible. White nationalism is not simply an identity community or political movement but should be understood as bricoleurs with genetic knowledge displaying aspects of citizen science.
Journal Article
Sounding race in rap songs
\"As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. Sounding Race in Rap Songs argues that rap music allows us not only to see but also to hear how mass-mediated culture engenders new understandings of race. The book traces the changing sounds of race across some of the best-known rap songs of the past thirty-five years, combining song-level analysis with historical contextualization to show how these representations of identity depend on specific artistic decisions, such as those related to how producers make beats.\" --Provided by publisher.
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‘Hang on, she just used that word like it’s totally easy
At a time when racism remains prevalent in educational spaces, this paper addresses what else we can know about the ways in which race and racism manifest and are experienced in practice. This paper draws on continual mobilisations of affect and new materialist theory to examine the conditions of emergence through which race and racism are experienced within ordinary, yet affective, encounters. I propose that drawing attention to how race surfaces in affective encounters may allow us to develop more critical interventions that challenge racisms in process.
Journal Article
British racial discourse : a study of British political discourse about race and race-related matters
This study identifies a central feature of British political life: the ability to justify racially discriminatory behaviour without recourse to explicit racist language. How, without mentioning racial criteria, have politicians introduced immigration controls deliberately aimed at reducing the number of black migrants?
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After the Riot: The Capitalization of Justice and the Refiguring of Racialized Politics
Street protests and the occupation of public spaces have once again become common forms of political engagement throughout the United States. Newer grassroots groups like #BLM and POP, and establishment activist organizations like the NAACP, have organized public demonstrations around fatal police shootings in multiple cities, while also mobilizing a new generation of political actors. This piece explores the way multiple activist organizations coalesce and clash around a recent fatal police shooting in a rural New Jersey prison town. In juxtaposing a mother's pursuit of justice with larger forms of protest, I problematize the capacity of establishment activism to disrupt local order and bring about broader political change, and I theorize the regimes of value (legally) defining Black life in Cliptown specifically, and in the US more broadly. This engaged ethnography thus shows what happens when activists align with politicians and police to enforce order, rather than with families and grassroots groups seeking justice. From this perspective, police violence, especially targeted against Black men, appears not simply as incidental but as key to the mechanics of local order. A fresh culture of rioting conjured by forces of the prematurely Black dead demands closer attention to local politics and policing when addressing criminal justice reform.
Journal Article
White Space and Dark Matter
To a packed audience in Clark Hall, Sheila Jasanoff, a distinguished scholar and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), gave the plenary address for “Where has STS Traveled,” a commemorative gathering of the fortieth anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the 4S. Not only was this meeting located in the very same (renovated) room as the first gathering, but also many of the original members had traveled from far and wide to Cornell University to reminisce and reflect on the academic field they had established, as well as imagine the possibilities of the next forty years. In response to a question about the direction of STS, Professor Jasanoff suggested that the 4S had not turned its reflective gaze inward to examine the politics of its own society, nor had it spent much effort interrogating the society’s contribution to social policy or enduring social problems. As I heard Jasanoff speak about our collective need for reflection and reflexivity, I had to wonder whether, and to what extent, we were ready to reflect on the subject matter of race and racism in this mostly color-blind field of inquiry.
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