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"blackness"
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Between Brown and Black
2022
With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.
OFFICER SAFETY TIME
2025
U.S. police reform advocates often press police departments to replace “fear-based” survival trainings with scenario or “reality-based” trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as effecting an arrest. Temporality is a key facet of these exercises: by decelerating and replaying stressful situations, scenarios promise to allay the impulsive fear presumed to drive racialized police violence. Drawing on ethnography with officers in Maryland, I argue that scenarios instead translate fear through what I call “officer safety time.” This hegemonic temporal regime encourages police to “think threat first,” read danger in the subjunctive mood, and inhabit a heteromasculine habitus of state power. While presumptively color-blind, officer safety time seals anti-Black violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. I argue that scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in police—while immunizing them against substantive reform.
Journal Article
Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery
2020
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how and why ideas regarding “intersectional” approaches to feminism and Black activism are drawn on in marketing content related to the concept of being “woke” (invested in addressing social injustices). It considers which subject positions are represented as part of this and what they reveal about contemporary issues concerning advertising, gender, race and activism.
Design/methodology/approach
This study involves an interpretive and critical discursive analysis of so-called feminist advertising (“femvertising”) and marketing examples that make use of Black social justice activist ideas.
Findings
Findings illuminate how marketing simultaneously enables the visibility and erasure of “intersectional”, feminist and Black social justice activist issues, with the use of key racialised and gendered subject positions: White Saviour, Black Excellence, Strong Black Woman (and Mother) and “Woke” Change Agent.
Research limitations/implications
This research signals how brands (mis)use issues concerning commercialised notions of feminism, equality and Black social justice activism as part of marketing that flattens and reframes liberationist politics while upholding the neoliberal idea that achievement and social change requires individual ambition and consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance.
Practical implications
This work can aid the development of advertising standards regulatory approaches which account for nuances of stereotypical representations and marketing’s connection to intersecting issues regarding racism and sexism.
Originality/value
This research outlines a conceptualisation of the branding of “woke” bravery, which expands our understanding of the interdependency of issues related to race, gender, feminism, activism and marketing. It highlights marketing responses to recent socio-political times, which are influenced by public discourse concerning movements, including Black Lives Matter and Me Too.
Journal Article
THE PARADOX OF HUMANITARIAN RECOGNITION
2024
Eritreans experience what I call the paradox of humanitarian recognition. Beneficiaries of some of the highest refugee-recognition rates in Global North countries, Eritreans nevertheless experience kidnap, ransoming, extortion, and pre-emptive detention in countries of transit like Sudan and Libya. Efforts by the European Union to address these abuses under multilateral anti-trafficking agreements—as well as broader efforts to externalize European borders and asylum—have further contained and criminalized networks of solidarity that extend beyond countries of transit into countries of settlement such as Italy. Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews with Eritreans in northern Italy, this article analyzes Eritrean migrants’experiences of violence in Libya, a country of transit, and efforts of Eritrean activists to both bring this violence to light and to aid recent refugees. Eritreans’ experiences of seeking asylum upend the binaries between legal inclusion and exclusion on which refugee exceptionalism is predicated.
Journal Article
Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics
2019
Though to deny the geological impact of human force on nature is now essentially quasi-criminal, many theorists (mostly in the humanities) remain, nonetheless, unimpressed with what this “new era” has afforded us in terms of critical potential. This article is concerned with what Srinivas Aravamudan deems “the escapist philosophy of various dimension of the hypothesis concerning the Anthropocene.” Following Erik Swyngedouw's indictment of apocalyptic discourses' vital role in displacing social antagonisms and nurturing capitalism, this article argues that the new regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness have been powerful in disavowing racial antagonisms. It discusses the ways in which Anthropocene ethics have foreclosed proper political framings by promoting a moral philosophy unequipped to face the racial histories of our current ecological predicament. It contends that the “political Anthropocene” (if there is or ought to be one) will remain an impossibility until it is able to wrestle with the problem of black suffering.
Journal Article
M(ai)cro: Centering the Macrosystem in Human Development
2021
Abstract
Both society and psychological science are deeply grounded in (and often perpetuate) white supremacy and anti-Blackness. While human development is inextricable from macro-level structural racism and hierarchies of oppression, developmental research often locates processes in the micro-level of individuals and relationships, ultimately obscuring how intimately macro-level forces shape developmental processes. The current paper aims to shift the starting point of the story of human development by centering the macrosystem, and specifically racism (and its partnering ideologies of sexism, heteronormativity, classism, and capitalism) in ecological systems theory and developmental psychology broadly. Through the lens of racial socialization research, we present an empirical example to illustrate how the sociopolitical context of racism is itself a source of socialization. Finally, we propose new language, m(ai)cro, to conceptualize the simultaneous and transactional macro-as-micro processes in development. We conclude with guiding principles for how to work toward equity and justice in human development.
Journal Article
A Private Woe
2024
This paper tries to find out an adequately race-sensitive definition of the everyday. It contrasts universalized ideas of the everyday as underlined by Rita Felski with specific instances of racist violence described in Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name. It illustrates Felski’s inadequacy in describing the everyday from the perspective of black experience of racist violence. It posits racist violence as a paradoxical phenomenon – it is mundane and everyday while disrupting the everyday. It then questions Andrew Smith’s assertion that the ‘black everyday’ is structurally impossible. The paper also challenges the position of the black individual in a binary of being triumphant or tragic, instead of being ordinary. Taking inspiration from scholars like Matthew F. Delmont, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, this paper presents an alternative definition of the everyday, highlighting black people’s ability to recalibrate their everyday narratives despite racist violence, while also presenting definitions of ‘blackness’ beyond skin colour and violence and including the beautiful aspects of their cultural traditions. This paper then problematizes Felski’s assertion that the everyday is “secular” by engaging with the text and the biomythography as a genre.
Journal Article
World languages for Black Linguistic Reparations
2024
This conceptual work highlights the history of Black erasure throughout the existence of world languages (WLs) as a field of study in the United States. It outlines the unique challenges faced by African descended learners who have and continue to pursue WL study in US classrooms. These include but are not limited to reduced local funding and programmatic expectations due to the remnants of anti‐Black educational policies, monolingual and imperial language ideologies prevalent in texts and pedagogical approaches, and generations of segregation in and outside of schools. Finally, this work proposes WLs serve as a site of Black Linguistic Reparations through, (1) the redistribution of resources in the field, (2) the repair of enacted WL teaching to meet the calls of ACTFL's standards for preparing students for communication in a pluralistic society, and (3) a recreation of the “world” as narrated through a global, rather than a white Western lens. The Challenge The decline in World Language (WL) educators reflects long standing barriers to WL study rooted in the anti‐Black underpinnings that shaped the field. How has the development of the US WL study systematically excluded Black communities? How might acknowledging and repairing those harms systemically and programmatically reinvigorate our field?
Journal Article
Transgressive body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
2023
In a society where colour is a major reason for social stratification, the black identity is burdened with the perceived negativities generated by its colour. This reality becomes conspicuous in a space defined by racial superiority and migrant status. In Americanah, unlike her other novels, Adichie migration concerns are more profound to reflect the perception and intense consequences of racial identity for African migrants and black people in the West. Through a close reading of this text from a postcolonial view, this article contends that the migrant status and blackness of African subjects, represented in physical attributes, expose their bearer to racial prejudice. This article further argues that to be integrated and access racial privileges, African migrants must suppress or eliminate the racial burdens attached to blackness by transforming or modifying their identity. Such modification evoked by a transgression is accompanied by a loss of identity.ContributionThe most outstanding feature of this article is the exploration of the interface between transgression, body and space in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2013) Americanah. This article contributes to the growing discourse on transgression, racism and African migrants’ realities and examine the concerns of black people regarding colour politics through intercontinental migration. This article further seeks to address significant questions about the way race influences the cultural attitude of minority groups and how black immigrants react to racial Othering.
Journal Article